Biblical Series: The Phenomenology of the Divine

[0] Welcome to Season 3, Episode 8 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter.

[2] I hope you enjoy this episode.

[3] It's called The Phenomenology of the Divine.

[4] I asked Instagram the other day, where in the world it was normal out?

[5] I got feedback.

[6] Florida and Texas are apparently kind of normal.

[7] I can say if this is normal for Florida, I'm not looking forward to returning to Canada.

[8] Croatia and Greece and Sweden are also pretty good, apparently.

[9] So there's some random information for you.

[10] My podcast is out, the Michaela Peterson podcast.

[11] The first episode was with Aubrey Marcus, and it was released yesterday.

[12] I also released one with Hamilton Morris, Max Lugavir, and Greg O 'Gallader.

[13] If you head to my website, Michaela peterson .com, you can check it out if you're interested.

[14] I'm pretty proud of it.

[15] I did all the graphics and everything myself.

[16] I do have a handy podcast man helping me out with sound, though.

[17] Anyway, enough about me and on to the episode.

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[32] Season 3, episode 8, the phenomenology of the divine, a Jordan B. Peterson lecture.

[33] Hello, everyone.

[34] Thank you again for showing up.

[35] So, tonight, we're going to finish off the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel.

[36] And I don't think that'll take very long.

[37] And then we're going to turn to the Abrahamic stories.

[38] And there are a very complex set of stories.

[39] They sit between the earliest stories in Genesis that I would say end with the Tower of Babel and then the stories of Moses, which are extraordinarily well developed.

[40] The Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them, multiple stories conjoined together.

[41] And I found them very daunting.

[42] They're very difficult to understand.

[43] And so I'm going to stumble through them the best that I can, I would say that's probably the best way to think about this, because they have a narrative content that's quite strange.

[44] I was reading a book while doing this called The Disappearance of God that I found quite helpful.

[45] And the author of that book argues that one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is that God is very manifest at the beginning in terms of personal appearances even and then that proclivity fades away as the Old Testament develops and there's a parallel development that's maybe causally linked I'm not exactly sure how to conceptualize it but that appears to be causally linked is that the stories about individuals become more and more well developed so it's as if as God fades away so to speak, the individual becomes more and more manifest.

[46] And there's a statement in the Old Testament, the location of which I don't recall, but I'll tell you about it in future lectures, where God essentially tells whoever he's speaking with, and I don't remember who that is, that he's going to disappear and let man essentially go his own way and see what happens.

[47] Not a complete disappearance, but maybe a transformation to something that modern people regard more as a psychological phenomena rather than the sort of objective entity that God seems to be in the beginning of the biblical stories.

[48] And so I've been wrestling with that a lot because the notion that God appears to Abraham multiple times.

[49] And that's not a concept that's easy for modern people to grasp, For us, generally speaking, apart from, say, issues of faith, God isn't some thing, someone who makes himself personally manifest in our lives.

[50] He doesn't appear to us.

[51] That's, I suppose, why the question of belief is so paramount for modern people.

[52] I presume that if God was in the habit of appearing to you, you likely wouldn't have a problem with belief.

[53] I mean, it might be more complicated than that, but that's how it seems to me. And so when we read stories about God making himself manifest either to a nation, say, in the case of Israel, or to individuals, it's not easy to understand.

[54] It's not easy to understand why people would write stories like that if they thought like we thought.

[55] And I mean, really, it wasn't that long ago that the Bible was written, say, from a biological perspective, it's really only yesterday, it's a couple of thousand years, say, 4 ,000 years, something like.

[56] that.

[57] That's not very long ago from a biological perspective.

[58] It's nothing.

[59] So, the first thing I tried to do was to see if I could figure out how to understand that.

[60] And so I'll start the lecture, once we finish the remains of the story of Noah.

[61] I'll start the lecture with an attempt to situate the Abrahamic stories in a context that might make them more accessible.

[62] At least a context that worked for me to make them more accessible.

[63] Let's conclude the Noah story first.

[64] However, when we ended last time, the ark had come to its resting place, and Noah and his family had debarped.

[65] And so this is the stories of what occurs immediately, afterwards.

[66] It's a very short story, but I think it's very relevant for both of these stories, the Tower of Babel as well, very relevant for our current times.

[67] And the sons of Noah that went forth of the ark were Shem and Ham and Japheth.

[68] And Ham is the father of Canaan.

[69] These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth overspread.

[70] And Noah began to be a husband's man, and he planted a vineyard.

[71] And he drank of the wine and was drunken, and he was uncovered within his tent.

[72] And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without.

[73] And Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father.

[74] And their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

[75] And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

[76] And he said, cursed to be Canaan, a servant of servants shall.

[77] he be unto his brethren.

[78] And he said, Blessed shall be the Lord God of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant.

[79] And God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant.

[80] And Noah lived after the flood 350 years, and all the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died.

[81] And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.

[82] Okay, so, I remember thinking about this, story, it's got to be 30 years ago.

[83] And I think the meaning of the story stood out for me. Sometimes, when you read complicated material, sometimes a piece of it will stand out.

[84] It's, for some reason, it's like it glitters, I suppose.

[85] That might be one way of thinking about it.

[86] It's, you're in sync with it and you can understand what it means.

[87] I've really experienced that reading the Tao Te Ching, which is a document I would really like to do a lecture on at some point.

[88] because some of the verses I don't understand but others stand right out and I can understand them and I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant and I think it means you know we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve and the idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability your physical boundaries in time and space and your your physiological your fundamental physiological insufficiencies as they might be judged by others.

[89] So there's biological insufficiency that's sort of built into you because you're a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half -insane creature.

[90] And that's just an existential truth.

[91] And then, of course, even merely as a human being, even with all those faults, there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be judged harshly by the group.

[92] Well, might be.

[93] We'll definitely be judged harshly by the group.

[94] And so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self -conscious and to know your limits and to know your vulnerability.

[95] And that's what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked.

[96] And so the question is, what does it mean to see your father naked?

[97] And it seems to me, and especially in an inappropriate manner like this, it, it's, it's, it's as if ham, the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth, when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first gods.

[98] They're the father of the eventual deity of redemption.

[99] Marduk.

[100] They're very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse.

[101] And that makes Tiamat enraged.

[102] And so she bursts forth from the darkness to do them in.

[103] It's like a precursor to the flood story.

[104] or an analog to the flood story.

[105] And I see the same thing happening here with Ham is that he's insufficiently respectful of his father.

[106] And the question is exactly what does the father represent?

[107] And you could say, well, there's the father that you have, and that's a human being, that's a man like other man, a man among men, but then there's the father as such, and that's the spirit of the father.

[108] And insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time.

[109] You have the personal father that's a man among other man, just like anyone other's father.

[110] But insofar as that man is your father, that means that he's something different than just another person.

[111] And what he is is the incarnation of the spirit of the father.

[112] And to see that, to take it to what?

[113] To disrespect that carelessly.

[114] Maybe even, like Noah makes a mistake, right?

[115] he produces wine and gets himself drunk.

[116] And you might say, well, you know, if he's sprawled out there for everyone to see, it's hardly Ham's fault if he stumbles across him.

[117] But the book is laying out a danger.

[118] And the danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment.

[119] And if you're disrespectful, then you transgress against the spirit of the father.

[120] And if you transgress against the spirit of father and lose spirit of the father and lose respect for the spirit of the father, then that is likely to transform you into a slave.

[121] That's a very interesting idea.

[122] And I think it's particularly interesting, maybe not particularly interesting, but it's particularly germane, I think, to our current cultural situation, because I think that we're pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that's directed towards, our culture, and the patriarchal culture, so to speak, we're constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and, let's say, nakedness.

[123] And there's nothing wrong with criticism, but the thing about criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff.

[124] It's not to burn everything to the ground, right?

[125] It's to say, well, we're going to carefully look at this, we're going to carefully differentiate, we're going to keep what's good, and we're going to move away from what's bad, but the point of the criticism isn't to identify, everything is bad.

[126] It's to separate what's good from what's bad so that you can retain what's good and move towards it.

[127] And to be careless at that is deadly because you're inhabited by the spirit of the Father, right?

[128] Insofar as you're a cultural construction, which of course is something that the postmodern neo -Marxists are absolutely emphatic about, you're a cultural construction.

[129] Insofar as you're a cultural construction, then you're inhabited by the Spirit of the Father, And to be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes you not all of what you are, certainly, certainly not all of what you are, but a good portion of what you are insofar as you're a socialized cultural entity.

[130] And if you pull out the, if you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left?

[131] You can hardly manage on your own.

[132] You know, it's just not possible.

[133] You're a cultural creation.

[134] And so Ham makes this desperate error and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father, something like that.

[135] He does it without sufficient respect.

[136] And the judgment is that not only will he be a slave, but so all of his descendants.

[137] And he's contrasted with the other two sons who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt, something like that.

[138] And so when they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect and don't capitalize on it.

[139] And maybe that makes them strong.

[140] That's what it seems to me. And so I think that's what that story means.

[141] It has something to do with respect.

[142] You know, and the funny thing about having respect for your culture, and I suppose that's partly why I'm doing the biblical stories, is because they're part of my culture.

[143] They're part of our culture, perhaps, but they're certainly part of my culture.

[144] And it seems to me that it's worthwhile to treat that with respect to see what you can glean from it and not kick it when it's down, let's say.

[145] So that's how the story of Noah ends.

[146] You know, and the thing, too, is Noah is actually a pretty decent incarnation of the Spirit of the Father, which I suppose is one of the things.

[147] that makes Hams misstep more egregious, is that, I mean, Noah just built an arc and got everybody through the flood, man, you know?

[148] It's not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify humiliating him.

[149] And, you know, I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an arc, right?

[150] And that's the arc that you can think about that as the arc that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers.

[151] That's the tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit, that we take for granted, because it works so well, that protects us from things that we can't even imagine, and we don't have to imagine, because we're so well protected.

[152] And so one of the things that's really struck me hard, I would say, about disintegration and corruption of the universities, is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that.

[153] You know, criticism, as I said, is a fine thing, if it's done in the spirit, in a proper spirit.

[154] And that's the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff.

[155] But it needs to be accompanied by gratitude.

[156] And it does seem to me that anyone who lives in the West, in the Western culture at this time in history and in this place, and who isn't simultaneously grateful for that is half blind, at least.

[157] because it's never been better than this and it could be so much worse and it's highly likely that it will be so much worse because for most of human history so much worse is the norm so then there's this little story that crops up that seems in some ways unrelated to everything that's gone before it but I think it's also an extremely profound little story it took me a long time to figure it out it's the Tower of Babel and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and dwelt there.

[158] That's Noah's descendants and the whole earth was of one language and of one speech and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there and they said to one another go let us make brick and burn them thoroughly and they had brick for stone and slime they had for mortar so they're establishing a city and they said go let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven and let us make a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth and the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built and the Lord said behold the people is one and they all have one language and now this they begin to do and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do go to let us go down and their confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech.

[159] So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth and they left off to build the city.

[160] Therefore is the name of it called Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

[161] It's a very difficult story to understand.

[162] On the face of it, it doesn't seem to show God in a very good light.

[163] although that happens fairly frequently in the Old Testament as far as I can tell but you know the thing to do if you're reading in the spirit of the text let's say is to remember that it's God that you're talking about and so even though you might think that he's appearing in a bad light your duty as a reader I suppose is to assume that you're wrong and that what he did was right and then you're supposed to figure out well how could it possibly be right because the axiomatic presupposition is that it's God, and whatever he does is right.

[164] And you might say, well, you can disagree with that.

[165] And it's also the case that some of the people that God talks to in the Old Testament actually disagree with him and convince him to alter his actions.

[166] But the point still remains that it's God, and if he's doing it, then by definition, there's a good reason.

[167] There's an idea much later that John Milton develops in Paradise Lost, which is an amazing poem.

[168] It's a profound enough poem so that it's almost been incorporated into the biblical structure, I would say.

[169] So the corpus of Christianity host Milton was saturated by the Miltonic stories of Satan's rebellion.

[170] None of that's in the biblical texts.

[171] It's only hinted at in very brief passages.

[172] And Milton wrote his poem to justify the ways of God to man which is quite an ambition really it's an amazing profound ambition to try to produce something to produce a literary work that justifies being to human beings because that's what Milton was trying to do one of my readers here sent me a link the other day or viewers to a work of philosophy by an Australian philosopher whose name I don't remember, who basically wrote a book saying that being as such human experience is so corrupt and so permeated by suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all.

[173] It's sort of the ultimate expression of nihilism.

[174] Gertha in Faust, his Mephistopheles, who's a satanic character, obviously, has that as a credo.

[175] That's Satan's fundamental motivation, is his objection to creation itself is that creation is so flawed and so rife with suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all and so that's his motivation for attempting to continue to destroy it in Milton's Paradise Lost Satan is an intellectual figure and you see that motif emerge very frequently by the way in popular culture so for example in the Lion King the figure of Scar who's a satanic figure is also hyper -intellectual.

[176] And that's very common, that, you know, it's the evil scientist motif, or the evil advisor to the king, the same motif.

[177] It encapsulates something about rationality, and what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that rationality, like Satan, is the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom.

[178] It's a psychological idea, you know, that the most powerful sub -element of the human psyche is the intellect.

[179] And it's the thing that shines out above all.

[180] within the domain of humanity and maybe across the domain of life itself, the human intellect, there's something absolutely remarkable about it, but it has a flaw, and the flaw is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions and to assume that they're total.

[181] Solzhenitsyn, when he was writing the Gulag Archipelago, had a warning about that with regards to totalitarian ideology.

[182] And he said that the price of selling your God -given soul to the, entrapments of human dogma was slavery and death, essentially.

[183] And Satan, in Milton's paradise loss, Satan decides that he can do without the transcendent, he can do without God, and that's why he foments rebellion.

[184] It's something like that.

[185] And the consequence of that, the immediate consequence from Milton's perspective, was that as soon as Satan decided that what he knew was sufficient, and that he could do without the transcendent, which you might think about as the domain outside of what you know, something like that.

[186] Immediately he was in hell.

[187] And when I read Paradise Lost, I was studying totalitarianism, and I thought, you know, the poet, the true poet, like a prophet, is someone who has intimations of the future.

[188] And maybe that's because the poetic mind, the philosophical or prophetic mind, is a pattern detector and there are people who can detect the underlying, it's like the melody of a nation, melody as in song, the song of a nation and can see how it's going to develop across the centuries.

