[Music] all right so I suggested to you last
class that human beings world as a place of action through the lens of their
social cognitive biological sub structure and I made that argument on
the basis of the supposition that our primary environment was actually other
people and I mentioned to you I believe that those other people are arranged in
hierarchies of influence and authority or power or dominance which is often how
its construed and that the dominance hierarchy as a structure is at least 300
million years old which makes it older than trees and it's
for that reason that you share the same neural biology to govern your
observations of your position in the hierarchy as lobsters do which is a
remarkable fact you know it's a remarkable that the lobster uses
serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate its status position and that modifying
the serotonin function in the lobster can produce changes in its behavior can
can / help the logs to overcome defeat for example which is very much
equivalent to what happens to a human being when they take antidepressants you
know it's it's it's a good example of the conservation of biological structure
by evolution and another a good illustration of the continuity of life
on Earth it's really amazing but the other thing it is a testament to is the
ancient nature of the social structure now we tend to think of the social
structure as something other than nature right because society is I suppose
mythologically opposed it's opposed in a narrative way cultures opposed to nature
it's the town in the forest but the town has been around a long time so to speak
and the structure of the town is also part of nature in that the dominance
hierarchy is part of and because it's so ancient you have to
consider it as part of the mechanism that has played the role of selection in
the process of natural selection and so roughly seem what seems to happen is
that there is a plethora of dominance hierarchies especially in complex human
communities and many of them are masculine in structure in that their
dominance are keys that primarily men compete in or that has been the
historical norm and that some men rise to the top based on whatever the
dominance hierarchy is based on and they make their preferential mates and it's a
good strategy for women to engage in because why and many sorts of female
animals do precisely this is they let the male's battle it out and then pick
from the top and or often the dominant males there's no choice on the part of
the females it's the dominant males just chasing away the subordinate males but
with humans it's usually the case that the females have the opportunity to do
at least some choosing and so we have if you think about that what that implies
is that we have evolved to climb up dominance hierarchies and then I would
say it's not exactly that even because there are many different dominance
hierarchies and so the skills that you might use to climb up one might not be
necessarily the same skills that you would use to climb up another and so
then I would say what we have all evolved for instead and I'm still
speaking mostly on the masculine edge of things historically speaking is the
ability to climb up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies right and
that's that's a whole different idea it's like the averaged hierarchy across
vast spans of time and I think it's for that reason that we among others that we
evolve general intelligence because general intelligence is a general
problem-solving mechanism and it seems to be situation in depend
so to speak and of course there's been an arms race for the development of
intelligence between men and women because each gender has to keep up with
the other and women have their own dominance hierarchies there's certainly
no doubt about that and of course now men and women more
increasingly compete within the same hierarchies and we don't exactly know
how to sort that out yet because it's an extraordinarily new phenomena but in any
case because of the the permanence of the dominance hierarchy it has come to
be represented in fundamental narratives because human beings and this is
something that we share everywhere it's the thing the Wall Street bankers shares
with with the kalahari Kung Bushmen who are among the genetically speaking they
seem to be very close to what the original most original human beings were
like in Africa before the Diaspora about fifty thousand years ago but you know
both of those people despite their vast differences live in
communities that have a hierarchical structure that are composed of
individuals that are embedded in a natural world you know the world outside
of the dominant Sarki and so that's the standard human environment I would say
and so stories that rely on the representations of those environments
and their interactions are what you might describe as universal stories and
that's why people can understand them and I would say further and this is
drawing substantially on say derivation of the work of Carl Jung because I think
he delved into this more deeply than anyone else so a lot of this stuff is
quite Union in its in its origins we the commonality between human beings so you
know you have to have commonalities in order to communicate right axiomatic
commonalities because otherwise you have to explain everything and so there's
many things that human beings don't have to explain to one another we don't have
to explain anger we do have to explain jealousy we don't have
to explain fear we don't have to explain pain we don't have to explain joy we
don't have to explain love etc those are built into us and so there are
predicates of being human and you could say that those human predicates and the
standard human environment produce standard narratives and then you could
say even further and this is more of a leap I would say is that those who act
out the role of the victor in those standard narratives are precisely the
people who attain victory in life and I would say biologically defined in that
they make more attractive partners but also I believe that there's an alignment
between human well-being which is a very weak word and participation in these
meta narratives that drive success because well do you want to be a failure
or a success well you know it's hard to be a success you have to adopt a lot of
responsibility and so you might be willing to take your chances as a
failure but I can't exactly I'm not going to make the presumption that
that's going to put you in a situation other than one where you experienced a
lot of frustration anger disappointment depression pain and anxiety at the
bottom of the heap and so generally that's not what people are aiming for
although under certain circumstances if people don't like responsibility and are
willing to take their chances they might take the irresponsibility and it's
apparent freedoms over the necessity of thinking things through the medium and
long run anyways we stop here I suggested to you that one of the primary
narrative representations was the known or culture or order I think those or the
explored territory or the dominance arc I think those things are basically
interchangeable from from a representational perspective and you
know in the movie The Lion King that's represented by Pride Rock which is the
central place of orientation founded on Raw
which is the sort of thing that people embed their memories in that's why we
make sculptures and gravestones and that sort of things rock stands for permanent
and to have rock under your feet as to be on a solid foundation and that's a
pyramid in some sense in that movie and the pyramid has topped by you know the
king and queen and they're their offspring so that's that's the divine
couple that's one way of thinking about it and Simba of course is the newborn
hero and you know you extend that even though it's lions and drawings of lions
at that and animals are acting it out it's completely irrelevant to you that
those characters happen to be animated and that what you're watching is a
fiction so and I would say to you with regards to fiction you know you might
say well is fiction true or not and the answer to that is yes and no it's not
true in that the events portrayed in fiction occurred in the world they
didn't but they're fiction is true the same way numbers are true I would say
like you know if you have one apple and one orange and one banana the common
analogy between all of those three is one and you might say well is one as
real as one fruit is the abstraction one as real as one fruit and I would say it
depends on what you mean by real but representing things mathematically and
abstractly gives you incredible power and you could make the case that the
abstraction is actually more real than the phenomena that it represents and
certainly mathematicians would make that case they would say that mathematics is
in some sense more real than the phenomenal world and you know you don't
have to believe that mostly it's a matter of choice in some sense but you
can't deny the fact that an abstraction has enough reality so that if you're
proficient in using it you can really you can change the world and in and in
insanely powerful ways you know I mean all the computational equipment you
people are using or depending on the abstractions one and zero
essentially and I mean look at what emerges from that and so I would say
with regards to fiction if you take someone like Dostoyevsky oh I think it's
a favorite of mine by the way I would highly recommend that you read all five
of his great novels because they are unparalleled in their psychological
depth and so if you're interested in psychology Dostoyevsky's the person for
you Tolstoy is more of a sociologist but
Dostoyevsky man he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes
around transformative reading anyways Dostoyevsky's characters this character
named her skull in the Cobb is a character in crime and punishment and
Raskolnikov is a materialist rationalist I would say which was a rather new type
of person back in the 1880s and he was sort of taken by the idea that God was
dead and took and convinced himself that the only reason that he that anyone
acted in a moral way in a traditional way was because of cowardice they were
unable to remove from them the restrictions of mere convention and act
in the manner of someone who rose above the norm and so he's tortured by these
ideas he's half starving he's a law student he doesn't have enough to eat he
doesn't have much money and so you know he's not thinking all that clearly
either and he's got a lot of family problems his mother's sick and she can't
spend him send a much money and his sister is planning to engage in a
marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical who he hopes
will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law
school and they write him brave letters telling him that she's very much in love
with this guy but he is smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that
his sister is just planning to prostitute herself in you know in an
altruistic manner he's not very happy with that and then at the same time as
all this is happening he becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he's you know
pawning his last possessions to and she's a horrible
person and not only by his estimation she pawns a lot of things for the
neighborhood and people really don't like her she's grasping and cruel and
deceitful and and resentful and like and she has this niece who's not very bright
intellectually impaired whom she basically treats as a slave and beats
all the time and so Raskolnikov you know involved in this mess and half starved
and a bit delirious and possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas
decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the land
let the pawnbroker take her wealth which he all she does is keep it in a chest
free the niece so that seems like a good idea so remove one apparently horrible
and useless person from the world free his sister from the necessity of this
loveless marriage and allow him to go to law school where he can become educated
and do some good for the world you know so one of the things that's lovely about
Dostoyevsky is that he you know when sometimes when one person is arguing
against another or when they're having an argument in their head they make
their opponent into a straw man which is basically they take their opponent and
curricular their perspective and try to make it as weak as possible and and
laugh about it and and then they come up with their argument and destroy this
straw man and feel that they've obtained victory but it's a very pathetic way of
thinking it's not thinking at all what thinking is is when you adopt the
opposite position from your suppositions and you make that argument as strong as
you can possibly make it and then you pit your perspective
against that that strong iron man not the straw man and you argue it out you
battle it out and that's what Dostoevsky does in his novels I mean he's the
people who stand for the antithesis of what dust is dust is he actually
believes are often the strongest smartest and sometimes most admirable
people in the book and so takes great moral courage to do that and
you know in risk Olenick oov what he wanted to do was set up a character who
had every reason to commit murder every reasonable reason philosophically
practically ethically even well so risk Olenick off goes and he kills the old
lady with an axe and it doesn't go the way he expects it will because what he
finds out is that post murder Raskolnikov and pre murder Raskolnikov
are not the same people at all they're not even close to the same people he's
entered an entirely different universe and Dostoevsky does a lovely job of
describing that universe of horror and chaos and and and deception and and and
suffering and terror and all of that and he doesn't even use the money he just
buries it in a and an alley as fast as he can and then doesn't want anything to
do with it again and anyways the reason I'm telling you all this is potentially
to entice you into reading the book because it is an amazing amazing book
but also because you might say well his risk is what happened to Raskolnikov
true are the stories in that book true and the answer to that is well from a
factual perspective clearly they're untrue but then if you think of
Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a particular type of person who lived at
that time and the embodiment of a certain kind of ideology which had swept
across Europe and really invaded Russia and which was actually a precursor a
philosophical precursor to the Russian Revolution then Raskolnikov is more real
than any one person he's like a composite person he's like a person
who's irrelevant sees have been eliminated for the purpose of relating
something about the structure of the world and so I like to think of those
things as sort of meta real meta real they're more real than real and of
course that's what you expect people to do when they tell you about their own
lives about their own day you don't want a factual description of
every muscle twitch you want them to distill their experiences down into the
gist which is the significance of the experience and the significance of the
experience is roughly what you can derive from listening to the experience
that will change the way that you look at the world and act in the world so
it's valuable information and they can tell you a terrible story and then that
can be valuable because that can tell you how not to look in the world look at
the world and act in it or they can tell you a positive story you can derive
benefit either way which is why we also like to go watch stories about horrible
psychopathic thugs you know and and hopefully we're learning not to be like
them although there are additional advantages in that you know someone you
might be some say that someone who is incapable of cruelty is a higher moral
being than someone who is capable of cruelty and I would say and this follows
young as well that that's incorrect and it's dangerously incorrect because if
you are not capable of cruelty you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is and
so part of the reason that people go watch anti heroes and villains is
because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster
within them which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect
because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth and if you
grow teeth and you realize that you're somewhat dangerous and let or maybe
somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that
you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing and so
that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel what it
means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not
being able to be cruel because in the first case you're nothing but weak and
naive and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control
and you know a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that as part of
their philosophy of training it's like we're not training you
to fight we're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights but
if you happen to have to get in one and then I guess the philosophy also is is
that if you're competent at fighting that actually decreases the probability
that you're going to have to fight because when someone pushes you you'll
be able to respond with confidence and with any luck and this is certainly the
case with bullies with any lock a reasonable show of confidence which is
very much equivalent to the show of dominance is going to be enough to make
the bully back off and so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness
is actually the best guarantee of peace and that's partly why Jung believed that
it was necessary for people to integrate their shadow and he said that was a
terrible thing for people to attempt because the human shadow mmm which is
all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize reaches all the
way to hell and what he meant by that was it's through an analysis of your own
shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable and you as
well of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterize let's say the 20th
century and without that understanding there's no possibility of bringing it
under control when you study Nazi Germany for example or you study the
Soviet Union particularly under Stalin and you're asking yourself well what are
these perpetrators like forget about the victims let's talk about the
perpetrators the answer is they're just like you and if you don't know that that
