138. Maps of Meaning 10: Genesis and the Buddha

[0] I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material partly because I was interested in why people were so inclined to go to any lengths to protect their belief systems.

[1] I wanted to understand, and I knew that those were systems of value, right, that a belief system is something that enables you to ascribe value to things so that you can act.

[2] in the world towards things and away from things, roughly speaking.

[3] And I've already made a case to you that belief systems regulate people's emotions, but not as a consequence of decreasing their death anxiety or anything like that, or even directly decreasing their threat sensitivity or uncertainty, but more specifically by helping them orientes, themselves in the world so that what they do matches what they want in the social environment and it's an important set of distinctions because the emotional control that belief systems allow is mediated by success in the social environment that's the crucial thing it's not it's not directly it's not as if you're holding a belief system and that's directly inhibiting somehow your emotional responsivity, it's more that you have a mode of orienting yourself in the world so that other people can understand what you're up to, so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict, and the fact that you can do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation, that's what regulates your emotion.

[4] So it's not only the fact of the belief system, it's the fact that it's shared with everyone else.

[5] And so people are willing to defend their belief systems because they're defending the territorial structure that enables them to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone else around them.

[6] Now, then the question arises, what if two different groups of people have different belief systems?

[7] What do you do in a situation like that.

[8] And one answer is you capitulate.

[9] Another answer is that you fight.

[10] Another answer might be that you come to some consensus about how the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated so that you can inhabit the same territory without subordination or without conflict.

[11] But if you're going to come together in an agreement, you can't do that simply by abandoning the belief system because the belief system is what orientes you in the world.

[12] And so the negotiation is very tricky.

[13] And because of that, it often ends up in subordination or conflict.

[14] Another question that might arise out of that rat's nest of questions is if you have belief system A and you have belief system B and they're in conflict, is there any principles that you can use or any guidelines you can use to take the belief systems apart to try to understand what might be of central value in either of them are both, so that if you do bring them together, or even if one supersedes the other, that there's some evidence that they're predicated on principles that are actually viable.

[15] And of course, that brings up the question of what constitutes viable principles.

[16] And I got interested in that more particular question, because when the Cold War was raging, There were two ideological systems set up in the world, roughly speaking.

[17] There were, of course, more, but we can simplify it for the sake of argument down to two.

[18] And one was predicated on the communitarian principles that were put forward by Marx, and the other was a consequence of, you know, I would say, Western individualistic, free market capitalist democracies, roughly speaking.

[19] And then you might ask yourself, were those only, was that only a difference of opinion?

[20] right?

[21] Because that's the central question.

[22] If it's just a difference of opinion, if what's underneath it is arbitrary, then A, it doesn't matter which system wins, roughly speaking.

[23] B, there's no right and wrong in the discussion, right?

[24] It's, and that that would be something that would be more akin to a postmodern claim.

[25] It's just group A puts forward their claims to power, and group B puts form their claims to power, and they're both equally valid, and, well, have Adder fundamentally, because there's no way of solving the problem.

[26] But it struck me that that, I didn't think that we should leap to that conclusion so rapidly.

[27] And so I started to investigate, I think, I started to investigate the substructure of Western thought, not so much communist thought, because I thought of communism as an interloper on the scene.

[28] It was a system that wasn't devised and formalized until the late 1900s, late 1800s.

[29] and I didn't see it as part of what you might describe as organic development.

[30] There's no mythology, so to speak, at the basis of the communist perspective.

[31] And one of the things that's very interesting is that although those ideas were roundly defeated by the end of the 20th century, they're making a comeback so rapidly that it's almost unbelievable.

[32] You know, I got an email from a medical student yesterday at the University of Toronto, and now the courses that they have to take, the mandatory, these are social justice courses, include modules on equity.

[33] And equity is equality of outcome.

[34] They're pushing, people are having the equality of outcome notion pushed on them in mandatory training in universities everywhere again.

[35] And equity isn't equality of opportunity.

[36] It's equality of outcome.

[37] Now, that was the central dictum of the communist states in the 20th century.

[38] It's like, what the hell?

[39] How did we get back to that again already?

[40] So, and the idea being is if there isn't absolute equality of outcome within an organization that the thing is corrupt and needs to be restructured from the bottom up.

[41] And then the question, of course, is who decides that outcomes are equal by what means and with what groups?

[42] Because you can produce an infinite number of groups of people with equally validly in some sense.

[43] And you're never going to get equality of outcome across the infinite number of ways that you can parse up society into groups.

[44] It's not even technically possible unless everyone has nothing.

[45] So, anyways, these are obviously very powerful ideas and the mere fact that they killed a hundred million people already or more in the 20th century wasn't enough to put them to rest.

[46] Anyways, so back to the main theme.

[47] Is there something, this is the main question.

[48] Is there something, is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that are more than just bloody opinion.

[49] That's the question.

[50] Because if there isn't, well, then what do you do about that?

[51] It's arbitrary?

[52] You're just holding it for no reason whatsoever.

[53] It could be a different system.

[54] There's no reason to stick with it.

[55] All of those things.

[56] Like it takes the core out of it.

[57] Well, that was Nietzsche's claim, right?

[58] He said, you take the core metaphysical presupposition out from underneath Western civilization or any civilization for that matter.

[59] matter, and the whole thing loosens, shakens, shakes, and crumbles.

[60] Well, for Nietzsche, the metaphysical presupposition was God.

[61] Well, and then the question, of course, well, what even does that mean?

[62] And on one hand, it means, I suppose, adherence to a dogmatic set of beliefs, but then you might ask yourself, well, is there something else that it means?

[63] It means at least the hypothesis of some transcendent value.

[64] It means at least that.

[65] So, you know, Nietzsche announced the death of God.

[66] And so one of the consequences of that, Dostoevsky was working on exactly the same set of ideas.

[67] And in crime and punishment in particular, which is a book, like it's a necessary book.

[68] That's the thing.

[69] There's a number of books that were written in the last 120 years that you really have to read.

[70] And crime and punishment is one of them.

[71] And I think the Gulag Archipelago is another.

[72] And probably beyond good and evil is another.

[73] But, you know, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were writing in parallel.

[74] It's remarkable how much their lives intertwined.

[75] And Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than is generally known.

[76] There's been some recent scholarship indicating that.

[77] But in Dostoevsky's book, Crime and Punishment, he has his main character, Raskolnikov, decides that he's going to commit a murder.

[78] And he has very good justification for the murder.

[79] And Dostoevsky is very good at this.

[80] He puts his characters into very, very difficult moral situations and gives them full justification for pursuing the, for pursuing the pathway that they're pursuing.

[81] And so Raskolnikov, he's broke and starving.

[82] He wants to go to law school.

[83] His sister's about to prostitute herself, roughly speaking, by marrying a guy that hates her, that she hates and that, and he has contempt for her, at least acts in that manner.

[84] He's trying to rescue his mother as well, who's also in dire financial straits.

[85] He goes to a pawnbroker to pawn his meager position so that he can continue to scrape by.

[86] And she has this niece, I believe it's her niece that's not very bright, who she basically treats as a slave and is horrible to.

[87] And so the pawnbroker has this money.

[88] Raskolnikov is in dire need.

[89] He thinks, look, I'll just kill her, because why the hell not.

[90] I'll take her money.

[91] She's not doing any good with it anyways.

[92] I'll free her niece, who's just lurking as a slave.

[93] She's got all these other people tangled up in her pawn broke her schemes.

[94] All that'll happen is the world will be a better place.

[95] And the only thing that's holding me back is conventional moral cowardice.

[96] And, you know, Dostoevsky has his character in crime and punishment go through days, hours, hours and days and weeks of intense imagination, about this, rationalization about this, trying to justify himself placing himself outside the law so that he can perpetrate this act and telling himself with all the best nihilistic arguments that the only possible thing that could be holding him back is an arbitrary sense of indoctrinated morality.

[97] And so Dostoevsky explores that.

[98] He does commit the murder.

[99] And then, of course, all hell breaks loose because things don't necessarily turn out the way that you want.

[100] He gets away with it, however.

[101] Well, he gets away with it technically because no one knows he did it.

[102] But he doesn't get away with it in relationship to his own conscience.

[103] And so the rest of the book explores that.

[104] Well, Dostoevsky, I believe it was in crime and punishment, although he makes the same point in many of his books, he makes a very fundamental point.

[105] And this is the kind of point that I think that people who haven't investigated these matters down this particularly particular literary and philosophical pathway, never grapple with.

[106] Dostoevsky said straightforwardly, if there's no God.

[107] So if there's no higher value, let's say, if there's no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want.

[108] And that's the question that he's investigating.

[109] And you see, this is why I have such frustration, say, with people like Sam Harris, the sort of radical atheists, because they seem to think that once human beings abandoned their grounding in the transcendent, that the, the, the, the, the, the, the plausible way forward is with a kind of purest rationality that automatically attributes to other people equivalent value.

[110] It's like, I just don't understand that.

[111] They believe that that's the rational pathway.

[112] What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you, whenever I want it, at every possible second?

[113] Why is that irrational?

[114] And how possibly is that more irrational than us cooperating so we can both have a good time of it?

[115] I don't understand.

[116] understand that.

[117] I mean, it's as if the psychopathic tendency is irrational.

[118] There's nothing irrational about it.

[119] It's pure naked self -interest.

[120] How is that irrational?

[121] I don't understand that.

[122] Where's the pathway from rationality to an egalitarian virtue?

[123] Why the hell not every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost?

[124] It's a perfectly coherent philosophy.

[125] And it's actually one that you can institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you wanted to do it.

[126] So I don't, see, to me, I think that the universe that people like Dawkins and Harris inhabit is so intensely conditioned by mythological presuppositions that they take for granted the ethic that emerges out of that as if it's just a given, a rational given.

[127] And this, of course, precisely Nietzsche's observation, as well as Dostoevsky's.

[128] That's Nietzsche's observation.

[129] You You don't get it.

[130] The ethic that you think is normative is a consequence of its nesting inside this tremendously lengthy history, much of which was expressed in mythological formulation.

[131] You wipe that out.

[132] You don't get to keep all the presuppositions and just assume that they're rationally axiomatic.

[133] To make a rational argument, you have to start with an initial proposition.

[134] Well, the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality.

[135] Now, you could say that's a transcendent morality instantiated in the figure of God.

[136] That's fine.

[137] You could even call that a personification of the morality.

[138] If you don't want to move into a metaphysical space, I'm not arguing for the existence of God.

[139] I'm arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God.

[140] and that you can't just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact mid -air without any foundational support.

[141] Now, you don't have to buy that, but if you're interested in the idea, then you can read Nietzsche, because that's what he was trying to sort out.

[142] And it wasn't only Nietzsche came to that conclusion.

[143] It was many people have come to that conclusion, but I think the two who've outlined it most spectacularly were Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

[144] And Nietzsche is an unbelievably influential philosopher.

[145] You know, I don't think there was anyone that was more influential during the entire course of the 20th century, accepting a very, very tiny handful of other people, accepting the scientists.

[146] We won't bother with their discussion.

[147] You could put Marx in that category.

[148] You could put Freud in that category partly.

[149] But after that, the list starts to get a lot thinner, you know, so maybe there's 10 people up in that level.

[150] And Dostoevsky, of course, I think, I mean, if you ever, if anybody ever prepares a list of the top 10 greatest literary figures in the world, he would be in the top 10 list.

[151] I think he's perhaps second to Shakespeare and maybe above Shakespeare in my estimation.

[152] So these aren't trivial people we're talking about, and they weren't dealing with trivial issues.

[153] Well, so then the question might be, what's at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value?

[154] And I wanted to approach that, staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as possible.

[155] Because you can claim anything you want from a metaphysical perspective, and that's a big problem.

[156] And so people will say, well, why come up with a hypothesis of God, for example?

[157] God could be anything.

[158] There's a satire.

[159] The flying spaghetti monster, right?

[160] It's a classic satirical representation of a deity that the atheist types use to buttress their arguments.

[161] And fair enough, you know, as a satirical idea, it's pretty damn funny.

[162] But there's things about this that aren't the least bit amusing.

[163] And the thing that's not amusing is, well, what, if anything, is our culture predicated on?

[164] Okay, so what happened?

[165] Well, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky put this forth this set of propositions.

[166] And out of Dostoevsky's line of thinking, to some degree, grew Solzhenitsyn.

[167] Solzhenitsyn documented the absolute horrors of equity -predicated Soviet society, you know, and we don't teach, we don't learn about that, right?

[168] This I don't understand, is that what happens?

[169] happened in the 20th century on the radical left end of the spectrum is not well documented.

[170] Students don't learn about it.

[171] Why the hell is that?

[172] We learn about World War II.

[173] We learn about what happened in the Holocaust, and fair enough, we absolutely should.

[174] But nobody knows.

[175] It's mystery to everyone when I talk about what happened in the Soviet Union, and that's absolutely appalling.

[176] And that's to say nothing about what happened in China, which was equally horrible.

[177] The system didn't work.

[178] It was predicated on the wrong values, unless you think that that sort of thing means worked, you know, because you have to define that as well.

[179] But it collapsed under its own weight after it killed tens of millions of people.

[180] And still, it's not like Russia has recovered.

[181] It doesn't seem to me like that's a very good definition of worked.

[182] Now, whatever we're doing in the West seems to work for all of its flaws.

[183] And the question is, are we just deceiving ourselves?

[184] Is it just arbitrary power politics and opinion?

[185] Or is there something at the bottom of it?

[186] So when Solzhenitsin wrote the Gulag Archipelago, he believed that the Russians would have to return to Orthodox Christianity to find their pathway forward.

[187] And that's, of course, has made him into a reactionary in the eyes of many of his critics.

[188] But that is perhaps what is happening in Russia, although it's very difficult to tell, because Putin also seems to be using his affiliation with the Orthodox Christian Church as a means to consolidate power.

[189] So the situation in Russia is unclear, but a religious revival, if that's happening in Russia, and perhaps it isn't, but if it is happening, is something that unfolds over decades and even centuries, so it's not an easy thing to evaluate.

[190] when it first starts to happen.

[191] But Solzhenitsyn drew the same conclusions that Dostoevsky did fundamentally, not in exactly the same way, but very, very close.

[192] He believed, as far as I could tell, that unless people were willing to adhere to some sort of transcendent value, that they had no protection against pathological ideologies and no protection against the murderous impulses that came along with them.

[193] And I found his work unbelievably, I found his right incredible, powerful and credible.

[194] I don't know how you can read that book and not draw that kind of conclusion.

[195] I think people who criticize Soljanitzin have never read the damn book because that book is like it's like going into the ring with Muhammad Ali and being pummeled to death for half an hour.

[196] You know, you don't recover from it that easily.

[197] So I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material partly because I was interested in why people were so inclined to go to any links to protect their belief systems.

[198] I wanted to understand, and I knew that those were systems of value, right?

[199] That a belief system is something that enables you to ascribe value to things so that you can act in the world towards things and away from things, roughly speaking.

[200] and I've already made a case to you that belief systems regulate people's emotions but not as a consequence of decreasing their death anxiety or anything like that or even directly decreasing their threat sensitivity or uncertainty but more specifically by helping them orient themselves in the world so that what they do matches, what they want in the social environment.

[201] And it's an important set of distinctions because the emotional control that belief systems allow is mediated by success in the social environment.

[202] That's the crucial thing.

[203] It's not directly, it's not as if you're holding a belief system and that's directly inhibiting somehow your emotional responsivity.

[204] It's more that you share, you have a mode of, orienting yourself in the world so that other people can understand what you're up to so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict and the fact that you can do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation, that's what regulates your emotion.

[205] So it's not only the fact of the belief system, it's the fact that it's shared with everyone else.

[206] And so people are willing to defend their belief systems because they're defending the territorial structure that enables them to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone else around them.

[207] Now, then the question arises, what if two different groups of people have different belief systems?

[208] What do you do in a situation like that?

[209] And one answer is you capitulate.

[210] Another answer is that you fight.

[211] Another answer might be that you come to some consensus about how the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated so that you can inhabit the same territory without subordination or without conflict.

[212] But if you're going to come together in an agreement, you can't do that simply by abandoning the belief system because the belief system is what orientes you in the world.

[213] And so the negotiation is very tricky.

[214] And because of that, it often ends up in subordination or conflict.