[189] You see that in Nietzsche because Nietzsche, for example, in mid, you know, around 1860 or so, I mean, he prophesied what was going to happen in the 20th century.

[190] He said that he said specifically that the specter of communism would kill millions of people in the 20th century.

[191] It's an amazing prophecy.

[192] He said that in the notes that became will to power.

[193] And Dostoevsky was of the same sort of mind, someone who was in touch enough with the fundamental patterns of human movement that they could extrapolate out into the future and see what was coming.

[194] And, I mean, some people are very good at detecting patterns, you know.

[195] And Milton, I think, was of that sort.

[196] And I think he had intimations of what was coming as human rationality became more and more powerful, and technology became more and more powerful.

[197] And the intimation was that we would produce systems that dispensed with God that were completely rational and completely total that would immediately turn everything they touched into something indistinguishable from hell.

[198] And Milton's warning was, it's embodied in the poem, is that the rational mind that generates a production and then worships it as if it's absolute, immediately occupies hell.

[199] So what does that have to do with the Tower of Babel?

[200] Well, you know what, back in 2008, when we had that economic collapse, this strange idea emerged politically, and that was the idea of too big to fail.

[201] And I thought about that idea for a long time, because I thought, there's something deeply wrong with that.

[202] Because one of the things that made Marx wrong was Marx believed that capital would flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people and that the dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed and like so many things that Mark said that's it's kind of true it's kind of true in that the distribution of wealth and in fact the distribution of anything that's produced follows a Pareto pattern and the Pareto pattern basically is that a small proportion of people end up with the bulk of the goods.

[203] And it isn't just money.

[204] It's anything that people produce creatively ends up in that distribution.

[205] And that's actually, the economists call that the Matthew principle, and they take that from a statement in the New Testament, and the statement is, to those who have everything more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.

[206] And it's a map of the manner in which the world manifests itself where human creative production is involved and the map seems to indicate that as you start to produce and you're successful, the probability that you will continue to be successful or accelerate increases as you're successful.

[207] And as you fail, the probability that you will fail starts to accelerate.

[208] So your progress through life looks like this or like this, something like that.

[209] And the reason that Marx was right was because he noted that as a feature of the capitalist system.

[210] The reason that he was wrong is that It's not a feature that's specific to a capitalist system.

[211] It's a feature that's general to all systems of creative production that are known.

[212] And so it's like a natural law, and it's enough of a natural law by the ways that the distribution of wealth can be modeled by physical models using the same equations that govern the distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum.

[213] So it's a really profound It's a fundamentally profound observation about the way the world lays itself out.

[214] And it's problematic, because if resources accrue unfairly to a small minority of people, and there's a natural law -like element to that, that has to be dealt with from a social perspective, because if the inequality becomes too extreme, then the whole system will destabilize.

[215] And so you can have an intelligent discussion about how to mitigate the effects of the transfer of creative production into the hands of a small number of people.

[216] Now, the other reason, however, having said that, the other reason that Marx was wrong, there's a number of them.

[217] One is that even though creative products end up in the hands of a small number of people, it's not the same people consistently across time.

[218] It's the same proportion of people.

[219] And that's not the same thing.

[220] You know, like, imagine that there's water going down a drain, and you say, well, look at the spiral.

[221] It's permanent.

[222] You think, well, the spiral's permanent, but the water molecules aren't.

[223] They're moving through it.

[224] And it's the same, in some sense, with the Pareto distribution, is that there's a 1 % and there's always a 1 %, but it's not the same people.

[225] And the stability of it differs from culture to culture, but there's a lot of movement in the upper world.

[226] a tremendous amount of movement.

[227] And one of the reasons for that movement is that things get large and then they get too large, and then they collapse.

[228] And so, in 2008, when the politicians said, too big to fail, they got something truly backwards, as far as I can tell, and that was a reverse, the statement was reversed.

[229] It should have been so big it had to fail.

[230] And that's what I think the story of the Tower of Babel is about.

[231] It's a warning against the expansion of a system until it encompasses everything.

[232] It's a warning against totalitarian presumption.

[233] So what happens, for example, when people set out to build the Tower of Babel is they want to build a structure that reaches to heaven.

[234] So the idea is that it can replace the role.

[235] of God.

[236] It's something like that.

[237] It can erase the distinction between earth and heaven, and so there's a utopian kind of vision there as well.

[238] We can build a structure that's so large and encompassing that it can replace heaven itself.

[239] And that's an interesting, the fact that that doesn't work and that God objects to it is also extraordinarily interesting.

[240] And it's an indication to me of the unbelievable profundity of these stories.

[241] It's like, I think one thing we should have learned from the 20th century, but of course, didn't, was that there's something extraordinary dangerous about totalitarian utopian visions.

[242] That's something Dostoevsky wrote about, by the way, in his great book, Notes from Underground, because Dostoevsky had figured out by the early 1900s that there was something very, very pathological about a utopian vision of perfection, that it was profoundly anti -human, and in notes from underground, he demolishes the notion of utopia.

[243] One of the things he says that I loved, it's so brilliant.

[244] He said, imagine that you brought the socialist utopia into being.

[245] And Dostoevsky says, and that human beings had nothing to do except eat, drink, and busy themselves with the continuation of the species.

[246] He said that the first thing that would happen under circumstances like that would be that human beings would go mad and break the system, smash it, just so that something unexpected and crazy.

[247] could happen, because human beings don't want utopian comfort and certainty.

[248] They want adventure and chaos and uncertainty.

[249] And so that the very notion of a utopia was anti -human, because we're not built for static utopia.

[250] We're built for a dynamic situation where there's demands placed on us, and where there's the optimal amount of uncertainty.

[251] Well, we know what happened in the 20th century as a consequence of the widespread promulgation of utopian schemes and what happened was mayhem on a scale that had never been matched in the entire history of humanity and that's really saying something because there was plenty of mayhem before the 20th century I guess there wasn't as much industrial clout behind it and so so early you see so early in the biblical narrative you have a warning against hubris, and some indication that properly functioning systems have an appropriate scale.

[252] I read an article in The Economist magazine this week about the rise of nationalist movements all over the world as a counterbalance to globalization, maybe it's most marked with the European economic community.

[253] And the economist writers were curious about why that counter -movement has been developing, but it seems to me that it's also a Tower of Babel phenomena, is that, and maybe this is most evident in the European economic community, to bring all of that multiplicity under the, what do you call it, under the umbrella of a single unity, is to simultaneously erect a system where the top is so far from the bottom that the bottom has no connection to the top.

[254] You know, your social systems have to be large enough so they protect you, but small enough so that you have a place in them.

[255] And it seems to me perhaps that's what's happened in places like the EEC is that the distance between the typical citizen and the bureaucracy that runs the entire structure has got so great that it's an element of destabilization, in and of itself, and so people revert back to, say, nationalistic identities, because it's something that they can relate to.

[256] There's a history there and a shared identity, a genuine identity, an identity of language and tradition.

[257] It's not an artificial imposition from the top, an artificial abstract imposition.

[258] In the Egyptian creation myth, the version I'm most familiar with, In the previous creation myth, an older one, the Mesopotamian creation myth, mostly what you see menacing humanity is Taimat.

[259] She's the dragon of chaos, and so that's nature.

[260] It's really mother nature, red in tooth and claw.

[261] But by the time the Egyptians come along, it isn't only nature that threatens humanity.

[262] It's the social structure itself.

[263] And so the Egyptians had two deities.

[264] that represented the social structure and one was Osiris who was like the spirit of the father he was a great hero who established Egypt but became old and willfully blind and and and senile and he had an evil brother named Seth and Seth was always conspiring to overthrow him and because Osiris ignored him long enough Seth did overthrow him, chopped him into pieces and distributed them all around the kingdom.

[265] And his son Horace had to come back and fight Osiris's son Horus had to come back and defeat Seth to take the kingdom back.

[266] And that's how that story ends.

[267] But the Egyptians seem to have realized maybe because they had become bureaucratized to quite a substantial degree that it wasn't only nature that threatened humankind.

[268] It was also the proclivity of human organizations to become too large, too unwieldy, too deceitful and too willfully blind and therefore liable to collapse and again I see echoes of that in this story of the Tower of Babel so it's a calling for a kind of humility of social engineering one of the other things I've learned as a social scientist and I've been warned about this by I would say great social scientists that you want to be very careful about doing large -scale experimentation with large -scale systems, because the probability that if you implement a scheme in a large -scale social system, that that scheme will have the result you intended is negligible.

[269] What will happen will be something that you don't intend, and even worse, something that works at counter -purposes to your original intent.

[270] And so, and that makes sense, because if you have a very, very complex system, and you perturb it, the probability that you can predict the consequence of the perturbation is extraordinary low, obviously.

[271] If the system works, though, you think you understand it because it works, and so you think it's simpler than it actually is, and so then you think that your model of it is correct, and then you think that your manipulation of the model, which produces the outcome you model, will be the outcome that's actually produced in the world.

[272] And that doesn't work at all.

[273] I thought about that an awful lot, thinking about how to remediate social systems, because obviously they need careful attention and adjustment, and it struck me that the proper strategy for implementing social change is to stay within your domain of competence, and that requires humility, which is a virtue that is never promoted in modern culture, I would say.

[274] It's a virtue that you can hardly even talk.

[275] about.

[276] But humility means you're probably not as smart as you think you are.

[277] And you should be careful.

[278] And so then the question might be, well, okay, you should be careful, but perhaps you still want to do good, or you want to make some positive changes.

[279] How can you be careful and do good?

[280] And then I would say, well, you try not to step outside of the boundaries of your competence, and you start small, and you start with things that you actually could adjust, that you actually do understand that you actually could fix.

[281] I mentioned to you at one point that one of the things Carl's Jung said was that modern men don't see God because they don't look low enough.

[282] It's a very interesting phrase.

[283] And one of the things that I've been promoting, I suppose, online is the idea that you should restrict your attempts to fix things to what's at hand.

[284] So there's probably things about you that you could fix, right?

[285] Things that you know that aren't right.

[286] not anyone else's opinion, your own opinion, that aren't right, you can fix them.

[287] Maybe there's some things that you could adjust in your family, although that gets hard.

[288] You have to have your act together a lot before you can start to adjust your family, because things can kick back on you really hard, and you think, well, it's hard to put yourself together, it's really hard to put your family together.

[289] Why the hell do you think you can put the world together?

[290] Right?

[291] Because obviously the world is more complicated than you and your family.

[292] And so if you're stymied in your attempts, even to set your own house in order, which of course you are, then you would think that what that would do would be to make you very, very leery about announcing your broad -scale plans for social revolution.

[293] Well, it's a peculiar thing because that isn't how it works, because people are much more likely to announce their plans for broad -scale social revolution than they are to try to set themselves straight or to set their family straight.

[294] And I think the reason for that is that as soon as they try to set themselves straight or their families, the system immediately kicks back at them, right?

[295] instantly.

[296] Whereas if they announce their plans for large -scale social revolution, the lag between the announcement and the kickback is so long that they don't recognize that there's any error there.

[297] And so, you know, you can get away with being wrong if nothing falls on you for a while.

[298] And so, and it's also an incitement to hubris because you can announce your plans for large -scale social revolution and stand back and you don't get hit by lightning and you think well I might be right even though you're not you're seriously not right I might be right and then you think well how wonderful is that especially if you could do it without any real effort and I really do think fundamentally I believe that that's what universities teach students now that's what they teach them to do I really believe that and I think it's absolutely appalling and I think it's horribly dangerous because it's not that easy to fix things.

[299] Especially if you don't, especially if you're not committed to it.

[300] And I think you know if you're committed because what you try to do is you try to straighten out your own life first.

[301] And that's enough.

[302] Like there's a, I think it's a statement in the New Testament that it's, I think it's in the New Testament that it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule the city.

[303] And that's not a metaphor.

[304] It's like all of you who've made announcements to yourself about changing your diet and going to the gym every January know perfectly well how difficult it is to regulate your own impulses and to bring yourself under the control of some what would you say well -structured and ethical, attentive structure of values it's extraordinarily difficult and so people don't do it and instead they wander off and I think they create towers of Babel and the story indicates, well, those things collapse under their own weight and everyone goes their own direction.

[305] I think I see that happening with the LGBT community.

[306] I think, because one of the things I've noticed, it's very interesting because the community is some sense, it's not a community, but that's a technical error, but it's composed of outsiders, let's say.

[307] and what you notice across the decades is that the acronym list keeps growing and I think that's because there's an infinite number of ways to be an outsider and so once you open the door to the construction of a group that's characterized by failing to fit into the group then you immediately create a category that's infinitely expandable and so I don't know how long the acronym list is now it depends on which acronym list you consult, but I've seen lists of 10 or more acronyms.

[308] And one of the things that's happening is that the community is starting to fragment in its interior, because there is no unity.

[309] Once you put a sufficient plurality under the sheltering structure of a single umbrella, say, the disunity starts to appear within.

[310] And I think that's also a It's a manifestation of the same issue that this particular story is dealing with So that ends, I would say The most archaic stories in the Bible There's something about the flood story and also the Tower of Babel I think they outline the two fundamental dangers that beset mankind one is The probability that Blindness and sin will produce a natural catastrophe or entice one That's something modern people are very aware of in principle, right?

[311] Because we're all hyper -concerned about environmental degradation and catastrophe.

[312] And so that's the continual reactivation of an archetypal idea in our unconscious minds, that there's something about the way we're living that's unsustainable and that will create a catastrophe.

[313] It's so interesting because people believe that firmly and deeply.

[314] But they don't see the relationship between that and the archetypal stories.

[315] because it's the same story.

[316] Overconsumption, greed, all of that is producing an unstable state and nature will rebel and take us down.

[317] You hear that every day, in every newspaper, and every TV station, it's broadcast to you constantly.

[318] And so that idea is presented in Genesis in the story of Noah.

[319] And then the other warning that exists in the stories, one is beware of natural catastrophe that's produced as a consequence of blindness and grief, agreed, we'll say.

[320] The other is, beware of social structures that overreach, because they'll also produce fragmentation and disintegration.

[321] And so it's quite remarkable, I think, that that, at the close of the story of the Tower of Babel, we've got both of the permanent existential dangers that present themselves to humanity already identified.

[322] At the end of the story of Adam and Eve, there's like a fall into history, right?

