1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:16,500 Alright, so I suggested to you last class that human beings have world as a place of action 2 00:00:16,500 --> 00:00:25,500 through the lens of their social cognitive biological substructure. 3 00:00:25,500 --> 00:00:33,880 And I made that argument on the basis of the supposition that our primary environment 4 00:00:33,880 --> 00:00:35,360 was actually other people. 5 00:00:35,360 --> 00:00:42,160 And I mentioned to you, I believe that those other people are arranged in hierarchies of influence 6 00:00:42,160 --> 00:00:48,360 of end authority or power or dominance, which is often how it's construed. 7 00:00:48,360 --> 00:00:54,200 And that the dominance hierarchy as a structure is at least 300 million years old, which 8 00:00:54,700 --> 00:00:56,200 makes it older than trees. 9 00:00:56,200 --> 00:01:04,040 And it's for that reason that you share the same neurobiology to govern your observations 10 00:01:04,040 --> 00:01:10,700 of your position in the hierarchy as lobsters do, which is a remarkable fact. 11 00:01:10,700 --> 00:01:17,200 You know, it's a remarkable that the lobster uses serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate 12 00:01:17,200 --> 00:01:24,000 its status position and that modifying the serotonin function in the lobster can produce 13 00:01:24,100 --> 00:01:29,800 changes in its behavior can can over help the lobster overcome defeat for example, 14 00:01:29,800 --> 00:01:36,500 which is very much equivalent to what happens to a human being when they take anti-depressants. 15 00:01:36,500 --> 00:01:42,940 You know, it's a good example of the conservation of biological structure by evolution and 16 00:01:42,940 --> 00:01:46,600 another good illustration of the continuity of life on earth. 17 00:01:46,600 --> 00:01:52,400 It's really amazing, but the other thing it is, a testament to is the ancient nature 18 00:01:52,500 --> 00:01:53,800 of the social structure. 19 00:01:53,800 --> 00:01:58,700 Now we tend to think of the social structure as something other than nature, right? 20 00:01:58,700 --> 00:02:04,400 Because society is, I suppose, mythologically opposed, it's opposed in a narrative way, 21 00:02:04,400 --> 00:02:06,400 cultures opposed to nature. 22 00:02:06,400 --> 00:02:08,900 It's the town in the forest. 23 00:02:08,900 --> 00:02:15,400 But the town has been around a long time, so to speak, and the structure of the town is also part 24 00:02:15,400 --> 00:02:19,400 of nature in that the dominance hierarchy is part of nature. 25 00:02:19,900 --> 00:02:27,900 Because it's so ancient, you have to consider it as part of the mechanism that has played the role of selection 26 00:02:27,900 --> 00:02:29,900 in the process of natural selection. 27 00:02:29,900 --> 00:02:39,400 And so roughly, what seems to happen is that there is a plethora of dominance hierarchies, 28 00:02:39,400 --> 00:02:46,400 especially in complex human communities, and many of them are masculine in structure 29 00:02:46,900 --> 00:02:51,900 in that there are dominance hierarchies that primarily men compete in, or that has been the historical norm, 30 00:02:51,900 --> 00:02:58,400 and that some men rise to the top based on whatever the dominance hierarchy is based on, 31 00:02:58,400 --> 00:03:04,900 and they make their preferential mates, and it's a good strategy for women to engage in, 32 00:03:04,900 --> 00:03:12,400 because why, and many sorts of female animals do precisely this, is they let the males battle it out, 33 00:03:12,900 --> 00:03:17,900 and then pick from the top, or often the dominant males. 34 00:03:17,900 --> 00:03:24,400 There's no choice on the part of the females, it's the dominant males just chasing away the subordinate males, 35 00:03:24,400 --> 00:03:31,400 but with humans, it's usually the case that the females have the opportunity to do it at least some choosing. 36 00:03:31,400 --> 00:03:40,400 And so, if you think about that, what that implies is that we have evolved to climb up dominance hierarchies, 37 00:03:40,400 --> 00:03:46,400 and then I would say it's not exactly that even, because there are many different dominance hierarchies, 38 00:03:46,400 --> 00:03:53,400 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, 39 00:03:53,400 --> 00:04:04,400 and so then I would say what we have evolved for, instead, and I'm still speaking mostly on the masculine edge of things historically speaking, 40 00:04:05,400 --> 00:04:12,400 is the ability to climb up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies, right? 41 00:04:12,400 --> 00:04:18,400 And that's a whole different idea, it's like the average hierarchy across vast spans of time, 42 00:04:18,400 --> 00:04:24,400 and I think it's for that reason that we, among others, that we evolve general intelligence, 43 00:04:24,400 --> 00:04:32,400 because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism, and it seems to be situation independent, so to speak, 44 00:04:32,400 --> 00:04:38,400 and of course there's been an arms race for the development of intelligence between men and women, 45 00:04:38,400 --> 00:04:43,400 because each gender has to keep up with the other, and women have their own dominance hierarchies. 46 00:04:43,400 --> 00:04:51,400 There's certainly no doubt about that, and of course, now men and women more increasingly compete within the same hierarchies, 47 00:04:51,400 --> 00:04:56,400 and we don't exactly know how to sort that out yet, because it's an extraordinarily new phenomena. 48 00:04:57,400 --> 00:05:09,400 But in any case, because of the permanence of the dominance hierarchy, it is come to be represented in fundamental narratives, 49 00:05:09,400 --> 00:05:21,400 because human beings, and this is something that we share everywhere, it's the thing the Wall Street banker shares with the Calahary Kung Bushman, 50 00:05:21,400 --> 00:05:34,400 who are among the genetically speaking, they seem to be very close to what the original human beings were like in Africa before the diaspora, 51 00:05:34,400 --> 00:05:44,400 about 50,000 years ago, but both of those people, despite their vast differences, live in communities that have a hierarchical structure, 52 00:05:44,400 --> 00:05:49,400 that are composed of individuals that are embedded in a natural world. 53 00:05:49,400 --> 00:05:55,400 The world outside of the dominance hierarchy, and so that's the standard human environment, I would say, 54 00:05:55,400 --> 00:06:05,400 and so stories that rely on the representations of those environments and their interactions are what you might describe as universal stories, 55 00:06:05,400 --> 00:06:12,400 and that's why people can understand them, and I would say further, and this is drawing substantially on, say, 56 00:06:12,400 --> 00:06:25,400 derivations 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 Jungian in its origins. 57 00:06:25,400 --> 00:06:32,400 We, the commonality between human beings, so you know, you have to have commonalities in order to communicate, right, 58 00:06:32,400 --> 00:06:41,400 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. 59 00:06:41,400 --> 00:06:51,400 We don't have to explain anger, we don't 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, 60 00:06:51,400 --> 00:06:57,400 we don't have to explain love, etc., those are built into us, and so there are predicates of being human, 61 00:06:57,400 --> 00:07:05,400 and you could say that those human predicates and the standard human environment produce standard narratives, 62 00:07:05,400 --> 00:07:21,400 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, 63 00:07:21,400 --> 00:07:33,400 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, 64 00:07:33,400 --> 00:07:42,400 and participation in these meta narratives that drive success, because, well, do you want to be a failure or a success? 65 00:07:42,400 --> 00:07:49,400 Well, 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, 66 00:07:49,400 --> 00:08:00,400 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 experience a lot of frustration, 67 00:08:00,400 --> 00:08:09,400 anger, disappointment, depression, pain, and anxiety at the bottom of the heap, and so generally that's not what people are aiming for, 68 00:08:09,400 --> 00:08:17,400 although under certain circumstances, if people don't like responsibility, and are willing to take their chances, 69 00:08:17,400 --> 00:08:29,400 they might take the irresponsibility and its apparent freedoms over the necessity of thinking things through the medium and long run. 70 00:08:29,400 --> 00:08:42,400 Anyways, we stopped here, I just suggested to you that one of the primary narrative representations was the known or culture, or order, I think those, or the exploratory, 71 00:08:42,400 --> 00:08:52,400 or the dominance hierarchy, I think those things are basically interchangeable from a representational perspective, and in the movie, the Lion King, 72 00:08:52,400 --> 00:09:02,400 that's represented by Pride Rock, which is this central place of orientation, founded on Rock, which is the sort of thing that people embed their memories in, 73 00:09:02,400 --> 00:09:11,400 that's why we make sculptures and gravestones and that sort of things, Rock stands for permanent, and to have Rock under your feet is to be on a solid foundation, 74 00:09:11,400 --> 00:09:23,400 and that's a pyramid in some sense in that movie, and the pyramid has topped by the King and Queen and they're offspring, so that's the divine couple, 75 00:09:23,400 --> 00:09:34,400 that's one way of thinking about it, and Simba, of course, is the newborn hero, and you understand that, even though it's lions and drawings of lions at that, 76 00:09:34,400 --> 00:09:43,400 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. 77 00:09:43,400 --> 00:09:54,400 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, 78 00:09:54,400 --> 00:10:09,400 it's not true in that the events portrayed in fiction occurred in the world, they didn't, but their fiction is true the same way numbers are true, I would say, like, you know, 79 00:10:09,400 --> 00:10:22,400 if you have one apple and one orange and one banana, the common melody between all of those three is one, and you might say, well, is one as real as one fruit, 80 00:10:22,400 --> 00:10:34,400 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, 81 00:10:35,400 --> 00:10:44,400 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, 82 00:10:44,400 --> 00:10:52,400 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, 83 00:10:52,400 --> 00:11:01,400 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, 84 00:11:02,400 --> 00:11:18,400 you can really, you can change the world and then insanely powerful ways, you know, I mean all the computation equipment you people are using are dependent on the abstractions one and zero, essentially, and I mean look at what emerges from that, 85 00:11:18,400 --> 00:11:30,400 and so I would say with regards to fiction, if you take someone like Dosteewski, you would 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 cycle of life, 86 00:11:30,400 --> 00:11:46,400 in their psychological depth, and so if you're interested in psychology, Dosteewski is the person for you, told stories more of a sociologist, but Dosteewski, man, he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes around, 87 00:11:47,400 --> 00:11:56,400 transformative reading. Anyways, Dosteewski's characters, this character named Raskolnikov, is a character in crime and punishment, 88 00:11:56,400 --> 00:12:14,400 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, 89 00:12:14,400 --> 00:12:30,400 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, 90 00:12:30,400 --> 00:12:40,400 and so he's tortured by these ideas, he's half starving, he's lost to him, he doesn't have enough to eat, he doesn't have much money, and so he's not thinking all that clearly either, 91 00:12:40,400 --> 00:12:51,400 and it's got a lot of family problems, his mother's sick, and she can't spend a much money in his sister, his planning to engage in a marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical, 92 00:12:51,400 --> 00:13:02,400 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, 93 00:13:02,400 --> 00:13:11,400 but he is smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that his sister is just planning to prostitute herself in an altruistic manner, 94 00:13:11,400 --> 00:13:21,400 and he's not very happy with that, and then at the same time, as all this is happening, he becomes aware of this pawn broker who he's, 95 00:13:21,400 --> 00:13:32,400 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, 96 00:13:32,400 --> 00:13:43,400 and people really don't like her, she's grasping and cruel and deceitful and resentful, and she has this niece who's not very bright, intellectually impaired, 97 00:13:44,400 --> 00:13:55,400 whom she basically treats as a slave and beats all the time, and so a risk all in the call, you know, involved in this mess, and half starved and a bit delirious, 98 00:13:55,400 --> 00:14:05,400 and possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas, decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the landlord, the pawn broker, 99 00:14:06,400 --> 00:14:13,400 take her wealth, which she all she does is keep it in a chest, free the niece, so that seems like a good idea, 100 00:14:13,400 --> 00:14:22,400 so remove one apparently horrible and useless person from the world, free his sister from the necessity of this loveless marriage, 101 00:14:22,400 --> 00:14:32,400 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 Dostyowski is that he, 102 00:14:33,400 --> 00:14:38,400 you know, sometimes when one person is arguing against another or when they're having an argument in their head, 103 00:14:38,400 --> 00:14:45,400 they make their opponent into a straw mat, which is basically they take their opponent and caricature their perspective, 104 00:14:45,400 --> 00:14:52,400 and try to make it as weak as possible, and laugh about it, and then they come up with their argument, 105 00:14:52,400 --> 00:14:59,400 destroy this straw man and feel that they've obtained victory, but it's a very pathetic way of thinking, 106 00:14:59,400 --> 00:15:07,400 it's not thinking at all, what thinking is, is when you adopt the opposite position from your suppositions, 107 00:15:07,400 --> 00:15:15,400 and you make that argument as strong as you can possibly make it, and then you pit your perspective against that, 108 00:15:15,400 --> 00:15:25,400 that strong iron man, not the straw man, and you argue it out, you battle it out, and that's what Dostyowski does in his novels, 109 00:15:25,400 --> 00:15:34,400 I mean he's the people who stand for the antifysis of what Dostyowski actually believes are often the strongest, 110 00:15:34,400 --> 00:15:42,400 smartest, and sometimes most admirable people in the book, and so he takes great moral courage to do that, 111 00:15:42,400 --> 00:15:49,400 and you know, in Raskolnikov, what he wanted to do was set up a character who had every reason to commit murder, 112 00:15:50,400 --> 00:16:02,400 every reasonable reason, philosophically, practically, ethically even, well, so Raskolnikov goes and he kills the old lady with an axe, 113 00:16:02,400 --> 00:16:13,400 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, 114 00:16:14,400 --> 00:16:19,400 and they're not even close to the same people, he's entered an entirely different universe, 115 00:16:19,400 --> 00:16:31,400 and Dostyowski does a lovely job of describing that universe of horror and chaos and deception and suffering and terror, 116 00:16:31,400 --> 00:16:36,400 and all of that, and he doesn't even use the money, he just buries it in an alley as fast as he can, 117 00:16:36,400 --> 00:16:42,400 and then doesn't want anything to do with it again, and anyways, the reason I'm telling you all this is potentially, 118 00:16:42,400 --> 00:16:47,400 potentially, to entice you into reading the book, because it is an amazing, amazing book, 119 00:16:47,400 --> 00:16:55,400 but also because you might say, well, is Raskolnikov true, or the stories in that book true, 120 00:16:55,400 --> 00:17:00,400 and the answer to that is, well, from a factual perspective, clearly, they're untrue, 121 00:17:00,400 --> 00:17:07,400 but then if you think of Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a particular type of person who lived at that time, 122 00:17:07,400 --> 00:17:13,400 and the embodiment of a certain kind of ideology which had swept across Europe and really invaded Russia, 123 00:17:13,400 --> 00:17:18,400 and which was actually a precursor, a philosophical precursor to the Russian Revolution, 124 00:17:18,400 --> 00:17:24,400 then Raskolnikov is more real than any one person, he's like a composite person, 125 00:17:24,400 --> 00:17:35,400 he's like a person whose irrelevancies have been eliminated for the purpose of relating something about the structure of the world, 126 00:17:35,400 --> 00:17:41,400 and so I like to think of those things as sort of meta-real, meta-real, they're more real than real, 127 00:17:41,400 --> 00:17:50,400 and of course, that's what you expect people to do when they tell you about their own lives, about their own day, 128 00:17:50,400 --> 00:18:02,400 you don't want a factual description of every muscle twitch, you want them to distill their experiences down into the gist, 129 00:18:02,400 --> 00:18:12,400 which is the significance of the experience, and the significance of the experience is roughly what you can derive from listening to the experience 130 00:18:12,400 --> 00:18:17,400 that will change the way that you look at the world and act in the world. 131 00:18:17,400 --> 00:18:25,400 So it's valuable information, and they can tell you a terrible story, and that can be valuable, because that can tell you how not to look in the world, 132 00:18:26,400 --> 00:18:31,400 look at the world and act in it, or they can tell you a positive story, you can derive benefit either way, 133 00:18:31,400 --> 00:18:40,400 which is why we also like to go watch stories about horrible psychopathic thugs, and hopefully we're learning not to be like them, 134 00:18:40,400 --> 00:18:50,400 although there are additional advantages in that, you know, someone who might be say that someone who is incapable of cruelty 135 00:18:50,400 --> 00:18:56,400 is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of cruelty, and I would say, and this follows young as well, 136 00:18:56,400 --> 00:19:07,400 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. 