[215] Another question that might arise out of that rat's nest of questions is if you have belief system A and you have belief system B and they're in conflict, is there any principles that you can use or any guidelines you can use to take the belief systems apart to try to understand what might be of central value in either of them or both so that if you do bring them together or even if one supersedes the other, that there's some evidence that they're predicated on principles that are actually viable.

[216] And, of course, that brings up the question of what constitutes viable principles.

[217] And I got interested in that more particular question, because when the Cold War was raging, there were two ideological systems set up in the world, roughly speaking.

[218] There were, of course, more, but we can simplify it for the sake of argument down to two.

[219] and one was predicated on the communitarian principles that were put forward by Marx, and the other was a consequence of, you know, I would say, Western individualistic, free market capitalist democracies, roughly speaking.

[220] And then you might ask yourself, was that only a difference of opinion?

[221] Right, because that's the central question.

[222] If it's just a difference of opinion, if what's underneath it is arbitrary, then A, it doesn't matter which system wins, roughly speaking, speaking.

[223] B, there's no right and wrong in the discussion, right?

[224] It's, that that would be something that would be more akin to a postmodern claim.

[225] It's just group A puts forward their claims to power and group B puts form their claims to power and they're both equally valid and, well, have Adder fundamentally because there's no way of solving the problem.

[226] But it struck me that that, I didn't think that we should leap to that conclusion so rapidly.

[227] And so I started to investigate.

[228] I think I started to investigate the substructure of Western thought, not so much communist thought, because I thought of communism as an interloper on the scene.

[229] It was a system that wasn't devised and formalized until the late 1900s, late 1800s, and I didn't see it as part of what you might describe as organic development.

[230] There's no mythology, so to speak, at the basis of the communist perspective.

[231] And one of the things that's very interesting is that, although those ideas were roundly defeated by the end of the 20th century, they're making a comeback so rapidly that it's almost unbelievable.

[232] You know, I got an email from a medical student yesterday at the University of Toronto, and now the courses that they have to take, the mandatory, these are social justice courses, include modules on equity, and equity is equality of outcome.

[233] They're pushing, people are having the equality of outcome notion pushed on them in mandatory training in universities everywhere again, And equity isn't equality of opportunity.

[234] It's equality of outcome.

[235] Now, that was the central dictum of the communist states in the 20th century.

[236] It's like, what the hell?

[237] How did we get back to that again already?

[238] So, and the idea being is if there isn't absolute equality of outcome within an organization that the thing is corrupt and needs to be restructured from the bottom up.

[239] And then the question, of course, is who decides that outcomes are equal by what means and with what groups?

[240] because you can produce an infinite number of groups of people with equally validly in some sense.

[241] And you're never going to get equality of outcome across the infinite number of ways that you can parse up society into groups.

[242] It's not even technically possible unless everyone has nothing.

[243] So, anyways, these are obviously very powerful ideas.

[244] And the mere fact that they killed 100 million people already or more in the 20th century wasn't enough to put them to rest.

[245] Anyway, so back to the main theme, is there something, this is the main question, is there something, is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that are more than just bloody opinion?

[246] That's the question.

[247] Because if there isn't, well, then what do you do about that?

[248] It's arbitrary?

[249] You're just holding it for no reason whatsoever.

[250] It could be a different system.

[251] There's no reason to stick with it, all of those things.

[252] Like it takes the core out of it.

[253] Well, that was Nietzsche's claim, right?

[254] He said, you take the core metaphysical presupposition out from underneath Western civilization, or any civilization for that matter, and the whole thing loosens, shakens, shakes, and crumbles.

[255] Well, for Nietzsche, the metaphysical presupposition was God.

[256] Well, and then the question, of course, well, what even does that mean?

[257] On one hand, it means, I suppose, adherence to a dogmatic set of beliefs, but then you might ask yourself, well, is there something else that it means?

[258] It means at least the hypothesis of some transcendent value.

[259] It means at least that.

[260] So, you know, Nietzsche announced the death of God.

[261] And so one of the consequences of that, Dostoevsky was working on exactly the same set of ideas.

[262] And in crime and punishment, in particular, which is a book, like, it's a necessary book.

[263] That's the thing.

[264] There's a number of books that were written in the last 120 years that you really have to read, and crime and punishment is one of them, and I think the Gulag Archipelago is another, and probably beyond good and evil is another.

[265] But, you know, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were writing in parallel.

[266] It's remarkable how much their lives intertwined, and Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than is generally known.

[267] There's been some recent scholarship indicating that.

[268] But in Dostoevsky's book, Crime and Punishment, he has a, his main character, Raskolnikov, decides that he's going to commit a murder.

[269] And he has very good justification for the murder.

[270] And Dostoevsky is very good at this.

[271] He puts his characters into very, very difficult moral situations and gives them full justification for pursuing the pathway that they're pursuing.

[272] And so Raskolnikov, he's broke and starving.

[273] He wants to go to law school.

[274] His sister's about to prostitute herself, roughly speaking, by marrying a guy that hates her, that she hates and that, and he has contempt for her, at least acts in that manner.

[275] He's trying to rescue his mother as well, who's also in dire financial straits.

[276] He goes to a pawnbroker to pawn his meager position so that he can continue to scrape by.

[277] And she has this niece, I believe it's her niece that's not very bright, who she basically treats as a slave and is horrible to.

[278] And so the pawnbroker has this money.

[279] Raskolnikov is in dire need.

[280] He thinks, look, I'll just kill her, because why the hell not?

[281] I'll take her money.

[282] She's not doing any good with it anyways.

[283] I'll free her niece, who's just lurking as a slave.

[284] She's got all these other people tangled up in her pawnbroker schemes.

[285] All that'll happen is the world will be a better place.

[286] And the only thing that's holding me back is conventional, moral cowardice.

[287] And, you know, Dostoevsky has his character in crime and punishment go through days, hours, days and weeks of intense imagination about this, rationalization about this, trying to justify himself, placing himself outside the law so that he can perpetrate this act, and telling himself with all the best nihilistic arguments that the only possible thing that could be holding him back is an arbitrary sense of indulge.

[288] doctrinated morality.

[289] And so Dostoevsky explores that.

[290] He does commit the murder.

[291] And then, of course, all hell breaks loose because things don't necessarily turn out the way that you want.

[292] He gets away with it, however.

[293] Well, he gets away with it technically because no one knows he did it.

[294] But he doesn't get away with it in relationship to his own conscience.

[295] And so the rest of the book explores that.

[296] Well, Dostoevsky, I believe it was in crime and punishment, although he makes the same point in many of his books, he makes a very fundamental point.

[297] And this is the kind of point that, that I think that people who haven't investigated these matters down this particular literary and philosophical pathway never grapple with.

[298] Dostoevsky said straightforwardly, if there's no God.

[299] So if there's no higher value, let's say, if there's no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want.

[300] And that's the question that he's investigating.

[301] And you see, this is why I have such frustration, say, with people like Sam Harris, the sort of radical atheists, because they seem to think that once human beings abandon their grounding in the transcendent, that the plausible way forward is with a kind of purest rationality that automatically attributes to other people equivalent value.

[302] It's like, I just don't understand that.

[303] They believe that that's the rational pathway.

[304] What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you whenever I want it at every possible second?

[305] Why is that irrational?

[306] And how possibly is that more irrational than us cooperating so we can both have a good time of it?

[307] I don't understand that.

[308] I mean, it's as if the psychopathic tendency is irrational.

[309] There's nothing irrational about it.

[310] It's pure naked self -interest.

[311] How is that irrational?

[312] I don't understand that.

[313] Where's the pathway from rationality to an egalitarian virtue?

[314] Why the hell not every man for himself?

[315] and the devil take the hindmost.

[316] It's a perfectly coherent philosophy.

[317] And it's actually one that you can institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it.

[318] So I don't, see, to me, I think that the universe that people like Dawkins and Harris inhabit is so intensely conditioned by mythological presuppositions that they take for granted the ethic that emerges out of that, as if it's just a given, a rational given.

[319] And this, of course, precisely Nietzsche's observation, as well as Dostoevsky's.

[320] That's Nietzsche's observation.

[321] You don't get it.

[322] The ethic that you think is normative is a consequence of its nesting inside this tremendously lengthy history, much of which was expressed in mythological formulation.

[323] You wipe that out.

[324] You don't get to keep all the presuppositions and just assume that they're rationally axiomatic.

[325] They're, the rational, to make a rational argument, you have to start with an initial proposition.

[326] Well, the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality.

[327] Now, you could say that's a transcendent morality instantiated in the figure of God.

[328] That's fine.

[329] You could even call that a personification of the morality.

[330] If you want to, if you don't want to move into a metaphysical space, I'm not arguing for the existence of God.

[331] I'm arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God and that you can't just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact mid -air without any foundational support.

[332] Now, you don't have to buy that, but if you're interested in the idea, then you can read Nietzsche because that's what he was trying to sort out.

[333] And it wasn't only Nietzsche came to that conclusion.

[334] It was many people have come to that conclusion, but I think the two who've outlined it most spectacularly were Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.

[335] And Nietzsche is an unbelievably influential philosopher.

[336] You know, I don't think there was anyone that was more influential during the entire course of the 20th century, accepting a very, very tiny handful of other people, accepting the scientists.

[337] We won't bother with their discussion.

[338] You could put Marx in that category.

[339] You could put Freud in that category partly.

[340] But after that, the list starts to get a lot thinner, you know.

[341] So maybe there's 10 people up in that level.

[342] And Dostoevsky, of course, I think, I mean, if anybody ever prepares a list of the top 10 greatest literary figures in the world, he would be in the top 10 list.

[343] You know, I think he's perhaps second to Shakespeare and maybe above Shakespeare, in my estimation.

[344] So these aren't trivial people we're talking about, and they weren't dealing with trivial issues.

[345] Well, so then the question might be, what's at the bottom of the idea of?

[346] of a transcendent value.

[347] And I wanted to approach that, staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as possible, because you can claim anything you want from a metaphysical perspective, and that's a big problem.

[348] And so people will say, well, why come up with a hypothesis of God, for example?

[349] God could be anything.

[350] There's a satire.

[351] The flying spaghetti monster, right?

[352] It's a classic satirical representation of a deity that the atheist types use to buttress their arguments.

[353] And fair enough, you know, as a satirical idea, it's pretty damn funny.

[354] But there's things about this that aren't the least bit amusing.

[355] And the thing that's not amusing is, well, what, if anything, is our culture predicated on?

[356] Okay, so what happened?

[357] Well, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky put this forth this set of propositions.

[358] And out of Dostoevsky's line of thinking, to some degree, grew Solzhenitsyn.

[359] And Solzhen documented the absolute horrors of equity -predicated Soviet society.

[360] You know, and we don't teach, we don't learn about that, right?

[361] This I don't understand is that what happened in the 20th century on the radical left end of the spectrum is not well documented.

[362] Students don't learn about it.

[363] Why the hell is that?

[364] We learn about World War II.

[365] We learn about what happened in the Holocaust, and fair enough, we absolutely should.

[366] But nobody knows.

[367] It's mystery to everyone when I talk about what happened in the Soviet Union, and that's absolutely appalling.

[368] And that's to say nothing about what happened in China, which was equally.

[369] horrible.

[370] The system didn't work.

[371] It was predicated on the wrong values, unless you think that that sort of thing means work, you know, because you have to define that as well.

[372] But it collapsed under its own weight after it killed tens of millions of people.

[373] That doesn't really, and still, it's not like Russia has recovered.

[374] It doesn't seem to me like that's a very good definition of worked.

[375] Now, whatever we're doing in the West seems to work for all of its flaws.

[376] And the question is, are we just deceiving ourselves?

[377] Is it just arbitrary power politics and opinion, or is there something at the bottom of it?

[378] So when Solzhenitsyn wrote the gulag archipelago, he believed that the Russians would have to return to Orthodox Christianity to find their pathway forward.

[379] And that's, of course, has made him into a reactionary in the eyes of many of his critics.

[380] But that is perhaps what is happening in Russia, although it's very difficult to tell, because Putin also seems to be using his affiliation with the Orthodox Christian church as a means to consolidate power.

[381] So the situation in Russia is unclear, but a religious revival, if that's happening in Russia, and perhaps it isn't, but if it is happening, is something that unfolds over decades and even centuries, so it's not an easy thing to evaluate when it first starts to happen.

[382] But Solzhenitsyn drew the same conclusions that Dostoevsky did fundamentally, not in exactly the same way, but very, very close.

[383] He believed, as far as I could tell, that unless people were willing to adhere to some sort of transcendent value, that they had no protection against pathological ideologies, and no protection against the murderous impulses that came along with them.

[384] And I found his work, unbelievably, I found his writing incredible, powerful, incredible.

[385] I don't know how you can read that book and not draw that kind of conclusion.

[386] I think people who criticize Soljanitzin have never read the damn book, because that book is like, it's like going into the ring with Muhammad Ali and being pummeled to death for half an hour.

[387] You know, you don't recover from it that easily.

[388] So, then Jung branched off of Nietzsche.

[389] And so Nietzsche's idea was that people would have to create their own values, roughly speaking.

[390] And I think that's where Nietzsche's is his weakest, because it isn't obvious to me that people can create their own values.

[391] And I think he fell into, and I don't want to be a casual critic of Nietzsche, because that's always dangerous, given that he probably had an IQ of 260.

[392] You know, I mean, he was way the hell out there in the stratosphere.

[393] And just when you think you've understood what he was talking about, you can be bloody well sure that you didn't.

[394] But it does seem to me, and he was running out of time.

[395] He died young, you know, and he was trying to solve this problem in a rush, I would say.

[396] And he hypothesized that people would have to become Superman, over men, roughly speaking, in order to deal with the death of God.

[397] And that idea sort of branched off into Nazi propaganda, because that's in some sense what the Nazis were trying to do with their promotion of the perfect Aryan.

[398] You know, now it's a misappropriation of Nietzsche in my estimation.

[399] And it was partly because his sister, who is a perverse creature, what would you say, doctored his work in such a way so that it was more easily appropriated by the Nazis.

[400] But there is some danger in what he said too, because the question is, well, if you're going to transform yourself into the giver of values, what stops you from inflating yourself into something like a demigod and just pronouncing what the values are going to be?

[401] So that's a problem.

[402] You know, you're going to replace tradition with yourself.

[403] Well, there's dangers in that because there's nothing to keep you humble.

[404] That's the most appropriate objection.

[405] There's nothing to keep you humble.

[406] And those things can spiral out of control very rapidly.

[407] And they did say in the case of Hitler.

[408] I mean, it's easy to blame what happened in Germany on Hitler, but that's a big mistake because it was a dialogue between Hitler and the German people.

[409] Hitler didn't create himself.

[410] It was co -creation.

[411] He said things, people listened and told him back what to say.

[412] then he said them and they listened and they told them back what to say and it looped until he was the mouthpiece of their darkest desires.

[413] Now that's a game he was willing to play.

[414] But you can't think about that as it isn't like Hitler created Nazi Germany.

[415] Hitler and the Germans co -created Nazi Germany.

[416] Now when a leader gives articulation to the imagination of the population, that's what leader does.

[417] And, you know, you could say that, well, Hitler, maybe Hitler filtered what the Germans were telling him through a particular lens, because he had no shortage of resentment and desire for revenge in his own heart, you know.

[418] It's not like his life was his spectacular success before he became a political activist, and he was brutalized very badly in World War I. And he didn't get to pursue his primary dream, which was to be an art student in Vienna.

[419] And he had applied three times and got rejected all three times.

[420] And so he was bitter about that.

[421] He was basically living on the streets after World War I. It wasn't the world's happiest person.

[422] And I'm sure he carried a fair bit of resentment in his heart when he was in the trenches in World War I. In one experience that he had, all of his friends were killed by a mortar when he had wandered off to go do something else.

[423] So, you know, it's hard to even imagine what something like that would do to you.

[424] But I can tell you, when you're the only survivor out of 20 people, that's also going to get.

[425] give you an enhanced sense of your own specialness because the alternative is just to think about how goddamn arbitrary the universe really is.

[426] So Jung studied Nietzsche in great detail and he was particularly interested because Jung had his finger on the central problems all the time, right?

[427] Because he was a great psychologist and he was listening to what people said and he was a staggering genius as well.

[428] And so like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, he was that kind of prophetic type, I would say.

