You know when I told you that story about my nephew I believe right about him
Running around as a knight and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the Dragons
It's like well, where did that come from? Well partly it came from his culture, right?
Because if he was a knight and and so obviously that's a cultural construct
but the thing is is that his imagination is it's this
structure that's looking for things to fill itself with just like your
Predisposition to language. You have a predisposition to language. What is that? We don't know. What does it do?
It looks for things in the world to fill itself with
Right, and if you're if you first of all wouldn't you start to learn how to speak you babble every phoneme?
Did you know that there's there's lot there's if I was learning to speak an Asian language, there would be phonemes
I couldn't pronounce and vice versa an infant all of them
They babble all the phonemes and then as they start to learn the language
They lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language
So a baby babbles all laying all possible languages, that's a way of thinking about it and then loses the ability
So that's a man if that's you can see there so you could say well
You manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes
it's built into your biology and then as your
Enculturated in your own culture the set of archetypes that manifest its manifest themselves in that
Culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use. So my
My nephew's running around like a knight
Well, you know if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon
He would be running around with a bow and you know a poisoned arrow and a bowl. It's the same thing
It's the same idea. It's just
trapped out in different cultural dress and
He his little imagination was trying to solve the problem. How do you deal with the unknown? Well, what's the unknown?
It's these little devils that keep biting
Jumping up on you and biting you and they come out without end. So just killing them
It's like cutting the head off the Hydra right? Seven more grow. Well, what the hell good, is it to solve one problem?
When there's just a bunch more problems that are come
To come after you and that's everyone's question. That's the ultimate question of nihilism, right?
Why bother solving a problem if all that's gonna happen is that twenty more problems are gonna come your way. Why not?
Just give up and die. Well, right, it's a good question. It's that it's a good question
Right is this suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end?
That's another fundamental question of existence and people who've become truly
malevolent
Answer that question in the affirmative
They say it's too much. We should destroy it now
I wouldn't say they're precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons
But you have to understand and appreciate the logic. It's not irrational. That's the other thing
It's not irrational to work for the destruction of being it's not irrational
In fact, it might be the most rational thing. You could come up with depends on your initial initial set of presuppositions
So you down into the belly of the beast
so to speak to to to to to see what lurks in the
Imagination he sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas. Well, what are archetypal ideas there?
There are patterns of it you could think about them as as
Representations of patterns of adaptive behavior. And so then you might ask well, where did they come from?
Well, that's part of what I've been trying to
to to teach you about
They evolved as far as I can tell right they evolved collectively
Is that our society and this is the dominance hierarchy idea doormen desire key set themselves up as a matter
Of course, they're the standard way that animals organize themselves in a territory
Well, ok, human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware of thinking what the hell are we up to?
What the hell are we up to? What's and and there's a question that lurks in there. What?
constitutes acceptable
power what constitutes acceptable
Sovereignty who should lead who should rule what should be at the top. Well, we talked about that the Mesopotamians figured that out
Speech and vision, that's Marduk speech vision and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown
That's what should rule. Well, what's that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea? How could it be any other way?
well, that's what human beings are like and I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamians story and
Understand the reference which isn't an easy thing to do and fail to draw that conclusion
Marduk has eyes all the way around his head. He speaks magic words. He goes off to fight time at the dragon of chaos
Well, what's that? That's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown?
Well, is any of that?
is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just
analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective
We're prey animals were predators. We'd be threatened by reptiles
forever why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forests or the water as a
Representative of the unknown why wouldn't we harness that circuitry?
We already have it at hand and even more to the point. How could we do anything else? It's it makes perfect sense
Well, so then what you might say? Well, what would you want to be king?
You could say king of the world or king of your own soul. What do you want to subordinate yourself to?
How about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people
There's no nobler vision than that, and I don't see that. It's merely arbitrary and
So and it's not merely arbitrary - because if you do that to the degree that you do that
Assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt. You will be successful
It will actually aid you practically you'll rise up above men. You'll be selected by women
You'll be admirable you'll be valued and and you know that because if you look at the people that you admire and value
again, unless you've
taken a detour into dark places and are
are
possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction
You just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own
conclusions and you can ask yourself -
When you're torturing yourself with your conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it
What is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship to?
You have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if you're not matching it, what's the ideal?
Well, you don't know right it's it's kind of incoherent and and poorly articulated
But that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and and make itself known to you
It's really the purpose of religious education is to make that ideal articulated
Well, we've lost that
It's not a good thing
You