And the Lord said unto Abram... And this is...
This is the this is the opening of the story.
"Get thee out of thy country
and from thy kindred,
and from thy father's house,
onto a land that I will show thee."
And this is one of those phrases where every clause is significant.
Go somewhere you don't understand.
That's the first thing.
"Get thee out of thy country."
Back in the 1920s, there was a whole slew
of American writers who ended up as expatriates in Paris,
Hemingway among them, and who wrote The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald, yes.
And a variety of others.
It was very inexpensive in Paris at the time,
and part of their transformation into great literary figures was the fact
that they were out of their country, and now they can see what their country
was because you can't see what your country is until you leave it.
So you have to go into the unknown, and that's God's first command.
Go into the unknown because you already know what you know.
And so and that's not enough unless you think you're enough.
And if you're not enough and you don't
think you're enough, then you have to go where you haven't been.
And so that's the first commandment to Abraham.
It's like, okay, that's a good one.
That makes perfect sense.
Go to where you don't know.
Yes, "and from thy kindred."
Well, what does that mean?
It means grow up.
Right? That's what it means. It means get away from your family enough
so that you can establish your independence.
And that isn't because there's something wrong with your family,
although perhaps there is...you know?
As there is perhaps wrong with you, but it means: get away.
I talk to people very frequently
whose families have provided them with too much protection,
and they know it themselves, and that means they're deprived of necessity.
One of the things that you see
in the United States, for example, is that the children of first generation
immigrants often do better than their children.
And the reason for that is
that the children of first generation immigrants have necessity driving them.
And you don't know how much you need
necessity to drive you, because maybe you're not very disciplined.
And if any catastrophe doesn't immediately befall you, if you don't act forthrightly
today, then maybe you never act forthrightly, right?
Because the gap between your foolishness
and the punishment is lengthened by your unearned wealth.
And so you never grow up and learn, and you have to get yourself away
from your dependency in order to allow necessity to drive you forward,
and that's to become independent and to become mature.
And I think part of what's happening in our culture is that
the force that's attacking the forthright movement forward,
of young men in particular, is afraid of the power of men because it's
confused about the distinction between power and authority and competence.
A man who has authority and competence has
power as a byproduct, but the authority and competence is everything.
And people who can't understand that
fail to make the distinction between power and authority and competence.
And they're afraid of power and so they destroy authority and competence.
And that's a terrible thing because we need authority and competence.
What else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run?
And so you get away from your country
and you get away from your kin and from your father's house, right?
And you go out there and you establish yourself in the world.
It's a call to adventure.
That's what the first lines of the Abrahamic story is.
A call to adventure.
So, great. "Unto a land that I will show you."
Well, what does that mean?
One of the things that...
I've been struck very hard by a number of writers, Carl Jung,
obviously among them, he wrote things like Nietzsche,
that if you understand them, they just break you into pieces.
And one of the things that Jung understood and the psychoanalysts understand is one
of the most terrifying elements of psychoanalyst thinking.
It's very tightly allied with religious
thinking, which is that you are not the master of your own house.
There are spirits that dwell within you.
Meaning...
You have a will and you can exercise
a certain amount of conscious control over your being.
But there are all sorts of things
that occur within you that seem to be beyond your capacity of control.
Your dreams, for example.
That's a really good example.
Or your impulses, for example.
You might think of those as so foreign
from you that you don't even want them to be part of you.
But more subtly even, how about what you're interested in?
What compels you?
Where does that come from, exactly?
Because you can't conjure it up of your own accord.
So if you're a student and you're taking a difficult course,
you might say to yourself, well, I need to sit down and study for 3 hours.
But then you sit down and that is what happens.
Your attention goes everywhere.
And you might say, well, whose attention is it then, if it goes everywhere?
Because you say it's your attention, it's like, well, if it's your attention,
maybe you would be able to control it, but you can't.
And so then you might think, well,
just exactly what the hell is controlling it?
And you might say, well, it's random, it's better not be random.
I can tell you that that happens to some degree in schizophrenia.
There's an element of randomness in that.
It's not random.
It's driven by the action of phenomena that I think are best considered as
something like sub personalities, though even that's only a partial description.
You can't make yourself interested in something.
Interest manifests itself and grips you.
That's a whole different thing.
And so what is it that's gripping you?
And how do you conceptualize that?
Is that a divine power?
Well, it's divine as far as you're
concerned, because it grips you, and you can't do anything about it.
And so there's a calling in you towards
what you're compelled by and what you're interested in.
And sometimes that might be very dark
and sometimes not, but you're compelled forward by your interest.
And so the idea that what moves you away from your country in your father's house
and the comforts of your childhood home is something that's beyond you,
that you listen to and hearken to, that's exactly right.
And you can say, well, I don't want to call that God.
It doesn't matter what you call it, exactly.
It doesn't matter to what it is, what it's called.
It still is.
And if you don't listen to it, that's the other thing.
If you don't listen to it and I've been
a clinician and talked to enough people now, as old as I am, to know this absolutely,
if you do not listen to that thing
that beckons you forward, you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine.
You'll have everything that's terrible
about life in your life and nothing about it that's good and worse, you'll know,
that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had.
So...
This is not only a calling forth,
but a warning: "unto a land that I will show thee."
And that's it. "That I will show thee."
And you don't want to be too concrete about this, you know?
there's all sorts of new territories
that you can inhabit if you there's this abstract and conceptual territories.
If you go to university and you study
biology or you study physics or any discipline, you're in a territory, right?
You're in the territory that all the scholars have established.
And then as you master the discipline,
you move out beyond the established territory into the unknown.
And that's a new land, right?
Maybe it's even the land of your enemies, for that matter, but it's a new land.
The frontier is always in front of you.