[429] And he understood as well, perhaps, what was wrong with Nietzsche's formulation, the idea that people could only create their own values, and that's what would replace the foundation that was now lacking under Western civilization itself.

[430] And he came to his conclusion, I would say, through Freud, because Freud started analyzing parts of the human cognitive process and content that people hadn't attended to before in any great detail.

[431] And that was primarily dreams.

[432] You know, the idea of dream analysis, I suppose, is one of Freud's, perhaps Freud's major contribution to modern Western thought.

[433] The idea was there was something to dreams.

[434] And I suppose what Freud did is said, hey, look, isn't it strange?

[435] We have this whole other form of thought that we engage in.

[436] At night, and it speaks in a language that we don't really understand.

[437] And so what the hell is that?

[438] And you can say, and many modern people do, dreams are of no significance, or even that they're random processes, which is an absurd proposition, obviously, because they're by whatever they are, they're obviously not random.

[439] So, Freud's idea was that there was something in dreams that was informative.

[440] So that's just, now he had a method for extract, for extracting, out from the dream what the dream purported to represent, and he outlined that in great detail in the interpretation of dreams.

[441] And if you want to read one book by Freud, I would highly recommend that one.

[442] It's a very long book, and it's very detailed, but Freud does an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of the way that dreams work.

[443] Now, he made the, because he had brought a theoretical framework to bear, even on his investigation into dream structure, he concluded that dreams were essentially wish fulfillment.

[444] And that's where Jung and Freud disagreed.

[445] He also believed that the primary motivating factor of human beings was sexual.

[446] And now that's a tougher one to toss aside because even if you're a Darwinian rather than a Freudian, you're going to obviously support the proposition that sexual motivation among any living creature is going to be one of the highest order motivations because otherwise creatures don't reproduce and and prevail over the long run.

[447] So the question is, is that the ultimate source of motivation?

[448] And in some sense, the answer to that has to be yes.

[449] Well, Freud wanted to make that in some ways the sole source of motivation.

[450] And I'm oversimplifying, and I hate to do that in relationship to Freud, because he was not a simple -minded character.

[451] Jung had a dream once, if I remember correctly, that Freud and Jung were excavating a basement.

[452] And so Freud had outlined in, Freud had already discovered the basement, let's say.

[453] So that would be the unconscious structure of the psyche.

[454] And Jung broke through into another basement that was a multi -chambered place.

[455] So many, many, many rooms.

[456] And I suppose what drove Jung and Freud apart was Jung's proposition that there was a hell of a lot more going down, going on down there than had already met the eye.

[457] And they broke on the idea that the sexual impulse was primary, roughly speaking.

[458] They broke when Jung wrote a book called Symbols of Transformation, which is actually, there's three books that I know of that are sort of like maps of meaning.

[459] One is symbols of transformation.

[460] One is a book by Eric Neumann called The Origins and History of Consciousness.

[461] And the third one, well, is Maps of Meaning.

[462] They're the same book.

[463] They're just like they're trying to solve the same problem from three different directions.

[464] They're all attempts to address the same problem.

[465] And so Symbols of Transformation was a book that Jung wrote about the fantasies of a schizophrenic American woman.

[466] And he was trying to relate her fantasies to these old mythological ideas.

[467] And Jung's idea essentially, and this is an idea that was shared by people like Piajeje, so we were not going to say that Jung Orfroid just pulled this idea out of the air was that the birthplace of mythology and literature, for that matter, was the dream.

[468] That they share structural, that they share they share what mode of information presentation and it's a relatively radical hypothesis but but given that they both they both represent dreams dreams in mythological representations share an essentially narrative structure and they use their literary like you know i mean it's not so unreasonable to notice that a dream at night is like is like the movie that you play in your head.

[469] And it's not unreasonable to note as well that the dreams that you have at night bear a relationship to the daydreams that you have during the day.

[470] It's a form of cognition.

[471] It seems like an involuntary form of cognition, though, and that's a very strange thing.

[472] So Jung thought about the dream as nature speaking of its own accord, roughly speaking.

[473] And so his idea was, well, when you sleep, you dream, but the dream happens to you.

[474] It's not something that you create the way that, and you don't even think about creating it, because I might say, well, what are you thinking about?

[475] And you'll say, I'm thinking about whatever it is.

[476] And you'll take credit in some sense for thinking that because it seems like a voluntary activity.

[477] But what happens at night is that you think, but you think involuntarily.

[478] And so what Jung would say is that means that something is thinking in you.

[479] And that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it.

[480] And this is one of the things that's uncanny about the psychoanalysts is they were willing to take their observations to their logical conclusion.

[481] There are things.

[482] that think in you.

[483] What are those things?

[484] And what are they thinking?

[485] And why are they thinking it?

[486] Now, if you do dream analysis, and this is a tricky thing, because who's to say if your damn analysis is correct, right?

[487] It's very difficult to understand that.

[488] If you do dream analysis with someone, you generally have them lay out their dream.

[489] And then you ask them, when they're going through their dream a second time, they lay out their dream and you can kind of get a picture of it.

[490] And then they lay out their dream a second time, and as they go through it, every time they mention a detail or a character, you ask them what that reminds them of.

[491] And the hypothesis is that the dream is presenting an image or an idea that's associated with a network of ideas, and that if you can expand on the network of ideas as you go through the dream, you can elaborate on the dream, you can expand it upwards, and you can start to see what it might be attempting to put forward.

[492] Now, Freud's idea was that the dream knew what it was doing, but that its content was being suppressed and oppressed by an internal sensor.

[493] So the dream had to be sneaky about what it was saying because it was going to deliver a message that the person didn't want to hear.

[494] And that was tied up with his idea of repression.

[495] But that's not Jung's idea.

[496] See, Jung's idea was different.

[497] He said, no, no, the dream is trying to tell you what is trying to tell you as clear as it can.

[498] That's just the best it can do.

[499] And so you could think of the dream, and this is, I believe, the right way to think about it.

[500] The dream is the birthplace of thought, the same way that artists are the birthplace of culture.

[501] It's exactly the same process.

[502] It's that your mind is groping outward to try to comprehend what it has not yet comprehended.

[503] And it does that first by trying to map it onto image.

[504] And it's doing that in the dream, and it's somewhat incoherent.

[505] And, well, let's stick with incoherent, because it's not yet a full -fledged thought.

[506] It's the birthplace of thought.

[507] It's a fantasy about what might be.

[508] And then if you can grip the fantasy and share it with other people, then maybe they can elaborate upon it and bring it into being with more clarity than it would be if it merely existed as the precursor of a thought in your imagination.

[509] Now, because Jung's idea too was, okay, you think, you think in words.

[510] Where the hell do those thoughts come from?

[511] Well, they just spring into my head.

[512] Well, that's not much of an answer.

[513] They just, what, pop out of the void?

[514] Is there some sort of precursor to the development of the ideas?

[515] Is there a developmental pathway?

[516] So here's an image.

[517] This is the Buddha.

[518] There's calm water.

[519] There's a lotus.

[520] The roots go all the way down to the bottom of the lake.

[521] It's dark down there.

[522] The roots are embedded in the dark substrata at the bottom of the lake.

[523] The plant moves upwards towards the light.

[524] The water gets lighter and lighter as you move upward with the root.

[525] The flower...

[526] manifests itself on the surface and the Buddha sits in the middle.

[527] That's an image about how ideas develop.

[528] They come out from the bottom of reality and they push themselves up towards the light and they blast forward and something emerges as a consequence.

[529] That's what that image means.

[530] And it's an image.

[531] The gold Buddha that's sitting in the middle of the lotus is an image of the perfect person.

[532] You could think about the gold Buddha who sits in a triangle as exactly the same thing that's the eye on the top of the pyramid.

[533] These are all the same ideas.

[534] And what's the idea that's trying to burst forward?

[535] How to be in the world.

[536] Well, what other idea would burst forward?

[537] Because it's the only problem that you really have, right?

[538] How should you manifest yourself properly in the world?

[539] It's everyone's question.

[540] It's the ultimate question.

[541] It's been the ultimate question since the beginning of time.

[542] And we've been working out that idea forever, first of all, merely by acting it out, and then by representing the actions, and then by representing the representation.

[543] and spiraling all that together.

[544] So I started looking developmentally.

[545] I thought, okay, maybe these ideas have roots, and this was partly predicated on the observation from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche and so forth, that there did seem to be a necessary pattern in morality.

[546] There seemed to be a necessary pattern.

[547] It wasn't arbitrary.

[548] It was a representation of the specific mode of human being, and it isn't something that's just important.

[549] imposed on you by your cultures.

[550] It's not something that's just learned.

[551] It's intrinsic in you and it's manifest in the culture at the same time.

[552] And there's a dialogue between those two things, culture and nature, where both where the idea is embedded, trying to make the proper articulation of that spring forward in each individual.

[553] And that's only to say these aren't these aren't radical propositions.

[554] Your nature's strives so that you can manifest yourself properly in the world.

[555] Culture strives to aid you in that endeavor.

[556] Is there something about that that's of dubious validity?

[557] What else would it be doing?

[558] Working for your death?

[559] Hardly.

[560] Working for your destruction?

[561] Well, you could see that maybe when culture becomes pathologized, but to the degree that it's able to maintain itself across long periods of time, it obviously has to be striving in some way for your individual manifestation so that you can survive and flourish.

[562] So there's a co -creation of the human being going on through nature and through culture.

[563] And well, and then perhaps with your own voluntary will participating, whatever the hell that is, something we don't understand at all, and are prone to dismiss because of that.

[564] So then I learned about Pesier, and Pesier had some very interesting ideas, and I think I've told you already what Paget was up to.

[565] He wasn't a developmental.

[566] psychologist.

[567] He didn't even regard himself as a psychologist.

[568] He wanted to reconcile science and religion.

[569] That's what he was doing through his entire bloody life, because it drove him crazy when he was an adolescent.

[570] And he didn't think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together.

[571] So he's working on the same problem.

[572] And so one of the things that Piaget, who was very prone to observation, he was an ethologist of human beings.

[573] That's a good way of thinking about.

[574] An ethologist is a scientist who studies animals by watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions.

[575] And he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of children.

[576] And was so smart, that idea that when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal, so in play, that a morality emerges out of that.

[577] And that morality, and I've mentioned this before, there's a morality in game one.

[578] There's a morality in game two.

[579] There's a morality in game three.

[580] What's common across all those morality is a metamorality.

[581] And so the metamorality emerges from the particular moralities that are embedded in particular cooperative situations.

[582] We could say cooperative and competitive situations.

[583] You can expand that out to the, you can expand that out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy, right?

[584] Every social animal, and even many animals who aren't social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy.

[585] The dominance hierarchy has a structure.

[586] We couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy.

[587] Dominance hierarchy A, B, C, D, E, thousands of them across thousands of years.

[588] You extract out from all of them.

[589] What's central to all of them?

[590] That's the pyramid of value.

[591] What's the question do you need answered about the pyramid of value?

[592] What's at the top?

[593] Because that's the ideal.

[594] That's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden Buddha in the in the Lotus it's the same thing it's the same thing as the crucifix paradoxically enough and that has to do it has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering it's something like that these are not arbitrary ideas they're deeply that's my case anyways they're deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture there they're as deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology.

[595] And we already know the answer to that.

[596] The dominance hierarchy has been around for 350 million years.

[597] It's a long time.

[598] You don't get to just brush that off and say, well, morality is some sort of second order cognitive problem.

[599] It's like, no, it's not.

[600] I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system.

[601] You have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status.

[602] And it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions.

[603] So if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy, barely clinging on to the world, everything overwhelms you.

[604] And that's because you're damn near dead.

[605] And so everything should overwhelm you.

[606] You've got no extra resources.

[607] Any more threat, you're sunk.

[608] So you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive so that you grab well, the grabbing is good.

[609] And if you're nearer the top in the dominance hierarchy, and your counter tells you that, then your serotonin levels go up.

[610] You're less sensitive to negative emotion.

[611] you're less impulsive, you live longer, like everything works in your favor.

[612] Your immune system functions better, and you're oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long -term future.

[613] And you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time.

[614] And so then the question is, is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies?

[615] Well, that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random, and that, you can think that if you want, but I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever.

[616] I mean, we certainly have, even for sexual selection, we impose criteria.

[617] They're not random and arbitrary.

[618] So, okay, so back to Jung.

[619] So what was Jung trying to do?

[620] Well, he was trying to see.

[621] See, Jung believed that once we had stopped populating the cosmos with gods that they went inside.

[622] That's a good way of thinking.

[623] Well, think about it this way.

[624] You know, an archaic person looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate the sky.

[625] What's the sky?

[626] Well, it's the constellations.

[627] It's the domain of the gods.

[628] Well, why?

[629] Well, because the gods are out there beyond your understanding.

[630] Well, that's what you see when you look up at the sky.

[631] So you populate the night sky with figures of your imagination.

[632] So the gods are the things that you broadcast out of your imagination and see spread over the world.

[633] It's like the contents of your unconscious are manifesting themselves when you encounter the unknown.

[634] It's exactly what it is.

[635] That's exactly how else could it be?

[636] Right?

[637] You're projecting your fantasy onto what you don't understand.

[638] That's how you start to cope with what you don't understand.

[639] You populate the unknown with deities.

[640] Where did they come from?

[641] They came from your imagination.

[642] Well, what happens when you take them out of the world?

[643] Do they disappear?

[644] No. They just go back into your imagination.

[645] So that's where Jung dug down to find them.

[646] That's the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the, or rescuing your father from the belly of the whale.

[647] It's the same idea is that the corpses of the gods inhabit your imagination.

[648] So where do you go if you need to revivify them?

[649] You go into your imagination.

[650] And that's exactly what Jung did.

[651] And I mean, this is no secret.

[652] If you read Young, he tells you that's what he did.

[653] He tells you that's why he did it.

[654] It's not an interpretation on my part.

[655] So then the question is, what's down there?

[656] Is it just mess and catastrophe?

[657] Or is there something in it that's patterned?

[658] Well, Jung's proposition was that you rediscover the great archetypes that guide human being by investigating the structure of your imagination.

[659] imagination.

[660] When he thought about the imagination in some sense, at least in part as a manifestation of your biology.

[661] Well, yes, what else would it be?

[662] You know, and I told you that story about my nephew, I believe, right, about him running around as a knight and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the dragons.

[663] It's like, well, where did that come from?

[664] Well, partly it came from his culture, right?

[665] Because he was a knight.

[666] And so obviously that's a cultural construct.

[667] But the thing is, is that his imaginative, nation is, it's this structure that's looking for things to fill itself with, just like your predisposition to language.

[668] You have a predisposition to language.

[669] What is that?

[670] We don't know.

[671] What does it do?

[672] It looks for things in the world to fill itself with, right?

[673] And if you're, if you first of all, when you start to learn how to speak, you babble every phoneme.

[674] Did you know that?

[675] There's, there's, there's, if I was learning to speak an Asian language, there would be phonemes I couldn't pronounce and vice versa.

[676] An infant, all of them, they babble all the phonemes.

[677] And then as they start to learn the language, they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language.

[678] So a baby babbles all, laying all possible languages.

[679] That's a way of thinking about it.

[680] And then loses the ability.

[681] So that's a manifest, that's, you can see there.

[682] So you could say, well, you manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes.

[683] It's built into you.

[684] your biology.

[685] And then as you're inculturated in your own culture, the set of archetypes that manifest themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use.

[686] So my nephew's running around like a knight.

[687] Well, you know, if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon, he would have been running around with a bow and, you know, a poisoned arrow and a bow.

[688] It's the same thing.

[689] It's the same idea.

[690] It's just trapped out in different cultural dress.

[691] And he, his little imagination was trying to solve the problem.

[692] How do you deal with the unknown?

[693] Well, what's the unknown?

[694] It's these little devils that keep biting, jumping up on you and biting you, and they come out without end.

[695] So just killing them, it's like cutting the head off the hydra, right?

[696] Seven more grow.

[697] Well, what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there's just a bunch more problems that are going to come after you?

[698] And that's everyone's question.

[699] That's the ultimate question of nihilism, right?

[700] Why bother solving a problem if all that's going to happen is that 20 more problems are going to come your way?

[701] Why not just give up and die?

[702] Well, right, it's a good question.

