Genesis - Chaos and Order

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

[2] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[3] This is part two of the psychological significance of the biblical story series that's running throughout the summer.

[4] This lecture is entitled, Genesis, Chaos, and Order.

[5] Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series every Tuesday throughout the remainder of the summer at the Isabel Bader Theater in Toronto.

[6] You can find tickets for future events in this biblical series in the description of this episode, or at jordanb peterson .com slash bible dash series.

[7] Okay, well, I thought this time that I would actually cover some of the, the biblical stories.

[8] So, and hopefully a number of them.

[9] 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.

[10] So, assuming I'm, that everything is still working out properly next year.

[11] It's a long ways away.

[12] All right.

[13] So, I guess we'll start.

[14] 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.

[15] And it's a really important line, and I thought I would reemphasize it.

[16] 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.

[17] So it has this odd, it has this appearance of linearity, but it really, it isn't linear.

[18] It's like your God, in some sense, standing outside of time.

[19] That's your book, and you can play with time anywhere along it.

[20] And the people who put the book together, or the books together, took fully.

[21] advantage of that.

[22] And that makes the story, it gives the story odd parallels in many, many places, in a very large number of places.

[23] 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.

[24] 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's it doesn't it doesn't even fit the definition of like a superstitious belief it's it's a dream -like belief in some sense and what I what I see many of the ideas in the in the Bible as is is these dreamlike ideas that that under not lie our normative cognition and that constitute the ground from which our more articulated and explicit ideas have emerged.

[25] 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.

[26] 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 stumbling block for a purely objective view of the world seems to me to be consciousness.

[27] 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.

[28] And it isn't also easy to understand what constitutes being in the absence of consciousness, because it seems to be the case.

[29] 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 not that idea at all.

[30] If a movie is running and no one's watching it, in what sense can you say that there's even a movie running?

[31] Because the movie seems to be the experience of the movie, not the objective elements of the movie.

[32] 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.

[33] 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.

[34] 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.

[35] Or at least that's one way of looking at it.

[36] 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.

[37] 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 and he actually thinks about it.

[38] 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.

[39] It's like consciousness is not something we understand.

[40] I don't think we understand it at all.

[41] It's something we can't get a handle on with our fundamental materialist philosophy.

[42] And I don't know why that is.

[43] 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, well, we've been trying to understand it for hundreds of years.

[44] 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.

[45] So, anyways, what it seems to me is the idea that God used the word 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.

[46] I mean, we're not omniscient, obviously, and we can't just do whatever we want, but we encounter a formless and chaotic potential.

[47] That's always what we're grappling with, and somehow we use our consciousness to give that form.

[48] And this is how people act.

[49] 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.

[50] 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.

[51] And everyone knows what that means, and no one acts like a mystery has been uttered when you say that.

[52] And, you know, you can see a situation in your own life that's full of potential.

[53] 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.

[54] And it activates your nervous system, right?

[55] 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 the neurochemical dopamine and which have their roots way down in the ancient hypothalamus, a very, very archaic and fundamental part of the brain, that responds to potential, which is the possibility of accruing something new and valuable, It responds to potential with active movement forward and engagement.

[56] And so we're engaged in the world as potential, and it looks like consciousness does that.

[57] And so there's this idea that, and this is the main idea that I think is being put forth in Genesis 1.

[58] It's something like, and you see this in mythology, like from what I've been able to gather, there's always three causal elements that make up being at the bottom of world mythology.

[59] And one is the formless potential that makes up being once it's interacted with, and that's generally given a feminine nature.

[60] And I think that's because it's like the source from which all things emerge and rise.

[61] It's something like that.

[62] It's more complicated than that, but it's something like that.

[63] And then there's some kind of interpretive structure that has to grapple with that formless potential.

[64] And I think that's the sort of thing that was alluded to by Emmanuel Kant, when he was criticizing the notion that all of our information comes from sense, which would be the pure empirical perspective, right?

[65] Because when you encounter the world, you encounter it with a cognitive structure that already has shape.

[66] And so it's already in you this structure.

[67] And without that a priori structure, you wouldn't be able to take the formless potential and give it structure.

[68] And I think that's something, it's akin in some way to the idea of God the Father.

[69] And I'll try to develop that idea more.

[70] 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.

[71] And then there's the final element, and that element seems to be something like consciousness itself, the consciousness that actually inheres in the individual.

[72] So it's not only that you have a structure, it's that the structure has the capacity for action in the world.

[73] And it's like, you're the spirit that gives the dead structure life.

[74] It's something like that.

[75] And as far as I can tell, the Trinitarian notion that characterizes Christianity is something like, well, formless potential, which has never given the status of a deity in Christianity.

[76] And then the notion that there's an a priori interpretive structure that's a consequence of our ancient existence as beings.

[77] It goes back as far in time as you can go, the notion of a structure.

[78] And then the idea of a consciousness that is the tool of that structure and that interacts with the world and gives it reality.

[79] And that's the word as far as I can tell.

[80] And so the notion is that there's a father and that's the structure and there's a son that's transcendent that characterizes consciousness itself.

[81] And that it's the sun, the speaking of the sun, that is the active principle that turns chaos into order.

[82] And, God, it's such a sophisticated idea 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.

[83] Your very body is an interpretive structure, right?

[84] It's been crafted over, let's say, three billion years of evolution.

[85] Without that, you wouldn't be able to perceive anything.

[86] 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.

[87] 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 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.

[88] And that's, of course, a very difficult thing to understand, partly because the God that's referred to in those chapters has a kind of polytheistic element, although it's an element that's moving rapidly towards a unified monotheism.

[89] 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 godlike.

[90] 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 analogous role, in the creation of habitable order out of chaos.

[91] That's a magnificent, remarkable, crazy idea.

[92] And yet we developed it, and I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system.

[93] I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system.

[94] That's the notion that everyone is equal before God, which is, of course, a completely...

[95] That's such a strange idea.

[96] It's very difficult to understand how anybody could have ever come up with that idea because the manifold differences between people are 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 easily brushed off as pointless and pathological and without value whatsoever, and all the power accrues to a certain tiny, you know, aristocratic minority at the top.

[97] But if you look at the way that the idea of the individual sovereignty development, It's clear that it unfolded over thousands and perhaps 10 ,000s of years before it became something firmly fixed in the imagination that each individual had something of transcendent value about them.

[98] And man, I tell you, we dispense with that idea at our serious peril.

[99] 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?

[100] You act that idea out.

[101] It's firmly shared by everyone who acts in a civilized manner.

[102] 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?

[103] So, all right.

[104] So that's the sort of idea is that there's this God of tradition and structure.

[105] That's God the Father, who uses the Son, which is more of an active force, and primarily something that's verbal, which I also think is extremely interesting because it's associated not with thought precisely, but with speech.

[106] 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.

[107] And at least in principle, speech is something that's shaped by the existence of everyone else, at least across time, because when you speak, your speech is put forward in the world as a causal element, and it's also subject to criticism and cooperation and mutual shaping.

[108] And so there's an idea here, too, that speech is, that the cognitive processes that bring habitable reality out of uninhabitable chaos have this collective and public element, which is part of the reason, by the way, that I'm an advocate of free speech, let's say, above all.

[109] because I don't think, although it is the case, for example, in the Canadian Bill of Rights, that every single right has equal value.

[110] That's the theory.

[111] It's an idiotic theory because it's absolutely impossible for a large set of rights to have absolutely equal standards, stances.

[112] That cannot happen.

[113] There's no way that that can ever work.

[114] But that is the legal judgment.

[115] 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 manufactured 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 some like consciousness and how we had to represent that dramatically say or symbolically or in a dream -like fashion before we could actually formulate the term and and localize that to some degree in people.

[116] It's very sophisticated.

[117] So John makes the case that, well, there's an emanation of God or an element of God the transcendent consciousness.

[118] It's something like that that acts directly and in a sort of living way with the with the underlying potential of the world.

[119] And I think that that's phenomenologically accurate, and I do think that that's the way we regard our lives.

[120] 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.

[121] But that isn't how you act.

[122] 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?

[123] And we treat each other as if we have free choice and free will, and perhaps we don't.

[124] But it's certainly the case that societies that are predicated on the idea that we don't do very well, and societies that are predicated on the idea that we do seem to do a lot better.

[125] Plus, people tend to get very annoyed at you if you treat them like their automatones that lack free will.

[126] 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.

[127] It's an insult to someone to suggest to them that they're not responsible for their choices.

[128] You know, you usually, to do that to someone from a legal perspective, you have to argue something like diminished capacity, right?

[129] Well, you're mentally ill, or you don't have the intellectual capacity, 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.

[130] 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.

[131] But part of that, too, is that if you do something good, you're also responsible for that.

[132] And that also seems necessary because, I mean, do you really, I mean, it's got to be more annoying 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 actual choices had nothing to do with that.

[133] I mean, people find that sort of thing extraordinarily punishing.

[134] 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.

[135] 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.

[136] So, all right, so here's how the book opens.

[137] In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

[138] 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.

[139] Now, 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.