just means that you don't know anything about people including yourself and then
it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you and believe me
that's no picnic so that's enough to traumatize people and that's partly why
they don't do it and it's also partly why the path to enlightenment and wisdom
is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and
doing what made you happy then everyone in the world would be a paragon of
wisdom but it's not that at all it's the it's a matter of facing the thing you
least want to face and everyone has that old there's this old story in King
Arthur where the night's go off to look for the Holy
Grail which is either the cup that Christ drank out of it the Last Supper
or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he
was crucified the stories vary but it's it's basically a holy object like the
Phoenix in some sense that's representation a representation of
transformation so it's a it's an ideal and so King Arthur's knights who sit at
a round table because they're all roughly equal go off to find the most
valuable thing and they and where do you look for the most valuable thing when
you don't know where it is well each of the knights looks at the forest
surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest
to him and that's a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom
and the gateway to the development of personality which is exactly the same
thing is precisely through the porthole portal that you do not want to climb
through and the reason for that's actually quite technical this is a union
presupposition - is that well there's a bunch of things about you that are
underdeveloped and a lot of those things are because there's things you've
avoided looking at because you don't want to look at them and there's parts
of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to develop those parts
and so it's by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don't want to
look because that's where you've kept it and so and that's why there's you know
an idiosyncratic element of it for everyone your particular place of
enlightenment and terror is not going to be the same as yours except that they're
both places of enlightenment and terror so they're equivalent at one level of
analysis and and different than another so anyways back to the fiction and and
and and what it does if it distills truth and it produces characters that
are composites and the more they become composites the more they approximate a
mythological character and so they become more and more universally true
and more and more approximating religious deities but the problem with
that is they become more and more distant from individual experience and
so with literature there's this very tight line
where you need to make the character more than merely human but not so much
of a God that you know one of the things that happened to Superman in the 1980s
Superman started out he's got a heavenly set a parents by the way in an earthly
set of parents and he's an orphan like Harry Potter very common theme is that
when Superman first emerged he could only jump out of her buildings you know
and maybe he could stop a locomotive but by the time the 1980s rolled around like
he could juggle planets and you know swallow hydrogen bombs and you know he
could do anything well people stopped buying the Superman comics because how
interesting is that it's like something horrible happens and Superman deals with
it and something else horrible happens and Superman deals with it and it's like
that's dull he turned into such an archetype he was basically the
omniscient omnipresent omnipotent God and that's no fun it's like God wins and
then God wins again and then again God wins and you know so then they had to
weaken him in different ways with kryptonite you know so green kryptonite
kind of made him sick and red kryptonite I think kind of mutated him if I
remember correctly and anyways they had to introduce flaws into his characters
so that there could be some damn plot and that's something to think about you
know there's a deep existential lesson in that in that your being is limited
and flawed and fragile you're like the genie which is genius in the little tiny
in the little tiny lamp you know this immense potential but
constrained in this tiny little living space as Robin Williams said when he
played the genie in Aladdin but the fact that you have limitations means that the
plot of your life is the overcoming of those limitations and that if you didn't
have limitations well there wouldn't be a plot and maybe there would be no life
and so that's part of the reason why perhaps you have to accept the fact that
you're flawed and insufficient and and live with it and consider it a
precondition for being it's at least a reasonable
it's a reasonable idea so anyways one of the main characters is the country the
known the explored territory we went over that a bit and it always has two
elements I mean your country is your greatest friend and your worst enemy you
know because it squashes you into conformity and demands that you act in a
certain manner and reduces your individuality to that element that's
tolerated by everyone else and it it constrains your potential in a single
direction and so it's really tyrannical but at the same time it provides you
with a place to be and all of the benefits that have accrued as a result
of the actions of your ancestors and all the other people that you're associated
with so there's the good tyrant or the bad tyrant and the good King and those
are archetypal figures and that's because they're always true and they're
always true simultaneously you know which is partly why I object to the
notion of the patriarchy because it's a myth the law the it's the what do you
call that it's the apprehension of a mythological trope which is that of the
evil tyrant without any appreciation for the fact that the archetype actually has
two parts and the other part is the wise king and you know you can tell an evil
tyrant story about culture no problem but it's one-sided and that's very
dangerous because you don't want to forget all the good things that you have
while you're criticizing all the ways that things are in error that's a lack
of gratitude and it's a lack of wisdom and it's it's founded in resentment and
it's it's very dangerous both personally and socially I told you that Captain
Hook is a tyrant because he's got this crocodile chasing him in the crocodile
has a clock in its stomach and that's death it's like obviously right tick
tick tick tick and it's a crocodile and it's under the water and it's already
got a taste of him so he's being chased around by death and that makes him
terrified and resentful and and cruel and bitter
so he's a tyrant and he wants to wreak havoc everywhere and then Peter Pan of
course looks at Captain Hook and thinks why the hell should I grow up and to be
a tyrant and sacrifice all the potential of childhood and the answer to that is
the potential sacrifices itself if you don't utilize it as you mature and you
just end up a 40 year old lost boy which is a horrifying thing to behold it's
almost as if you're the corpse of a child the living corpse of a child
because who the hell wants a six-year-old 40 year old you're a little
on the stale side by that point and not the world's happiest individual so you
know your potential is going to disappear because you aged anyways and
so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction and
at least become something no matter how limited rather than nothing so you know
Peter Pan that's a great story it's a great mythological story so well so
let's talk about tyrants well not only are they mythological figures but they
exist and they tend to be deified I mean Stalin was for all intents and purposes
God the Father in Soviet Russia although he was pretty much only the worst
elements of Old Testament God who was you know constantly smiting people and
and wiping out populations and doing all sorts of things that seem to be quite
nasty but nonetheless you know people worshipped him in many ways and and he's
a representation of just exactly what goes wrong when things really go wrong
when people stop paying attention and when they all lie because one of the
things that characterized the communist state was that no one ever got to say
anything they actually believed ever and that was partly because one out of three
people was an informer which meant if you had a family of six people two of
them were informing on the government about you and that included your own
children and you and if you were an informer you were often amply rewarded
by the state so that if you lived in an overcrowded apartment building with
three families in the same flat and you informed on you know the
woman down the hall that you didn't like she got shift shipped off to the old
concentration camp and you got her apartment and so that was a lovely
society and it only killed about thirty million people between 1919 and nineteen
fifty-nine so that's what happens when the archetypal structure gets tilted
badly when people forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill as citizens
as awake citizens who are capable of stating the truth and the archetype
shift so there's nothing left of the Great Father except the tyrant and let's
not have that happen I mean the one on the right is really interesting because
consciously or unconsciously you know there's Stalin surrounded by what is for
all intents and purposes fire you know he looks like he looks like Maleficent
in Sleeping Beauty when she shows up at Aurora's christening you know she puts
her arms up in the air and green fire surrounds her it's like it's like he's
surrounded by fire and there's Lenin above him who's like king of the fiery
realm and that's for sure so I mean all the terrors that happened
in the Soviet Union didn't start under stell and they started under Lenin and
Lenin was or Stalin was definitely Lenin's legitimate son let's put it that
way so you know this is another example of the tyrannical element of the Great
Father and the sorts of things that can happen I mean I kind of got a an evil
kick out of this bad that was quite old you know
it's kitschy in some sense and and you know it shows I don't think that's
something you'd ever see at a magazine today
10 unusual stamps showing evil dictator you know well fair enough I mean that's
what he was and that's the consequence and that's just a tiny bit of the
consequence because the Nazis wiped out a very large number of people often
using compassion as a as a as a as a justification so when they went
after the mentally ill and the terminally ill and those who whose
intelligence was compromised for biological reasons and and those who
were too old they basically justified it by saying
that the enforced euthanasia was merciful and that you were actually
being a good person by complying with the requirements and so something to
think about more mythological representations I like
these quite a bit so there's their Hitler as you know Knight of the faith
essentially with I suppose that's a recreation of the Christian holy spirit
dove you know except it's an eagle which is a bird of prey and and a prayer and
uh what do you call those things a scavenger right so that's kind of
interesting but that's Hitler as night of the of the blood roughly speaking and
there this is an allied war poster essentially that assimilates the Nazis
to poisonous snakes and you know we don't like poisonous snakes very much
and and it's probably because they've been preying on us for approximately
twenty million years because snakes and primates humans in particular co-evolved
and so the snake is a representation of that which lies outside the comfortable
domain and that can be you know a snake obviously or it can be an abstract snake
and the abstract snake is your enemy or an even more abstract snake is the evil
in your own heart and this is going to be a bit of a leap for you but there's
this ancient idea that developed in what in the West over thousands of years far
predating Christianity that at least its origins that the snake in the Garden of
Eden was also Satan which is like of what the hell it's a very strange idea
but the reason for that as far as I can tell is that you know we have this
circuitry that detects predators and a predator
representation of a predator is a snake or a monster that incorporates
snake-like features like a dragon or something like that or a dinosaur with
lots of teeth or a shark that lives under the water and will pull you down
you know because I suspect a lot of our ancestors met a nasty death at the hands
of Nile crocodiles while they were in the African veldt going down to get some
nice water so you know that's the thing that jumps up and pulls you under and
you know that happens in your own life because things jump up and pull you
under you know and use the same circuitry we use the same circuitry to
process unknown things that upset us as we once used to detect predators who
were likely to invade our space and so and and human beings are capable of
abstraction and so you know you could think about the real predator that might
invade your space and maybe that's a snake or a wolf or or some kind of
monster you know and that's pretty concrete and biological chimps have that
you know chimps don't like snakes and so if you a chimp comes across a snake in
the wild then like a big let's say I don't know what live with chimps I don't
know if they're pythons but they have constrictors there anyways so you know
maybe there's like a 20 foot constrictor and this and the chimp like stays a good
distance away from it but it won't leave and then it has this particular cry that
it uh ters that's called a snake rah WRA a and so it makes this noise which means
something like holy shit that's a big snake and I actually mean that because
the circuits that primates use to utter distress calls are the same circuits
that we use to curse just so you know that's why people with Tourette's
syndrome swear because like what what's up with that how can you have a
neurological condition that makes you swear well it turns out that guttural
effect Laden curses are mediated by a different speech circuit and that's the
speech circuit we share with the predator alarms of other primates so
that's pretty cool so anyways this chimp stands there and makes this snake noise
and then all bunch of other chimps come running and you know some of them stay a
fair ways from the snake can some of them get pretty close but
they'll stand there and watch that snake for like 24 hours you know so they're
fascinated by it and you know if you've handled snakes you can understand that
fascination because they're fascinating you know and they're numinous I would
say that that's the right way of putting it at numinous is a word that means
intrinsically meaningful like a fire you know you can't look away from fire you
know if you're sitting in front of a fireplace it's like you're staring at it
and that's because you're all descended from the first mad chimpanzee who had
some weird genetic mutation that made it impossible for him to stay away from
fire it was like the first chimp arsonist you know and and he figured it
out and well hey now he was a chimp with a stick with fire on it like that's a
mega chimp man and so you know we have that mutation in spades and no wonder so
anyways so they they make this you know they have this reaction to snakes and
chimps that have never seen a snake if they're in a cage and you throw a rubber
snake in there it's like bang they hit the roof but then they look at the snake
you know it's so it's like it's terrifying and fascinating at the same
time and you should look at the snake because you want to know what it does
but you should stay away from it because it's a snake so you you're kind of
screwed in terms of your motivations right one is get the hell away and the
other is well don't don't let that thing do anything that you're not watching and
so that's really the reaction we have to the unknown it's terrifying but we watch
it and then you know the meta story is that not only do we watch it but we go
explore it and so you might think well back in the Garden of Eden so to speak
when we were living in trees the snakes used to come and eat us and and our
offspring more likely and you know we weren't very happy about that and then
we figured out how to maybe maybe by accident draw up a stay a stick on a
snake and that was a good thing because the snake didn't like that and then
maybe the next thing we learned a little later was to like actually take a stick
and like ock the snake with it and you can
believe that the first primate who figured out that was just as popular as
the guy who mastered fire and so we're pretty good at whacking state snakes
with sticks which is why Springfield has a snake
whacking day it's devoted to nothing but that right I don't know if you know that
Simpsons episode but it's quite comical so well so then you think about the
snake as a predator and it's the thing that invades the garden always because
you just can't keep snakes out of the damn garden no matter how hard you try
and then you think of snakes and maybe you think of meta snakes and like a meta
snake would be also a predator but maybe that's the predator that represents the
the destructive spirit of the other tribe because chimpanzees for example
are quite tribal and they definitely go to war with one another and so you think
you abstract out the idea of the predator to represent malevolence as
such and then you take that one step further and you realize that the worst
of all evil predators is the human capacity for evil and then at that point
you know you're starting to I would say psychologize or spiritual eyes the idea
of danger and making it make it into something that's conceptual and
something that's psychological and something that you can you can face sort
of on mas I mean one of the things people had to figure out was how do you
deal with danger and so you feel figure out how you deal with a specific danger
but then because human beings are death so damn smart they thought well what if
we considered the class of all dangerous things and then what have we considered
a a mode of being that was the best mode of being in the face of the class of all
dangerous things well that's a lot better you get you know you could solve
all the dangerous problems all at once instead of having to conjure up a
different solution for every dangerous thing and that's basically as far as I
