oh
Hello, everyone. Thank you again for showing up, so
tonight
We're going to finish off the story of Noah and also
the story of
the Tower of Babel
and I don't think that'll take very long and
then we're going to
turn to the abrahamic Stories and
They're a very complex set of stories. They sit between
the
Earliest stories in Genesis that I would say end with the tower of babel
And then the stories of moses which are extraordinarily well-developed
Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them
multiple stories
conjoined together and
There I found them very daunting
they're very difficult to understand and
so
I'm going to stumble through them the best that I can I would say that's that's probably the best way to think about this because
they
Have a narrative content. That's quite strange
I
was reading a book while doing this called the disappearance of God that I found quite helpful, and
the author of that book argues that
one of the things that happens in the old testament is that
God is very manifest at the beginning
in terms of personal appearances even and then that
proclivity fades away as the old testament develops, and there's a
parallel development
That it's maybe maybe causally linked. I'm not exactly sure how to conceptualize it, but that appears to be causally linked is that?
the
Stories about individuals become more and more well-developed so it says in it's as if as God fades away, so to speak
the individual becomes more and more manifest and
There's a statement in the old testament the location of which. I don't recall
But I'll tell you about it in future lectures where God essentially tells
Whoever he's speaking with and I don't remember who that is that he's going to disappear and let man essentially go his own way
And see what happens not a complete disappearance, but maybe a transformations is something that
Modern people regard more as a psychological phenomena rather than the sort of objective entity that God seems to be in
the beginning of the biblical stories
and so I've been wrestling with that a lot because
the notion that
God, I got appears to Abraham multiple times and
that's not a concept that's easy for modern people to
to grasp in
for us
generally speaking apart from say issues of Faith
God is it some?
thing
someone who makes himself personally manifest in our lives
He doesn't appear to us
That's I suppose why the question of belief is so paramount for modern people
I presume that if God had within the habit of appearing to you you likely wouldn't have a problem with belief
I mean it might be more complicated than that, but that's how it seems to me, and so when we read stories about
God making himself manifest either to a nation say in the case of israel or to individuals
It's not easy to understand
It's not easy to understand why people would write stories like that if they thought like we thought and I mean it really it wasn't
That long ago that the Bible was written say from a biological perspective. It's really only yesterday
It's a couple thousand years say four thousand years something like that
That's not very long ago from a biological perspective, it's it's nothing
so
the first thing I tried to do is to
see if I could figure out how to understand that and so else the lecture once we finish the the
remains of the story of Noah, I'll start the lecture with a with an attempt to
Situate the abrahamic stories in a context that might make them more accessible
These two contexts that work for me to make them more accessible
Let's conclude
the Noah Story
first however when we
ended last time
The ark had come to its resting place and Noah and his family had
debarked
and
so this is the stories of
What occurs immediately after afterwards?
it's a very short story, but I think it's it's very relevant for
both
Of these stories the tower of babel is well very relevant for our current times and the sons of Noah
That went forth of the ark were shem, and ham and Japheth and ham
Is the father of Canaan?
These are the three sons of Noah and of them was the whole Earth overspread and Noah began to be a husbandman
and he planted a vine yard and
he drank of the wine and was drunken and he was uncovered within his tent and
Ham the father of Canaan saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren without?
and shem and Japheth took a garment and laid upon both their shoulders and went backward and
Covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backward and they saw not their fathers nakedness
And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son
had done unto him and he said curse had to be Canaan a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren and
He said blessed shall be the lord. God of shem and Canaan Shall be his servant and God shall enlarge Japheth
And he shall dwell in the tents of shem and Canaan Shall be his servant
and Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died and
the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech okay, so
I remember thinking about this story
It's got to be 30 years ago
And I think the meaning of the story stood out for me sometimes
When you read complicated material sometimes a piece of it will stand out. It's for some reason. It's like it glitters
I suppose that might be one way of thinking about it. It's
it
You're in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I've really experienced that reading the Dao. De Jing which is document
I would really like to do a lecture on at some point because some of the verses
I don't understand but others stand right out
and I can understand them and I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant and I
think it means you know we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve and
The idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability
the physical Your physical boundaries in time and space and
Your your your physiological
your fundamental physiological
Insufficiencies as they mate might be judged by others, so there's biological
Insufficiency that sort of built into you because you're a fragile Mortal vulnerable half insane creature
And that's that's just an existential truth, and then of course
even
merely as a
Human being even with all those faults there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be
judged harshly by the group
Well might be will definitely be judged
Harshly by the group and so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious and and to and to
Know your limits and to know your vulnerability, and that's what is
revealed
To ham when he comes across his father naked and so the question is
What does it mean to see your father naked and it seems to me and especially in an inappropriate Manner like this it it?
it's it's it's as if
ham
He does the same thing that happens in the mesopotamian creation myth
When when time out and absolute give rise to the first gods
there there the father of the eventual
deity of
redemption Marduk
they're very careless and noisy and they kill apps, ooh their father and
attempt to inhabit his corpse and that makes timeout enraged and so she
Bursts Forth from The Darkness to
To do them in it's like a precursor to the flood story or an analogue to the flood story
And I see the same thing happening here with ham. Is that he's is
insufficiently respectful of his father and
The question is exactly what does the father represent and you can say well there's there's?
There's the father that you have and that's a human being that's the demand like other men a man among men
but then there's the farther as such and that's the spirit of the father and
Insofar as you have a father you have both at the same time you have the personal father
That's a man among other men
just like anyone others father, but insofar as that man is your father that means that he's something different than just another person and
what he is is the
incarnation of the spirit of the Father and
to see that to take it to what to
Disrespect that carelessly, maybe even he's like no one makes a mistake right? He?
produces wine and gets himself drunk and you might say well
you know if he sprawled out there for everyone to see it's hardly hams fault if he stumbles across them but
The book is laying out a danger and the danger is that well maybe you catch your father at
his most vulnerable moment and if you're
disrespectful
Then you transgress against the spirit of the father and if you transgress against the spirit of father and lose
Spirit of the father and lose respect for the spirit of the father then that is likely to transform you into a slave
That's a very interesting idea and I think it's particularly interesting
Maybe not particularly interesting, but it's it's particularly germane. I think to our current cultural situation because I think that
We're pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father so to speak
because of the intense criticism, that's
Directed towards our culture and the patriarch of culture, so to speak
we're constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and let's say nakedness and
There's nothing wrong with criticism, but the thing about Criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff
It's not to burn everything to the ground
Right, it's to say well. We're going to carefully look at this we're going to carefully differentiate
We're going to keep what's good and we're going to move away from what's bad
But the point of the Criticism isn't to identify everything is bad. It's to
Separate what's good from what's bad so that you can retain. What's good and move towards it and
And to be careless at that is deadly because you're inhabited by the spirit of the father right insofar as you're a cultural
Construction which of course is something that the that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely?
emphatic about you're a cultural construction insofar as you're a cultural construction, then you're inhabited by the spirit of the father and to be
Disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes you not all of what you are certainly
Certainly not all of what you are
But a good portion of what you are insofar as you're a socialized cultural entity and if you pull out
If you pull the foundation out from underneath that what do you have left you can hardly manage on your own?
You know it's just not possible. You're a cultural creation. And
so Ham makes this desperate
error and is Careless about
Exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father something like that. He doesn't without sufficient respect. And the judgment is that
not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants, and he's contrasted with the other two sons who I
Suppose are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt something like that, and so when they see him in a compromising position
they handle it with respect and and and
don't capitalize on it and
Maybe that makes them strong. That's what it seems to me, and so I think that's what that story means
It has something to do with respect
you know and the funny thing about having respect for your culture, and I suppose that's partly why I'm doing the biblical stories is because
They're part of a they're part of my culture
they're part of our culture perhaps, but they're certainly part of my culture and
It seems to me that
it's worthwhile to treat that with respect to see what you can glean from it and
And not kick it when it's down. Let's say
so
and so that's how the story of no ends you know and the thing too is Noah is actually a
Pretty decent incarnation of the Spirit of the father that which I suppose is one of the things that makes hams
Misstep more egregious is that I mean noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood man
You know it's not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify
humiliating him and
You know I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation
To note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an ark
Right, and that's the ark that you could think about that as the ark that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. That's the
Tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit that we take for granted
Because it works so well
that protects us from things that we can't even imagine and we don't have to imagine because we're so well protected and
So one of the things that's really struck me hard. I would say about the
Disintegration and corruption of the universities is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that
You know what?
Criticism as I said it's a fine thing if it's done in the spirit in a proper spirit
And that's the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff, but it needs to be accompanied by gratitude
And it does seem to me that anyone who lives in in the west in the western culture at this time
in history and in this place and who hasn't
simultaneously grateful for that is is
half-blind
at least because it's never been better than this and
It could be so much worse and it's highly likely that it will be so much worse because for most of human history
So much worse is the norm
so
then there's this little story that
Crops up that seems in some ways unrelated to everything that's gone before it
But I think it's also an extremely profound little story it took me a long time to figure it out. It's the tower of babel
and it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of shinar and dwelt there that's
Noah's Descendants and the whole Earth was of one language and of one speech
And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of shinar and they dwelt there
And they said to one another
Go let us make brick and burn them thoroughly and they had brick for stone and slime they head for mortar
So they're establishing a city and they said go let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach
Unto heaven and let us make a name lest. We be scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth
and
the Lord came down to see the city in the tower which the children of men built and
The Lord said behold the people is one and they all have one language and now this they begin to do
And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do
Go to let us go down and there confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth and they left off to build the city
therefore is the name of it called babel because the lord did there confound the language of all the Earth and
From thence did the Lord scattered them abroad
Upon the face of all the Earth
It's a very difficult story to understand and it's on the face of it. It doesn't seem to show
God in a very good light although that happens fairly frequently in the old testament as far as I can tell but
You know the thing to do if you're reading in the spirit of the text let's say is to remember that
It's God that you're talking about and so
Even though you might think that
He's appearing in a bad light
Your duty as a reader. I suppose is to assume that you're wrong and that what he did was right
And then you're supposed to figure out well, how could it possibly be right because the axiomatic
Presupposition is that it's God and whatever he does is right, and you might say well, you can disagree with that
And it's it's also the case that some of the people that God talks to in the old testament
Actually disagree with him and convinced him to alter his actions, but the point still remains that it's God and if he's doing it then
By definition. There's a good reason
There's an idea much later that John Milton develops in in
Paradise lost
Which is an amazing poem
And It's it's it's a it's it's a profound enough poem so that it's almost been incorporated into the biblical structure I would say so
the Corpus of Christianity
Post Milton
was Saturated by
the Miltonic stories of Satan's Rebellion none of us in the in the in the
Biblical texts or it's only hinted at in very brief passages and Milton wrote his poem
To justify the word the ways of God to man, which is quite an ambition really!
It's an amazing profound ambition
To try to produce something
to produce a literary work
That justifies being to human beings, because that's what Milton was trying to do, so one of my readers here
Sent me a link the other day for viewers
To a work of philosophy by an australian Philosopher whose name I don't remember
Who basically wrote a book saying that:
being as such, human experience, is so corrupt and so
Permeated by suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all
sort of the ultimate expression of Nihilism and
Goethe in in Faust his Mephistopheles who's a Satanic character obviously has that as a credo
That's that Satan's fundamental motivation is
His objection to creation itself is that creation is so flawed and so rife with suffering that it would be better if it had never
existed at all and so that's his motivation for attempting to
continue to Destroy it but in
Milton's Paradise lost
Satan is an intellectual figure, and you see that motif emerged very frequently by the way in
popular culture, so for example in the lion king the figure of Skaar who's a Satanic figure is also hyper intellectual and
That's very common that you know it's the evil scientist motif or the or the evil advisor to the king the same motif it
Encapsulates something about rationality and it what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that
Rationality like Satan is the highest angel in God's heavenly Kingdom. It's a psychological idea. You know that the most powerful
Sub element of the human psyche is the intellect and and it's the thing that shines out above all
within the domain of humanity and maybe across the
Domain of life itself the human intellect there's something absolutely remarkable about it
but it has a flaw and the flaw is that it tends to
Fall in love with its own productions and to assume that their total
Solzhenitsyn when he was writing the Gulag Archipelago
had a warning about that with regards to
totalitarian Ideology, and he said that the price of selling your god-given soul to the entrapments of
human dogma was slavery and death essentially and
Satan
in Milton's Paradise Lost Satan
decides that
He can do without the transcendent he can do without God and that's why he foments rebellion
It's something like that and the consequence of that the immediate consequence from Milton's perspective was that as soon as Satan
Decided that what he knew was sufficient
That he could do without the transcendent which he might think about as the domain outside of what you know something like that
immediately he was in hell and
When I read Paradise lost I was studying totalitarianism, and I thought you know the poet
the true Poet like a prophet
if someone who has
intimations of the future
and maybe that's because the poetic mind the philosophical or prophetic mind is a pattern detector and
And there are people who can detect the underlying it's like the malady of a nation
Melody is in song the song of a nation and can see how it's going to develop across the centuries you see this you see
That Nietzsche because Nietzsche for example in the mid you know in 1860 or so. I mean he prophesied
What was going to happen in the 20th century said that he said specifically that the spectre of Communism would kill
Millions of people in the 20th century, it's amazing prophecy. He said that in the notes that became will to power and
Dostoyevsky was of the same sort of mind someone who was in touch enough with the fundamental patterns of
Human movement that they could extrapolate out into the future and see what was coming
and I mean some people are very good at detecting patterns you know and and uh
Milton, I think was of that, sort and
I
think he had intimations of what was coming as human rationality became more and more powerful and technology became more and more powerful and the
Information was that we would produce systems that dispensed with God
That were completely rational and completely total that would immediately turn everything they touched into something
indistinguishable from Hell, and
then Milton's warning was
embodied in the poem is that
the rational mind that
Generates a production and then worships it as if it's absolute immediately occupies hell
So what does that have to do with the tower of babel?