[140] So, there are a lot of pieces of old stories in the Old Testament that flesh out the meaning of these lines.

[141] And I can give you a quick overview of it.

[142] One of the ideas that lurks, underneath these lines.

[143] Although you can't tell because it's in English.

[144] 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.

[145] Too bad for me. But the without form and void and the deep idea, you see, that's associated with this notion of endless deep potential.

[146] So for example, the words that are used to represent without form and void are something like, well, one is to, I'm a I'm going to get this partly wrong, Tohu Wabohu, and another one is Ta 'om.

[147] And it's important to know this, because those words are associated with an earlier Mesopotamian word, which is Ta 'amat.

[148] And Ta 'amat was a dragon -like creature who represented the salt water.

[149] And Ta 'amat had a husband named Apsu, and Ta 'amat and Apsu were sort of locked together in kind of a sexual embrace.

[150] And it was that locking together of Ta 'amat and Apsu, and I would say that's potential and order.

[151] something like that, or chaos in 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 Anumae Lish, to the being, to the old gods first and then eventually as creation progressed to human beings themselves.

[152] And so there's this idea lurking underneath 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.

[153] 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.

[154] And I think part of the reason for that, and 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.

[155] Like we went out beyond the confines of our safe spaces, let's say.

[156] Our space is defined 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 conquered and encountered things out there, like literally animals, like mammoths and snakes and predators of all sorts.

[157] And it was 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.

[158] And that idea lurks deeply inside the opening lines of Genesis.

[159] And it's a profound idea, in my estimation.

[160] 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.

[161] So that would be home territory.

[162] So that's that unknown territory that's characterized by promise because there are new things out there, but also by intense danger, right?

[163] 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.

[164] And there was a kind of, let's say, paternal courage that went along with that.

[165] And it was that the spirit of paternal courage that enabled the conquering of the unknown.

[166] And there's no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order.

[167] 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.

[168] And so I don't think that it's too much to say at all that the circuits that engage you, for example, when you're having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love.

[169] And so you're trying to structure the world around you jointly to create a habitable space that you can both exist within.

[170] 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 predators and geographical unknowns.

[171] It's the same circuit.

[172] It's just that we do it abstractly now instead of concretely.

[173] But of course it has to be the same circuit because evolutionary is a very conservative force.

[174] And what else would it be?

[175] 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.

[176] And because of that, our first response is to use snake detection circuitry on them, and that accounts for our capacity, almost immediate capacity, to demonize.

[177] And there's a reason for that.

[178] It's not a trivial thing.

[179] First of all, it's a very fast response.

[180] And second of all, it's a response.

[181] that has worked for a very, very, very long time.

[182] 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 the heroic warrior who slays the enemy, right?

[183] And, of course, that's not precisely a politically correct representation of the hero in modern times.

[184] Well, and no wonder, but it's still something that you go watch in movies all the time and admire, right?

[185] 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 uh 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 it's still, well, really, really, right?

[186] It's 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.

[187] It's like, okay, so this, this, without form and void is this chaotic, And it's a hard thing to get a grip on, you know, what exactly this means.

[188] But I can give you another kind of example of how you would experience the formless chaos of potential in your own lives.

[189] And even how the order that you currently inhabit can dissolve into that.

[190] 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.

[191] So it's a work of psychology, and he was thinking, well, 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.

[192] And Dante believed that it was betrayal.

[193] And I think that's right, because, you know, one of the things that enables long -term cooperation, peaceful cooperation between people is trust.

[194] And I would also say that trust is the fundamental natural resource.

[195] 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.

[196] 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?

[197] And that was the end of eBay.

[198] Right, right, exactly.

[199] Exactly.

[200] But that isn't what happened.

[201] Like the default transaction on eBay was so honest that the brokers, you could hire brokers to begin with.

[202] I can't remember what they were called exactly, but you could pay someone a fee so that they would guarantee the transaction.

[203] 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.

[204] The default trade was so honest that those things vanished right away.

[205] 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.

[206] And the only reason that worked was because people trusted one another.

[207] And so trust is an unbelievably powerful economic force, maybe the most powerful economic force.

[208] Anyways, if you have a relationship with someone, it's predicated on trust.

[209] And part of the reason for that is that trust is what enables us to look at each other without running away screaming.

[210] 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.

[211] You know, I think chimpanzee full of snakes.

[212] That's what a human being is.

[213] 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.

[214] But then if that trust is betrayed, then all the snakes come forth very, very rapidly.

[215] And so all of you, I suspect, have been betrayed one way or another.

[216] And so what happens?

[217] 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.

[218] And so you're standing on solid ground and the chaos, it's like you're standing on thin ice.

[219] The chaos is hidden.

[220] The shark beneath the waves isn't there.

[221] You're safe.

[222] You're in the lifeboat.

[223] 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?

[224] You're where everything is secure, because you've predicated your perception of the world on the axiom of trust.

[225] And the next second, really, the next second, you're in a completely different place.

[226] 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.

[227] 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 are 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.

[228] And I have no idea where I am now.

[229] I thought it was at home, but I'm not.

[230] I'm in a house and it's full of strangers.

[231] And I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow or next week or next year.

[232] It's like all of that certainty, that habitable certainty collapses right back into the potential from which it emerged.

[233] And that's a terrifying thing.

[234] That's a journey to the underworld from a mythological perspective.

[235] And that is really something worth knowing.

[236] Because, you know, journeys to the underworld are extraordinarily common in mythological stories.

[237] And, you know, like the Hobbit going out to find the smog, the dragon, and get the gold as a journey into the underworld.

[238] And journeys to the underworld happen all the time.

[239] And modern people don't understand what the underworld is, except that we've all been there, and we go there all the time.

[240] And we go there every time the solidity and stability of the world that we've erected, at least partly through our speech, is shableness.

[241] Because while 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 the 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 even for example is archetypal.

[242] It's because we do inhabit walled gardens, right?

[243] Because a walled garden is half structure, society, and half nature.

[244] That's what a walled garden is.

[245] And a walled garden is a place of paradise and warmth and love and and and and sustenance, but it's also the place where something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it.

[246] And I think part of the reason that that that story exists at the beginning of this collection of books is because it explains the eternal situation of human beings.

[247] We're always in that situation.

[248] We're in a walled garden, or we bloody well hope we are, but there's always a snake.

[249] 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, but go and interact with that state the second that we can manage it.

[250] You know, 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 a anything to do with it, which is of course something you know if you have teenagers, or even children, or if you know anything about yourself or your partner.

[251] So these stories are trying to express what you might describe as an unchanging transcendent reality.

[252] You know, it's something like what's common across all human experience across all time.

[253] And that's what Jung essentially meant by an archetype.

[254] And you could say, well, you know, we tend to think that what we see with our senses is real.

[255] 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?

[256] And so we see things that we can touch and pick up.

[257] We see tools, essentially, that are useful for our moment -to -moment activities.

[258] We don't see the structures of eternity, especially not the abstract structures of eternity.

[259] We have to imagine those with our imagination.

[260] Well, and that's partly what these stories are doing.

[261] They're saying, well, there's forms of stability that transcend our capacity to observe, which is hardly surprising.

[262] We know that if we're scientists, right?

[263] Because we're always abstracting out things that we can't immediately observe.

[264] 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 observing them with your senses, but you can imagine them with your imagination.

[265] 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.

[266] 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 It's a pattern that repeats in many, many places with variation.

[267] You extract out the central pattern.

[268] 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.

[269] And I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve, which we'll talk about in quite a bit of detail today, has been immune to being forgotten, is because it says things about the nature of the human condition, that are always true.

[270] I can give you another brief example.

[271] You know, like, people have a lot of guilt.

[272] You know, there's a line of social psychology that claims that most people feel that they're better than other people.

[273] Like, I just don't buy that.

[274] That isn't what I've seen in my life.

[275] And maybe I'm a 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.

[276] And I don't mean the sort of tragedy that you whine about.

[277] I mean, you know, your mother has Alzheimer's or your best friend committed suicide or 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.

[278] And if you don't, hey, you will, so, you know.

[279] So, no, that, so that tragic sense of being is there with people all the time.

[280] And it's also the case that in my experience, like I rarely meet someone who says, hey, you know, I'm doing everything I possibly can.

[281] I'm a hell of a guy, and I can't see how I could possibly improve, you know?

[282] You meet someone like that, you think they're narcissistic, right?

[283] And you're right.

[284] But most people don't feel that way.

[285] They feel like they could do a hell of a lot better than they are.

[286] And they're quite acutely aware of their faults, and they don't feel that they're what they should be.

[287] 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.

[288] 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.

[289] You have to work and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future constantly, and you know you're going to die.

[290] And you have all that weight on you.

[291] And to me again, that's just, how can anything be more true than that?

[292] That's just, as far as I can tell, that's just how it is.

[293] Unless you're naive, beyond comprehension, there's something about your life that is echoed in that representation.

[294] 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.

[295] And that's also what's expressed in the notion of the fall.