can tell where the hero's story came from and the hero's story is basically
you know there's a community it's threatened by the emergence of some old
evil often represented by a dragon that's
sort of typical say of the Lord of the Rings stories there's a hero often a
humble guy but not always sometimes a knight decides he'll go out there you
know and chase down the snake maybe even or the serpent or the dragon maybe even
in its lair and he'll have a bunch of adventures on the way that transform him
from you know useless naive Hobbit into you know sword wielding hero and he
confronts the dragon and gets the gold and frees the people that it had
enslaved and then comes back transformed to share what he's learned with the
community it's like well that's the human story fundamentally and that's
that's our basic instinctive pattern and it's represented in narratives
constantly and that's partly what this see this has meaning you know what this
means why why do you know well you know
because it draws on symbolic representations that you already
understand you understand that a mess of tooth snakes is not a good thing and
that may be the sensible thing to do is stomp them and it's not like you need an
instruction manual to figure out what the poster means and so you know that's
two different representations of Hitler that's sort of the pro-hitler
representation and I would say that's the anti-hitler representation and you
know that's the real Hitler who at this point does not look like a very happy
clam so so that's the known that's culture that's order and what's
eternally juxtaposed to culture and the known and the explored and order is the
unknown and the unknown is a strange place the unknown is actually it's a
physical place like the unknown is the place that when you're camping and
you're around a fire the unknown is everything outside the circle of the
light and you remember in the Lion King you may not remember when when when
Mufasa that's the king right goes and takes Simba up to show him his territory
he says he is the king of everything that the light touches
and that's a very old idea and you guys had no problem with you know that was
fine that made sense and that I would be on the light was the darkness and that
was the elephant graveyard that was death that was the place of death and
danger that's where the hyenas hung out and you weren't supposed to go there and
so of course Simba because he's a rule breaking hero just like Harry Potter
immediately goes there and so you know that's like the forbidden fruit it's the
same sort of idea if you want someone to do something the best thing to do is
tell them that they shouldn't and not explain why you know so for example if I
said to you at the beginning of this class look I've got one rule here don't
sit in that chair no matter what you'd be thinking the whole year especially if
I reminded you well just what's up with that chair like let's chair as magical
all of a sudden you some of you might even well you probably wouldn't because
this is a ridiculous example but maybe you know you come to class early and sit
in that chair just to see what would happen you know and people are very
curious and that's exactly what we're like and that's a very old story too
right it's like opening Pandora's box don't open that box you'll be sorry it's
like oh huh you know all the horrors of the world fly out and believe me you
will open Pandora's box many times in your life because you know with your
family or maybe your mate or maybe your children you'll have this idea that they
have a box with things in it that you want to know about and you'll say well
I'm kind of curious about this particular event so why don't you tell
me about it and they say well no we probably really shouldn't open that box
and you keep bugging them and then they open it and then all sorts of things fly
out that you didn't expect and then maybe you think hey it would have been
better if I would have just left that damn box closed but and you can do the
same thing to yourself believe me and so the Pandora's box idea the
forbidden fruit idea that's that's a major-league idea and part of the reason
in the judeo-christian tradition why people are saddled with the notion of
original sin is because hyper cortically developed chimpanzees without much sense
can keep their hands off things and so they
keep exploring even when they know better and every time they do that they
learn something that is that destroys the paradise that they currently inhabit
right because there's plenty Unni and I never learned anything in your life
that's of importance without it having a pretty damn destabilizing effect on you
at the moment of realisation right you learn something happy it's like whatever
you know that all that means is that I was doing things right like it's nice
and everything but it's not informative you do something and all hell breaks
loose that'll make you think that's for sure you might never stop thinking for
the rest of your life so anyways the unknown the unknown is that which
surrounds the known it's an unexplored territory it's usually represented as
female I think for a variety of reasons and not not as female exactly it's not
the right way to think about it as feminine and that's not the same thing
because feminine is a symbolic category whereas female is like an actual female
and so you don't want to confuse the metaphor with with the with the
actuality because we have these social cognitive categories built-in you know
you might say masculine feminine and offspring something like that we had to
use what we could to represent what we were attempting to figure out and we
kind of mapped them onto the external realities of being the best we could
using what we could and so you know nature is benevolent and it's fruitful
you know all things come from nature and all things come from the unknown right
because the known is already there it's the unknown that manifests the new right
and so that's part of the reason for the characterization of the unknown as
feminine and then there's also the case that women play a massive role in sexual
selection among human beings so that mmm from an evolutionary perspective you're
twice as likely to be a failure if you're a man then you
or if you're a woman in that you have twice as many female ancestors as male
ancestors and you think well that's impossible but it's not all you have to
do is imagine that every woman has one child half the men have two and the
other half have zero and so end of problem and that's basically how it
works out so women are more choosy mater's than men by a substantial margin
there was a funny study done by the guy who established it's one of the big
dating sites and he looked at how women rated men and they rated the 50th
percentile man at the 15th percentile so 85% of men were below average according
to women's ratings now men had their same arbitrary choices because of course
they preferred younger women to older women and and they were more swayed I
would say by by attractiveness but that didn't have set nearly as big an effect
on their actually actually writing of women so anyway so you know from from a
Darwinian perspective nature is that which selects so that's all it is and so
sexual selection plays a massive role in human evolution you know the fact that
we have these massive brains is very likely a consequence of a positive
feedback loop and sexual selection you know because otherwise that's the
only time you can get really rapid changes in evolutionary space where you
know you get a process going that reinforces itself so there's a little
preference for intelligence and then that produces more intelligent men and
women and then there's a little more preference for intelligence and you know
maybe then that turns into the ability to speak and or to master fire and then
there's way more selection for intelligence and the brain just goes
like this you know and women have paid a pretty big price for that because your
hips are basically so wide that you can barely run and if they were any wider
than you couldn't and of course the pelvic passageway through which the baby
travels is too small so it's really painful and dangerous and the
baby's head has to compress quite a lot I mean they come out cone-shaped often
and then they're born really young so you have to take care of them forever
like what the hell you know a deer is born a fawn is born and it's like two
seconds later it's standing and then it's running from a lion it's like you
know it's like 15 minutes later and a baby it's like you just lies there and
you know utters plaintive noises that's all it can do and that does that for
like ten months before it could skitter away from a sloth if it was predatory
you know so you really got to take care of those creatures and so that's a big
price to pay that's a big price to pay for our cortical evolution so anyways
here is some of the symbolic represents representatives of the unknown the
unconscious Dionysian force of the it'd that sort of Freud's representation of
the unknown the terrors of the darkness that's the unknown the monsters that
lurk they're the source and the resting place of all things the great mother the
Queen the matrix which means matter which means mother
the matriarch matter mother the container the cornucopia the object to
be fertilized the source of all things the fecund
the pregnant the strange the emotional the foreigner the place of return and
rest the deep the valley the cleft the cave hell death and the grave because
it's beyond the moon ruler of the night and mysterious dark and matter and the
earth then you know all this because when you watch a movie that's rife with
symbolic representations it draws on those underlying metaphors and they're
natural I mean where does a witch live well in a swamp for God's sake she
doesn't live in the penthouse of a New York Tower she lives in a swamp and it's
dark there and if the moon's up that's a better and maybe it could be a crescent
moon or maybe it could be a full moon but you know witches live in the right
place if you're going to understand it and you all you understand all of that
and it's part of the structure of your imagination you could say
and so it's part of the unspoken fantastical imagination that unites all
of us and it makes us specifically human there's a good representation of the
underworld and the place of transformation so that's Hell in Isis in
Egypt was queen of the underworld and the underworld generally has a queen and
she usually shows up when order falls apart and so you go to the underworld
when your life falls apart that's what it means and so when you see these
stories of the hero you know journeying to unknown lands of terror and danger
that's that's what happens to you it happens to you all the time you know
you're you're in this little safe space like The Hobbit in the Shire and then
you know there's a great evil brewing somewhere and you can no longer ignore
it so off you go into the land of terror and uncertainty and better to go on
purpose then accidentally that's for sure because at least you can be
prepared and we also know that if you're going to face a threat if you face it
voluntarily what happens is your body activates itself for exploration and
mastery but if you face it involuntarily same size threat then you you you you
revert to pray pray mode and you're frozen and that's way way way more
stressful it's way harder on your body and so it's better to keep your eye open
and watch for emergent threats because you all know you know what you're not
doing quite right and where your life is likely to unravel you all have a sense
of that and the best thing to do is to not ignore that to pay attention to it
to watch it and to take corrective action early and then you know you stay
on top of things and things your little trip to the underworld might be a few
minutes long instead of a catastrophe that produces post-traumatic stress
disorder knocks you out for four or five years and maybe you never recover so and
that's right you know that's what these kind of symbolic representations mean
it's those are states of being that that that indicate being devoured and you can
be devoured your own unconscious Jesus that happens
all the time what does that mean well you know and it's an autonomous thing in
some sense you know like if you if you get depressed or if you get really
anxious you don't have any control over that it's like it sweeps up over you and
pulls you down why down well down is where you go when you're sad you don't
go up man I'm up today oh that's too bad no it's man I'm down today and well
that's partly this and it's partly because this is subordinate and it's
partly because down is closer to the ground and farther from the sky like
there's all sorts of reasons you're feeling down rather than up up is where
you're aiming right yeh MUP you don't aim down well there the reason those
phrases make sense is because they're locked deeply into this underlying
structure of imagination and well those are the architect or the archetypal
structures according to Jung and I I think that he's far as I can tell he's
dead accurate and I think we understand the biology of such things much better
than we did so there is more representations she's she's quite the
friendly creature that's Kelly I like this representation better those
are heads by the way in hands so she sort of represents well very complex
things she represents death she represents transformation in this I
already like this representation I think it's brilliant so imagine that what the
people were doing who formulated these representations what they were trying to
do was to make a representation of the domain of threat itself right so that
they could deal with the idea that because we can say threat well what is
that what the hell does that mean well threat is the category of all
threatening things and so then you can think about threat and you can think
about threat across all those individual instances and maybe you can figure out
how to deal with threat right how what's the best way to be in the world so that
you most effectively deal with threat well that's sort of like apart from how
do you deal with pain that's sort of like the ultimate
question of human beings you want to be terrified No
so you want to be in danger No so like you better figure out how to deal with
threat so first of all you have to conceptualize it so we'll take a look at
this representation so that's Kelly shear
her hair is on fire well fire you know that's that's a numinous phenomena
dangerous but transformative she's wearing a headdress of skulls she has a
weapon in this hand and and she has a tiger's tongue she often has a snake
around her waist need none of these do but she often does but in this case this
then that's because you know it it's a snake we've already covered that well
these things that look like snakes here aren't you notice how her belly is
concave well it's because she's just given birth to this unfortunate person
that she happens to be standing on and she's eating him intestines first and
that's a fire ring which he is in and then it's got skulls on the inside of it
it's like what's that supposed to do well partly it's supposed to represent
that which terrifies you it's like yeah fair enough man because I don't imagine
you saw those things in there before I explained them but someone who was
familiar with that image would know what it meant it's like some poor artist was
sitting there thinking well how do I represent destruction it's like bang
whoa okay well put that down and then we won't look at it again so and then what
do you do with this you make sacrifices to it and you think well that's kind of
primitive you know first of all well that doesn't really exist well it does
if it's an amalgam of threat symbols I can tell you that it exists that's for
sure so it exists as an abstraction if nothing else do you offer it sacrifices
well what the hell do you think you do what are you doing in class why aren't
you like drinking vodka and snorting cocaine you know because you could be
doing that instead here you are listening to me you know slaving away in
university you're young it's like really you've got nothing better to do than sit
there you know well what you're willing to forego today
pleasure for tomorrow's advantage and that's what sacrifice is and human
beings discovered that dramatically first you know like we were we were apes
for God's sake we didn't just leap up and think oh we better save for tomorrow
you know we it took thousands of years for that idea to emerge and it emerged
in dramatic form and it was sort of like well society is sort of like a god know
what they weren't thinking this through is like if you're gonna represent
society well it's like this masculine God that's always judging the
hell out of you that's everywhere all at the same time it's like yeah yeah that's
true absolutely and what do you have to do with it well you have to give it what
it wants why why do you have to give it what it wants because it'll crush you if
you don't and that's exactly right and if you're lucky and you give it the
right sacrifice then it'll smile on you and you get to have a good life and that
was like that was the major discovery of mankind man that was a killer discovery
it was like the discovery of the future you know we discovered the future as a
place and it was a place that you could bargain with you can bargain with the
future wow that's just what an idea that is you know it's it's so unlikely well
how do you bargain with the future well you give it what it wants and you know
some of that you maintain your social relationship and you know you make
yourself useful to other people and you shape yourself so that you can cooperate
with people and you you don't act impulsively and maybe you squirrel
something away for the next harvest even if you're hungry and you know and then
the future isn't hell and you make the proper sacrifices and so if you
sacrifice to Kelly then she turns into her opposite and showers benevolence on
you and that's Mother Nature right it's like look out for Mother Nature man you
know two weeks out in the bush right now and you're dead and it's not pleasant
and then if it's the spring you last longer huh but the bugs eat you and so
that's not very fun either so nature you know it's bent on your
destruction but if you treat it properly and carefully and make the right
sacrifices then maybe one of her trees will offer you some fruit and that would
be okay and so believe me lots of people died trying to figure that out
so here's another way of looking at it so I said you know order and chaos known
