Transcriber: Helena Galani Reviewer: Chryssa R. Takahashi
If you saw "The Wolf of Wall Street",
you saw [Matthew] McConaughey demonstrating
what I call the Thymus thump to DiCaprio.
He overdoes it a bit.
He doesn't really realize that it's a spiritual exercise
and a form of therapy,
as I'm going to unveil it to you this morning.
He just uses it as a way of raising the resonance
and vibratory effect of his voice.
And it's completely lost on DiCaprio who was so spiritually vacuous
that if you took a sledgehammer to him, you wouldn't raise anything
except maybe a howlery verb.
There is a wonderful opera called Mahagonny,
"The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny"
by Brecht and Weill, the same guys who did "The Threepenny Opera".
It's about a mythical city in Florida.
It's really a parable of the late stage
of the self-destruction of industrial society.
This mythical city is a magnet for prostitutes and pimps
and criminals and gamblers and low life.
♪ Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar. ♪
♪ Oh, don't ask why. I tell you we must die. ♪
And in the middle of the opera, one of the characters, out of the blue
gives voice to this existential lament:
(German) "Aber etwas fehlt".
"But something is missing".
And what's missing is what's missing with DiCaprio
in "The Wolf of Wall Street".
It's the soul. It's this centre realm, this middle realm,
between reason and desire.
My teacher Tillich characterised our historical period
as suffering from the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness.
There are so many people that suffer a sense of emptiness,
of loss in this region of their body and of their consciousness.
The Greeks had a word for it - 'thymós',
t-h-y-m-ó-s with an accent over the o.
It means courage, vitality and spirit
in the sense of spirited with the bodily basis.
You know, if you say, somebody is very spirited, they have high spirits.
We often use it with reference to horses;
"very spirited horse".
And it means "soul". It's really basically "soul".
And it came into expression in Western culture with Socrates.
He's credited with discovering the human soul.
And it's usually thought of as rational self consciousness.
But it's based on the soul which is here rather than here.
And Plato makes it the middle realm of consciousness:
reason, thymos and desire.
My teacher Tillich wrote a book about it
called "The Courage To Be".
It resists translation of the Greek word thymos,
a brilliant translation.
And he traces the history of the courage to be
through Western philosophy.
A vital self-affirmation.
It's a corollary of the courage to be.
The confidence, the vital confidence to meet any obstacle.
There are two cognates from thymos:
the thymus gland and thymus vulgaris,
the herb thyme, going through the Latin.
The thymus gland is the centre of the immune system
and, both terms for the herb and the gland,
bear out the meaning of the Greek root "thymos".
It's the centre of your immune system
so it's the gland of courage.
It defends you against illness and disease.
It programmes your T-cells, your thymus cells
which are the front line of defense.
In a way, the thymus gland is the kind of proto brain.
It has immune memory
and, best of all, it distinguishes between self and not self.
So, if you wanted to look at the root of our self affirmation,
of our self understanding it would be the thymus gland and our immune system
which is based on this distinction between self and not self.
There is a fairly recent science called "Psychoneuroimmunology"
which attempts to trace the pathways from the brain to the immune system.
And in cases of enourmous stress, the brain secretes cortical steroids,
cortisol which diminishes the immune system.
And so, it's no wonder that post-traumatic stress sufferers,
because they have been under such great stress,
also have such a diminished immune system.
And suicide is a consequence.
The statistics on suicide that I heard in the rehearsal yesterday
is just unbelievable.
So what has happened is that they suffered, in a sense of destruction,
an undermining of their soul
which is this middle realm
which we are so unmindful of.
We have relegated soul to soul food and soul music.
(Laughter)
I mean that's OK but we need to recapture it
and we need to see that soul and spirit are embodied
and have a bodily basis.
That's what's forgotten.
We think of soul and spirit as something evanescent,
almost like a vapour that vanishes off.
No, they are an expression of our vitality.
So, the herb thyme is a germicidal disinfectant.
It is mild but because of that, it is an assistant to the immune system,
it kills germs.
It is a major herb of French cuisine,
it was grown in public places in the ancient world
and people stepped on it to release its aroma.
They burnt it on altars and they had a chorus that danced around the altar
to inhale its fumes.
Medieval maidens sewed it into the garments of knights
because it represented courage.
I am going to make an ointment
for the purpose of rubbing on your thymus gland.
I am going to call it a thyme bomb.
(Laughter)
So, I left the best definition of thymos for the last.
Courage to be, vital self affirmation, the bridge between reason and desire, OK.
The unreflective striving towards what is noble.
That's quintessentially Greek.
Thymos is rooted to eros
in what the Greeks depicted as a chariot ride of the soul
to the true, the good and the beautiful,
what they called in the Middle Ages, the Transendentalia.
What a word!
Think of your soul and your spirit
walking hand in hand in your thymic field.
As part of your expression of thymic therapy
and the spiritual exercise,
they are walking hand in hand in your thymic field
and they break into a dance
because they have seen the wild thyme bloom.
So, everybody all together,
the thymus thump.
Aaaaaah. Alright, alright.
Audience: Aaaaaah.
The Greeks had a word for it: Thymos.
Presenter: Thank you Paul.
Paul Lee: Thank you! (Applause)