[296] The existentialist said, well, people feel like they have a debt that they have to pay off to existence for the crime of their being, something like that, and maybe it's because we're acutely aware that we have to offer something of value to the people around us so that they can tolerate us while 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, And it's very interesting because, you know, there's, in the Adam and Eve story, there's two catastrophes, essentially.

[297] 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.

[298] And their eyes are open, right?

[299] So that's the terminology that's used.

[300] And to have your eyes open means to have an increment in consciousness, essentially, because eyes are associated with consciousness for human beings, because we're intensely visual animals.

[301] 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.

[302] It's one of the two major fears of people, because one is social humiliation, and the other is something like mortality and death.

[303] 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.

[304] So, and then that's a good example of the two archetypal fears that characterize human beings.

[305] 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, 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 Carl Jung was very, very helpful in this because he faced these stories with the beginner's 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, the Freudian idea that God was just the father or the Marxist idea that religion was the opiate of the masses.

[306] It's like if religion was the opiate of the masses, then And communism was the methamphetamine of the masses, I can tell you that.

[307] So, you know, you've been betrayed by someone.

[308] And so you fall into that underworld of doubt about everything.

[309] And it's a serious place to be in that underworld, eh?

[310] Because not only do you not know where you came from or who you are or where you're going, that's bad enough.

[311] So that's the underworld itself.

[312] But there's a subdivision of the underworld, like the worst suburb, which is, I think, what hell is essentially from a metaphysical.

[313] perspective because, you know, if someone really cuts you off at the knees, especially if they do it in a malevolent way, 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.

[314] You know, they just weren't being stupid.

[315] They were like after you for whatever reason.

[316] 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 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 develop a nurse fantasies of the ultimate revenge.

[317] And that's a horrible place to be, and that's hell as far as I can tell.

[318] And that's why hell has always been a suburb of the underworld.

[319] Because 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.

[320] 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 a at least at one point in their life.

[321] 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.

[322] All it does is make everything that's bad even worse.

[323] 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.

[324] And so that's another, That's another fundamental separation, right?

[325] Light and darkness.

[326] Those are, in some sense, the two fundamental, two of the fundamental elements of our conscious 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.

[327] And so our existence is bounded by light and darkness.

[328] We're up and alert when it's light.

[329] And that's partly because we're highly visual animals, right?

[330] Unlike most animals, because most animals use smell.

[331] We use vision.

[332] We're very strange to that.

[333] way.

[334] And vision is associated with enlightenment and illumination and with the breaking of the dawn and with the coming of the new day and all of that.

[335] So, and so for, for light to be created is, is associated in some sense with the emergence of conscious being.

[336] And so that's another echo of that notion.

[337] And the particular phrasing of the story also is important because it's again that God said, right?

[338] So that's the use of that word.

[339] And that's the active element of the structure that gives rise to, that gives order to chaos.

[340] It's something like that.

[341] So it's like the spirit of the structure manifests itself and produces the fundamental divisions of experience.

[342] That's what's being presented here.

[343] And God separated the light from the darkness.

[344] He called the light day and the darkness he called night.

[345] And again, the fact that things are named is also very important.

[346] So you see this later with Adam because God gives Adam the job of naming all the animals.

[347] And it's sort of like the animals don't actually exist in some sense till they're named.

[348] And 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?

[349] Because 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.

[350] name because before it has a name, it's just kind of part of the blurry background and something like that.

[351] And you could say it exists before it has a name, and that's true, but it's also true that it doesn't exist before it has a name.

[352] Because as soon as you give something a name, its 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.

[353] It's on its way to being a tool.

[354] And so 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.

[355] 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.

[356] The best we've managed so far is some parrots, right?

[357] There's gray African parrot.

[358] 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 is the brain of a parrot.

[359] 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 next generation, which is obviously a critical element of really having that ability.

[360] 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.

[361] And, you know, you can say that we're just like ants on this little trivial planet out on the edge of one of 100 million galaxies and that what's happening here has no cosmic significance.

[362] But that's an arbitrary proposition, you know.

[363] I mean, we're very complicated things 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.

[364] There's no reason to consider consciousness a trivial phenomenon.

[365] I mean, it's taken three and a half billion years for you to develop the brain that you've developed.

[366] And human beings are amazing creatures.

[367] I mean, just a casual walk through YouTube and all those crazy kids that climb cranes and do that.

[368] What's that?

[369] Yeah, parkour, man. That stuff's unbelievable, you know?

[370] I mean, human beings are crazy, crazy animals.

[371] There's almost nothing we can't do.

[372] And I'm very loath to assume that the transformations of consciousness that are described in the early stories in the biblical accounts are somehow cosmically trivial.

[373] It doesn't strike me that way, and it's certainly not self -evident.

[374] And even if they are cosmically trivial, whatever that means, the rocks don't care.

[375] what you think.

[376] Well, who cares what the rocks think?

[377] First, they don't think.

[378] So I don't see why that's exactly relevant.

[379] But 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.

[380] The Heidegger, for example, who's a philosopher 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.

[381] about him.

[382] But one of the things that Heidegger said was that the fundamental element of human being, of human phenomenology, was care.

[383] He said that that's the basic essence of your being is that you care about things.

[384] You know, and that's, either negatively or positively, right?

[385] To not care about something or to hate it is still to be involved in care.

[386] And so, even if the cosmos itself is neutral with regards to our existence.

[387] We're not, and we're the only things that we know of that are conscious.

[388] And so, well, we might as well go with that.

[389] And there's no reason.

[390] See, I can't help but think that the constant attempts by people to trivialize the nature of their own consciousness has a dark side.

[391] I'm a psychoanalyst, and so I always think that way.

[392] 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.

[393] It's a great justification for total lack of responsibility.

[394] And 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.

[395] Plus, it's a lot easier.

[396] And so the notion that consciousness is trivial immediately allows you to wander down that path.

[397] And so I'm skeptical of those claims.

[398] And I also think that there's a deep hatred of humanity that underlies those claims as well.

[399] 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.

[400] 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.

[401] You know, you can't utter a more genocidal phrase than that, you know?

[402] And of course, you always do it in, in a display.

[403] of your care for the world.

[404] 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.

[405] No, it's really sickening.

[406] It's appalling.

[407] And there's a hatred for humanity that's at the bottom of it.

[408] And I mean, you can kind of understand why, because we're messy and we don't clean up after ourselves.

[409] And, you know, we're like raping the rainforests and that sort of thing.

[410] But I do have some sympathy for people because, you know, we're hell on Mother Nature, but she certainly returns the favor.

[411] So.

[412] 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.

[413] 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.

[414] It's like, good God, people deserve a bit of respect for struggling forward and not always trying to make the planet a worse place when they're beset on all sides constantly by, you know, an ending series of tragedy.

[415] You'd think we could have a little bit of sympathy for ourselves as a consequence of that.

[416] It's like we're not all like rapacious, greedy monsters who are bent on just devouring everything in our path, you know?

[417] It's a little bit more complicated than that.

[418] So, all right.

[419] Anyway, so, well, so let's go to the next part of this here.

[420] All right, so God said, let there be an expanse.

[421] in the midst of the waters and let it separate the waters from the waters.

[422] And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse.

[423] And it was so, and God called the expanse heaven.

[424] And there was evening and there was morning the second day.

[425] Well, to understand that, because what, that doesn't make any sense at all, really.

[426] So I think I told you a little bit about this before.

[427] So the world that's being created in this particular account is a phenomenological world.

[428] There's a disk of land, because if you go out in a field and you look around, you're on a disk of land, so that's pretty obvious, and then there's a dome on top of it.

[429] 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?

[430] And underneath the ground, there's fresh water.

[431] You can drill down and find that, and then around that there's salt water, and so that's the world.

[432] 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.

[433] And so that's the world that's being created.

[434] And so, one of the things that is worth thinking about, and 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.

[435] So one of the things Jung was interested in, for example, was astrology, but mostly for a psychological reason, because, you know, 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.

[436] But then the constellations become gods, say, and the gods turn into a drama.

[437] And so, and the drama comes from within.

[438] It's the projection of imagination.

[439] And so when Jung was analyzing astrology, he was analyzing psychology because he saw the astrological narrative as the projection of the human imagination onto the cosmos.

[440] And so when he was analyzing astrology, he was analyzing psychology.

[441] And the same thing is the case with these stories, is that the world they describe is only, it's not the natural world like a scientist would describe it, because these people weren't scientists.

[442] They didn't have the technology and the tools.

[443] It was the way they, for them it was the world.

[444] For us, it's the way they saw the world.

[445] And so, we're looking at the way they saw the world.

[446] And a lot of that psychology, and we share that psychology to a large degree with those people.

[447] So, in this is psychology.

[448] But it's interesting to know what the geographical substrate is so that you can kind of understand the stories.

[449] And I like this picture, because that's, it's great from a psychological perspective.

[450] It's a very famous picture.

[451] And, you know, so basically what you have here is the world as we know it.

[452] And there's the dome with the sun and the moon on it and the stars.

[453] And then if you look outside what you know, well, then you're out into this cosmic space, right?