we know it back into 2008 when the
When we had that economic collapse?
the strange idea emerged politically and that
was the idea of too big to fail and
I thought about that idea for a long time because I thought
There's something deeply wrong with that is one of the things that made Marx wrong
was Marx believed that capital would flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people and that the
dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed and
Like so many things that Marx said that's it's kind of true. It's kind of true in that
The distribution of wealth and in fact a distribution of anything, that's produced
Follows a Pareto
Pattern and the Pareto Pattern basically is that a small proportion of people end up with the bulk of the goods
And it isn't just money it's it's anything that people produce creatively
ends up in that distribution and
That's actually the economists call that the Matthieu principle
And they take that from a statement in the new testament
and the statement is to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken and
It's it's a map of the manner in which the world manifests itself where
Human creative production is involved and the map seems to indicate that as you start to produce and you're successful
The probability that you will continue to be successful or accelerate
Increases as you're successful and as you fail the probability that you will fail starts to accelerate
So if your progress to life looks like this or like this
something like that and the reason that Marx was right was because he noted that as a
Feature of the capitalist system the reason that he was wrong. Is that it's not a feature that's specific to a capitalist system
it's a feature that's general to all systems of creative production that are known and
so it's like a natural law and it's enough of a natural law by the way that the distribution of wealth can be modeled by
Physical models using the same equations that govern the distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum, so it's a really profound
It's a fundamentally
profound observation about the world way the world lays itself out, and it's problematic because if
resources accrue
unfairly to a small minority of people
and there's a natural law like element to that that has to be dealt with from a social perspective because if the
Inequality becomes too extreme then the whole system will destabilize and so you can have an intelligent
discussion about how to mitigate the effects of
the transfer of creative
production into the hands of a small number of people
Now the other reason however having said that the other reason that Marx was wrong. There's a number of them
One is that even though
creative products end
Up in the hands of a small number of people it's not the same people consistently across time
It's the same proportion of people, and that's not the same thing
you know like imagine that there's water going down a drain and you say well look at the
Spiral it's permanent, you think well the spiral is permanent, but the water Molecules aren't they're moving through it
And it's the same in some sense with the pareto distribution
is that there's a 1% and there's always a 1%, but it's not the same people it's
the stability of it differs from
culture to culture
but there's a lot of movement in the upper 1% a tremendous amount of movement and one of the reasons for that movement is that
things get large and then they get too large and then they collapse and
so in
2008 when the politicians said too big to fail
They got something truly backwards as far as I can tell and that was
With a reverse the statement was reversed it should have been so big it had to fail
And that's what I think the story of the tower of babel is about it's it's a warning
against the
expansion of the system
Until it encompasses everything it's a warning against
Totalitarian presumption so what happens for example
When people set out to build the tower of babel as they want to build a structure that reaches to heaven
right so the idea is that
It can it can it can replace it can replace the role of God
it's something like that it can erase the distinction between
Earth and Heaven, and so there's a utopian kind of vision there as well as we can build a structure
That's so large and encompassing that that
That it can replace heaven itself
That's an interesting
The fact that that doesn't work and that God objects to it is also extraordinarily interesting and it's an indication to me of the unbelievable
Profundity of these stories. It's like I think one thing we should have learned from the 20th century, but of course didn't was that
There's something extraordinary dangerous about totalitarian utopian visions. That's something dostoevsky wrote about by the way in his great book
Notes from Underground because Dostoevsky figured out by the early 1900's that there was something very very
Pathological about a utopian vision of perfection that it was profoundly anti-human and and notes in notes from underground
He demolishes the notion of utopia one of the things he says that I loved it's so Brilliant said imagine that you
brought the Socialist utopia into being and
dostoyevsky says and that human beings had nothing to do except
eat
Drink and busy themselves with the continuation of the species
He said that the first thing that would happen under circumstances like that
Would be that
Human beings would go mad and break the system smash it just so that something unexpected
And crazy could happen because human beings don't want
utopian comfort and certainty they want adventure and Chaos and uncertainty and
so that the very notion of a utopia was anti-human because we're not built for
static utopia
we're built for a
dynamic situation where there's
Demands placed on us and where there's the optimal amount of uncertainty
Well, we know what happened in the 20th century as a consequence of the widespread
promulgation of utopian schemes and
what happened was
mayhem on a scale that had never been matched in the entire history of humanity, and that's really saying something because
There was plenty of Mayhem before the 20th century
I guess there wasn't as much industrial clout behind it and so so early you
see
so early in the biblical narrative you have a warning against Hubris and
and
some indication that
properly functioning systems have an appropriate scale I
read an article in the economist magazine this week about the
rise of Nationalist Movements all over the world as a counterbalance to
globalization maybe it's most marked with the European economic community
And the economist writers were curious about why
that counter movement has been developing, but it seems to me that it's also a tower of Babel phenomena is that
And maybe this is most evident in the European economic community
to bring all of that multiplicity under the
What would you call it under the umbrella of a single unity is?
To simultaneously erect a system where the top is so far from the bottom that the bottom has no connection to the top
You know your your your social systems have to be large enough, so they protect you, but small enough
So that you have a place in them, and it seems to me perhaps. That's what's happened in
in places like the EEC is that the distance between the typical citizen and the
Bureaucracy that runs the entire structure has got so great
that
it's an element of
destabilization in and of itself and so people revert back to say nationalistic identities because
It's something that they can
relate to
If there's a there's a history there and a shared identity a genuine identity
An identity of language and tradition it's not an artificial imposition from the top an artificial abstract imposition
in in the egyptian creation myth
the version I'm most familiar with
in the previous
Creation myth the older one the Mesopotamian creation myth
Mostly what you see
Menacing humanity is Tiamat she's the dragon of Chaos and so that's nature. It's really
It's really mother nature
red in tooth and claw
but by the time the egyptians come along
It isn't only nature that threatens humanity
it's the social structure itself and so the
egyptians had two deities that represented the social structure and one was Osiris who was
Like the spirit of the father. He was a great hero who established egypt, but became old and and
Willfully blind and and and
and
senile and he had an evil brother named Seth and
Seth was always conspiring to overthrow him and
because
Osiris ignored him long enough Seth did overthrow chopped him into pieces and distributed all around the kingdom and
His son Horus had to come back and fight
Osiris his son Horus had to come back and defeat
Seth to take the Kingdom back. That's how that story ends
But the egyptians seem to have realized maybe because they had become bureaucratized to quite a substantial degree
That it wasn't only nature that threatened
Humankind it was also the proclivity of human organizations to become too large too unwieldy
too deceitful and to willfully blind and therefore liable to collapse and
Again, I see echoes of that in the story of the tower of babel
so
It's a calling for
A
kind of humility of social engineering
one of the other things I've learned as a social scientist and
I've been warned about this by I would say great social scientists that
You want to be very careful about
doing large-scale
experimentation with large scale systems because the probability that if you implement a
Scheme in a large-scale social system that that scheme will have the result you intended is
Negligible what will happen will be something that you don't intend and even worse
something that works at counter purposes to your original intent and
so and that makes sense because
If you have a very very complex system
And you perturb it the probability that you can predict the consequence of the perturbation is extraordinary low obviously
If the system works though you think you understand it because it works and so you think it's simpler than it actually is and so
Then you think that your model of it is correct
and then you think that your manipulation of the model which produces
The outcome you model will be the outcome that's actually produced in the world that doesn't work at all
I Thought about that an awful lot
thinking about how to remediate social systems because obviously they need
Careful attention and adjustment, and it struck me that the proper
strategy for implementing social change is to stay within your domain of competence and that
Requires humility which is a virtue that is never
Promoted in Modern culture. I would say it's it's a virtue that you can hardly even talk about
but humility means
You're probably not as smart as you think you are and you should be careful and so then the question might be well
Ok you should be careful, but perhaps you still want to do good you want to make some positive changes?
how can you be careful and do good and then I would say well you try not to step out the boundaries of your
competence and you start small and you
start with things that you actually could adjust that you actually do understand that you actually could fix I
Mentioned to you at one point that one of the things carl jung said was that
Modern men don't see God because they don't look low enough. It's a very interesting Phrase and
one of the things that I've been
Promoting I suppose
Online is the idea that
You should restrict your attempts to fix things
to what's
at hand
So there's probably things about you that you could fix right things that you know that aren't right?
Not anyone else's opinion your own opinion that aren't right you can fix them
Maybe there's some things that you could adjust in your family that gets hard you
Have to have your act together a lot before you can start to adjust your family because things can kick back on you really hard
And you think well it's hard to put yourself together. It's really hard to put your family together
Why the hell do you think you can put the world together?
right because obviously the world is more complicated than you and your family and so if you if you're stymied in your attempts
Even to set your own house in order which of course you are
Then you would think that what that would do would be to make you very very leery about
announcing your broad-scale plans for social revolution
Well, it's a peculiar thing because that isn't how it works because people are much more likely to announce their plans for Broad-scale social revolution
Than they are to try to set themselves straight or to set their family straight
And I think the reason for that is that as soon as they try to set themselves straight or their families the system immediately
kicks back at them right instantly whereas if they announced their plans for large-scale social revolution
the lag between the
announcement and the kickback is so long that. They don't recognize that
there's any error there and so you know you can get away with being wrong if if nothing falls on you for a while, and
so and it's also
An incitement to hubris because you can now see your your plans for large-scale social revolution and stand back
And you don't get hit by lightning and you think well
I might be right even though you're not you're seriously not right. I might be right and then you think well
How wonderful is that especially if you could do it without any real effort, and I really do think fundamentally I believe that
That's what the universities teach students now. That's what they teach them to do. I really believe that and I think it's absolutely appalling
And I think it's horribly dangerous
Because it's not that easy to fix things especially if you don't
especially if you're not committed to it and
I think you know if you're committed because what you try to do is you try to straighten out your own life first
and that's enough like there's a I think it's a statement in the new testament that it's I think it's in the new testament that it's
More difficult to rule yourself than to rule the city
And that's not a metaphor. It's like all of you. Who've made
announcements to yourself about
Changing your diet and going to the gym every January know perfectly well how difficult it is to regulate your own
impulses and to bring yourself under the control of some
What would you say?
well-structured and
ethical
attentive
structure of values
it's extraordinarily difficult and so people don't do it and instead they wander off, and I think they create towers of Babel and
the story indicates well those things collapse under their own weight and
everyone goes their own Direction I
Think I see that happening
with the LGBT community I
think because one of the things I've noticed it's very interesting because the community is in some sense, it's not a community but
That's a technical error, but it's it's composed of outsiders. Let's say and
what you notice across the decades is that the acronym list keeps growing and
I think that's because there's an infinite number of ways to be an outsider and so once you open the door
to the construction of a group that's characterized by
Failing to fit into the group then you immediately create a category that's infinitely
expandable and so I don't know how long the acronym list is now it depends on which acronym list you consult but I've seen
lists of 10 or more acronyms and one of the things that's happening is that
The Community is starting to fragment in
Its in its interior because there is no unity
once you put a sufficient plurality under the
sheltering
structure of a single umbrella say
the disunity starts to appear within and I think that's also uh
It's a manifestation of the same issue that this particular story is dealing with
So that ends. I would say the most archaic stories in the in the bible
There's something about the flood story and and also the tower of babel
I think they outline the two fundamental dangers that beset Mankind one is
the probability that
Blindness and sin will produce a natural catastrophe or entice one
That's something modern people are very aware of in principle right because we're all hyper concerned about environmental degradation and catastrophe and so
That's the continual
Reactivation of an archetypal idea in our in our unconscious minds that there's something about the way
we're living that's unsustainable and that will create a
catastrophe it's so interesting because people believe that firmly and deeply and
But they don't see the relationship between that and the archetypal stories because it's the same story
Overconsumption greed all of that is producing an unstable state and nature will rebel and take us down
You hear that every day in every newspaper and every TV station?