137 00:19:07,400 --> 00:19:17,400 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, 138 00:19:17,400 --> 00:19:25,400 which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect, because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. 139 00:19:25,400 --> 00:19:31,400 And if you grow teeth, then you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous, 140 00:19:31,400 --> 00:19:38,400 and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing. 141 00:19:39,400 --> 00:19:51,400 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, 142 00:19:51,400 --> 00:19:59,400 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. 143 00:20:00,400 --> 00:20:05,400 And a lot of martial arts concentrating on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training. 144 00:20:05,400 --> 00:20:13,400 It's like we're not training you to fight, we're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights, 145 00:20:13,400 --> 00:20:26,400 but if you happen to have to get in one, and the antigastophilosophy also is that if you're competent at fighting, that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight, 146 00:20:26,400 --> 00:20:33,400 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, 147 00:20:33,400 --> 00:20:41,400 with any luck, 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. 148 00:20:41,400 --> 00:20:48,400 And so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace, 149 00:20:48,400 --> 00:20:53,400 and that's partly why you and believe that it was necessary for people to integrate their shadow, 150 00:20:54,400 --> 00:21:04,400 and he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt because the human shadow, which is all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize, 151 00:21:04,400 --> 00:21:15,400 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, 152 00:21:15,400 --> 00:21:20,400 of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterized, let's say, the 20th century, 153 00:21:20,400 --> 00:21:24,400 and without that understanding, there's no possibility of bringing it under control. 154 00:21:24,400 --> 00:21:31,400 When you study, not see Germany, for example, or you study the Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, 155 00:21:31,400 --> 00:21:36,400 and you're asking yourself, well, what are these perpetrators like, forget about the victims? 156 00:21:36,400 --> 00:21:45,400 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, 157 00:21:45,400 --> 00:21:52,400 and then it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you, and believe me, that's no picnic. 158 00:21:52,400 --> 00:22:01,400 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 159 00:22:01,400 --> 00:22:07,400 trod upon, because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy, 160 00:22:07,400 --> 00:22:12,400 then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom, but it's not that at all. 161 00:22:12,400 --> 00:22:20,400 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, 162 00:22:20,400 --> 00:22:27,400 where the night's go off to look for the holy grail, which is either the cop that Christ drank out of it, 163 00:22:27,400 --> 00:22:38,400 or the cop into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified, the story is very, but it's basically a holy object like the phoenix, in some sense, 164 00:22:38,400 --> 00:22:42,400 that's representation, a representation of transformation. 165 00:22:42,400 --> 00:22:52,400 So it's an ideal, and so King Arthur's knights who sit at the round table, because they're all roughly equal, go off to find the most valuable thing, 166 00:22:52,400 --> 00:22:57,400 and where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don't know where it is? 167 00:22:57,400 --> 00:23:06,400 Well, each of the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle and enters the forest out the point that looks darkest to him, 168 00:23:06,400 --> 00:23:12,400 and that's a good thing to understand, because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of personality, 169 00:23:12,400 --> 00:23:19,400 which is exactly the same thing, is precisely through the porthole portal that you do not want to climb through, 170 00:23:20,400 --> 00:23:28,400 and the reason for that is actually quite technical, this is a union pre-supposition too, is that, well, there's a bunch of things about you that are under developed, 171 00:23:28,400 --> 00:23:33,400 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, 172 00:23:33,400 --> 00:23:44,400 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, 173 00:23:44,400 --> 00:23:51,400 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, 174 00:23:51,400 --> 00:23:59,400 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. 175 00:23:59,400 --> 00:24:08,400 So they're equivalent at one level of analysis and different at another, so anyways, back to fiction and what it does, 176 00:24:09,400 --> 00:24:17,400 it distills truth, and it produces characters that are composites, and the more they become composites, 177 00:24:17,400 --> 00:24:25,400 the more they approximate a mythological character, and so they become more and more universally true, 178 00:24:25,400 --> 00:24:33,400 and more and more approximating religious deities, but the problem with that is they become more and more distant from individual experience, 179 00:24:33,400 --> 00:24:43,400 and so with literature there's this very tight line where you need to make the character more than merely human, 180 00:24:43,400 --> 00:24:49,400 but not so much of a god that, you know, one of the things that happened to Superman in the 1980s, 181 00:24:49,400 --> 00:24:56,400 Superman started out, he's got a heavenly set of parents by the way, and an earthly set of parents, and he's an orphan like Harry Potter, 182 00:24:56,400 --> 00:25:04,400 very common theme, is that when Superman first emerged, he could only jump over buildings, and maybe he could stop a locomotive, 183 00:25:04,400 --> 00:25:12,400 but by the time the 1980s rolled around, he could juggle planets, and swallow hydrogen bombs, and he could do anything. 184 00:25:12,400 --> 00:25:20,400 Well, people stop buying the Superman comics because how interesting is that, it's like something horrible happens and Superman deals with it, 185 00:25:20,400 --> 00:25:26,400 and something else horrible happens and Superman deals with it, and it's like that's dull. 186 00:25:26,400 --> 00:25:39,400 He turned into such an archetype, he was basically the omnipresent omnipotent god, and that's no fun, it's like god wins, and then god wins again, 187 00:25:39,400 --> 00:25:45,400 and then again god wins, and so then they had to weaken him in different ways with kryptonite, 188 00:25:45,400 --> 00:25:52,400 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, 189 00:25:52,400 --> 00:25:59,400 they had to introduce flaws into his character so that there could be some damn plot, and not something to think about, you know, 190 00:25:59,400 --> 00:26:09,400 there's a deep existential lesson in that, in that your being is limited and flawed and fragile, you're like the genie, 191 00:26:09,400 --> 00:26:18,400 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, 192 00:26:18,400 --> 00:26:29,400 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, 193 00:26:29,400 --> 00:26:37,400 and that if you didn't have limitations, while there wouldn't be a plot, and maybe there would be no life, and so that's part of the reason why, 194 00:26:37,400 --> 00:26:50,400 perhaps you have to accept the fact that you're flawed and insufficient and live with it and consider it a precondition for being, it's at least a reasonable idea. 195 00:26:50,400 --> 00:26:58,400 So anyways, one of the main characters is the country, the known, the explored territory, we went over that a bit, 196 00:26:58,400 --> 00:27:08,400 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, 197 00:27:08,400 --> 00:27:17,400 and demands that you act in a certain manner and reduces your individuality to that element that's tolerated by everyone else, 198 00:27:18,400 --> 00:27:29,400 and 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, 199 00:27:29,400 --> 00:27:39,400 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. 200 00:27:40,400 --> 00:27:50,400 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, 201 00:27:50,400 --> 00:27:58,400 which is partly why I object to the notion of the patriarchy, because it's a mythola, it's the, what do you call that? 202 00:27:58,400 --> 00:28:08,400 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, 203 00:28:08,400 --> 00:28:18,400 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, 204 00:28:18,400 --> 00:28:26,400 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, 205 00:28:26,400 --> 00:28:38,400 that's a lack of gratitude, and it's a lack of wisdom, and it's found it in resentment, and it's very dangerous, both personally and socially. 206 00:28:38,400 --> 00:28:50,400 I told you that Captain Hook is a tyrant, because he's got this crocodile chasing him in the crocodile, has it's clock in its stomach, and that's death, it's like obviously, right tick tick tick tick tick, 207 00:28:50,400 --> 00:29:04,400 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 cruel, and bitter, and so he's a tyrant, 208 00:29:04,400 --> 00:29:13,400 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, 209 00:29:13,400 --> 00:29:22,400 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, 210 00:29:22,400 --> 00:29:32,400 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, 211 00:29:32,400 --> 00:29:40,400 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, 212 00:29:40,400 --> 00:29:49,400 so your potential is going to disappear because you age anyways, and so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction, 213 00:29:49,400 --> 00:30:01,400 and at least become something, no matter how limited, rather than nothing, so, you know, Peter Pan, that's a great story. 214 00:30:01,400 --> 00:30:15,400 It'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, 215 00:30:15,400 --> 00:30:25,400 I mean, Stalin was a furl and tense and purposes, God, the father, in Soviet Russia, although he was pretty much only the worst elements of old testament God, 216 00:30:25,400 --> 00:30:33,400 who was constantly smiting people and wiping out populations and doing all sorts of things that seem to be quite nasty, 217 00:30:33,400 --> 00:30:42,400 but nonetheless, you know, people worshipped him in many ways, and he's a representation of just exactly what goes wrong, 218 00:30:42,400 --> 00:30:49,400 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 219 00:30:49,400 --> 00:30:58,400 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, 220 00:30:58,400 --> 00:31:05,400 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, 221 00:31:05,400 --> 00:31:16,400 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, 222 00:31:16,400 --> 00:31:23,400 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, 223 00:31:23,400 --> 00:31:32,400 and you got her apartment, and so that was a lovely society, and it only killed about 30 million people between 1919 and 1959, 224 00:31:32,400 --> 00:31:42,400 so that's what happens when the archetypal structure gets tilted badly when people forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill 225 00:31:42,400 --> 00:31:52,400 as citizens, as a wake, citizens who are capable of stating the truth, and the archetypes shift, so there's nothing left of the great father except the tyrant, 226 00:31:52,400 --> 00:32:00,400 and let's not have that happen. I mean, the one on the right is really interesting, because consciously, unconsciously, you know, 227 00:32:00,400 --> 00:32:07,400 there's Stalin surrounded by what is for all intents and purposes fire, you know, she looks like, 228 00:32:07,400 --> 00:32:12,400 he looks like, he looks like Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty when she shows up at Aurora's Christening, you know, 229 00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:16,400 she puts her arms up in the air and green fire surrounds her, it's like, 230 00:32:21,400 --> 00:32:28,400 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. 231 00:32:28,400 --> 00:32:34,400 So I mean, all the terrors that happened in the Soviet Union didn't start under Stalin, they started under Lenin, 232 00:32:34,400 --> 00:32:41,400 Lenin, Lenin or Stalin was definitely Lenin's legitimate son, let's put it that way. 233 00:32:41,400 --> 00:32:48,400 So, you know, this is another example of the tyrannical element of the great father, 234 00:32:48,400 --> 00:32:59,400 and the sorts of things that can happen. I mean, I kind of got an evil kick out of this ad that was quite old, you know, 235 00:32:59,400 --> 00:33:06,400 it's kitschy in some sense, and you know, it shows, I don't think that's something you'd ever see at a magazine today. 236 00:33:06,400 --> 00:33:15,400 Ten unusual stamps showing evil dictator, you know, well fair enough, I mean, that's what he was, 237 00:33:15,400 --> 00:33:24,400 and that's the consequence, and that's just a tiny bit of the consequence, because Lenin's wiped out a very large number of people, 238 00:33:24,400 --> 00:33:36,400 often using compassion as a justification, so when they went after the mentally ill and the terminally ill, 239 00:33:36,400 --> 00:33:45,400 and those who whose intelligence was compromised for biological reasons, and those who were too old, 240 00:33:45,400 --> 00:33:51,400 they basically justified it by saying that the enforced youth in Asia was merciful, 241 00:33:51,400 --> 00:33:59,400 and that you were actually being a good person by complying with the requirements, and so something to think about. 242 00:33:59,400 --> 00:34:05,400 More mythological representations, I like these quite a bit, so there's their Hitler as, you know, 243 00:34:05,400 --> 00:34:13,400 night of the faith, essentially, with, I suppose that's a recreation of the Christian Holy spirit dove, you know, 244 00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:20,400 except it's an eagle, which is a bird of prey, and a friend, and what do you call those things a scavenger, right? 245 00:34:20,400 --> 00:34:32,400 So that's kind of interesting, but that's Hitler as night of the blood, roughly speaking, and there, this is an allied war post, 246 00:34:32,400 --> 00:34:38,400 or essentially that assimilates the Nazis to poison the snakes, and, you know, 247 00:34:38,400 --> 00:34:45,400 we don't like poisonous snakes very much, and it's probably because they've been praying on us for approximately 20 million years, 248 00:34:45,400 --> 00:34:55,400 because snakes and primates humans in particular co-evolved, and so the snake is a representation of that, 249 00:34:55,400 --> 00:35:05,400 which lies outside the comfortable domain, and that can be, you know, a snake, obviously, or it can be an abstract snake, 250 00:35:05,400 --> 00:35:12,400 and the abstract snake is your enemy, or an even more abstract snake is the evil in your own heart, 251 00:35:12,400 --> 00:35:21,400 and this is going to be a bit of a leap for you, but there's this ancient idea that developed in the west over thousands of years, 252 00:35:21,400 --> 00:35:30,400 far predating Christianity, that, at least it's origins, that the snake in the garden of Eden was also Satan, 253 00:35:30,400 --> 00:35:35,400 which is like of what the hell, it's a very strange idea, but the reason for that, as far as I can tell, 254 00:35:35,400 --> 00:35:44,400 is that, you know, we have this circuitry that detects predators, and a good representation of a predator is a snake, 255 00:35:44,400 --> 00:35:50,400 or a monster that incorporates snake-like features like a dragon, or something like that, or a dinosaur with lots of teeth, 256 00:35:50,400 --> 00:35:57,400 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 257 00:35:57,400 --> 00:36:02,400 that the hands of Nile crocodiles, well, they were in the African vault going down to get some nice water, 258 00:36:02,400 --> 00:36:08,400 so, you know, that's the thing that jumps up and pulls you under, and, you know, that happens in your own life, 259 00:36:08,400 --> 00:36:13,400 because things jump up and pull you under, you know, and use the same circuitry. 260 00:36:13,400 --> 00:36:20,400 We use the same circuitry to process unknown things that upset us as we once used to detect predators, 261 00:36:21,400 --> 00:36:31,400 who are likely to invade our space, and so, and human beings are capable of abstraction, and so, you know, you could think about the real predator that might invade your space, 262 00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:38,400 and maybe that's a snake or a wolf or some kind of monster, you know, and that's pretty concrete and biological, 263 00:36:39,400 --> 00:36:47,400 chimps have that, you know, chimps don't like snakes, and so, if you, a chimps comes across a snake in the wild, then, like a big, let's say, 264 00:36:47,400 --> 00:36:53,400 I don't know what live with chimps, I don't know if they're pifins, but they have constrictors, they're anyways, so, you know, 265 00:36:53,400 --> 00:37:00,400 maybe there's like a 20-foot constrictor and this, and the chimps, like, stays a good distance away from it, but it won't leave, 266 00:37:00,400 --> 00:37:10,400 and then it has this particular cry that it utters, that's called a snake-r-a-w-r-a-a, and so, it makes this noise, which means something like, 267 00:37:10,400 --> 00:37:17,400 holy shit, that's a big snake, and I actually mean that because the circuits that primates use to, 268 00:37:17,400 --> 00:37:26,400 to utter distress calls are the same circuits that we use to curse just so you know, that's why people with Tourette syndrome swear, 269 00:37:26,400 --> 00:37:33,400 because like, what's up with that? How can you have a neurological condition that makes you swear? Well, it turns out that, 270 00:37:33,400 --> 00:37:42,400 gutteral, affect laden curses are mediated by a different speech circuit, and that's the speech circuit we share with the predator, 271 00:37:42,400 --> 00:37:51,400 alarms of other primates, so that's pretty cool. So anyways, the chimps don't, they're, makes this snake noise, and then, 272 00:37:51,400 --> 00:37:57,400 all bunch of other chimps come running, and some of them stay a fair ways from the snake, and some of them get pretty close, 273 00:37:57,400 --> 00:38:04,400 but they'll stand there and watch that snake for like 24 hours, you know, so they're fascinated by it, and, you know, 274 00:38:04,400 --> 00:38:12,400 if you've handled snakes, you can understand that fascination because they're fascinating, you know, and their luminous, I would say, 275 00:38:12,400 --> 00:38:19,400 that's the right way of putting it, a luminous is a word that means intrinsically meaningful, like a fire, you know, 276 00:38:19,400 --> 00:38:24,400 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, 277 00:38:24,400 --> 00:38:35,400 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. 