unknown explored territory unexplored territory I love this this is the Taoist
symbol it's a symbol of being and being isn't reality as you would conceptualize
it as a scientist it's more like reality as it manifests itself to you as a
living thing which is completely different you know science extracts out
all the subjectivity all it is there is an array of our objective facts of
equivalent value and that's part of its method but that's not the world in which
you live the world in which you live is full of motivation and emotion it's full
of terror and pain and joy and frustration and and other people that's
for sure and so that's the real world and so well that's what this is it's
it's the real world and what is it made out of well it's made out of all those
things you know that can get out of hand you know because the explored territory
and the known can get so damn tight that it's nothing but a tyrant and then it's
all those things you don't know and that's pretty exciting because you know
you want to go find out some things you don't know and that adds a lot of spice
to life you want a little adventure you don't want to go out with someone who's
so predictable that you know everything about them in a week you know unless
you're hyper conservative you want to go out with someone who's got they're a
little erratic like not too erratic let's say they're a little dangerous
perhaps not too dangerous but some of that at least you want predictability
with a bit of unpredictability in there well that's exactly what this means it's
like that's predictability with a little unpredictability in it and what that
also means is that what you know can be turned into what you don't know just
like that and that's going to happen to you lots of times in your life man when
someone close to you dies suddenly it's like poof
order turns into chaos and now you're in chaos and what the hell are you gonna do
there and that's a good question because you need to know what to do
there cuz you're gonna be there and it happens to you when your dreams fall
apart you know I mean your dreams for your life or you know when you discover
something awful about yourself that you didn't know or you know it flips on you
all the time and in small ways sometimes you know you have a fight with a friend
or in big ways that that wipe you out for well indefinitely sometimes because
you can fall into chaos and never get out you know that's the people who are
trapped in the belly of the beast it isn't necessary that when you descend
into chaos that you learn something and you get back out you could just be stuck
there suffering until you die and that's you know I wouldn't recommend that you
know it's something to avoid but it happens to people all the time all the
time you see them wandering around you know shattered on the streets of Toronto
you know they're done they're in chaos and there's so much chaos around them
that you won't even go near them the chaos spreads like eight feet around
them and so when you see someone like that you're like well first we're not
going to look too closely and people like that often don't like you to look
at them because that also helps them remember where they are and that's no
Pleasant thing and you're gonna just stay away from that maybe you'll cross
the street maybe you'll keep your head down whatever you're not going anywhere
near that chaos and no bloody wonder you know and and you don't think about it
much after you pass it because it's a hell of a thing to think about and what
are you gonna do about it anyway so you don't know what to do about it you might
just make it worse well so chaos you know that's the other half of life and
it can turn into order sometimes better order that's actually what you do when
you explore right you explore you find out something new not too new not to
Pandora boxy you know you bite off as much as you can chew but no more and so
that rearranges the way you look at the world but you're doing it voluntarily so
you can kind of tolerate there the recalibration and you strength
and the order right because now you become more competent and I would say
that you're trying to live on the edge between order and chaos and I and I mean
that's a real place that's an actual it's a meta place but it's more real
than places because it's so old it's such an old place it really exists and
your nervous system knows that it sees the world this way in fact the right
hemisphere is roughly specialized for chaos and the left hemisphere is roughly
specialized for order which is why the left hemisphere tends to have the
linguistic elements and and why people are right-handed and the right
hemisphere has a more diffuse structure it's more associated with negative
emotion and imagination and the two communicate between each other through
the corpus callosum and the right hemisphere appears to update the less
left hemisphere kind of slowly often in dreams and so if you were hurt if your
right hemisphere is hurt for example back here in the parietal lobe then you
lose the left part of your body you can't move it anymore
but you also lose the idea that you have a left part of your body so it's like
blindness it's a blindness to the left and so if someone comes along and says
you know you're not moving your left arm you're gonna say yeah well my arthritis
is bothering me 2d have moved it for six months MA my arthritis is bothering
today or you know you don't move in your left foot it's like well you know uh I'm
too tired well what's happened is the left hemisphere has a representation of
the body and it's not being updated because the part of the brain that would
notice that the left is gone because of a stroke it isn't there anymore and so
the left already has a model and it's not gonna change just it's hard to
change your model of yourself you know have a tooth pulled what happens it's
like your damn tongue is in that hole for the next six months fiddling around
constantly and that's because you're rebuilding your neurological model of
your body it's like try it out with your whole left side and see how well you do
you know so this guy named Ramachandran was experimenting with people like this
and one of the things he did was kind of he was checking their balance and you
can do that by irrigating the ear with cold water and
that makes people go like this makes their eyes move back and forth because
it upsets the vestibular system and what he found was that if he if he poured
cold water in the left ear of someone with right per aisle damage who had left
neglect that they'd all of a sudden sort of wake up catastrophic ly they'd have a
terrible reaction to the fact that they were paralyzed on the left and they
would know that it had happened and cry and you know amid all sorts of distress
and no wonder and then like 20 minutes later they'd
snap back into their damaged mode of being and they would not deny because
that isn't really what it is is that they couldn't update the model they just
didn't have the neurology for it anymore so they were back to not noticing that
it was gone and coming up with stories about it and so well so that's a good
example of how the right and left hemispheres worked together and how
they're kind of mapped onto this weirdly enough so you know we're map were
adapted to the meta reality and so what that would be is we're adapted to that
which remains constant across the longest spans of time and that's not the
same things that you see flitting around you day to day those are just they just
like clouds they're just evaporating you know there's things underneath that that
are more fundamental that are more fundamental realities like the dominance
hierarchy like the tribe like the danger outside of society like the threat that
other people pose to you and that you pose to yourself
those are eternal realities and we're adapted to those that's our world and
that's why we express that in stories and so then you might say well how do
you adapt yourself to this world and the answer to that isn't I believe this is a
neurological answer I believe this that your brain can tell you when you're
optimally situated between chaos and order and the way it tells you that is
by producing the sense of engagement and meaning so let's say there's a place in
the environment you should be okay what should that place be
well you don't want to be terrified out of your skull like what good is that and
you know you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep
you want to be somewhere where you know you're kind of on firm ground here but
over here you're kind of testing out new territory and some of you who are
exploratory and emotionally stable you know you're gonna go pretty far out into
the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself and other people
are gonna just put a toe in the chaos and you know that's neuroticism
basically that's that your sensitivity to threat that's calibrated differently
in different people and more some people are more exploratory than others that's
kind of extraversion and openness working together and and intelligence so
some people are going to tolerate a larger admixture of chaos in their order
those are liberals by the way and I mean that technically liberals are more
interested in novel chaos and conservatives are more interested in the
stabilization of the structures that already exist and who's right well it
depends on the situation and that's why conservatives and liberals have to talk
to each other because one of them isn't right and the other wrong sometimes the
conservatives are right and sometimes the liberals are right because the
environments go in like this you can't predict the damn thing so that's why you
have to communicate and that's what a democracy does it allows people of
different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate the damn
societies so anyways so let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and
order so what does that mean well you're stable enough but you're interested
right because a little novelty heightens your anxiety that wakes you up a bit
that's the adventure part of it but it also focuses the part of your brain that
does exploratory activity and that's actually associated with pleasure
that's the dopamine circuit and so if you're optimally balanced and you know
that you know you're there when you're listening to an interesting conversation
or you're engaged in one it's a real conversation you know you're saying some
things you know and the other person is saying some things they know
but the both of what you know is changing it's like wow that's so
interesting you'll have a conversation like that forever or maybe you're
reading a book like that or you're listening to a piece of music that
models that because what music does is provide you with predictable forms
multi-level predictable forms that transform
just the right amount and so music is a very representational art form it says
this is what the universe is like you know there's a dancing element to it
repetitive and then cute little variations that sort of surprise and
delight you and and you think wow that's so cool and it doesn't matter how
nihilistic you are you know music still infuses you with a sense of meaning and
that's because it models meaning that's what it does that's why we love it and
you know you can dance to it and that sort of symbolizes you putting yourself
in harmony with these multiple layers of reality and positioning yourself
properly and you like that too you know you'll pay for it oh boy I get to go
dancing you know oh boy I get to listen to music it's like what the hell are you
doing listening to music what good is that well you think that's a stupid
question I don't care about your dopey criticism I'm going to listen to some
music right it did there's no rational there's no rational argument against
music it's like you just don't even think about it you just walk away from
someone who's stupid enough to ask that question it's like some things are
obvious well why okay so that's pretty fun so
what mediates between these two domains well that's what consciousness does far
as I can tell and that's sort of the individual and that's the hero that's
another way of thinking about it it's the logos that's another way of thinking
about it it's the word that generates order out of chaos at the beginning of
time it's the consciousness that interacting with the matter of the world
produces being that's basically it that's basically you for all intents and
purposes how do you do that well the unconscious
does it to some degree you know because it's with our fantasy that we first meet
the unknown right well look say you're going out with a new person it's like
what do you do you project a fantasy on them and then you fall in love with the
fantasy and aren't you stupid because you're gonna find out that the match
between your damn fantasy and the actual person is tenuous at best and so young
would call that a projection of either the anima or the animus you know the
anima is what a man projects onto a woman he finds desirable it's like oh
she's the perfect woman it's like well how do you know that
you've like seen her for four seconds you know but it grips you and the same
thing happens in the opposite direction and it's an action of instinct you know
it's like you fall in love with the image and but interestingly enough what
you do in a relationship that works is that you actually I think that what you
see it's a rough approximation when you
project the ideal and fall in love with it you see what could be it could be
that but it's going to take you a hell of a lot of work because like you got no
shortage of flaws and the other person has no shortage of flaws and so you're
bringing your flaws together and that's going to produce a lot of friction and
you're gonna have to engage in a lot of dialogue before you approach that level
of perfection again but maybe you can do it then you get to live happily ever
after well would not be nice well so the
unconscious meets the unknown and it it meets it with imagination and fantasy
and dream and art that's how you take so you don't just go from what you don't
know to fully articulated knowledge in one bloody leap you can't do that you
have to extend pseudo pods of fantasy and imagination into the unknown that's
kind of what theorizing is like right even scientifically you know you don't
know something scientifically you generate a theory well it's an
imaginative representation that your unconscious is helping you generate and
so you meet the unknown with fantasy that's what the unconscious is for from
the psychoanalytic perspective that's what
rheems do and you can see why you dream about the future you know it's like well
what's the future gonna be like well you have a little imaginative story going on
and it's like you don't really create it it's sort of you watch it unfold you
know maybe you could tweak it here and there but it sort of comes to you from
wherever the hell things like that come from you know the unconscious that's the
psychoanalytic answer it's not really much of an answer because it's more like
a representation of a place that we don't understand but that's where
creativity comes from and I mean some people are really creative right down to
the bloody core so in my clinical practice I often see people who are high
in openness because they're attracted to me because they watch my lectures and
you have to kind of be high in openness to like my lectures so because well you
do because they go everywhere you know and and they're not necessarily very
orderly so so anyways lots of my clients are really high in openness and they're
funny people often especially if they're smart because sometimes they have the
most nihilistic intelligence you can imagine it's just self-critical and
nihilistic and brutally brutal man and smart and so they just criticize
themselves out of existence and so often I have to just try to get them to quit
listening to their chattering right self-critical rationality and go out and
create something you know with their massive creativity and as long as
they're doing that they're engaged in the world and happy as hell but as soon
as that self-critical rationality comes in and shuts down the creativity they're
just they're just like walking corpses you know and it's because if you're
really open like that's your a tree and it has some trunks and you know your
your most prominent trait is the most lively trunk and if you're a creative
person and you're not engaging in a creative enterprise
you're just you're like a tree that that has been that has had its vitality
amputated and so this is not trivial this stuff is this is deeply deeply
deeply rooted in your biology and and those are people often who have like
dream lives you just can't believe I have one client
he has like four spectacular dreams a week and most of the time we
just spend discussing them I mean God he and I had another client who could be
lucid in her dreams which is more common among women she could ask the damn
characters what they represented and they would tell her it was like okay
that was pretty weird and like a lot of the things they told her were really
helpful and they were not things that she wanted to hear she she basically one
of them told her she if she was gonna live she'd have to go visit a
slaughterhouse and the reason for that was because she was raised as a little
princess and protected from horrible mother nature until she hit puberty in
which time she turned into an evil villain because that's how the family
worked perfect child evil teenager overnight and then well
that was hard on her and she wasn't prepared because she thought the world
was princess world and you know she couldn't go through a butcher store
without having a fit and no wonder you know like really Jesus you know it's no
wonder but you do it but she couldn't so we used to go to butcher stores and that
would make her cry and and that she was a vegetarian that would make her cry and
you know bemoan the cruelty of the world and it's like yeah fair enough man those
are bloody slabs of meat it's like I don't know why everyone isn't screaming
when they walk through the butcher store but but you got to get used to it man
because you can't live in the world otherwise and so the dream character who
was a gypsy told her that she had to go visit a slaughterhouse which seemed
rather impractical and so I asked her if she could think of anything else to do
and she saw it well why don't we go visit a funeral home and and watch an
embalming and I thought oh how good that sounds that sounds like a fun way to