It's broadcast to you constantly so that idea is presented in in Genesis in the story of Noah and then the other
Warning that exists in the stories one is Beware of Natural Catastrophe
That's produced as a consequence of blindness and greed will say the other is
Beware of
social structures that overreach
Because they'll also produce fragmentation and disintegration, and so it's quite remarkable. I think that that
With at the close of the story of the tower of babel?
we've got both of
the permanent existential dangers that
present themselves to humanity
already identified
At the end of the story of Adam and eve. There's like a fall into history
Right so in one way history begins with the fall, but there's like a second fall
I think with the flood and the tower of Babel and
history and even more real sense begins now it begins with this story of Abraham and and it's
it's
We're no longer precisely in the realm of the purely mythical. That would be another way of thinking about it
We have identifiable person who's part of an identifiable tribe is doing identifiable things
We're in the realm of history and so history begins twice in the old testament I
suppose it begins again after moses as well, but
We've moved out of the domain of the purely mythical into the realm of history with with the emergence of the stories about abraham
This is from aldous huxley
So the first thing that that I want to talk about in
relationship to the abrahamic stories is this idea of the experience of God because
Abraham although quite identifiable as an actual individual is
Also, characterized by this peculiarity and the peculiarity is that God manifests himself to Abraham
Both as a voice and but also as a presence
The stories never describe exactly how god manifests himself except now and then he comes in the form of an angel
That's fairly concrete
But it's a funny thing that the author of or authors of the abrahamic story
seems to take
The idea that God would make an appearance
more or less for granted and so
It's very
I think the part of the reason that I've struggled so much with the abrahamic stories is because it's so hard to get a handle
on that and to understand what that might mean and
So I'm going to hit it from a bunch of different perspectives and let's see if we can
Come up with some
Understanding of it the first thing I'll do is tell you a story about a female
Neurologist whose name escapes me at the moment. She wrote a book called my stroke of insight
Jill Bolte I think is her name and
She was a harvard-trained
She was she had she had
medical training from Harvard in Neuropsychological function and knew a lot about hemispheric specialization
we talked a little bit about hemispheric specialization before one of the
Ways of conceptualizing the difference between the two hemispheres is that the left hemisphere?
Operates in known territory and the right hemisphere operates in unknown territory. That's one way of thinking about or the left hemisphere operates
in the orderly domain and the right hemisphere operates in the chaotic domain or the left hemisphere operates in the
Domain of detail and the right hemisphere operates in the domain of the large picture
It's something like that now people differ in their neurological wiring, so those are
Over generalizations, but that's okay
we live with that for the time being it's certainly not an
overgeneralization to point out that you do in fact have two hemispheres and that their structures differ and if the connections between them are cut
Which could happen for example if you had surgery for intractable epilepsy that each hemisphere would be capable of housing its own consciousness
That's been well documented by a neural neural neurologist in Gazzaniga
Who did and Sperry who did split brain experiments must be 30 years ago now?
so
And we know that the right in the left hemisphere are specialized for different
Functions the right hemisphere for example seems to be more involved in the generation of negative emotion and the left hemisphere more
Involved in the generation of positive emotion an approach so the right hemisphere stops you and the left hemisphere moves you forward
anyways
Jill
Bolte I hope I've got that right
had a stroke
and
Maintained consciousness during the stroke and analyzed it while it was happening and she was able
while it was happening to
hypothesize about what part of her brain was being destroyed and
what so she had a congenital blood vessel malformation and had an aneurysm and
It just about killed her
but she said that
It affected her left hemisphere
And she said that she experienced a sense of divine unity as a consequence of the stroke
because the left hemisphere function was disrupted and destroyed and so she became a right hemisphere dominant and
her experience of that was the dissolution of the specific ego into the
Absolute consciousness something like that now that's only a case study, and you don't want to make too much of case studies
But there is an overwhelming amount of evidence
that those two kinds of consciousness exist
one being
your consciousness of you as a
localized and specified being and the other being
this
capacity to experience
oceanic dissolution and the sense of the cosmos being one
Now why we have those capacities for different conscious
experiences
Is very difficult to understand. I mean part of me thinks that
Maybe we have a generic human brain
it's the brain of the species and
Allied with that we have a specific
individual brain and one is the left hemisphere and the other is the right hemisphere the left hemisphere being the
specific individual brain and usually it's on and working because you obviously have to take care of yourself as a
specific entity and not as a generalized
Cosmic phenomena, it's hard to dice celery when you're a generalized cosmic phenomena
Right so you have to be more pointed than that but but look let's make no mistake about it
The fact that those different states of consciousness exists is not
Disputable they can be elicited in all sorts of ways and so
I'm going to read you something that Aldous Huxley wrote about this back, I think, in 1956 this was after he
Started his experimentation with mescaline
The psychedelics were introduced into western culture in the 1950s in a whole bunch of different ways psilocybin mushrooms
LsD. I was discovered right at the end of World War two
Was discovered by accident actually?
laboratory Sandoz labs the guy who discovered it Albert Hofmann had spilled some on his hands you can absorb it through your skin and
He was biking home and had the world's first LSD trip which was somewhat of a shock to him and then to the entire world
Huxley who was a great literary figure, a real genius
experimented with mescaline in the late fifties and
He wrote a book called the doors of perception which had a huge impact on the emerging psychedelic culture both on
The East coast at Harvard and on the West coast with Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters the people who popularized LSD
That's all documented in a book called the electric Kool-Aid acid test; Which I would highly recommend
It's Tom Wolfe it's a brilliant book on the east coast it was timothy leary
I had timothy leary's old job at Harvard. So that was kind of cool. You know in a warped way
So I met people there who knew him
Who didn't think much of them also, but who did know him but
Huxley had this mescaline experience, and it transported him to this
alternative consciousness
And he said that during his mescaline experience that the entire world glowed from within like if there was an inner light
like a paradisal inner light and that everything was deeply meaningful and
Symbolically suggestive and overwhelming and beautiful and timeless so he had an experience of divine
Eternity I suppose is the most straightforward way to to put that and we know perfectly well that
the psychedelic drugs that all share the same chemical structure they interact with the brain chemical called Serotonin
Which is a very very fundamental?
Neurotransmitter they all have approximately the same
range of effects
Although those effects are very
There's a very large multitude of effects that sort of exist underneath that umbrella
Huxley was
staggered by his mescaline experience he he didn't really know what to make of it, and I think that that's
the common experience of people who have
exceptionally profound psychedelic experiences and I'll
Tell you some documentation about that in a moment, but he spent quite a long time
Trying to come to grips with what this might mean from an intellectual perspective and huxley had a great brain
I mean someone was going to wrestle with the problem like that. He was a good candidate
He must have had a verbal IQ of 180. I mean he's
his books are incredibly literate Incredible credible mastery of language and complexity of characterization and and
intellectual Discourse really remarkable
So this is what Huxley had to say after his mescaline experience he talked about heaven and hell
and he talked about that in reference to bad trips essentially because
it was known by that point that a Psychedelic experience could transport you to an
Ecstatic domain of Divine revelation
but could take you to the worst imaginable place as well huxley was very interested in why you would even have the capacity for
Experiences like that and which I think is a very good question and it's completely unanswered question
I mean, we don't know much about consciousness and we know even less about psychedelics
I would say they are an absolute mystery. I don't think we understand them in the least
Huxley did a good job of starting to at least map out the mysteries of the terrain he said like the earth of a hundred
Years ago our mind still has its darkest Africa's its unmapped Borneo's and Amazonian basin in
Relation to the Fauna of these regions. We are not yet zoologists
We are mere naturalist sand collectors of specimens the fact is unfortunate
But we have to accept it we have to make the best of it
However, lowly the work of the collector must be done before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification analysis experiment and theory
Making like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus the creatures inhabit these remoter regions of the mind
Are exceedingly improbable.
Nevertheless they exist they're facts of observation
And as such they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives
when psychiatrists started to study LSD that
was mostly in the late 50s and running forward from that they thought about
The drug as a psychedelic which was a chemical substance that would induce psychosis, but that turned out to not be true
not with the psychedelics because
schizophrenics were given LSD and
The schizophrenics reported that
while the experience experience was certainly
extraordinarily strange, it wasn't like being schizophrenic and
then it was found later that if you gave schizophrenics amphetamines that made them worse in fact you can induce a
Paranoid psychosis in a normal person by overdosing them with amphetamines
So whatever the hallucinogens are the psychedelics are doing
It's not the same thing as mania and it's not the same thing as schizophrenia not at all
so
So you can't just write the experience off as an induced psychosis, whatever it is
Independent of its utility or lack thereof it's not that
Now can be induced by drugs
Can be induced by deprivation right? I mean there are accounts throughout history of people
putting themselves in Extreme
Physiological situations in order to induce transformations of consciousness fasting is one of the routes to doing that
Dancing is another route
Isolation prolonged periods of isolation will also do it now you could say that exposing yourself to any of those in excess
produces a state that's
indistinguishable from illness and
That there's no reason to assume that the phenomena that are associated with illness have any
Utility Whatsoever although, it's interesting to me that
A Disrupted consciousness can Produce coherent experiences. It's not exactly what you expect
It was just an illness you know if you develop say a high fever
your experience
Isn't transcendent and coherent its fragmented and pathologized and and the difference
I think is quite distinct although
We don't only we don't have to only speculate about that because there's been enough experimental work done
Now with hallucinogens and psychedelics to indicate that
The notion that what they produce is something that's only akin to Pathology is wrong
because
It's not a matter of opinion at this point in the sequence of scientific and historical
Investigation in fact there was a large-scale study done
Ten Years ago? five years ago? of two hundred thousand people who had experimented with pSychedelics
And they were mentally and physically healthier than people who hadn't on virtually every parameter they examined in
fact the rate of
Flashbacks, you've heard of LSD flashbacks mostly a hypothetical phenomena
But the rate of self-reported flashbacks was higher among the non psychedelic users than among the psychedelic users
so that was very interesting was a huge study now it might be you could say that those who had experimented with
Psychedelics were prone to be healthier to begin with but he that still contradicts the Pathology argument
So it doesn't matter either way the Pathology argument is contradicted
now,
oh I did put that in it was Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
This is what she said about her stroke I
Remember that first day of the stroke with terrific bittersweetness in the absence of the normal functioning of my left
Orientation association area my perception of my physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air. I felt like a genie
Liberated from its bottle it's good metaphor
The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent
Euphoria the absence of Physical Boundary was one of glorious bliss
Recently this Dr. Roland Griffith I
met him once at a conference in San Francisco surprised surprised a
Conference on awe and this was just when he was embarking on his experiments with psilocybin which were the first experiments on
hallucinogens that were permitted by the
National Institute of Mental Health in some three four decades he had to be very careful to
Lay out the scientific protocols so that the ethics committees would approve the experiments and so that the federal funding agencies would
also allow the experiments to go through he started to experiment with
psilocybin and
He's found a number of and published a number of very interesting
Results one was that a single psilocybin trip
and I
specified trip because
Sometimes when people take psilocybin out the doses that griffith uses. They don't have a psychedelic experience
Most people who take the dose do but not everyone those who take the dose and don't have the mystical experience don't
Experience the consequences of taking the drug and the consequences can be quite profound
So one consequence is that if you have the mystical experience that's associated with psilocybin ingestion
You're liable to
Represent that to others and yourself as one of the two or three most experienced important experiences of your entire life
So that would be at the same level as the birth of your child or your marriage
let's say assuming that those were transcendent experiences, but that's
But that's how people describe them so that's that's very interesting in and of itself
then
the next thing that griffith another thing that griffith reported was that one year after a
Psilocybin dose a single psilocybin dose profound enough to induce a mystical experience
the trait
openness of the participants had increased one standard deviation
Which is a tremendous amount and so it looked like one dose produced a permanent neurological and psychological transformation now
You know I'm not saying that that's a good thing
I'm not saying that because I don't think that openness is a
Untroubled blessing, but it's certainly a testament to the unbelievable potency of the of the drugs
There's about a 10% chance by the way with psilocybin ingestion of a trip to hell
and so that's certainly something very much worth considering when you're thinking about the potential effects of this kind of
experience
so the the mystical experience produced by psilocybin is rated by people as the most profound among the most profound experience of their life as
life-Changing it produces permanent personality
transformations eighty-five percent success in smoking cessation with a single dose
Right that's another thing that griffiths demonstrated now that is mind boggling because there are chemical treatments for smoking cessation
bupropion is one it
Reduces craving to some degree, but its success rate is
Nowhere Near 85%
certainly not with a single dose and
so
We don't understand how it can be that that occurs, but it's nicely documented by griffiths team in this
Experiment he gave psilocybin to people who are dying of cancer
cancer patients often develop Chronic clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety
Previous studies suggest that psilocybin may decrease depression and anxiety in cancer patients aldous huxley took LSD on his deathbed by the way
so the idea that there was something about
psychedelic substances that could
Buffer people against the catastrophes of mortality is an idea. That's as old as experimentation with the drug itself
the effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life threatening diagnosis and symptoms of depression and/or anxiety
unsurprisingly
I don't really know if it's reasonable to describe the emotional state of people diagnosed with cancer of uncertain Prognosis or
Mortal significance as depression precisely
You know you know what I mean is that if you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have intractable
fatal cancer
The normative response is to be rather upset and anxious about that and so it
One of the things that bothers me about clinical psychiatry and clinical psychology is the automatic
Presupposition that even overwhelming states of negative emotion are properly categorized as depression
I don't think you're depressed when you get a cancer diagnosis. I don't think that's the right way to think about it
I think that you have a big problem
And it's not surprising that you're overwhelmed by negative emotion and to think about that as a psychiatric malfunction is a major error
but anyways
It's a side issue with regards to this study
the effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life threatening diagnosis and symptoms of depression
And/or anxiety I cannot imagine how they got this through an ethics committee. It's just
We're going to take people who have uncertain diagnosis of cancer that are potentially life-threatening, and we're going to give them psychedelics. It's like
But they did it they did it and I think it's a testament to griffiths stature as a researcher that
That that was allowable
This is a randomized double-blind crossover trial very carefully designed clinical investigation
people were assigned to the treatment group or the to the drug group or the non drug group randomly blindly and
Investigated the effects of the drug also with different doses which is another hallmark of a well-designed
Pharmacological study very low Placebo like dose 1 or 3 milligrams per 70 kilograms of body weight versus a high dose
22 or 30 milligrams per 70 kilograms of
psilocybin
chemical psilocybin administered in counterbalance sequence with five weeks between sessions and a six-month follow-up
instructions to participants and staff minimized the effects of expectancy participant staff and community observers rated
Participant Moods attitudes and behaviors throughout the study, that's also
The Hallmark of a well-designed study because they didn't rely on a single source of information for the outcome data right they got self reports
That's fine, but they had
Relatively objective observers also Gathered data at the same time
High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in Clinician and self related measures of depressed mood and anxiety
along with increases in quality of Life life meaning and Optimism and
decreases in death anxiety
That's interesting. It's a subtle and
Scientifically Sparse statement, but it's a very interesting one
it was the in
there's a there's an intimation of a causal relationship here increases in quality of Life life meaning and
decreases in death anxiety
I mean the intimation there is that one of the ways of decreasing your anxiety about death is to increase the
felt meaning in your life and the psilocybin
Dosages potentiate that but it's a good thing to know in a general manner if it happens to be a generalizable truth
right if you're terrified of mortality
terrified of vulnerability
there's always the possibility that the life path that you're following isn't rich enough to buffer you against the
negative
element of
Existence. It's a reasonable hypothesis and an optimistic one
I think although a difficult one that six-month follow-up
these changes were sustained with about 80% of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and
anxiety
Steven Ross commenting about this
He was a co-investigator said it is simply unprecedented in
Psychiatry that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results
Right which means we have no idea
Why this happens
participants attributed improvements in attitudes about life/self mood relationships and
spirituality to the High-dose experience with more than 80% endorsing
Moderately or greater increased well-being in life satisfaction
Community Observers showed corresponding changes
mystical types psilocybin experience on session day
Mediated the effect of psilocybin dose on therapeutic outcomes. What that means is that
well
When researchers were trying to look at a causal relationship between drug ingestion and the positive outcome
The causal relationship was drug ingestion mystical experience positive outcome it wasn't drug ingestion positive outcome there had to be the experience
Produced by the pharmaceutical agent in order for the pharmaceutical agent to have had its effect now. We don't again
We don't know why that is either?