[323] So in one way, history begins with the fall.

[324] But there's like a second fall, I think, with the flood in the Tower of Babel.

[325] And history, in an even more real sense, begins now.

[326] It begins with this story of Abraham.

[327] And it's, we're no longer precisely in the realm of the purely mythical.

[328] That would be another way of thinking about it.

[329] We have identifiable person who's part of an identifiable tribe, who's doing identifiable things, we're in the realm of history.

[330] And so history begins twice in the Old Testament.

[331] I suppose it begins again after Moses as well.

[332] But we've moved out of the domain of the purely mythical into the realm of history with the emergence of the stories about Abraham.

[333] This is from Eldous Huxley.

[334] So the first thing that I want to talk about in relationship to the Abrahamic stories is this idea of the experience of God because Abraham, although quite identical, as an actual individual is also characterized by this peculiarity and the peculiarity is that God manifests himself to Abraham both as a voice and but also as a presence.

[335] The stories never describe exactly how God manifests himself except now and then he comes in the form of an angel.

[336] That's fairly concrete.

[337] But it's a funny thing that the author of, or authors of the Abrahamic stories, seems to take the idea that God would make an appearance more or less for granted.

[338] And so, it's very, I think the part of the reason that I've struggled so much with the Abrahamic stories is because it's so hard to get a handle on that and to understand what that might mean.

[339] And so I'm going to hit it from a bunch of different perspectives and we'll see if we can come up with some understanding of it.

[340] The first thing I'll do is tell you a story about a female neurologist whose name escapes me at the moment she wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight Jill Bolte I think is her name and she was a Harvard trained she had medical training from Harvard in neuropsychological function and knew a lot about hemispheric specialization we talked a little bit about hemispheric specialization before, one of the ways of conceptualizing the difference between the two hemispheres is that the left hemisphere operates in known territory and the right hemisphere operates in unknown territory.

[341] That's one way of thinking about it.

[342] The left hemisphere operates in the orderly domain and the right hemisphere operates in the chaotic domain or the left hemisphere operates in the domain of detail and the right hemisphere operates in the domain of the large picture.

[343] It's something like that.

[344] Now people differ in their neurological wiring so those are overgeneralizations, but that's okay.

[345] We'll live with that for the time being.

[346] It's certainly not an overgeneralization to point out that you do, in fact, have two hemispheres and that their structures differ.

[347] And if the connections between them are cut, which could happen, for example, if you had surgery for intractable epilepsy, that each hemisphere would be capable of housing its own consciousness.

[348] That's been well documented by a neural, neurologist named Gazaniga, who did, and Sperry, who did split brain experiments, must be 30 years.

[349] years ago now.

[350] So, and we know that the right and the left hemisphere are specialized for different functions.

[351] The right hemisphere, for example, seems to be more involved in the generation of negative emotion, and the left hemisphere more involved in the generation of positive emotion and approach, so the right hemisphere stops you and the left hemisphere moves you forward.

[352] Anyways, Jill, Voltae, I hope I've got that right, at a stroke and maintained consciousness during the stroke, and analyzed it while it was happening.

[353] And she was able, well it was happening, to hypothesize about what part of her brain was being destroyed.

[354] And so she had a congenital blood vessel malformation and had an aneurysm.

[355] And it just about killed her.

[356] But she said that it affected her left hemisphere.

[357] And she said that she experienced a sense of divine unity as a consequence of the stroke because the left hemisphere function was disrupted and destroyed and so she became right hemisphere dominant and her experience of that was the dissolution of the specific ego into the absolute consciousness something like that.

[358] Now that's only a case study and you don't want to make too much of case studies but there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that those two kinds of consciousness exist, one being your consciousness of you as a localized and specified being.

[359] And the other being this capacity to experience oceanic dissolution and the sense of the cosmos being one.

[360] Now, why we have those capacities for different conscious experiences is very difficult to understand.

[361] I mean, part of me thinks that maybe we have a generic, human brain that's the brain of the species.

[362] And allied with that, we have a specific individual brain.

[363] And one is the left hemisphere and the other is the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere being the specific individual brain.

[364] And usually it's on and working because you obviously have to take care of yourself as a specific entity and not as a generalized cosmic phenomena.

[365] It's hard to dice salary when you're a generalized cosmic phenomena, right?

[366] So you have to be more pointed than that.

[367] But look, let's make no mistake about it.

[368] The fact that those different states of consciousness exist is not disputable.

[369] They can be elicited in all sorts of ways.

[370] And so I'm going to read you something that Elvis Huxley wrote about this back, I think, in 1956.

[371] This was after he started his experimentation with mescaline.

[372] Because the psychedelics were introduced into Western culture in the 1950s in a whole bunch of different ways.

[373] psilocybin mushrooms, LSD.

[374] That was discovered right after the end of World War II.

[375] It was discovered by accident, actually.

[376] Laboratory, Sandoz Labs, the guy who discovered it.

[377] Albert Hoffman had spilled some on his hands.

[378] You can absorb it through your skin.

[379] And he was biking home and had the world's first LSD trip, which was somewhat of a shock to him, and then to the entire world.

[380] Huxley, who was a great literary figure, a real genius, experimented with Mesklin in the late 50s.

[381] And he wrote a book called The Doors of Perception, which had a huge impact on the emerging psychedelic culture, both on the East Coast at Harvard and on the West Coast with Ken Kese and his merry pranksters, the people who popularized LSD.

[382] That's all documented in a book called The Electric Koolet Acid Test, which I would highly recommend.

[383] It's Tom Wolfe.

[384] It's a brilliant book.

[385] On the East Coast, it was Timothy Leary.

[386] I had Timothy Leary's old job at Harvard.

[387] Harvard.

[388] So that was kind of cool, you know, warped way.

[389] So I met people there who knew him, who didn't think much of him also, but who did know him.

[390] But Huxley had this mescaline experience, and it transported him to this alternative consciousness.

[391] And he said that during his mesquine experience, that the entire world glowed from within, like there was an inner light, like a paradisal inner light, and that everything was deeply meaningful and symbolically suggestive and overwhelming and beautiful and timeless.

[392] So he had an experience of divine eternity, I suppose, is the most straightforward way to put that.

[393] And we know perfectly well that the psychedelic drugs that all share the same chemical structure, they interact with the brain chemical called serotonin, which is a very, very fundamental neurotransmitter.

[394] They all have approximately the same range of effects, although those effects are very, there's a very large multitude of effects that sort of exist underneath that umbrella.

[395] Huxley was staggered by his mescaline experience.

[396] He didn't really know what to make of it.

[397] And I think that that's the common experience of people who have exceptionally profound psychedelic experiences.

[398] And I'll tell you some documentation about that at a moment.

[399] But he spent quite a long time trying to come to grips with what this might mean from an intellectual perspective and Huxley had a great brain.

[400] I mean, if someone was going to wrestle with a problem like that, he was a good candidate.

[401] He must have had a verbal IQ of 180.

[402] I mean, his books are incredibly literate, incredible, incredible mastery of language and complexity of characterization and intellectual discourse.

[403] Really remarkable.

[404] So this is what Huxley had to say after his mesclan experience.

[405] He talked about heaven and hell, and he talked about that in reference to bad trips, essentially, because it was known by that point that a psychedelic experience could transport you to an ecstatic domain of divine revelation, but could take you to the worst imaginable place as well.

[406] Huxley was very interested in why you would even have the capacity for experiences like that, which I think is a very good question, and it's a completely unanswered question.

[407] I mean, we don't know much about consciousness, and we know even less about psychedelics, I would say.

[408] They are an absolute mystery.

[409] I don't think we understand them in the least.

[410] Huxley did a good job of starting to at least map out the mysteries of the terrain.

[411] He said, like the Earth of 100 years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africa's, its unmapped Borneo's and Amazonian basins.

[412] In relation to the fauna of these regions, we are not yet zoologists.

[413] We are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens.

[414] The fact is unfortunate, but we have to accept it.

[415] We have to make the best of it.

[416] However lowly, the work of the collector must be done before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment, and theory -making.

[417] Like the giraffe and the duck -billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable.

[418] Nevertheless, they exist.

[419] They are facts of observation.

[420] And as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.

[421] When psychiatrist started to study LSD, that was mostly in the late 50s and running forward from that, they thought about the drug as a psychotomimetic, which was a chemical substance that would induce psychosis.

[422] But that turned out to not be true, not with the psychedelics, because schizophrenics were given LSD, and the schizophrenics reported that, while the experience was certainly extraordinarily strange, it wasn't like being schizophrenic.

[423] And then it was found later that if you gave schizophrenics amphetamines, that made them worse.

[424] In fact, you can induce a paranoid psychosis in a normal person by overdosing them with amphetamines.

[425] So whatever the hallucinogens or the psychedelics are doing, it's not the same thing as mania, and it's not the same thing as schizophrenia.

[426] Not at all.

[427] So you can't just write the experience.

[428] off as an induced psychosis.

[429] Whatever it is, independent of its utility or lack thereof.

[430] It's not that.

[431] Now, it can be induced by drugs.

[432] It can be induced by deprivation, right?

[433] I mean, there are accounts throughout history of people putting themselves in extreme physiological situations in order to induce transformations of consciousness.

[434] Fasting is one of the roots to doing that.

[435] Dancing is another route.

[436] Isolation, prolonged periods of isolation will also do it.

[437] Now, you could say that exposing yourself to any of those in excess produces a state that's indistinguishable from illness and that there's no reason to assume that the phenomena that are associated with illness have any utility whatsoever.

[438] Although it's interesting to me that a disrupted consciousness can produce coherent experiences.

[439] It's not exactly what you expect if it was just an illness.

[440] You know, if you develop, say, a high fever, your experience isn't transcendent and coherent.

[441] It's fragmented and pathologized.

[442] And the difference, I think, is quite distinct.

[443] Although we don't have to only speculate about that because there's been enough experimental work done now with hallucinogens and psychedelics to indicate that the notion that what they produce is something that's only akin to pathology is wrong.

[444] It's not a matter of opinion at this point in the sequence of scientific and historical investigation.

[445] In fact, there was a large -scale study done 10 years ago, five years ago, of 200 ,000 people who had experimented with psychedelics, and they were mentally and physically healthier than people who hadn't on virtually every parameter they examined.

[446] In fact, the rate of flashbacks, You've heard of LSD flashbacks, mostly a hypothetical phenomenon.

[447] But the rate of self -reported flashbacks was higher among the non -psychedelic users than among the psychedelic users.

[448] So that was very interesting.

[449] It was a huge study.

[450] Now, it might be, you could say, that those who had experimented with psychedelics were prone to be healthier to begin with.

[451] But that still contradicts the pathology argument, so it doesn't matter.

[452] Either way, the pathology argument is contradicted.

[453] Now, oh, I did put that in.

[454] It was Dr. Jill.

[455] Jill Bolt -Taylor.

[456] This is what she said about her stroke.

[457] I remember that first day of the stroke with terrific bitter sweetness in the absence of the normal functioning of my left orientation association area.

[458] My perception of my physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air.

[459] I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle.

[460] It's a good metaphor.

[461] The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.

[462] The absence of physical boundary was one of glorious bliss.

[463] Recently, Dr. Roland Griffith, I met him once at a conference in San Francisco, surprise, surprise.

[464] A conference on awe, and this was just when he was embarking on his experiments with psilocybin, which were the first experiments on hallucinogens that were permitted by the National Institute of Methylacine, health in some three, four decades, he had to be very careful to lay out the scientific protocols so that the ethics committees would approve the experiments and so that the federal funding agencies would also allow the experiments to go through.

[465] He started to experiment with psilocybin, and he's found a number of, and published, a number of very interesting results.

[466] one was that a single psilocybin trip and I specify trip because sometimes when people take psilocybin at the doses that Griffith uses they don't have a psychedelic experience most people who take the dose do but not everyone those who take the dose and don't have the mystical experience don't experience the consequences of taking the drug and the consequences can be quite profound So, one consequence is that if you have the mystical experience that's associated with psilocybin ingestion, you're liable to represent that to others and yourself as one of the two or three most important experiences of your entire life So that would be at the same level as the birth of your child or your marriage, let's say Assuming that those were transcendent experiences, but that's But that's how people describe them.

[467] So that's very interesting.

[468] interesting in and of itself, then the next thing that Griffith, another thing that Griffith reported was that one year after a psilocybin dose, a single psilocybin dose, profound enough to induce a mystical experience, the trait openness of the participants had increased one standard deviation, which is a tremendous amount.

[469] And so it looked like one dose produced a permanent neurological and psychological transformation.

[470] Now, you know, I'm not saying that that's a good thing.

[471] I'm not saying that, because I don't think that openness is a untroubled blessing, but it's certainly a testament to the unbelievable potency of the drugs.

[472] There's about a 10 % chance, by the way, with psilocybin ingestion of a trip to hell, and so that's certainly something very much worth considering when you're thinking about the potential effects of this kind of experience.

[473] So the mystical experience produced by psilocybin is rated by people as the most profound, among the most profound experience of their life, as life -changing.

[474] It produces permanent personality transformations.

[475] Eighty -five percent success in smoking cessation with a single dose.

[476] Right?

[477] That's another thing that Griffiths demonstrated.

[478] Now, that is mind -boggling, because there are chemical treatments for smoking cessation.

[479] Um, bupropryon is one.

[480] It, reduces craving to some degree, but its success rate is nowhere near 85%.

[481] Certainly not with a single dose.

[482] And so we don't understand how it can be that that occurs, but it's nicely documented by Griffith's team.

[483] In this experiment, he gave psilocybin to people who are dying of cancer.

[484] Cancer patients often develop chronic clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety.

[485] Previous studies suggest that psilocybin may decrease depression and anxiety and cancer patients.

[486] Eldis Huxley took LSD on his deathbed, by the way.

[487] So the idea that there was something about psychedelic substances that could buffer people against the catastrophes of mortality is an idea that's as old as experimentation with the drug itself.

[488] The effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with a drug.

[489] life -threatening diagnoses, and symptoms of depression and or anxiety, unsurprisingly.

[490] I don't really know if it's reasonable to describe the emotional state of people diagnosed with cancer of uncertain prognosis or mortal significance as depression precisely.

[491] You know what I mean is that if you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have intractable fatal cancer, the normative response is to be rather upset and anxious about that.