278 00:38:35,400 --> 00:38:46,400 It was like the first chimps aresonist, you know, and he figured it out, and, well, hey, now he was a chimps with a stick with fire on it, like that's a mega chimps, 279 00:38:46,400 --> 00:39:03,400 and so, you know, we have that mutation in spades and no wonder, so anyways, so they make this, you know, they have this reaction to snakes, and chimps that have never seen a snake, 280 00:39:03,400 --> 00:39:10,400 if they're in occasion, you throw a rubber snake in there, it's like bang, they hit the roof, but then they look at the snake, you know, 281 00:39:10,400 --> 00:39:17,400 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, 282 00:39:17,400 --> 00:39:23,400 but you should stay away from it because it's a snake, so you're kind of screwed in terms of your motivations, right? 283 00:39:23,400 --> 00:39:29,400 One is get the hell away, and the other is, well, don't let that thing do anything that you're not watching, 284 00:39:29,400 --> 00:39:36,400 and so that's really the reaction we have to the unknown, it's terrifying, but we watch it, 285 00:39:36,400 --> 00:39:41,400 and then, you know, the meta story is that not only do we watch it, but we go explore it, 286 00:39:41,400 --> 00:39:46,400 and so you might think, well, back in the Garden of Eden, so to speak, when we were living in trees, 287 00:39:46,400 --> 00:39:54,400 the snakes used to come and eat us, and our offspring more likely, and, you know, we weren't very happy about that, 288 00:39:54,400 --> 00:40:02,400 and then we figured out how to maybe buy accident, drop a stick on a snake, and that was a good thing, 289 00:40:03,400 --> 00:40:07,400 because the snake didn't like that, and then maybe the next thing we learned a little later was to, like, 290 00:40:07,400 --> 00:40:13,400 actually take a stick and like whack the snake with it, and you can believe that the first 291 00:40:13,400 --> 00:40:20,400 primate who figured out that was just as popular as the guy who mastered fire, and so we're pretty good at whacking 292 00:40:20,400 --> 00:40:28,400 the snake with sticks, which is why Springfield has a snake whacking day, it's devoted to nothing but that. 293 00:40:28,400 --> 00:40:33,400 All right, I don't know if you know that, Simpsons episode, but it's quite comical. 294 00:40:33,400 --> 00:40:39,400 So, well, so then you think about the snake as a predator, and it's the thing that invades the garden always, 295 00:40:39,400 --> 00:40:45,400 because you just can't keep snakes out of the damn garden, no matter how hard you try, and then you think of snakes, 296 00:40:45,400 --> 00:40:54,400 and maybe you think of metasnakes, and like a metasnake would be also a predator, but maybe that's the predator that represents the, 297 00:40:54,400 --> 00:41:02,400 the destructive spirit of the other tribe, because chimpanzees, for example, are quite tribal, and they definitely go to war with one another, 298 00:41:02,400 --> 00:41:11,400 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, 299 00:41:11,400 --> 00:41:22,400 and you realize that the worst of all evil predators is the human capacity for evil, and then at that point, you know, 300 00:41:22,400 --> 00:41:31,400 you're starting to, I would say, psychologists or spiritualize the idea of danger, and making it make it into something that's conceptual, 301 00:41:31,400 --> 00:41:38,400 and something that's psychological, and something that you can face sort of on mass. 302 00:41:38,400 --> 00:41:43,400 I mean, one of the things people had to figure out was, how do you deal with danger? 303 00:41:43,400 --> 00:41:50,400 And so you figure out how you deal with a specific danger, but then because human beings are dead, so damn smart, they thought, well, 304 00:41:50,400 --> 00:41:54,400 what if we considered the class of all dangerous things? 305 00:41:54,400 --> 00:42:03,400 And then what if we considered a motive being that was the best motive being in the face of the class of all dangerous things? 306 00:42:03,400 --> 00:42:08,400 Well, that's a lot better. You get, you know, you get solve all the dangerous problems, all it wants, 307 00:42:08,400 --> 00:42:14,400 instead of having to conjure up a different solution for every dangerous thing, and that's basically as far as I can tell, 308 00:42:14,400 --> 00:42:23,400 where the hero story came from, and the hero story is basically, you know, there's a community that's threatened by the emergence of some old evil, 309 00:42:24,400 --> 00:42:30,400 often represented by a dragon. That's sort of typical say of the Lord of the Rings stories. 310 00:42:30,400 --> 00:42:37,400 There's a hero, often a humble guy, but not always, sometimes a knight decides he'll go out there, you know, 311 00:42:37,400 --> 00:42:43,400 and chase down the snake, maybe even at or the serpent or the dragon, maybe in an even in its layer, 312 00:42:43,400 --> 00:42:48,400 and he'll have a bunch of adventures on the way that transform him from, you know, useless, naive, 313 00:42:48,400 --> 00:42:57,400 hobbit into, you know, sword wielding hero, and he confronts the dragon and gets the gold and frees the people that it had enslaved, 314 00:42:57,400 --> 00:43:03,400 and then comes back, transformed to share what he's learned with the community. 315 00:43:03,400 --> 00:43:08,400 It's like, well, that's the human story fundamentally, and that's our basic instinct of pattern, 316 00:43:08,400 --> 00:43:14,400 and it's represented in narratives constantly, and that's partly what this, see this has meaning. 317 00:43:14,400 --> 00:43:23,400 You know what this means? Why? Why do you know? Well, you know, because it draws on symbolic representations that you already understand, 318 00:43:23,400 --> 00:43:33,400 you understand that a mess of tooth snakes is not a good thing, and that maybe the sensible thing to do is stomp them, 319 00:43:33,400 --> 00:43:40,400 and it's not like you need an instruction manual to figure out what the poster means, 320 00:43:40,400 --> 00:43:46,400 and so, you know, that's two different representations of Hitler, that's sort of the pro Hitler representation, 321 00:43:46,400 --> 00:43:54,400 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. 322 00:43:54,400 --> 00:44:02,400 So, that's the known, that's culture, that's order, and what's eternally juxtaposed to culture, 323 00:44:02,400 --> 00:44:11,400 and the known, and the explored, and order is the unknown, and the unknown is a strange place, the unknown is actually, 324 00:44:11,400 --> 00:44:18,400 it's a physical place, like the unknown is the place that when you're camping and you're around to fire, 325 00:44:18,400 --> 00:44:25,400 the unknown is everything outside the circle of the light, and you remember in the Lion King, you may not remember, 326 00:44:25,400 --> 00:44:38,400 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, 327 00:44:38,400 --> 00:44:43,400 and that's a very old idea, and you guys had no problem with, you know, that was fine, that made sense, 328 00:44:43,400 --> 00:44:50,400 and that out beyond the light was the darkness, and that was the elephant graveyard, that was death, that was the place of death and danger, 329 00:44:50,400 --> 00:44:54,400 that's where the Hyene is hung out, and you weren't supposed to go there, and so of course Simba, 330 00:44:54,400 --> 00:45:01,400 because he's a rule-breaking hero, just like Harry Potter, immediately goes there, and so, you know, that's like the forbidden fruit, 331 00:45:01,400 --> 00:45:10,400 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, 332 00:45:10,400 --> 00:45:16,400 and not explain why, you know, so for example, if I said to you at the beginning of this class, 333 00:45:16,400 --> 00:45:26,400 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, 334 00:45:26,400 --> 00:45:33,400 just what's up with that chair, like that's chair is magical all of a sudden, you, some of you might even, while you probably wouldn't, 335 00:45:33,400 --> 00:45:39,400 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, 336 00:45:39,400 --> 00:45:45,400 you know, and people are very curious, and that's exactly what we're like, and that's a very old story too, right? 337 00:45:45,400 --> 00:45:50,400 It's like opening Pandora's box, don't open that box, you'll be sorry, it's like, oh, ho ho ho! 338 00:45:50,400 --> 00:45:58,400 You know, all the horrors of the world fly out and believe me, you will open Pandora's box many times in your life, 339 00:45:58,400 --> 00:46:08,400 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, 340 00:46:08,400 --> 00:46:16,400 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, 341 00:46:16,400 --> 00:46:21,400 no, we probably really shouldn't open that box, and you keep bugging them, and then they open it, 342 00:46:21,400 --> 00:46:29,400 and then all sorts of things fly out that you didn't expect, and then maybe you think, hey, it would be better if I were to just left that damn box closed, 343 00:46:29,400 --> 00:46:39,400 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 a major league idea, 344 00:46:39,400 --> 00:46:45,400 and part of the reason in the Judeo-Christian tradition, why people are saddled with the notion of original sin is because, 345 00:46:45,400 --> 00:46:56,400 hyper-curdically developed chimpanzees without much sense can't keep their hands off things, and so they keep exploring, 346 00:46:56,400 --> 00:47:07,400 even when they know better, and every time they do that, they learn something that destroys the paradise that they currently inhabit, 347 00:47:07,400 --> 00:47:13,400 because there's plenty, you never learn anything in your life, that's of importance without it, 348 00:47:13,400 --> 00:47:22,400 having a pretty damn destabilizing effect on you at the moment of realization, you learn something happy, it's like, whatever, 349 00:47:22,400 --> 00:47:29,400 you know, that means that I was doing things right, like it's nice and everything, but it's not informative. 350 00:47:29,400 --> 00:47:39,400 You do something in all hell breaks loose, that'll make you think, now it's for sure you might never stop thinking for the rest of your life, 351 00:47:39,400 --> 00:47:47,400 so anyways, the unknown, the unknown is that which surrounds the known, it's unexplored territory, 352 00:47:47,400 --> 00:47:56,400 it's usually represented as female, I think, for a variety of reasons, and not as female exactly, it's not the right way to think about it as feminine, 353 00:47:56,400 --> 00:48:03,400 and that's not the same thing because feminine is a symbolic category, whereas female is like an actual female, 354 00:48:03,400 --> 00:48:13,400 and so you don't want to confuse the metaphor with the actuality, because we had the social cognitive categories built in, 355 00:48:13,400 --> 00:48:22,400 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, 356 00:48:22,400 --> 00:48:38,400 and we kind of mapped them onto the external realities of being the best we could using what we could, and so nature is benevolent, and it's fruitful, all things come from nature, 357 00:48:38,400 --> 00:48:46,400 and all things come from the unknown, right, because the known is already there, it's the unknown that manifests the new, right, 358 00:48:46,400 --> 00:48:59,400 and so that's part of the reason for the characterization of the unknown is feminine, and then there's also the case that women play a massive role in sexual selection among human beings, 359 00:48:59,400 --> 00:49:10,400 so that from an evolutionary perspective your twice is likely to be a failure if you're a man, then you are a few are a woman in that you have twice as many female ancestors, 360 00:49:10,400 --> 00:49:19,400 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, 361 00:49:19,400 --> 00:49:31,400 and the other half have zero, and so, and of problem, and that's basically how it works out, so women are more choosy-meters than men by a substantial margin, 362 00:49:31,400 --> 00:49:49,400 there's a funny study done by the guy who was 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, 363 00:49:49,400 --> 00:50:00,400 so 85 percent 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, 364 00:50:00,400 --> 00:50:16,400 and they were more swayed I would say by attractiveness, but that didn't have certainly as big an effect on their actual rating of women, so anyways, so from a Darwinian perspective, 365 00:50:16,400 --> 00:50:33,400 nature is that which selects, that's all it is, and so sexual selection plays a massive role in human evolution, the fact that we have these massive brains is very likely a consequence of a positive feedback loop in sexual selection, 366 00:50:33,400 --> 00:50:43,400 because otherwise, that's the only time you can get really rapid changes in evolutionary space where you get a process going that reinforces itself, 367 00:50:43,400 --> 00:50:51,400 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, 368 00:50:51,400 --> 00:51:01,400 and maybe then that turns into the ability to speak, or to master fire, and then there's way more selection for intelligence, and the brain just goes like this, 369 00:51:01,400 --> 00:51:11,400 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, 370 00:51:11,400 --> 00:51:23,400 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, 371 00:51:23,400 --> 00:51:33,400 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, a deer is born, a fawn is born, 372 00:51:33,400 --> 00:51:45,400 and it's like two seconds later it's standing, and then it's running from a lion, it's like 15 minutes later, and then baby it's like, you just lies there, and you know, 373 00:51:45,400 --> 00:51:59,400 otters plaintive noises, that's all it can do, and it does that for like 10 months before it could skid her away from a sloth if it was predatory, you know, so you really got to take care of those creatures, 374 00:51:59,400 --> 00:52:05,400 and so that's a big price to pay, that's a big price to pay for our cortical evolution. 375 00:52:05,400 --> 00:52:17,400 So anyways, here's some of the symbolic representatives of the unknown, the unconscious, dineasy, and forests of the id, that sort of Freud's representation of the unknown, 376 00:52:17,400 --> 00:52:29,400 the terrors of the darkness, that's the unknown, the monsters that lurk there, the source and the resting place of all things, the great mother, the queen, the matrix, 377 00:52:29,400 --> 00:52:41,400 which means matter, which means mother, the matriarch, matter, mother, the container, the cornecopio, the object to be fertilized, the source of all things, the fecund, the pregnant, 378 00:52:41,400 --> 00:52:58,400 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 the mysterious dark, and matter, and the earth. 379 00:52:58,400 --> 00:53:07,400 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. 380 00:53:07,400 --> 00:53:18,400 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 at a swamp and it's dark there, and if the moons up, that's a better, 381 00:53:18,400 --> 00:53:25,400 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, 382 00:53:26,400 --> 00:53:43,400 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 then makes us specifically human. 383 00:53:44,400 --> 00:54:03,400 There's a good representation of the underworld and the place of transformation, so that's hell, an 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. 384 00:54:03,400 --> 00:54:15,400 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 what happens to you. 385 00:54:15,400 --> 00:54:30,400 It happens to you all the time, you know, 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, 386 00:54:30,400 --> 00:54:58,400 and better to go on purpose than 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-sized threat, then you've revert to prey mode, and you're frozen, and that's way, way, way more stressful. 387 00:54:58,400 --> 00:55:09,400 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. 388 00:55:09,400 --> 00:55:26,400 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, 389 00:55:26,400 --> 00:55:34,400 instead of a catastrophe that produces post-traumatic stress disorder knocks you out for four or five years, and maybe you never recover. 390 00:55:34,400 --> 00:55:39,400 So, and that's what these kind of symbolic representations mean. 391 00:55:39,400 --> 00:55:49,400 Those are states of being that indicate being devoured, and you can be devoured by your own unconscious, Jesus, that happens all the time. 392 00:55:49,400 --> 00:56:00,400 What does that mean? Well, you know, and it's an autonomous thing in some sense, you know, like if you get depressed, or if you get really anxious, you know, I'm getting control over that. 393 00:56:00,400 --> 00:56:05,400 It's like it sweeps up over you and pulls you down, and why down? 394 00:56:05,400 --> 00:56:09,400 Well, down is where you go when you're sad, you don't go up. 395 00:56:09,400 --> 00:56:18,400 Man, I'm up today. Oh, that's too bad. No, it's man, I'm down today, and while that's partly this, and it's partly because this is subordinate, 396 00:56:18,400 --> 00:56:30,400 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? 397 00:56:30,400 --> 00:56:45,400 Yeah, mop, you don't aim down. Well, the reason those phrases make sense is because they're locked deeply into this underlying structure of imagination, and well, those are the archetypal structures according to Jung, 398 00:56:46,400 --> 00:56:59,400 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. 399 00:56:59,400 --> 00:57:04,400 So there's more representations. She's quite the friendly creature. That's Kelly. 