Maybe some people needed a higher dose who knows because people vary tremendously in their sensitivity to pharmaceutical substances
Now why am I telling you all this well? I'm telling you for a variety of reasons one is the first is
Make no mistake about it
human beings have the capacity for forms of consciousness that are radically unlike our normative forms of consciousness and
the evidence that those alternative forms of consciousness are
purely
Pathological which is the simplest explanation right? You perturb the system it produces Pathology that's negative that is the simplest explanation
the Evidence for that is
weak at Best
Leaving out the bad trip issue which which is non-trivial
the empirical evidence as it accrues in fact seems to suggest that the consequence of mystical
positive mystical experiences associated with psychedelic intake is
overwhelmingly positive even in extreme situations, and you really can't find a more extreme situation than
uncertain Cancer diagnosis with
Concomitant and depression and anxiety like I mean that's not as bad as it gets
But it's kind of in the ballpark and so the fact that even under circumstances like that. There is the overwhelming
Probability that the experience would be positive because that's another thing you wouldn't expect you know
Even from some of the earlier earliest discussions about psychedelic use that were put forth by people
including Timothy Leary
Describing the importance of set right so that the early experimenters
noted that
if you had a psychedelic experience
and you were in a bad state or in a bad place that that was one of the precursors to a bad trip that the
negative emotion that you entered the
experience with could be magnified tremendously by the by the chemical substance and so that it was necessary to
be somewhere safe to be around people that you trust to be in a familiar environment to get all the
Variables that you couldn't control under control, but here is a situation where that isn't what's happening at all because people have this
cancer diagnosis of cancer diagnosis of unspecified outcome
And they still the vast majority of them had a positive experience and the positive experience experience had long lasting positive consequences
so
so the case that
the transcendent experience is not real
That's wrong
It's real. now, We don't know what that means because it actually challenges to some degree our concepts of what two dudes real
But it's certainly well within the realm of normative human experience
So it's part of the human capacity and you know there's been other neurological experiments too. There's
there's a researcher Canadian researcher if I remember correctly who invented something he called the God helmet and
It used Electromagnetic stimulation brain stimulation to induce mystical experiences now
I don't remember what part of the brain. He was shutting off or activating with that particular Gadget, but
And you know there's also. There's all sorts of other
indications of this sort of thing that have cropped up in other
domains of the Neurological literature for example
It's very common for people who are epileptic to have
religious experiences as
part of the prodrome to the actual seizure that was the case with dostoyevsky for example who had
Incredibly intense religious experiences that would culminate an epileptic seizure
and he said that they were of sufficient quality that he would give up his whole life to have had them and
the funny thing too is that
In my reading of dostoevsky at least is that I think that
epileptic seizures and the associated mystical experiences were part of what made him a
Transcendently Brilliant author
I don't think that he would have broken through into the domains of insight that he possessed without those strange neurological experiences
And it was certainly not the case that his epilepsy or the experiences that were associated with it
Produced what you might describe as an impairment in his cognitive functions quite the contrary at least that's how it looks to me
here's another
Here's another something worth considering
And I don't know how important it is but it might be really important it depends on how important
This is something that carl jung said so depends on how important jung is
now freud
Established the field of psychoanalysis and with it
investigation I would say
Rigorous investigation into the contents of the unconscious a modern psychologists and psychiatrists like to
What would you say? denigrate freud, but I think there's a reason for that
I think that freud's
Fundamental insights were so profound and so valuable that they got immediately absorbed into our culture and now they seem self-evident and so that all
That's left of freud is his errors
You know because we believed everything else. We believe all the profound things he discovered
We just take them for granted and so we don't believe the things that he said that weren't quite on the money
And that's all we credit with him with now
But he was certainly the first person who brought up the idea of the unconscious in a in a rigorous manner
And he was the first person to do a rigorous examination of dreams the interpretation of dreams is a great book
it's well worth reading and he was the first person to note that people were in some sense inhabited by
subpersonalities that had a certain degree of autonomy and and and independent life
Brilliant observation the cognitive psychologists haven't caught up with that at all yet
Jung was profoundly affected by freud jung was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and by freud those were his two main intellectual
Influences, I don't think one more than the other
He split with freud on the religious issue
That was what caused the disruption in their relationship
And I think it's an extremely interesting historical occurrence and it might be of profound significance
freud believed that the fundamental myths of the human being was the Oedipal myth, and the Eda pole myths
From a broader perspective is a failed hero story, so the Oedipal myth is the myth of a man who?
Develops who grows up, but then
accidentally
becomes too close to his mother sleeps with her. He doesn't know who she is and as a consequence blinds himself and there's a
There's a there's a warning about human development gone wrong in that story
and I think that freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well because
human beings have a very long period Of dependency and one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that
many People's problems are
Associated with their inability to break free of their family like they're consumed by the family drama right they can't get Beyond
What happened to them in their family?
They're stuck in the past. It's and that's
That's equivalent symbolically speaking you might say to the idea of being too close to your mother of
the Boundaries being
Improperly specified and that happens far more often than anyone would like to think
As I said freud thought it was a universal
but Jung
See he had a different idea and his idea was that it wasn't the failed hero story. That was the universal human myth
it was the successful hero story, and that's a big difference like it's seriously a big difference because
the successful Hero's story is
Remembering sleeping beauty you may remember this in the disney movie
The Evil queen traps the prince in a dungeon, and she's not going to let him out till he's old right
And so there's this comical scene where she's down in the dungeon. He's all in chains, and she's laughing at him
telling him what his future is going to be like it's quite evil and
you know she
Paints this wonderful picture of him being freed in like 80 years and hobbling out of the castle on his his horse
That's old it can barely stand up in him with Grey hair and you know she and she recites this story of his eventual
Triumphant departure from the castle as a old and decrepit man and she has a great laugh about it, and it's nice
You know it's a real punchy story. It's really something wonderful for children. That's story and
he gets free of the of
the
Shackles and the things that free em are three little female fairies?
It's the positive aspect of the feminine that frees him from the dungeon, so it's very interesting and very accurate from a psychological perspective
it's the negative element of the feminine that encapsulates him in the dungeon and suppose development of the feminine would freeze him and
and then he has a the queen the evil queen is not very happy when he
Escapes, you may remember that she stands on top of her castle tower and starts to spin off Cosmic Sparks
I mean, she's quite the creature
enveloped in flame, and then she turns into a dragon and she then the prince has to fight with her in order to
Make contact with sleeping beauty and and awaken her from her
comatose existence as her unconscious existence and
That's a brilliant, It's a brilliant representation of a successful hero myth. He
He doesn't end up
staying in an unholy relationship with his mother let's say he escapes and
then conquers the worst thing that can be imagined and
Is Noble by that and not as a consequence, He's able to wake the slumbering feminine from its coma and
That's a Jungian story
And that's the story that he juxtaposed against freud see freud thought of religious phenomena
As part of an occult tide that would be they would drown rational rationality
that's why freud was so dominant Lee anti-religious and
Jung thought no
It's not the case you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's something profound and
Central to the Hero myth and Jungian Clinical work
is essentially the awakening of the hero myth in the
analysand in the in the client or in the patient to
conceptualize yourself as that which can confront Chaos and triumph and that that's associated with an
ennobling of the of consciousness and the establishment of
proper positive relationships between male and female and
You know I'm a skeptical person
I'm a very very skeptical person and I've
Tried with every trick. I have to put a
Lever underneath Jung story and lift it up and and disrupt it and I I can't do it I
Think he was right and that freud was wrong. I mean I have great respect for freud
I think he got the program problem diagnosed very very nicely and in my clinical work I
See the phenomena that freud described emerged continually constantly that the best if you're interested in that
There's a documentary you should watch. I may have mentioned it before
I think it's the best documentary ever made certainly the best one
I've ever seen it's called crumb
And it's about an underground cartoonist Robert crumb who who is part of a hippie movement and although he hated hippies
He was part of the hippie movement in the 60s in San Francisco and started the entire underground comic
What? culture that manifested itself eventually in in
graphic novels, there's quite a
significant figure
from the perspective of popular art and a very very intelligent man and
Also, I would say a hero although a very bent and depraved and warped one
Someone very acutely aware of his own shadow and the documentary outlines his attempts to escape from his
absolutely dreadful mother and
The failure of his two brothers to do the same thing
one of whom
Ended up as a street beggar in San Francisco the other who drank furniture polish and died six months after the documentary was produced
It's an unbelievably shocking
documentary it's the only piece of
Film that I've ever seen that captures
Freudian Pathology I've never seen anything because you can't see it. Generally unless you're in a clinical
Situation unless you know the details of someone's lives the personal intimate details you cannot communicate it
but the
documentarist who made the film
Who's Robert zwigoff if I remember correctly was a friend of the crumbs and so he got access in a way that no one else?
Would have and they were also very forthright and forthcoming about their situation in general
I would highly recommend that it's it's a real punch if you want to know how a rapist thinks
Like if actually want to know because maybe you don't want to know in fact you probably don't want to know
Right because do you really want to know that?