[492] And so, one of the things that bothers me about clinical psychiatry and clinical psychology is the automatic presupposition that even overwhelming states of negative emotion are properly categorized as depression.

[493] Because I don't think you're depressed when you get a cancer diagnosis.

[494] I don't think that's the right way to think about it.

[495] I think that you have a big problem.

[496] And it's not surprising that you're overwhelmed by negative emotion, and to think about that as a psychiatric malfunction is a major error.

[497] But anyways, it's a side issue with regards to this.

[498] study.

[499] The effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life -threatening diagnosis and symptoms of depression and or anxiety.

[500] I cannot imagine how they got this through an ethics committee.

[501] It's just, we're going to take people who have uncertain diagnosis of cancer that are potentially life -threatening and we're going to give them psychedelics.

[502] It's like, but they did it.

[503] They did it.

[504] And I think it's a testament to Griffith's stature as a researcher that that was allowable.

[505] This was a randomized double -blind crossover trial, very carefully designed clinical investigation.

[506] People were assigned to the treatment group, or to the drug group, or the non -drug group, randomly, blindly.

[507] And it investigated the effects of the drug also with different doses, which is another hallmark of a well -designed pharmacological study.

[508] Very low placebo -like dose, one or three milligrams per 70 kilograms of body weight, versus a high dose, 22 or 30 milligrams per 70 kilograms of psilocybin, chemical psilocybin administered in counterbalance sequence with five weeks between sessions and a six -month follow -up.

[509] Instructions to participants and staff minimized the effects of expectancy.

[510] Participant staff and community observers rated participant moods, attitudes, and behaviors throughout the study.

[511] That's also the hallmark of a well -designed study because they didn't rely on a single source of information for the outcome data, right?

[512] They got self -reports, that's fine, but they had relatively objective observers also gather data at the same time.

[513] High -dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician and self -related measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety.

[514] And that's an interesting, it's a subtle and scientifically sparse statement, but it's a very interesting one.

[515] There's an intimation of a causal relationship here increases in quality of life, life meaning, and decreases in death anxiety.

[516] I mean, the intimation there is that one of the ways of decreasing your anxiety about death is to increase the felt meaning in your life, and the psilocybin dosages potentiate that, but it's a good thing to know in a general manner, if it happens to be a generalizable truth, right?

[517] If you're terrified of mortality, terrified of vulnerability, There's always the possibility that the life path that you're following isn't rich enough to buffer you against the negative element of existence.

[518] It's a reasonable hypothesis and an optimistic one, I think, although a difficult one.

[519] At six -month follow -up, these changes were sustained with about 80 % of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety.

[520] Stephen Ross commenting about this.

[521] He was a co -investigator said it is simply unprecedented in psychiatry that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results.

[522] Right, which means we have no idea why this happens.

[523] Participants attributed improvements and attitudes about life slash self -mood relationships and spirituality to the high -dose experience with more than 80 % endorsing moderately or greater increased well -being and life satisfaction.

[524] Community observers showed corresponding changes.

[525] mystical type psilocybin experience on session day mediated the effect of psilocybin dose on therapeutic outcomes what that means is that well when researchers were trying to look at a causal relationship between drug ingestion and the positive outcome the causal relationship was drug ingestion mystical experience positive outcome it wasn't drug ingestion positive outcome there had to be the experience produced by the pharmaceutical agent in order for the pharmaceutical agent to have had its effect.

[526] Now, again, we don't know why that is either.

[527] I mean, maybe some people needed a higher dose.

[528] Who knows?

[529] Because people vary tremendously in their sensitivity to pharmaceutical substances.

[530] Now, why am I telling you all this?

[531] Well, I'm telling you for a variety of reasons.

[532] One is, the first is, make no mistake about it.

[533] Human beings have the capacity for forms of consciousness that are radically unlike our normative forms of consciousness.

[534] and the evidence that those alternative forms of consciousness are purely pathological, which is the simplest explanation, right?

[535] You perturb a system, it produces pathology, that's negative.

[536] That is the simplest explanation.

[537] The evidence for that is weak at best, leaving out the bad trip issue, which is non -trivial.

[538] The empirical evidence, as it accrues, in fact seems to suggest that the consequence of mystical, positive mystical, experiences associated with psychedelic intake is overwhelmingly positive, even in extreme situations.

[539] And you really can't find a more extreme situation than uncertain cancer diagnosis with concomitant depression and anxiety.

[540] Like, I mean, that's not as bad as it gets, but it's kind of in the ballpark.

[541] And so the fact that even under circumstances like that, there was the overwhelming probability that the experience would be positive, because that's another thing you wouldn't expect, you know, even from some of the earliest discussions about psychedelic use that were put forth by people, including Timothy Larry, describing the importance of set, right, so that the early experimenters noted that if you had a psychedelic experience and you were in a bad state or in a bad place, that that was one of the precursors to a bad trip, that the negative emotion that you entered the experience with could be magnified tremendously by the, by the, by the, chemical substance and so that it was necessary to be somewhere safe, to be around people that you trust, to be in a familiar environment, to get all the variables that you could control, under control.

[542] But here is the situation where that isn't what's happening at all, because people have this cancer diagnosis of unspecified outcome, and they still, the vast majority of them had a positive experience, and the positive experience had long -lasting positive consequences.

[543] So, the case that the transcendent experience is not real, that's wrong.

[544] It's real.

[545] Now, we don't know what that means, because it actually challenges, to some degree, our concepts of what constitutes real.

[546] But it's certainly well within the realm of normative human experience.

[547] So it's part of the human capacity.

[548] And, you know, there's been other neurological experiments, too.

[549] There's a researcher, a Canadian researcher, if I remember correctly, who invented something he called the God Helmet, and it used electromagnetic stimulation, brain stimulation, to induce mystical experiences.

[550] Now, I don't remember what part of the brain he was shutting off or activating with that particular gadget.

[551] And, you know, there's all sorts of other indications of this sort of thing that have cropped up in other...

[552] domains of the neurological literature, for example, it's very common for people who are epileptic to have religious experiences as part of the prodroma to the actual seizure.

[553] That was the case with Dostoevsky, for example, who had incredibly intense religious experiences that would culminate in epileptic seizure.

[554] And he said that they were of sufficient quality that he would give up his whole life to have had them.

[555] And the funny thing, too, is that in my reading of Dosteuf, at least, is that I think that epileptic seizures and the associated mystical experiences were part of what made him a transcendently brilliant author.

[556] I don't think that he would have broken through into the domains of insight that he possessed without those strange neurological experiences.

[557] And it was certainly not the case that his epilepsy or the experiences that were associated with it produced what you might describe as an impairment in his cognitive function.

[558] It's quite the contrary.

[559] At least that's how it looks to me. Here's another something worth considering, and I don't know how important it is, but it might be really important.

[560] It depends on how important.

[561] This is something that Carl Jung said, so it depends on how important Jung is.

[562] Now, Freud established the field of psychoanalysis, and with it, investigation, I would say, rigorous investigation into the contents of the unconscious.

[563] A modern psychologist and psychiatrists like to.

[564] what would you say denigrate Freud and I think there's a reason for that I think that Freud's fundamental insights were so profound and so valuable that they got immediately absorbed into our culture and now they seem self -evident and so that all that's left of Freud is his errors you know because we believe everything else we believe all the profound things he discovered we just take them for granted and so we don't believe the things that he said that weren't quite on the money and that's all we credit with him with now but he was certainly the first person who brought up the idea of the unconscious in a rigorous manner.

[565] And he was the first person to do a rigorous examination of dreams.

[566] Because the interpretation of dreams is a great book.

[567] It's well worth reading.

[568] And he was the first person to note that people were, in some sense, inhabited by sub -personalities that had a certain degree of autonomy and independent life.

[569] Brilliant observation.

[570] The cognitive psychologists haven't caught up with that at all yet.

[571] Jung was profoundly affected by Freud.

[572] was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and by Freud.

[573] Those were his two main intellectual influences.

[574] I don't think one more than the other.

[575] He split with Freud on the religious issue.

[576] That was what caused the disruption in their relationship.

[577] And I think it's an extremely interesting historical occurrence.

[578] It might be a profound significance.

[579] Freud believed that the fundamental myth of the human being was the Oediple myth.

[580] And the Oediple myth, from a broader perspective, is a failed hero story.

[581] So the Edipal myth is the myth of a man who develops, who grows up, but then accidentally becomes too close to his mother, sleeps with her.

[582] He doesn't know who she is, and as a consequence, blinds himself.

[583] And there's a, there's a, there's a warning about human development gone wrong in that story.

[584] And I think that Freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well, because human beings have a very long period of dependency.

[585] And one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that many people's problems are associated with their inability to break free of their family.

[586] Like they're consumed by the family drama, right?

[587] They can't get beyond what happened to them in their family.

[588] They're stuck in the past.

[589] And that's equivalent, symbolically speaking, you might say, to the idea of being too close to your mother, of the boundaries being improperly specified, and that happens far more often than anyone would like to think.

[590] As I said, Freud thought it was a universal.

[591] But Jung, see, he had a different idea, and his idea was that it wasn't the failed hero story that was the universal human myth.

[592] It was the successful hero story, and that's a big difference.

[593] Like, it's seriously a big difference, because the successful hero story is, Remember in Sleeping Beauty, you may remember this in the Disney movie.

[594] The evil queen traps the prince in a dungeon, and she's not going to let him out till he's old, right?

[595] And so there's this comical scene where she's down in the dungeon, he's all in chains, and she's laughing at him, telling him what his future is going to be like.

[596] She's quite evil.

[597] And, you know, she paints this wonderful picture of him being freed in like 80 years and hobbling out of the castle on his horse that's so old he can barely stand up, and him with gray hair, and, you know, and she recites this story of his eventual triumphant departure from the castle as an old and decrepit man, and she has a great laugh about it.

[598] And it's nice, you know, it's a real punchy story.

[599] It's really something wonderful for children, that story.

[600] And he gets free of the shackles, and the things that free him are three little female fairies.

[601] It's the positive aspect of the feminine that frees him from the dungeon.

[602] So it's very interesting and very accurate from a psychological perspective.

[603] It's the negative element of the feminine that encapsulates him in the dungeon and it's the positive element of the feminine that frees him.

[604] And then he has a...

[605] The queen, the evil queen, is not very happy when he escapes.

[606] You may remember that she stands on top of her castle tower and starts to spin off cosmic sparks.

[607] I mean, she's quite the creature, enveloped in flame, and then she turns into a dragon.

[608] And then the prince has to fight.

[609] with her in order to make contact with Sleeping Beauty and awaken her from her comatose existence as her unconscious existence.

[610] And it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant representation of a successful hero myth.

[611] He doesn't end up staying in an unholy relationship with his mother, let's say.

[612] He escapes and then conquers the worst thing that can be imagined and is ennobled by that.

[613] And that, as a consequence, he's able to wake the slumbering feminine from its coma.

[614] And that's a Jungian story.

[615] And that's the story that he juxtaposed against Freud.

[616] See, Freud thought of religious phenomena as part of an occult tide that would drown rationality.

[617] That's why Freud was so vehemently anti -religious.

[618] And Jung thought, no, it's not the case.

[619] You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[620] There's something profound and central to the hero myth.

[621] And Jungian clinical work is essentially the awakening of the hero myth in the...

[622] in the...

[623] in the...

[624] in the client or in the patient.

[625] To conceptualize yourself as that which can confront chaos and triumph, and that that's associated with an ennobling of consciousness, and the establishment of proper positive relationships between male and female.

[626] And, you know, I'm a skeptical person.

[627] I'm a very, very skeptical person, and I've tried with every trick I have to put a lever underneath Jung's story and lift it up and disrupt it, and I can't do it.

[628] I think he was right and that Freud was wrong.

[629] I mean, I have great respect for Freud.

[630] I think he got the problem diagnosed very, very nicely.

[631] And in my clinical work, I see the phenomena that Freud described emerged continually, constantly.

[632] The best, if you're interested in that, there's a documentary you should watch.

[633] I may have mentioned it before.

[634] I think it's the best documentary ever made.

[635] It's certainly the best one I've ever seen.

[636] It's called Crum.

[637] And it's about an underground cartoonist, Robert Crum, who was part of the hippie movement, although he hated hippies, he was part of the hippie movement in the 60s in San Francisco and started the entire underground comic, what, culture, that manifested itself eventually in graphic novels.

[638] He was quite a significant figure from the perspective of popular art and a very, very intelligent man. And also, I would say a hero, although a very bent and depraved and warped one, someone very acutely aware of his own shadow and the documentary outlines his attempts to escape from his absolutely dreadful mother and the failure of his two brothers to do the same thing one of whom ended up as a street beggar in San Francisco and the other who drank furniture polish and died six months after the documentary was produced it's an unbelievably shocking documentary it's the only piece of film that I've ever seen that captures Freudian pathology.

[639] I've never seen anything.

[640] Because you can't see it generally unless you're in a clinical situation, unless you know the details of someone's lives, the personal, intimate details.

[641] You cannot communicate it.

[642] But the documentorist who made the film, who's Robert Zweigoff, if I remember correctly, was a friend of the crumbs.

[643] And so he got access in a way that no one else would have.

[644] And they were also very forthright and forthcoming about their situation in general.

[645] I would highly recommend that.

[646] It's a real punch.

[647] If you want to know how a rapist thinks, like if you actually want to know, because maybe you don't want to know, in fact, you probably don't want to know.

[648] Right, because do you really want to know that?

[649] Because to understand that means to put yourself in that position and to understand it.

[650] If you really want to know how a serial sexual predator thinks and why, if you watch crumb and you pay attention, you'll know.

[651] And that's only a tiny bit of what the film has to offer.

[652] It's really quite remarkable.

[653] Anyways, Jung split with Freud on the issue of the Oedipal story as the fundamental myth of humankind, and on the issue of the validity of the religious viewpoint.

[654] And Jung came down heavily on the side of the validity of the religious viewpoint.

[655] And he established that in a book called Symbols of Transformation, which was written in 1914, and that's the book that broke that produced the permanent split with Freud.

[656] And that book, I would say that book's actually been written three times.

[657] It was written as symbols of four times, written as symbols of transformation, which Jung extensively revised when he was old.

[658] And then it was rewritten, in a sense, by a student of Jung's called Eric Neumann, who's also someone I would really recommend.

[659] Eric Neumann, I think, is Jung's greatest student.

[660] And he wrote two books.

