so in the second volume of harry potter
correct me if i have any of these
details wrong you remember there's that
snake
the basilisk so there's this magic
castle right
you guys have no problem with that magic
castle no problem
there's an orf he's an orphan he goes to
the magic castle to learn how to be
more than normal right the muggles he
has a muggle family
we're not too happy with the muggle
family like as representatives of normal
people
they they have some lacks now of course
the reason for that is that
well that's what teenagers often feel
about their parents right they feel
jesus these couldn't really be my
parents
i must have some other parents who are
like together
those are like magical parents right
parents that live in the sky and of
course harry potter has
earthly parents that's the muggles and
dursley i think is the kid
he's a one he's a wonderful piece of
work
and uh you know ill-formed a
spoiled ill-formed selfish very far from
the ideal
he's a foil for harry and of course he's
appreciated and doted on
and harry is actually punished for his
virtues that's a classic story right
to be punished for your virtues i mean
if you look at the story
the central story in christianity the
central story in christianity is about
someone who is precisely punished in the
worst possible way for the highest
possible virtues
that's what makes it an archetypal story
because there isn't anything more unfair
than that
and so it's a limit in a sense you it
can't be worse than that
being punished for being you know
unworthy it's like yeah yeah well
at least makes sense but to be punished
because you have your act together and
you're a good person
that's real punishment and that's what
happens to harry
so luckily he finds out that he's
magical which is quite convenient
and off he goes to wizarding school and
you know that's actually like taking
that's actually like going and studying
the humanities
i mean it was when they still were
you know because it's through the
humanities
that you that you make contact with the
magic of your culture
and that makes you more than merely the
child of your parents
because you are more than merely the
child of your parents you're the child
of nature
and you're the child of culture and
until
you understand what that means
understand that you have two sets of
parents like the divine hero always has
two sets of parents
you you can't construe yourself properly
as an individual you're not situated
properly in the world
you don't know what your
responsibilities are you can't orient
your values properly and you will
suffer for that because as far as i can
tell
because life is so difficult
you have to do something that's truly
worthwhile
in order to justify it and so
well that's what all these stories tell
you that's what the story of jonah is
telling you it's like
you have an ethical duty to straighten
things up
and if you don't do it you're going to
be sorry
and that story is echoed everywhere well
now saint george
well let's go to harry potter that's
what we were talking about
so he goes off to the magic castle and
uh he's learning to be a wizard
and he's kind of an interesting
character right because he's not really
good
and we find out i think that's because
it doesn't have a piece of
voldemort in them isn't that what
happens
yeah and that's what that means is that
to be good truly good you can't just
follow rules
that's that's very clear in the harry
potter story and you also have to be
able to understand
malevolence and in order to understand
malevolence so that you can withstand it
you have to understand that part of you
that's malevolent
because if you don't you're naive and if
you're naive
you're easy pickings and so that's a
union idea too in the union ideas that
part of personality development is to
understand your shadow
and the shadow is those things about you
that you do not
want to admit to and
you can learn about your shadow by
reading history you know you can read
about
auschwitz you can read about the
concentration camps in russia
and you can imagine yourself as a guard
instead of as a heroic rescuer of
unfortunate victims which
would be very very unlikely
and once you can imagine yourself as a
guard which is a terrifying thing to do
then you understand something about
yourself
and i actually think and i think this is
also from student studying young that
you cannot have proper respect for
yourself until you know that you're a
monster
because you won't act carefully enough
you know if you think well i'm a nice
person i'd never do anyone any harm it's
like
you're no saint you can be sure of that
and the harm that you do people can come
in many many ways
and so if you regard yourself as
harmless
inoffensive nice well
why do you have any reason to be careful
you're like a teddy bear sitting on a
shelf
even if you throw it at someone no one's
gonna get hurt but that isn't what
you're like because you're a human being
and human beings are
some vicious creatures
and there's utility in knowing that
because it's also the case
you know in the harry potter series
harry could stand up against voldemort
and understand him and speak his
language because he was
infected by him to some degree very very
interesting idea
anyways in the second hand the reason
i'm telling you this
and this is worth thinking about it's
like how long were each of those books
like 500 pages they're long eh
and there was how many of them seven and
how many of them were
sold i mean how many of you read every
harry potter book
right that's how many of you read at
least one
okay how many you saw the movies it's
like you're all in a cult
you are i'm telling you really that's