[703] It's a good question, right?

[704] Is the suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end?

[705] That's another fundamental question of existence.

[706] And people who've become truly malevolent answer that question in the affirmative.

[707] They say, it's too much, we should destroy it.

[708] Now, I wouldn't say they're precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons, but you have to understand and appreciate the logic.

[709] It's not irrational.

[710] That's the other thing.

[711] It's not irrational to work for the destruction of being.

[712] It's not irrational.

[713] In fact, it might be the most rational thing you could come up with.

[714] It depends on your initial set of presuppositions.

[715] So, Jung, down into the belly of the beast, so to speak, to see what lurks in the imagination.

[716] He sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas.

[717] Well, what are archetypal ideas?

[718] There are patterns of, you could think about them as representations of patterns of adaptive behavior.

[719] And so then you might ask, well, where did they come from?

[720] Well, that's part of what I've been trying to, to, to, to, to, teach you about, they evolved as far as I can tell, right?

[721] They evolved collectively, is that our society, and this is the dominance hierarchy idea.

[722] Dominance hierarchy set themselves up as a matter of course.

[723] They're the standard way that animals organize themselves in a territory.

[724] Well, okay, human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self -aware thinking, what the hell are we up to?

[725] What the a question that lurks in there.

[726] What constitutes acceptable power?

[727] What constitutes acceptable sovereignty?

[728] Who should lead?

[729] Who should rule?

[730] What should be at the top?

[731] Well, we talked about that.

[732] The Mesopotamians figured that out.

[733] Speech and vision.

[734] That's Marduk.

[735] Speech, vision, and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown.

[736] That's what should rule.

[737] Well, what?

[738] Is that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea?

[739] How could it be any other way?

[740] Well, that's what human beings are like.

[741] I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamian story and understand the reference, which isn't an easy thing to do, and fail to draw that conclusion.

[742] Marduk has eyes all the way around his head.

[743] He speaks magic words.

[744] He goes off to fight Tiamat, the dragon of chaos.

[745] Well, what's that?

[746] That's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown.

[747] Well, is any of that, is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective.

[748] We're prey animals, we're predators.

[749] We'd be threatened by reptiles forever.

[750] Why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forest or the water as a representative of the unknown?

[751] Why wouldn't we harness that circuitry?

[752] We already have it at hand, and even more to the point, how could we do anything else?

[753] It makes perfect sense.

[754] well so then you might say well what would you want to be king you could say king of the world or king of your own soul what do you want to subordinate yourself too how about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people there's no nobler vision than that and i don't see that it's merely arbitrary and so and it's not merely arbitrary too because if you do that to the degree that you do that assuming your society's isn't entirely corrupt, you will be successful.

[755] It will actually aid you practically.

[756] You'll rise up above men.

[757] You'll be selected by women.

[758] You'll be admirable.

[759] You'll be valued.

[760] And you know that because if you look at the people that you admire and value, again, unless you've taken a detour into dark places and are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction, You just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own conclusions.

[761] And you can ask yourself too, when you're torturing yourself with your conscience, because you're not doing what you should be and you know it, what is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship too?

[762] You have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if you're not matching it.

[763] What's the ideal?

[764] Well, you don't know, right?

[765] It's kind of incoherent and poorly articulated, but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to.

[766] to manifest itself and make itself known to you.

[767] It's really the purpose of religious education is to make that ideal articulated.

[768] Well, we've lost that.

[769] It's not a good thing.

[770] Okay, so I talked to you about the Mesopotamian story.

[771] And I talked to you about the Egyptian story and what I thought it meant.

[772] And it's a bit of an elaboration on the same theme because it says, well, the hero isn't only the deity, the transcendent pattern, let's say, that goes out into the unknown, cuts it into pieces, and makes the world.

[773] That's not good enough, because it only deals with the terrible mother.

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

[775] But there's a terrible father, too, once culture gets instantiated in large scale, and the Egyptians had that problem.

[776] Two problems.

[777] Chaos.

[778] Second problem.

[779] Pathological order.

[780] Well, structures tend towards pathological order.

[781] The Egyptians laid out, why?

[782] That's Seth, right?

[783] Seth is the evil advisor of the king who's lurking in the background all the time, trying to tear the structure down for his own malevolent purposes.

[784] So now and then that overcomes the structure and destroys the, and what rigidifies and makes malevolent the entire social structure.

[785] So it degenerates into, say, fascist totalitarianism, something like that.

[786] And that's been a threat since we've had highly organized societies.

[787] Then the hero ends up in the underworld and has to come back and do direct combat with that malevolent force at the price of his own consciousness, right?

[788] Because Horace gets one of his eyes destroyed.

[789] It's no bloody joke to face the forces that make a culture rigid and malevolent.

[790] So there's an addition to the hero archetype.

[791] Two things happen.

[792] One, you go out and you conquer chaos and you make order out of it.

[793] But the second is you take pathological order, recast it into chaos, and then allow it to reemerge.

[794] And you do that, not in some arbitrary sense, but in tandem with your rescued father.

[795] And that's, I guess, in part, what Nietzsche missed, as far as I can tell, is he didn't, he knew that he knew of the death of God.

[796] Perhaps he didn't know that it had happened many times.

[797] Mircea Eliad documented that across many cultures.

[798] But what Nietzsche didn't seem to lay out, at least, in his vision of the Superman or the overman, was that it was a responsibility of the person who wants to revivify the culture to go down and rescue.

[799] the damn culture, which is what you're supposed to be doing in university, because your father is lying dead in the libraries, right?

[800] So you're supposed to be going in there and taking that spirit out of the books and manifesting it in your own being.

[801] That's what the universities were for, although I don't think that's what they're for anymore.

[802] So we talked about the Mesopotamian story, and we talked about the Egyptian story.

[803] And other people have documented the emergence of hero mythology in cultures far more diverse than the ones that I'm exposing you to that was done most popularly by Joseph Campbell but Campbell's like I don't think Campbell had a single idea that he didn't derive from Jung and I'm not saying that in a in a critical manner because Campbell was good at standing as a mediator between Jung and a more general population he did and that's a non -trivial accomplishment seriously but but but but you is still the source of those ideas, and if you're serious about them, that's the person that you have to go to for that kind of knowledge.

[804] So now I wanted to tell you some other stories that are in some sense closer to Western culture.

[805] They're the stories upon which Western culture is actually predicated.

[806] So I'm going to tell you, well, I'm not only Western story today, I'm going to tell you a couple of stories from Genesis, and I'm going to tell you about the story of the Buddha.

[807] I'm going to do that at the same time because the story of the Buddha is almost a perfect parallel, structurally speaking, to the story of Adam and Eve.

[808] And so I want to show you that, and you can decide for yourself if I'm imposing a pattern on it, because God only knows, right?

[809] Or whether or not, once you have the key to understanding the stories, which I hope I provided you with, with the idea of the dragon of chaos and the great mother and the great father and the individual, it gives you a schema that you can use to understand the characterizations of great stories.

[810] And as far as I can tell, it works pretty much universally across stories.

[811] So I want to walk you through those foundational stories.

[812] And I would say, one of the things to know about the way the Bible is structured, there's a couple of things you want to know about it, is that it was authored by multiple people across extraordinarily vast spans of time and then aggregated by other people and sorted into something that seemed to make sense.

[813] And so you can really think about it as a, because Bible, is a library.

[814] It's a library of books.

[815] It's not a book.

[816] The library is organized a certain way that makes a kind of sense.

[817] But it's not exactly as if anyone decided what that sense would be.

[818] It's the collaborative work of hundreds and thousands of people across thousands of years attempting to organize a collective story into something out of which the sense emerges.

[819] It's like human beings acted, and then they dreamed about how they acted, and then they wrote down what they dreamed about how they acted, and then they organized what they wrote about how they dreamed they acted.

[820] And that's how that book came into being.

[821] And the information that's within it emerged from the behavioral level upward, right, rather than being imposed top down.

[822] Now, there's a feedback, right?

[823] Because if you understand how you act, then that changes how you act.

[824] And so you can't avoid the top -down feedback, but a tremendous amount of the information in there, and this is why it's revelatory information, we don't know.

[825] It's in there because how we act is informative.

[826] And then if you represent how we act, that's informative.

[827] But the information came from how we act, not from the representation of how we act.

[828] And then you might think, well, how did we learn how to act?

[829] And the answer is, we've been trying to figure out how to do that for 3 .5.

[830] five billion years.

[831] There's lots of information encoded in our actions and in our social interactions, way more than we understand.

[832] So we're acting something out.

[833] We don't understand what it is, but we're doing our best to pull that information upward, partly by dreaming about it.

[834] That's what you're doing at night.

[835] You're trying to figure out what the hell you're up to.

[836] Well, you don't know because you don't know yourself in totality.

[837] How could you possibly know?

[838] Best you can do is dream yourself up and then speak yourself into some sort of articulated existence.

[839] It's just an approximation because you, whatever you is, whatever you are, rapidly supersedes whatever you think you are.

[840] That's why people constantly shock themselves, you know, if you were only what you thought of yourself, well, wouldn't life be simple?

[841] You'd know exactly what you were doing all the time, and you could even control your own behavior.

[842] Well, good luck with that.

[843] You can't do that for yourself, much less for other people.

[844] So let's go through these stories.

[845] So they're sequenced.

[846] People are trying to make sense out of them.

[847] They're aggregating these stories from all sorts of different places, all sorts of different tribes, all sorts of different times, and then trying to make them coherent without losing the content and without doing arbitrary editing.

[848] And so part of the reason that the Bible is full of internal contradictions is for the same reason that a dream is full of internal contradictions.

[849] If you impose too much coherence on it, you start losing the, look, imagine you have an, imagine that you have a impressionist painting.

[850] Well, it's messy and, and, and the, the image emerges.

[851] And you might say, well, we could replace that with a nice, clean line drawing, or even a sequence of stick figures, and get the basic point across.

[852] It's like, well, you would, but you'd lose the, the richness.

[853] the unarticulable richness would be lost in the premature attempt to bring logical closure to the phenomena.

[854] And so, in fact, we know already that that's maybe the difference between dreams and waking thought.

[855] So waking thought sacrifices completeness for coherence, right?

[856] So whereas dream thought sacrifices coherence for completeness.

[857] And that's not something I'm saying arbitrarily.

[858] This is something that has been thought through by people who've been thinking this sort of thing through for a long time.

[859] Precise thought excludes too much.

[860] An imprecise thought is not sufficiently coherent.

[861] So we do both.

[862] Precise thought.

[863] Left hemisphere.

[864] Linguistically mediated.

[865] Sequential, logical.

[866] Incoherent but complete thought.

[867] Imagistic, emotion -based, right hemisphere.

[868] The right hemisphere even has a more diffuse structure.

[869] It's like the right hemisphere is trying to get a picture of everything.

[870] Now, it's not going to be a very detailed picture because it's a picture of everything, full of contradictions, but at least it's a picture of everything.

[871] And the left says, that's not good enough for precise action.

[872] And it's not.

[873] So we'll narrow that to precision, but we lose the richness.

[874] But you need both.

[875] So there's an interplay.

[876] Well, the documents that the Bible is composed of are half dream and half articulated thought.

[877] And they have the advantages of articulated thought and the advantages of the dream.

[878] but also the disadvantages of both.

[879] So it's, to the degree that it's articulated, it's in a dogmatic box, to the degree that it's a dream, it's still incoherent.

[880] But the problem is you have to move through the entire world, even though you don't know it in detail.

[881] So you need detailed knowledge, where detailed knowledge is necessary, and you need vague but complete knowledge where that's necessary.

[882] It's a very uncomfortable balance, but we have to face everything, even though we don't understand, understand anything completely.

[883] Now, Genesis, the first stories in Genesis are, what would you say?

[884] Unidentifiably ancient.

[885] God only knows how old they are.

[886] The story of Noah, here's an interesting thing, I know this guy who's a, he's a Kwakawa tribal member and an artist who lives on the tip of northern, of Vancouver Island.

[887] And the culture he comes from is about 14 ,000 years old, something like that.

[888] And maybe it's been unbroken for 14 ,000 years, very long period of time.

[889] And he's not literate, this guy.

[890] Although he's very intelligent, has a great memory, and is also a great artist.

[891] And he's told me some of the stories that have come down through the Kwakwakwak tradition.

[892] And he was educated by his grandparents who were original language speakers, and he's an original language speaker.

[893] So there are many people like that left, I think there's only 3 ,000 in his particular tribal group.

[894] They have a story that's the flood story, except it's canoes, and it isn't a dove, it's a crow.

[895] But the damn story is exactly the same.

[896] It's like, well, what the hell's up with that?

[897] In fact, at the end, it's not a canoe.

[898] It's a bunch of canoes that are tied together.

[899] And at the end, the canoes all break apart, and that's why there are people all over the world.

[900] It's like the story of the Tower of Babel, which I'm going to talk to you about today.

[901] So the reason I'm telling you that is because the stories at the beginning of Genesis are extraordinarily old.

[902] Now, so maybe he tells the same story that we tell, you know, making the presumption that we are the people who are part of this Judeo -Christian tradition.

[903] And I know that that's not the case for everyone.

[904] Either he's telling the same damn story, and it emerged from a central point, so long ago that it's 20 ,000.

[905] thousand years or 30 ,000 years or maybe 50 ,000 years since we moved out of Africa, something like that.

[906] And the story has survived, which is certainly possible because oral, you think, can an oral tradition survive that long?

[907] That's the wrong question.

[908] Oral traditions always survive that long.

[909] What's radical is that they disappear.

[910] We're the radicals.

[911] The oral tradition is something that stays the same generation after generation.

[912] So how much innovation do you think there isn't a small tribal group?

[913] None.

[914] That's why they don't have advanced technologies.

[915] They stay the same.

[916] The stories stay the same.

[917] So the idea that they can be transmitted, unchanged, over thousands and tens of thousands of years is really not a debatable proposition.

[918] It's the norm.

[919] So either the stories emerged from a central source and have never been lost so that you can pick them up everywhere, or there's something about the stories that automatically regenerates themselves.

[920] And I suppose it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. It's like my nephew, when he perceived himself as a dragon slaying knight, it's like, well, was that the continuation of an oral tradition, or was it something that he spontaneously come up with?

[921] And the answer is, both, both.

[922] The pattern was there.

[923] He just had to see it, and he saw it and synthesized it and encapsulated it in his own imagination.

[924] Well, that's not much different than the oral tradition being unbroken.

[925] It's just a variant of the same thing.

[926] I mean, if you lose a story, but everyone acts it out, you can reconstruct the story, right?

[927] And if everyone doesn't act it out, then the culture dies, because there's some things about the story that you have to act out if your culture is going to survive.

[928] That's the hypothesis.

[929] And then that would be, well, that would be where you would search for ultimate values, the stories that enable you as an individual to flourish in such a manner that your culture flourishes in a way to enhance your flourishing, right?

[930] That's the right way that you want to organize things.

[931] You know that's what you do inside a family if it's functioning well, right?

[932] The family functions so that every individual benefits from being in the family.

[933] And that strengthens the family.

[934] That's what Piaget called an equilibrated solution.

[935] Technically speaking, when he was looking for the origin of moral ideas, he came up with the idea of equilibrium state.

[936] And an equilibrated state is one.

[937] The three of you are in an equilibrated state.

[938] if you all want to be in that state and while you're in that state, the things that you're doing together work better and they facilitate each of your development.

[939] Right.

[940] So it's the stacking of a set of ethical propositions so that the individual benefits at the same time as the group.

[941] And you can increase that stacking.

[942] We could say, well, it's not only that.

[943] You want to organize yourself so that all three of you get what you want better than you would if you were alone and so that you're healthy.

[944] And so the stacking also occurs all the way down the physiological chain.

[945] You want to be manifesting yourself in the world so that you remain as physiologically healthy as you possibly can't.

[946] So your stress responses are properly balanced in all of that.

[947] And then maybe your equilibrium state is well enough developed so it doesn't just include the three of you.

[948] It extends outward beyond you into the greater community.

[949] And things stack like that.

[950] And that's if they all get stacked up every level, It's stacked on top of each other properly.

[951] You have an equilibrated state.

[952] And I don't think that that's any different than a vision of paradise.

[953] I think those are the same thing.

[954] So now the question is, well, can that happen?