And so when the Earth was less inhabited
than it is now, the frontier was the psychological
frontier, and the geographical frontier was the same thing.
And now they've separated to some degree
because there's not so much geographical frontier, but the frontier is a place
that never disappears, and the land that's beyond the land
that you know is always there, and it's always where you should go.
And all of that is packed into these four phrases.
So...
When I've been thinking about narrative, you look at the world through a story,
you can't help it, and the story is what gives value to the world,
or the story is what you extract from the value of the world.
You can look at it either way.
You're somewhere. And it's not good enough.
That's the eternal human predicament. Wherever you are, isn't good enough.
And to some degree, that's actually a good
thing, because if it was good enough, well, there's nothing for you to do.
So it's actually may be a good thing that it's insufficient.
And that might be why sometimes having less is better than having more.
And I don't want to be a Pollyanna about that.
I mean, I know that there's deprivation that can reach to the point where it's
completely counterproductive, but it isn't always the case that starting
with little is if you start with little, you start with more possibility.
It's something like that.
So you move from always from what's
unbearable about the present to some better future, right?
And if you don't have that, then you have nothing but threat and negative emotion.
You have no positive emotion because
the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the better future.
And then the evidence that you generate yourself that you're moving towards it,
that's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes.
So you want to set up this structure properly.
It's very-very important.
And so what it means is that you want
to be going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is
worth the while, and you can ask yourself that.
And that's part of what we tried to build
into the Future Authoring program, which is, well, we know what's wrong with life.
It's rife with suffering and insufficiency and deception and evil.
It's all of that, obviously, okay, what would make the journey worthwhile?
But you can ask yourself that.
It's like, all right, in order to bear up under this load,
what is it that I would need to be striving to attain?
And if you ask yourself that, that's to knock and the door will open.
That's what that means. If you ask yourself that,
then you will find an answer, and you'll think you'll shrink away from it.
You'll think, well, there's no way I could do that.
It's like, well, you don't know what you could do.
You don't know what's possible, and you're not as much as you could be.
And so God only knows what you could do
and have and give if you sacrificed everything to it.
And that's the reason Abraham is constantly making sacrifices.
It's archaic, right?
He's burning up like baby lambs.
But like, well, they're alive.
That's something, and they're valuable.
And that's something... You have to admit,
even if you think about it as a modern person, that the act of sacrificing
something, might have some dramatic compulsion to it.
To go out into a flock and to take something that's newborn and to cut its
throat and to bleed it and to burn it might be a way of indicating to yourself
that you're actually serious about something.
And it isn't so obvious that we have rituals of seriousness like that now.
And so it's not so obvious that we're actually serious about anything.
And so maybe that's not such a good thing.
And so maybe we shouldn't be thinking
that these people were so archaic and primitive and superstitious.
It's possible that they knew something that we don't.
And certainly in the Abrahamic story is one of the things that maintains Abraham's
covenant with God is his continual willingness to sacrifice.
That sacrificial issue is so important
because you are not committed to something unless you're willing to sacrifice for it.
Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing and I think it borders on miraculous
that those concepts are embedded into this narrative at the level of dramatic action.
You know, instead of abstract explanation, people are acting this out.
And the fundamental conception is so
profound that it's really quite awe-inspiring, it's breathtaking really.
When you understand what message is trying to be conveyed.
You have to make sacrifices and what you have to sacrifice? You have to sacrifice
that which is most valuable to you currently that's stopping you.
And God only knows what that is.
It's certainly the worst of you.
It's certainly that and God only knows
to what degree you're in love with the worst of you.
Well so you move from the unbearable
present to the ideal future and you can't help that.
You have to live in a structure like that. That's your house.
That's another way of thinking about it.
And if you want to get your house in order and if you want it to be a place that you
can live properly then you have to plan the future that is perfect.
And then I think, well what does that mean?
And it means it's good for you.
One of the things that I do all the time with my clinical and consulting clients is
trying to figure out what would be good for them.
But we do more than that.
We try to think, okay, well, how can we set this up so it's really good for you?
And that all the side consequences of that
are things that are good for other people.
Because people are often also timid about trying to get something that's good
for themselves because they feel that it's selfish or that they don't deserve it.
So we set it up so that, well look, we're going to set it up so that it's
plainly obvious that this will not harm the structure of the universe.
For you to have what you need and to do it
in a way that's of benefit to other people.
There's no downside to that.
And so it's okay.
It's okay if you reach out and take that.
One of the things that's interesting about
the biblical stories, abrahamic stories as well is that God
doesn't really seem to be opposed to the success of the people that he's chosen.
What happens to them as they progress through their journey is they get larger
flocks and they get more authority and they get life more abundant.
That's what happens.
God doesn't seem to be a miser in the Old Testament.
It's like if you put in the effort and you
accept the covenant and you make the sacrifices,
then you get to be successful and maybe successful beyond your wildest dreams.
And that that actually seems to be okay with God.
And that's pretty cool given that general notion of Old Testament, God is that all
he's doing is casting out curses and death wherever he happens to wander.
There's certainly no shortage of that.
But again, it seems to me that that's very
good news and that you also don't have to be perfect in order to have that happen.
And then the other thing, this is the issue about going into the unknown.
It's like, well, if you leave your country
and your kin and your father's house and you go out into a land that your
intuition guides you to, you're going to undergo these radical transformations.
This is a sacrificial transformation, too,
because you're moving forthrightly and voluntarily into chaos, right?
And that's the same as the dragon fight.
That's the hero story.
And what will happen there is that you will transform yourself.
And so the call to an ideal is also the call to a sequence of deaths
and rebirths that move you closer and closer to the ideal.
And that's what God is calling Abraham to do.
In the first sentence of this story, you... (to be continued)