[661] He wrote one called The Origins and History of Consciousness, which is a description of the development of consciousness out of unconsciousness using the hero myth as a, as a, what would you say, as an interpretive skeleton.

[662] So Newman viewed the hero myth as the dramatized story of the emergence of human consciousness out of the surrounding unconsciousness in which it was embedded.

[663] The struggle for consciousness, the struggle of consciousness upward towards the light, A lotus flower struggles up through the muck and the water to lay itself on the surface of the water and bloom and reveal the Buddha, which is, of course, what the lotus flower does from a symbolic perspective.

[664] For Neumann, the hero's story was the story of the successful development of consciousness, and the origins of consciousness, the origins and history of consciousness is a great book.

[665] Interestingly, Camille Pahlia read the origins and history of consciousness.

[666] She's one of the few mainstream intellectuals that I've ever encountered, who read that and commented on it.

[667] And she believed that it would be sufficient antidote to postmodern denigration of literature.

[668] She thought it was that powerful a work, and I believe that.

[669] I think it's a remarkable book.

[670] Carl Jung wrote the foreword to that book, and he said in the forward, that it was the book that he wished he would have written.

[671] So it's sort of like Jung, he wrote.

[672] I don't remember how many volumes Dozens of very thick difficult volumes It was like Neumann was able to what distill those into a single volume statement and so I would also say if you're interested in Jung The best book to read is the origins and history of consciousness It's the best intro into the Jungian world So Jung's very difficult to very difficult to understand It requires a real shift of perspective in order to understand what he's talking about And Norman wrote another book called The Great Mother, which is a little bit more specialized in some sense, but it's also extremely interesting because it fleshes out the archetype of chaos and its representation as feminine.

[673] It's a brilliant book as well, and highly worth reading both those books.

[674] Anyways, Jung was a very strange person and a visionary, and so that's kept him outside of, the academic realm almost entirely.

[675] I mean, I was constantly warned as an undergraduate, and then a graduate student, and then a professor, against ever talking about Jung in any way whatsoever.

[676] When I went on the job market, when I was at McGill, when I had graduated from McGill, I had done my scientific research on alcoholism, and I had a fairly lengthy publication record that was pure empirical research, and really neurophysiological research into the pharmacology of alcoholism.

[677] And I established a reasonably solid dossier of publications.

[678] But at the same time, I was writing this book that became maps of meaning.

[679] And so I'd split my time in graduate student school between these two endeavors, one very specifically neurological and pharmacological and really biologically based.

[680] And the other, very abstract, religious, symbolic, psychoanalytic.

[681] the complete opposite, but I could see that the two things overlapped really nicely, and there was a number of scientists at the time that were also drawing the same conclusions, the same relationship between the biology and the psychoanalysis.

[682] Jacques Panksep, who wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which is a great classic, is one of those people who saw the relationship between the neurobiology of emotion and motivation and the psychoanalytic insights never became a mainstream view, but I think it's too complex.

[683] I think that bridging the gap between the biology and the symbolic is too much for people, generally speaking.

[684] You know, it was certainly virtually too much for me because I got quite ill when I was a graduate student.

[685] I think, for a variety of reasons, I also, like, would go out and party three nights a week, and so that probably had something to do with it, but working on those two things simultaneously was also rather exhausting.

[686] Now, Jung was a tremendously insightful clinician, and he was a strange person, introverted visionary, high in introversion, very, very, very, very, very high in openness, like off the charts.

[687] And also, God only knows what his IQ was.

[688] I mean, every time I read Jung, it's like reading Nietzsche, it's terrifying because, you know, he's so damn smart that he can think up answers to questions that you don't even, it's not like you don't understand the answers.

[689] You never conceptualized the damn questions.

[690] It's really something to read someone like that, right, who says, well, here's a mystery, and you think, wow, I never thought of that as a mystery, and here's the solution.

[691] It's like, okay, that's, that's something.

[692] You know, and he could read Greek, and he could read, he read all the ancient, he read a very large variety of ancient languages and was very familiar with the entire corpus of, of astrological thought, and of alchemical thought, and of classic literature, biblical stories, and I mean, educated in a way that no one is educated now.

[693] And so he's a very daunting person to encounter and terrifying, absolutely terrifying.

[694] His book, Ion, which is the second volume of, it's the second volume of volume of volume, which is the archetypes of the collective unconscious.

[695] That damn book is just absolutely terrifying because Jung, he's one of these visionaries who can see way underneath the social structures and look at patterns that are developing across for, in Jung's case, it crossed thousands of years and lays them out.

[696] And so that's a really, that's really something to, to encounter.

[697] Ion is a terrifying book.

[698] Anyways, one question might be, well, because I read Jung and I think, how the hell did he know these things?

[699] How could he figure these things out?

[700] I can't understand how he could possibly know these things.

[701] Well, here's a partial answer.

[702] Jung was a visionary, and so what that means, as far as I can tell and like we could do a little quick survey here how many of you think you think in words put up your hands do you think in words okay so it looks like what about pictures how many of you think in pictures okay so that's interesting how many of you think that's about half and half by the way probably a fewer on the word side how many of you think in pictures and words okay and so all right so it was roughly a third in each category but that's also something that I really haven't encountered any research on from the neuropsychological perspective it's like well do you think in pictures or do you think in words and and is that actually a reliable distinction I think I think in words most of the time but I can think in pictures like if I'm trying to build something I can think in pictures very almost instantaneously but it isn't my natural mode of thinking I'm hyperverbal and so my natural mode of thinking is to think everything through in words but I know my wife isn't like that.

[703] She thinks in images and then has to translate them into words.

[704] And so, anyways, Jung was very literate and he could really think in words, but he could really think in images.

[705] Also, talking to my wife quite extensively, like her, the intensity of her visualization vastly exceeds mine.

[706] So, for example, if I close my eyes and I try to imagine the crowd in front of me, it's pretty low resolution and vague and not brilliantly colored and vivid, you know, it's like I'm seeing through a glass darkly, let's say.

[707] I can't bring images to mind with spectacular clarity, but my wife is very good at that, and Jung seemed to be absolutely a genius at that kind of thinking.

[708] And he had a lot of visionaries in his family history as well, so I don't know to what degree there's a hereditary component of that, and I don't know to what degree that's actually like a neurological specialization.

[709] I presume it would be associated with the trade openness, distinguishes itself, differentiates itself into interest in ideas and interest in aesthetics.

[710] And my suspicion are, is that the people who are more interested in aesthetics are the visionary types, the ones that think in images.

[711] Anyways, Jung could really think in images, and he could imagine beings.

[712] And I had a client once, who was a lucid dreamer, and how many of you have had a lucid dream?

[713] So you know you're dreaming while you're, okay, many.

[714] That phenomenon wasn't really even identified.

[715] as a phenomenon until the end of the 19th century.

[716] There was a book written about it that Freud tried to get his hands on, but couldn't, because it was a very rare book.

[717] And then there was a researcher about 30 years ago who started to study lucid dreams.

[718] But anyways, I had a client who was a lucid dreamer, and one of the things she could do was ask her dream characters what information they were trying to convey, and they would tell her.

[719] So that was very interesting.

[720] And one of the consequences of that was, and I don't have this story completely right in my memory, but it's close enough.

[721] She was afraid of a very large number of things, and in her dream, I think it was a gypsy standing by a wagon, told her that if she was going to be successful in university, that she would have to visit a slaughterhouse.

[722] And that was something that was way beyond her capacity to tolerate.

[723] She was a vegetarian.

[724] She couldn't stand the sight of raw meat even.

[725] And she was very oppressed and depressed and anxious because of the slaughterhouse nature of existence.

[726] And so her dream focused on that.

[727] And one of the consequences of that, because the slaughterhouse was out of the question as a clinical intervention, I took her to an embalming.

[728] Right?

[729] Because I asked her, I asked her what might be acquitted.

[730] to that, and so she suggested that.

[731] And, you know, exposure therapy is a hallmark of clinical psychology, right?

[732] One of the things you do with people as a clinician is you find out what they're afraid of and you gradually and voluntarily expose them to that, and that cures them.

[733] And that's associated with the hero myth, right?

[734] It's exactly the same thing.

[735] It's like there's a dragon.

[736] It's stopping you because there's lots of dragons.

[737] Most of them aren't stopping you.

[738] You can ignore them.

[739] You don't have to just go, you know, slash away it randomly.

[740] You're not supposed to be fighting dragons that aren't in your way.

[741] But if they are in your way, you can't ignore them, and then you decompose them into sub -dragons, and you have people, you know, take them on.

[742] And as they take them on, they dispense with the dragon, and they gain the power of the dragon.

[743] It's like a video game.

[744] Actually, a video game is like that.

[745] That's why people like the video games.

[746] Well, that's right, right?

[747] There's a reason that you absorb power when you overcome things when you play a video game.

[748] It's not like that's intrinsic to the video game structure.

[749] That's an archetypal idea.

[750] Anyways, we went and saw an embalming, which was a very interesting experience and and quite useful for her because she knew what she could tolerate after that and it was a hell of a lot more than she thought she could tolerate and so that's very useful to know back to you he's a visionary thinker now my client I said she could lose a dream and she could ask her dream characters what they wanted and what they were trying to communicate to her.

[751] So that was pretty interesting.

[752] That happened spontaneously.

[753] It had nothing to do with me. I mean, I'm interested in dreams, and many of my clients are great dreamers, especially the creative ones, because I think it's a hallmark of creativity to have vivid dreams and to be able to remember them.

[754] But that was a faculty that was natural to her.

[755] Jung had this other client at one time, at one point, and she had a variety of fears.

[756] And she had this dream.

[757] that she told me, and she was walking down a beach, and on the side of the beach up, a dune, a small dune, there was this old man with a snake, a big python, and there's a crowd around him, and she was walking by the snake handler, and the snake in the crowd, and she didn't want to have anything to do with him.

[758] He was sort of showing people this snake, and she told me that dream, and I thought, well, you know, you probably need to go see that snake.

[759] And so I relaxed her, quasi -hyhyhypict, technique and it's very straightforward.

[760] Hypnosis is generally nothing but pronounced relaxation, though you have to be susceptible to hypnosis to actually fall into a hypnotic trance as a consequence of being relaxed.

[761] I just relaxed her.

[762] I had her breathe deeply and pay attention to different parts of her body and just relax her muscles one by one essentially so that she could concentrate.

[763] And then I told her we'd play with the dream a little bit.

[764] It's a Jungian technique.

[765] I said, well, so call the dream image to mind, which she could do quite well.

[766] said, okay, so let's explore it.

[767] It's like pretend, it's like pretend play.

[768] You know, if you're a kid and you're pretend playing, you don't exactly direct the game, right?

[769] You play the game.

[770] So it's partly your direction, obviously, because you're the player, but the thing also happens spontaneously of its own accord.

[771] And you can think about that as a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind in some sense.

[772] It's a developmental dialogue.

[773] It's not a fun game if you just direct it.

[774] It's only a fun game if you you're inviting and something is welling up as a consequence.

[775] It's the same thing that happens when you're engaged in some kind of artistic or literary production.

[776] If it's all topped down, you know, if you're forcing it, then it's propaganda, it's empty.

[777] What you want to sort of is put yourself in a receptive state of mind, in an imaginative state of mind, and it's sort of half you and half nature itself manifesting itself in your creative imagination.

[778] And that was the sort of state that we were striving for.

[779] and she, I asked her when she was in, relaxed, I said, well, what do you think about the snake handler?

[780] And she said, well, he's probably a charlatan, and he's just there trying to impress the crowd and to show off.

[781] And she was afraid to go up there because she thought people would push her towards the snake and she'd have to touch it.

[782] And so there was a fear of the crowd issue going on there too.

[783] And I said, well, just, look, go up there, but do it under these conditions, is that, you know, if people get pushy, what are you going to tell them?

[784] And so we figured out something.

[785] He said, look, just tell.

[786] them that, you know, you want to look at the snake at your own pace and that you don't need any encouragement or help and it would be good if you were just left alone.

[787] So that enabled her to defend herself.

[788] So she was afraid that the crowd would push her to do something that she didn't want to do.

[789] That was part of the theme of the dream.

[790] So anyway, she eventually climbed the dune in her imagination and went into the crowd and the crowd turned out to be quite welcoming and not hostile and not pushy, which isn't what you'd expect, right?

[791] because you'd think the crowd would have reacted in accordance with her fear, since it was her fantasy.

[792] But that's the thing about fantasies.

[793] They have this autonomous quality.

[794] But the crowd was welcoming and not hostile, and it turned out that the snake handler wasn't a charlotte, and he was just an old guy who had this snake, and he was out there just showing it to people because he thought it was a cool thing, and that maybe it was good for people to come and look at a snake.

[795] And so she got close enough to the snake to touch it.

[796] And so, so I'm telling you that because I want you to understand a bit more about what Jung was trying to do.

[797] And so he wrote these books, notebooks that haven't been published yet, called the Black Books.

[798] And the Black Books are the documentation of his experiments with his imagination.

[799] And what he would do is daydream, like a child daydreams.

[800] He regained that faculty, although I think with Jung, it was a faculty that had never really disappeared.

[801] And he had figures of imagination that came to him that he could speak with, and he spoke with these figures of imagination and documented that over a very long period of time.

[802] And that was originally, that was eventually distilled into a book called The Red Book, which was published about three or four years ago.

[803] And it was a book that Jung regarded as the central source from which all his inspiration, emerged.

[804] It was sort of...

[805] The way it looks to me is that we embody a lot of information in our action, right?

[806] And our action has developed as a consequence of imitating other people.

[807] And not only the people around us, but of course the people around us imitated the people who came before them, and those people imitated the people who came before them, and so on, so far back that it's as far back as you can go.

[808] And so you embody these patterns of behavior that are extremely informative that you don't understand that are a consequence of collective imitation across the centuries and so then those patterns can become manifest as figures of the imagination and those figures of imagination are the distillations of patterns of behavior and so as the distillations of patterns of behavior they have content and it's not you that content it's you could even think about it as content that's evolved although it's cultural transmitted, it's content that's evolved.

[809] And so these figures of the imagination can reveal the structure of reality to you.

[810] And that's what happened with Jung.

[811] And that's what he described in the red book and that was what permeated his psychology, a psychology that was based on the presupposition that the fundamental archetypal structures of religious belief were not pathological, not deceitful, not protective in some delusional sense against the fear of death, but quite the contrary, the very stories that enabled us to move forward as confident human beings in the face of chaos itself.