[955] That's a whole different story.

[956] I mean, it happens in your own life at those times where everything comes together for you.

[957] You know, it's chaotic, and then everything snaps together.

[958] And you think, that's exactly right.

[959] And it's unstable.

[960] You can't maintain it.

[961] It fragments again.

[962] But that's what you're working towards.

[963] If you have any sense, you're working towards that constantly.

[964] And I think that's what music represents.

[965] It's the stacking of harmonious patterns, right, that are playing themselves out in being.

[966] And you watch how people respond to music.

[967] The orchestra is led by the leader.

[968] Every different individual plays his or her part.

[969] They're organized into string sections and horn sections and so on.

[970] So you get individual subgroup, group orchestra, leader.

[971] then maybe you have people dancing.

[972] Well, so what does that mean?

[973] So maybe it's men and women dancing in front of that, like a Viennese waltz.

[974] So it's the harmonious stacking of pattern being in the background, led by someone who's making sure that the time is in order, and men and women arranging themselves according to the patterns, right?

[975] And everyone has a wonderful time when that's happening.

[976] And it's acting out the proposition that all of these levels of being can be stacked up harmoniously at the same time.

[977] And everybody has a tremendously fine.

[978] time while they're doing it.

[979] Maybe that's how you find a mate at a dance.

[980] And for exactly the same reason, it's an optimal place to do that.

[981] You see if there's someone that you can be with, with whom you can mutually act out the patterns of being.

[982] Well, we're all acting that out at a dance.

[983] We don't know what we're doing.

[984] We're having a good time.

[985] Well, yeah, that's a little glimpse of paradise.

[986] That's what that good time is.

[987] Now, the Bible stories before, what happens, what seems to happen is that you can, there's two cataclysmic events at the first part of, at the end of the first part of Genesis.

[988] There's the flood.

[989] So the prehistoric world is wiped out by the flood.

[990] And so the idea there in some sense, there's a bunch of ideas, but one of them is there's a place in history past which we cannot look.

[991] And that's absolutely true.

[992] One of the things that's very strange about human beings is that are written civilizations, the ones we have records of all seem to have popped up somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six thousand.

[993] years ago.

[994] It doesn't matter where you look, right?

[995] Central America, China, India, Greece, Egypt.

[996] It's all the same.

[997] Six thousand years ago.

[998] Poof, there we were.

[999] Well, what happened before that?

[1000] Well, the answer is, we don't know.

[1001] Everything is obscured by the chaos of history before that point.

[1002] And all that's emerged out of it, so to speak, are these incredibly ancient stories.

[1003] And so we're going to walk through the ancient stories and see what we can pull out of them.

[1004] We've already done that with several.

[1005] So, So there are some representations of the Garden of Eden.

[1006] So this is by Hieronymus Bosch.

[1007] I don't know if you know who Hieronymus Bosch is, but he's definitely worth looking up because he was one strange character.

[1008] He was like, I think he painted in the 15th century, if I remember correctly.

[1009] He was like this 15th century version of Salvador Delhi.

[1010] His paintings are so uncanny that they're still shocking to the modern eye, which is really something because it's not easy to shock a modern person with a visual image.

[1011] But Hieronymus Bosch will definitely do that.

[1012] And that's his representation of paradise.

[1013] There's some central structure in the middle that's partly phallic and partly chambered.

[1014] So, and there's Adam and Eve, united by God.

[1015] So, and there's one by Peter Paul Rubens.

[1016] And it's sort of the primordial lush landscape that you might think about as the, what, the ancestral human home.

[1017] It's something like that.

[1018] A treed landscape.

[1019] Well, why trees?

[1020] Well, we liked fruit.

[1021] We lived in trees.

[1022] Why not trees?

[1023] I mean, even modern people have a very powerful tendency to think about trees as sacred.

[1024] You wouldn't get environmentalists tying themselves to great, you know, Douglas firs and protecting them.

[1025] If there wasn't some deep felt sense within us that they're sacred, whatever that means, well, trees are our home.

[1026] That's as close to sacred as you're going to get.

[1027] So, okay, so I'm going to read you something from the book of Job.

[1028] and this is God harassing Job so I don't know if you know the story of Job but it's a very interesting story and basically what happens with Job is that God and the devil have a bet which seems a little on the unreasonable side for God but he gets to do whatever he wants so he has a bet with Satan roughly speaking and says he says well Job he tells Satan that Job is a good guy and that he's faithful to God and Satan says, yeah, let me at him for a while.

[1029] I bet you we can do something about that.

[1030] And God says, roughly speaking, no, you can torture him all you want.

[1031] He's going to stay faithful.

[1032] And Satan says, well, we'll have a bet on that.

[1033] And so God hands him over.

[1034] And what happens to Job?

[1035] It's like everything terrible that you can imagine then happens to Job, right?

[1036] His, all his family dies, all his possessions are destroyed.

[1037] He gets a horrible skin disease.

[1038] And so then he's sitting there by the fire, sort of scraping himself with bits of broken pots.

[1039] And all his friends come around and tell him that the reason all this happened to him was because he deserved it.

[1040] So it's perfect, right?

[1041] It's like an ultimate suffering story.

[1042] It's a precursor to the idea of the crucifix.

[1043] That's one way of thinking about it.

[1044] So, and Job has a chat with God and asks him, like Kane did, roughly what's going on.

[1045] And God attempts to, he's irritated that Job would even dare to question him.

[1046] like he's God.

[1047] It gets to do whatever he wants.

[1048] It's a very strange book.

[1049] Anyways, this is one of the things that God says to Job.

[1050] Well, God is trying to justify himself, I would say, to Job.

[1051] And the reason I'm telling you this, you see, is because, so imagine that you're trying to analyze a literary work.

[1052] You might say, well, where's the meaning in the literary work?

[1053] And the answer is, it's in the words, word by word.

[1054] It's in the phrases.

[1055] It's in the phrases.

[1056] It's in the sentences.

[1057] It's in the relationship of the sentences to each other.

[1058] It's in the relationship of the sentences within paragraphs.

[1059] It's in the relationship of the paragraphs within the contexts of the chapters.

[1060] And it's in the relationship between the chapters and the whole book and then the book in the whole culture.

[1061] So you can't, it's not easy to localize the meaning.

[1062] It exists at all those levels simultaneously and they all inform one another.

[1063] And what that means.

[1064] And it's even worse in a book like the Bible.

[1065] I want to show you a picture.

[1066] This is an amazing picture.

[1067] So let me tell you what this is.

[1068] So the Bible is the world's first hyperlinked document.

[1069] That's a good way of thinking about it.

[1070] So what you have here, so what you see at the bottom, there's a line along the bottom, and then there's small lines coming down from it, okay?

[1071] Each of those, the line has dots on it.

[1072] Each jot is a verse.

[1073] Okay?

[1074] And then there's a line associated with the verse that's a varying length, and the length corresponds to how many times that verse is cross -referenced somewhere else in the document.

[1075] And then these rainbow -colored lines are the cross -references.

[1076] So now that's really worth thinking about.

[1077] So then you think, well, that book is deep.

[1078] Well, why is it deep?

[1079] Well, it's because every single thing in it refers to every other thing.

[1080] It's connected like your brain is connected.

[1081] Like it's not a linear document.

[1082] And the thing is a book is a very strange thing, right?

[1083] because when you, or even a story, because when you lay out the story, in some sense, you're like God.

[1084] You're outside of the space and time of the story.

[1085] And so you can adjust the end to make the beginning different.

[1086] You know, how if you watch a movie and it's got a surprise ending, it changes the beginning.

[1087] You thought the beginning was one thing, but it isn't.

[1088] It's something else.

[1089] Well, when you lay out a story, you can fiddle with the story anywhere in the story.

[1090] And so, and you can also make something that happens before, dependent on something that happens after, which is very strange.

[1091] And that's what's happened with the Bible, because people have worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, trying to synthesize it and make it coherent and make it make sense.

[1092] And so they're continually connecting everything that's inside of it to everything else.

[1093] And so you end up with a document map that looks like that.

[1094] So now, so you think about that.

[1095] Everything is connected to everything in that document, not chaotically, but meaningfully, just like your brain is connected in a meaningful way.

[1096] It's not everything isn't connected to everything.

[1097] It's connected in a meaningful way.

[1098] And then you think, well, where, what do the stories mean?

[1099] And then the answer is, well, that's a hard question because all of them are connected with each other.

[1100] And then there's all these different levels of analysis.

[1101] And so you can pull out meanings at one level of analysis that aren't self -evident at another level of analysis.

[1102] Just like if you're listening to a complex piece of symphonic music, you can follow a baseline or you can follow the strings or you can follow the horns, and they're all harmoniously interrelated, but they're also separable.

[1103] Okay, so there's an image that lurks in the Old Testament, and the image is the same image, it's roughly the same image as the image of Marduk confronting Tiamat.

[1104] So, for example, at the beginning, God makes, here's how the beginning goes.

[1105] In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form in void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, let there be light, and there was light.

[1106] Okay, so we got to look at the first few lines here.

[1107] So this is God justifying himself to Job.

[1108] He says, can you pull in Leviathan with a fish hook or tie down its tongue with a rope?

[1109] Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?

[1110] Will it keep you begging for mercy?

[1111] Will it speak to you with gentle words?

[1112] Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life.

[1113] Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house?

[1114] Will traders barter for it?

[1115] Will they divide it up among the merchants?

[1116] Can you fill its hide with harpoons or its head with fishing spears?

[1117] If you lay a hand on it, you will remember the struggle and never do it again.

[1118] Any hope of subduing it is false.

[1119] The mere sight of it is overpowering.

[1120] no one is fierce enough to rouse it who is then able to stand against me who has a claim against me that i must pay everything under heaven belongs to me more computer trouble oh there we go i will not fail to speak of leviathan's limbs its strength and its graceful form who can strip off its outer coat who can penetrate its double coat of armor who dares open the doors of its mouth ringed about with fearsome teeth.

[1121] Its back has rows of shields tightly sealed together.

[1122] Each is so close to the next that no air can pass between.

[1123] They are joined fast to one another.

[1124] They cling together and cannot be parted.

[1125] Its snorting throws out flashes of light.

[1126] Its eyes are like the rays of dawns.

[1127] Flames stream from its mouth.

[1128] Sparks of fire shoot out.

[1129] Smoke pours from its nostrils as from a boiling pot over burning reeds.

[1130] Its breath sets coals ablaze and flames dart from its mouth.

[1131] Strength resides in its neck.

[1132] Dismay goes before it.

[1133] The folds of its flesh are tightly joined.

[1134] They are firm and immovable.

[1135] Its chest is as hard as rock.

[1136] Hard as a lower millstone.

[1137] When it rises up, the mighty are terrified.

[1138] They retreat before it's thrashing.

[1139] The sword that reaches it has no effect, nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.

[1140] Iron it treats like straw and bronze like a rotten wood.

[1141] Arrows do not make it flee.

[1142] Slash.

[1143] Slash.

[1144] things stones are like chaff to it.

[1145] A club seems to it but a piece of straw.

[1146] It laughs at the rattling of the lance.

[1147] Its undersides are jagged pot shirts, leaving a trail in the mud like a threshing sledge.

[1148] It makes the depths churn like a boiling cauldron and steeds up the sea like a pot of ointment.

[1149] It leaves a glistening wake behind it.

[1150] One would think the deep had white hair.

[1151] Nothing on earth is its equal, a creature without fear.

[1152] It looks down on all that are hot and is king over all that are proud.

[1153] Well, so what's God doing?

[1154] He's describing what he defeated in order to create the world.

[1155] That's Marduk and Thai Matt.

[1156] Okay, so that's one reference like that.

[1157] All right.

[1158] So now, another reference like that.

[1159] This is from Psalms 74.

[1160] Yet God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth.

[1161] Thou didst break the sea in pieces by thy strength.

[1162] Thou didst shatter the heads of the sea monsters in the waters.

[1163] Thou did crush the heads of Leviathan, right?

[1164] That's the creature that we just heard described.

[1165] Thou gavest him to be food to the folk inhabiting the wilderness.

[1166] Now you remember, so when Marduk defeats Tiamat, he cuts her into pieces and makes the world out of her pieces.

[1167] And here what's happening is that the force that encounters the Leviathan is able to break it into pieces and feed everyone with it.

[1168] Now, the reason I'm telling you that in relationship to this is because and the earth was what without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, let me tell you a little bit about that, those lines.

[1169] Before God's, God begins to create, the world is Tohuwabohu.

[1170] That's from the Hebrew.

[1171] The word Tohu by itself means emptiness or futility.

[1172] So there's a psychological element to that, eh?

[1173] And that emptiness or futility in some sense is what you confront when you're trying to extract your life from the world.

[1174] It is used to describe the desert wilderness as well.

[1175] Tohuwabohu chaos is the condition that barra ordering remedies.

[1176] So there's the idea in the first verse is that this initial chaos is being ordered and the order is what makes the world.

[1177] So it's it's standard cosmology.

[1178] order emerges out of chaos and the thing that makes it emerge is the word of God.

[1179] Now, darkness and deep, which is Tejom in Hebrew, are two of the three elements of the chaos represented in Tohuabohu.

[1180] The third is the formless earth.

[1181] In the Anuma Elish, the deep is personified as the goddess Taimat, the enemy of Marduk.

[1182] Here it is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world.

[1183] Okay, but we know, Teom and Teumat are the same word, or at least Teum was derived from time out.

[1184] So the idea that's presented at the beginning of Genesis is the same.

[1185] It's an abstracted and psychologized representation of the story that the Mesopotamians put forward.

[1186] So Yahweh is Marduk, roughly speaking, going out and conquering the dragon of chaos and making order out of it, and then there are these illusions later, say, in Job and in the Psalms of him doing exactly that, conquering a primordial monster and making the world out of its pieces.

[1187] Well, What does that mean exactly?

[1188] Well, it means that the highest ordering principle is the spirit that goes out into the darkness or the deep that encounters the dragon of chaos, because obviously Leviathan is a dragon, and defeats it and feeds the people as a consequence.

[1189] Well, we are hunting creatures after all.

[1190] And in order to establish our place in the world, we had to go out there and conquer the dragons of the wilderness.

[1191] You might wonder, why does a dragon breathe fire?

[1192] Well, there's a bunch of reasons, as far as I can tell, fire is awe -inspiring.

[1193] So fire and a terrible predator are the same thing, because they both inspire awe.

[1194] Fire is transforming.

[1195] But predate, like, what's a good metaphor for being bitten by a poisonous snake?

[1196] Well, have you ever seen the wounds that a poisonous steak produces if you're bitten by them?

[1197] It's like someone took your arm and incinerated it.

[1198] And so the idea that a snake has fiery breath is, well, let's call it close enough from a metaphorical perspective, right?

[1199] Now, God is claiming to Job that he's the spirit that clears the wilderness and then builds order out of chaos.

[1200] And because because he's the embodiment of that spirit in some sense, Job has no reason to ever question his moral decisions.

[1201] It's something like that in the story of Job.

[1202] But the point, that point will leave aside because it's a more complicated the issue.

[1203] The point is that the writers of the Bible are trying to dream up a representation of the spirit of civilization.

[1204] That's the right way to think about it.

[1205] You can think of Yawa as the spirit of civilization.

[1206] And what is that?

[1207] Well, it's the thing that encounters the wilderness and makes habitable order, but then it's also the spirit of the order itself.

[1208] And that's, I think, why in Christianity there's a representation of God the Father, because he's a representation of the culture that's generated after the, the, the Chaos is ordered, right?

[1209] You have the spirit that goes out into chaos and orders, and then you have the spirit of the order.

[1210] And then the spirit of the order and the spirit of the ordering principle have to figure out how to coexist.

[1211] That's partly what the Egyptians were trying to figure out, right?

[1212] There's a dynamic relationship between the culture and the spirit that generates the culture.

[1213] And then you might also ask, should the culture be superordinate?

[1214] And the answer seems to be, the emergent answer seems to be that.

[1215] the spirit that generates the culture should be superordinate to the spirit of the culture.

[1216] It's something like that.

[1217] And that's also why I think that one of the brilliant discoveries, let's say, of Western individualistic civilization, is that the group is there to serve the individual because the individual is the thing that revivifies the group.

[1218] So each depend on the other, integrally.

[1219] But if you subordinate the individual to the group, then the group stagnates and dies.