[454] And those are like the wheels of the planets and the music of the spheres.

[455] 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.

[456] It's a psychological picture.

[457] It's like because you do know some things.

[458] And then outside of that, there are things you don't know.

[459] And when you're feeling brave, you put a foot or two out where you don't understand.

[460] 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 and you take a look at the at the at whatever structure is out there and 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 the white paisley here, and that's what you know, and 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.

[461] They don't want just security.

[462] 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 criticism of the notion of a political utopia.

[463] 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.

[464] That was 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.

[465] And it's so right because, you know, the utopian notion that if you just had all the material stuff you wanted, that you'd be, well, what would you be?

[466] What would you do?

[467] Would you just sit in the couch and watch TV?

[468] I mean, 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.

[469] So we're not adapted for security and utopia.

[470] 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.

[471] And, you know, I think, I believe this, and I believe it actually has something to do with the hemispheric structure of your, of the physiology of your brain, because the right hemisphere looks roughly adapted to what you don't know, and the left hemisphere, and 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 you can tell that.

[472] That's what's so cool, and this tells you that this is actually reality that's manifesting itself to you.

[473] You know, that sense of active engagement you have in the world when things are working well for you, you know, 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 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 properly balanced in your being at that moment and that's why it feels so good and now what else could it possibly be I mean you know our our brain is capable of looking beyond our vision, that's what it's for.

[474] And that sense of engagement, there's no reason to assume that that's anything but a real signal.

[475] And you can reduce it.

[476] 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.

[477] And the problem with being where you know nothing is that's just too much, man. Like, you know, you go into panic mode because anything can happen there and you can't handle it.

[478] So you've got to mediate between those two things.

[479] You want to be secure enough so that your physiology isn't revving out of control, and you want to be out there in the unknown enough so that you keep updating yourself constantly, constantly, constantly.

[480] And that's the place where information flow is maximized.

[481] 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.

[482] And it's the sort of thing that human beings are supposed to act out.

[483] And God said, let the waters under heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear.

[484] And it was so.

[485] God called the dry land earth and the waters that were gathered together he called seas.

[486] And God saw that it was good.

[487] Well, that's an interesting thing too, because, you know, there's this.

[488] There's this play written by a German named Goethe, I can never say that properly, it's Johann van G -O -E -T -H -E, and I can't say it, but he wrote this play called Faust, and 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 I really like.

[489] It was very profound, and basically Girttha's Mephostophilis says, you know, he's the adversary of the word.

[490] That's a good way of putting it.

[491] Because that's how it works out mythologically.

[492] He's the figure behind the snake in the Garden of Eden, which is something we'll talk about more.

[493] But he has a sophisticated philosophy.

[494] He's not just some random troublemaker.

[495] He's got a deep philosophy, and his philosophy is quite straightforward.

[496] And it's compelling.

[497] It's compelling.

[498] And people are gripped by it quite often, far more often than they think.

[499] His philosophy is, well, look around at the world.

[500] It's like Ivan Karamazov, in the brothers Karamazov, when he's trying to disabuse his younger brother of being a Christian monk.

[501] Neffostovly says, well, look at the world.

[502] I mean, all you look around the world, it's nothing but a bloodbath.

[503] It's just suffering everywhere.

[504] Everything eats everything, and people die terribly, and they're cruel to one another, and the whole mess is nothing but a constant haul of terrible carnage and ruin and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and 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 been.

[505] And that's a very, I think it's a very, it's a terrible philosophy, I believe, because I think what happens if you acted out is that you make the very things that led you to despair far worse.

[506] And I can't see that if it's reasonable to draw a logical conclusion that suffering should, it justifies your desire to make being end, that the answer to that can't be to produce more suffering.

[507] That just doesn't make sense.

[508] And my observation, has been that people who act out the mephistophelian 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 are 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 gonna 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.

[509] So anyways, but in this, God says that it was good, and I've thought about that a lot, because the question is something like, well, is something better than nothing?

[510] Because that's a really good question, you know?

[511] And I thought about two things in relationship to that.

[512] And one is, well, maybe it depends on how it is that you are, right?

[513] 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.

[514] 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.

[515] And it's a straight and narrow road.

[516] It's a very difficult road to tread.

[517] So I think, well, that's possible.

[518] I'm not an optimist by nature, but 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 that make things worse.

[519] Everyone knows that.

[520] And so if that's the case, there has to be the opposite, right?

[521] There has to be ways that you could act that make things better.

[522] And obviously you can act in ways that make things really way worse.

[523] And so the question is, well, are there ways that you can act that make things really much better?

[524] And I think that's the question is, can we have our cake and eat it too?

[525] Can we have the being that requires limitation and suffering?

[526] And also simultaneously transcend that by our mode of being.

[527] And I believe that the biblical stories, and perhaps not only the biblical stories, but the biblical stories are one of the human imagination's best attempts to address and answer that question.

[528] That's what the entire story is about.

[529] So the first of it is the catastrophe of the collapse of self -consciousness and the entrance of humanity into history.

[530] 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.

[531] Is there a mode of acting in the world that allows that to be justifiable?

[532] even more that allows that to be triumphant.

[533] 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.

[534] And you have the problem of tolerating yourself even in all your insufficiency.

[535] 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 lift up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you're insufficient and mortal 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 a natural it's a natural phenomenon you see it's 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 in side of us that calls to that and that makes us want to mimic that and to follow it.

[536] And I think that that's the deepest and most profound of instincts, and I think it's right.

[537] 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.

[538] 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.

[539] And, you know, Alexander Solzhen, who was the person who did most unmask the absolute horrors of communist totalitarianism, said that he believed that the Nuremberg judgments were the most important event of the 20th century.

[540] And that was the judgment at the end of World War II, that there were certain actions that no one was to undertake.

[541] 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.

[542] 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 their forcible removal from their parents and all the terrible things that went along with that, that that's just okay.

[543] It's just an opinion, it's just something that happened, and there are circumstances under which that's justifiable.

[544] If there's no transcendent good and evil underneath that argument, it's only a matter of practicality.

[545] And it seems to me that that's not the right conclusion to draw.

[546] That's how it seems to me, and that's what Solzhenitsyn concluded when he looked at the Nuremberg trials.

[547] So, 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 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.

[548] And you know perfectly well, 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.

[549] You know, it's, 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.

[550] Well, that's obviously a call to being.

[551] It's a statement from your own soul that says, well, there's something about that, that's how you should be.

[552] And maybe then, well, we get a chance to participate in what is good.

[553] I've thought too, you know Well, we'll leave that for a little later And God said Let the earth sprout 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 And there was evening and there was morning The third day I like that That's you see it's interesting these old pictures because if you look here you've got this halo around God's head and you've got this split again between night and darkness and God's right on the border between the two and that's the sun right 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 enlightenment that's right on the border between these two sets of phenomena, and 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 caveman 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 same seasons.

[554] I mean, I just can't imagine how they figured that out.

[555] It's that the degree of careful observation that it took.

[556] 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.

[557] And you see the same thing with the pyramids.

[558] 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 in order in the universe.

[559] 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.

[560] Amazing.

[561] And that let them be lights in the expanse of heavens to give light upon the earth, and it was so.

[562] 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.

[563] And God set them in the expanse of heavens to give light on the earth to rule over the day and over the night.

[564] And so there's an idea of sovereignty there too, right?

[565] That there's an analogy between the ruler and the heavenly bodies that light up the darkness, essentially.

[566] 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.

[567] And it's not power, it's not power, it's authority and competence and not power.

[568] It's not dominance either.

[569] 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.

[570] That's not what you need from a ruler even though it devolves into that from time to time.

[571] What you want is the kind of wisdom that illuminates the darkness and to associate the sovereign with the heavenly kings of the light is a perfectly reasonable thing to do from a metaphoric perspective.

[572] That's an ancient, ancient idea you know, and another example of how we're grounded in a dream.

[573] 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.

[574] And God saw that it was good.

[575] Another emphasis on the fact that it was better that there was something than nothing.

[576] And, you know, maybe you could consider that the declaration of the cosmos is something like, well, it's better that there's something than nothing.

[577] And well, how do you know that?

[578] And I guess the answer to that is that there's something instead of nothing.

[579] And I know that that's not proof, but it's still a remarkable fact that it happens to be the case, and no one does know why that is.

[580] And 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 really committed to it, and we shook our resentment and our anger and our hatred.

[581] 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.

[582] 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 the suffering of the world and there was you know there's this guy I 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 tendencies, and then if you want to pull it out, it breaks, right?

[583] Because, obviously, because otherwise you just pull it out, and 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 one percent, and it's, you and you live in North America, and thank God for that.

[584] But, you know, just a little imagine, you don't even want to think about it, let alone have it.

[585] And he went to Africa and wiped the damn thing out.

[586] It's like, well, great, you know.

[587] It seems to me the planet's a lot better off without any guinea worms on it.

[588] Even though that's like guinea worm genocide talk, I'm still, you know, pretty happy about it.

[589] And so that was one guy who thought, well, we don't need these things.