[812] And it's conceivable, I think perhaps probable, that nothing more important conceptually happened in the 20th century than that, because it was the first time post -enlightenment that a rapprochement between the intellect and the underlying religious archetypal substructure occurred.

[813] You have in the capacious intellect of Jung, and the same thing happened to some degree with Piaget, the religious domain and the factual domain were brought back together, and the fact of Jung's enduring and increasing popularity and influence, I would say, is a direct consequence of that.

[814] Now, some of his work was spun off into the new age, and the new age is a very optimistic and naive movement, and it's predicated on the idea that you can do nothing, say, but follow your bliss, and that will take you ever higher to enlightenment, and that's not the Jungian idea at all.

[815] The union idea is that what you most need will be found where you least want to look.

[816] So there's this story, King Arthur.

[817] There's this story of King Arthur.

[818] They're all in a round table, right?

[819] King Arthur and his knights, they're all equals.

[820] They're all superordinate, but they're all equals.

[821] And they go off to look for the Holy Grail.

[822] And the Holy Grail is the container of the redemptive substance, whatever that is.

[823] It might be the cup that Christ used at the Last Supper, or it might be a chalice that was used to capture his blood on the cross, Right, when he was pierced by a sword, the stories differ.

[824] But that's the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is lost.

[825] That's the redemptive substance, and the knights of King Arthur go off to search for the Holy Grail.

[826] But they don't know where to look.

[827] So, where do you look when you don't know where to look for something you need desperately, but have lost?

[828] Well, each of the knights goes into the forest at the point that looks darkest to him.

[829] And that's Jungian psychoanalysis in a nutshell.

[830] It's like that which you fear and avoid, that's which you hold in contempt, that which disgusts you, and that you avoid.

[831] That's the gateway to what you need to know.

[832] There's nothing new age about that.

[833] That's for sure.

[834] Now, Jung, when he started this endeavor, he started with this, this is part of the notebooks from the black book.

[835] He said, he wrote, my soul, my soul, where are you?

[836] Do you hear me?

[837] I speak.

[838] I call you.

[839] Are you there?

[840] I've returned.

[841] I'm here again.

[842] I've shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet.

[843] And I've come to you.

[844] I am with you.

[845] After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again.

[846] For the Jungians, the hero's journey is a journey within.

[847] And I think that that's probably the bias of introverts to believe that the hero's journey is only an inward journey.

[848] I think that it can be an outward journey, too, because I don't think it matters where you confront the unknown, whether it's within or without what matters is whether or not you confront the unknown.

[849] That's what matters.

[850] But he found that what he had ignored was an undiscovered part of himself, so that might be something that was equivalent to Huxley's notion that there were tremendous potential breadth in the realm of human conscious experience.

[851] Huxley was influenced to some degree by Jung.

[852] Now, Jung knew of Huxley's experiments and had commented on psychedelic use, and he said something like, beware of wisdom you did not earn.

[853] And Jung was very good at stating things very profoundly, very simply, and that's a very intelligent piece of advice.

[854] Beware of wisdom you did not earn.

[855] He wrote a paper, if you're interested in this sort of thing, he wrote a paper called the relations between the ego and the unconscious, which is an absolute masterwork, but completely incomprehensible, unless you know what it's about.

[856] And what it's about is the danger of what he called ego inflation.

[857] And so one of the things that can happen as a consequence of a revelatory experience is that the division between the individual ego and what would you call it so hard to come up with a word that isn't somehow naive or or, or, or, or, or cliched, to erase the relationship, the boundary between the specific consciousness of the ego and the more generalized consciousness and more generalized consciousness as such is a dangerous thing to do, because you can start to equate yourself, your specific self, with that more generalized consciousness as such.

[858] And Jung thought about that as something akin to a psychotic inflation.

[859] and the paper relations between the ego and the unconscious is a document that tells you how to avoid that if you're playing in this kind of realm and one of the injunctions is to keep your feet on the ground he thought that was what partly what happened to Nietzsche was that Nietzsche wasn't grounded enough in life he wasn't grounded enough in day -to -day rituals and routines and the mundane now you debate whether or not that's the case, whether or not that's a reasonable argument, but that was still what Jung believed.

[860] Okay, so why am I telling you all this?

[861] I'll finish with this.

[862] From December 1913 on Young carried on in the same procedure, deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state and then entering into it as a drama.

[863] These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form.

[864] In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness.

[865] The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking masculine.

[866] These journals are Jung's contemporaneous clinical ledger to his most difficult experiment or what he later describes as a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world.

[867] Jung believed that we were dreaming all the time, but that during waking life, the pressure of external images was such.

[868] that the unconscious fantasy imagery was, or that the fantasy imagery was of insufficient magnitude to be conscious, but that we were always situated in a dream in relationship to the world.

[869] So, when we started talking about the creation of the universe at the beginning of the Genesis stories, I spent quite a long time setting the stage for the stories because there's no point in having a conversation about the God who gives rise to being, unless you have some sense of what that might conceivably mean to the modern mind.

[870] And I felt the same way about Abrahamic stories as I couldn't get a handle on them until I could understand and articulate more clearly what it might mean, how a modern person might understand a direct experience of God.

[871] And the first question would be, is such a thing possible?

[872] And the answer to that seems to be a qualified yes.

[873] First of all, it's a universal human experience.

[874] That's a very strange thing.

[875] It's not something that people have made up, as Freud might have it, as a defense against death.

[876] It's not a tenable hypothesis.

[877] It's a realm of potential experience.

[878] Now, that experience doesn't necessarily have to have the Judeo -Christian content that we've been discussing.

[879] Quite the contrary, there are manifestations of these alternative forms of consciousness all over the world that take on their own peculiar forms, although they're patterned to some degree.

[880] Like the hero myth, for example, the myth of the fight against the dragon seems to be unbelievably widespread.

[881] And so it's not as if it's random.

[882] But there's not much point in having a discussion about what happens to Abraham unless you can conceptualize it in terms that are amenable to modern skeptical consciousness.

[883] So we can establish the proposition that mystical experience is not only possible, it's quite common, and it's inducible in a variety of ways and the manner in which it's inducible is reliable and there's no evidence as well that it's pathological.

[884] In fact, there's a fair bit of evidence that the patterns of behavior that are associated with the mystical experience are core elements of proper human adaptation in the world.

[885] The Abrahamic stories open up with a manifest God.

[886] Now, I'm going to read you some things from Friedman who wrote the disappearance of God.

[887] He was trying to look at the underlying structure of the stories.

[888] Now, you know, Friedman noted that the books in the Old Testament were written by a lot of different people at very different times and then they were sequenced by other people for reasons that we don't exactly understand but there's still an underlying narrative there's multiple underlying narrative unities despite the fact of that rather arbitrary sequencing and that's a strange thing you know I guess you could say if you had a collection of ancient books and you were trying to put them together you'd try to put them together you'd try to put them together in some way that made sense, right?

[889] And it wouldn't make sense unless you stumbled across some kind of underlying narrative that allowed you to order them.

[890] And so it's not entirely surprising that they're ordered in a manner that's comprehensible.

[891] But Friedman's comments on the underlying narrative structure, part of it was, well, we'll go through this.

[892] The books of the Old Testament were composed by a great many authors, according to both traditional religious views and modern critical scholarship.

[893] The phenomenon of the diminishing apparent presence of God across so many stories through so many books by so many authors, spread over so many centuries is consistent enough to be striking, impressive, and ultimately mysterious.

[894] But the hiding of the divine face is only half the story.

[895] There's another development also extending across the course of the entire narrative of the Hebrew Bible, which we must see before we can appreciate the full force of this phenomena, and before we can pose a solution to the mystery of how this happened.

[896] Gradually from Genesis to Ezra and Esther, there is a transition from divine to human responsibility for life on Earth.

[897] The story begins in Genesis with God in complete control of the creation, but by the end, humans have arrived at a stage at which, in all apparent ways, they have responsibility for the fate of the world.

[898] The first two human beings, Adam and Eve, take little responsibility themselves.

[899] They do not design or build anything.

[900] When they're embarrassed over their nudity, they do not make clothes.

[901] They cover themselves with leaves.

[902] It's God who makes their first clothing for them.

[903] Noah, by no means a fully developed personality, Noah is not an every man either.

[904] Broadly speaking, he reflects a step beyond Adam and Eve in human character and responsibility.

[905] Abraham, beyond the counts of divine commands that Abraham does carry out, the narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham acts on his own initiative.

[906] He divides land with his nephew, Lott.

[907] He battles kings.

[908] He takes concubines.

[909] He argues with his wife, Sarah.

[910] On two occasions, he tells kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife, and he arranges his son's marriage.

[911] In the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness, there are in the case of Abraham the stories of a man's life.

[912] The Abraham section thus develops the personality and character of a man, to a new degree in biblical narrative, while picturing in him a new degree of responsibility.

[913] It is not just that Abraham is kinder, gentler, more intrepid, more ethical, or a better debater than his ancestor Noah.

[914] Rather, both the Noah and the Abraham stories are pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the deity.

[915] Before the story is over, humans will become a great deal stronger and bolder than Abraham.

[916] I don't know what that means, you know.

[917] See, it isn't, it is certainly the case that the individual exists in the modern world, the differentiated, self -aware, self -conscious individual.

[918] And it's certainly the case that that wasn't the case at some point in the past.

[919] And so it's the case that there's been a development, I don't know if you could call it a progression, but a development of the autonomous individual over some span of historical time.

[920] Now, we don't know how long that's been, but my suspicions are it hasn't been that long.

[921] I mean, I read once about a Neolithic ceremony that involved the particular placement of a bare -skirts, skull in a cave.

[922] And then I read that, and they had found these placements in caves that were at least 25 ,000 years old.

[923] And then I read that they found caves in Japan among the Ainu who were the indigenous inhabitants of Japanese territory and rather archaic people who had the same ceremony with the bear and that put the skull in the same orientation and place in caves.

[924] And that that tradition remained unbroken for about 25 ,000 years.

[925] And you think, well, is it possible for an oral or ritual tradition to remain unbroken for spans of tens of thousands of years?

[926] And the answer to that is not only is it possible, it's actually the norm.

[927] Because, like, one chimpanzee is like the next chimpanzee, right?

[928] In the progression, in the biological progression.

[929] If you took a chimpanzee troop now, and you went back 25 ,000 years, and you looked at a chimpanzee troop, it'd be the same thing.

[930] There's no historical progression.

[931] That's how you can tell the chimps really don't have culture.

[932] because if they could even accrete 1 ,000th of a percent of culture, transmissible culture per generation, it wouldn't take more than about a million years before they'd have a whole civilization, and they don't.

[933] They're the same as they were.

[934] And so the continuity, the stability and unchanging nature of a species, essentially speaking, is the rule.

[935] The variant is us.

[936] It's like, what the hell happened after the last ice age?

[937] 15 ,000 years ago.

[938] We went from tribal, uniform, stable, to whatever the hell we are now.

[939] It's this transition from generic to specific.

[940] It's something like that, and I can't help but think that that's reflected in this text, and that it has something to do with this transition of consciousness from what?

[941] From possession by the generic divine to dominance by the specific individual?

[942] It's something like that.

[943] Is that a neurological transformation?

[944] Is that what this is a record of?

[945] I mean, we don't know.

[946] One of the things Jung said about God, because Jung's relationship with God as an object of belief is very complex, in his technical writing, he always talks about the image of God.

[947] He never talks about God.

[948] He talks about the image of God.

[949] He said that the image of God dwells within.

[950] That's not the same thing as God dwelling within, right?

[951] We could mean all of these capacities that we have for transcendent consciousness could be a byproduct of biological evolution.

[952] They can have no reflection.

[953] They can have no relationship whatsoever to an actual transcendent reality.

[954] There's no way of telling.

[955] The transcendent reality seems to manifest itself as an element of experience, but that doesn't mean that it has a reality outside of the subjective, even if it exists, as it clearly does.

[956] But Friedman suggests that what's happening in the biblical narrative is the sequential emergence of the individual as a redemptive.

[957] force, and that the Old Testament documents that implicitly, unconsciously, as a consequence of descriptive fantasy, and that that's what's going on in the book.

[958] And that, so the cosmos is under the control of generic deity to begin with something like that, and then that control shifts to localized, identifiable, increasingly personal and detailed individuals.

[959] And you see that in Noah and then you see it in Abraham and then you see it in Moses.

[960] And then there's this working out of what it would mean to be a fully developed individual.

[961] And that's what these stories, they're like prototypes, their attempts to bring about the proper mode of being, right?

[962] And so Abraham is a manifestation of that because he enters into a covenant with God.

[963] He's selected by God or enters into a partnership with God, it's not exactly obvious.

[964] God provides him with forward motion and intuition and leads him towards a successful mode of being, and it's complex successful mode of being, because Abraham has a very complex life.

[965] There's plenty of ups and downs, right?

[966] It's not unbroken purity of being towards a divine end.

[967] Abraham lies and cheats and deceives and does all sorts of things that a real person would do.

[968] And Moses, for example, kills someone.

[969] And so these people, the biblical people, are very genuine individuals, but they're given, with all their faults, right?

[970] With all their sins, with all their deceit, they're still put forth as potential modes of proper models of potential proper being in the world.

[971] And the entire corpus of the Bible seems to be nothing but an attempt to keep throwing up variance of the personality, trying to experiment, to find out what personality works in the world.

[972] And of course, from a Christian perspective, that culminates in the figure of Christ as the redemptive word, and that's associated, as we've already talked about, with the force that brought order out of chaos at the beginning of time.

[973] And so, well, that's my attempt to provide proper context for the understanding of the Abrahamic stories.

[974] And so, hopefully, with that context, we can move forward, being able to swallow the camel, so to speak, of the initial presence of God in the stories.

[975] And so we'll return to all of that next week.

[976] Let's wait one second.

[977] Okay, until people have an opportunity to leave.

[978] I would very much like to ask the people who are asking the questions to take a few seconds before they ask the question.

[979] and make sure that the mic is positioned properly so that everyone can hear you, because people keep writing and complaining that, well, they're very happy with the questions, and I would say the questions have been of very high caliber so far, but they're not very happy that they can't hear them.

[980] So I know that, you know, you're obviously nervous and in a hurry when you want to ask a question, but take a second or two to set the mic up properly and make sure that everyone can hear you.