Because the understand that means to put yourself in that position and to understand it if you really want to know how a serial sexual
Predator thinks and why if you watch crumb and you pay attention?
you'll know and
That's only a tiny bit of what the film has to offer. It's really quite remarkable
anyways
Jung split with freud on the issue of
Beautiful story as the fundamental myth of humankind and on the issue of the validity
of the religious Viewpoint and
Jung came down heavily on the side of the validity of the religious Viewpoint and he established that in a book called symbols of
Transformation which was written in 1914 and that's the book that broke that produced the break
permanent split with freud and that book I
Would say that books actually been written three times
it was written as symbols of four times written in symbols of transformation which jung
extensively revised when he was all and then it was rewritten in his innocence by a student of Jung's called
Erich Neumann who is also something someone I would really recommend Erich Neumann I think is Jung's greatest student and
He wrote two books. He wrote one called the origins and history of consciousness
Which is a description of the development of consciousness out of unconsciousness
Using the hero myth as a...
what would you say? as a as an interpretive Skeleton, so Neumann viewed the hero myth as
The dramatized story of the emergence of human consciousness out of the surrounding
Unconsciousness in which it was embedded the struggle for consciousness the struggle of consciousness upward towards the light like a lotus flower
Struggles up through the muck and and the water to to lay itself on the surface of the
Water and bloom and reveal the Buddha which is of course what the lotus flower does from the symbolic perspective?
for Neumann
The Hero's story was the story of the development success development of consciousness and the origins of consciousness
The origins and history of consciousness is a great book
interestingly
Camille Paglia wrote read
The origins and history of consciousness. She's one of the few
Mainstream intellectuals that I've ever encountered who read that and commented on it and she believed that it would be sufficient
antidote to postmodern denigration of literature, she thought it was that powerful of work and I
Believe that I I think it's a remarkable
Book carl jung wrote the foreword to that book and he said in the foreword that it was the book that he wished he would
Have written so sort of like Jung he. Wrote I don't remember how many volumes
dozens of very thick difficult volumes was like Neumann was able to
What? Distill those into a single
volume statement
And so I would also say if you're interested in Jung the best book to read is the origins and history of consciousness
It's the best intro into into the Jungian world seems very difficult to
very difficult to understand it requires a real shift of perspective in order to understand what he's talking about and
Neumann wrote another book called the great mother
Which is a little bit more specialized in some sense
but it's also extremely interesting because it flashes out the archetype of Chaos and
It's representation as feminine. It's a brilliant book as well, and
highly worth Highly worth reading both those books
anyways
Young was a very strange person and a visionary and and
So he that's kept him outside of
The academic realm almost entirely I mean I was constantly warned as an undergraduate, and then a graduate student and then a professor
against ever talking about jung in any way whatsoever
When I went on the job market when I was at McGill when I had graduated from McGill
I'd done my scientific research in alcoholism, and I had a fairly Lengthy publication record
That was pure empirical research and really neural
physiological research
into the pharmacology of alcoholism and I
established a reasonably solid
dossier of publications
but at the same time I was writing this book that became maps of meaning and sorry split my time and graduate student school between
these two endeavors one very
Specifically neurological and pharmacological and really biologically based on the other very
Abstract religious symbolic psychoanalytic
The complete opposite, but I could see that the two things
overlapped really nicely and there was a number of
Scientists at the time that were also drawing the same
conclusions the same
Relationship between the biology and the psychoanalysis jacques panksepp who wrote a book called effective neuroscience which is a great classic is
one of those people who who saw the
relationship between the Neurobiology of emotion and motivation and the psychoanalytic insights
Never became a mainstream view but I think it's too complex
I think that bridging the gap between the biology and and the symbolic is too much for people generally speaking
You know it was certainly virtually too much for me because I got quite ill when I was a graduate student I think
for a variety of reasons
I also like with glug party three nights a week, and so that probably had something to do with it, but
But working on those two things simultaneously was also rather exhausting now
Jung
Was a tremendously insightful clinician
And he was a strange person introverted visionary
High in introversion very very very very very high in openness like off-the-charts and also God only knows what his IQ was I mean
Every time I read you it's like reading Nietzsche
It's terrifying because you know he's so damn smart that he can think up
Answers to questions that you don't even it's not like you don't understand the answers they never conceptualized the damn questions
It's really something to read someone like that right who says well
Here's the mystery and you think wow I never thought of that as a mystery and here's the solution. It's like okay. That's that's
That's something you know and he could read Greek and he could read
He read all the ancient... He read a very large variety of ancient languages and was very familiar with the entire corpus of
astrological thought and of alchemical thought and of
classic literature and biblical stories, and I mean educated in a way that no one is educated now and
So he's very daunting person to encounter and terrifying absolutely terrifying his book ion
which is the second volume of
it's the second volume of Volume 9 which is the archetypes of the collective unconscious that damn book is just
Absolutely terrifying because jung is one of these visionaries who can see?
Way underneath the social structures and look at patterns that are developing across for in Jung's case across
Thousands of years and lays them out and so that's a really that's really something to to encounter ion is a terrifying book
anyways one
Question might be well because I read Jung and I think how the hell did he know these things how could he figure these things?
Out I can't understand how he could possibly know these things
Well, here's a partial answer
Jung
Was a visionary and so what that means as far as I can tell and like we could do a little quick survey here
How many of you think you think in words?
Put up your hands. Do you think in words?
Ok so it looks like what about pictures. How many of you think in pictures?
Ok so that's interesting how many of you think that's about half and half by the way probably a few err on the word side
How many of you think in pictures and words?
Ok and so alright, so it was Roughly 1/3 in each category
But that's also something that I really haven't encountered any research on
from the neuropsychological perspective, it's like
Well, do you think in pictures or do you think in words and and is that actually a reliable distinction?
I think I think in words
Most of the time, but I can think in pictures like if I'm trying to build something I can think in pictures very
Almost instantaneously, but it isn't my natural mode of thinking
I'm hyper verbal and so my natural mode of thinking is to think everything through in words
But I know my wife isn't like that. She thinks and images and then has to translate them into words and so
Anyways, you was very literate, and he could really think in words
but he could really think in images also talking to my wife quite extensively like her the
intensity of her visualization vastly exceeds mine
So for example if I close my eyes and then try to imagine the crowd in front of me
it's pretty low resolution and vague and not brilliantly colored and vivid you know it's it's it's
Like I'm seeing through a glass darkly. Let's say
I can't bring images to mind with that with spectacular clarity
but my wife is very good at that and you seem to be absolutely a
Genius at that kind of thinking and he had a lot of visionaries in his family history as well
So I don't know to what degree there's a hereditary component of that
And I don't know to what degree that's actually like a neurological specialization. I presume it would be associated with
the trait Openness
Distinguishes itself differentiates itself into interesting ideas and interest in aesthetics
And my suspicion are is that the people who are more interested in aesthetics are the visionary types the ones that think in images.
Anyways Jung could really think in images and he could imagine
beings and I had a client once who was a lucid dreamer and
How many of you had lucid dream? So you know you're dreaming? Well you well you're okay many
That's that phenomena wasn't really even even identified as a phenomena until the end of the 19th century
There was a book written about it that
freud tried to get his hands on but couldn't because it was a very rare book and then there was a
researcher about 30 years ago who started to study lucid dreams
But anyways, I had a client who was a lucid dreamer and one of the things she could do was
Ask her dream characters what
Information they were trying to convey and they would tell her.
So that was very interesting; and one of the consequences of that was I don't have this story completely right in my memory
But it's close enough
She was afraid of a very large number of things and in her dream. I think it was a gypsy
Standing by a wagon told her that if she was going to be successful in university
that she would have to visit the slaughterhouse and
That was something that was way beyond her capacity of tolerate she was a vegetarian
she couldn't stand the sight of raw meat even and so and
She was very oppressed and depressed and anxious because of the slaughterhouse nature of existence and so her dream
focused on that and
One of the consequences of that because the slaughterhouse was out of the question as a clinical intervention
I
Took her to an embalming
Right because because I asked her I asked her what what?
What might be equivalent to that and so she suggested that and you know exposure therapy is a hallmark of Clinical psychology?
right one of the things you do with people as a clinician is you find out what they're afraid of and
You gradually and voluntarily expose them to that and that cures them and that's associated with the hero myth, right?
It's exactly the same thing. It's like. There's a dragon
It's stopping you because there's lots of dragons most of them aren't stopping you. You can ignore them
You don't have to just go you know slash away it randomly
You're not supposed to be fighting dragons that aren't in your way, but if they are in your way
You can't ignore them and then you decompose them into sub dragons
And you have people you know take them on and as they take them on
They dispense with the dragon and they gain the power of the drag. It's like a video game
Actually a video game is like that. That's why people like the video games. Well, that's right, right?
There's a reason that you absorb power when you overcome things when you play a video game. It's not like that's
Intrinsic to the video game structure, that's an archetypal idea
Anyways, we went and saw an embalmbng which was a very interesting
experience and
and
quite quite useful for her because she knew what she could tolerate after that and it was a hell of a lot more than she
Thought she could tolerate and so that's very useful to know
Back to Jung
He's a visionary thinker now my client. I said she could lucid dream, and she could ask her dream
characters
What they wanted and what they were trying to communicate to her so that was pretty interesting
That happens spontaneously had nothing to do with me
I mean, I'm interested in dreams and many of my clients are great dreamers
Especially the creative ones because I think it's a hallmark of creativity to have vivid dreams and to be able to remember them
But that was a faculty that was natural to her
Jung
Had this other client at One time at one point
And she had a variety of fears and she had this dream that
She told me and she was walking down a beach
And on the side of the beach up a dune a small dune
there was this old man with a snake a big python, and there's a crowd around him and
she was walking by the
Snake handler and the snake in the crowd and she didn't want to have anything to do with them
he was sort of showing people the snake and
She told me that dream, and I thought well. You know you probably need to go see that snake
and so I
Relaxed hers quasi hypnotic technique, and it's very straightforward
Hypnosis is generally nothing but
pronounced relaxation well you have to be susceptible to hypnosis to actually fall into a hypnotic trance as a
Consequence of being relaxed I just relaxed her
I had her breathe deeply and pay attention to different parts of her body and just relax her muscles
One by one essentially so that she could concentrate and then I told her we play with the dream a little bit
It's a Jungian technique said well, so call the dream image to mind which she could do quite well said okay
So let's let's explore it. It's like pretend. It's like pretend play
You know if you're a kid in your pretend playing you don't exactly direct the game right you you play the game?
So it's partly your direction obviously because you're the player
But the thing also happens spontaneously
Out of its own accord and you can think about that as a dialogue between the conscious mind in the unconscious mind in some sense
It's a developmental dialogue. It's not a fun game. If you just direct it. It's only a fun game if
you're inviting and something is well as a consequence the same thing that happens when you're
You're engaged in some kind of artistic or literary production if it's all top down
You know if you're forcing it then it's Propaganda
It's empty what you want to sort of put yourself in a receptive state of mind in an imaginative state of mind
And it's sort of half you in half
Nature itself
Manifesting itself in your creative imagination, and that was the sort of state that we were striving for, and she, I
Asked her when she was in relaxed. I said well, what do you think about the snake handler and she said well?
He's probably a Charlatan and he's just their turn to impress the crowd and to show off and she was afraid to go up there
Because she thought people would push her towards the snake and she'd have to touch it
And so there was a fear of the crowd issue going on there too, and I said well, just look go up there
About do it under these conditions. Is that you know if people get pushy
What are you going to tell them and so we figured out something said look?