spend a day and so I phoned up a funeral parlor and I said I had a client it was
terrified of death yeah and I was the therapist who was also a little shaky on
the concept myself and so they they had no problem with that they deal with
death all the time which is really something to think about right a human
being can actually have an occupation where they do nothing but deal with
death and they don't go stark raving mad it's like what the hell's up
with that it's like working in a palliative care ward where your your
clients that you you know have a relationship all they're gonna do is die
this week next week the week after people do that it's like those people
are tough man they're tough so anyways we went and watched this embalming which
was I have a rather high level of disgust sensitivity so it was a little
on the rough side for me but she sat there and first while she was not we
were outside this little room she was not looking at that man no way and she
kind of go like this and you know that was pretty good and then she'd go like
this and then she go like this and then and she watched it and then she asked if
she could go in and she put on the glove and she touched the body and she didn't
have a fit she didn't have a panic attack and so she walked away from there
learning that there was a hell of a lot more to her than she thought there was
and that she could see things that she didn't think she could see and live and
after that she sort of had a touchstone it's like well I'm kind of afraid of
this well is it as bad as going to see the embalming
no it's not that bad well I guess I can do it it's like an initiation right she
had an initiation and so did I you know and I learned a lot from doing that I
learned that one of the things you need to do if you're going to be a human
being is to prepare yourself to be useful in the face of death and so when
you have a parent that dies which you know shatters people's ideas often they
can't even think about it if you can't even think about that man you've got
some thinking to do because you need to be able to at least think about that
because otherwise you're just gonna be a wasteland when it happens and you never
know you could even have a higher ambition maybe you could even be useful
when it happens instead of being part of the heap of destroyed people who also
have to be taken care of you know and that's brutal you have to be brutal to
be useful in the aftermath of your parents death you know you don't get to
crumble and fall apart and no you have every reason to so you got to be kind of
some tough monster to manage that but you want to be useful in the face of
tragedy or do you want to be well you make your choice so out of the
unconscious you get ritual you get dreams you get drama you get stories you
get art you get music and that sort of buffers us we have our little domain of
competence and we're buffered by the domain of fantasy and culture and that's
really what you learn about when you come to university if you're lucky and
and the professors are smart enough to actually teach you something about
culture instead of constantly telling you that it's completely reprehensible
and should be destroyed it's like why you would prefer chaos to order is
beyond me and the only possible reason is that you haven't read enough history
to understand exactly what chaos means and believe me if you understood what it
means you'd be pretty goddamn careful about tearing down the temple that you
live in unless you want to be a denizen of chaos and some people do you know
because that's when the impulses that you Harbor can really come out and shine
and so a little gratitude is in order and that makes you appreciative of the
wise King well being smart enough to know that he's also an evil tyrant it's
like that's that's a total conception of the world it's balanced it's like yeah
we should preserve nature but good god it is trying to kill us and you know
yes our culture is tyrannical and oppressive people but it is protecting
us from dying that's helpful you know and yes we're reasonably good people but
like don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself and you
know that's wisdom at least in part and that's what these stories try to teach
you there's a nice mythological
representation I love this one it's like the Dome of the known and the seeker
looking outside you know that's a that's a metaphysical representation you know
and then that is the world as it looks to us right you go out in a field and it
looks like there's a dome covering it it's a circle a big circle with a dome
over it and you know what's outside the dome well the unknown right that's where
heaven is theoretically you know it's a projection obviously
heaven is in the unknown well it was localized in space
I suppose that's partly because when people looked up in the sky they were
overwhelmed with all so it's a reasonable conclusion you know it it's a
projection of an unconscious presupposition it's a projection of
fantasy you know heaven is a fantasy and and I'm not denigrating fantasy by the
way and it's projected imaginatively onto the sky and that's part of the way
you discover what's in your fantasy well this is us man we mediate between chaos
and order and you know those are the two archetypal representations fundamentally
you know and I think they apply to both genders you know like women can act as
the individual who holds the world on his or her shoulders and males men can
play a maternal role you know meet female human beings are quite masculine
and male human beings are quite feminine and so you know maybe maybe this
archetype dominates among men and that archetype dominates among women which I
would say is that is the case as far as I'm concerned although there in our
individual conceptions and of course those two things have to work in
conjunction but that's you the eternal mediator between chaos and order which
also has its enemy so that's that's Horace there and that Seth who's
eventually turns into Satan as though as the West progresses so to speak and
that's represented there as well the temptations of I would say resentment
and hatred which everyone has to fight with all the time all right
initiations so this is cool this is a standard hero story and initiate
initiative rights are a part of human heritage and so let's take a look this
is from el yada I would like even now to stress the fact
that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profaned
it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology it's not mental illness
it has an int initiatory structure and signification
short it reproduces a traditional mystical pattern the total crisis of the
future shaman sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the
personality and to madness can be valuated not only as an initiatory death
but also as a symbolic returned to the pre cosmogonic chaos to the amorphous
and indescribable state that precedes any comes Morgan II well what he means
by that is that I suppose the mythological view of the emergence of
order that's a cosmogony is that there's a state of potential and chaos out of
which order emerges and you know here's here's how it is that you think that way
because you do think that way so you know imagine what you're facing when
you're facing the future right well you might say well the future is full of
potential right it's full of potential what the hell does that mean you know
you act as if that you act as if that potential is really a real thing and
you're confronting it all the time I'm confronting the potential of the future
well it doesn't exist yet so did what you're confronting doesn't even really
exist what you're conceptualizing doesn't really exist and in some sense
you bring it into being by plotting your path through it well the pre cosmogonic
chaos is the same as the potential of the future it's exactly the same idea
it's the realm of possibility from which actuality emerges and you participate in
turning that possibility into actuality that's what you're doing all the time
now can I explain that well no I have no idea how consciousness and the substrate
of the world interact i I can only say that that's how it
looks that's how it feels you know that's how people act and
they'll get into trouble if they don't manifest their potential whatever that
is that's all those things you could be that you're not well where are those
it's just potential well that's the chaos this is a that's the I would say
that's the the cosmos that's the cosmos that you live in all the time it's a
little story it's the thing that you extract out of the chaos it's
- consists of your conception of where you are now and your conception of where
you want to be at some point could be ten minutes could be three years if you
can slide it and then you have a little plan about how you should move your body
to do transform one in into the other that's your action powder and that's a
little story and when you ask someone to say what they were up to you they'll
tell you a little story like that you know I was at some place and I went
somewhere else and here's how I did it then they might tell you more
interesting story which is I was someplace and something happened that I
really didn't expect and it knocked me for a loop you know and that's a good
divorce story I came home one night and my wife was gone it's like yeah chaos
and probably a bit of willful blindness preceding it we might suspect
anyways down into chaos and then well maybe you learn something down there and
maybe you don't but hopefully you do and you put yourself together if you're
lucky and then pop bang you pop up into another little structure of order and
that's an initiatory process it's like you're some more stable falls apart or
maybe you break it apart on purpose you do it voluntarily you know people do
that all the time you know they do that for example when they experiment with
drugs and they do that when they go on wild adventures and you know when they
break themselves out of their normal routine and throw themselves somewhere
they don't understand and hope that that's going to produce a transformation
of personality that's the basic story that's the initiatory story now this is
William James who was the one of the establishes of modern psychology and a
kind of an odd guy he was an early experimenter with psychedelics of course
they'll never tell you that but he was and he is his drug of choice was nitrous
oxide which is an inhalant gas which seems to be inert no one really knows
why it works but it produces quite intense hallucinogenic experience
mystical experience although if you breathe too much of it then you die
because it doesn't it doesn't have any oxygen in it so so don't do that and and
he wrote some really bad hippie poetry back
in the 1880s well he was you know experimenting with with nitrous oxide
I'll read a little bit of that to you pure experience is the name which I give
to the original flux of life before a reflection has categorized it only
newborn babes in persons in semi coma from sleep drugs illnesses or blows can
have an experience pure in the literal sense of that which is not yet any
definite what though ready to be any sorts of what's both full both of
oneness and of many 'no specs that don't appear changing throughout yet so
confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points either of
distinction or of identity can be caught 1905 William James Journal of philosophy
you know a lot of these old guys that established what we regard is you know
fairly stable bodies of knowledge we're just as crazy as you could possibly
imagine they're just the most peculiar damn people and they get sanitized you
know as they are represented in history and that's no fun you know I mean it's
much more interesting to know what they were like they were just so bloody
peculiar and and strange and involved in all sorts of weird things that's a lot
more fun to know that here's his poem Wow
it's like right from 1968 no verbiage can give it because the verbiage is
other incoherent coherent same and it fades and it's infinite and it's
infinite don't you see the difference don't you see the identity constantly
opposites United the same me telling you to write and not to write extreme
extreme extreme something and other than that thing intoxication and other nest
and intoxication every attempt at betterment every attempt at other menthe
is a it fades forever and forever as we move it's like it's just about as
incoherent as post modernist philosophy so we know for archaic and traditional
cultures that a symbolic return to chaos is equivalent to preparing a new
creation it follows that we may interpret the psychic chaos of the
future shaman as assigned the profane man is being dissolved and a
new personality being prepared for birth transformation here's a way of thinking
about it paradise Paradise Lost redemption classic story
of mankind always it was a great past we're in a state of chaos we're heading
towards a better future everyone thinks that way the stories are based on that
well that's that now Ellen Burch a who wrote a lot about the psychoanalysts
believed that Freud and Jung in particular had a creative illness which
he regarded as a sort of spontaneous shamanic transformation and he said a
creative illness has these elements it follow succeeds a period of intense
preoccupation with an idea and search for certain truth it's a polymorphous
condition that can take the shape of depression neurosis psychosomatic
ailments or even psychosis Jung was in that state when he wrote this book
called the red book which was just released last year which is full of
visionary illustrations and hands very strange poetry and it contains the the
communications he had with imaginative beings that he conjured up when when
practicing doing exactly that he practiced that for years and he had
these autonomous beings manifest themselves in his fantasy it had long
conversations with them it just you know while he was working as a doctor and
having a sane normal life and well it's kind of well it's really something
whatever the symptoms they're felt is painful while he thought maybe he was
going mad and some people think he did if not agonizing by the subject with
alternating periods of alleviation and worsening throughout the illness the
subject never loses the thread of his dominating preoccupation it's often
compatible with normal professional activity and family life but even if he
keeps to his social activities he's almost entirely absorbed with
himself he suffers from feelings of utter isolation even when he has a
mentor who guides him through the ordeal like the shaman apprentice with his
master the termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration
the subject emerges from his ordeal with a permanent Tran
formation in his personality and a conviction that he has discovered a
great truth or a new spiritual world many of the 19th and 20th century
figures regarded universally as great Nietzsche Darwin Dostoyevsky Tolstoy
Freud Jung were all additionally characterized by lengthy periods of
profound psychological unrest and uncertainty
well you don't generate a new theory without some birth pangs right because
your old theory has to bite the dust first and when your old theory bites the
dust it's like where are you you don't know do you know if you're gonna come up
with a new one no here's a cool thing this is my daughter she was five years
at this point she was playing prince or in princess
with Julie and her three-year-old she said dad if we killed a dragon we could
use his skin as armor wouldn't that be a good idea I thought
hey yeah that's that's a hell of an idea kid you know you go right after the
thing that frightens you the most and you develop something that protects you
from doing that it's like where did she get that idea
well good work kiddo she had plenty of dragons in her life so the following
dream was described by my daughter Mikayla three years nine months old
about my son Julian one year Julian was in the process of toilet training and
rapid speech development was having some trouble controlling his emotions Mikayla
liked to call him baby we had several discussions about the
fact that he wasn't really a baby anymore she told me this story while I
was at the computer so I was able to get it for Batum she wasn't very happy with
the idea that he wasn't a baby anymore because she kind of liked the baby she
took care of that baby a lot and her little brain was having a hard time with
the notion that whatever that thing is now it isn't a baby it's like well
where's my baby and believe me plenty of mothers go through the same thing then
they attempt to keep their children babies for the rest of their lives so
this is what Mikayla said the dream Julian's eyes fell out and then he
falled into pieces I said what sort of pieces she said Julian pieces and the
bones fall doubt too then a hole got him and there was water in it and when he
came out he was big mom Julian isn't a baby anymore no he
a big boy and a bug with legs got him out cuz bugs can swim and the whole was
in the park and it moved into the backyard and he fall into it a tree
burned and left the hole I thought wow that's so amazing it's like it was a it
was a shamanic transformation dream it was like the tree that's The Tree of
Life had burnt and left a hole the kid fell into it it dissolved him right down
to his bones this little bug which would be a union representation of the self
like Jiminy Cricket by the way in Pinocchio the bug was the thing that was
alive that helped him through the transformation he stepped out and now he
was big it's like that was her little brain conjuring up the notion of radical
transformation so this is cool I hope this works
this is a dream that my my nephew had did someone animated Jordan Peterson is
a clinical psychologist from the University of Toronto Maya do disagree
with some of his fundamental ideas but his thoughts and facing problems merge
with my stoic values within one of his maps of meaning lectures he tells a true
story about a four year old boy his nephew who for months was suffering from
terrible night terrors terrors that were waking him up screaming this boy by the
way did have some areas of instability in his family life Jordan visited the
young boy's house and the boy was running around dressed as an eight with
a sword a shield and a helmet at night aim he would take a sword and shield to
bed so Jordan got speaking to him and the boy described his dream and the
dream he's standing surrounded by knee-high Dwarfs these dwarves had beaks