[981] And so have a way at it.

[982] Hello, Dr. Peterson.

[983] Hey, there we go.

[984] Tonight I'd like to ask you about two different psychological disorders.

[985] The first being borderline personality disorder.

[986] So two lectures ago, somebody asked you about it, and you gave a very sparse answer.

[987] I can't remember exactly what you said, but it seemed like it was too much complexity to just answer it right there and then.

[988] And then somebody else also asked you about the same disorder in your Patreon live stream recently.

[989] And when they asked you that, you kind of stopped for a moment and something, I don't know, something kind of flicked on in your head, it seemed like, and you thought for a couple seconds, and then you said, you know what, I don't think that I can answer that right now because it's just too, it's just too bloody complex.

[990] And I was wondering, just like many young men have gravitated towards your lectures, Do you think that there's something about this particular disorder that there's something about people with this particular disorder that might gravitate to your insights and your lectures?

[991] Okay, okay, so I would say probably no to the second one, but I could comment more about borderline personality disorder.

[992] I think I have enough mental energy to do that tonight.

[993] So, technically speaking, it's often considered the female variant of antisocial personality disorder.

[994] So it's classified in the domain of externalizing disorders, acting out disorders.

[995] And I think what happens, we don't understand borderline personality disorder very well.

[996] And it's characterized by tremendous impulsivity, radical confusion of identity, and then this pattern of idealization of people with who, whom the person afflicted with the disorder is associating with radical idealization of those people, and then radical devaluation of them.

[997] And then there's another theme that sort of weaves along with it, which is the proclivity of people with borderline personality disorder to presume that they will be abandoned, and then to act in a manner that makes such abandonment virtually certain.

[998] And so it's a very complicated disorder, that, I think, gets at the crux of it.

[999] One of the things that's interesting about people with borderline personality disorder, in my experience, is that they're often quite intelligent.

[1000] And you see in the person with borderline personality disorder something like the waste or the squandering of tremendous potential.

[1001] They seem capable of thinking through the nature of their problems and analyzing them and discussing it.

[1002] but not capable whatsoever of implementing any solutions.

[1003] And technically, there's no relationship between IQ and conscientiousness.

[1004] It's very weird.

[1005] Because if you read the neuropsychological literature, and you read about the functions of the prefrontal cortex, they're usually conceptualized in intellectual terms.

[1006] And they're associated with planning and strategizing and so forth.

[1007] And that's what conscientiousness is, is planning and strategizing and implementation.

[1008] But the correlation between IQ and conscientiousness is zero.

[1009] And so is the correlation between working memory and conscientiousness.

[1010] Zero.

[1011] And zero is a very low correlation, right?

[1012] I mean, really, it's hard to find things in psychology that are correlated at zero.

[1013] Things tend to be correlated to some degree.

[1014] They tend to be interrelated.

[1015] The borderline seems to be able to strategize and to abstract, but not to be able to implement.

[1016] And so the intellect per se seems to be functional, but it's not embodied in action.

[1017] It's very, so it can be frustrating to be associated with someone who has borderline personality disorder because they can tell you what the problem is and even tell you what the solution might be, but there's no implementation.

[1018] So maybe something went wrong developmentally.

[1019] We don't know exactly how these sorts of, of things come about.

[1020] The other thing that seems to be characteristic of borderline, people with borderline personality disorder is that they remind me very much of people who are two years old.

[1021] And in some manner, like, people with borderline personality disorder can have temper tantrums.

[1022] In fact, they often do.

[1023] And, you know, now and then you see a temper tantrum, and they're usually thrown by two -year -olds, right?

[1024] Most people grow out of temper tantrums by the time they're about three.

[1025] They're very rare at four, which is a good thing, because if they're still there at four, That is not a good diagnostic predictor.

[1026] That's actually a good diagnostic predictor, but it's not the kind that you want.

[1027] And, you know, it's funny the way that we respond to two -year -old temper tantrums because the two -year -old will throw themselves on the ground and beat their hands and their legs on the floor and scream and yell and turn red or even blue.

[1028] I saw a child once who was capable of holding his breath during a temper tantrum until he turned blue, which was really an impressive feat.

[1029] You should try that, right?

[1030] It's really hard.

[1031] You really have to work at it And you see that in adult borderlines They'll have temper tantrums And the funny thing is when a two -year -old does it It's like it's a little Off -putting But when an adult does it It's completely bloody terrifying And it happens very frequently with borderlines And so I would also say to some degree They didn't get properly socialized Between that critical period of development Between 2 and 4 And you see the same thing with adult males Who grow up to be antisocial because a large proportion of adult males who grow up to be antisocial are aggressive as children, as two -year -olds.

[1032] So there's a small proportion of two -year -olds who are quite aggressive.

[1033] They'll kick and hit and bite and steal, if you put them with other two -year -olds.

[1034] It's about 5 % of the males, smaller fraction of the females.

[1035] But most of them are socialized by the time they're four.

[1036] But there's a small percentage who aren't, and they tend to stay antisocial, and they tend to turn into long -term offenders.

[1037] And the critical period for socialization development seems to be between two and four.

[1038] And it seems to be mediated by pretend play and rough and tumble play and those sorts of mechanisms.

[1039] And if it isn't instantiated by the age of four, it doesn't happen.

[1040] And it doesn't look like it's addressable.

[1041] Now, there are dialectic behavior therapies that have been developed for people with borderline personality disorder.

[1042] And they're purported to be successful.

[1043] But...

[1044] Okay, thank you.

[1045] If I may. So the second psychological disorder I wanted to ask you about is psychopathy.

[1046] So you've mentioned that psychopaths tend to switch from dominance hierarchy to dominance hierarchy because people get tired of their shenanigans and they have to move on to fresh people.

[1047] And psychopaths also tend to be very low in conscientiousness.

[1048] And you've said that when you see some of these protesters at your speeches, some of the men in particular, your clinical intuition, tells you that there's something seriously pathological about them.

[1049] And I was wondering if you would suspect that some of these men might be psychopathic as...

[1050] Well, some of them likely are, but I don't know if a higher proportion of the ones who show up at protests and sort of creep me out, or...

[1051] I don't know if there's a higher proportion of people like that at the protests or not.

[1052] I mean, I suspect in general that regardless of the protest, the proportion of people who have personality disorders among protesters is higher than the proportion of people who have personality disorders in the general population.

[1053] Because you just expect that, you just expect that kind of acting out behavior.

[1054] I'm not, believe me, I'm not saying that all protest is associated with personality disorder.

[1055] I'm not saying that at all.

[1056] There's plenty of reason for protest, but some of the reason for protests are credible reasons and some of them aren't credible reasons.

[1057] And I was just thinking that, like, the social justice hierarchy, so to speak, would be one of the last that these confused men.

[1058] That's a different issue.

[1059] There are analysis of the dangers of agreeableness.

[1060] So agreeableness is a personality trait that underlies the radical egalitarian ethos, because agreeable people want everything to be shared equally.

[1061] And it's a good, I think it's a good ethos for a small group, for a family, because a family is kind of a communist system in some sense, right?

[1062] It's like you want the food to be divided up equally among the children, clearly, and you want all the children sort of regardless of their inherent abilities to have the same opportunities and perhaps even the same outcomes.

[1063] So I think agreeableness, which is associated, at least in part, with the maternal instinct, let's say, maternal patterns of behavior, I think it's a good first -pass motivational approximation to a localized familial ethic.

[1064] I think it's a catastrophe at larger scales.

[1065] I don't think it scales at all.

[1066] I actually think that's why we evolved conscientiousness.

[1067] because conscientiousness is the principle that allows larger -scale organizations to exist.

[1068] Agreeableness won't do it.

[1069] Now, conscientiousness is a mystery, right?

[1070] We don't have a neurological model.

[1071] We don't have a conceptual model.

[1072] We don't have an animal model.

[1073] We don't have a pharmacological model.

[1074] And we really only have one way of assessing it, which is self and other reports of personality proclivity.

[1075] So, anyways, The problem with agreeableness, this has been modeled by game theorists, is that a population of cooperative people can be dominated by a single shark.

[1076] So agreeableness is insufficient as a principle because it opens itself up to, what do you call that, manipulation and manipulation, let's leave it at that, to manipulation and exploitation.

[1077] That's the other thing.

[1078] Exploitation.

[1079] Thank you.

[1080] Hi, Dr. Peterson.

[1081] I had one quick comment and a question.

[1082] So my comment was about your idea of sub -personalities as one -eyed monsters.

[1083] Now, there's the idea of multiple personality or split personality disorder.

[1084] It's controversial as to whether or not it exists.

[1085] But there's some recent research that suggests that you may actually have multiple personalities that use different parts of the brain.

[1086] so they have differential access to the hippocampus, they have their own memories, and they use the brain differently.

[1087] But that seems to be an exaggeration of subpersonalities to me, which is quite interesting.

[1088] The question I had was about, so you talked about Jung and how you should confront that, which you don't want to confront the most or you're most afraid of, or disgusted by, that you have the most resistance to.

[1089] So, but we were talking about psychedelics and the experience of hell.

[1090] So at least some of the people I've talked to, they describe negative trips as an experience of constant fear, prolonged fear, and some of the most dramatic and personalized fear that they've ever experienced.

[1091] So shouldn't negative psychedelic trips elicit the kind of confrontation that, young thought you should engage in?

[1092] Could be.

[1093] Could well be.

[1094] No, it's conceivable that I read this strange book once that made the claim that what was in the Ark of the Covenant was a mixture that was made from aminita muscaria mushrooms.

[1095] And that's not as far -fetched as you might think because there was a a mycologist, an amateur mycologist named Gordon Wasson.

[1096] who established credibly the notion that it was aminita muscaria potions that was the soma of the Rig Veda.

[1097] And so it's a strange idea, but it's not an idea that's completely outside of the realm of possibility.

[1098] And the aminitas muscaria is the fly agaric, a red mushroom with white dots.

[1099] and it's used in shamanic rituals in cross Asia and it's apparently not toxic in its dried form although that is not a recommendation you know this is serious serious and dangerous speculation and material one of the things that the priests had to do before they communed with what was ever in the Ark of the Covenant was purify themselves And so one possibility is that the bad psychedelic experience is a involuntary confrontation with what Jung would describe as the shadow.

[1100] It's like, so beware of experimenting with substances that produce divine revelations if you're in a serious state of disorder.

[1101] And I do think that is what happens to people, is that they encounter.

[1102] everything about them that's chaotic and out of place.

[1103] And some people get trapped in that, and they can't get beyond it.

[1104] And that's because there's so much of it.

[1105] And so, but we don't know enough to know.

[1106] Citizen Peterson, you're a son of a bitch.

[1107] How are you?

[1108] I'm not too bad.

[1109] You got a question?

[1110] That's my question.

[1111] No, I've got a real question.

[1112] I've got a good question.

[1113] You're going to like this one.

[1114] It's about inspiration, because you talk about inspiration quite a bit in this lecture series, and also I wanted to point out you have a, I guess, a 45 -minute armchair discussion, which you have a video of of one paragraph of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, which I posted.

[1115] And it seems like you're awestruck at the structure and the choices, and I guess the ideas contained in various layers of this paragraph.

[1116] And you're inspired, and that inspires you to, I guess, do your work that you do.

[1117] I encountered, I guess, a similar phenomenon here with one sentence written by the great Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

[1118] And, I mean, this one sentence answers the question, why do people search for God?

[1119] And if you could read it out and then deconstruct it, it's one sentence.

[1120] It's at the end of page 105, if you want to read it from the book, or I just...

[1121] That's the question that human existence not only poses, but itself is, the inconclusiveness inherent in it, the bounds it comes up against, and that yet yearn for the unbounded, more or less in the sense of Nietzsche's assertion that all pleasure yearns for eternity, yet experiences itself as a moment.

[1122] This simultaneity of being limited and of yearning for the unbounded and open has always prevented man from resting in himself, made him sense that he is not self -sufficient, but only comes to himself by going outside himself and moving toward the entirely other and infinitely greater.

[1123] Well, it's a hell of a sentence.

[1124] Like, when I read that sentence, I decided I wanted to write like Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

[1125] I had a very similar experience when I watched the Joe Rogan podcast, 877.

[1126] I said, I want to speak like Jordan Peterson.

[1127] That's what I wanted So, I had this discussion with a Patreon supporter this week, a young guy from Australia.

[1128] And he said something very interesting that's related to this.

[1129] And it's something that's very profound, I said, I think.

[1130] There's this idea in Christianity that we've discussed briefly that the judge and the Redeemer are the same figure.

[1131] Now, you know, in the book of Revelation, you may know this or you may not.

[1132] Christ comes back as a judge and he has a sword coming it's a it's a revelatory vision that book it's a very strange it's the last thing you'd expect conservative Christians is to believe in believe me it's such a visionary hallucination the book of revelation but Christ comes back with a sword coming out of his mouth and he comes back as a judge and he divides the damned from the redeemed and most are damned and some are redeemed it's very very harsh now Jung believe that the figure of Christ in the Gospels was too agreeable, too merciful, too tilted towards mercy, and that that called out for a counterposition.

[1133] And that was the counterposition of judgment.

[1134] Very interesting hypothesis.

[1135] But then there's this melding of the two ideas that the judge and the Redeemer are the same thing.

[1136] Okay.

[1137] Now, this young man told me that his life lacked purpose and direction and meaning and that he was nihilistic.

[1138] until he started he read Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is a book I actually like quite a bit I've read it three times at different decades of my life and one of the things that's very interesting about that book is that it's an examination of the idea of quality of the idea that there are qualitative distinctions between things and that we have an instinct to make qualitative distinctions and so a qualitative distinction is simply this is better than that which is a judgment okay now what Ratsi is hypothesizing is that the person in and up, you know how you're, the idea, the modern ideas you're supposed to accept yourself?

[1139] I think that's an insane idea, by the way.

[1140] Really, I think, I can't think of a more nihilistic idea than that.

[1141] You're already okay.

[1142] It's like, no, you're not.

[1143] And the reason you're not is you could be way more than you are.

[1144] And so what do you want to be?

[1145] You want to be okay as you are?

[1146] Or do you want to strive towards what's better?

[1147] And this young man, this Australian, he said the reason that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had such a impact on him was because he wasn't happy with his current mode of being, right?

[1148] He didn't consider the manner in which he conducted himself sufficient.