[1220] And so that's a very bad long -term strategy, even though the group and belonging to the group is clearly necessary.

[1221] You need to uphold the values of the group, but the values of the group should be subordinated to producing the individual who gives the group vision.

[1222] And the Mesopotamians figured that out.

[1223] The Egyptians figured that out.

[1224] We figured it out.

[1225] We just don't know that we figured it out.

[1226] And it's not a mere arbitrary supposition.

[1227] All right.

[1228] So I should show you, because this is actually.

[1229] interesting, I think, perhaps.

[1230] I want to show you what the cosmology, what people considered the structure of the initial order, because it's kind of interesting.

[1231] And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters.

[1232] And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so.

[1233] And God called the firmament heaven.

[1234] And the evening and the morning were the second day.

[1235] Well, so what are they thinking about?

[1236] Well, that's the sort of classical view of the world, it's something like that, is that there's a disk, and that's the disc we inhabit, and there's land, that's the disk, and under the disk there's water, fresh water, and then under that there's the ocean, and then on top of that, there's a dome, and that's the sky, that's the firmament, that's heaven, and there's water above that, well, obviously, because it rains, so there has to be water up there.

[1237] So that's the way the cosmos was conceptualized, just so you know.

[1238] Now, it's a phenomenological conceptualization, because that's, what it looks like, right?

[1239] And you might say, well, that's wrong.

[1240] It's like, well, yes, it's wrong in a functional sort of way.

[1241] It's right from a phenomenological perspective, but it's wrong from a, well, from a scientific perspective.

[1242] It was never designed to be a scientific perspective.

[1243] So, all right, so we won't bother with this part.

[1244] We'll start here.

[1245] So God makes animals and plants and all of that, and then at the end of it, this is on the, which day?

[1246] Sixth day.

[1247] God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the foul of the air and over the cattle and all of the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

[1248] Okay, well, the relevant, there's two relevant issues there.

[1249] One is, let us make man in our image after our likeness.

[1250] Well, what exactly does that mean?

[1251] Well, we've already, we've already encountered that to some degree.

[1252] We've already encountered what the nature of the spirit of God is in this story.

[1253] The nature of the Spirit of God that creates order out of chaos is the thing that creates order out of chaos.

[1254] And so the statement here is that there's something about human beings that partakes in that.

[1255] Now, when I started unpacking this, I thought, okay, look, there's an idea that's at the root of our legal system.

[1256] And so our legal system is the articulation of the patterns by which we live.

[1257] and to a fair degree it's it's an evolved system it's a culturally constructed system but it's an evolved system as well and it's predicated on the idea that there's something about the individual that the law has to respect well so the question is well is that just an arbitrary supposition because that's really the question it's the same question as is western civilization founded on something that's a rock or is it just founded on something that's an opinion well it's the same question with regards to the law the law assumes that there's something about you that's sovereign.

[1258] Even if you're a murderer, you have inalienable rights.

[1259] Now, you think that is a bloody weird thing for any sort of system to have come up with, because the idea that if you're the ultimate in malevolent transgressors, that you still have some sort of sovereign value, it's like that is such an unlikely thing for people to think up, that you really have to think a long time about how that might have come to be.

[1260] Well, there's an idea here.

[1261] That's the idea is that there's something about human beings.

[1262] Men and women, you know, because people often complain about the patriarchal structure of the Bible.

[1263] It's based on a misapprehension of anthropology that was popularized by someone named Gimbutas at UCLA.

[1264] For her perspective, there's not a shred of historical evidence, although there's some psychological truth in it.

[1265] In Genesis, both men and women are created in the image of God.

[1266] And that's quite a remarkable thing, I think.

[1267] It's a remarkable part of the document, because it's not what you'd expect from a patriarchal, you know, from a, from a document that was designed to do nothing but extend the dominion of the patriarch.

[1268] It's like you would have left women with the damn cattle.

[1269] That would have made things a lot easier.

[1270] And that isn't what happened.

[1271] So both men and women have this image.

[1272] And what's the image?

[1273] Well, that's the image of the thing that can order chaos.

[1274] And so it's necessary to treat you as if you have intrinsic value, because the fact that you can partake in the process of mediating between order and chaos.

[1275] chaos means that you're basically the salvation of society.

[1276] That's what it means.

[1277] And so society can't impose on you to too great a degree because you are too valuable for even the law to push arbitrarily past a certain point.

[1278] Now, then you have to think, this is where you really have to think about what you believe.

[1279] Do you believe that or not?

[1280] Because there's not much difference, really.

[1281] technically speaking, there's not much difference between that and believing these stories.

[1282] It depends bloody well what you mean by believe.

[1283] They're not scientific representations of an evolutionary process.

[1284] Obviously, the people who came up with them weren't scientists.

[1285] So whatever they are, they're not that.

[1286] But they're making a proposition.

[1287] That's not an accidental proposition.

[1288] And we know that partly because it's rooted so deeply in these ancient stories.

[1289] We have no idea how old the Mesopotamian story is.

[1290] You know, it's the oldest story we have in written form.

[1291] So we know that.

[1292] But God only knows how old it is.

[1293] It's part of an oral tradition, and these oral traditions can be...

[1294] Look, the same carver gave me a big thing called a sea -sudel, and it's a man in the middle of a double -headed sea serpent.

[1295] Right?

[1296] So there, there, that's 14 ,000 years old.

[1297] That came from Siberia.

[1298] It's the same bloody idea.

[1299] It's the same idea.

[1300] So these ideas aren't arbitrary.

[1301] So the question is, well, are they true?

[1302] Well, then the question is, what the hell do you mean by true?

[1303] Because it comes down to that.

[1304] Is it true that habitable order is dependent on the spirit that moves into the unknown and takes the Leviathan and chops it into pieces and distributes it?

[1305] And the answer to that is, yes, that's true, as far as I can tell.

[1306] And do you mean, is it literally true?

[1307] Well, it's just true as things get.

[1308] That's how we got here.

[1309] We got here because people went into the unknown, they conquered what was out there, they took what was of utility from that, they brought it back and they shared it with the community.

[1310] That's why we're here.

[1311] That is the central story of humankind.

[1312] And that's still what we do.

[1313] We're not exactly necessarily going out to conquer an embodied monster, although we do that if we hunt, for example, but most of us don't do that anymore.

[1314] But to the degree that you're an explorer in the intellectual realm, you're still going out into the unknown.

[1315] and conquering what's out there looming, like maybe it's the cure for a disease.

[1316] You're looking that right in the face.

[1317] You're trying to decompose it and break it into its parts.

[1318] You're trying to understand it.

[1319] And then you're trying to tell everybody what you found.

[1320] Well, and everybody pats you on the back and says, well, you're a brave explorer of the unknown.

[1321] Well, that is exactly the sort of thing that we should be fostering.

[1322] And it's the thing that we all admire.

[1323] So, okay, so that happens on the sixth day.

[1324] and so now we know human beings are made in God's image.

[1325] Well, what does that mean exactly?

[1326] I think what it means, a reasonable way of thinking about it.

[1327] You can think about it like the genie.

[1328] The genie has this tremendous amount of power that's constrained in a very small space.

[1329] And genie and genius are the same word, roughly speaking.

[1330] So your genius is the genie that inhabits you, right?

[1331] It's this logo spirit.

[1332] but it's put in a very small container.

[1333] You see that idea represented in the Christian conception of the relationship between Christ and God because there's an idea that God had to empty himself out in order to fit into the body of Christ.

[1334] It's something like that.

[1335] They call that kinosis.

[1336] That's a technical word.

[1337] And it seems to be the idea that you're a low, it's like you're a low resolution representation of the ultimate spirit that encounters the unknown.

[1338] It's something like that.

[1339] It's a very smart idea.

[1340] And you could say maybe that's what human beings have in common, is that that, that reach an embodiment of that spirit for lack of a better word.

[1341] So, okay, so then God makes the, God makes human beings, male and female, makes them in his own image and is happy about them and says, well, you're going to dominate the world, which, you know, people like David Suzuki read that to say, you should go out and dominate the world, because they read that kind of patriarchal oppression into the text.

[1342] but this is more a description of how things are going to be than whether or not they should be that way.

[1343] So, anyways, that's the sixth day.

[1344] The seventh day, God rests, right?

[1345] So that's the origin of the week, roughly speaking.

[1346] So, okay, that's one story.

[1347] There's two creation stories in Genesis, and they actually don't match completely in their structure.

[1348] And what happened was someone they call the redactor, maybe it was a bunch of people we don't know, took creation story one and creation story two from different places and thought, well, these are sort of the same and they're sort of different and people are going to be unhappy if we dispensed with this one and they're going to be unhappy if we dispensed this one, but they don't make sense together.

[1349] So let's see if we can put them in some kind of order that makes approximate sense.

[1350] And they took the newer one and put it second and took the older one and put it first.

[1351] So Adam and Eve is an older story than the story that I just told you.

[1352] but it's a different story.

[1353] It's written in a different style, but it's been more or less brought into narrative coherence with the first story.

[1354] So, and you could say at the level of the sentence, there is paradoxes, but at the level of the chapter, let's say the stories make sense.

[1355] So, okay, so what happens?

[1356] Up there went from the earth a mist and it watered the whole face of the ground.

[1357] And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

[1358] And man became a living soul.

[1359] There's an identity in this archaic sort of thought between breath and spirit, right?

[1360] Respiration, spirit, spirit, numa, like pneumatic tire, spirit.

[1361] The breath contains the spirit.

[1362] Well, why is that?

[1363] Well, because when people die, the breath leaves their body.

[1364] And so it's an easy thing to identify that with the animating spirit, right?

[1365] Anima means spirit as well.

[1366] So that's the phenomenological reality of the story.

[1367] And Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

[1368] Eden means well -watered place.

[1369] Well, why?

[1370] Well, where do you want to live?

[1371] These are desert people, right, who are writing this.

[1372] Well, what do they want?

[1373] They want an oasis.

[1374] What's an oasis?

[1375] It's a garden with water.

[1376] Well, you're going to live somewhere.

[1377] It's not going to be out in the middle of the damn desert.

[1378] You want to be in a garden that's watered.

[1379] And then you could say you also be in a walled garden that's protected.

[1380] And that's what paradise means.

[1381] Paradisa means walled garden.

[1382] So this initial paradise is a walled garden.

[1383] Why walled?

[1384] Order.

[1385] It's culture, nature.

[1386] What does it mean?

[1387] Well, that's the natural environment of human beings.

[1388] It's the optimal balance between culture and nature.

[1389] That's what a walled garden is, with enough water flowing in it to keep it fertile.

[1390] And that water is also chaos, right?

[1391] There has to be, it can't be static and dry and solid and stale.

[1392] There has to be some living element to it.

[1393] So it's a walled place that the water can still fructify.

[1394] And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the site.

[1395] So it's also full of trees.

[1396] This is our natural habitat.

[1397] And good for food.

[1398] The tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

[1399] So these are two trees.

[1400] They bring forth fruit that produce something.

[1401] One produces the knowledge of good and evil, and the other produces eternal life.

[1402] So why, well, I'll get to that, admit.

[1403] And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads.

[1404] We won't bother with that.

[1405] So now God is having a little chat with Adam, and he says, look, you can eat every tree of the garden, except one.

[1406] Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you don't eat that, because in the day you eat, you'll surely die.

[1407] So you might ask, well, why is the tree put there to begin with?

[1408] and, well, the answer to that is, who the hell knows?

[1409] That's how the story portrays it.

[1410] We don't know.

[1411] And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone.

[1412] I will make a help meet for him.

[1413] And out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fall of the air and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.

[1414] And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

[1415] So that's an echo of the idea of the power of the word, right?

[1416] So even though these stories are from different traditions, they're separate traditions.

[1417] You see at the beginning that God uses his, word to bring order out of chaos and then he allows Adam in some sense to do the same thing is that there's this unarticulated plethora of being and the man comes along it says that's that that's that and that brings them into a higher order form of being so it's a it's a replication of the creation in a in a shrunken form and Adam gave names to all the cattle cattle are just anything that has four legs roughly speaking and to the foul of the air and to every beast of the field But for Adam, there was not found a help meet for him.

[1418] And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof.

[1419] And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

[1420] She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. And then there's an injunction.

[1421] Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

[1422] Well, there's also a, there's a moral injunction there.

[1423] And so the idea is that the two beings that have been created are actually not whole until they're one thing, right?

[1424] And once they're joined together, that's supposed to be one thing.

[1425] And that one thing is actually a more perfect entity than the two things that are apart.

[1426] So, and that's actually part of the sacred basis of the idea of monogamous relationships in Western culture.

[1427] And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

[1428] a crucial piece of information.

[1429] So what exactly does that mean?

[1430] Well, the first question is, what does it mean to be naked?

[1431] And so that's something that I thought about a lot in relation, and there's a relationship there with shame.

[1432] So the first question is, what does it mean to be naked?

[1433] And the second question is, what does it mean to be not ashamed of that?

[1434] Well, there's a, I would say, there's an implication of a kind of unconsciousness.

[1435] So Adam and Eve exist in this paradisal state, but they don't have the capacity for self -reflection.

[1436] There's no self -consciousness here.

[1437] Well, why would I say that?

[1438] Because there's very little difference between self -consciousness and shame.

[1439] In fact, if you do psychometric analysis of the state of self -consciousness, it loads with neuroticism.

[1440] So it loads with anxiety and emotional pain.

[1441] So to become self -conscious, what does it mean to become self -conscious?

[1442] It means you become aware, one way of thinking about it is you become aware of your vulnerability or another is that you become aware of your insufficiency.

[1443] Okay, so let's say that you're standing up in front of a crowd talking and you become self -conscious.

[1444] What happens?

[1445] Well, first of all, you can't talk anymore.

[1446] The second is he kind of fall inside.

[1447] The third is you feel ashamed and the fourth is that you retreat and you look down.

[1448] So it's a low status operation and it's associated with heightened anxiety.

[1449] And so then you might say, well, why would you become self -conscious before a crowd?

[1450] Well, the answer is they can see you, right?

[1451] And they can judge you.

[1452] And you can make an error in front of them.

[1453] And you can make a fool of yourself.

[1454] So they put you down, you can display yourself in a manner that ratchets you down the dominance hierarchy.

[1455] That's to become self -conscious.

[1456] And so, well, at least you have the advantage of being covered up in front of the crowd.

[1457] But let's say all of a sudden you're stripped of your clothes.

[1458] So what's the problem with that?

[1459] Well, all of your insufficiencies, let's say, are on painful display.

[1460] You can be evaluated by everyone.

[1461] But even more importantly than that, if possible, is that clothes actually protect the most vulnerable parts of you.

[1462] Human beings are upright animals, right?

[1463] We're very strange animals.

[1464] You take a cat or a dog.

[1465] They're basically armored.

[1466] The part of them that you see, their back is heavily armored, heavily protected.

[1467] Human beings stretched upright.

[1468] And so the softest part of parts of us are there for display, but also were displayed as sexual creatures too.

[1469] And so to become, to be naked and not ashamed of it is to lack self -consciousness.

[1470] So the idea is that the Adam and Eve in the original state in the garden lacked self -consciousness.

[1471] Now the serpent was more subtle.

[1472] Suttles an interesting word here because it means kind of fog -like and vague and difficult to detect.

[1473] So it's something that that lurks and is hidden.

[1474] So that's what the serpent is.

[1475] It's in the domain of hidden things than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

[1476] And the serpent said unto the woman, hey, hasn't God said, you shouldn't eat of every tree of the garden?

[1477] And the woman said, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree, which is in the middle of the garden, the central fruit.

[1478] God has said, you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it lest you die.

[1479] And the serpent said unto the woman, you shall not surely die.

[1480] for God knows that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes will be opened and you will be as God's knowing good and evil.

[1481] All right.

[1482] So there's another implication there.

[1483] We already saw that there's the implication that Adam and Eve are not self -conscious.

[1484] And now there's the implication that their eyes aren't open, or at least that they're not open fully in some sense.

[1485] They're not open, for example, to the knowledge of good and evil.

[1486] And that seems to be associated somehow with death in some strange way.

[1487] Okay.

[1488] So, and it's the serpent talking to the woman.

[1489] So the serpent is the tempter of the woman.

[1490] So the question is, why in the world would that be?

[1491] I showed you those representations of Mary, right?