and every time you would try to move the dwarfs would jump up and bait him a very
fretting scenario for a young boy and if you look behind all the dwarfs away in
the background there was a dragon and every time this dragon would puff out
fire and smoke more dwarfs would be created so there's no point fighting off
the dwarfs because more would just be me it
so Jordan tapped him and asked what could you do about that so the kid says
he could jump up on the Dragons head he could poke out his eyes with a sword so
he couldn't see then they could go go down the throat to the box where the
fire came from carve a piece out of that box thereby destroying it and use that
piece as a sheet its shamed before Jordan arrived was already a keynote in
life what he knew he had to do and after that conversation he had no more Nate
pears this is what Marcus really is meant when he said the impediment to
action advances action what stands in the way becomes the way he was tell not
us that we must not shy away from problems or shown or personal
responsibility we must be willing to sacrifice her comfort Goethe source of
her problems to solve them and then take something away well there you go so yeah
he was waking up screaming at night for four weeks
that's night terrorist he couldn't really remember what hell was going on
and there was instability and his family his parents got divorced soon after and
he was off to kindergarten and that was kind of destabilizing him too and so it
was fun to watch him zip around as a knight it's like you know where'd he get
that idea well you know he watched TV watch movies see his little imagination
was aggregating the picture of the hero and then he was trying to act it out
that's what he was doing pretending right I'm pretending to be the thing
that takes on the unknown and then he has this amazing dream it's like it's
mind-boggling it's so sophisticated it's like well here I am
and there's troubles everywhere and they're biting me they're jumping up on
me and it's like a Hydra you know in the Hydra you cut off a hydras head and
seven more heads grow it's like that's life man solve one problem seven more
appear right so also that that was the Dragons at the background chaos itself
and chaos kept breeding these are the evil little Dwarfs which is what it does
it's like it's one damn trouble after another we fight this one off fight this
one off it's like who cares the dragon the dwarf generating machine is still
working in the background so he I asked him and that was purposeful what
could you do see that's a leading question that
implies that there's something that he could do he said well I take my dad that
was missing in the animation and we go well poke the dragon's eyes out go right
down to the source of the problem extinguish it make a shield right so
that meant that he would have strengthened his character by the
encounter so brilliant and then and I talked to his mom for months afterwards
done no more night terrors what had happened he identified with the
mythological hero he did identified with st. George and the dragon he identified
with that little bloody tree dwelling primate who 20 million years ago was the
first one to drop a stick on a snake he adopted the classic human mode of being
in the face of uncertainty and construed himself as that which could prevail end
of terrors well I guess we're done E so we're gonna do something a little
different than the syllabus today because you know we got this one hour to
our problem and I really can't cover constructionism reasonably in two hours
or one hour that was supposed to be today
so what I'm going to do is instead is continue on the line that I've been
pursuing but I'm going to expand it up more into Union psychology which is the
what we're going after after constructivism anyways and so I can
weave the constructivism and the depth psychology together and it's nice to do
that because it gives you a kind of a coherent view so just so you know we're
one lecture ahead at the moment roughly speaking and I'll do constructivism on
Tuesday for two hours so all right so I showed you that anime animation I told
you about my nephew's dream which is a remarkable dream you know really it's
just amazing amazing dream and it's it's got this archetypal pattern you know and
the pattern is that there's a threat and worse than not that there's there are
threats and at the back of it there is the the
fact of threat itself you see so human beings were so smart hey so this is so
amazing that we figured this out so you imagine well human beings are the only
creatures that can really conceive of the class of all threatening things
right and that's kind of why we can be permanently anxious there's so it's sort
of annoying so you know here you are and it's safe there's no Lions here or or
anything that might prey on you but you can think of something to be anxious
about no problem you know I'm certain you've got some little skeleton rattling
around in your closet somewhere that's like eating away at you and so I think
part of the reason we're so damn awake human beings is because we're always
anxious like and you have to be awake when you're anxious and the the anxiety
system actually activates your reticular activating system and that that that
actually produces its the substrate for consciousness if you snap a few fibers
in the back of your brain that are part of the reticulating activate reticular
activating system in a car accident or something you'll go into a coma and
that'll be that here you're not getting out of it doesn't take much of an injury
either in the right place so anyways so human beings have been struggling with
this problem of threat forever really for as long as there's been life
or at least as long as there's been life with a nervous system and you know
that's several hundred million years it's a long time and of course it's easy
to you know to respond to a particular threat think about zebras they're out
there on the veldt and there's lions everywhere right but the zebras are like
they're calmed because there's lions are sleeping and so the zebras don't think
apparently oh my god what was going to happen with those Lions wake up because
they don't think that way you know and they're not going to be happy if the
lion goes into a hunting Crouch and starts its hunting approach obviously
but it's not like the zebras are freaking out non-stop because there are
Lions around you know so they can react to specific threats but human beings
partly because we discovered the future which was a big mistake was a big
mistake because the future is an uncertain place
we realized that well there isn't any threat right now but there might well be
some tomorrow and if there isn't some tomorrow well maybe next week or next
month or next year like it's coming and so there's danger so it's the category
of danger you know and out of the category of danger emerged specific
threats and the dragon seems to be a symbol of it is a symbol I believe of
the ever-present fact of predatory slightly predatory threat but our
nervous systems as they've become capable of abstraction have used that
underlying architecture to represent more abstract categories so it's not
it's not a predator like a dragon is not a predator because there are no dragons
but maybe a dragon is a snake and a and a crocodile and maybe a leopard and
maybe a predatory bird all mangled into one monster because a monster is
actually technically something that's made out of disparate parts and so it's
a good symbolic representation for the unknown as such that which lies beyond
the campfire let's say and what lurks out there and so the eternal problem is
what the hell do you do with the dragon and that also explains why the dragon
typically is a treasure garter right because it's even more the problem is
even worse out there in no-man's land out there in potential
there's threat and and and like mortal threat but there's also endless
opportunity and riches and wealth and and and the possibility of attracting
someone and all of that and so well the dragon
you can't just be afraid of it you just stay in your burrow the whole time and
lots of animals more or less do that is you know especially the nocturnal ones
they just hide away but that is what human beings alight because we're not
only prey animals right we're also predators and then of course we're crazy
we're absolutely insane chimpanzees right we're crazy and so we're always
out there mucking about with things and with our you know fingers and and our
thumbs and and taking the world apart and putting it back together and we're
crazily exploratory and and in troublemaking and so we don't just run
from dragons we go hunt them down and so and so there's a story here there's the
oldest story that mankind knows and literally it is the oldest story that we
know is this stories in this story basically is there's a bounded space a
walled garden a walled city you know on all the original cities were walled
because if they weren't barbarians would swoop in and they'd just steal all your
stuff and so you know that was kind of pointless so you know you wanted to have
some major-league walls surrounding your territory and so that's inhabited space
and inside that is here little dominance hierarchy and so all you primates knew
exactly who was who inside that space so you didn't have to fight with each other
and you could predict each other's behavior because you believed the same
things and saw the world roughly the same way and acted the same way and so
you were sort of secure but then the problem is is that that can always be
breached there's always something outside of it that's a danger and so
that's signified by this this little creature here this is dragon and that
that twirl in its tail is very common among dragons actually it's actually a
symbol because you imagistic languages imagistic symbols have an ancient
language and it it's referring to something that's basically eternal and
so it lives down here in this in this cave because it's an underground thing
it's an underground thing and you can kind of imagine what that's like and
sometimes this happens in initiation rituals among archaic people they're
gonna when they're gonna initiate usually the young men because nature
initiates women know by itself usually the young men maybe they'll put them in
a cave and leave them there you know for like well who know who knows how long
and Sagada think what's in a cave that caves are dark man I don't know if
you've ever been in one but like they're dark and they're really dark and so not
only is there whatever there is in the cave and you don't know what the hell's
in the cave there's whatever you imagined might be in the cave and so
when you're in that cave and you're alone you you're confronting the devils
and demons and monsters of your own imagination you know and so then you
have a chance to perhaps deal with that and overcome it and that's perhaps part
of the initiation ceremony you know and that's part of growing up because you
have to learn how to face the things that terrify and upset you and
and we cast them and put them back together we talked a little bit about
this idea of the pre cosmogonic chaos that that Iliad it refers to and and
that's this stuff out of which order is produced at the beginning of time and
it's also the stuff out of which you constantly reproduce order and the young
unions the psychoanalysts especially the really deep psychoanalysts like young
Freud was a more surface psychoanalyst and that's not an insult there's some
things that Freud figured out they're absolutely amazing he was a precursor to
Jung for sure for Jung the hero's journey was the journey inside the
unconscious and that would be perhaps in some sense that the the willingness to
face everything terrible that's happened to you and to think it through and to
articulate it and and to come to grips perhaps with your own capacity for
malevolence that was a really important part of Union ideas that the first step
towards individuation which is the manifestation of your full self let's
say was the discovery of your shadow and your shadow is the part of you that will
do terrible things under the right circumstances and maybe even without
that much provocation and you know and it's a terrifying part of you to come
into contact with because it's sort of it's sort of the way that you're
specifically attached to the archetype of evil that's a that's a good way of
thinking about it and you know modern people they don't really think much
about think much about the idea of good and evil but that's because the most of
them are so they I'm naive you can just barely even comprehend it you know if
you read any history if you really read it like and you and you don't come away
with the idea that evil exists it's like you're just reading the wrong kind of
history you know it's just unbelievable what people can do to each other and
we're so imaginative you know and one of the things I figured out about people
the reason that we're we have the knowledge of good and evil let's say is
that because we're self conscious and we know about ourselves we know about our
own vulnerability right you know what hurts you you really know what hurts you
way more than an animal knows and so when you're all so creative and so once
you know what hurts you man you can really hurt someone else and you can do
it in such a creative way you can draw it out you can
make it excruciating you can take people apart physically and psychologically and
you can keep them say even right on the edge of death so that you can keep doing
that endlessly and you know that happens hell of a lot more than you think it
happens it happens a lot and so well and you think well you know that doesn't
involve me it's like oh yes it does man that's the problem because you know
you're human and that's the sort of things that human beings are capable of
and I'm not saying you're all it's all probable that you do that ever or or
that but I'm saying that you know you got to take that into account when
you're looking at the world and you think about all the perpetrators out
there it's like it's not like there's perpetrators and there's victims that
isn't how it works it doesn't work that way at all and so the horrors of
humanity as well as the noble elements of humanity are all elements of your
central being and for you and this is the terrible thing for young the pathway
to higher wisdom was through the terrible portal of well you could say
hell for that matter really in and so who wants to do that man it's like no
you know like maybe you're resentful about something well you probably are
because like everybody's resentful about something you know and resentment is
just vicious emotion it's really useful it's really useful because if you're
resentful about something it either means that you should grow the hell up
and accept the responsibility and quit sniveling around and whining or it means
that someone actually is oppressing you and and pushing on you too hard and
bullying you and demeaning you and you have something to say or do that you're
not saying or doing and no wonder you're not saying or doing it because you know
it can be really dangerous to say things or do them to free yourself from from
being oppressed you can get in a lot of trouble in the short term for doing it
so it's easier just to not say anything sort of day after day in the short term
you protect yourself but just crushes you and then the the resentment comes up
and resentment and that can just get so out of hand you know it starts with
resentment and then it starts it goes to the desire for revenge
you know because you'll play nasty little tricks on the person that's
opressing you at any chance you'll talk about them
behind their back and if they want you to do something you'll do it badly or
you'll do it grudgingly or you'll do a half rate job and you'll set up little
traps and you know so it puts you in a poisonous space and then if that if you
really start to dwell on that say in your basement for three or four years
about just exactly how terrible the world is and how that's focused on you
and how everyone's rejected you and how you get to this point where you're
thinking that you know existence itself is a kind of poisonous endeavor and that
the best thing for you to do is go out there and do as much you know create as
much mayhem as you possibly can and if you really get to a dark place you think
I'm going to create as much mayhem as I possibly can by targeting the most
innocent thing I can possibly imagine and then you end up shooting kids in
Connecticut and that's how you get there and so that's a bad road man there's
dark things down there but you can go there and people do and they go through
the hole of resentment and so resentment can tell you you've got something to say
you bloody well better say it you've got a free yourself from what's oppressing
you you have to stand up for that because otherwise you become oppressed
and then once you're oppressed that's just not so good and so like in your
marriage and your relationships you got to tell people what you're thinking you
don't have to assume you're right that's a whole different story because you're
not cuz you're you know ignorant and you're biased and you know so you're not
right but you can stumble towards your this the expression of yourself and then
you can listen to the other person and hope that they tell you some way that
you're stupid that's useful so you can be a little less stupid in the future
because that wouldn't that be good and so you know you go after the unknown you
don't protect what you know you already know what you know you go after what you
don't know that's why you have to talk to people you don't agree with that's
where you have to talk to your enemies because they're gonna tell you things
you don't know you could even listen to them it's possible they know a thing or
two you don't know but people don't like that you know they just talk to people
who think the same way and then they just stay stupid and so that's and
that's not because if you're not wise the world
will wallop you it'll flatten you and and far more than it has to and then
you'll be better and resentful and you'll be part of that force that
Wallops instead of the force that fights against that so well so you go after the
dragon and that's what that's what this guy is doing he's going after the dragon
it's it's threatening the society because it always does chaos what's
outside of order always threatens order always always and so you have to step
forward you know in this manner voluntarily and and and go after that