[590] And, yeah, well, fair enough, you know.

[591] Yeah, well, so good for him.

[592] Like, you know, I mean, he can die thinking that.

[593] the world's a better place that it was when he first popped out and so good so good for that.

[594] And that's a good aim, you know, I think, is to think that when you're on your deathbed, 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.

[595] 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.

[596] And we perfectly well know that people can manage that.

[597] and that many, many people try to do nothing but manage precisely that.

[598] 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.

[599] And there was evening and there was morning the fourth day.

[600] So you have the sun here, and then the moon here, as far as I can tell.

[601] Yeah.

[602] Actually, I think this is the moon over here, but...

[603] So, yeah, and that's part of the Sistine Chapel, which is, you know, an absolutely remarkable.

[604] No, part of the reason, too, and 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.

[605] And Dante's Inferno would be one of those Milton's Paradise Lost, which is an absolutely amazing piece of work.

[606] Milton wrote it because he wanted to justify the ways of God to man. You know, what an ambition that is.

[607] And I mean, he was serious about that.

[608] He took the problem seriously.

[609] It's like, it's the Mephistophelian problem, is that, well, this is a rough business that we're involved in.

[610] And, you know, maybe we should just give it up.

[611] And I think the world, the whole world, I think, was deciding that in the 1980s when we were deciding whether we're going to engage in the ultimate nuclear catastrophe, you know, and we were very, very close to that a number of times.

[612] 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.

[613] But, you know, Milton, he wrote Paradise Lost to it's a 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 they're right there in everyone's face and at least at some point in your life.

[614] 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.

[615] And it's, 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.

[616] 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 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.

[617] And that's not the right way to be.

[618] It's the right way to be in a situation like that is to be strong and reliable.

[619] And I don't think you can do that without being wise and you can't be wise without putting yourself together and without knowing something about where you came from and what you're like and that's history and the humanities.

[620] And so this isn't optional.

[621] It's more necessary if man does not live by bread alone and that's exactly the issue here.

[622] So you see these magnificent works, you know, I mean, there's a, there's, it's, 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, and it's ennobling, and you know, you think people, religious or not, people, hundreds of millions of people, come from all.

[623] over the world to Rome and go through this little tiny chapel to look at this.

[624] There's something in it that everyone needs to see.

[625] You know, it's not just beauty.

[626] It's more than beauty.

[627] It's that which feeds the soul.

[628] And everyone feels that, even if they can't explain it.

[629] So, and God said, let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.

[630] So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves with which the water 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 that 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 um re presented 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 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.

[631] And then you have Old Testament God and like, don't mess around with him, right?

[632] Because he'll give you good smiting if you get out of line.

[633] There's no doubt about that.

[634] And he's kind of an arbitrary character.

[635] And, you know, lots of modern people think, well, how could you believe in a God like that?

[636] And it's like, when I read that, I think, well, the Old Testament people, that isn't how they thought.

[637] They thought, you better look the hell out because life is really difficult.

[638] If you step out of line, you're going to get flattened, and God doesn't care in some sense whether you approve of him.

[639] It's like, what the hell does that have to do with anything?

[640] Obviously, you don't approve.

[641] It's like you better pay attention, though, because otherwise you're going to be in real trouble.

[642] And there's real wisdom in that.

[643] 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.

[644] You know, it wasn't following a morality that human beings could really understand as moral.

[645] He thought that was very realistic, and I like that interpretation.

[646] 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.

[647] And that's such a strange thing because you look at the world and you think, yeah, really?

[648] just good, eh?

[649] Well, the cancer and the earthquakes is kind of hard to fit into that picture, and, you know, the terrible things that happen to children and all of that is very difficult to square with the notion of a good God, obviously.

[650] But then the underlying idea is that if you act in that manner, it makes it more likely to be true.

[651] It's something like that, and so I would consider that in some sense an act of both courage and faith.

[652] 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.

[653] Now, you can't see it because, well, you get to see all the things about it that aren't so good.

[654] That's not the point.

[655] It's a metaphysical presupposition, something like that.

[656] It's a decision to act that way.

[657] I'm going to act as if being is good and to further that.

[658] And then the implicit idea is, well, there isn't any way that you can make things work out.

[659] better than to do that.

[660] And so there's a courageous element to it, which I think is also expressed to some degree in the idea of Christ's like voluntary sacrifice of his own life.

[661] 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.

[662] And now that becomes something like a divine pattern.

[663] 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.

[664] I haven't been studying good.

[665] I've been studying evil.

[666] Because evil is easier to believe, especially after the 20th century.

[667] It's like, I think you have to be, you have to be blind not to think about the things that happened in the 20th century as evil.

[668] And some of the things that happened were so brutal.

[669] It's just absolutely unimaginable.

[670] And, well, unless you imagine it.

[671] And it's right there.

[672] It's part of the historical record.

[673] And then I think, well, if there's something that's 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.

[674] 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?

[675] The fact that everybody looks forward into the future to know that you're finite, and so is everything that you love.

[676] And it's very difficult for that not to poison your existence.

[677] And while 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 right there's a 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.

[678] It's a courageous attitude, especially given that there's so much evidence that makes that conclusion difficult to continually draw.

[679] But the alternative seems to me to be far worse.

[680] So there's God again with the sun behind him because he's associated with the solar consciousness and he's creating all these strange, wonderful creatures.

[681] And, you know, it's a...

[682] And people say, well, you know, the idea of God as an old man in the sky, let's say, that's primitive.

[683] It's much more better to think about it as a much more better, Jesus.

[684] Anyways, it's more sophisticated to think of the divine essence as a disembodied spirit or something like that.

[685] 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.

[686] And so the idea that the divine is something that's at least as complicated.

[687] as a human being strikes me as something that's actually quite reasonable.

[688] 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.

[689] And I really, that's also a very interesting notion, you know, 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.

[690] It can't be just, it can't be just a spirit, a spirit with without form and I think that's part of the reason too why Christianity put so much emphasis at the end of time on the resurrection of the body because there's 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.

[691] 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.

[692] I don't think it's primitive at all.

[693] And then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.

[694] And it's our because, well, this is part of the priestly story.

[695] There's, as I said, a number of sources for the Old Testament.

[696] And in the priestly version, if I remember correctly, it's Elohim.

[697] That may be wrong.

[698] It 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, right?

[699] 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 it wasn't easy for people to figure out, you know, because what's constant across sources of power?

[700] 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.

[701] It's the first, the observation that there are powers that determine the destiny of people, at least in part, that you're, 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 is 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.

[702] They are not merely simple superstitions.

[703] 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.

[704] It's much, much more complicated than that.

[705] 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.

[706] And so you have to wrestle with these stories.

[707] You can't just, and I say, 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.

[708] But you have to take the story seriously if you're going to, if you're going to, if you're going to approach the problem properly, you can't just casually dismiss them.

[709] It's not appropriate.

[710] And so, so let us make man in our image.

[711] That's a very interesting idea.

[712] 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.

[713] Human beings weren't godlike, they were the playthings of the gods, right?

[714] They were just, the gods just tortured us for their amusement, you know, love and hatred and anger and all those powerful forces.

[715] We were just play things to the gods.

[716] There wasn't anything particularly divine about us, the notion that in some sense, since we partake of the divine, that's a staggering idea.

[717] 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.

[718] 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.

[719] So God created man in his own image.

[720] In the image of God, he created him.

[721] Male and female, he created them.

[722] That's interesting because there is more.

[723] 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 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.

[724] And there's God creating Adam and Eve, and they're looking pretty happy about the whole thing.

[725] And that's Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel representation.

[726] There's some cool things about this.

[727] 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.

[728] So that's a form of credible.

[729] What the hell is God doing in this thing?

[730] You know, I mean, what is this exactly?

[731] And so there's been some interesting answers to that, and this is one of them.

[732] 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.

[733] And of course, Michelangelo was one of the first people who did detailed dissections.

[734] 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, you know, there's an analogy or a metaphorical identity between the notion of whatever God is and the structures that give rise to consciousness.

[735] And I think we really underestimate the degree to which consciousness is both, say, miraculous and not understood.

[736] 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.

[737] It really is remarkable, and that consciousness is dependent on on something that wells up from deep within that material substrate that we don't understand at all.

[738] It's really a crazy remarkable thing.

[739] You know, and you hear a lot about scientific reductionism, but I'll tell you something that's kind of interesting.

[740] And it's a tangent, too.

[741] You know, the guy that discovered DNA, I think it was Watson, and it's Watson and Crick, but I don't remember who wrote this book, but one of them, I don't remember which one.

[742] He believed that DNA was so complicated that it had to come from space.

[743] He didn't believe it could have possibly evolved on Earth.

[744] 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?

[745] They were very aware of the limits of their own knowledge.

[746] And I mean, DNA is something really quite spectacularly remarkable.

[747] It's an eternal substance.

[748] It's been around for a very long time, and the idea that we understand it is a very stupid idea.

[749] And I would say that I would say that the same thing applies to the brain, like we're scratching away at the surface of something.

[750] We don't understand at all.

