You have the unknown world.
That's just what you don't know at all.
That's the outside...
That's the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit, something like that.
It's chaos itself.
And then you act in that world and you act in ways you don't understand.
There's more to your actions than you can understand.
One of the things Jung said, I loved this when I first understood it.
He said, everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is.
And you should know what your myth is
because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don't want it to be.
And that's really worth thinking because... Thinking about, because you have
a pattern of behavior that characterizes you.
God only knows where you got it.
Partly it's biological, partly it's from your parents.
It's your unconscious assumptions.
It's the way the philosophy of your society has shaped you,
and it's aiming you somewhere.
Well, is it aiming you somewhere you want to go?
That's a good question.
That's part of self realization.
We know we don't understand our actions.
Almost every argument you have with someone is about that.
It's like, why did you do that?
You come up with some half baked reasons why you did it.
You're flailing around in the darkness.
You try to give an account for yourself, but you can only do it partially.
It's very-very difficult because...
You're a complicated animal with the beginnings of an articulated
mind, something like that, and you're just way more than you can handle.
All right, so you act things out, right?
You act things out, and that's a kind of competence.
And then you imagine what you act out and you imagine what everyone else acts out.
So there's a tremendous amount
of information in your action, and then that information is translated up
into the dream and into art, into mythology and literature,
and there's a tremendous amount of information in that.
And then some of that is translated into articulated thought.
And I'll give you a quick example of something like that.
I think this is partly what happens in Exodus when Moses comes up with The Law.
He's wandering around with the Israelites forever in the desert,
and they're like going left and going right and worshipping idols
and having a hell of a time and getting rebellious.
And Moses goes up in the mountain and he
has this tremendous revelation, sort of in the sight of God, and it illuminates him.
And he comes down with The Law, you think, well, Moses acted as a judge.
I know this is a mythological story.
Moses acted as a judge in the desert.
He was continually mediating between
people who are having problems, constantly trying to keep peace.
And so what are you doing when you're
trying to keep peace as you're trying to understand what peace is, right?
You have to apply the principles.
What are the principles?
Well, you don't know.
The principles are whatever satisfies people enough to make peace.
And maybe you do that 10x thousand times,
and then you get some sense of, oh, here's the principles that bring peace.
And then one day it blasts into your consciousness like a revelation.
Here's the rules that we're already acting out.
Well, that's the Ten Commandments.
They're there to begin with.
And Moses comes forward and says, look,
this is already basically what we're doing.
But now it's codified, right?
That's all historical process that's condensed into a single story.
But obviously that happened because we have written law, right.
And that emerged in good legal systems.
That emerges from the bottom up.
That's English common laws.
Exactly like that, right?
It's single decisions that are predicated
on principles that are then articulated and made into the body of law.
And the body of law is something you act out.
That's why it's a body of law.
If you're a good citizen, you act out the body of law.
The body of law has principles.
Okay, so the question is, there are principles that guide our behavior.
What are those principles?
Well, I think if you want the initial answer of what
the archaic Israelites meant by God, that's something like what they meant.
Now, it's not a good enough explanation,
but look, imagine that you're a chimpanzee, and you have a powerful...
Dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society that represents power.
Now, more than that, because it's not sheer physical prowess
that keeps a chimp at the top of the hierarchy.
It's much more complicated than that.
And you could say, well,
there's a principle that the dominant person manifests.
And then you might say, well, that principle shines
forth even more brightly if you know ten people who are dominant, powerful,
then you can extract out what dominance means from that.
You can extract out what power means
from that, and then you can divorce the concept from the people.
And we had to do that at some point
because we can say power, in a human context, and we can imagine what
that means, but it's divorced from any specific manifestation of power.
Well, how the hell did we do that? Like, that's so complicated?
If you're a chimp, the power is in another chimp.
It's not some damn abstraction.
Well, so the question is, think about it.
We're in these hierarchies, many of them across centuries.
We're trying to figure out what the guiding principle is.
We're trying to extract out the core of the guiding principle,
and we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being.
It's something like that.
That's God.
It's an abstracted ideal, and it's put in personified form.
It manifests itself in personified form.
But that's okay, because what we're trying to get at is in some sense the essence
of what it means to be a properly functioning and...
Properly functioning, properly social,
and properly competent individual.
We're trying to figure out what that means.
You need an embodiment, you need an ideal that's abstracted
that you could act out that would enable you to understand what that means.
And that's what we've been driving at.
So that's the first hypothesis, in some sense.
I'm going to go over some
of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we formalized as God.
But that's the first sort of hypothesis is that...
A philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself first as a concrete
pattern of behavior that's characteristic of a single individual.
And then it's a set of individuals, and then it's an abstraction from that set.
And then you have the abstraction.
It's so important.
So here's a political implication, for example.
One of the debates, we might say, between
early Christianity and the late Roman Empire, was whether or not
an Emperor could be God, literally, right? To be deified, to be put in a temple.
And you can see why that might happen because that's someone at the pinnacle
of a very steep hierarchy who has a tremendous amount of power and influence.
But the Christian response to that was
never confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself.
It's brilliant.
You see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that.
So that even the person who has the power Is actually subordinate to something else.
Subordinate to....
Let's call it a divine principle, for lack of a better word.
So that even the King himself is subordinate to the principle.
And we still believe that because we believe that our President or
Prime Minister is subordinate to the damn law, whatever the body of law is right.
There's a principle inside that that even the leader is subordinate to.
And without that, you could argue... You can't even
have a civilized society because your leader
immediately turns into something that's transcendent and all powerful.
I mean, that's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened
in Maoist China And what happened in Nazi Germany, is there was nothing
for the powerful to subordinate themselves to.
You're supposed to be subordinate to God.
So what does that mean?
Well, we're going to tear that idea apart.
But partly what it means is that you're
subordinate, vven if you're sovereign to the principle of sovereignty itself.
And then the question is, what the hell is the principle of sovereignty?
And I can say we have been working that out for a very long period of time.
And so that's one of the things that we'll
talk about because the Ancient Mesopotamians and the Ancient
Egyptians had some very interesting dramatic ideas about that.