[1492] Holding the infant up in the air with her foot on the snake.

[1493] And so you think, well, who's more self -conscious?

[1494] Women are men.

[1495] And the answer to that is, women are more self -conscious than men.

[1496] And even further, you might say that women taught men to be self -conscious.

[1497] And I believe that to be the case.

[1498] Maybe baby.

[1499] taught women to be self -conscious, but women taught men to be self -conscious, and they still teach them that all the time, because there's nothing that makes a man more self -conscious that to be rejected by a woman that he desires.

[1500] So the woman is always offering self -consciousness to men, and it isn't necessarily a gift that they exactly appreciate.

[1501] And that motif, of course, runs through the Adam and Eve story centrally, because Eve is damned forever in some sense for making Adam self -conscious.

[1502] Well, he didn't want to be self -conscious.

[1503] Things were pretty good when his eyes were closed, and he was wandering around, not worrying about whether he was naked or not.

[1504] Well, the women became self -conscious.

[1505] Why?

[1506] Because of snakes.

[1507] Well, maybe, right?

[1508] Maybe that's exactly what happened, you know?

[1509] So you imagine we're being preyed upon for millions of years by predatory reptiles, right?

[1510] And we become more and more alert to threat and more and more alert to threat.

[1511] And then one day we get so alert to threat that we can see threat lurking in the future.

[1512] And then all of a sudden we become aware of the future and then we become aware of death.

[1513] And then we're really self -conscious.

[1514] But it's pretty good if you want to keep the snakes down, which we've been doing quite successfully ever since then.

[1515] But it's a big price to pay.

[1516] We got so damn sensitive to threat that we were finally able to conceive the ultimate threat, not proximal threats, but the fact of threat itself and the fact of mortality itself and the fact of finitude itself.

[1517] And maybe women learned that because they become painfully aware of the mortal limitations of their infants first, right?

[1518] This small thing could die, could end.

[1519] And certainly as an object of predation.

[1520] You can imagine God only knows how many infants human beings lost to predators.

[1521] I mean, I told you at one point, I believe that there was a cat that was found that had a, that had a skull and jaws that were specialized for biting the skulls of proto humans.

[1522] So one long tooth at the back that would drive right through the back of the skull so the cat could put its teeth here and drive the tooth right into the back of the skull.

[1523] So, you know, that's a good.

[1524] enough dragon for our, for our intents and purposes, I would say.

[1525] Anyways, the snake comes along and opens the woman's eyes.

[1526] When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that was pleasant to the eye, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.

[1527] And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

[1528] Well, there's a lot happening in those few lines.

[1529] Now, there's a fruit thing going on there.

[1530] Snake and fruit.

[1531] Okay, so we know from Lynn Isbell, hypothetically, that the reason that primates like us developed our intense vision is because we co -evolved with snakes.

[1532] So the snakes opened her eyes.

[1533] What about fruit?

[1534] Color vision.

[1535] Right, why?

[1536] To detect ripe fruit.

[1537] We know that.

[1538] And are women and ripe fruit the same?

[1539] Well, they're the same insofar as it was women offering the ripe fruit.

[1540] And that's undoubtedly something that happened, you know?

[1541] The hypothetical idea is the males hunt and bring home protein.

[1542] The women gather.

[1543] What are they gathering?

[1544] Well, they're gathering at minimum ripe fruit.

[1545] And then what are they doing?

[1546] They're sharing it.

[1547] Well, you also bring about a moral obligation when you're sharing food, right?

[1548] There's an invitation to reciprocity there.

[1549] And so the fact that women were sharing, let's say, ripe fruit with men, also brings them into their, what would you call?

[1550] builds up the basis for the potential of a reciprocal moral obligation.

[1551] It's something like that.

[1552] And the problem, again, for men with being allied with women and infants, is that it also heightens their self -consciousness, because you're a lot tougher and more indomitable, say, if there's just you.

[1553] But as soon as you have a wife, say, and then you also have an infant, well, all the burden of their self -consciousness and their vulnerability is placed upon you.

[1554] Well, it's a hell of a bargain.

[1555] Well, why did men accept the bargain?

[1556] well, it's partly because women stood in front of them offering them fruit, right?

[1557] Well, part of the price that the men paid for that was to wake the hell up.

[1558] Well, who the hell wants that?

[1559] It's a lot more, it's a lot more calming to remain asleep with no knowledge of the sort of burden of mortality that you would bear if you became self -conscious.

[1560] So fine.

[1561] So now they're done with it.

[1562] The snake and the fruit woke them up and they can see and the scales drop from their eyes.

[1563] And so we can really see.

[1564] Well, so what does that mean?

[1565] Half our brain is visual, is devoted to visual processing.

[1566] So as well, as long as, as our eyes got better, our brain got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

[1567] What happens when it gets big enough?

[1568] Well, not only can you see, you can meta -see.

[1569] It's you can start to see into the future.

[1570] Well, that's exactly what happened to us.

[1571] Not only could we see with our eyes, we could see with our imagination.

[1572] And our imagination is our eye, you can see with your eyes closed, right?

[1573] Close your eyes.

[1574] Bring up a vision.

[1575] You can imagine the future.

[1576] Well, what are you seeing?

[1577] You're seeing a potential future with your eyes closed.

[1578] The circuitry's there.

[1579] Once it's developed, you can use it to imagine.

[1580] You can project your vision into places that don't even exist.

[1581] And you can start to conceptualize the future.

[1582] What happens when you conceptualize the future?

[1583] Well, this is a, I'm spoiling the punchline.

[1584] You have to work.

[1585] Because you can see the future coming.

[1586] You think, oh, oh, the future's coming.

[1587] It isn't just the present anymore.

[1588] I don't have to just worry about whether or not I'm hungry right now.

[1589] I'm going to have to worry about whether I'm hungry tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and for me and for my wife and for my child and for the community.

[1590] It's like you can forget about your day -to -day existence in paradise at that point.

[1591] There's no evidence that people in industrialized societies are happier than people in non -industrialized societies.

[1592] In fact, quite the contrary.

[1593] We're less happy.

[1594] Why?

[1595] Well, because we fully and constantly bear the burden of the future.

[1596] Well, that's good because we don't die and we live maybe 30 years longer and we have fewer horrible diseases and all of that.

[1597] But that doesn't mean it's any picnic.

[1598] You have to carry that along with you wherever you go.

[1599] That's the burden of self -consciousness, right?

[1600] And that's exactly what happens.

[1601] When God finds out that Adam and Eve have become self -conscious, one of the first things he says is, jigs up now, man, you're going to be working forever, toiling forever.

[1602] It's your destiny.

[1603] There's no escaping from it.

[1604] Well, human beings work.

[1605] What does that mean?

[1606] They sacrifice the present for the future.

[1607] And that's partly, as soon as this happens, like the next story, which is Canaan Abel, you see the motif of sacrifice emerge.

[1608] Right.

[1609] That story circulates around the motif of sacrifice.

[1610] Sacrifice the present for the future.

[1611] Well, what's the price you pay?

[1612] You don't get the present.

[1613] That's a big price, right?

[1614] Because what you do is what you're doing essentially is you're taking all.

[1615] all the potential suffering of the future, and putting it into the present, all the time.

[1616] Well, so what happens?

[1617] Well, maybe you live longer, and you live healthier, but you're not without the burden that that puts on you.

[1618] So, the eyes of them were both opened, and they knew they were naked.

[1619] Well, so what does that mean?

[1620] Well, what does naked mean?

[1621] It means you know you're vulnerable.

[1622] That's exactly what it means.

[1623] They know they're vulnerable.

[1624] So they sew fig leaves together and make themselves apron.

[1625] And so what happens is they wake up, their eyes open, they know they're vulnerable.

[1626] So they discover the future.

[1627] They discover their vulnerability extended into the future.

[1628] And the first thing they do is build culture, right?

[1629] That's the fig leaves.

[1630] It's like, okay, here's the vulnerability.

[1631] We put a barrier between us in the world.

[1632] It's like a wall, right?

[1633] Because this is externalized clothing.

[1634] That's one way of thinking about it.

[1635] And so to put that clothing on, this is clothing is a human universal, by the way.

[1636] Now, sometimes it's only used for decorative purposes, but far more often, especially in cold climates, it's used for protection.

[1637] So to clothe yourself is to recognize your vulnerability and to use culture to hold it at bay.

[1638] So fine, they make themselves aprons.

[1639] And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

[1640] And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

[1641] Okay.

[1642] So before Adam and Eve wake up, before they realize they're vulnerable, they don't hide from God.

[1643] So what does that mean?

[1644] Well, he's the spirit that goes into the unknown to conquer it and to make the world.

[1645] Okay, so let's say that's what you're supposed to do.

[1646] You're supposed to mediate between chaos and order.

[1647] Okay, and you're supposed to do that forthrightly.

[1648] So then the question is, what the hell is stopping you?

[1649] And that answer is easy.

[1650] your knowledge of your vulnerability obviously that's what's stopping you it's like why aren't you courageous and forthright well because you can be cut off at the knees and terribly hurt and so you're going to shrink back from that responsibility and it's no bloody wonder right it's it's obviously what's going to happen so the Lord God calls unto Adam so he's trying to what that means for God to call on you is to say for God to say I'm want to act through you or I want to act with you of that spirit let's say well Adam says I heard I heard God says dad and where are you and Adam says I heard your voice in the garden right I heard the call but I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself it's like yes that's exactly what human beings are like that's precisely exactly what we're like we hear the call but we hide and we have the thing is it's there's good reason for it it's not something trivial.

[1651] And God said, who told you you were naked?

[1652] Did you eat the tree that I told you shouldn't eat?

[1653] And the man says, the man doesn't come off very well in this particular phrase as far as I'm concerned.

[1654] And there's actually quite, this is actually quite a comedic story, except that it's also a catastrophic tragedy.

[1655] It's like, God calls Adam out.

[1656] Like, what's with you?

[1657] Now, you know, you're hiding from me. Why?

[1658] And the first thing Adam does is, it says, it's her fault.

[1659] It's her fault.

[1660] She made me self -conscious.

[1661] Well, I see that in resentful men all the time.

[1662] They're very antipathetic towards women, and they blame their misery and resentment on the fact that women won't have anything to do with them.

[1663] Well, the women are making them self -conscious for not being all they should be, because the women think, why should I bother with you?

[1664] If you're not the embodiment of the spirit that will move into the unknown and face the Leviathan, which is exactly what she should be saying, and you're thinking, well, I don't want to have anything to do with that, but I'd like women to like me anyways.

[1665] It's like, well, good luck with that.

[1666] So that doesn't work out.

[1667] And so instead of getting your act together, you say, those goddamn women, that's exactly what Adam says to God.

[1668] He said, well, don't be laying this on my feet.

[1669] It's the woman, you made her.

[1670] She made me all self -conscious and cowardly.

[1671] It's like, brilliant, great, wonderful.

[1672] And God says to the woman, what did you do?

[1673] And the woman said, well, it was the serpent that confused me. And I ate.

[1674] Well, it's like, actually, I'm a little more sympathetic to her than to Adam, all things considered.

[1675] Because after all, she was trying to deal with.

[1676] with the damn snake, right?

[1677] And we find out that the snake is not only the thing that prays upon her infants, but as the tradition developed, it's identified with Satan himself.

[1678] So, and that's the snake in every soul.

[1679] That's the right way of thinking about that.

[1680] So she had her reasons, but doesn't matter.

[1681] You pay whether you have your reasons or not.

[1682] And so God says to the serpent, because you've done this, you're cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field.

[1683] Upon the belly shalt thou go and dust shall thou eat, all the days of thy life.

[1684] So first of all, the serpent seems to have legs, right?

[1685] And then it's turned into a snake.

[1686] And that's actually how it worked, by the way, because snakes had legs and they lost them.

[1687] Now, you know, I'm not trying to say that this story necessarily represents that, but it's an interesting parallel.

[1688] And he tells the snake, I'll put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed, it shall bruise thy head and thou shall bruise his heel.

[1689] Well, yes, well, that's the snake's striking, right?

[1690] And the fact that when human beings see snakes, They want to, just like the Simpsons, Wacking Day, right?

[1691] It's time to get rid of the snakes.

[1692] And that's why the many great saints are those who drive the snakes from the land, like St. Patrick or St. George and the dragon.

[1693] And it's the same representation of the hero moving out into the wilderness and confronting the predatory, the predatory potential is the right way of thinking about it.

[1694] All right.

[1695] Unto the woman, he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.

[1696] In sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire to be, shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

[1697] Well, that's a statement of destiny, not a statement of the way it should be.

[1698] So what does it mean?

[1699] I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.

[1700] Well, self -consciousness will do that, because, of course, women are fully aware of exactly how fragile their infants are.

[1701] So that's a big problem.

[1702] In sorrow, thou shalt bring forth children.

[1703] That's something particular to human women, right?

[1704] and here's why.

[1705] The price we paid for the rapid expansion of our brain, which is also something that gave us this self -consciousness and vision, meant that there's an evolutionary arms race between the pelvic width of women and the hole in the center of the pelvis and the infant's head.

[1706] So what happens is the infant is born far too young for a mammal of our size, because if it was any older, the head would be too big, the pelvis would have to be too wide, its structural stability would be compromised and then women couldn't run.

[1707] So right now, women are at the maximum for hip width in terms of their ability to run.

[1708] So what's happened is that infants have had to be born younger with a compressible head.

[1709] So, you know, the bones of an infant skull aren't joined together.

[1710] And sometimes after babies are born, their head is actually almost cone -shaped because of the tremendous pressure that was exerted on their head during the birthing process.

[1711] And of course, that's killed innumerable women.

[1712] Right.

[1713] I mean, women's life expectancy before what?

[1714] The latter half of the 20th century was way below men because they died in childbirth all the time.

[1715] And why?

[1716] Well, it's a, it's a very, what do you call that?

[1717] It's a, it's a very narrow gateway.

[1718] And the price that women pay for it is very high risk of death, very high risk of sorrow because of death of children in childbirth.

[1719] And also extraordinary.

[1720] extraordinary pain in giving birth.

[1721] So that's the price women pay for having vision and being self -conscious.

[1722] Well, that's, and then worse, they desire their husband and he'll rule over them.

[1723] Well, whether or not that's good or bad, it doesn't matter.

[1724] God's statement is that's how it's going to be.

[1725] Well, partly that's because, as far as I can tell, there isn't really women, roughly speaking.

[1726] There's women with infants.

[1727] And a woman with an infant is compromised in terms of her, what?

[1728] independent individuality to a remarkable degree, because the infant is dependent, absolutely dependent, absolutely dependent for a year, and then unbelievably dependent for like eight years after that, and then still pretty dependent for another five.

[1729] So once you have an infant, it's no longer you.

[1730] And I've talked to lots of women for whom that was a great relief, by the way, because it actually is somewhat of a relief to now not be the center of everything.

[1731] You know, if you go visit your in -laws, for example, and you you have a baby, it's like they pay attention to the baby.

[1732] Your parents will do the same thing.

[1733] It's kind of nice to have that happen, but it's still an absolute catastrophe for you as an independent being.

[1734] And you're not going to go out in the forest and hunt down dragons when you have an infant.

[1735] So even if you could do it, you're not going to do it.

[1736] And so that's basically what that statement outlines.

[1737] And then to Adamie says, because you listen to your wife and ate of that tree, which I said, you know, maybe that's not such a good idea.

[1738] Curse it is the ground for thy sake.

[1739] sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

[1740] Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shall eat the herb of the field.

[1741] In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread till thou return into the ground.

[1742] That's the death part.

[1743] For out of it wast thou taken.

[1744] For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt thou return.

[1745] I missed one thing about that.

[1746] When the serpent, this took me a long time to figure out, I think I've mentioned it already, but it's worth reviewing.

[1747] the serpent tells Eve that if she eats from the fruit of the tree then her eyes will be open and she'll be as God's knowing good and evil well the serpent doesn't say well you'll be as as God's insofar as knowing good and evil but you'll die so you only get half the gift and so then I thought well there's this weird minter mingling of occurrences in the story there's the development of vision there's the development of self -consciousness There's the knowledge of nakedness, there's the emergence of work, there's the emergence of pain and suffering in childbirth, and there's knowledge of good and evil.

[1748] I thought, for ages, I thought, what the hell, what the hell, what's going on there?