Just tell them that
You know you want to
look at the snake at your own pace and that you don't need any encouragement or help and it would be good if you
Were just left alone so that enabled her to defend yourself
so she was afraid that the crowd would push her to do something that
She didn't want to do that was part of the theme of the dream
So anyway
she
Eventually climbed the dune in her imagination
And went into the crowd and the crowd turned out to be quite welcoming and not hostile and not pushy
Which isn't what you'd expect right because the you'd think the crowd would have,
Reacted in accordance with her fears since it was her fantasy, but that's the thing about fantasies. They have this autonomous quality
But the crowd was welcoming and not hostile and it turned out that the snake handler wasn't a Charlatan
He was just an old guy who had this snake and he was out there
just showing it to people because he thought it was a cool thing and and
And that maybe it was good for people to come and look at a snake and so she got close enough to the snake to
touch it and so
So I'm telling you that because I want you to understand a bit more about what jung was trying to do and so
He wrote these books
notebooks that haven't been published yet called the black books and the black books are the
documentation of his experiments with his imagination
and
What he would do is he dream like a child daydreams. He regained that faculty although
I think with Jung it was a faculty that had never really disappeared and
he had figures of imagination that came to him that he could speak with and
He spoke with these figures of imagination and documented that over a very long period of time, and that was originally that was
eventually
Distilled into a book called the red book which was published about three or four years ago
and it was a book that jung regarded as the
Central source from which all his inspiration
emerged
it was sort of the way it looks to me is that
we embody a lot of information in our action right and our action has
Developed as a consequence of imitating other people and not only the people the people around us
But of course the people around us imitated the people who came before them and those people imitated the people who came before them
And so on so far back that it's as far back as you can go and so you embody these patterns of behavior that are
Extremely informative that you don't understand that are a consequence of collective imitation across the centuries and so then those
patterns can become manifest as figures of the imagination and those figures of
imagination are the distillation of patterns of behavior and
so as
The distillation of patterns of behavior they have content and it's not you that content. It's you could even think about it as content
That's evolves although
It's culturally transmitted this
content that's evolved and so these figures of the imagination can reveal the structure of reality to you and
That's what happened with jung, and that's what he described in the red book, and that was what permeated his
psychology, A
Psychology that was based on the presupposition
That the fundamental archetypal structures of religious belief were not
pathological not deceitful not
Protective in some delusional sense against the fear of death, but quite the contrary the very stories that in
enabled us to move forward as
confident human beings in the face of Chaos itself
And it's conceivable. I think perhaps probable
That nothing more important
Conceptually happened in the 20th century than that
Because it was the first time
post enlightenment
that a rapprochement between
the intellect and the underlying
religious archetypal sub structure
Occurred you have in the capacious intellect of young the same thing happened to some degree with Piaget
the religious domain and the factual domain were brought back together and
the fact of Jung's enduring and
Increasing popularity and influence, I would say is a direct consequence of that now
some of his work was spun off into the new age and
And the new age is a very optimistic and naive movement
It's predicated on the idea that you can do nothing say, but follow your bliss and that will take you
Ever higher to enlightenment, and that's not the Jungian idea at all
the Jungian idea is that
What you most need will be found where you least want to look
So there's this story king arthur
There's this story of king arthur that they're all in a round table right king arthur and his knights. They're all equals. They're all
superordinate, but they're all equals and they go off to look for the holy Grail and
The holy Grail is the container of the redemptive substance whatever that is
It might be the cup that christ used at the last supper might be
Chalice that was used to capture his blood on the cross right when he was pierced by a sword the stories differ
But that's the holy grail and the holy grail is lost
that's the redemptive substance and the knights of king arthur go off to search for the holy Grail and
But they don't know where to look
So where do you look when you don't know where to look for something you need?
desperately
But have lost
well each of the knights goes into the forest at the point of the Darkest to him and
That's Jungian psychoanalysis in a nutshell
It's like that which you fear and avoid that's what you hold in contempt that which disgusts you and that you avoid
That's the Gateway to what you need to know
There's nothing new age about that. That's for sure
Now Jung when he started this endeavor, He started with this this is part of the notebooks from the black book he said
He wrote my soul
For my soul. Where are you? Do you hear me? I speak I call you are you there?
I've returned I'm
Here again, I've Shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I've come to you. I am with you
After long years of long wandering I have come to you again
for the Jungians the
Hero's journey is a journey within and and I think that that's probably
the
Bias of introverts to believe that the Hero's journey isn't only an inward Journey
I think that it can be an outward journey too because I don't think it matters where you confront the unknown whether it's within or
Without what matters is whether or not you confront the unknown. That's what matters
But he found that what he had ignored
Was an undiscovered part of himself so that might be something that was equivalent to huxley's
Notion that there were tremendous
Tremendous Potential breath in the realm of human Conscious experience and Huxley was influenced to some degree by Jung
now Jung knew of Huxley's experiments and had commented on psychedelic use and he said something like
Beware of wisdom you did not earn and
Jung was very good at stating things very profoundly very simply and that's a very intelligent piece of advice Beware of
Wisdom you did not earn he wrote a paper
If you're interested in this sort of thing he wrote a paper be called the relations between the ego and the unconscious
Which is an absolute masterwork, but completely incomprehensible unless you know what it unless you know what it's about
And what it's about is the danger of what he called ego inflation
And so one of the things that can happen as a consequence of a revelatory experience is
that the
Division between the individual ego and and and what would you call it?
So hard to come up with a word that isn't
somehow naive or
or cliched
To erase the relationship the boundary between the specific consciousness of the ego and the more generalized
consciousness
And more generalized consciousness as such is
A dangerous thing to do because you can start to equate yourself your specific self with that more generalized
consciousness as such and Jung thought about that is it something akin to a psychotic inflation and
the paper relations between the ego and the unconscious is a document that tells you how to avoid that if you're
playing in this kind of realm and
one of the
Injunctions is to keep your feet on the ground
He thought that was what partly what happened to Nietzsche was that Nietzsche wasn't grounded enough in life
He wasn't grounded enough in Day-To-day rituals and routines and the mundane now you could debate whether or not
That's the case whether or not that's a reasonable argument, but that was still what Jung believed
Okay, so why am I telling you all this?
I'll finish with this from December 1913 onward jung carried on in the same procedure
Deliberately evoke a fantasy in a waking state
And then entering into it as a drama these fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form in
Retrospect he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness
the example of dreams indicated the
existence of background activity
And he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging just as one does when taking mescaline. These journals are jung's contemporary?
Contemporaneous clinical ledger to his most difficult experiment or what later describes as a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world?
You'll believe that we were dreaming all the time
but that during waking life the pressure of external images was such that the
Unconscious fantasy imagery was or that the fantasy imagery was of insufficient magnitude to be conscious
But that we were always situated in a dream in relationship to the world
so
When we started talking about
The creation of the universe at the beginning of the genesis stories, I spent quite a long time setting the stage for the stories because
There's no point in having a conversation about the God who gives rise to being
Unless you have some sense of what that might conceivably mean to the modern mind, and I felt the same way about
the Abrahamic stories is I couldn't get a handle on them
Until I could understand and articulate more clearly
What it might mean?
how a modern person might understand a
direct experience of God in the first question would be
is such a thing possible and the answer to that seems to be a
Qualified yes, first of all it's a universal human experience. That's a very strange thing
It's not something that people have made up as freud might have it as a defense against death. It's not a tenable hypothesis
it's a realm of potential experience now that experience doesn't necessarily have to have the
Judeo-Christian content that we've been discussing quite the contrary there are
Manifestations of this these alternative forms of consciousness all over the world that take on their own peculiar forms although
They're patterned to some degree
that's like the hero myth for example of myth of the fight against the dragon seems to be unbelievably widespread and
So it's not as if it's random
Sorry, I should just see what time it is here
But there's not much point in having a discussion about what happens to abraham
Unless you can conceptualize it in terms that are amenable to modern skeptical consciousness
So we can establish the proposition that
Mystical experience is not only possible It's quite common
and It's inducible in a variety of ways and the manner in which it's inducible is reliable and there's no evidence as well that it's pathological
In fact there's a fair bit of evidence that the patterns of behavior that are associated with the mystical experience are
core elements of proper Human adaptation in the world
The abrahamic stories open up with a manifest God now I'm going to read you some things from Friedman who wrote the disappearance of God
He was trying to look at the underlying structure of the stories now. You know Friedman noted that
The books in the old testament were written by a lot of different people
At very different times and then they were sequenced by other people for reasons that we don't exactly understand
But there's still an underlying narrative
There's multiple underlying narrative unities despite the fact of that rather arbitrary sequencing, and that's a strange thing
You know I guess you could say
If you had a collection of ancient books and you were trying to put them together you'd try to put them together in some way
that made sense
right and it wouldn't make sense unless you stumbled across some kind of underlying narrative that allowed you to order them and
So it's not entirely surprising that that they're ordered in a manner that's comprehensible, but
Friedman's comments on the Underlying narrative structure
part of it was
well, we'll go through this the books of the old testament were composed by a great many authors according to both traditional religious views in
Modern Critical scholarship the phenomenon of the diminishing apparent presence of God across so many stories
Through so many books by so many authors spread over so many centuries is
Consistent enough to be striking impressive and ultimately mysterious
But the hiding of the divine face is only half the story
There's another development also extending across the course of the entire narrative of the Hebrew Bible
which we must see before we can appreciate the full force of this phenomena and
before we can pose a solution to the mystery of this of how this happened gradually from
Genesis to Ezra and Esther there is a transition from Divine to human responsibility for life on Earth
the story begins in Genesis with God in complete control of the creation
But by the end humans have arrived at a stage at which in all apparent ways they have responsibility for the fate of the world
the first two human beings
Adam and Eve. Take little responsibility themselves they do not design or build anything when they're embarrassed over there nudity
They do not make clothes they cover themselves with leaves. It's God who makes their first clothing for them
Noah
By no means a fully developed personality Noah is not an everyman either broadly speaking
He reflects a step Beyond Adam and eve in human character and responsibility
Abraham
Beyond the counts of Divine commands that abraham does carry out the narrative also includes a variety of stories in Which abraham
Acts on his own initiative he divides land with his nephew lot
He battles kings he takes concubines he argues with his wife Sarah on two occasions
he tells kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife and
He arranges in son's marriage in the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness
There are in the case of Abraham the stories of man's life
The Abraham section thus develops the personality and character of a man a man
To a new degree in biblical narrative while picturing in him a new degree of responsibility it is not just that Abraham is kind lured
Kinder gentler More Intrepid more ethical or a better debater than his ancestor, Noah?
Rather both the Noah and the Abraham stories are pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the deity
Before the story is over humans will become a great deal stronger and bolder than abraham
I don't know what that means you know
see
It isn't it is certainly the case that
the individual exists in the Modern world the differentiated
Self-Aware self conscious individual and it's certainly the case that that wasn't the case at some point in the past and
So it's the case that there's been a development
I don't know if you could call it a progression
But a development of the autonomous individual over some span of historical time now
We don't know how long that's been but my suspicions are it hasn't been that long
I mean,
I read once
about a neolithic ceremony that involved the particular placement of a bear skull in a cave, and then I read that and
They had found these placements in caves that were at least 25,000 years old
And then I read that they found caves in Japan among the Ainu
who were
the indigenous inhabitants of Japanese territory and Rather Archaic people who
Had the same ceremony with the bear and that put the skull in the same orientation
And place in caves and that that tradition remained unbroken for about 25,000 years
And you think:
Well is it possible for an oral or ritual tradition to remain unbroken for?
Spans of tens of thousands of years and the answer to that is not only is it possible. It's actually the norm
because like
One Chimpanzee is like the next chimpanzee right in the in the progression in the biological
Progression if you took a chimpanzee troop now, and he went back 25,000 years and you looked at a chimpanzee troop
It'd be the same thing. There's no historical progression
That's how you can tell the chimps really don't have culture
Because it's bigger it could even accrete one one thousandth of a percent of culture transmissible culture per generation
It wouldn't take more than about a million years before
They'd have a whole civilization
And they don't they're the same as they were and so the continuity the stability and unchanging nature of the species
Essentially speaking is the rule that the variant is us
It's like what the hell happened after the last ice age
fifteen thousand years ago
We went from Tribal
Uniform stable to whatever the hell. We are now it's this transition from
Generic to specific, it's something like that, and I can't help but think that that's reflective in this text
and it has something to do with this transition of consciousness from
From what from possession by the Generic divine to dominance by the specific individual?
It's something like that. Is that a neurological transformation?
is that what this is a record of being that we don't know one of the things young said about God because
Humans relationship with God as an object of belief is very complex
He in his technical writing
He always talks about the image of God he never talks about God he talks about the image of God
He said that the image of God dwells within that's not the same thing as God dwelling within right we could mean all of these
Capacities that we have for transcended consciousness could be a byproduct of biological evolution they could have no reflection
They could have no relationship whatsoever to an actual transcendent reality
There's no way of telling the transcendent reality seems to manifest itself as an element of experience
But that doesn't mean that it has in reality outside of the subjective
even if it's even if it exists as it is it clearly does but
Friedman suggests that what's happening in the biblical narrative is the sequential emergence of the individual as a redemptive?
Force and
that the old testament documents that
implicitly unconsciously as a consequence of
Descriptive fantasy and that that's what's going on in the book and that
so the cosmos is under the control of
Generic Deity to begin with something like that and then that control shifts to
localized identifiable
increasingly personal and detailed individuals
you see that in Noah, and then you see the neighbor ham and then you Moses and
Then there's this working out of what it would mean to be a fully developed individual, and that's what these stories. They're...
They're like prototype, they're attempts to...