400 00:57:04,400 --> 00:57:16,400 I like this representation better. Those are heads, by the way, and hands. So she sort of represents, well, very complex things. She represents death. She represents transformation. 401 00:57:16,400 --> 00:57:31,400 In this, I really 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 is to make a representation of the domain of threat itself, right? 402 00:57:31,400 --> 00:57:44,400 So that they could deal with the idea that because we can say threat, well, what does 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. 403 00:57:44,400 --> 00:57:49,400 Across all those individual instances, and maybe you can figure out how to deal with threat, right? 404 00:57:49,400 --> 00:57:59,400 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? 405 00:57:59,400 --> 00:58:16,400 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. 406 00:58:16,400 --> 00:58:27,400 She her hair is on fire. Well, fire, you know, that's that's a new menace phenomenon, dangerous, but transformative. She's wearing a head dress of skulls. 407 00:58:27,400 --> 00:58:35,400 She has a weapon in this hand and she has a tiger's tongue. She often has a snake around her waist. 408 00:58:35,400 --> 00:58:43,400 She needs none of these do, but she often does. But in this case, the stem, that's because, you know, it's a snake. We've already covered that. 409 00:58:43,400 --> 00:58:48,400 Well, these things that look like snakes here aren't. You know what? That's how her belly is concave. 410 00:58:48,400 --> 00:58:56,400 Well, it's because she's just given birth to this unfortunate person that she happens to be standing on and she's eating in test-dying's first. 411 00:58:56,400 --> 00:59:07,400 And that's a fire ring which she 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. 412 00:59:07,400 --> 00:59:16,400 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. 413 00:59:16,400 --> 00:59:22,400 It's like some poor artist was sitting there thinking, well, how do I represent destruction? And it's like bang. 414 00:59:22,400 --> 00:59:34,400 Whoa, okay, we'll 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. 415 00:59:34,400 --> 00:59:45,400 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. 416 00:59:45,400 --> 00:59:54,400 So it exists as an abstraction. If nothing else, do you offer its sacrifices? Well, what the hell do you think you do? What are you doing in class? 417 00:59:54,400 --> 01:00:00:05,400 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, 418 01:00:05,400 --> 01:00:17,400 waving 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's pleasure for tomorrow's advantage. 419 01:00:17,400 --> 01:00:29,400 And that's what sacrifice is. And human beings discovered that dramatically first, you know, like we were, we're apes for God's sake. We didn't just leap up and think, oh, we better save for tomorrow. 420 01:00:29,400 --> 01:00:39,400 You know, we 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. 421 01:00:39,400 --> 01:00:50,400 No, they weren't thinking this through. It's like if you're going to 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. 422 01:00:50,400 --> 01:00:59,400 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 do you have to give it what it wants? 423 01:00:59,400 --> 01:01:09,400 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. 424 01:01:09,400 --> 01:01:20,400 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. 425 01:01:20,400 --> 01:01:36,400 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 so unlikely. Well, how do you bargain with the future? 426 01:01:37,400 --> 01:02:01,400 Well, you give it what it wants. And, you know, some of that's 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. 427 01:02:01,400 --> 01:02:13,400 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? 428 01:02:13,400 --> 01:02:28,400 It's like, look out for mother nature, man. You know, two weeks out in the bush right now in your dead. And it's not pleasant. And then if it's the spring, you last longer. But the bugs eat you. And so that's not very fun either. 429 01:02:28,400 --> 01:02:48,400 So nature, you know, it's bent on your destruction. But if you treat it properly and carefully and make the right sacrifice is 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. 430 01:02:48,400 --> 01:02:58,400 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. 431 01:02:58,400 --> 01:03:12,400 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. 432 01:03:12,400 --> 01:03:27,400 You know, science extracts out all the subjectivity. All it is there is an array of 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. 433 01:03:27,400 --> 01:03:40,400 It's full of terror and pain and joy and frustration and other people. That's for sure. And so that's the real world. And so, well, that's what this is. It's the real world. And what is it made out of? 434 01:03:40,400 --> 01:03:53,400 Well, it's made out of all those things you know that can get out of hand, you know, because the explored territory in the known can get so damn tight that it's nothing but a tyrant. 435 01:03:53,400 --> 01:04:07,400 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. 436 01:04:07,400 --> 01:04:25,400 Unless you're hyper conservative, you want to go out with someone who's got their a little radic. 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. 437 01:04:25,400 --> 01:04:34,400 That's 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. 438 01:04:34,400 --> 01:04:41,400 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. 439 01:04:41,400 --> 01:04:48,400 Order turns into chaos and now you're in chaos and what the hell are you going to do there? And that's a good question. 440 01:04:48,400 --> 01:04:57,400 Because you need to know what to do there. Because you're going to be there. And it happens to you when your dreams fall apart. You know, I mean your dreams for your life. 441 01:04:57,400 --> 01:05:12,400 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. 442 01:05:12,400 --> 01:05:19,400 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. 443 01:05:20,400 --> 01:05:29,400 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. 444 01:05:29,400 --> 01:05:34,400 And that's, you know, I wouldn't recommend that, you know, it's something to avoid. 445 01:05:34,400 --> 01:05:42,400 But it happens to people all the time, all the time, you see them wandering around, you know, shattered on the streets of Toronto. 446 01:05:42,400 --> 01:05:52,400 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. 447 01:05:52,400 --> 01:06:00,400 And so when you see someone like that, you're like, well, first we're not going to look to closely and people like that often don't like you to look at them. 448 01:06:00,400 --> 01:06:06,400 Because that also helps them remember where they are and that's no pleasant thing. And you're going to just stay away from that. 449 01:06:06,400 --> 01:06:14,400 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. 450 01:06:14,400 --> 01:06:23,400 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 going to do about it anyways. 451 01:06:23,400 --> 01:06:33,400 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. 452 01:06:33,400 --> 01:06:42,400 Sometimes better order. That's actually what you do when you explore, right? You explore. You find out something new, not too new, not too panoroboxy. 453 01:06:42,400 --> 01:06:54,400 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 the recalibration. 454 01:06:54,400 --> 01:07:04,400 And you strengthen 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. 455 01:07:04,400 --> 01:07:11,400 And I mean, that's a real place. That's an actual. It's a meta place. But it's more real than places. 456 01:07:11,400 --> 01:07:18,400 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. 457 01:07:18,400 --> 01:07:30,400 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 why people are right handed. 458 01:07:30,400 --> 01:07:36,400 And the right hemisphere has a more diffuse structure. It's more associated with negative emotion and imagination. 459 01:07:36,400 --> 01:07:46,400 And the two communicate between each other through the corpus colosome and the right hemisphere appears to update the left hemisphere kind of slowly often in dreams. 460 01:07:46,400 --> 01:07:58,400 And so if you are hurt, if your right hemisphere is hurt, for example, back here in the prior load, then you lose the left part of your body. You can't move it anymore. 461 01:07:58,400 --> 01:08:05,400 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. 462 01:08:05,400 --> 01:08:14,400 And so if someone comes along and says, you know, you're not moving your left arm, you're going to say, yeah, well, my arthritis is bothering me to have moved it for six months. 463 01:08:14,400 --> 01:08:27,400 Well, my arthritis is bothering today or, you know, you don't move in your left foot. It's like, well, you know, I'm too tired. Well, what's happened is the left hemisphere has a representation of the body. 464 01:08:27,400 --> 01:08:35,400 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. 465 01:08:35,400 --> 01:08:43,400 And so the left already has a model and it's not going to change. It's just hard to change your model of yourself. You don't have a tooth pulled. 466 01:08:43,400 --> 01:08:50,400 What happens? It's like your damn tongue is in that hole for the next six months, settling around constantly. 467 01:08:50,400 --> 01:08:58,400 And that's because you're rebuilding your neurological model of your body. It's like try that with your whole left side and see how well you do. 468 01:08:58,400 --> 01:09:17,400 You know, so this guy named Rama Shandran was experimenting with people like this. One of the things he did was kind of he was checking their balance and you can do that by regaining the ear with cold water and that makes people go like this makes the rise move back and forth because it upsets the vestibular system. 469 01:09:17,400 --> 01:09:27,400 What he found was that if he if he poured cold water in the left ear of someone with right-pryled damage, who had left neglect that they'd all of a sudden sort of wake up, 470 01:09:27,400 --> 01:09:38,400 catastrophicly 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, 471 01:09:38,400 --> 01:09:55,400 it made 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. 472 01:09:55,400 --> 01:10:02,400 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. 473 01:10:02,400 --> 01:10:11,400 And so that's a good example of how the right and left hemisphere's work together and how they're kind of mapped on to this weirdly enough. 474 01:10:11,400 --> 01:10:24,400 So, you know, we're 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. 475 01:10:24,400 --> 01:10:40,400 And that's not the same things that you see flitting around you day to day, those are just like clouds, they're just evaporating, you know, there's things underneath that are more fundamental that are more fundamental realities like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, 476 01:10:40,400 --> 01:10:50,400 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. 477 01:10:50,400 --> 01:11:04,400 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 is, and I believe this is a neurological answer, I believe this. 478 01:11:04,400 --> 01:11:18,400 That your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos in order and the way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. 479 01:11:18,400 --> 01:11:32,400 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. 480 01:11:32,400 --> 01:12:01,400 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 going to go pretty far out into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself and other people are going to just put a toe in the chaos and you know, that's neuroticism basically that's your sensitivity to threat that's calibrated differently and different people. 481 01:12:01,400 --> 01:12:16,400 And more some people are more exploratory than others, that's kind of extroversion and openness working together and intelligent. So some people are going to tolerate a larger at mixture of chaos in their order. Those are liberals, by the way. 482 01:12:16,400 --> 01:12:30,400 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. 483 01:12:30,400 --> 01:12:40,400 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. 484 01:12:40,400 --> 01:12:58,400 Sometimes the conservatives are right and sometimes the liberals are right because the environment's going 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. 485 01:12:58,400 --> 01:13:06,400 So anyways, so let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos in order. So what does that mean? Well, you're stable enough. 486 01:13:06,400 --> 01:13:16,400 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. 487 01:13:16,400 --> 01:13:24,400 And also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity and that's actually associated with pleasure. That's the dopamine circuit. 488 01:13:24,400 --> 01:13:32,400 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. 489 01:13:32,400 --> 01:13:42,400 It's a real conversation. 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. 490 01:13:42,400 --> 01:13:52,400 It's like, wow, that's so interesting. You'll have a conversation like that forever. Maybe you're reading a book like that or you're listening to a piece of music that models that. 491 01:13:52,400 --> 01:14:01,400 Because what music does is provide you with predictable forms, multi-level predictable forms that transform just the right amount. 492 01:14:01,400 --> 01:14:14,400 And 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. 493 01:14:14,400 --> 01:14:27,400 And you think, wow, that's so cool. 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 is that's why we love it. 494 01:14:27,400 --> 01:14:38,400 And you know, you can dance to it and that sort of symbolizes you putting yourself in harmony with these multi-polar layers of reality and positioning yourself properly. 495 01:14:38,400 --> 01:14:45,400 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. 496 01:14:45,400 --> 01:14:55,400 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 doopy criticism. I'm going to listen to some music, right? 497 01:14:55,400 --> 01:15:09,400 There's no rational, there's no rational argument against music. It's like you just don't even think about him. He just walk away from someone who's stupid enough to ask that question. It's like, 498 01:15:09,400 --> 01:15:25,400 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. 499 01:15:25,400 --> 01:15:33,400 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. 500 01:15:33,400 --> 01:15:51,400 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. 501 01:15:51,400 --> 01:15:59,400 What 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? 502 01:15:59,400 --> 01:16:05,400 Well, look, say you're going out with a new person. It's like, what do you do? You project a fantasy on them. 503 01:16:05,400 --> 01:16:16,400 And then you fall in love with the fantasy and aren't you stupid because you're going to find out that the match between your damn fantasy and the actual person is tenuous at best. 504 01:16:16,400 --> 01:16:28,400 And so Jung would call that a projection of either the anima or the anima's, you know, the anima is what a man projects on to a woman. He finds desirable. It's like, oh, she's the perfect woman. 505 01:16:28,400 --> 01:16:34,400 It's like, well, how do you know that? You've like, seen her for four seconds, you know, but it grips you. 506 01:16:34,400 --> 01:16:41,400 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. 507 01:16:41,400 --> 01:16:55,400 But interestingly enough, what you do in a relationship that works is that you actually, I think that what you see to rough approximation, when you project the ideal and fall in love with it, you see what could be. 508 01:16:55,400 --> 01:17:02,400 It could be that, but it's going to take you hell of a lot of work because like you got no shortage of flaws. 509 01:17:02,400 --> 01:17:09,400 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. 510 01:17:09,400 --> 01:17:20,400 And you're going to have to engage in a lot of dialogue before you approach that level of perfection again, but maybe you can do it. 511 01:17:20,400 --> 01:17:24,400 Then you get to live happily ever after. Well, would not be nice. 512 01:17:24,400 --> 01:17:33,400 Well, so the unconscious meets the unknown and it meets it with imagination and fantasy and dream and art. That's how you take. 513 01:17:33,400 --> 01:17:39,400 See, you don't just go from what you don't know to fully articulated knowledge in one bloody leap. 514 01:17:39,400 --> 01:17:48,400 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? 515 01:17:48,400 --> 01:17:58,400 Even scientifically, you don't know something scientifically, you generate a theory. Well, it's an imaginative representation that your unconscious is helping you generate. 516 01:17:58,400 --> 01:18:05,400 And so you meet the unknown with fantasy. That's what the unconscious is for from the psychoanalytic perspective. That's what dreams do. 517 01:18:05,400 --> 01:18:13,400 And you can see why you dream about the future. You know, it's like, well, what's the future going to be like? Well, you have a little imaginative story going on. 518 01:18:13,400 --> 01:18:19,400 It's like, you don't really create it. It's sort of you watch it unfold. You know, maybe you can tweak it here and there. 519 01:18:19,400 --> 01:18:26,400 But it sort of comes to you from wherever the hell things like that come from, you know, the unconscious. 520 01:18:26,400 --> 01:18:35,400 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. 521 01:18:35,400 --> 01:18:48,400 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 watched my lectures. 522 01:18:48,400 --> 01:18:58,400 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 they're not necessarily very orderly. So, 523 01:18:59,400 --> 01:19:15,400 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. 524 01:19:15,400 --> 01:19:27,400 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, self-critical rationality and go out and create something. 525 01:19:27,400 --> 01:19:33,400 You know, with their massive creativity and as long as they're doing that, they're engaged in the world and happy as hell. 526 01:19:33,400 --> 01:19:40,400 But as soon as that self-critical rationality comes in and shuts down the creativity, they're just like walking corpses. 