[751] And so it's quite interesting, I think, and maybe Michelangelo had enough gall to do that.

[752] It's certainly possible.

[753] I mean, he had enough gall to do dissections when the cost of that was death.

[754] You know, he had this rob corpses essentially to go and do it so he was he wasn't I would say not particularly politically correct so 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 there's there's this joke in the atheistic 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 got, and that's the flying spaghetti monster, by the way, and, and, and so that's, that's called touched by his nudely appendage.

[755] And, uh, anyways, it's, it's not very sophisticated, but it is funny.

[756] So, 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.

[757] And God said, behold, I have given you ever, 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 to 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.

[758] 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.

[759] I like that too, you know.

[760] One of the, I did a lot of counseling 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.

[761] 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?

[762] Because one answer is you just work till you die, right?

[763] I mean, you just exhaust yourself, and well, that's not a good idea.

[764] And then you have to figure out why that isn't a good idea.

[765] 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 interferes with the amount of work that you could still do, right?

[766] 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 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 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.

[767] So if something is properly structured in a moral manner, then you can do it over and over and over again without any degeneration.

[768] And so that's kind of like a relationship.

[769] If your relationship is negotiated, you can continue to negotiate it, and then you can have a relationship that lasts for a long time.

[770] You can do it today and next week and next month and next year.

[771] You can maintain it across time.

[772] 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.

[773] Okay, so I'm going to go over again the idea of the attributes of God.

[774] 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.

[775] 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.

[776] And it's a statement that it has a cosmic quality rather than a discovery.

[777] 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.

[778] It's a very interesting set of propositions.

[779] And I don't believe that they're simply refutable.

[780] It's a perfectly coherent argument, even though it's primarily made metaphorically.

[781] And so then, once again, I want to build up the framework of associations around the idea of God.

[782] 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 asked them what that makes them remember, or what that thing means to them, or what comes to mind.

[783] And that's the associational technique, and it's predicated on the idea that your memory works by association.

[784] 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.

[785] 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.

[786] And I think often that can be unbelievably useful, you know, and it's like the dream is an idea that's trying to come to birth.

[787] 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.

[788] 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.

[789] But it doesn't do that in one fell swoop.

[790] It doesn't just take potential and turn it into articulated ideas.

[791] It has to dream up what's out there first, projects its imagination out there to get a handle on what it might be.

[792] Then that's presented in the dream, and if you analyze the dream, you can make it more articulate.

[793] And so that's what we're going to do with the attributes of God to build up the representational structure a little bit.

[794] 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.

[795] And the underlying idea there too is that when the ruler becomes the ideal, the state turns into the biblical Egypt.

[796] And the biblical Egypt is a tyranny.

[797] 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.

[798] And that was deadly.

[799] Then you were slaves.

[800] And then the thing was going to collapse as well.

[801] No matter how big and grandiose, as soon as the ruler became.

[802] 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.

[803] 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.

[804] Now, when the ruler becomes the ideal, the state turns into the biblical Egypt, and the biblical Egypt is the archetypal tyranny.

[805] So, what is God like?

[806] Well, from the Christian perspective, there's three elements.

[807] One is, seems to have something to do with tradition.

[808] And so that's God the Father, and that's partly the embodiment, I would say, of the human being.

[809] And that's an ancient, ancient thing.

[810] And it's also partly the embodiment of the tradition of human beings, which is also a very ancient thing.

[811] 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.

[812] 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.

[813] 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.

[814] And then there's the notion of the suffering individual, and that's a very complicated idea.

[815] 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.

[816] So it's like a Zen cone.

[817] It's a really interesting idea because they think, well, what in the world can something like that lack?

[818] And the idea is limitation.

[819] So something that's everything lacks limitation.

[820] And that's that idea, like when I first encountered that, just blew me away.

[821] I thought it was such a brilliant, brilliant realization that there are advantages to not being able to do things.

[822] Partly because it gives you something to do, I suppose that's a big part of it, right?

[823] If you had everything you wanted at every moment at your fingertips, well, that's, there's nothing, there's no story.

[824] It's funny, you know, because that happened to Superman, you know, the cartoon character.

[825] By the 1980s, he could juggle planets and you could bounce like hydrogen bombs off him and be fine.

[826] It's like everyone got bored because, well, what were you going to do to Superman?

[827] 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.

[828] And the whole cartoon series basically died because he didn't have any flaws.

[829] There's no story without the limitation.

[830] And I think that's an absolutely remarkable idea.

[831] And so part of the notion of Christ, and this is something that I 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.

[832] 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.

[833] It's not instantiated in a specific time and place in history.

[834] 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 an it's it's a 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 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.

[835] And what that means in part is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence.

[836] And so that's partly betrayal, right?

[837] Betrayal by friends and by family and by the state.

[838] 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.

[839] But, you know, the arbitrary nature of justice, and also the fact of finitude.

[840] 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.

[841] And that's a very, very powerful idea as far as I'm concerned.

[842] And I'm also, you know, the world's a weird place, and I've seen some very strange things in my life.

[843] And one of the things that I've seen is that, you know, I've dealt with some people who were very, let's say, that they weren't on a good path, let's put it that way.

[844] 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.

[845] I'm speaking metaphorically, obviously.

[846] And their worldview 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 like a like a gravitational object and bend things around them to fit their narrative, their unhappy and tragic narrative.

[847] 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 that and that ordered things around them in profound ways.

[848] 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 your yourself together.

[849] I mean, we know that things can go very, very badly wrong if you do things very badly wrong.

[850] There's no doubt about that.

[851] But the converse is also true if you start to sort yourself out properly and then you have a beneficial effect on your family.

[852] I mean, first of all, that's going to echo down the generations, but it also spreads out into the community.

[853] And we are networked together.

[854] You know, we're not associated linearly.

[855] We all affect each other.

[856] And so it's an open question the degree to which acting out the notion of, the notion that being is good and the notion that you can accept its limitations and that you should still strive for virtue.

[857] It's, it's an open question how profound effect that would have on the structure of reality if you really chose to act it out.

[858] 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.

[859] And I think there are times when those two things come together.

[860] And I've seen that happen.

[861] And so I don't think we know the limits of virtue.

[862] don't think we know what true virtue could bring about if we aimed at it carefully and practically.

[863] 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.

[864] 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.

[865] So, that's kind of the Trinitarian idea, same idea there.

[866] And you see, this is, it's 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.

[867] It's not exactly the sky, whatever the heaven was, that people believed in.

[868] It's something that's, it's like the sky opens, and there's a dimension beyond the sky.

[869] It's something like that, and I wanted to show you this, too, just to show you that this isn't only a Western.

[870] conception, you know, and it has something to do with mystical experience, because there is a bodhisattva.

[871] 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.

[872] It's the eternal recurrence of this, of this redemptive archetype, and the sky opens up, and you can see that thing recurring and recurring and recurring.

[873] Same idea is basically, that's the Blue Buddha who's a healing, 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 the the possibility of the metaphysical and the physical coming together in some sort of 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.

[874] You can induce them chemically.

[875] You can induce them electrochemically.

[876] Lots of people who have epilepsy have epileptic pro -dromas that are associated with divine enlightenment.

[877] 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 well so that's the Trinitarian idea fundamentally and this this notion here is the notion that well the cross is a 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 the cathedral is, and it's, the center of the world is where you are.

[878] Because as a consciousness, you're the center of the world.

[879] That center of the world is a place of betrayal and suffering and limitation.

[880] That's exactly what it is.

[881] 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?

[882] 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.

[883] You're supported by your tradition, and that's why you need your tradition too.

[884] 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.

[885] 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.

[886] Because you don't know what you are, what you could be, and so without that, because you're a historical creature You know what students ask me sometimes why study history.

[887] It's like, well, because History is about you.

[888] That's why.

[889] It's like history tells you who you are You can't tell who you are because you only live a little while.

[890] How the hell can you figure out who you are?

[891] 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.

[892] And you know, you're pummeled down and people picked on you and there's 50 things about you that are horrible.

[893] And, you know, you've got a self -esteem problem.

[894] You're sort of hunched over and you've got all these problems, you know.

[895] 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.

[896] 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.

[897] Okay, so we're going to stop exactly at 10 tonight, because that's the deal with the theater people.

[898] And besides, I'll be out of anything intelligent to say by that point, certainly.

[899] So, well, at least we got through one story, so that was good.

[900] Okay, let's give everyone like two, you know, just a few seconds to settle down, and everyone who wants to leave can leave.

[901] So thank you for all for coming, by the way.

[902] I'm constantly amazed that, you know, everybody comes and listens to this because, you know, it's just, well, it's strange.

[903] Let's put it that way.

[904] so far it's been fun though so that's good okay let's go hi oh that works hi dr peterson um i was a raised catholic and anytime there was a bit of a 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 how do you deal with a perfect god or the conception of a perfect god who by nature is incapable of an imperfect design.

[905] Sorry, incapable of a perfect design.

[906] So what I mean by that is many religions present, for example, good and evil as separate deities that pre -existed simultaneously.