To bring about the proper mode of being right and so Abraham is a is a manifestation about because he enters into a covenant with
God he's selected by God or enters into a partnership with God. It's not exactly obvious. God
provides him with forward motion and intuition and
Leads them towards a successful mode of being and it's complex successful mode of being cuz Abraham is a very complex life
There's plenty of ups and downs right it's it's not
unbroken
purity of being
Towards a divine and abraham lies and cheats and deceives and does all sorts of things that that a real person would do and
And moses for example kills someone and so these people that the biblical people are very
Genuine individuals, but they're given with all their faults right with all their sins with all their deceit
They're still put forth as potential modes of proper models of potential
proper being in the world and the entire corpus of the
Bible seems to be nothing but an attempt to keep throwing up variants of the
Personality trying to experiment to find out what personality works in the world
of course from a Christian perspective that culminates in the figure of christ as the redemptive word and that's
associated as we've already talked about with the force that brought order out of Chaos at the beginning of time and
so
well, that's my attempt to
provide proper context for the understanding of the abrahamic stories
And so hopefully with that context we can move forward
being able to
swallow the camel so to speak of the initial presence of God in the stories and
So we'll return to all of that next week
Let's wait one second. Okay till people
Have an opportunity to leave
I would very much like to ask the people who are asking the questions
To take a few seconds before they ask the question and make sure that the mic is positioned properly
So that everyone can hear you because people keep writing and complaining that while they're very happy with the questions
And I would say the questions have been a very high caliber so far, but they're not very happy that they can't hear them
So I know that you know you're obviously nervous and in a hurry when you want to ask you a question
but take a second or two to
Set the mic up properly and make sure that everyone can hear you and so
Have a way at it.
"Hello Dr. Peterson"
Hey, there we go
"Tonight, I'd like to ask you about two different psychological disorders the first being Borderline personality disorder
so two lectures ago
Somebody asks you about it, and you gave a very sparse answer
I can't remember exactly what you said, but it seemed like it was uh
It would there was too much complexity to just answer it right there and then and then somebody else also acts
Asked you about the same disorder in
your patreon livestream recently and when they when they asked you that you kind of you kind of Stopped for a moment and
Something I don't know something kind of flicked on in your head
It seemed like and you and you thought for a couple seconds
And then you said you know what I don't think
That I can answer that right now because just - it's just too bloody complex, and I was wondering just like
Many young men have gravitated towards your lectures. Do you think that there's something about this particular disorder that
There's something about people with this particular disorder that might gravitate to your insights and your lectures"
Okay, okay, so now I would say probably no to the second one, but I could comment more about Borderline personality disorder
I think I have enough mental energy to do that tonight, so
technically speaking
It's often considered the female variant of antisocial personality disorder
So it's it's it's it's classified
or it's classified in the domain of externalizing disorders acting out disorders and
I think what happens,
We don't understand Borderline personality disorder very well, and it's characterized by
Tremendous impulsivity
Radical confusion of identity
and then this pattern of idealization of
people with whom the
person afflicted with the disorder is
Associating with radical idealization of those people and then radical devaluation of them
and then there's another theme that sort of weaves along with it, which is
the proclivity of
people with Borderline personality disorder to presume that they will be abandoned and
then to act in a manner that makes such abandonment virtually certain and
So it's a very complicated
disorder, but that I
Think gets at the Crux of it
One of the things that's interesting about people with Borderline personality disorder in my experience. Is that they're often
quite intelligent and
You you see in the person with Borderline personality
Disorder something like the waste or the squandering of tremendous potential
they seem capable of
thinking through the Nature of their problems and
analyzing it and discussing it but not capable whatsoever of implementing any solutions and
Technically, there's no relationship between IQ and conscientiousness
It's very weird
because if you read the neuropsychological literature and you
Read about the functions of the prefrontal Cortex. They're usually conceptualized in intellectual terms and
they're associated with planning and strategizing and so forth and
That's what conscientiousness is is planning and strategizing and implementation?
But the correlation between IQ and conscientiousness is zero and so as the correlation between working memory and conscientiousness
zero and Zero
Is a very low correlation right? I mean really it's hard to find things in psychology that are correlated at zero
Things tend to be correlated to some degree. They tend to be interrelated
the Borderline seems to be able to strategize and to abstract but not to be able to implement and
And so this the intellect per se seems to be functional
But it's not embodied in action
It's very so it can be
frustrating to be associated with someone who has borderline personality disorder because
They can tell you what the problem is and even tell you what the solution might be but there's no implementation
So maybe something went wrong developmentally
We don't know exactly how these sorts of things come about the other thing that seems to be characteristic of Borderline people with Borderline personality
disorder is that they they remind me very much of people who are 2 years old and
in some Manner like
people with Borderline personality
Disorder can have temper tantrums in fact they often do and we know now and then you see a temper tantrum
And they're usually thrown by two-year-olds right most people go out of temper tantrums by the time they're about three
They're very rare at four it. Which is a good thing because if they're still there at four that is not a good diagnostic predictor
that's a actually good diagnostic predictor, but it's not the kind that you want and
You know it's funny the way that we respond to two-year-old temper tantrums because the two-Year-old will throw themselves on the ground
beat their hands and their legs on the floor and scream and yell and turn red or even blue
I saw a child once who was capable of holding his breath during a temper tantrum until he turned blue
Which was really an impressive feat you should try that right? It's really hard is you really have to work at it and
You see that in adult borderlines. They'll have temper tantrums, and the funny thing is when a two-year-old does it it's like
It's you know, it's little
off-putting
but when an adult does it it's
Completely bloody terrifying and it happens very frequently with borderlines, and so I would also say to some degree
they didn't get properly socialized between that critical period Of development between two and four and you
See the same thing with adult males who grow up to the anti-social
Because a large proportion of adult males who grow up to be antisocial are aggressive as children as two-year-Olds
So there's a small proportion of two-Year-olds who are quite aggressive
They'll kick and hit and bite and steal if you put them with other two-year-olds it's about five percent of the of the Male's
Smaller fraction of the females, but most of them are socialized by the time, they're four
but there's a small percentage who aren't and they tend to stay antisocial and they tend to turn into long term offenders and
then attend the devel the critical period for socialization development seems to be between two and four and it seems to be mediated by
pretend play and Rough-and-Tumble play and those sorts of mechanisms, and if it isn't instantiated by the age of four
It doesn't happen, and it doesn't look like it's addressable now there are
dialectic behavioural therapies that have been developed for people with borderline personality disorder, and they're purported to be successful, but
"Okay, thank you. If I may so the second
Psychological disorder I want to ask you about is psychopathy
So you've mentioned that
Psychopaths tend to switch from dominance Hierarchy to dominance Hierarchy because people get tired of their shenanigans. They have to move on to fresh people
and
Psychopaths also tend to be very low in conscientiousness, and you said that when you see some of these protesters
at your speeches
some of the men in particular,
your
Clinical intuition tells you that there's something seriously pathological about them and I was wondering if you would suspect
That some of these men might be
Psychopathic as..." well some of them likely are but I don't know if a higher proportion of the ones who show up at
Protests and sort of creep me out
Or I don't know if there's a higher proportion of people like that at the protests or not
I mean
I suspect in general that regardless of the protest the proportion of people who have personality disorders among
Protesters is higher than the proportion of people who have personality disorders in the general
Population because you just expect that you just expect that kind of acting out behavior. I'm not believe me
I'm not saying that all protest is associated with personality disorder. I'm not saying that at all
There's plenty of reason for protest
But some of the reason for protests are
Credible reasons and some of them aren't credible reasons that -- "I was just thinking that like the social justice
Hierarchy so to speak would be one of the last that these
Confusing--", that's that's that's a different issue. You know there are
There are analysis of the dangers of agreeableness, so agreeable
This is a personality trait that underlies the radical
Egalitarian ethos because agreeable people want everything to be shared equally and it's a good
I think it's a good ethos for a small group for a family because family is kind of a communist system in some sense
Right it's like you want the food to be divided up equally among the children
clearly and you want all the children sort of regardless of their
Inherent abilities to have the same opportunities and perhaps even the same outcomes
So I think agreeableness which is associated at least in part with maternal
Maternal the Maternal Instinct let's say maternal patterns of Behavior. I think it's
It's a good
first Pass
Motivational approximation to a localized familial ethic I think it's a catastrophe at larger scales
I don't think it scales at all. I actually think that's why we evolved conscientiousness
Because conscientiousness is the principle that allows larger scale organizations to exist agreeableness won't do it
now
Conscientiousness is a mystery right we don't have a neurological model
We don't have a conceptual model
We don't have an animal model. We don't have a pharmacological model, and we really only have one way of assessing it which is
self and other reports of personality proclivity
so
anyways
The problem with agreeableness. This has been modeled a game theorist is that a
Population of cooperative people can be dominated by a single shark
So agreeable this is insufficient as a principle because it opens itself up to
you call that manipulation and
"infiltration?"
"I thought that was part of.. [unintelligible]"
Manipulation let's let's leave it at that to manipulation and and and and exploitation. That's the other thing
exploitation
so
"Thank you"
"Hi, Dr. Peterson. I had one quick comment and a question so my comment was about your idea of but
Subpersonalities as one-eyed monsters now. There's the idea of multiple personality or split personality disorder
It's controversial as to whether or not it exists
But there's some research recent research that suggests that you may actually have multiple personalities
That use different parts of the brain so they have differential access to the hippocampus. They have their own memories
They can
they use the brain differently, but that seems to be an exaggeration of sub personalities
Which is quite interesting.
The question I had was about
So you talked about Jung and how
You should confront that which you don't want to confront the most
so you're most afraid or disgusted by that you've the most resistance to arm, so but we were talking about psychedelics and
in the experience of hell, so
at least some of the people I've talked to they describe negative trips as
an experience of a
constant fear prolonged fear and
some of the most
Dramatic and personalized fear that they've ever experienced; so shouldn't negative on
psychedelic trips
Elicit the kind of concentration that Jung thought you should engage them?" Could be.
Could could well be you know it
It's conceivable that...
I read this strange book once that
made the claim that what was in the ark of the covenant was a mixture that was made from
Amanita Muscaria mushrooms
And that's not as far-fetched as you might think
Because there's a mycologist an amateur mycologist named Gordon Wasson
who
Established, credibly, the notion that it was Amanita Muscaria
potions that was the soma of the Rig veda and
so it's a strange idea but
it's not an idea that's completely outside of the realm of possibility and
the Amanita
Muscaria is the fly agaric in the red mushroom with white dots, and it's used in shamanic rituals in Cross Asia
and
It's apparently not toxic in its dried form although that is not a recommendation
You know this is serious serious and dangerous
speculation and material
One of the things that the priests had to do
before they commune with what was ever in the ark of the covenant was purify themselves and
So one possibility is that?
the bad
psychedelic experience is a
Involuntary
Confrontation with what you would describe as the shadow
It's like so
Beware of
experimenting with
substances that produce divine revelations if you're in a serious state of disorder
And I do think that is what happens to people is that they encounter?
Everything about them that's chaotic and out of place.
And some people get trapped in that and they can't get beyond it and that's because there's so much of it
and so
But we don't know enough to know
so
"Citizen Peterson, you son of a bitch
How are you?" I'm not too bad you got a question?
"That's the question. No I've got a real question. I got a great question you're going to like this one, okay?
It's about inspiration because you talk about inspiration quite a bit in this lecture series and also I wanted to point out
you have a I guess a
45-minute Armchair discussion, which you have a video of one paragraph of Nietzsche's Beyond good and evil
You posted and it seems like you're awestruck at the structure and the choices and I guess
the ideas contained in various layers of this paragraph
And you're inspired and that inspires you to I guess do your work that you do..?
I encountered, I guess a similar
Phenomenon here with one sentence written by the great Joseph Cardinal ratzinger and
I mean this one sentence answers the question why do people search for God and if you could read it out and then
Deconstruct it. It's on sentence
I've copied the original pages
It's at the end of page 105 if you want to read it from the book or I just--" that's 'the question that
human existence not only poses
but itself is the in conclusiveness inherent in it the bounds it comes up against and that yet yearn for the
Unbounded more or less in the sense of Nietzsche's assertion that all pleasures yearns for eternity
It experiences itself as a moment
This simultaneity of being limited and of yearning for the unbounded and open has always prevented man from resting in himself
Made him sense that he is not
Self-sufficient, but only comes to himself by going outside himself and moving toward the entirely other and infinitely greater'
Well, it's a hell of a sentence
"Like when I read that sentence. I decided I wanted to write like Joseph Cardinal ratzinger
I had a very similar experience when I watched the Joe Rogan podcast
877 I said I want to speak like Jordan Peterson
That's what I wanted to do" so I had this...
I had this discussion with a patreon supporter this week a young guy
from Australia and
He said something very interesting that's related to this and it's a bit. It's something that's very profound. I said I think
There's this idea in Christianity that we've discussed briefly that the judge and the redeemer are the same figure now
You know in the book of revelation you may know this and you may not
Christ comes back as a
Judge he has a sword coming out.. it's a revelatory vision. Not that that book it's a very strange
It's the last thing you'd expect conservative Christians to believe and believe me and such a visionary
hallucination the book of revelation
but christ comes back with a sword coming out of his mouth and he comes back as a judge and he
Divides the damned from the redeemed and most are damned and some are redeemed
It's very very harsh Jung believed that the figure of christ in the gospels was too agreeable
To merciful to tilted towards mercy and that that called out for a counter
position and that the counter position of judgment very interesting hypothesis
But then but then there's this this melding of the two ideas that the judge and the redeemer are the same thing
Okay
now
This young man told me that his life lacked
Purpose and direction and meaning and that he was nihilistic until he started he read "zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance"
Which is a book I actually like quite a bit
I've read it three times at different decades of my life and one of the things that's very interesting about that book is that it's
an examination of the idea of quality of the idea that there are
Qualitative distinctions between things and that we have an instinct to make qualitative distinctions and so a qualitative distinction is
Simply this is better than that which is a judgment
Okay, now what ratzinger is
hypothesizing is that
The person in enough you know how you the idea of the modern idea is you're supposed to accept yourself
I think that's an insane idea by the way really I think I can't think of a more nihilistic idea than that you're already ok
It's like no
You're not and the reason you're not is could you could be way more?