527 01:19:40,400 --> 01:19:51,400 And it's because if you're really open like that's you're a tree and it has some trunks and you know, your most prominent trait is the most lively trunk. 528 01:19:51,400 --> 01:20:01,400 And if you're a creative person and you're not engaging in a creative enterprise, you're just like a tree that has had its vitality amputated. 529 01:20:01,400 --> 01:20:15,400 And so this is not trivial. This stuff is deeply deeply rooted in your biology and those are people often who have like dream lives. You just can't believe I have one client. 530 01:20:15,400 --> 01:20:22,400 He has like four spectacular dreams a week and most of the time we just spend discussing them. I mean, God. 531 01:20:22,400 --> 01:20:28,400 And I had another client who could be lucid in her dreams, which is more common among women. 532 01:20:28,400 --> 01:20:35,400 She could ask the damn characters what they represented and they would tell her. It was like, okay, that was pretty weird. 533 01:20:35,400 --> 01:20:48,400 Like a lot of the things they told her were really helpful and they were not things that she wanted to hear. She basically, one of them told her if she was going to live, she'd have to go visit a slaughterhouse. 534 01:20:48,400 --> 01:21:01,400 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. 535 01:21:01,400 --> 01:21:10,400 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. 536 01:21:10,400 --> 01:21:20,400 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. 537 01:21:20,400 --> 01:21:30,400 But she couldn't, so we used to go to butcher stores and that would make her cry and that she was a vegetarian. That would make her cry and, you know, bemoan the cruelty of the world. 538 01:21:30,400 --> 01:21:38,400 And it's like, you have 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. 539 01:21:38,400 --> 01:21:43,400 But you got to get used to it, man, because you can't live in the world otherwise. 540 01:21:43,400 --> 01:21:50,400 And so the dream character who was a gypsy told her that she had to go visit a slaughterhouse, which seemed rather impractical. 541 01:21:50,400 --> 01:21:58,400 And so I asked her if she could think of anything else to do and she thought, well, why don't we go visit a funeral home and watch an embalming? 542 01:21:58,400 --> 01:22:08,400 And I thought, oh, good. That sounds, that sounds like a fun way to spend a day. And so I've phoned up a funeral partner. 543 01:22:08,400 --> 01:22:17,400 And I said, I had a client who was terrified of death. And I was a therapist who was also a little shaky on the concept myself. 544 01:22:17,400 --> 01:22:25,400 And so 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, 545 01:22:25,400 --> 01:22:30,400 where they do nothing but deal with death. And they don't go stark-raving mad. 546 01:22:30,400 --> 01:22:37,400 It's like, what the hell's up with that? It's like working an impalutive care ward where your clients that you, you know, have a relationship. 547 01:22:37,400 --> 01:22:43,400 All they're going to do is die this week, next week, the week after. People do that. 548 01:22:43,400 --> 01:22:47,400 It's like, those people are tough, man. They're tough. 549 01:22:48,400 --> 01:22:54,400 So anyways, we went and watched this embalming, which was, I have a rather high level of disgust sensitivity. 550 01:22:54,400 --> 01:23:03,400 So it was a little on the rough side for me. But she sat there in first while she was not, we were outside this little room. 551 01:23:03,400 --> 01:23:08,400 She was not looking at that man, no way. And she kind of go like this. And you know, that was pretty good. 552 01:23:08,400 --> 01:23:15,400 And then she go like this. And then she go like this. And then she watched it. 553 01:23:16,400 --> 01:23:20,400 And then she asked if she could go in and she put on a glove and she touched the body. 554 01:23:20,400 --> 01:23:29,400 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. 555 01:23:29,400 --> 01:23:33,400 And that she could see things that she didn't think she could see and live. 556 01:23:33,400 --> 01:23:40,400 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 abomin? 557 01:23:40,400 --> 01:23:44,400 No, it's not that bad. Well, I guess I can do it. It's like an initiation, right? 558 01:23:44,400 --> 01:23:56,400 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. 559 01:23:56,400 --> 01:24:03,400 And so when you have a parent that dies, which, you know, shatters people's ideas off and they can't even think about it. 560 01:24:03,400 --> 01:24:11,400 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. 561 01:24:11,400 --> 01:24:17,400 Otherwise, you're just going to be a wasteland when it happens. And you never know you could even have a higher ambition. 562 01:24:17,400 --> 01:24:25,400 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. 563 01:24:25,400 --> 01:24:34,400 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. 564 01:24:35,400 --> 01:24:47,400 And no, he 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 pathetic? 565 01:24:47,400 --> 01:24:52,400 Well, you make your choice. 566 01:24:53,400 --> 01:24:59,400 So out of the unconscious, you get ritual, you get dreams, you get drama, you get stories, you get art, you get music. 567 01:24:59,400 --> 01:25:07,400 And that sort of buffers us. We have our little domain of competence and we're buffered by the domain of fantasy and culture. 568 01:25:07,400 --> 01:25:14,400 And that's really what you learn about when you come to university, if you're lucky and the professors are smart enough to actually teach you something about culture. 569 01:25:14,400 --> 01:25:23,400 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. 570 01:25:23,400 --> 01:25:30,400 The only possible reason is that you haven't read enough history to understand exactly what chaos means. 571 01:25:30,400 --> 01:25:38,400 And believe me, if you understood what it means, you'd be pretty goddamn careful about tearing down the temple that you live it. 572 01:25:38,400 --> 01:25:49,400 Unless you want to be a denizen of chaos and some people do. Because that's when the impulses that you harbor can really come out and shine. 573 01:25:49,400 --> 01:25:59,400 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. 574 01:25:59,400 --> 01:26:08,400 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. 575 01:26:08,400 --> 01:26:16,400 And yes, our culture is tyrannical and oppresses people, but it is protecting us from dying. That's helpful. 576 01:26:16,400 --> 01:26:23,400 And yes, we're reasonably good people, but don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself. 577 01:26:23,400 --> 01:26:32,400 And that's wisdom, at least in part. And that's what these stories try to teach you. 578 01:26:32,400 --> 01:26:41,400 There's a nice mythological representation. I love this one. It's like the dome of the known and the seeker looking outside. 579 01:26:41,400 --> 01:26:47,400 That's a metaphysical representation. And that is the world. It looks to us. 580 01:26:47,400 --> 01:26:55,400 Right? You go out and a field and it looks like there's a dome covering it. It's a circle. Big circle with a dome over it. And you know what's outside the dome? 581 01:26:55,400 --> 01:27:05,400 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. 582 01:27:05,400 --> 01:27:10,400 I suppose that's partly because when people looked up in the sky, they were overwhelmed with awe. 583 01:27:10,400 --> 01:27:18,400 So it's a reasonable conclusion. You know, it's a projection of an unconscious presupposition. 584 01:27:18,400 --> 01:27:26,400 It's a projection of fantasy. You know, heaven is a fantasy. And I'm not denigrating fantasy by the way. 585 01:27:26,400 --> 01:27:32,400 And it's projected imaginatively onto the sky. And that's part of the way you discover what's in your fantasy. 586 01:27:32,400 --> 01:27:40,400 Well, this is us. Man, we mediate between chaos and order. And you know, those are the two archetypal representations fundamentally. 587 01:27:40,400 --> 01:27:55,400 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 male men can play a maternal role. 588 01:27:55,400 --> 01:28:11,400 You know, female human beings are quite masculine and male human beings are quite feminine. And so, you know, maybe this archetype dominates among men and that archetype dominates among women, which I would say is that is the case. 589 01:28:11,400 --> 01:28:23,400 As far as I'm concerned, although there are individual conceptions, of course, those two things have to work in conjunction, but that's you. The eternal mediator between chaos and order. 590 01:28:24,400 --> 01:28:28,400 Which also has its enemy. So that's that's Horace there. 591 01:28:28,400 --> 01:28:39,400 And that's Seth, who's eventually turns into Satan as the, as the West progresses, so to speak, and that's represented there as well. 592 01:28:39,400 --> 01:28:48,400 The temptations of, I would say resentment and hatred, which everyone has to fight with all the time. 593 01:28:49,400 --> 01:29:00,400 All right, initiations. So this is cool. This is a standard hero story and initiate an issue to rewrite, so a part of human heritage. And so let's take a look. This is from Eliaida. 594 01:29:00,400 --> 01:29:10,400 I would like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane. It does not belong to ordinary symptomatology. It's not mental illness. 595 01:29:10,400 --> 01:29:35,400 It has an inter-necitory structure and signification. In 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 evaluated not only as an initiatory death, but also as a symbolic return to the pre-cosmorganic chaos to the amorphous and indescribable state that precedes any cosmogity. 596 01:29:35,400 --> 01:29:48,400 What he means by that is that I suppose the mythological view of the emergence of order, that's a cosmogity, is that there's a state of potential and chaos out of which order emerges. 597 01:29:48,400 --> 01:29:58,400 Here's how it is that you think that way, because you do think that way. So imagine what you're facing when you're facing the future, right? 598 01:29:58,400 --> 01:30:05,400 Well, you might say, well, the future is full of potential, right? It's full of potential. What the hell does that mean? 599 01:30:05,400 --> 01:30:14,400 You know, 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. 600 01:30:14,400 --> 01:30:26,400 Well, it doesn't exist yet. So 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. 601 01:30:26,400 --> 01:30:37,400 Well, the pre-cosmorganic 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. 602 01:30:37,400 --> 01:30:44,400 And you participate in turning that possibility into actuality. That's what you're doing all the time. 603 01:30:44,400 --> 01:30:58,400 Now, can I explain that? Well, no. I have no idea how consciousness and the substrate of the world interact. I can only say that that's how it looks. That's how it feels. 604 01:30:58,400 --> 01:31:10,400 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? 605 01:31:10,400 --> 01:31:24,400 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. 606 01:31:24,400 --> 01:31:35,400 It's the thing that you extract out of the chaos. It sort of 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. 607 01:31:35,400 --> 01:31:44,400 It's... you can slide it. And then you have a little plan about how you should move your body to transform one into the other. 608 01:31:44,400 --> 01:31:51,400 That's your action pattern. That's a little story. And when you ask someone to say what they were up to, they'll tell you a little story like that. 609 01:31:51,400 --> 01:32:00,400 I was at some place and I went somewhere else and here's how I did it. And then they might tell you more interesting story, which is I was someplace. 610 01:32:00,400 --> 01:32:10,400 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. 611 01:32:10,400 --> 01:32:20,400 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. 612 01:32:20,400 --> 01:32:29,400 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. 613 01:32:29,400 --> 01:32:35,400 And then, pa, bang, you pop up into another little structure of order. And that's an initiatory process. 614 01:32:35,400 --> 01:32:45,400 It's like, you're somewhere stable, falls apart, or maybe you break it apart on purpose. You do it voluntarily. People do that all the time. 615 01:32:45,400 --> 01:32:56,400 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. 616 01:32:56,400 --> 01:33:04,400 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. 617 01:33:04,400 --> 01:33:11,400 Now, this is William James, who was one of the establishers of modern psychology. And I kind of know a guy. 618 01:33:11,400 --> 01:33:16,400 He was an early experimenter with psychedelics. Of course, they'll never tell you that, but he was. 619 01:33:16,400 --> 01:33:31,400 And he has 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. 620 01:33:31,400 --> 01:33:37,400 Although, if you breathe too much of it, then you die because it doesn't have any oxygen in it. So, so don't do that. 621 01:33:37,400 --> 01:33:47,400 And he wrote some really bad hippy poetry back in the 1880s. Well, he was experimenting with nitrous oxide. 622 01:33:47,400 --> 01:33:49,400 I don't know, it's all read a little bit of that to you. 623 01:33:49,400 --> 01:33:56,400 Pure experiences the name, which I give to the original flux of life before reflection has categorized it. 624 01:33:56,400 --> 01:34:05,400 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, 625 01:34:05,400 --> 01:34:15,400 which is not yet any definite what. Though ready to be any sorts of what's, both full both of oneness and of manliness, 626 01:34:15,400 --> 01:34:25,400 but in respects that don't appear changing throughout, yet so confusingly that it's phases interpenetrate and no points either of distinction or of identity can be caught. 627 01:34:25,400 --> 01:34:36,400 1905, William James, Journal of Philosophy. You know, a lot of these old guys that established what we regard as fairly stable bodies of knowledge, 628 01:34:36,400 --> 01:34:43,400 were just as crazy as you can possibly imagine they're just the most peculiar damn people and they get sanitized. 629 01:34:43,400 --> 01:34:51,400 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. 630 01:34:51,400 --> 01:34:59,400 They were just so bloody peculiar and strange and involved in all sorts of weird things that's a lot more fun to know that. 631 01:34:59,400 --> 01:35:14,400 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. 632 01:35:15,400 --> 01:35:23,400 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. 633 01:35:23,400 --> 01:35:38,400 Extreme, extreme, extreme, something and other than that thing. Intoxication and otherness than intoxication. Every attempt, it betterment, every attempt, it otherment is a, it fades forever and forever as we move. 634 01:35:38,400 --> 01:35:43,400 It's like, it's just about as incoherent as postmodern as philosophy. 635 01:35:43,400 --> 01:35:50,400 So we know for our cake and traditional cultures that a symbolic return to chaos is equivalent to preparing a new creation. 636 01:35:50,400 --> 01:35:59,400 It follows that we may interpret the psychic chaos of the future shaman as a sign that the profane man is being dissolved and a new personality being prepared for birth. 637 01:35:59,400 --> 01:36:09,400 Transformation. Here's a way of thinking about it. Paradise, paradise lost, redemption, classic story of mankind. 638 01:36:09,400 --> 01:36:17,400 Always, there was a great past where in the state of chaos we're heading towards a better future. Everyone thinks that way. 639 01:36:17,400 --> 01:36:22,400 The stories are based on that. Well, that's that. 640 01:36:22,400 --> 01:36:34,400 Now, Ellen Burjay, 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. 641 01:36:34,400 --> 01:36:43,400 And he said, a creative illness has these elements. It follows, succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search for certain truth. 642 01:36:43,400 --> 01:36:49,400 It's a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of depression, erosis, psychosomatic ailments or even psychosis. 643 01:36:49,400 --> 01:36:59,400 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 very strange poetry. 644 01:36:59,400 --> 01:37:11,400 And it contains the communications he had with imaginative beings that he conjured up when practicing, doing exactly that. He practiced that for years. 645 01:37:11,400 --> 01:37:19,400 And he had these autonomous beings manifest themselves in his fantasy and had long conversations with them. 646 01:37:19,400 --> 01:37:24,400 It's just, you know, well, he was working as a doctor and having a sane normal life. 647 01:37:24,400 --> 01:37:28,400 Well, it's kind of, well, it's really something. 648 01:37:28,400 --> 01:37:34,400 Whatever the symptoms they felt is painful while he thought maybe he was going mad, and some people think he did. 649 01:37:34,400 --> 01:37:43,400 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. 650 01:37:43,400 --> 01:37:53,400 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. 651 01:37:54,400 --> 01:38:01,400 He suffers from feelings of isolation, even when he has a mentor who guides him through the Ordeal, like the Shaman apprentice with his master. 652 01:38:01,400 --> 01:38:05,400 The termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration. 653 01:38:05,400 --> 01:38:17,400 The subject emerges from his Ordeal with a permanent transformation in his personality and a conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world. 654 01:38:17,400 --> 01:38:22,400 Many of the 19th and 20th century figures regarded universally as great. 655 01:38:22,400 --> 01:38:30,400 Nietzsche Darwin, Dostiowski, Tolstoy, Freud, Jung were all additionally characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty. 656 01:38:30,400 --> 01:38:35,400 Well, you don't generate a new theory without some birthpanks, right? 657 01:38:35,400 --> 01:38:41,400 Because your old theory has to bite the dust first, and when your old theory bites the dust, it's like, where are you? 658 01:38:41,400 --> 01:38:45,400 You don't know. Do you know if you're going to come up with a new one? 659 01:38:45,400 --> 01:38:55,400 So here's a cool thing. This is my daughter. She was five years at this point. She was playing Prince or Princess with Julian her three-year-old. 660 01:38:55,400 --> 01:39:00,400 She said, Dad, if we killed a dragon, we could use his skin as armor. Wouldn't that be a good idea? 661 01:39:00,400 --> 01:39:10,400 I thought, hey, 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. 