[1749] Why is there an emphasis on moral knowledge?

[1750] What does this have to do with moral knowledge?

[1751] And the implication is that in the initial state of unconsciousness, there was no moral knowledge.

[1752] And I think of that as an animal -like state, right?

[1753] There's no moral knowledge in animals.

[1754] You don't think, well, that evil cat.

[1755] You don't ever think that, even if it's acting like that.

[1756] like a predator, even if it's playing with its prey.

[1757] You don't attribute moral knowledge to the cat because you say, well, it doesn't know what it's doing.

[1758] It doesn't understand what it's doing, which is to say it acts it out, but it can't represent it, or maybe even more.

[1759] It acts it out, but it can't represent it, and it certainly can't analyze its representation.

[1760] It doesn't have that level of capacity, but we do.

[1761] So that's associated with moral knowledge to some degree.

[1762] Why knowledge of good and evil?

[1763] I thought, all right, here's what it is.

[1764] Let's think about what you would consider reprehensible universally.

[1765] You could say, how's this?

[1766] Torturing an infant.

[1767] I would consider that virtually universally reprehensible.

[1768] Wouldn't you say?

[1769] Okay, so we'll accept that as a reasonable definition.

[1770] So then the question is, one, why would you do it?

[1771] We'll leave that aside for a moment.

[1772] Two, how do you know how to do it?

[1773] That's the issue.

[1774] And that's easy.

[1775] Once I know how I can be hurt because I'm aware of my own vulnerability.

[1776] I know how you can be hurt.

[1777] And I can make it into a game and I can prolong it forever and I can do it the worst possible way.

[1778] And that's why when you open your eyes and you know your vulnerability and your nakedness that you immediately have the knowledge of good and evil.

[1779] And so then evil becomes something like, well, there's tragedy in life, fine, earthquakes, cancer, disease, all those terrible things.

[1780] That's different than me deciding that I'm going to make you miserable.

[1781] The one is, while you're a limited creature in an unlimited world, you're going to get hurt because of that.

[1782] And maybe there's ways that you can be that will enable you to transcend that, at least to some degree, and still have the benefits of being.

[1783] That's entirely different than me deciding that things are going to go a lot worse for you than they might.

[1784] And human beings are capable.

[1785] I don't know if you've ever gone to some of the dungeon, torture dungeons in Europe.

[1786] Boy, those are fun places to go.

[1787] You think you take the most malevolent person you possibly could, and then have a little convention of those people, and then get them to think up the worst possible things that they could possibly devise, and then you have the instruments of torture that are in a medieval torture dungeon, right?

[1788] It's an art form, and you think, well, why are people willing to inflict that on one another?

[1789] Well, we'll talk about that next time when we talk about the story of Cain Abel, because I think it holds the secret to that.

[1790] And in the meantime, I'll stop with this story, but I want to tell you the story.

[1791] story of the Buddha because it maps onto it very nicely.

[1792] So what do you have?

[1793] You have a protected space.

[1794] There's unconscious beings in a protected space.

[1795] Something comes in the form of the serpent to reveal death, to reveal vulnerability and death, right?

[1796] And then the paradise comes to an end.

[1797] The human beings are eliminated from it and they don't get to come back.

[1798] So God puts angels with flaming swords at the gateway to paradise so that people cannot come back.

[1799] it.

[1800] It isn't obvious what that means, except that there's got to be some sort of trial by fire before reentering paradise, but we can leave that alone for a moment.

[1801] So that's the basic structure of the story.

[1802] Unconscious human beings, emergence of knowledge, realization of death and suffering, and the elimination of the paradise, right?

[1803] Okay, so now I'll read you the story of the Buddha.

[1804] The father of Prince Gautama, the Buddha, Savior of the Orient, determined to protect his son from desperate knowledge and tragic awareness, built for him an enclosed pavilion, a walled garden of earthly delights.

[1805] Okay, so the story goes that an angel visited Buddha's father and said that he's going to have a son, and the son is either going to become the greatest ruler that the world has ever seen or a spiritual leader.

[1806] And the father, being a practical man, thought, well, there's no bloody way.

[1807] I want my son to be some like wandering spiritual leader.

[1808] I want him to be the greatest king that the world has ever seen.

[1809] Okay.

[1810] And so the father decides, how am I going to get my son to be the greatest ruler the world has ever seen?

[1811] I better get him to fall in love with the world because then he's not going to go traipsing after some sort of half -witted spiritual knowledge.

[1812] He's going to stick to practical tasks, right?

[1813] That's something that a father should do to some degree is orient you in the world, right?

[1814] And maybe he shouldn't subvert your spiritual development to any great degree.

[1815] But there's a practical element to this.

[1816] And, and, and, And so anyways, that's how it works.

[1817] And so that's what happens.

[1818] The father builds this city of perfection.

[1819] And he eliminates from it everything that's a reminder of the suffering that's associated with life.

[1820] So the only thing that's allowed, the only creatures that are allowed to be in there, the only people that are allowed to be in there are healthy, young, and happy people.

[1821] So the Buddha grows up surrounded by nothing but the positive elements of life.

[1822] Well, you think, well, what does that mean?

[1823] Well, it's akin to the paradise idea, obviously.

[1824] walled enclosure of paradise where there's no death, but there's more to it than that too.

[1825] It's also in some sense what a good father would do.

[1826] What do you do with your young children?

[1827] Well, you don't expose them to death and decay at every step of the way, right?

[1828] You build a protected world for them, like a walled enclosure, and you only keep what's healthy and life giving inside of it.

[1829] And you don't expose them to things that they can't tolerate.

[1830] You know, maybe you don't take a three -year -old to a funeral.

[1831] Now, maybe you do, but maybe you don't.

[1832] There's things that you don't expect them to be able to cope with.

[1833] You regulate what they're allowed to watch.

[1834] You're not going to show them the Texas chainsaw massacre when they're four years old, right?

[1835] So you're staving off knowledge of mortality and death.

[1836] And so he's just being a good father in many ways here.

[1837] All signs of decay and degeneration were thus kept hidden from the prince.

[1838] Immersed in the immediate pleasures of the senses, in physical love, in dance and music and beauty and pleasure.

[1839] Gotama grew to maturity, protected absolutely.

[1840] from the limitations of mortal being.

[1841] However, he grew curious, despite his father's most particular attention and will and resolve to leave his seductive prison.

[1842] Well, it's that curiosity element.

[1843] It's the same thing that lurks in the Adam and Eve story.

[1844] It's like God tells Adam and Eve.

[1845] See that tree over there?

[1846] Don't be bothering with it.

[1847] Well, you know what's going to happen with human beings, especially if there's a snake associated with it.

[1848] They're going to be over there right away, checking that place out.

[1849] And that's exactly what happens with the Buddha.

[1850] It's like he's raised to be healthy.

[1851] And what is, what's the consequence of that is that the fact that he's healthy makes him look for what's beyond the protected confines of the thing that made him healthy.

[1852] It's like, it's like even in the Geppetto story, you know, where Geppetto paints on Pinocchio's mouth and he's ready to go.

[1853] He puts him outside the next day, and Pinocchio's ready to run away with all the kids, right?

[1854] So the consequence of raising a child in a healthy way is that the child is going to be curious enough, to go out there and look for some trouble.

[1855] And we actually know that because there is follow -up studies of teenagers.

[1856] You imagine that there's teenagers who never break any rules.

[1857] And then there's teenagers who break all the rules, okay?

[1858] These teenagers don't do very well.

[1859] Introverted, depressed, anxious, depressed.

[1860] Sorry, I said that twice.

[1861] These ones are antisocial.

[1862] The ones in the middle, that's what you want.

[1863] You want your damn teenager to get out of the paradisal confines of your house and to go cause some trouble and to investigate.

[1864] Maybe you don't want to.

[1865] to know about it any more than you have to.

[1866] You don't want them to be breaking rules all the time and you don't want them to be so timid and oppressed that they can't make a move on their own and never make a mistake.

[1867] So the paradoxical thing here, and it's sort of echoed, this is why I like these two stories back to back is like, if you give people what they want, then the first thing they're going to do is try to get beyond it.

[1868] And Dostoevsky says the same thing in notes from underground.

[1869] He says, if you gave people everything they wanted, pure utopia.

[1870] So he says so that they're sitting in a pool of bliss with nothing but bubbles of happiness coming up from the surface and all they have to do is eat cake and busy themselves with the continuation of the species.

[1871] Dostoevsky's observation is the first thing that people would do is find something to smash that with just so that something interesting and perverse could happen.

[1872] It's like, well, yes, we're creatures that are designed to encounter the unknown.

[1873] We want to keep moving beyond what we have, even if what we have is what we want.

[1874] And maybe that's partly because we're oriented towards the future.

[1875] We think, well, this is great, but it's not good enough.

[1876] It's great, but it's not good enough.

[1877] There's always something more that drives us forward.

[1878] Well, so that's what happens with the Buddha.

[1879] He gets curious.

[1880] He sees the walls.

[1881] He thinks, there's walls.

[1882] There's probably something outside of those walls.

[1883] So then he goes to his father.

[1884] And he says, I want to go outside.

[1885] What's outside?

[1886] And his father says, nah, you don't want to go outside.

[1887] And Buddha says, yeah, well, I really do want to go outside.

[1888] And his father knows that unless he lets him go outside, he's going to climb over the walls.

[1889] And so the father decides he's going to let him go outside, but he's going to fix everything out there first.

[1890] So he goes outside.

[1891] It's like the Chinese preparing for the Olympics, you know, when they sprayed the grass with green paint, got rid of all the homeless people.

[1892] It's the same thing.

[1893] So he goes outside the city and he tells everyone, all right, old people, sick people, dying people, hit the road.

[1894] We don't want to see you for a while.

[1895] all this out.

[1896] We want the attractive people around the sides of the roads, like waving palm fronds and all of that.

[1897] And so when my son comes out, he's going to see nothing but what's good.

[1898] And so he gets that all arranged and he lets his son go outside.

[1899] Now, his son goes outside in this little chariot thing, and he has someone with him.

[1900] Now unbeknownst to his father, that person that's with him is an emissary of the gods.

[1901] And so in a perverse way, he plays the same role as the serpent in the story of Adam and Eve.

[1902] And the gods have already arranged so that the father's, uh, care is going to be insufficient.

[1903] And it's the snake in the garden idea.

[1904] It's like, no matter how much care you take to make things perfect, some of the, some of what, what you're excluding is going to come back in.

[1905] So anyways, Buddha goes outside and, and he's in his chariot.

[1906] And preparations were made to gild his chosen route to cover the adventurer's path with flowers and to display for his admiration and preoccupation, the fairest women of the kingdom.

[1907] The prince set out with full retinue in the shielded comfort of a chaperone chariot and delighted in the panorama previously prepared for him.

[1908] The gods, however, decided to disrupt these most carefully laid plans and sent an aged man to hobble in full view alongside the road.

[1909] The prince's fascinated gaze fell upon the ancient interloper.

[1910] Compelled by curiosity, he asked his attendant.

[1911] What is that creature stumbling, shabby, bent and broken beside by retinue?

[1912] And the attendant answered, that is a man, like other men, who was born an infant, became a child, a youth, a husband, a father, a father of fathers.

[1913] He has become old, subject to destruction of his beauty, his will, and the possibilities of life.

[1914] Like other men, you say, hesitantly inquired the prince.

[1915] That means this will happen to me, and the attendant answered inevitably with the passage of time.

[1916] Well, that's the end of that party.

[1917] The world collapses in on Buddha, and bang, he hightails at home.

[1918] Well, what does that mean?

[1919] Well, that's what children do, roughly speaking, is they're around their mother.

[1920] They've got security there.

[1921] They go out into the unknown.

[1922] They encounter something that's just a little bit too much for them.

[1923] Bang, they come home.

[1924] They get out patted back into shape and hugged and taken care of.

[1925] Hugging children and patting them is actually analgesic.

[1926] It actually reduces pain.

[1927] Unsurprisingly, that's what you do with someone who's grieving, right?

[1928] So you hug them because grief is pain.

[1929] So they, you know, you pat them, they get rid of their pain, they get rid of their anxiety.

[1930] You calm them down, and what happens?

[1931] Well, the next day they want to go out again.

[1932] Well, that's exactly what happens to the Buddha.

[1933] So he's all shorted out by his encounter with death, which is very little different than what happens to Adam and Eve, runs back, recovers for six months.

[1934] He has post -traumatic stress disorder.

[1935] He runs home, and he recovers for six months, right?

[1936] In time, his anxiety lessened.

[1937] His curiosity grew, and he ventured outside again.

[1938] This time the God sent a sick man into view.

[1939] This creature, he asked, as attendant, shaking and palsied, horribly afflicted, unbearable to behold, a source of pity and contempt.

[1940] What is he?

[1941] And the attendant answered, that's a man like other men who was born whole, but who became ill and sick, unable to cope, a burden to himself and others, suffering and incurable.

[1942] Like other men, you say, inquired the prince, this could happen to me, and the attendant answers, no man is exempt from the ravages of disease.

[1943] Once again, the world collapsed and Gotammer returned to his home.

[1944] but the delights of his previous life were ashes in his mouth, and he ventured forth a third time.

[1945] The gods in their mercy sent him a dead man in funeral procession.

[1946] This creature, he asked, his attendant, laying so still, appearing so fearsome, surrounded by grief and by sorrow, lost and forlorn.

[1947] What is he?

[1948] And the attendant answered, that is a man, like other men, born of woman, beloved and hated, who was once you, who once was you, and now is the earth.

[1949] Like other men you say inquired the prince, then this could happen to me. This is your end, said the attendant and the end of all men.

[1950] Well, that's the end of childhood, right?

[1951] There's no going back after that.

[1952] It's like Pinocchio goes back.

[1953] There's no one home anymore.

[1954] There's nothing that your father can do to protect you from knowledge of death.

[1955] There's no returning to the childhood unconsciousness, because you now know, and there's no going backwards.

[1956] Suicide, that's going backwards.

[1957] That's how you replace your emergent self -consciousness with the old blissful unconsciousness, and that's exactly what suicidal people wish.

[1958] They're going to destroy their painful self -consciousness and make it all go away.

[1959] The world collapsed a final time, and Gottama asked to be returned home.

[1960] But the attendant had orders from the prince's father and took him instead to a festival of women, occurring nearby in a grove in the woods.

[1961] The prince was met by a beautiful assemblage who offered themselves freely.

[1962] to him without restraint in song, dance, and play in the spirit of sensual love.

[1963] But Gottama could think only of death and the inevitable decomposition of beauty and took no pleasure in the display.

[1964] Well, so you see the parallels between one story and the other.

[1965] They have the same underlying structure.

[1966] Initial paradise, partly childhood, partly unconsciousness, the emergence of knowledge of mortality into that and the demolition of the paradise.

[1967] This is the same meta story that we've been talking about all along ordered state collapse into chaos well the rest of the story is the return like in the bible bible is actually set up that way it's collapse into history and then a movement upward the question is what's the movement upward that's the question here when the collapse is caused by knowledge of mortality and self -con and the emergence of self -consciousness and knowledge of death is there any manner in which redemption can be attained?

[1968] Or is that the final, like, is that finally, is that, does that finally demolish you?

[1969] Well, that's the question.

[1970] And that's, that's, that's, that's, it's the answer to that question that entire civilizations constantly pursue.

[1971] And the question is, well, what is the answer?

[1972] And part of the answer is identification with the spirit that generates order out of chaos.

[1973] That's the answer.

[1974] It's something like that.

[1975] And so then the question is, what does that?

[1976] mean?

[1977] Well, that'll be what the last two lectures in the course are about, because we're down to two last lectures.

[1978] So, any questions?

[1979] Does it make sense?

[1980] More importantly, really, is there any way in which it doesn't make sense?

[1981] Because these stories are not supposed to make sense, right?

[1982] That's the theory, is that they're archaic superstitions or something like that.

[1983] Well, it doesn't seem to me that that's the case.

[1984] It seems to me that they make insanely perfect sense.

[1985] They're exactly right.

[1986] They tell you exactly what human beings are like and exactly what the situation that we face is.

[1987] So, and so then the question is, well, the diagnosis is made properly.

[1988] What has the cure been properly identified?

[1989] Well, that's what we'll discuss for the next two sessions.