[1149] And the fact that the author of Zenon, it was Persig, laid out the notion that you could make qualitative distinctions and there really was a difference between good things and bad things or great things and evil things.

[1150] It gives you direction.

[1151] It gives you the possibility of moving upward.

[1152] And Ratzinger is pointing out, at least to some degree, that human beings are insufficient in and of themselves and need the movement upward.

[1153] And so they need to conceptualize something like the highest good, and then to strive for that.

[1154] And the thing is, is that there isn't any difference between conceptualizing the good and being judged, because if you're going to conceptualize the good and move towards it, what you have to do is separate from yourself all those things that aren't good and leave them behind.

[1155] And that's why the Redeemer and the judge are the same thing.

[1156] And one of the things that's really appalling, I think, about our modern world is that we're rejecting the notion of qualitative distinctions.

[1157] You say, well, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying that one thing is better than another.

[1158] It's like, okay, fair enough.

[1159] It's not fun to be cast off with the damned.

[1160] that's for sure but if people are in fact insufficient in their present condition which seems to be the case I mean try finding someone who isn't then if you deny the possibility of qualitative distinction because you want to promote a radical egalitarianism then you remove the possibility of redemption because there's no movement towards the good and it seems to me that it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for well it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for the equal.

[1161] Because for us to be equal, it would mean, as far as I can tell, that we would all be equally unredeemed and miserable.

[1162] And so...

[1163] He also mentions in the previous paragraph, I believe, that even in the case when you experience the human life at its fullest, that it's most beautiful, that it's most meaningful, you have a deep, I guess, understanding that you have something to be thankful for you.

[1164] You need to thank somebody for that.

[1165] It's not based entirely on your own merit, and that points you towards something else.

[1166] And also...

[1167] I don't think that you can have a profoundly positive experience, you know, in the best sense, without that accompanying it.

[1168] That's a feeling of being blessed.

[1169] It's something like that.

[1170] Yeah.

[1171] That's good.

[1172] Walk back and also I'd like to talk.

[1173] Wait, hold it.

[1174] I'm going to stop you.

[1175] Okay, because I'm going to ask this person.

[1176] But I would like to say that those were remarkably good questions.

[1177] So, Dr. Pearson, thank you for the wonderful lecture.

[1178] Given your working definition of truth, and let's say within the Abrahamic religious tradition, would you say that the more perhaps mystical sects and denominations, which place more emphasis on the transcendental experience of God, of the on -induced experience, as opposed to the more fundamentalist, orthodox, literalist, which perhaps emphasized what I've noticed the moral policing of behaviors.

[1179] Would you say that the former is more true than the latter?

[1180] No. No. Okay, sorry.

[1181] Continue.

[1182] And B, could the former in some way serve as an antidote to extremist, literalism, jihadism, Fundamentalism.

[1183] Okay, so yes, to the second part.

[1184] But the first part, it's a great question.

[1185] We did some research on this a while back, because we were looking at the different religious proclivities of liberals and conservatives.

[1186] And liberals, like, if you're liberal, it means you're high and openness and low in conscientiousness.

[1187] And if you're conservative, then you're high and conscientiousness and low in openness.

[1188] And the liberals are spiritual and the conservatives are dogmatic.

[1189] but it's best to think of those as partners, right?

[1190] Because the spiritual, mystical end is where the revelations emerge and the renewal, but that's where there's chaos and discord as well.

[1191] Because what's new disrupts what's stable.

[1192] And so what's new has to be turned into, it has to be integrated into what's stable, and so you need both those poles.

[1193] And of course, if the dogmatists get the upper hand, then everything turns into a tyranny of state, stone, that's Egypt in the Old Testament.

[1194] But if the mystics get the upper hand, then everything floats off the earth into some impractical ether that is equally counterproductive.

[1195] And so there has to be a dialogue between those different poles.

[1196] And I think you see that in the distribution of human temperament.

[1197] You know, the conscientious types, they tend to be orderly.

[1198] The orderly types tend to tend towards kind of a right -wing totalitarianism.

[1199] That's their proclivity when things get out of hand, especially if they're low in openness.

[1200] That's a danger.

[1201] But you see the same thing with the people who are too open and not conscientious at all.

[1202] They're dreaming all the time, but they never do anything.

[1203] There's never anything implemented, and that's a bad thing.

[1204] So I don't think that you can say that the dogmatic structure is necessary because that perpetuates the system, and the revelatory element is necessary because that renews it when renewal is necessary.

[1205] And there has to be a continual dialogue between those elements so that neither of them fall prey to their own particular form of pathology.

[1206] That's one of the problems with the current political, what would you call it, polarization that's occurring across the West is that the right and the left are not talking to each other anymore.

[1207] That's a very bad thing, because the left will wander into a pit and fail without boundaries, and the right will enclose itself in smaller and smaller spaces until it can't move without the left.

[1208] And one of the reasons that democracy works is because it makes people talk, or allows them to talk.

[1209] You can have it either way.

[1210] But it's because every virtue has its vice, right?

[1211] And so, and a meta -virtue is something like the amalgamation of singular virtues into something that's a transcendent structure that has more to do with the harmony of virtues, than with any given virtue, even though I think that freedom of speech is the clearest manifestation of that harmony of virtues.

[1212] And so awe could be a lubricant for the beginning of this discussion, do you think, between liberals and conservatives?

[1213] I don't know how to answer that.

[1214] It doesn't follow immediately from your initial presupposition, so the awe experience is a different issue.

[1215] Yeah, well, the...

[1216] At least exposing conservatives to some form of that experience.

[1217] Could it be a prerequisite for a more productive dialogue?

[1218] See, I mean, in the church, in a church ceremony, let's say, a classical church ceremony, there's some intermingling of both, right?

[1219] You mean, you think about a church ceremony that takes place in a Gothic cathedral.

[1220] You certainly got the dogma and the relatively rigid rule structure.

[1221] But at the same time that's aligned with intense beauty in the architectural forms in the in the light that's streaming in through the stained glass windows and the music and I mean the Gothic Cathedral is a forest, right?

[1222] It's a stone forest with sunlight streaming in through the trees and it's a balance between structure and light.

[1223] They're absolutely unbelievable structures and they speak of the transcendent, but inside that there's a structure and so it seems that in order for the religious impulse to be balanced, property, there has to be a reasonable dialogue, even in practice, between the mystical, awe -inspiring, transcendent, and the dogmatic.

[1224] Yeah, either of those can go as, either of those goes astray without the other.

[1225] If you're too dogmatic, do you need awe?

[1226] Likely.

[1227] Yes, because that would show you that there's something beyond your own presuppositions.

[1228] So, awe, I should tell you something interesting about awe as a physiological phenomena.

[1229] You know how you're listening to music and you get chills?

[1230] Some people experience that more than others.

[1231] Open people experience that more.

[1232] Or music is a pretty reliable elicitor of chills.

[1233] That's pilo erection.

[1234] That's your hair standing on end.

[1235] You see a cat when it sees a dog puffs up.

[1236] That's awe.

[1237] It's the same thing.

[1238] Like that chill is your hair standing on end.

[1239] And that's the sensation you get in the presence of a meta predator.

[1240] It's something like that.

[1241] And so the awe experience is a...

[1242] I mean, obviously, it's become very cognitively and emotionally complex in human beings, but its fundamental evolutionary underpinning is the instantaneous pile of erection that you see in prey animals when they're confronted by a predator.

[1243] And of course, that would be...

[1244] If you are a rabbit, you can bloody well believe that you see a wolf and it would inspire awe.

[1245] That's for sure.

[1246] I mean, if a wolf that was 20 feet high came bounding in here, man, you'd feel awe.

[1247] So, yeah.

[1248] That'll convince you that there's something that you still need to know.

[1249] Last question.

[1250] Perfect timing.

[1251] Hi, Dr. Peterson.

[1252] My name is Gary, and I'm a clinical and counseling master's student right now.

[1253] And so one of the key ideas that's been surfacing time and time again in your lectures is the idea that phenomenology is structured and flows mythologically.

[1254] And the way that plays out is, I'm supposing affectively, just pay attention to what comes up kind of naturally and you can locate the chaotic elements in your experience and prod at them with whatever degree of necessity you think.

[1255] So trying to situate this within the clinical context, we can conceptualize sexualize, psychotherapy as a kind of guided journey, just as you touched on in this lecture, where it's more of a meta -juryony in a sense, a meta -heroic journey, but I don't know how you want to think about it.

[1256] But just for those of us who are interested in kind of grounding and implementing these ideas within psychotherapeutic practice, what should we watch out for in the process itself?

[1257] What comes up?

[1258] What should we be afraid of or fearful of or cautious about or what should we tend towards?

[1259] That's my question.

[1260] Well, I think one of the people who I've read that's had the biggest impact on me as a clinician was Carl Rogers.

[1261] And the reason for that is that Carl Rogers put tremendous emphasis on listening.

[1262] Like, it's almost impossible to overestimate how useful it is to listen to your clients.

[1263] Like, you need a meta -scheme in some sense.

[1264] and the meta scheme, I think, is laid out in the sermon on the mount.

[1265] It's something like, orient yourself and your client, towards the good.

[1266] The client has to conceptualize what that might be.

[1267] You can serve as a guide, but it has to come from that person.

[1268] Because one of the things that you want to find out from your client is, okay, what's wrong?

[1269] They have to tell you.

[1270] And what would not having something wrong look like?

[1271] Like, what is it, if you could have what you wanted, and that that would be good, what would that look like?

[1272] Okay, so that establishes your star, right?

[1273] It's like Geppetto establishing the relationship with the star at the beginning of Pinocchio.

[1274] Here's what we're aiming at.

[1275] Okay, so now you've got that schema, here's what we're aiming at.

[1276] Now you might say, you might think, well, now what happens to the client is they meet their dragons along the way.

[1277] And their dragons would be, well, now you know what you want, and there are things in your way.

[1278] and some of those things might many of those things are going to be intensely practical but they're practical slash psychological so like so maybe someone has a job and they would like to move forward in the job but they're terrified of speaking in public well you know is that a psychological problem or a practical problem it's both it's also a real problem in many positions unless you can speak fluently publicly you're you're going to hit a ceiling and you're not going to go anywhere and so for the person to move towards that goal, then they have to confront the obstacles that manifest themselves within that framework.

[1279] And part of your job as a clinician is to identify the obstacles and to discriminate them from things they don't have to worry about, right?

[1280] Part of it is, you know, you can't just run around and try to combat all the chaos in the world.

[1281] Some of it is your chaos, and a bunch of it isn't.

[1282] And the chaos that's yours is the chaos that emerges as you move towards a necessary goal.

[1283] And so partly what you're doing by listening to your client is to help them cut their dragons down to size.

[1284] You know, because what'll happen if you start to talk to somebody about public speaking and you really talk to them is that you decompose the problem into a set of maybe 20 sub -problems, like, well, do you know exactly how to give a speech?

[1285] Like, what's your theory of public speaking?

[1286] Do you know how to look at people when you're talking?

[1287] Do you know how to speak loudly enough so that people can hear you?

[1288] Do you have a philosophy of public speaking?

[1289] I mean, all those things are necessary in order to do it properly.

[1290] You need to decompose that with the client and then to make those problems.

[1291] You have to decompose them to the point where they can be met by a practical solution.

[1292] And then you have to guide the person through the implementation of the practical solution.

[1293] And mostly you do that by listening.

[1294] It's like what you need to be is the person who helps the person that you're working with orient themselves towards a better future.

[1295] That's the compact.

[1296] You and I are in this space at this time to make things better.

[1297] First of all, we have to decide what better would look like.

[1298] And second, we need a strategy.

[1299] And third, we need to, once we have that, we're going to see the obstacles.

[1300] And some of those are going to be psychological and some of them are going to be practical.

[1301] And we're going to engage in joint problem solving of whatever sort is necessary in order to minimize the impact of those problems or to gain from the problems.

[1302] Dream analysis can be extremely useful for that, by the way.

[1303] It's even more useful for helping the person identify what the goal is, because that's often difficult for people.

[1304] It's like, well, I know that something's wrong, but I don't know what I want.

[1305] Sometimes people get so stuck there that they just can't get, they just can't get out of it.

[1306] So, and then what would you watch out for?

[1307] Phenomenologically, the way it shows up, the way it's experienced.

[1308] Well, I would say as a clinician, one of the things that you should watch out for is So there's a couple of rules of thumb that I think are useful.

[1309] Don't do anything for your clients that they can do for themselves And don't do them any favors Now, I think you can step Beyond the confines of your role carefully now and then to show that There's there's a more human connection than the merely contractual.

[1310] I think that's very useful But their problems are are not your problems.

[1311] You do not have any right to their problems.

[1312] And so you have to maintain that detachment because otherwise you can steal their destiny.

[1313] You don't want to be the person that solves their problems because you steal their destiny when you do that.

[1314] You want to be someone with whom they can figure things out for themselves.

[1315] And so there can be hubris in being a clinician because you can be the problem solver and that elevates you to a position.

[1316] You elevate yourself to that position.

[1317] You'll fall flat on your face.

[1318] You'll hurt your clients and things will kick back on you very, very hard because what the hell do you know right nothing because that person is very complicated and they need to they need to sort themselves out and but you can be a facilitator for that but that's all you should be and so you have to watch that you have to watch over becoming overly entangled so you have to maintain your detachment in the best sense and you have to not overstep your it's easy to become hubristic when the person is looking to you for the answers it's like you might, you don't have the answers, although you might be able to find, help the person find their way.

[1319] That's what you do with everyone you love too, right?

[1320] I mean, you don't provide them with the answers.

[1321] Because then they become little clones of you and unhappy, bitter, resentful and angry little clones of you because you usurp their destiny.

[1322] And so, the same thing applies within familial arrangements or friendships, all of that.

[1323] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos.

[1324] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1325] See jordanb peterson .com for audio, ebook, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1326] Remember to check out jordanb peterson .com slash personality for information on his new course, which is now 50 % off.

[1327] you enjoyed this podcast.

[1328] If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review.

[1329] Next week's episode is a continuation of the biblical series and is titled The Call to Abraham.

[1330] Talk to you next week.

[1331] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at jordan .b. Peterson.

[1332] Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates, other events and my list of recommended books can be found on my website jordan b peterson dot com my online writing programs designed to help people straighten out their pasts understand themselves in the present and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at self -authoring dot com that's self -authoring dot com from the westwood one podcast network