the truth it's really the truth
so in the second volume there's this
snake that's zipping around there the
basilisk right and it lives in the
underground that's chaos that's chaos
and that's because wherever you are
you're on thin ice and underneath your
thin ice is chaos
and here we are in this unbelievably
civilized environment
and everyone's getting along so
perfectly but you know
we've got hot we've got lights we've got
electricity the sewage system is working
no one's hungry it's like we can be
peaceful
but if any of that fell apart and it
could easily fall apart because it's a
bloody miracle it ever works at all
then the chaos that's just underneath
the surface is going to come up
right now and it's useful to know
that because it makes you properly
grateful if you really understand it
it makes you properly grateful for the
bloody miracle that
it is that you can be here in peace
so anyways there's this snake that's
underneath the surface and it's
you know no joke that thing it's big
and it's ancient it's always been there
and what happens if you look at it
it turns you to stone right it paralyzes
you
well that's the more that's the gorgon
that's medusa
the woman with the head of snakes and if
you look at her it paralyzes you
what does that mean well you're walking
through the jungle and
big snake appears what do you do
you freeze and no bloody wonder because
you're a prey animal and that's what
they do when they see things that are
going to eat them
and so the snake
well lots of people still die from snake
bite
and our ancestors were
and i mean our ancestors like you know
tens of millions of years ago
when they were living in trees and
weren't very big they made a nice snack
for a snake
and there's a woman named lynn isbell
who's an anthropologist at ucla
who's correlated the presence of
carnivorous snakes
with the acuity of primate vision and
what she found was that
the more snakes around the better the
primates could see
so and we're particularly good at
picking up patterns like snake
camouflage in the lower half of our
visual quadrant you know and people
generally don't like snakes you can
learn to handle them but
no snake fear appears to be innate it's
an aid in chimpanzees and it tends to
increase as you age rather than
decreasing you can overcome it but
well my daughter had snakes and one day
her snake bitter it was a fairly big
snake
and she hadn't paid attention to it for
a while so it nailed her
and from then on she had very difficult
time
grabbing the snake it was like bitten
once
you know shy permanently she also told
me
years later she had nightmares about
snakes all the time when she had a snake
in her room
it's like you know and i think it was
probably the smell
so anyways so
harry potter decides he's going to go
after the basilisk right he's going to
go out there and face the thing that
he's most afraid of
so he does that way down in the depths
so it's like jonah going down into the
depths
and he faces the basilisk and it
bites him and you know that's a that's
right because
if you go down into the depths you can
get bitten
like it's no joke and this is a hero
story but
the thing about the hero story is it's
actually real the thing that you're
facing is actually dangerous
and even though facing it voluntarily
might be your best
bet and is likely your best bet because
that's the central story of humanity
that doesn't mean you're going to
succeed it's the real thing so anyways
he gets bitten
right and he's going to die now he's
rescuing ginny
so that's the saint george story if you
go after like dragon
dragons like to capture virgins
god only knows why i think it's because
i think it's because one of the things
that male humans have done from the
beginning of time is
chase the damn predators away and i
suspect that
the males from god only knows how long
ago
who were particularly good at that were
rewarded with female attention and why
the hell not
so it's deeply rooted inside of us that
idea
of facing the unknown and freeing the
woman so the idea there is that
if you it's a male idea in large part
i can talk about the central female myth
and i will as we proceed
the idea is that if you're the sort of
person
who can stand up against the unknown and
the frightening
then you're also likely if you develop
into that sort of person then you're
also likely to develop into the sort of
person
that other people will find attractive
so you know and that's why jung believed
that the inside the shadow was the anima
which is like a female figure and so his
idea was something like
you know if you look watch movies
there's always this beta male guy
if they're romantic movies and he's a
nice guy and he's the friend and you
know the woman tells him everything but
she doesn't like him a bit
she likes the guy who's like got an edge
and and who's capable of i would say
mayhem
but at least of aggression
now that doesn't mean she wants him to
be aggressive but what it does mean is
that she wants him to be able to be
aggressive
that would be good and so he's the
romantic target and so he's the person
that's incorporated the shadow
and he's someone that is respectable and
perhaps useful
and so well that's a very old story
so let's let's think about this for a
minute i've already
offered you a proposition and i think
it's an important proposition and i'm
i'm offering you this proposition so
that you can make
sense of art and literature and
mythology
and religion and dance and all those
strange
ritualistic things that human beings do
which seems central to us
including including not least
the inerratical tendency of us to seek
out
stories of heroes i should finish the
harry potter story so harry potter goes