Than you are so what do you want to be you want to be ok as you are or do you want to strive
towards what's better? and
This young man this australian
he said that the reason that 'zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' had such a
Impact on him was because he wasn't happy with his current mode of being right he didn't
Consider the Manner in which he conducted himself
sufficient and the fact that
The author of Zen and, it was Persik laid out the notion that you could make qualitative distinctions,
And there really was a difference between good things and bad things or great things and evil things, it gives you direction
it gives you gives you the possibility of moving upward and
Ratzinger is pointing out at least to some degree that
Human beings are insufficient in and of themselves and need the movement upward and so they need to
conceptualize something like the highest good and then to strive for that and
The thing is is that there isn't any difference
between conceptualizing the good and being judged
because if you're going to
conceptualize the good and move towards it what you have to do is separate from yourself all those things that aren't good and
leave them behind and that's where the redeemer and the judge are the same thing and
One of the things that's really appalling
I think about our modern world is that we're rejecting the notion of qualitative distinctions
You say well, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying that one thing is better than another it's like okay fair enough
It's not fun to be cast off with the damned. That's for sure
But if people are in fact insufficient in their present condition
Which seems to be the case; I mean try finding someone who isn't?
Then if you deny the possibility of qualitative distinction because you want to promote a radical
egalitarianism then you remove the possibility of redemption because there's no movement towards the good and it seems to me that it's a
Catastrophe to sacrifice the good for
Well, it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for the equal; because for us to be equal would be mean as far as I can
tell that we would all be equally unredeemed and miserable and
so
"He also mentioned in the previous paragraph
I believe that even in the case when you experience the human life at its fullest that it's most
Beautiful as its most meaningful you have a deep I guess
Understanding that you have something to be thankful for you need to thank somebody for that
It's not based entirely on your own merit and that
Points you towards something else and also, and-" I don't think that you can have a profoundly positive
experience
You know in the best sense without that accompanying it
That's a feeling of being blessed. It's something like that. Yeah. That's a good oh
Wait hold it. I'm going to stop you
Okay, because I'm going to ask this person, but I would like to say that those were remarkably good questions
so
"Dr. Peterson, thank you for the wonderful lecture
given your working definition of truth and
And let's say within the abrahamic religious tradition would you say that the more perhaps
mystical sects and denominations
which place more emphasis on the
transcendental experience of God also on this experience
as opposed to the more fundamentalist, Orthodox
literalist which perhaps
Emphasize that what I've noticed
Moral policing of behaviors" yeah? "would you say that the former is more true than the latter?" no. "and--"
no. and and okay, sorry continue. "And B: could the former in some ways serve as an antidote to
extremists literalism, Jihadism
Fundamentalism?" okay, so yes to the second part, but the first part it's a great question
We did some research on this a while back because we're looking at
the different religious proclivities of liberals and conservatives and
Liberals like if you're liberal it means you're high in openness and low in conscientiousness, and if you're conservative
Then you're high and conscientiousness and low and openness and that the liberals are spiritual and the conservatives are dogmatic
but it's best to think of those as
partners, right? because the
spiritual mystical end is where the revelations Emerge and the renewal, but that's where there's Chaos and and
Discord as well, because what's new disrupts what's stable
and so
What's new has to be turned into...
It has to be integrated into what's stable
And so you need both those poles and of course if the dogmatists get the upper-hand then everything
turns into a Tyranny of stone that that's egypt in the old testament, but if the if the if the
Mystics get the upper hand then everything floats off the earth into some
impractical ether that is equally counterproductive, and so there has to be a
dialogue between those different poles
And I think you see that in the distribution of human temperament
You know the conscientious types there they tend to be orderly the orderly types tend to tend towards kind of a right-wing
Totalitarianism that's their proclivity when they when they when things get out of hand especially if they're low in openness, that's a danger
but
You see the same thing with the people who are too open and not conscientious at all
They're dreaming all the time, but they never do anything. There's never anything implemented and that that's bad. That's a bad thing
So I don't think that you can say that like- the dogmatic structure is necessary because that perpetuates the system and the revelatory
Element is necessary because that renews it when renewal is necessary and there has to be a continual dialogue between those elements
So that neither of them fall prey to their own particular form of Pathology that's one of the problems with the current political
What would you call it?
Polarization that's occurring across the west is that the right and the left and are talking to each other anymore.
That's a very bad thing because the left will
wander into a pit and fail without
boundaries and the right will enclose itself in smaller and smaller spaces until it can't move without the left and
One of the reasons that democracy works is because it makes people talk; or allows them to talk you can have it either way
but it's in its bits because
Every virtue has its vice
right and so a meta virtue is something like the amalgamation of singular virtues into something that's a
Transcendent structure that has more to do with the harmony of virtues rather than with any given virtue
even though I think that freedom of speech is the clearest manifestation of that harmony of virtues, so and
"So all could be a lubricant for the beginning of this discussion. Do you think between the liberals and conservatives?"
I don't know how to answer that
It doesn't follow immediately from your from your initial presupposition, so the awe experience is a different issue
"[Unintelligible]"
Yeah, we'll be able
Yes, "at least exposing conservatives to some form of that experience could it be if we requisite for a more productive dialogue?"
See I mean in it in in in the church in church ceremony let's say a classical church ceremony
There's some intermingling of both right you mean you think about a church ceremony that takes place in the Gothic cathedral
We've certainly got the dogma and they're under and the relatively rigid rule structure
but at the same time that's aligned with intense beauty and
In the architectural forms in the in the light that's streaming in through the stained-glass
windows and the music and I mean the Gothic cathedrals are forests right it's a stone forest with sunlight streaming in through the Trees and
It's a balance between structure light there are absolutely
unbelievable structures
And they speak of the transcendent but but inside that there's a structure and so it
Seems that in order for the religious impulse to be balanced properly there has to be a reasonable
dialogue even in practice between the mystical awe-inspiring transcendent and the dogmatic yeah either of those can
Can go as either those goes astray without the other if you're too dogmatic. Do you need aw?
likely yes, because that would show you that there's something beyond your own presuppositions, so
So awe, I should tell you something interesting about awe as a as a physiological phenomena
You know how you're listening to music and you get chills?
Some people experience that more than others open people experience that more or music is a pretty
reliable
elicitor of
Chills, that's piloerection. That's your hair standing on end. You see a cat when it sees a dog puffs up. That's awe
It's the same thing like that that chill is your hair standing on end
And that's this that's sensation you get in the presence of a meta predator
It's something like that and so the awe
experience is a
I mean obviously it's become very cognitively and emotionally complex in human beings, but it's fundamental
evolutionary underpinning is
the Instantaneous
piloerection that you see in prey animals when they're confronted by a predator and of course that would be if you are a rabbit
You can bloody well believe that you see a wolf and it would inspire. Awe that's for sure
I mean if a wolf that was 20 feet high came bounding in here, man, you'd feel awe so
Yeah, that will convince you that there's something that you still need to know
last
last question
"Perfect timing. Hi, Dr. Peterson
My name is Gary, and I'm a clinical and counseling master student right now and so one of the key ideas
That's been surfacing time and time again in your
Lectures is the idea that
Phenomenology is structured and flows
mythologically and
the way that plays out is I'm
supposing effectively just pay attention to what comes up kind of
naturally and you can locate the chaotic elements in your experience and
Prod at them with whatever degree of Necessity you think so
trying to situate this within the clinical
context
We can conceptualize
Psychotherapy as a kind of guided journey just as you touched on in this lecture
Where it's more of a meta journey in a sense a meta heroic journey if I don't know how you want to think about it
but
Just for those of us who are interested in kind of grounding and implementing these ideas within?
psychotherapeutic practice
What should we watch out for in the process itself?
What comes up? What should we be afraid of or fearful of or cautious about or what should we tend towards that's my question"
Well, I think one of it
One of the people who I've read that's had the biggest
Impact on me as a Clinician was carl Rogers
And the reason for that is that carl Rogers put tremendous emphasis on listening.
Like it's almost impossible to overestimate how useful it is to listen to your clients like you need a meta
Scheme in some sense and
The meta Scheme, I think is laid out in the sermon on the mount. It's something like
orient yourself and your client
Towards the good
The client has to conceptualize what that might be you can serve as a guide
But it has to come from that person because one of the things that you want to find out from your client is okay
What's wrong?
they have to tell you and
What would not having something wrong look like like what is it if you could have what you wanted and that and that...
That would be good. What would that look like okay? So that establishes your star, right? It's like Geppetto
Establishing the relationship with the star at the beginning of pinocchio. Here's what we're aiming at
Okay, so now you've got that schema
Here's what we're aiming at
now you might say you might think well now that what happens to the client is they meet their dragons along the way and
The dragons would be well now
You know what you want,
And there are things in your way and some of those things might many of those things are going to be intensely practical
But they're practical/
Psychological so like so maybe someone is has a job and they would like to move forward in the job
But they're terrified of speaking in public
Well, you know is that a psychological problem or a practical problem?
It's both
It's also a real problem in many positions unless you can speak fluently
Publicly you're you're going to hit a ceiling and you're not going to go anywhere and so
For the person to move towards that goal
Then they have to confront the obstacles that manifest themselves
Within that framework and part of your job as a clinician is to identify the obstacles
And to discriminate them from things they don't have to worry about right part of it is
you know you can't just run around and try to
Combat all the Chaos in the world some of it is your Chaos and a bunch of it isn't and the Chaos
That's yours is the Chaos that emerges as you move towards a necessary goal
And so partly what you're doing by listening to your client is to help them cut their dragons down to size
You know because what will happen if you start to talk to somebody about public speaking and you really talk to them
Is that you decompose the problem into a set of maybe 20 subproblems like well
Do you know exactly how to give a speech? What's your theory of
Public speaking? Do you know how to look at people when you're talking? Do you know how to speak loudly enough?
so that people can hear you? do you have a philosophy of
Public speaking? you know all those things are necessary in order to do it properly you need to decompose that with the client and then to
Make those problems you have to decompose them to the point where they can be met by a practical solution
and then you have to guide the person through the implementation of the practical solution and
Mostly you do that by by listening
It's like the what you need to be is the person who helps the person
That you're working with orient themselves towards a better future
That's the compact you and I are in this space at this time to make things better
first of all we have to decide what better would look like and
Second we need a strategy and third
we need to
Once we have that we're going to see the obstacles and some of those are going to be
Psychological and some of them are going to be practical and we're going to engage in joint
problem-solving of whatever, sort is necessary in order to
Minimize the impact of those problems or to gain from the problems and dream analysis can be extremely useful for that by the way
It's even more useful for helping the person identify what the goal is because that's often difficult for people. It's like well
I know that something's wrong
But I don't know what I want. sometimes people get so stuck there that they just can't get they just can't get out of it
So and then what would you watch out for?
"Phenomenologically. The way it shows up, The way, It's experienced"
Well, I would say the clinician one of the things that you should watch out for is resentment
So there's a there's a couple of rules of thumb that I think are useful
Don't do anything for your clients that they can do for themselves and don't do them any favors?
Now I think you can step
Beyond the confines of your role
carefully now and then
to show that
There's there's there's a more human connection than the merely contractual. I think that's very useful but
Their problems are not your problems you do not have any right to their problems
And so you have to maintain that detachment because otherwise you can steal their destiny
You don't want to be the person that solves their problems because you steal their destiny when you do that
You want to be someone with whom they can figure things out for themselves?
And so there can be hubris in being a clinician because you can be the problem solver and that elevates you to a position
You elevate yourself to that position. You'll fall flat on your face
You'll hurt your clients and things will kick back on you very very hard because what the hell. Do you know?
right
Nothing because that person is very complicated and they need to they need to sort themselves out and but you can be a facilitator
For that, but that's all you should be
And so you have to watch that you have to watch over
becoming over and k over ly entangled so you have to maintain your detachment in the best sense, and you have to not overstep your
It's easy to become hubristic when the person is looking to you for the answers
It's like you might you don't have the answers although you might be able to find help the person find their way
That's what you do with everyone. You love - right?
I mean, you don't provide them with the answers because then they become little clones of you and
unhappy bitter resentful and Angry little clones of you because you usurped their destiny and
so
the same thing applies within familiar Arrangements or friendships all about it, so