662 01:39:10,400 --> 01:39:18,400 Where did she get that idea? Well, good work, kiddo. She had plenty of dragons in her life. 663 01:39:18,400 --> 01:39:28,400 So, the following dream was described by my daughter, Michaela, three years, nine months old, about my son, Julian one year. 664 01:39:28,400 --> 01:39:33,400 Julian was in the process of toilet training and rapid speech development, was having some trouble controlling his emotions. 665 01:39:33,400 --> 01:39:40,400 Michaela 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, 666 01:39:40,400 --> 01:39:47,400 while I was at the computer, so I was able to get it for a baby. She wasn't very happy with the idea that he wasn't a baby anymore, because she kind of liked the baby. 667 01:39:47,400 --> 01:39:54,400 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. 668 01:39:54,400 --> 01:39:58,400 It's like, well, where's my baby and believe me, plenty of mothers go through the same thing. 669 01:39:58,400 --> 01:40:02,400 Then they attempt to keep their children babies for the rest of their lives. 670 01:40:02,400 --> 01:40:08,400 So, this is what Michaela said, the dream. Julian's eyes fell out and then he followed into pieces. 671 01:40:08,400 --> 01:40:12,400 I said, what sort of pieces? She said, Julian pieces. 672 01:40:12,400 --> 01:40:18,400 And the bones fall out too. Then a whole got him and there was water in it and when he came out he was big. 673 01:40:18,400 --> 01:40:25,400 Mom, Julian isn't a baby anymore? No, he's a big boy and a bug with legs got him out because bugs can swim. 674 01:40:25,400 --> 01:40:29,400 And the hole was in the park and it moved into the backyard and he followed into it. 675 01:40:29,400 --> 01:40:34,400 A tree burned and left the hole. I thought, wow, that's so amazing. 676 01:40:34,400 --> 01:40:37,400 It was a shamanic transformation dream. 677 01:40:37,400 --> 01:40:42,400 It was like the tree, that's the tree of life, it burned and left the hole. 678 01:40:42,400 --> 01:40:45,400 The kid fell into it, it dissolved him right down to his bones. 679 01:40:45,400 --> 01:40:51,400 This little bug which would be a union representation of the self, like Jiminy Cricket, by the way in Pinocchio. 680 01:40:51,400 --> 01:40:55,400 The bug was the thing that was alive that helped him through the transformation. 681 01:40:55,400 --> 01:40:57,400 He stepped out and now he was big. 682 01:40:57,400 --> 01:41:02,400 It's like that was her little brain conjuring up the notion of radical transformation. 683 01:41:02,400 --> 01:41:06,400 So, this is cool. I hope this works. 684 01:41:06,400 --> 01:41:11,400 This is a dream that my nephew had that someone animated. 685 01:41:11,400 --> 01:41:15,400 Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist from the University of Toronto. 686 01:41:15,400 --> 01:41:23,400 Now, I do disagree with some of his fundamental ideas, but his thoughts and facing problems merge with my story values. 687 01:41:23,400 --> 01:41:30,400 Within one of his maps of meaning and lectures, he tells a true story about a four-year-old boy, his nephew, 688 01:41:30,400 --> 01:41:36,400 who for months was suffering from terrible naitaras, tears that were waking him up screaming. 689 01:41:36,400 --> 01:41:40,400 This boy, by the way, did have some areas of instability in his family life. 690 01:41:41,400 --> 01:41:47,400 Jordan visited the young boy's house and the boy was running around for a night with a sword, a shield, and a helmet. 691 01:41:47,400 --> 01:41:50,400 At night time, he would take a sword and shield to bear. 692 01:41:50,400 --> 01:41:54,400 So, Jordan was speaking to him and the boy described his dream. 693 01:41:54,400 --> 01:41:58,400 In the dream, he was standing surrounded by knee-hate dwarves. 694 01:41:58,400 --> 01:42:06,400 These dwarves had beaks, and every time he would try to move the dwarves would jump up and bite him, a very fettings narrow for a young boy. 695 01:42:07,400 --> 01:42:15,400 And if he looked behind all the dwarves, the way in the background there was a dragon, and every time this dragon would puff out fire and smoke, more dwarves would be created. 696 01:42:15,400 --> 01:42:19,400 So, there's no point fighting off the dwarves because more would just be made. 697 01:42:19,400 --> 01:42:24,400 So, Jordan tapped him and asked, what could you do about that? 698 01:42:24,400 --> 01:42:27,400 So, the kid says he could jump up on the dragon's head. 699 01:42:27,400 --> 01:42:30,400 He could put her to his eyes with a sword, he couldn't see. 700 01:42:31,400 --> 01:42:41,400 Then he could go go down the throat, to the box where the fire came from, a carapace out of that box, thereby destroying it, and use that piece as a shield. 701 01:42:41,400 --> 01:42:52,400 The child, before Jordan arrived, was already acting out on life what a new he had to do, and after that conversation, he had no more nightmares. 702 01:42:52,400 --> 01:42:58,400 This is what Marcus really has meant when he said, the impediment to action advances action. 703 01:42:58,400 --> 01:43:01,400 What stands in the way becomes the way. 704 01:43:01,400 --> 01:43:07,400 He was telling us that we must not share away from problems or shown our personal response of all of it. 705 01:43:07,400 --> 01:43:14,400 He must be willing to sacrifice or comfort, go to the source of our problems to solve them, and then take something away. 706 01:43:14,400 --> 01:43:16,400 Well, there you go. 707 01:43:16,400 --> 01:43:21,400 So, yeah, he was waking up screaming at night for weeks. 708 01:43:21,400 --> 01:43:22,400 That's night terrors. 709 01:43:22,400 --> 01:43:26,400 He couldn't really remember what hell was going on, and there was instability in his family. 710 01:43:26,400 --> 01:43:32,400 His parents got divorced soon after, and he was off to kindergarten, and that was kind of destabilizing him too. 711 01:43:32,400 --> 01:43:35,400 And so it was fun to watch him zip around as a night. 712 01:43:35,400 --> 01:43:38,400 It's like, you know, where to get that idea? 713 01:43:38,400 --> 01:43:47,400 Well, he watched TV, he watched movies, he, his little imagination was aggregating the picture of the hero, and then he was trying to act it out. 714 01:43:47,400 --> 01:43:49,400 That's what he was doing, pretending, right? 715 01:43:49,400 --> 01:43:54,400 I'm pretending to be the thing that takes on the unknown, and then he has this amazing dream. 716 01:43:54,400 --> 01:44:03,400 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. 717 01:44:03,400 --> 01:44:08,400 And it's like a hydra, you know, in the hydra, you cut off a hydra's head and seven more heads grow. 718 01:44:08,400 --> 01:44:10,400 It's like, that's life, man. 719 01:44:10,400 --> 01:44:13,400 So, all of one problem, seven more appear, right? 720 01:44:13,400 --> 01:44:20,400 So, well, so that was the dragon at the background, chaos itself, and chaos kept breeding. 721 01:44:20,400 --> 01:44:25,400 These evil little dwarfs, which is what it does, it's like it's one damn trouble after another. 722 01:44:25,400 --> 01:44:27,400 You fight this one off, fight this one off, it's like who cares? 723 01:44:27,400 --> 01:44:34,400 The dragon, the dwarf generating machine is still working in the background, so he, I asked him, and that was purposeful. 724 01:44:34,400 --> 01:44:36,400 What could you do? 725 01:44:36,400 --> 01:44:38,400 See, that's a leading question. 726 01:44:38,400 --> 01:44:41,400 That implies that there's something that he could do. 727 01:44:41,400 --> 01:44:48,400 He said, well, I take my dad, that was missing in the animation, and we'd go, well, poke the dragons. 728 01:44:48,400 --> 01:44:52,400 It's always out, go right down to the source of the problem. 729 01:44:52,400 --> 01:44:54,400 Extinguish it, make a shield, right? 730 01:44:54,400 --> 01:44:59,400 So, that meant that he would have strengthened his character by the encounter. 731 01:44:59,400 --> 01:45:02,400 So, brilliant. 732 01:45:02,400 --> 01:45:07,400 And then, and I talked to his mum from months afterwards, done no more night terrors. 733 01:45:07,400 --> 01:45:09,400 What had happened? 734 01:45:09,400 --> 01:45:12,400 He identified with the mythological hero. 735 01:45:12,400 --> 01:45:14,400 He identified with St. George and the dragon. 736 01:45:14,400 --> 01:45:22,400 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. 737 01:45:22,400 --> 01:45:33,400 He adopted the classic human mode of being in the face of uncertainty, and construed himself as that which could prevail. 738 01:45:33,400 --> 01:45:35,400 End of terrors. 739 01:45:35,400 --> 01:45:42,400 Well, I guess we're done, eh? 740 01:45:42,400 --> 01:45:51,400 So, we're going to do something a little different than the syllabus today, because, you know, we've got this one hour, two hour problem. 741 01:45:51,400 --> 01:45:56,400 I already can't cover constructionism reasonably in two hours, about one hour. 742 01:45:56,400 --> 01:45:57,400 That was supposed to be today. 743 01:45:57,400 --> 01:46:06,400 So, I'm going to do 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, 744 01:46:06,400 --> 01:46:09,400 what we're going after after constructivism anyways. 745 01:46:09,400 --> 01:46:17,400 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 coherent view. 746 01:46:17,400 --> 01:46:25,400 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. 747 01:46:25,400 --> 01:46:28,400 So, alright, so I showed you that animation. 748 01:46:28,400 --> 01:46:33,400 I told you about my nephew's dream, which is remarkable dream, you know, really. 749 01:46:33,400 --> 01:46:36,400 It's just amazing, amazing dream. 750 01:46:36,400 --> 01:46:46,400 And it's got this archetypal pattern, you know, and the pattern is that there's a threat, and worse than that, that there are threats. 751 01:46:46,400 --> 01:46:50,400 And at the back of it, there is the fact of threat itself. 752 01:46:50,400 --> 01:46:53,400 You see, so human beings were so smart, hey. 753 01:46:53,400 --> 01:46:56,400 So, this is so amazing that we figured this out. 754 01:46:56,400 --> 01:47:03,400 So, you imagine, well, human beings are the only creatures that can really conceive of the class of all threatening things, right? 755 01:47:03,400 --> 01:47:06,400 And that's kind of why we can be permanently anxious. 756 01:47:06,400 --> 01:47:07,400 So, it's sort of annoying. 757 01:47:07,400 --> 01:47:16,400 So, you know, here you are, and it's safe, there's no lions here, or anything that might prey on you. 758 01:47:16,400 --> 01:47:20,400 But you can think of something to be anxious about no problem, you know? 759 01:47:20,400 --> 01:47:26,400 I'm certain you've got some little skeleton rattling around in your closet somewhere that's like eating away at you. 760 01:47:26,400 --> 01:47:33,400 And so, I think part of the reason we're so damn awake human beings is because we're always anxious. 761 01:47:33,400 --> 01:47:36,400 Like, and you have to be awake when you're anxious. 762 01:47:36,400 --> 01:47:45,400 And the anxiety system actually activates your particular activating system, and that actually produces. 763 01:47:46,400 --> 01:47:48,400 It's the substrate for consciousness. 764 01:47:48,400 --> 01:47:56,400 If you snap a few fibers in the back of your brain that are part of the reticulating activating system in a car accident or something, you'll go into a coma. 765 01:47:56,400 --> 01:47:57,400 And that'll be that. 766 01:47:57,400 --> 01:47:58,400 You're not getting out of it. 767 01:47:58,400 --> 01:48:01,400 It doesn't take much of an injury either in the right place. 768 01:48:01,400 --> 01:48:07,400 So, anyways, so human beings have been struggling with this problem of threat forever. 769 01:48:07,400 --> 01:48:13,400 Really, for as long as there's been life, or at least as long as there's been life with a nervous system. 770 01:48:13,400 --> 01:48:16,400 And, you know, that's several hundred million years. 771 01:48:16,400 --> 01:48:17,400 It's a long time. 772 01:48:17,400 --> 01:48:23,400 And, of course, it's easy to, you know, to respond to a particular threat. 773 01:48:23,400 --> 01:48:24,400 Think about zebras. 774 01:48:24,400 --> 01:48:25,400 They're out there on the veld. 775 01:48:25,400 --> 01:48:27,400 And there's lions everywhere, right? 776 01:48:27,400 --> 01:48:30,400 But the zebras are like, they're calm because their lions are sleeping. 777 01:48:30,400 --> 01:48:33,400 And so, the zebras don't think, apparently. 778 01:48:33,400 --> 01:48:34,400 Oh, my God. 779 01:48:34,400 --> 01:48:37,400 What was going to happen with those lions wake up? 780 01:48:37,400 --> 01:48:39,400 Because they don't think that way. 781 01:48:39,400 --> 01:48:44,400 You know, and they're not going to be happy if the lion goes into a hunting crouch and starts its hunting approach. 782 01:48:44,400 --> 01:48:47,400 Obviously, but it's not like the zebras are freaking out. 783 01:48:47,400 --> 01:48:50,400 No, I'm stopped because there are lions around, you know. 784 01:48:50,400 --> 01:48:57,400 So, they can react to specific threats, but human beings, partly because we discovered the future, which was a big mistake. 785 01:48:57,400 --> 01:49:01,400 There's a big mistake because the future is an uncertain place. 786 01:49:01,400 --> 01:49:06,400 We realized that, well, there isn't any threat right now, but there might well be some tomorrow. 787 01:49:06,400 --> 01:49:12,400 And if there isn't some tomorrow, well, maybe next week or next month or next year, like it's common. 788 01:49:12,400 --> 01:49:14,400 And so, there's danger. 789 01:49:14,400 --> 01:49:17,400 So, it's the category of danger, you know. 790 01:49:17,400 --> 01:49:21,400 And out of the category of danger, emerge specific threats. 791 01:49:21,400 --> 01:49:32,400 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. 792 01:49:32,400 --> 01:49:41,400 But our nervous systems, as they've become capable of abstraction, have used that underlying architecture to represent more abstract categories. 793 01:49:41,400 --> 01:49:55,400 So, it's not a predator, like a dragon, it is not a predator because there are no dragons, but maybe a dragon is a snake and a crocodile and maybe a leopard and maybe a predatory bird all mangled into one monster. 794 01:49:55,400 --> 01:49:59,400 Because a monster is actually technically something that's made out of disparate parts. 795 01:49:59,400 --> 01:50:08,400 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. 796 01:50:08,400 --> 01:50:12,400 And so, the eternal problem is what the hell do you do with the dragon? 797 01:50:12,400 --> 01:50:17,400 And that also explains why the dragon typically is a treasure-gargher, right? 798 01:50:17,400 --> 01:50:18,400 Because it's even more. 799 01:50:18,400 --> 01:50:20,400 The problem is even worse. 800 01:50:20,400 --> 01:50:23,400 Out there in no man's land, out there in potential. 801 01:50:23,400 --> 01:50:26,400 There's threat and mortal threat. 802 01:50:26,400 --> 01:50:33,400 But there's also endless opportunity and riches and wealth and the possibility of attracting someone and all of that. 803 01:50:33,400 --> 01:50:37,400 And so, well, the dragon, you can't just be afraid of it. 804 01:50:37,400 --> 01:50:43,400 You just stay in your burrow the whole time and lots of animals more or less do that, especially the North Turnlwants. 805 01:50:43,400 --> 01:50:44,400 They just hide away. 806 01:50:44,400 --> 01:50:48,400 But that isn't what human beings are like because we're not only prey animals, right? 807 01:50:48,400 --> 01:50:50,400 And then, of course, we're crazy. 808 01:50:50,400 --> 01:50:52,400 We're absolutely insane chimpanzees, right? 809 01:50:52,400 --> 01:50:53,400 We're crazy. 810 01:50:53,400 --> 01:51:07,400 And so, we're always out there mucking about with things and with our, you know, fingers and our thumbs and taking the world apart and putting it back together and we're crazily exploratory and and trouble making. 811 01:51:07,400 --> 01:51:12,400 And so, we don't just run from dragons, we go hunt them down. 812 01:51:12,400 --> 01:51:22,400 And so, and so there's a story here that there's the oldest story that mankind knows and literally it is the oldest story that we know is this story. 813 01:51:22,400 --> 01:51:36,400 It's in the story basically as there's a bounded space, a walled garden, a walled city, you know, and all the original cities were walled because if they weren't barbarians would swoop in and they just steal all your stuff and so, you know, that was kind of pointless. 814 01:51:36,400 --> 01:51:41,400 So, you know, you wanted to have some major league walls surrounding your territory. 815 01:51:41,400 --> 01:51:45,400 So, that's inhabited space and inside that is your little dominance hierarchy. 816 01:51:45,400 --> 01:51:49,400 And so, all you primates knew exactly who was who inside that space. 817 01:51:49,400 --> 01:51:57,400 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. 818 01:51:57,400 --> 01:51:59,400 And so, you were sort of secure. 819 01:51:59,400 --> 01:52:02,400 But then the problem is is that that can always be breached. 820 01:52:02,400 --> 01:52:04,400 There's always something outside of it that's a danger. 821 01:52:04,400 --> 01:52:10,400 And so, that signified by this, this little creature here is, this dragon. 822 01:52:10,400 --> 01:52:15,400 And that, that twirl in its tail is very common among dragons. 823 01:52:15,400 --> 01:52:22,400 It's actually a symbol because you're, images, the language is, images, the symbols have an ancient language. 824 01:52:22,400 --> 01:52:26,400 It's referring to something that's basically eternal. 825 01:52:26,400 --> 01:52:30,400 And see, it lives down here in this cave because it's an underground thing. 826 01:52:30,400 --> 01:52:31,400 It's an underground thing. 827 01:52:31,400 --> 01:52:33,400 And you can kind of imagine what that's like. 828 01:52:33,400 --> 01:52:37,400 And sometimes this happens in initiation rituals among archaic people. 829 01:52:37,400 --> 01:52:42,400 They're going to, when they're going to initiate, usually the young men, because nature initiates women, no by itself. 