this episode of after school is brought to you by manscaped.com
Dostoevsky said that in 'Notes from the Underground", a great great book and
you know he said, I love this, it was his an early
criticism of the notion of a political utopia
he said look if you gave people everything they wanted
they had nothing to eat but cake and nothing to do but sit in warm pools and
busy themselves with the continuation of the species
that was his his lines that the first thing they would do well maybe after the
first week was like go kind of half insane and smash
everything up just so that something that they didn't expect would happen so
that they'd have something interesting to do
and it's so right because you know the the utopian notion that if you just had
all the material stuff you wanted that you'd you'd be
well what would you be? what would you do? would you just sit in the couch and
watch tv? I mean you'd you'd be i don't know what you'd be cutting yourself
just for entertainment in no time flat you know and that's the sort of thing
that people do and so we're not adapted for security and
utopia we're adapted for a certain amount of security because you know we
are vulnerable but mostly we want to have one foot out
where we don't know what the hell is going on
because that's where you're alert and alive and tense
and with it and and you know i think i believe this and i believe it actually
has something to do with the hemispheric structure
of the physiology of your brain is it because the right hemisphere looks
roughly adapted to what you don't know and the
left hemisphere this is a very this is an
oversimplification but a useful one is adapted to the world that you do know
and the right place for you to be is halfway between them because that and
you can tell that that's what's so cool and this tells you that this is actually
reality that's manifesting itself to you you know that sense of active engagement
you have in the world when things are working well for you you know where
you're where you should be at the right time
you're alert and on top of things and engaged and you
don't have much of a sense of time and the sense of the tragedy of life
sort of recedes and that's when you're that's when you've got one foot when
it's where it's secure and one foot out in the unknown
and your brain signals to you that you're in the right place by making what
you're doing meaningful and that sense of meaning is actually a
neurophysiological signal that you've got the forces of the cosmos
properly balanced in your being at that moment and that's why it feels so good
and now well what else could it possibly be i mean
you know our our brain is capable of looking beyond our vision
that's what it's for and that sense of engagement there's no reason to
assume that that's anything but a real signal and
you can reduce it you could say well the problem with being where
you know only is that you don't know everything and that's going to be a
problem in the future and the problem with being where you
know nothing is that's just too much man like you know
you go into panic mode and because anything can happen there and you can't
handle it so you've got to mediate between those
two things you want to be secure enough so that your physiology isn't
revving out of control and you want to be out there in the unknown enough so
that you keep updating yourself constantly constantly constantly and
that's that's the place where information flow is maximized
and you know that because that's where you are when you're having a really
interesting conversation with someone or you're gripped by a book
or you're really into a movie or maybe something that you do as a you know
apart from your work or maybe even in your work you're into it and
that's because you are in the right place at the right time and your whole
nervous system is signaling that to you and i would say that's the sort of place
that you should be all the time if of course you can't be because no one's
perfect but it's that's that's the recreation of paradise
on earth it's something like it because you are in the right place at the right
time when that is happening and so we're mobile creatures right we
need to know where we're going because all we're ever concerned about
roughly speaking is where we're going that's what we need to know where are we
going what are we doing and why it turns out that the way that we're
constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion
unless we have an aim and we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim
it isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy as you all know if
you've ever attained anything because as soon as you attain it then the whole
little game ends then you have to come up with another
game right so it's it's sisyphus and that that's okay but but it does
show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives you because it
collapses the game that's what happens when you graduate
from university it's like you're king of the mountain
for one day and then you're like surf at at starbucks for the next five years you
know so yeah so what happens is that that human
beings are weird creatures because we're much more
activated by having an aim and moving towards it then we are by attainment and
what that means is you have to have an aim
and that means you have to have an interpretation and it also means that
the nobler the aim that's one way of thinking about it
the better your life and that's a really interesting thing to know because you
know you've heard ever since you were tiny
that you should act like a good person and you shouldn't lie for example and
you might think well why the hell should i act like a good
person and why not lie i mean even a three-year-old can ask
that question because smart smart kids learn to lie earlier by the way
and they think well why not twist the fabric of reality
so that it serves your specific short-term needs i mean that's a great
question why not do that why act morally if you can get away with
something and it brings you closer to something you want
well why not do it these are good questions it's not
self-evident well it seems to me tied in with what i just
mentioned it's like you destabilize yourself and things
become chaotic that's not good and if you don't have a noble aim then
you have nothing but but shallow trivial
pleasures and they don't sustain you and that's not good because because life
is so difficult so much it's so much suffering it's so complex it ends and
everyone dies and it's painful it's like without a noble aim how can
you withstand any of that you can't you become desperate and once
you become desperate things go things go from bad to worse very rapidly
when you become desperate and so there's the idea of the noble aim
and it's it's not something it's it's something that's necessary it's the
bread that people cannot live without right that's not
physical bread it's the noble aim and what is that
well it's to pay attention it's to speak properly it's to confront chaos
it's to make a better world it's something like that
and that's enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up
without you know cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that
you can do something that's worthwhile to justify your wretched
position on the planet and whatever it is
that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it
which is very strange thing you know you can conceptualize a future in your
imagination and then you can work and make that
manifest you participate in the process of creation
it's an amazing idea because it gives consciousness
a constitutive role in the cosmos
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