when it's still manageable right and that's the case in your own life too so
you know if you're if you've had a proclivity to be bullied in the past you
know and you want to get out of that what you have to do is you have to make
yourself awake to the to the Maite to the to the what would you say to the to
the initial stages of that sort of bullying emerging in your life again
that sort of domination and you have to step forward against it when it's still
in its developing stages because maybe you can just not have it happen that
would be better and so you have to be ready to speak what you have to say more
or less at a moment's notice you can't be impulsive about it you know like if
you and I are talking and you make a mistake or I make a mistake
even if it's bothers one or the other of us we should just write it off because
it's like one encounter what the hell you you know maybe we had a bad night's
sleep or something you know you gotta be a little forgiving and what if it
happens twice then you know you should be a little awake and you should
remember both times and then if it happens a third time it's like that's
when you that's when you act and you say look we talked and this happened and I
thought yeah whatever and but then you did it again
and then you just did it again well then the person is basically like what are
they gonna do you know no well maybe they might argue with you but you kind
of got them and you're generally if you just point that out to people just like
that just that you noticed and they're willing to say something about it
they'll back the hell off they'll often apologize and sometimes you even make
them a little more conscious which is like hey that's
not such a bad idea that's what all this means and so this caught this chaos idea
it's so for young it was the unconscious right it was the contents of your
unconscious and so that might be the unknown past the threatening past that
you have never dealt with there might be the threatening future it might be the
threatening present but you realized as his as he got older that that the
unconscious was also the world and you think and so the chaos is not only your
unconscious mind which meets the unknown but it's actually the unknown itself
mingled together you think what the hell does that that's why the dragon is a
land creature and an air creature it's matter and spirit at the same time and
this sort of gets us into constructivism because the constructivist think that
basically what happens is that you encounter those elements of the world
that don't fit into your theory and out of those new elements you make the world
through your perceptions and you make yourself by incorporating the
information and transforming yourself and that's how Piaget explains the
development of a child if the child starts out with some reflexes basic
reflexes and manifesting the reflexes produces results in the world and then
the child has to reorganize its perceptions to take into account the
transformations and so then it it gets a little more sophisticated and then it
can do a few more things and then it can manifest more changes in the world and
then it martyr it attracts them and modifies its perceptions and actions to
account for them and it just keeps doing that that's how the child boots itself
up like a computer does it's a very cool idea and so from from the Piaget Gian
stance so it's constructive the stance you could think of the world as a latent
pool of information it's something like that with a structure obviously that you
can interact with with your little fingers in your body and your mind and
your eyes and your mouth and you make changes happen and you track them and
you model them and you build your skills and as you continue to do that in the
safety of your house initially under the care of your parents who who fill in
where you're ignorant you you you just emerge more and more competent and
confident and ready to move ahead so that's that's how the constructivist
idea works and so so there's kind of a chaos idea at the bottom of that which
is that out of which you emerge and the world emerges at the same time because
you know you don't see reality not at all you see almost like an animated
version of reality you know like when I look at you I just see the front of you
I just see the outside of you I see you at this height I don't see any of your
internal structure I don't see the the back part of you at all I don't see your
family I don't see your history I don't see your future you know I just see this
slice of you you're so complicated I just see this little like oversimplified
slice of you right now and I think that's the reality that's it's it's sort
of the reality the way that the Simpsons a Simpsons character is you it's like
it's sort of like you and it's enough so that you can watch the story but the
real you man god only knows what that is and that's a union idea you know that
the real you is something that radically transcends your perception of yourself
or your conception of yourself and that you get to that higher you at least in
part by going into the darkest place and so it's a hell of an idea man it's
really but it's the old idea of initiation it's as old as time that idea
and and there's something to it and we definitely recreate it in psychotherapy
like this isn't an airy theory it's quite the contrary because what you do
and as a psychologist always always a behaviorist say that the most the most
logical clinical type of psychologists a behaviorist is it an initiatory shaman
even though he or she doesn't know it because what they do is they say okay
well let's take a look at your life like okay you got a bunch of problems and
they're like massive dragons and you're just like you're not going anywhere with
those problems you're just cowering in the corner and what the behavioral
therapist does is cut them cut that dragon into those little Dwarfs until
the dwarfs are small enough so that you can really kick the hell out of them and
so and that by the way they do that is they they take the problem and they
decompose it into elements that are small enough that you have a reasonable
probability of mastering them so you take that problem apart into into its
micro problems careful careful process and then you think okay well how
could we progress a little bit this week and some of that is to face to practice
facing things you're afraid of so like if you're a graphic and you can't get on
an elevator you can't get on a taxi and you can't stand up to your husband and
I'm saying husband because most agoraphobic sar women most of them are
middle-aged women and most of them were too dependent for most of their life so
that's a monster it's like society husband elevator taxi
subway it's a monster and it's that place you will not go and that's because
you feel this high and everything else looks this big and so and partly that's
because you've run away and when you run away from something it grows and chases
you which is well it's exactly what happens to a prey animal man if you go
in the woods and you find a bear especially a grizzly well you're in real
trouble if it's a grizzly but if it's a black bear you know generally speaking
if you stand your ground and make a hell of a lot of noise that thing will leave
you alone but if you run well what's it supposed to think it eats things that
run from it so that's exactly where that idea came to come from you turn tail and
run and then the thing that you're afraid of is really a monster and it's
gonna like get you and eat you it's like well that's true psychologically as well
and and the same circuits that we use to when we were you know out in the forest
even even in trees the same circuits that we used to parse up the world then
into safe territory and place where the predators loom is the way we parse up
the world now which is safe territory and the place where the predators loom
it's just become abstracted way up abstracted way up so but it's the same
damn circuits it's we know this like the same circuits you used to forage for
information it's a dopaminergic circuit is the
circuit that squirrels use to forage for nuts and you think well why well it's
because there's no difference between information and food like you trade
information for food all the time that's what you're doing when you're working
especially if you're working on a computer so the idea that there's
there's an equation between information and food it's like well obviously
obviously there's an equation between them so of course you'd use the same
and I mean the damn squirrel has to remember where the nuts are and so for
him information is food even so when what happened to human beings is that we
started thinking hey maybe it's better to go after information than it is to go
after food because going after information produces more food than just
going after food and so that was a pretty damn smart idea so we're still
doing that so anyways this is what you're supposed to be doing and so and
this is what behavior therapists do they decompose your problems what are you
afraid of well okay you're afraid of everything well let's get something
specific you're afraid of well I'm afraid of an elevator okay an
elevator so I have a client she's afraid of elevators the elevator door open she
goes that's a tomb and I thought oh wow I thought it was an elevator but for you
it's not a bloody elevator it's death and so that's what you're
afraid of it's worse than that you're afraid of being trapped inside there in
the dark alone alone not knowing if anyone is going to rescue you stuck
there with your damn imagination freaking out it's like and if that's not
and then maybe you have a heart attacks because you're so terrified and you die
it's like you know so that's the elevator
well it's no bloody wonder there no one's gonna get into something like that
and then maybe underneath that is your distrust in the mechanisms of society
right because you know a normal person those weird creatures they'll get an
elevator what the hell they don't care and partly it's because they have an
implicit belief even if the thing stops somebody will come along and rescue them
and usually you don't even think about it right it's like no what the hell it's
an elevator it's like the danger is invisible to you and it's partly because
you implicitly trust the structure and so maybe you go into the unconscious
presuppositions of the person who is terrified of the elevator in the subways
and you find out they have a real problem with trusting Authority that's
partly why they don't get along with their husband why they've never been
able to stand up for themselves so then you say okay well you're afraid of the
damn elevator but it's not an elevator it's a tomb and the tomb is partly you
and partly it's partly the elevator and partly your unconscious mind and so well
what can you handle can you go look at an elevator from
and feet away it's like yes okay how about 9 feet away yes 5 feet yes 4 feet
no okay no problem four and a half feet we're gonna go from that elevator we're
gonna look at the damn thing until you're bored of it because that's what
we're trying to you should be bored of the elevator because then you're not
afraid of it obviously it's like it's an elevator you just don't notice it right
all these things around here that you don't notice I take you out of here and
ask you what color the walls are you haven't got any idea you know yeah I
suspect for most of you there's not a chance you'd be able to identify the
gender of the person who's sitting next to you unless you know them it's like
you just don't remember anything and why should you everything works like you
don't have to pay attention to it it's like is that staying up yeah it's still
up yeah still up still up if it's like really no you know you get bored of that
real quick and so then you just ignore it and but the agoraphobic has had that
veil of ignorance torn away and what they see behind it is mortal threat and
so that's really what you're helping them deal with and so this week there
are four and a half feet from the elevator next week they're a foot from
the elevator and the week after that the horrible gates of Hell open and they
look inside and they don't run and so hey they're tougher than they thought
they were and that's what you're teaching them actually you're not
teaching them that the world isn't dangerous because that's a stupid thing
to teach someone bloody right the world is dangerous it's terrifying and
sometimes people under they realize that and the veil lifts and they see horror
everywhere they see that and then they think well I'm just a little rabbit I'm
over here in the corner I can't move I'm petrified and then they
can't move they hide it home they cower at home because everything has become a
predatory domain and so what you teach them is you're not as much of a rabbit
as you think and part of that is that you help them grow some teeth so that
they can go home and have that fight with their husband that they should have
had 25 years ago and it happens very frequently with agra phobic clients that
you get them so they can go on the damn elevator and they can go on the subway
and they can take a taxi maybe they learn to drive Wow they get
some autonomy and then they're a little tougher and so then they can stand up
from loot for themselves and they go back and like their husband might not be
very happy with any of this really it depends on what sort of guy he is you
know if he's a real tyrant he might be just perfectly happy that he's married
to someone who you know was afraid of her own shadow because then she won't
ever leave and so that's a nasty little story and believe me it's not uncommon
so she gets tougher by facing what she fears and what she finds out is there's
a hell of a lot more to her than she thought and that's really what happens
when you do behavior therapy with someone who's agoraphobic it isn't
really that they get less afraid it's that they get braver that's way
different it's because brave is alert and able to cope naive is there's no
danger it's like hell yeah right there's no danger Jesus what a stupid theory
that is so anyways that's what all this is that's that's the story man and it's
a it's a major story it's the story of human transformation and growth it's the
evolution of mankind it's like it's a major story and we've been working on
the damn thing for like god only knows how long you know snakes and primates
co-evolved and our vision are sharp sharp sharp vision seems to have been an
evolutionary adaptation forced on us by the presence of predatory snakes and
we're talking tens of millions of years ago and human beings have unbelievably
sharp eyesight the only thing that can out see us is birds of prey and they
have eyes like an eagle a bald eagle has eyes as big as ours and it has two
phobias that phobia is the central part of the vision so an eagle is all eyes
man and so but human beings we're kind of like that too and like half our brain
is devoted to visual processing we have acute vision in Madagascar where there
are primates with no predatory snakes there are lemurs they can't see worth a
damn and I'm a anthropologist named Lynn Isabelle did a comprehensive study
worldwide trying to account for the acuity of primate vision and what she
found was that the more predatory snakes in the vicinity the sharper the eyesight
of the primates and so we have a really sharp eyesight
so that means a lot of us were eaten by snakes and none of your ancestors
fortunately because otherwise you wouldn't be here but a lot of those who
fell by the wayside were snake snack and you know when you're little and living
in a tree a snake is no damn joke and even now lots of people get bitten by
snakes and people are phobic of snakes at quite a rate and some of that
actually seems innate there's arguments about cycle between psychologists about
this but even the ones who don't accept the fact that it's innate accept the
fact that you can make someone afraid of a snake by conditioning just like that
we're trying to make them afraid of a flower by conditioning is really really
hard so we're at least at minimum prepared to be afraid of snakes minimum
and I believe it's I don't I believe this fear is actually an 8 although you
can learn to control it so anyways so that's that story and like
what a story man it's an amazing amazing story you see the the den of the dragon
here is littered with skulls and bones that's what that is so either thing is
no joke it's like look the hell out and that's this you know and look it up at
the top right hand corner there you know that's from Peter Pan right well you
remember Captain Hook we talked about him already he's a tyrant and he's a
tyrant because he's afraid of death and that's all he sees in life and so it
makes him cruel and better and death has already taken part of him right that's
why he has a hook and that damn crocodiles chasing him tick tick all the
time and of course that's the same situation you're all in man there was a
crocodile with a clock at its stomach chasing you and it could easily turn you
into a tyrant it can turn you into a tyrant or a cowering victim or a hero
those are the options fundamentally so and that's the Gorgon looking at her own
the Medusa looking at her own reflection you know mother nature with a head full
of snakes you know a terrifying vision and that's actually to some degree an
archetype that men get confused with women and you know that's the witchy
part of women and that's the part that's attractive attractive attractive but
rejecting rejecting rejecting it so many men are petrified by women they won't
approach them at all they have no idea how to talk to them they're just
petrified into and that's way more common than you
think and so that breeds resentment like you wouldn't believe you know you hear
the guy who shot up like Dawson College it's like what the hell do you think
motivated him it's like he that's what he saw and and it was because well he
was my opinion is he was too goddamn useless to be attractive to anyone and
so that's a hell of a place to be in you know it's then that's the problem
too if you're chronically rejected by people it's often because of your own
insufficiencies you know whether that's cowardice or lack of social skills or
whatever it is it's like you can't just brush it off as oh well you know no one
likes me but really I'm okay it's like no no wrong if everyone rejects you
there's probably something wrong and it's probably deep and difficult and
it's going to be horrible to fix and so it's this isn't a trivial problem it's
not a trivial problem at all and so you know that's mother nature for man too