830 01:52:42,400 --> 01:52:49,400 Usually the young men, maybe they'll put them in a cave and leave them there, you know, for like, well, who knows how long. 831 01:52:49,400 --> 01:52:51,400 And so, garlic, what's in a cave? 832 01:52:51,400 --> 01:52:53,400 And caves are dark, man. 833 01:52:53,400 --> 01:52:57,400 I don't know if you've ever been in one, but like they're dark and they're really dark. 834 01:52:57,400 --> 01:53:03,400 And so, not only is there whatever, there is in a cave, and you don't know what the hell's in the cave. 835 01:53:03,400 --> 01:53:06,400 There's whatever you imagine might be in the cave. 836 01:53:06,400 --> 01:53:14,400 And so, when you're in that cave and you're alone, you're confronting the devils and demons and monsters of your own imagination, you know. 837 01:53:14,400 --> 01:53:17,400 And so, then you have a chance to perhaps deal with that and overcome it. 838 01:53:17,400 --> 01:53:30,400 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 re cast them and put them back together. 839 01:53:30,400 --> 01:53:42,400 We talked a little bit about this idea of the pre-cosm agonic chaos that Eliata refers to, and that's the stuff out of which order is produced at the beginning of time. 840 01:53:42,400 --> 01:53:46,400 And it's also the stuff out of which you constantly reproduce order. 841 01:53:46,400 --> 01:53:54,400 And the young, the young ones, the psychoanalysts, especially the really deep psychoanalysts, like young, Freud was a more surface psychoanalyst. 842 01:53:54,400 --> 01:53:56,400 And that's not an insult. 843 01:53:56,400 --> 01:54:02,400 Some things that Freud figured out that are absolutely amazing. He was a precursor to young for sure. 844 01:54:02,400 --> 01:54:14,400 For young, the heroes journey was the journey inside the unconscious, and that would be perhaps in some sense that the willingness to face everything terrible that's happened to you and to think it through and to articulate it. 845 01:54:14,400 --> 01:54:23,400 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, 846 01:54:23,400 --> 01:54:34,400 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, 847 01:54:34,400 --> 01:54:45,400 and maybe even without that much provocation. And it's a terrifying part of you to come into contact with, because it's sort of the way that you're specifically attached to the archetype of evil. 848 01:54:45,400 --> 01:54:52,400 That's a good way of thinking about it. And modern people, they don't really think much about the idea of good and evil, 849 01:54:52,400 --> 01:54:57,400 because the most of them, so they are naive, you can just barely even comprehend it. 850 01:54:57,400 --> 01:55:08,400 If you read any history, if you really read it, and you don't come away with the idea that evil exists, it's like you're just reading the wrong kind of history. 851 01:55:08,400 --> 01:55:14,400 It's just unbelievable what people can do to each other. And we're so imaginative. 852 01:55:15,400 --> 01:55:25,400 And one of the things I figured out about people, the reason that we have the knowledge of good and evil, let's say, is that because we're self-conscious, and we know about ourselves, 853 01:55:25,400 --> 01:55:32,400 we know about our own vulnerability, right? You know what hurts you. You really know what hurts you way more than an animal knows. 854 01:55:32,400 --> 01:55:41,400 And so, and you're also 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, 855 01:55:41,400 --> 01:55:48,400 make it excruciating, you can take people apart physically and psychologically, and you can keep them safe and right on the edge of death, 856 01:55:48,400 --> 01:55:52,400 so that you can keep doing that endlessly, and you know, that happens. 857 01:55:52,400 --> 01:56:01,400 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. 858 01:56:01,400 --> 01:56:07,400 It's like, oh yes, it does, man, that's the problem, because you know, you're a human, and that's the sort of things that human beings are capable of. 859 01:56:07,400 --> 01:56:17,400 I'm not saying you're all, it's all probable that you do that ever, or that, but I'm saying that, you know, you got to take that into account. 860 01:56:17,400 --> 01:56:24,400 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. 861 01:56:24,400 --> 01:56:35,400 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, 862 01:56:35,400 --> 01:56:44,400 and for you, and this is the terrible thing, for you, the pathway to higher wisdom was through the terrible portal of, well, you could say, hell for that matter. 863 01:56:44,400 --> 01:56:51,400 Really, and so who wants to do that, man? It's like, no, you know, like, maybe you resentful about something. 864 01:56:51,400 --> 01:56:59,400 Well, you probably are, because like everybody's resentful about something, you know, and resentment is just vicious emotion. It's really useful. 865 01:57:00,400 --> 01:57:21,400 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 oppressive you 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. 866 01:57:21,400 --> 01:57:31,400 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 being oppressed. 867 01:57:31,400 --> 01:57:37,400 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. 868 01:57:37,400 --> 01:57:46,400 In the short term, you protect yourself, but just crushes you, and then the resentment comes up and resentment man, that can just get so out of hand. 869 01:57:46,400 --> 01:57:57,400 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 oppressing you at any chance you'll talk about them behind their back. 870 01:57:57,400 --> 01:58:15,400 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. 871 01:58:15,400 --> 01:58:30,400 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. 872 01:58:30,400 --> 01:58:39,400 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. 873 01:58:39,400 --> 01:58:46,400 And then you end up shooting kids in Connecticut and that's how you get there and so that's a bad road man. 874 01:58:46,400 --> 01:58:52,400 There's dark things down there but you can go there and people do and they go through the whole of resentment. 875 01:58:52,400 --> 01:59:02,400 And so resentment can tell you you've got something to say, you bloody well better say it, you've got to free yourself from what's oppressing you. 876 01:59:02,400 --> 01:59:08,400 You have to stand up for that because otherwise you become oppressed and then once you're oppressed. 877 01:59:09,400 --> 01:59:15,400 That's just not so good and so like in your marriage and your relationships. 878 01:59:15,400 --> 01:59:19,400 You've got to tell people what you're thinking you don't have to assume you're right. 879 01:59:19,400 --> 01:59:26,400 That's a whole different story because you're not because you're ignorant and you're biased and, you know, so you're not right. 880 01:59:26,400 --> 01:59:37,400 But you can stumble towards 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. 881 01:59:37,400 --> 01:59:41,400 So you can be a little less stupid in the future because that wouldn't that be good. 882 01:59:41,400 --> 01:59:45,400 And so you know you go after the unknown. 883 01:59:45,400 --> 01:59:49,400 You don't protect what you know we already know what you know. 884 01:59:49,400 --> 01:59:53,400 You go after what you don't know that's why you have to talk to people you don't agree with. 885 01:59:53,400 --> 01:59:57,400 That's why you have to talk to your enemies because they're going to tell you things you don't know. 886 01:59:57,400 --> 02:00:01,400 You could even listen to them it's possible they know a thing or two you don't know. 887 02:00:01,400 --> 02:00:06,400 But people don't like that you know they just talk to people who think the same way and then they just stay stupid. 888 02:00:06,400 --> 02:00:24,400 And so that's and that's not good because if you're not wise the world will wallop you it'll flatten you 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. 889 02:00:24,400 --> 02:00:33,400 So also you go after the dragon and that's what that's what this guy is doing he's going after the dragon hit it's threatening the society because it always does. 890 02:00:33,400 --> 02:00:55,400 Okay chaos what's outside of order always threatens order always always always and so you have to step forward you know in this manner voluntarily 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. 891 02:00:55,400 --> 02:01:05,400 And you get out of that what you have to do is you have to make yourself awake to the to the might to the to the what would you say to the. 892 02:01:05,400 --> 02:01:13,400 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. 893 02:01:13,400 --> 02:01:23,400 And 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. 894 02:01:23,400 --> 02:01:31,400 More or less on a moment's notice you can't be impulsive about it you know like if you are talking and you make mistake or I make a mistake. 895 02:01:31,400 --> 02:01:42,400 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 sleep or something you know you should be a little forgiving and. 896 02:01:42,400 --> 02:01:54,400 But 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 what that's when you act and you say look. 897 02:01:54,400 --> 02:02:05,400 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 going to do you know. 898 02:02:05,400 --> 02:02:16,400 No well maybe they might argue with you but you kind of got them and you generally if you just point that out to people just like that just that you noticed and are willing to say something about it. 899 02:02:16,400 --> 02:02:34,400 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 car this chaos ideas so for you was the unconscious right it was the contents of your unconscious and so that might be the unknown past. 900 02:02:34,400 --> 02:02:44,400 The threatening past that you have never dealt with might be the threatening future it might be the threatening present but you realized as his as he got older that. 901 02:02:44,400 --> 02:02:55,400 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. 902 02:02:55,400 --> 02:03:04,400 You think what the hell does that part 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. 903 02:03:04,400 --> 02:03:12,400 Constructivism because the constructivists think that basically what happens is that you encounter those elements of the world that don't fit into your theory. 904 02:03:12,400 --> 02:03:23,400 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 PGA explains the development of a child. 905 02:03:23,400 --> 02:03:34,400 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. 906 02:03:34,400 --> 02:03:43,400 The transformations and so then 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. 907 02:03:43,400 --> 02:03:52,400 It tracks them and modifies its perceptions and actions to account for them and it just keeps doing that and that's how the child boots itself up like a computer does. 908 02:03:52,400 --> 02:04:03,400 It's a very cool idea and so from from the PGA stand so it's struck to the stance you could think of the world as a latent pool of information it's something like that. 909 02:04:03,400 --> 02:04:30,400 With a structure obviously that you can interact with with your little fingers and 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 your ignorant you you just emerge more and more confident and confident and ready to move ahead. 910 02:04:30,400 --> 02:04:43,400 So that's how the constructivist idea works and 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. 911 02:04:43,400 --> 02:04:54,400 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. 912 02:04:54,400 --> 02:05:04,400 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. 913 02:05:04,400 --> 02:05:23,400 You're so complicated I just see this little like oversimplified slice of you right now and I think that's the reality and 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. 914 02:05:23,400 --> 02:05:25,400 The story but the real you man. 915 02:05:25,400 --> 02:05:39,400 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. 916 02:05:39,400 --> 02:05:52,400 By going into the darkest place and so it's a hell of an idea man it's really it 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 cycle. 917 02:05:52,400 --> 02:06:06,400 The recreated in cycle therapy like this isn't an airy theory it's quite the contrary because what you do and as a psychologist always always a behavior say that the most the most logical clinical type of psychologists. 918 02:06:06,400 --> 02:06:15,400 A behaviorist is 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. 919 02:06:15,400 --> 02:06:24,400 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 towering in the corner and. 920 02:06:24,400 --> 02:06:34,400 And what the behavior 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. 921 02:06:34,400 --> 02:06:45,400 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. 922 02:06:45,400 --> 02:06:57,400 And then you take the problem apart into into its micro problems careful careful analytic process and then you think okay well how could we progress a little bit this week and some of that is. 923 02:06:57,400 --> 02:07:14,400 To face to practice facing things you're afraid of so like if you're agrofobic 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 agrofobics are 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. 924 02:07:14,400 --> 02:07:26,400 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. 925 02:07:26,400 --> 02:07:37,400 And so and partly that's because you run away and when you run away from something it grows in 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. 926 02:07:37,400 --> 02:07:49,400 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 law of noise that thing will leave you alone but if you run. 927 02:07:49,400 --> 02:07:53,400 Well what's it supposed to think it eats things that run from it. 928 02:07:53,400 --> 02:08:05,400 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 going to like get you an eat you it's like well that's true psychologically as well. 929 02:08:05,400 --> 02:08:15,400 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. 930 02:08:15,400 --> 02:08:28,400 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. 931 02:08:29,400 --> 02:08:46,400 So but it's the same damn circuits it's we know this like the same circuits you use to forage for information to dopam energy circuit is the circuit that squirrels used to forage for knots and you think well why well it's because there's no difference between information and food. 932 02:08:46,400 --> 02:08:52,400 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. 933 02:08:52,400 --> 02:09:01,400 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. 934 02:09:01,400 --> 02:09:10,400 So of course you'd use the same circuits and I mean the damn squirrel has to remember where the knots are and so for him information is food even. 935 02:09:10,400 --> 02:09:16,400 So in what happened to human beings is that we started thinking hey maybe it's better to go after information. 936 02:09:16,400 --> 02:09:25,400 Then 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. 937 02:09:25,400 --> 02:09:29,400 So we're still doing that so anyways this is what you're supposed to be doing. 938 02:09:29,400 --> 02:09:35,400 And so and this is what behavior therapists do they decompose your problems what are you afraid of well. 939 02:09:35,400 --> 02:09:43,400 Let's get some specific your afraid of well I'm afraid of an elevator okay an elevator so I have a client. 940 02:09:43,400 --> 02:09:53,400 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. 941 02:09:53,400 --> 02:10:00,400 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. 942 02:10:01,400 --> 02:10:07,400 Not knowing if anyone is going to rescue you stuck there with your damn imagination freaking out. 943 02:10:07,400 --> 02:10:14,400 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. 944 02:10:14,400 --> 02:10:25,400 So that's the elevator well it's no bloody one who no one's going to get into something like that and then maybe underneath that is your distrust in the mechanisms of society right because you know. 945 02:10:25,400 --> 02:10:43,400 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 things stops somebody will come along and rescue them and usually you don't even think about it right it's like oh what the hell it's an elevator it's like. 946 02:10:43,400 --> 02:10:46,400 The danger is invisible to you. 947 02:10:46,400 --> 02:10:58,400 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. 948 02:10:58,400 --> 02:11:03,400 That's partly why they don't get along with their husband why they've never been able to stand up for themselves. 949 02:11:03,400 --> 02:11:14,400 So then you say okay while 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 you're unconscious mind and so. 950 02:11:14,400 --> 02:11:28,400 What can you handle can you go and look at an elevator from 10 feet away it's like yes okay how about nine feet away yes five feet yes four feet no okay no problem four and a half feet we're going to go from that elevator. 951 02:11:28,400 --> 02:11:48,400 We're going to 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. 952 02:11:48,400 --> 02:12:03,400 You know 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 that's like you just don't remember anything and why should you everything works like you don't have to pay attention to it. 953 02:12:04,400 --> 02:12:19,400 Is that staying up yeah still up yeah still up still up I was like really no you know you get bored of that real quick and so then you just ignore it and but the agrofobic is had that. 954 02:12:19,400 --> 02:12:27,400 Vail of ignorance tore in a way and what they see behind it is mortal threat and so that's really what you're helping them deal with and so. 955 02:12:27,400 --> 02:12:32,400 This week they're for and a half feet from the elevator next week they're a foot from the elevator and week after that. 956 02:12:32,400 --> 02:12:38,400 The horrible gates of hell open and they look inside and they don't run and so hey. 957 02:12:38,400 --> 02:12:44,400 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. 958 02:12:44,400 --> 02:13:09,400 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 cover at home because everything is become a predatory domain. 959 02:13:09,400 --> 02:13:14,400 And so what you teach them is you're not as much of a rabbit as you think. 960 02:13:14,400 --> 02:13:33,400 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 agrofobic clients that you get them so they can go on the day I'm elevator and they can go on the subway and they can take a taxi it maybe they learn to drive. 