down there
to rescue virginia no it's uh that's not
her name
what is it ginny yeah but there's a
there's a formal name for that it's a
variant of virginia anyways which is a
variant of virgin so
um and he gets bitten
yes genevra that's it he gets bitten and
the bite is poison and so there is dying
which doesn't seem to be so good and
then what happens
and again you guys swallow this it's no
problem
so what's his name the dumbledore
character
he's got a bird right so he's the wise
old man he's the ruler of the castle
he's the ruler of the magic castle
he's the magic king you know he's like
god the father as far as harry potter is
concerned
and he has a bird what kind of bird is
it it's a phoenix right
and one of the things that's very
strange about a phoenix is that
well it's immortal but in a strange way
you know
it lives and lives i think 100 years and
it gets older and older and then one day
poof it bursts into flames and
turns into an egg and then you get a new
phoenix
so that's a symbol of transformation
it's a symbol of transformation the bird
is a spirit
or psyche and so here's what it means
in part you know
you know how when you learn a lesson in
your life that that's not very pleasant
right it's not like when you learn
something important
it's the best day of your life it's
often
the importance of what you learn is
often proportionate to just how wretched
it is to learn it
you know you learn things the hard way
you learn things by getting hit because
obviously if what you're doing is
working you get what you want
there's no learning in that and that's
happy it's when you're doing something
and
you hit an obstacle and maybe you bloody
well hit it hard and then you know you
recoil and then you down into the depths
you go and you have to sort yourself out
and
you realize that you're you know this
particular kind of idiot and that
you should probably fix that and that's
really annoying and difficult and
you know and maybe you're down in the
dumps and anxious for quite a while and
then
you get it repaired more or less and you
know you put yourself back together
that's the phoenix poof into flames
bang egg new you and so
you know that's the ability to learn
now human beings are very strange
creatures right because we're very
malleable compared to most animals you
know like grizzly bears now and grizzly
bears
a thousand years ago it's like whatever
they're the same thing
they do the same thing there's no
transformation
but human beings we have this massive
brain
and you know it's a pain because it
means you have to take care of human
children until they're 40 and
and that's a big burden and so you know
we pay a big price for it it also makes
childbirth very difficult
and and it's costly you have to eat a
lot because you have a big brain because
it uses up a lot of energy
and so you know you pay a price for it
but the advantage is you're plastic
you can learn now learning is a strange
thing
because you can think of it as just
acquiring more information
but you could also think of it and this
is more accurate as
finding out something that you're doing
wrong so that's sort of built into you
like a character
a care element of your character a
presumption of your perception or a deep
habit
it's really built into you it's a neural
structure right
it's alive and you have to kill it
because it's working properly and the
pain that you go through in part when
you're suffering because you did
something stupid is
it's something like yours your the
neurology
i can never get this quite right it's
the pain of the death of that structure
and that could be a huge chunk of you
you know if you really have to go
through
a massive revision it's like
the person that comes out the other end
might hardly be the same at all
you know that happens for example if
you're trying to combat alcoholism
which is just you know a wretched thing
to do because
well all your friends are alcoholic all
your family drinks too much
the only thing you know how to do when
you're socializing is to go to the bar
and drink too much
you know you spend like 20 hours a week
on it
it's like it's not just that you're
addicted to the substance it's like
that's how you
live and so if you want to stop being an
alcoholic
not only do you have to stop drinking
alcohol but you have to stop
seeing all your drunk friends and maybe
you've had them for your whole life
and you have to have continual battles
with your drunk family
and then you have to figure out
something to do with that 20 hours
that's now like
hanging around your neck like an
albatross and so
you have to let that whole part of your
personality die
and a new part has to spring forth
and that's what the phoenix is and the
phoenix is the capacity of the person to
transform and so when harry gets bit by
the
snake that freezes him
he gets seriously injured the phoenix
comes in cries some tears in his wound
it repairs him bang he's back to life
and the strange thing is
that that's okay with all of the viewers
now why would that be there's nothing
about it that's rational
nothing right magic castle
that's not rational giant snake
underneath it
that's a little more rational
turning you to stone going down there to
face it
being rejuvenated by a phoenix it's like
yeah yeah that's okay we can
we'll watch that we'll swallow it we'll
be completely engaged in it and the
reason for that is because it's a myth
it's about how people it's a meta story
about how to act about how to conduct
yourself in the world to face the things
that you're afraid of that would
otherwise paralyze you
to let the death of what is
insufficient about you occur and then to
wait for the
rebirth