because from from the sexual selection point of view if they if they're not
selected as a mate Nature has taken them out of the game right and so you know
people don't really like that they're not that happy with that and so but
getting all whiny about it and then getting violent it's like that's just
not all not really very helpful although it's very common so this is Lyndon
Isabel an evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the
development of improved vision and large brain in primates a radical new theory
suggests these are old representations I really like this one this is I don't
remember I think it's Greek but it doesn't
exactly look Greek it might be older it doesn't matter anyways you see it's
the same thing same ideas as Graham's dream right it's like there's this thing
that exists this this multi headed snake and it's got this infinity problem it's
everywhere that's that little circle down there and the problem is well what
do you do with it you cut off one head seven more growth that's the eternal
problem of life and the problem is there there there is the category of problems
in life and it ain't going anywhere and so the question is can you deal with the
whole category at the same time that's the thing that's how to be in the
world is to deal with that category all at the same time and so how did how did
human beings what did they come up with as a solution and that's so cool too
because the solution they come up with not only was the heroism that allows you
to approach what you're terrified by and what you find offensive and to learn
from it but also the idea of sacrifice and and that was played out by cultures
everywhere including human sacrifice and you think what the hell was up with
those crazy bastards so long ago they were sacrificing two gods all the time
what kind of clueless behavior was that burned something and please God burn
something valuable and please God it's like what was with them what were they
thinking well they weren't stupid those people if they were stupid we wouldn't
be here they were not stupid and believe me they lived under a lot harsher
conditions than we do so those were some tough people man you know back then
you'd last about 15 minutes and so you don't want to be thinking of your
ancestors as stupid like there's no real evidence that we're much different
cognitively than we were a hundred and fifty thousand years ago
so anyways sacrifice what does that mean sacrifice well it's a discovery man it's
the discovery of the future it's like the future is actually the place where
there is threat and it's always gonna be there so what do you do you make
sacrifices in the present so that the future is better right everyone does
that that's what you're doing right now that's what you're doing here that's
what your parents are doing when they pay money to send you to university they
think you can bargain with reality it's amazing you can bargain with reality you
can forestall gratification now and it'll pay off it at a place in time that
doesn't even exist yet it's like who would have believed that it's like
that's a miracle that that occurs and it's not like people just figured that
overnight you know we were chimps for Christ's sake like how are we gonna come
up with an idea like that well it's like well we thought about it for seven
million years and you know we got to the point where we could kind of act it out
but we didn't know what we were doing but it was a merge it's like a dream it
was so the terror of the future is a dream
and the solution to the terror the dream of the terror of the future is another
dream and and it comes out in mythology and in fantasy and in drama where you
act out the sacrifice and then it's a step on the way to full understanding so
we can say sacrifice now instead of doing it you know although we still do
it it's just not concretize like it used to be we do it abstractly and we all
have faith that it will work you know and we also set up our society so that
it'll work and one thing about you know I'm not a fan of moral relativism for a
variety of reasons partly because I think it's an it's an extreme form of
cowardice but anyways apart from that no no no no there's minimal ways that you
can set up a society that will work and so one of them is is that the society
has to be set up so that your sacrifices will pay off or you won't work and then
the society will die and so it has to make promises people have to make
promises to one another and that's what money is money is a promise that your
sacrifice will pay off in the future that's what money is and so if the
society is stable you can store up your work right now you can sacrifice your
impulses and you can work and you can store up credit for the future and then
you can make the future a better place but Society has to be stable enough to
allow for that hyperinflation will do you in so the promise that's implicit in
the currency is the promise that what you're doing now will pay off in the
future and if people don't have that promise then well we know what they do
because in in gangs for example and say gangs in North America the time horizon
of the gang members shrinks rapidly because they don't really expect to be
alive at much past 21 and so they get really impulsive and violent and like
why the hell not that's that's what you do when when the future doesn't matter
when it's not real you you default back to living in the moment and you take
what you can get right now and no wonder because you don't know if you're gonna
be around you know in a year and you get whatever you can well you can bloody
well get it and that's like anarchy that state and so
you don't want to live and some people like to live in that state because
they're really wired for that you know and so they're they're much more
comfortable in those conditions there they're kind of like warrior types I
would say in some sense but you know for most people that's just where that
stress will just do you in you know the stress of a life like that so that's a
pretty horrible picture the one on the right I think and you know it's it's a
creepy picture and don't you think doesn't it seems like a creepy picture
to me yeah and so that's quetzel a codel if I remember correctly who's me who is
an Aztec dragon God and that's the Eye of Horus by oh by the way this little
thing here and that see the Egyptians they worship the eye
yeah well that's cool because well why did they worship the eye well wake the
hell up and look at the world that's your salvation to do that pay bloody
attention especially to the things you don't want to pay attention to and use
your vision have some vision and you can use your vision to see into the future
and that is your that's your Redemption and the Egyptians they didn't know how
to say that but they knew how to represent it and that's how they
represented it like the pupil on that is completely open completely dilated and
that's a God as far as the Egyptians we're concerned it's Horus and I'll tell
you Horus a story at some point so early primates developed a better eye for
color detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions
traits that are important for detecting threats at close range humans are
descended from these same primates all right
so now the initiation when you go into psychotherapy or when you make any
supreme moral effort which is roughly the same thing you have to confront that
which you do not know now I mentioned the called prima cosmogonic chaos and
the idea that at the end of Jung's life he sort of thought of the unconscious
and the world as the same and you think what the hell does that mean but here's
what it means so let's say you're in a long-term intimate relationship and you
get betrayed okay so what is it that you see when you see your partner at the
moment you know of the betrayal well you see the pre
maganda chaos and here's why well it rattles your unconscious up because you
don't know anything anymore you don't know what the past was right you don't
know what it was and it's supposed to be real and all of a sudden you don't know
what it was and so you come up with wild ideas about what it might have been and
what it represented and then you don't know what the future is gonna be anymore
so then your fantasy fills that space and you don't know who the hell you're
looking at that's for sure and you don't know much about human beings and you
certainly don't know anything about yourself
and so all of a sudden not only is everything in chaos inside your mind but
everything is in chaos in your world and it actually is and
there's no telling the difference between those two things you know and so
then they you're just shattered and so then you go talk to a therapist for like
two years and you think what happened what was the reality and the reality is
because who knows what the reality was like but as far as you're concerned the
reality is I better represent this properly in my head I better figure out
who I was who that person was what we did together and what it meant because I
do not want this to happen again and so you're healed
when you get to the point where you've grasped the bloody moral of the story
what went wrong and how can I not have that happen again
because that's the purpose of learning right that's the purpose of memory it's
to prepare you for the future and so you have to pull out of that massive chaos a
functional representation that increases your wisdom so that you're not this
naive target the next time you enter into a relationship so at least you can
have another relationship without being so traumatized that you know you you're
done and you know it can take people years to talk that through because this
landscape of potential opens up when when they're betrayed it's like well
anything could have been the truth well you to sort through that you have to
wander through all that mess and it's really painful and and emotional as well
you have to sort through all that mess to come out with the new you right there
renewed you and so well this is a representation of it this
is how people act this out by but whatever method he may have been
designated the shaman is recognized as such as only after having received two
methods of instruction the first is ecstatic dreams trances and visions the
second is traditional shamanic techniques names and functions of the
spirit mythology and genealogy of the clan and the secret language well one of
the things that happens this happens to you even if if you encounter something
terrible like a betrayal what happens is that you have to take a journey into the
domain of morality essentially which is how did I act and how did that person to
act and how should have they acted and how should have I acted and so and
that's part of your cultural structure and so that's the idea of rescuing the
dead farther from the depths right and that's what we'll show you some examples
of that so this is a critical issue with regards to the shamanic transformation
is that people go through these terrible terrible experiences often drug-induced
by the way with regards to the shaman they usually use psychedelic chemicals
of one form another often mushrooms but but they've come up with some very
strange concoctions like ayahuasca down in the Amazon and ayahuasca is an
amazing substance it's made out of the bark of one thing and another plant
whose name I don't remember that hardly even grow in the same place and that
have to be cooked together in a special way and no one has any idea how the damn
Amazonians figured that out it looks impossible and if you ask them they say
well the plants told us how to do it which you know Western people don't find
very helpful but the shamans are perfectly helped happy with that that
description in ayahuasca takes them apart and it does that in part because
its effects the serotonergic system very very powerfully like all psychedelics do
and it transports them to another world and that's how they interpret it and and
and and what we know about psychedelics you could put in a thimble and then
throw the thimble away we know nothing about psychedelics there's new
experiments going on at Johns Hopkins for example with psilocybin which is
part of this active chemical in magic mushrooms same structure basically as
LSD and mescaline all the real psychedelics have basically
the same structure except the one that's derived from Amanita muscaria which is
called muscarinic acid and it's a it's its own weird thing that no one knows
anything about anyways they have profound neuro chemical effects in very
small doses and the research group at Johns Hopkins has given psilocybin to
research subjects you know purified psilocybin because
they started the new experimentation with psychedelics and that's been banned
for like 40 years because psychedelics were so terrifying
to our culture that we just put them away it's like oh no we're not going
there and so even from a research perspective and even though some of the
psychedelics look very promising for the treatment of disorders like alcoholism
they recently used psilocybin to help people stop smoking down at Johns
Hopkins and I think they had an 80% success rate which is just like that's
just absolutely mind-boggling and so but if you give people psilocybin
and they have a mystical experience which is very common among people who
take these sorts of chemicals then their personality transforms permanently such
that one year later their one standard deviation higher in openness and
openness is the creativity dimension and that seems to be a permanent
transformation so that's really remarkable and about 80 percent of the
people who undergo the Johns Hopkins experiments report that the experience
is like one of the two or three most important things they've ever that's
never ever happened to them and so well that's that's something you know it's
like and then there's this guy named Rick Strassman down at I think he was at
the University of Texas and he did experimentation with DMT and DMT
dimethyltryptamine I remember I remember correctly is the active ingredient in
ayahuasca and you produce it in your brain and it's in plants it's like a
very common chemical but DMT is a weird hallucinogen because it has an
extraordinarily short mechanism of action it's like and people who take it
report that they're blasted out of their body like out of a cannon and then they
go out somewhere and encounter beings of various sorts and then ten minutes later
they're back and virtually everyone reports that which is really strange and
and so strassman was giving people DMT intravenously so that the trip
would last longer he this was all all you know nih-funded
experimentation all cleared with the relevant ethics boards all conducted
within the last 10 years and he basically quit doing it because he was a
pretty straight scientist you know he was measuring heart rate and pulse and
all that sort of thing trying to look at the physiology and then the people he
was giving these chemicals to kept coming back and telling him these these
crazy stories and well it just it was too much for him you know and no wonder
you know cuz they all said the same thing and he'd say well that was a dream
and they'd say no and it was the most real thing that ever happened to me and
he'd say well you know it's an archetypal experience and they'd say no
no no that was no archetypal experience I went somewhere else and I saw things
and I'm back and like I don't care what you think and like who the hell knows
right because it's all subjective but but the weird thing about it is that
everyone's reporting the same thing how the hell do you account for that and
then the shaman you know when they take these psychedelic chemicals they
basically say the same thing they say well first of all it more or less killed
me that's this you know i dissolved two skeleton and then I climbed the tree
that unites heaven and earth and I went into the realm of the gods and they gave
me some information and I'm back it's like okay well you know we don't really
know what to make of that and we and certainly that's what Elia describes
when he describes the shamanic the shamanic procession not the shamanic
initiation and you know there's dissolution to a skeleton first and then
like a death the symbolic death or experienced as an actual death and then
bang up into the realm of the gods and then they come back there's a very old
idea and that's a medieval representation of the tunnel that people
travel through at the end of their life to you know to find the light which is a
very common near-death experience report and people don't have any idea what the
hell to do with those reports except say well it's the paroxysm zuv the dying
brain which you'd expect to be a hell of a lot more random in my opinion and the
idea is there's a rebirth after that and you know here this is the Scandinavian
representation of that tree that unites earth with heaven and so there's the
Scandinavian representation it has a snake snakes down here eating it and
and that's the amazonian representation it's like how the hell he account for
that I mean those those pictures are so similar that it's just it's beyond
belief well you know we lived in trees for a long time a long long long long
time millions of years and there were lots of snakes around them and so the
idea that reality is a tree that's surrounded by a snake is that's in us
man it's down there it's deep and there's something about it that's true
now not true like we normally think of truth a truth true in an entirely
different manner so and all that's pretty damn strange we'll stop with this
my son drew this when he was seven years old blew me away man I thought it was so
cool so I had it laminated and so here is what it is on the right hand side
that's ordered it's like the yin-yang thing that's order left-side chaos right
and those are all mushroom houses which I thought was amazing and then there's
this river that runs right down the middle like the line for order and chaos
and then there's this tree that goes up to heaven and that's heaven up there
it's like there st. Peter there's the pearly gates there's the clouds it's
like it's he never went to church you know it's like what the hell and then
there's a little bug there that goes up and down from heaven to earth and that
was him and I thought he had a very organized psyche that kid he was a very
very stable kid and still is and I he drew that and I thought Jesus that's
just bloody will unbelievable and I still think that when I look at it and
that's a great example of an archetype and so we'll see you Tuesday
you