[907] What's interesting about Christianity is that Lucifer, the embodiment of evil in the Christian religion, is an outgrowth of God.

[908] And is sometimes, Milton, for example, presents him as a rebel against his interpretation of God's tyranny, right?

[909] Another example, you know, 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.

[910] 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?

[911] Oh, so good.

[912] That's a good, simple question.

[913] We're starting good.

[914] See, Carl Jung, he was kind of manician in his approach, and he tended towards thinking that evil, in some sense, was a separate entity.

[915] 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.

[916] And I mean this most practically, as I've said, for people in my clinical practice, I've dealt with many people who were touched by malevolence, And there's no other way of stating it properly.

[917] And this happens a lot to people who have post -traumatic stress disorder.

[918] Like, they encountered someone that wanted to hurt them for the sake of hurting them.

[919] You know, it wasn't some misunderstanding.

[920] You can forget about that.

[921] It wasn't that at all.

[922] 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, use, for example, very often in universities anymore.

[923] But I just can't understand that at all.

[924] But I thought about that a lot, and so I'm going to kind of answer that question by hitting it scattershot.

[925] The first thing is that there's an idea, and that this happens in Milton, that comes across in Milton, that distance from God is hell.

[926] Right?

[927] 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.

[928] And then there's another idea that Milton, Satan, who's Lucifer, the bringer of light, right?

[929] He's God's highest angel gone most wrong.

[930] And I kind of think about him as the spirit of rationality, of intelligence.

[931] It's not because I'm not an admirer of intelligence, because it's hooray for intelligence, but one of the things that Milton seemed to cotton 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.

[932] 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.

[933] And I also think that's, and we'll talk about this next week, I also think that that's the core idea behind the Tower of Babel.

[934] Remember, the Tower of Babel is raised by human beings so that the pinnacle will hit heaven.

[935] And so it's the idea that we can build a structure that makes the transcendent unnecessary.

[936] And so, okay, so there's those two things.

[937] 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.

[938] And so, I think the answer is something like this, is that in order for there to be being, there has to be limitation.

[939] In order for their good, to be good, there has to be the possibility of evil.

[940] I think the right path is to exist such that the possibility of evil remains open, but that you choose the good.

[941] And I don't think that evil, per se, is built into the structure of the world.

[942] I do think that that's human.

[943] I think that evil is human.

[944] And I think it's understandable.

[945] I did a lecture that's online about the distinction between evil and tragedy.

[946] And tragedy seems to be built into the structure of the world, and perhaps you can blame God for that.

[947] I mean, it doesn't seem to me that it's your fault that there are earthquakes, for example.

[948] But it is not obvious to me either that it's tragedy that takes the spirit out of people.

[949] I think that human beings are actually equipped to deal with tragedy, but we're not equipped to deal with malevolence.

[950] That destroys people.

[951] And so I think that, I think that metaphysically speaking, the world is structured so that people have a choice between good and evil.

[952] So then the next question is, why do we have a choice?

[953] And that's where my knowledge runs out.

[954] 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.

[955] And I think there's something to that.

[956] 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.

[957] And part of that is that we have free will, and part of that is that we have the choice between good and evil.

[958] And that's also all associated with the significance, maybe the cosmic significance of our lives.

[959] And that strikes me as plausible.

[960] And I think the weight of responsibility that people feel existentially is an indication of that.

[961] So that's about the best I could do with that.

[962] 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'd noticed was God consistently describes creation as good, right?

[963] He creates light, it's good, he creates dark, it's good.

[964] 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.

[965] And it might be something lost to translation, but that is described as very good.

[966] As soon as that dominion is brought into existence, it might speak to that notion of furthering creation.

[967] Here's something interesting too, and we'll develop this a lot, is that, 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, okay, and to me, that means that, well, they've woken up, right?

[968] There's been an increment in their consciousness, and the next thing that happens is that they recognize that they're naked.

[969] Okay, and to recognize that you're naked is to recognize that you're vulnerable.

[970] 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, right?

[971] So, we've got that sort of bipedal self -consciousness built into us.

[972] But what's really interesting is that when Adam and Eve realized that they're naked, it's the same moment that they know the difference between good and evil.

[973] And that, God, that just, I just ground away on that for years.

[974] I thought what the hell is, what's going on here?

[975] What's the relationship between consciousness, knowledge of nakedness, and the knowledge of good and evil?

[976] And then I think I figured it out.

[977] I think it was that, you see, when you know that you're vulnerable and they also develop knowledge of death, right?

[978] So there's deep knowledge of vulnerability and they get embarrassed about that.

[979] They cover themselves up, right?

[980] So that's culture.

[981] So it's a very profound shock for them to recognize that they're naked.

[982] It even makes Adam hide from God.

[983] Then they develop the knowledge of good and evil.

[984] 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.

[985] Because I'm aware of my own limitations, painfully aware.

[986] And now, because I know how I can be hurt, I know how you can be hurt, and I can take advantage of that.

[987] And that's, I think, how evil enters the world.

[988] That's what it looks like to me. It's like, I've got this expansion of knowledge.

[989] It says in Genesis that that gives people another attribute of divinity, knowing the difference between good and evil.

[990] It has nothing to do with animals, and it has nothing to do with Adam and Eve prior to having their eyes opened.

[991] But the cosmos switches when that self -consciousness manifests itself, and that's when the possibility of evil enters the world.

[992] It's something like that.

[993] And that's also echoed by the intimate relationship between the snake in the Garden of Eden and Satan, which is, we'll go into, because that's a very strange association.

[994] It's like this snake also becomes the adversary of being.

[995] 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.

[996] And then there's the snake that lives in you if you remove yourself from your family.

[997] And that snake that's in you, right?

[998] That's a psychological phenomena.

[999] That's equivalent to transcendent evil itself, the thing that inhabits every single person.

[1000] That's why there's that association between the snake and Satan.

[1001] 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.

[1002] I mean, you imagine if you're a medieval torturer.

[1003] 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?

[1004] And so you exploit your own vulnerability, you exploit the knowledge of your own vulnerability to bring pain into the world.

[1005] and I don't think that you can lay that precisely at God's feet.

[1006] Now, people have been arguing about that for a very long time, but my question, the question for me that arose from that is, all right, fine, like tragedy, you can lay that at God's feet.

[1007] Well, if we didn't bring additional evil into the world, could we tolerate the tragedy of being without becoming corrupt?

[1008] And I think generally the answer to that is yes, because I've seen people react quite heroically to the arbitrariness.

[1009] arbitrary burdens of their life.

[1010] But malevolence, man, that lays them low.

[1011] It lays them low and it seems to be to be nothing but a destructive force.

[1012] And I do believe as well, and I think you see this in the Canaan Abel story, that the root of malevolence is the desire for revenge against God for creation itself.

[1013] And I mean, I've read terrible things, written by terrible people, trying to get to the bottom of things.

[1014] And I mentioned the Columbine killers, for example.

[1015] And it's clear, all you have to do is go read what they wrote.

[1016] What they were doing was taking revenge against God.

[1017] They knew that.

[1018] It wasn't unconscious.

[1019] They'd been dwelling on this for months, plotting their revenge, and it was revenge against being itself for the crime of being.

[1020] So, thank you.

[1021] Hi, Doctor.

[1022] You'd said when God saw that it was good, you read that as potentially, well, it might be better than nothing.

[1023] And the story in Genesis is bracketed by days, which aren't necessarily literal days.

[1024] Yom, the original word, but it's also bracketed by, and he saw it was good, you know, at the end of the day.

[1025] So my question is, is there something more profoundly happening there between this profundity of speaking into existence the way, you know, the start is, to this observation, this seeing that it's good?

[1026] And are we, is God modeling consciousness?

[1027] Is there a little more there for us to grapple with?

[1028] Okay.

[1029] So go more for us to grapple with in what way?

[1030] In the sense that we have this amazing, this insight of speaking things forth, but you'd also comment on consciousness as until something's observed or until it's seen.

[1031] So when God sees that that creation was good, is there kind of this bracketing between the bringing forth through the, you know, the word through Jesus.

[1032] Okay, okay, that's good.

[1033] I see what you mean.

[1034] 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.

[1035] I mean, Christ makes that claim in the New Testament that he's the truth, right, and embodied.

[1036] 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.

[1037] And so, yeah, I think that that association exists.

[1038] And I think that that's, well, I also think that that's that in some sense the deepest claim of faith.

[1039] I believe that because I think that I think you have to make a decision in your life as far as I can tell.

[1040] And I think Kierkegaard knew this more clearly than anyone else I've ever read.

[1041] And that is that if being is good, then an honest relationship with being also has to be good.

[1042] And then if you have an honest relationship with being, then you're going to speak the truth.

[1043] 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.

[1044] And that's the rub of faith, and I think that's something that Kierkegaard wrestled with, you know.

[1045] And I mean, I'm trying to think if I can provide an example about that, and easily and quickly.

[1046] 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.

[1047] 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 favorite 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.

[1048] It's like the decision that God is good.