961 02:13:33,400 --> 02:13:43,400 They get some autonomy and then they're a little tougher and so then they can stand up for themselves and they go back and like there has been might not be very happy with any of this. 962 02:13:43,400 --> 02:13:54,400 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 is afraid of her own shadow because then she won't ever leave. 963 02:13:54,400 --> 02:13:58,400 And so that's a nasty little story and believe me it's not uncommon. 964 02:13:58,400 --> 02:14:04,400 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. 965 02:14:04,400 --> 02:14:09,400 And that's really what happens when you do behavior therapy with someone who's agrofobic. 966 02:14:09,400 --> 02:14:14,400 It isn't really that they get less afraid it's that they get braver that's way different. 967 02:14:14,400 --> 02:14:19,400 It's because brave is alert and able to cope. 968 02:14:19,400 --> 02:14:26,400 Nave is there's no danger it's like hell. Yeah, right there's no danger Jesus what a stupid theory that is. 969 02:14:26,400 --> 02:14:44,400 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. 970 02:14:44,400 --> 02:14:59,400 God only knows how long you know snakes and primates co evolved and our vision our sharp sharp sharp vision seems to have been an evolutionary adaptation forced on us by the presence of predatory snakes. 971 02:14:59,400 --> 02:15:08,400 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. 972 02:15:08,400 --> 02:15:18,400 And they have like an eagle a bald eagle has eyes as big as ours and it has two foe of us that foe of the central part of the vision so an eagle is all eyes man. 973 02:15:18,400 --> 02:15:26,400 And so but human beings were kind of like that too and like half our brain is devoted to visual processing we have acute vision. 974 02:15:26,400 --> 02:15:40,400 In Madagascar where there are primates with no predatory snakes their lemurs they can't see where the dam and anthropologist named Lynn is bel did a comprehensive study worldwide trying to account for the acuity of primate vision and what she found was that. 975 02:15:40,400 --> 02:15:45,400 The more predatory snakes and the vicinity the sharper the eyesight of the primates. 976 02:15:45,400 --> 02:15:55,400 And so we have a really sharp eyesight so that means a lot of us read by snakes and none of your ancestors fortunately because otherwise he wouldn't be here but a lot of those who fell by the wayside were. 977 02:15:55,400 --> 02:16:11,400 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. 978 02:16:11,400 --> 02:16:17,400 There's arguments about psychologists about this but even the ones who don't accept the fact that it's innate. 979 02:16:17,400 --> 02:16:27,400 Except 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. 980 02:16:27,400 --> 02:16:37,400 So we're at least at minimum prepared to be afraid of snakes minimum and I believe it's I don't I believe the fear is actually innate although you can learn to control it. 981 02:16:37,400 --> 02:16:50,400 So anyways so that's that story and like what a story man. So amazing amazing story you see the the den of the dragon here is littered with skulls and bones that's what that is so the thing is no joke. 982 02:16:50,400 --> 02:16:58,400 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. 983 02:16:59,400 --> 02:17:16,400 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 only season life and so it makes him cruel and better and death is already taken part of him right that's why he has a hook and that damn crocodiles chasing him tick tick tick tick tick all the time and of course. 984 02:17:17,400 --> 02:17:24,400 That's the same situation you're all in man there's a crocodile with a clock at its stomach chasing you and it could easily turn you into a tyrant. 985 02:17:24,400 --> 02:17:30,400 It can turn you into a tyrant or a cowering victim or a hero those are the options fundamentally. 986 02:17:30,400 --> 02:17:43,400 So and that's the gorgon looking at her own the madusa looking at her own reflection you know mother nature with the head full of snakes you know a terrifying vision and that's actually to some degree an archetype that men get confused with women. 987 02:17:44,400 --> 02:17:55,400 And you know that's the witchy part of women and that's the part that's attractive attractive attractive but rejecting rejecting and so many men are petrified by women they won't approach them at all. 988 02:17:55,400 --> 02:18:07,400 They have no idea how to talk to them they're just petrified into immobility 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. 989 02:18:08,400 --> 02:18:30,400 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 it's well he was my opinion is he's too god damn useless to be attractive to anyone and so that's a hell of a place to be in you know it's that's the problem too if you're chronically rejected by people it's often because of your own insufficiencies. 990 02:18:30,400 --> 02:18:48,400 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. 991 02:18:48,400 --> 02:19:02,400 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. 992 02:19:02,400 --> 02:19:20,400 nature has taken them out of the game right and so you know people don't really like that they're not that happy without and so but getting all whiny about it and then getting violent is like that's just not all not really very helpful although it's very common so. 993 02:19:21,400 --> 02:19:37,400 This is Lynn is a bell 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. 994 02:19:37,400 --> 02:20:01,400 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 as Graham's dream right it's like there's this thing that exists 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 cut off one head seven more growth that's the eternal problem of life and the problem is. 995 02:20:01,400 --> 02:20:12,400 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. 996 02:20:12,400 --> 02:20:25,400 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 you 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. 997 02:20:25,400 --> 02:20:32,400 The only was the heroism that allows you to approach what you're terrified by and what you find offensive and to learn from it. 998 02:20:32,400 --> 02:20:44,400 But also the idea of sacrifice and and that was played out by cultures everywhere including human sacrifice and you think what they hell was up with those crazy bastards so long ago they were sacrificing to gods all the time. 999 02:20:44,400 --> 02:20:54,400 The only way to be able to do this is to be able to do this is to be able to do this. 1000 02:20:54,400 --> 02:21:06,400 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. 1001 02:21:06,400 --> 02:21:20,400 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 150,000 years ago so anyways. 1002 02:21:20,400 --> 02:21:33,400 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 it actually the place where there is threat and it's always going to be there so what do you do. 1003 02:21:33,400 --> 02:21:38,400 You make sacrifices in the presence so that the future is better. 1004 02:21:38,400 --> 02:21:47,400 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. 1005 02:21:47,400 --> 02:21:49,400 You can bargain with reality. 1006 02:21:49,400 --> 02:22:01,400 It's amazing you can bargain with reality you can force stole gratification now and it'll pay off at a place in time that doesn't even exist yet. 1007 02:22:01,400 --> 02:22:13,400 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. 1008 02:22:13,400 --> 02:22:20,400 Well, it's like well we thought about it for seven million years and you know what we got to the point where we could kind of acted out. 1009 02:22:20,400 --> 02:22:37,400 But we didn't know what we were doing but it was a it emerged 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 it comes out in mythology and in fantasy and in drama. 1010 02:22:37,400 --> 02:22:47,400 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. 1011 02:22:47,400 --> 02:22:50,400 It's just not concretized like it used to be. 1012 02:22:50,400 --> 02:23:00,400 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 will work and one thing about you know. 1013 02:23:01,400 --> 02:23:11,400 I'm not a fan of moral relativism for a variety of reasons partly because I think it's in the it's an extreme form of cowardice but anyways apart from that. 1014 02:23:11,400 --> 02:23:25,400 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. 1015 02:23:25,400 --> 02:23:36,400 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. 1016 02:23:36,400 --> 02:23:54,400 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. 1017 02:23:54,400 --> 02:24:10,400 The inflation 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. 1018 02:24:10,400 --> 02:24:24,400 The time horizon of the gang member shrinks rapidly because they don't really expect to be alive that 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. 1019 02:24:24,400 --> 02:24:53,400 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 going to be around in any 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 in 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 they're they're kind of like warrior types I would say in some sense but you know for most people that's just. 1020 02:24:53,400 --> 02:25:00,400 Where that's stressful just do you in you know the stress of a life like that so. 1021 02:25:00,400 --> 02:25:17,400 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 it seems like a creepy picture to me yeah and so that's quetzal occult if I remember correctly who's knee who is an Aztec. 1022 02:25:17,400 --> 02:25:23,400 I think it's a very good thing in God and that's the eye of Horace by the way this little thing here and. 1023 02:25:23,400 --> 02:25:35,400 That's see the Egyptians they worship the eye. Yeah well that's cool because it 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. 1024 02:25:35,400 --> 02:25:44,400 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. 1025 02:25:44,400 --> 02:25:55,400 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 people on that is completely open. 1026 02:25:55,400 --> 02:26:08,400 It's completely dilated and that's a God as far as the Egyptians were concerned it's Horace and I'll tell you Horace the story at some point so early primates developed a better eye for color detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions. 1027 02:26:08,400 --> 02:26:14,400 Trates that are important for detecting threats of close range humans are descended from these same primates. 1028 02:26:14,400 --> 02:26:18,400 All right so now the initiation. 1029 02:26:18,400 --> 02:26:28,400 Wait 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. 1030 02:26:28,400 --> 02:26:39,400 I mentioned the cut pre-bacosmogonic chaos and the idea that at the end of young'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. 1031 02:26:39,400 --> 02:26:43,400 So let's say you're in a long term intimate relationship and you get betrayed. 1032 02:26:43,400 --> 02:26:51,400 Okay so what is it that you see when you see your partner at the moment you know of the betrayal. 1033 02:26:51,400 --> 02:26:56,400 Well you see the pre-cosmogonic chaos and here's why. 1034 02:26:56,400 --> 02:27:04,400 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. 1035 02:27:05,400 --> 02:27:14,400 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 going to be anymore. 1036 02:27:14,400 --> 02:27:19,400 So then your fantasy feels that space and you don't know who the hell you're looking at. 1037 02:27:19,400 --> 02:27:24,400 That's for sure and you don't know much about human beings and you certainly don't know anything about yourself. 1038 02:27:24,400 --> 02:27:35,400 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. 1039 02:27:35,400 --> 02:27:43,400 You know and so then you're just shattered and so then you go talk to a therapist for like two years and you think what happened. 1040 02:27:43,400 --> 02:27:53,400 What was the reality and the reality is because who knows what the reality was like but as far as your concern the reality is I better represent this properly. 1041 02:27:54,400 --> 02:28:04,400 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. 1042 02:28:04,400 --> 02:28:16,400 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. 1043 02:28:16,400 --> 02:28:22,400 And that's the purpose of learning right that's the purpose of memory it's to prepare you for the future. 1044 02:28:22,400 --> 02:28:34,400 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. 1045 02:28:34,400 --> 02:28:44,400 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. 1046 02:28:44,400 --> 02:28:54,400 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. 1047 02:28:54,400 --> 02:29:07,400 You have to wander through all that mess and it's really painful and an emotional as well you have to sort through all that mess to come out with the new you right the renewed you and so. 1048 02:29:08,400 --> 02:29:12,400 Well, this is a representation of it. This is how people act this out. 1049 02:29:12,400 --> 02:29:23,400 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, 1050 02:29:23,400 --> 02:29:31,400 the second is traditional shamanic techniques names and functions of the spirit mythology and genealogy of the clan and the secret language. 1051 02:29:31,400 --> 02:29:48,400 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. 1052 02:29:48,400 --> 02:30:01,400 And so and that's part of your cultural structure and so that's the idea of rescuing the dead father from the depths right and that's what will show you some examples of that so. 1053 02:30:01,400 --> 02:30:17,400 This is a critical issue with regards to the shamanic transformation is that people go through these terrible terrible experiences often drug and do so 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. 1054 02:30:17,400 --> 02:30:34,400 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. 1055 02:30:34,400 --> 02:30:47,400 No one has any idea how the dam Amazonians figured that out 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 shaman's are perfectly help happy with that. 1056 02:30:47,400 --> 02:31:03,400 That description and Ayahuasca takes them apart and it does that in part because it's fixed the serotonergic system very very powerfully like all psychedelics do and it transports them to another world and that's how they interpreted and. 1057 02:31:03,400 --> 02:31:10,400 And what we know about psychedelics you could put in a thimble and then throw the thimble away we know nothing about psychedelics. 1058 02:31:10,400 --> 02:31:24,400 There's new experiments going on at Johns Hopkins for example with psilocybin which is part of this act of chemical and magic mushrooms same structure basically as LSD and masculine and all the real psychedelics have basically the same structure except. 1059 02:31:24,400 --> 02:31:31,400 The one that's derived from amenita mascara which is called muskronic acid and it's a it's its own weird thing that no one knows anything about. 1060 02:31:31,400 --> 02:31:36,400 Anyways, they have profound neurochemical effects in very small doses and. 1061 02:31:36,400 --> 02:31:48,400 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. 1062 02:31:48,400 --> 02:31:54,400 And psychedelics were so terrifying to our culture that we just put them away it's like, oh no we're not going there. 1063 02:31:54,400 --> 02:32:02,400 And so even from a research perspective and even though some of the psychedelics look very promising for the treatment of disorders like alcoholism. 1064 02:32:02,400 --> 02:32:12,400 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. 1065 02:32:12,400 --> 02:32:20,400 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. 1066 02:32:20,400 --> 02:32:30,400 Their personality transforms permanently such that one year later there one standard deviation higher in openness and openness is the creativity dimension. 1067 02:32:30,400 --> 02:32:41,400 And that seems to be a permanent transformation so that's really remarkable and about 80% of the people who undergo the Johns Hopkins experiments report that the experiences like one of the two are more three most important things. 1068 02:32:41,400 --> 02:32:49,400 They've ever that's never ever happened to them and so well that's that's something you know it's like. 1069 02:32:49,400 --> 02:32:57,400 And then there's this guy named Rick Straussman down at I think he was at the University of Texas and he did experimentation with DMT and DMT. 1070 02:32:57,400 --> 02:33:05,400 I met Phil Triptamine I remember correctly is the act of ingredient in Ayahuasca and you produce it in your brain and it's in plants. 1071 02:33:05,400 --> 02:33:12,400 It's like a very common chemical but DMT is a weird hallucinogen because it has an extraordinarily short mechanism of action. 1072 02:33:12,400 --> 02:33:25,400 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. 1073 02:33:25,400 --> 02:33:35,400 And then later they're back and virtually everyone reports that which is really strange and and so Straussman was giving people DMT intervenously so that the trip would last longer. 1074 02:33:35,400 --> 02:33:52,400 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. 1075 02:33:52,400 --> 02:34:00,400 The people he was giving these chemicals to kept coming back and telling them these these crazy stories and. 1076 02:34:00,400 --> 02:34:19,400 Well, it just it was too much for them you know and no wonder you know because they all said the same thing and he'd say well that was a dream and they 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'd say. 1077 02:34:19,400 --> 02:34:37,400 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. 1078 02:34:37,400 --> 02:34:39,400 That's this. 1079 02:34:40,400 --> 02:34:49,400 You know I dissolved to skeleton and then I climbed the tree that you nights heaven and earth and I went into the realm of the gods and they gave me some information and I'm back. 1080 02:34:49,400 --> 02:34:59,400 It's like okay well you know we don't really know what to make of that and we and certainly that's what I already have described who need describes the shamanic the shamanic procession that the shamanic. 1081 02:34:59,400 --> 02:35:29,400 In the shamanic. 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That's just bloody well 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.