[1049] The decision is there's no better way to bring better being into being, then to speak the truth.

[1050] And I do think that's echoed.

[1051] I think that's a very wise observation.

[1052] I think that's echoed in that first story.

[1053] First of all, the act of speech, and second, the observation that the consequence was good.

[1054] So, yeah.

[1055] Thank you.

[1056] Good morning, Citizen Peterson.

[1057] First, I have a bunch of questions and the one that have them answered immediately.

[1058] Like, you have a post on Quora in which you encourage all children to incur skateboarding injuries?

[1059] 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.

[1060] 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?

[1061] Okay, okay, okay.

[1062] Well, the skateboarding question is, I have a book coming out in 2018 called 12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos.

[1063] And one of the chapters in there is from that Quora posting, and it's called Don't Bother Children when they're skateboarding.

[1064] And it's sort of associated with what I said earlier about parkour, for example, is that kids need to go out and push themselves against danger because that's what life is, is pushing yourself against danger.

[1065] 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.

[1066] The best thing you can do is make them able and courageous.

[1067] 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.

[1068] 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.

[1069] 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.

[1070] Okay, so there's that.

[1071] Now, the other one was rescuing people.

[1072] Yeah.

[1073] 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 did It 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, is, 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.

[1074] I mean, the way they think is by talking, and they can't talk unless they have someone to talk to.

[1075] And it's partly because, they're bouncing the idea off them and seeing if it makes sense and seeing how the person responds.

[1076] So listening is a great thing.

[1077] But Rogers was also interested in the 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.

[1078] And that seemed to be associated with this idea of that initial choice say between good and evil.

[1079] See, once someone comes to therapy, they've already done.

[1080] 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, and 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.

[1081] 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.

[1082] They're in kind of an authoritarian bubble.

[1083] And so I don't think that...

[1084] So even if you orient yourself as an archetypal hero, there's no way you can get through that barrier that...

[1085] Well, I think that that's part of the issue of free will.

[1086] I think that...

[1087] I do not think that people can learn unless they admit that they're wrong.

[1088] There was this play, the Cocktail Hour by T .S. Eliot, and 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.

[1089] And he says, well, why in the world would you hope such a thing?

[1090] 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.

[1091] And as far as I can tell, there's only two possibilities.

[1092] Either the world, in its essence is conspiring against me and I'm doomed because what am I going to do about the world?

[1093] 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.

[1094] And so I'm going to leave it at that.

[1095] This is psychological rescue, not like rescuing someone who's drowning, for example?

[1096] Yes.

[1097] You can rescue people when they're drowning even if they don't want you.

[1098] Perfect.

[1099] I'll tell you something about that, though.

[1100] Something interesting about that, and that's relevant, is that, you know, I don't know how many of you know how you rescue someone who's drowning.

[1101] You do it like this.

[1102] Right, you come to them like this, and you push them away with your foot if they're, 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.

[1103] And that's stupid because then you both drown Right, and so and that's a really good way That's a really good metaphor for trying to help someone too It's like when people are in real trouble You know some of it's they're confused and some of it is that their life is collapsed around them And there's some malevolence there and there's some desire for vengeance And it's just like one dangerous mess And if you're going to wait 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 you're damn psychological stability rests on.

[1104] You might be saying just because you're lucky and surrounded by sane people, that doesn't mean that you have the psychological wherewithal to really pull some one up from the depths of the underworld, especially if they've also got one foot in hell.

[1105] So you should bloody well be careful about doing that kind of thing.

[1106] 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.

[1107] It's very dangerous activity, and it can easily be counterproductive.

[1108] Okay, so about since 2006, I've been trying to figure out, like, extract the meta, the way you've put it, of social justice warriors.

[1109] And I think I found it, actually.

[1110] They seem to have this behavior where they just, they nebulize every standard we have, so they take a standard you have that has full of criteria.

[1111] They say, what something is, is how it is.

[1112] Like, that's a podium, but it has these criteria within it.

[1113] Oh, sorry.

[1114] They take, 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.

[1115] 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 or a male or a woman or something like that.

[1116] But the thing that came from this, and I figured this out when I learned about you, when I learned about you, is that nebulization appears to be the exact opposite process of individuation.

[1117] 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 like in the objective.

[1118] that you exist here, and then I am, which is a reiteration or reincarnation of I exist, which is, well, 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.

[1119] Well, if you exist and you're right, as what.

[1120] 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.

[1121] Because if you take as, for example, and the as is the predictive aspect, where you try to to take the subjective and make it objective.

[1122] So you have an idea.

[1123] You test it in reality and time is the ultimate arbiter that determines these things.

[1124] And it changes your understanding of reality.

[1125] It lets you know God.

[1126] It lets you know the objective.

[1127] And then from that point, there's the subjective, which is supposed to be formed from object to reality.

[1128] But because you've changed that, you know, have to sacrifice your old self.

[1129] The old way you saw Jordan Peterson of 10 years ago was not who he is now.

[1130] So it gets sacrificed.

[1131] And at the same time, you can point back to that guy, that Jordan Peterson, and say, well, that guy was wrong.

[1132] And that's the scapegoating of the sun.

[1133] 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.

[1134] I don't understand the relationship between that and the first part.

[1135] So, can you just clarify that?

[1136] The social justice aspect and the nebulization.

[1137] Oh, the social justice is the exact opposite process of individuation.

[1138] That's all it is.

[1139] And it actually occurs at as.

[1140] If you're at as, and you're thinking, well, what am I?

[1141] You either apply individuation.

[1142] You try to apply criteria.

[1143] You try to find out what you are in reality, or we 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.

[1144] 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?

[1145] Okay, I haven't considered that.

[1146] I know that Jung drew a parallel between the idea of the passion, for example, and the development of human individuality.

[1147] And so 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.

[1148] I haven't considered the metaphorical pathway that you just described, so I can't comment on that.

[1149] I'd have to think about that.

[1150] 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?

[1151] The phallogocentric West needs to be taken down to its essence is the refusal to engage in precisely.

[1152] language.

[1153] 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.

[1154] They don't believe in debate, and they don't believe in the, let's say, the redemptive power of dialogue, because mostly what they believe in is power.

[1155] So there's a nebulization in that manner.

[1156] There's this tendency to hide behind what's vague and fog -like instead of making things sharp and clear and crystalline.

[1157] And I do think that that's, well, that's part of the degeneration of a civilization as far as I'm concerned.

[1158] So you haven't considered that then?

[1159] No. Would you please?

[1160] I'll do my best.

[1161] I'll do my best.

[1162] Thank you.

[1163] Thank you.

[1164] Okay, so one, this is it, one more question.

[1165] I'll make you quick.

[1166] Okay.

[1167] Hi, Dr. Peterson.

[1168] 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?

[1169] So my question was, how do you do that if you don't know where you want to go?

[1170] Because that's kind of where I got stuck on your future authoring program because...

[1171] Okay, that's a good question.

[1172] That's a really good question.

[1173] I think it's echoed to some degree in the structure of the biblical stories in this manner.

[1174] So there's this notion in the Old Testament.

[1175] that morality is following a sequence of prohibitions.

[1176] There's a bunch of bad things you shouldn't do, and then basically you're good enough.

[1177] And I think there's wisdom in that.

[1178] I think that's kind of where children start, right?

[1179] I mean, I love children and all that, but they're crazy little creatures, and they need to be, you know, 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.

[1180] 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.

[1181] 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.

[1182] And so your job is to make them desirable social beings and a lot of that is prohibition.

[1183] 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 impulsive sin, let's say.

[1184] There's a positive good to be accomplished.

[1185] Well, you might say, well, I don't know what the positive good is.

[1186] Fair enough, man. 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.

[1187] It's a lot harder, too.

[1188] But 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.

[1189] 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.

[1190] And those are often small things, you know, and they can be like your room, put it in order.

[1191] because the thing is, it isn't exactly so important that your room is in order, although it is.

[1192] 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.

[1193] And in most households, there's a hundred things that could be done to just make it less hideous and horrible.

[1194] 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.

[1195] 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.

[1196] 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.

[1197] The mere fact of physical ownership doesn't make them yours.

[1198] You have to establish a dynamic relationship with the objects before they're actually yours.

[1199] 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.

[1200] And those will usually be, it's like having to eat a toad in the morning, right?

[1201] It's like, it's not going to be something you want to do.

[1202] There'll be things you're trying to avoid.

[1203] They're snakes, essentially.

[1204] 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?

[1205] It's usually some small thing because you're not that disciplined, you know, then you can go do it.

[1206] And then you put the world together a little more when you do that, and that spreads out.

[1207] But you also put your, you also construct yourself into something that's better able to call order forth from chaos.

[1208] And that makes you just incrementally stronger.

[1209] And then the next day, you can maybe take on a slightly larger task.

[1210] And like, you get the benefit of compound interest if you do that.

[1211] It's a tremendously powerful technique.

[1212] 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.

[1213] And that's what I would recommend.

[1214] Thank you.

[1215] All right.

[1216] Good night.

[1217] Thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1218] To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

[1219] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.