The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 135. Maps of Meaning 07： Images of Story & Metastory

00:00:00.960 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:50.980 Season 3, Episode 22, Maps of Meaning, Part 7, Images of Story and Metastory, a Jordan B. Peterson lecture.

00:01:04.040 So I'm back in Toronto. I came back two weeks early to set up everything for Dad coming back.

00:01:09.560 I'm Michaela Peterson, by the way, his daughter, if you didn't know that.

00:01:12.680 The Petersons are coming back to Canada. 0.99

00:01:14.600 Being home is such a relief. Living out of a suitcase in a foreign country really is quite stressful, even if you pretend it's not. 1.00

00:01:21.640 I could feel my body relax when I got home.

00:01:23.860 So that's incredible news. We haven't been home since January 4th.

00:01:28.500 Some other news.

00:01:30.320 I finagled a discount on Dad's Understand Myself personality test if you guys want to try it.

00:01:35.820 With the code SEPTEMBER15, you save 15%, so I believe that means it's $8 for the test.

00:01:41.800 It's incredibly accurate. I would highly recommend screening your roommates or future girlfriends or boyfriends with it.

00:01:48.780 I scored zero percentile in politeness, but 89 percentile in compassion, the two facets of the trait, agreeableness.

00:01:56.640 Anyway, again, if you're interested, the code is SEPTEMBER15, uppercase, but I believe it has to be uppercase.

00:02:01.940 And the website is understandmyself.com.

00:02:04.580 I hope you guys are doing well. I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:02:07.580 We're so happy to be home. I'm so excited for my dad to be back.

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00:03:06.160 Drive sober or get pulled over.

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00:05:27.520 All right, so I want to go through a lot of material today, and hopefully that'll work out.

00:05:51.940 It should.

00:05:53.860 So, so far what we've been doing is laying out an argument that you inhabit what you might describe as a frame of reference or a story,

00:06:05.640 or that you're occupied by sequential sub-personalities.

00:06:11.420 That's another reasonable way of thinking about it.

00:06:13.740 That might be the most reasonable way of thinking about it, really.

00:06:16.280 And that these frames of reference or sub-personalities have a point of view and associated thoughts and associated memories.

00:06:24.700 And that most importantly, perhaps, as well as directing your behavior and emotions, they also structure your perceptions.

00:06:33.720 And I think that's the most critical, that's the most critically important realization about the frames that you bring to bear on the world.

00:06:43.500 Because they, it's through them that the world manifests itself.

00:06:49.580 And what that means, to some degree, is that you have an indeterminate role to play as a consequence of your moral choices,

00:06:58.540 because these are essentially value-based structures.

00:07:01.000 As a consequence of your moral choices, you determine, to an indeterminate degree, the manner in which the world manifests itself to you.

00:07:09.880 So in that sense, you're a co-creator of your own being.

00:07:12.580 And then, you're also a co-creator through your action and your communication for the being of other people, as well.

00:07:20.440 And for the external world, insofar as you act upon it.

00:07:24.760 So, it's a non-trivial realization to understand that, to what degree your value structures filter the world for you and shape it.

00:07:36.200 And so we've been talking so far about the structure of that world.

00:07:39.140 And I introduced some neurophysiological ideas last time.

00:07:43.440 The idea being that you come into the world, obviously embodied, with a set of inbuilt, we'll call them sub-personalities, at hand.

00:07:51.820 Most of those are regulated by very archaic, ancient brain systems that you share with many other creatures on the evolutionary chain.

00:08:02.200 Which is partly why you can communicate with and understand other creatures.

00:08:06.620 Because if you didn't share that underlying biological structure, they would be opaque to you, in the same way that perhaps an octopus is relatively opaque to you.

00:08:16.520 You know, you can't understand it because you don't share an embodied platform.

00:08:20.220 And its experience is, therefore, entirely foreign to you.

00:08:23.740 But you share your embodied platform, certainly, very specifically with all mammals.

00:08:30.340 And, of course, you can understand mammals quite well.

00:08:32.740 But you can even really understand lizards, to some degree.

00:08:35.560 And especially the more social ones.

00:08:38.060 And so, there's this tremendous degree of inbuilt biological structure and biological commonality.

00:08:43.720 And we talked about it, most particularly in reference to the hypothalamus, which seems to be the built-in initial sub-personality generator.

00:08:53.800 Something like that.

00:08:54.580 And the hypothalamus is responsible for regulating what you might regard as the most fundamental biological elements of behavior.

00:09:02.420 The things, the systems that not only keep you alive, which is obviously very important, but also impel you to do such things as defend yourself, obviously part of survival, and also to reproduce and to explore.

00:09:17.660 And the exploration element's quite interesting, because you think of that as a very sophisticated form of behavior, and it is.

00:09:23.560 But it's rooted in an unbelievably archaic neurophysiology.

00:09:26.680 So, the hypothalamus roughly sets you into motivated frames.

00:09:32.680 And then, when those frames either fail, or when they're all quiescent because they've been satiated, it pops you into an exploratory state of mind.

00:09:40.300 And you wander around exploring, foraging for information, roughly speaking, so that you can update all the sub-personalities that you use to organize your perceptions and frame your emotions and so forth.

00:09:53.780 Now, so the hypothalamus throws up these frames.

00:09:58.180 It makes you hungry.

00:09:59.220 It makes you thirsty.

00:10:00.620 It makes you defensively aggressive.

00:10:03.000 It helps regulate your temperature through behavior and all of those things.

00:10:06.800 Now, the problem with that is that it's a set of impulsive unidimensional systems.

00:10:12.780 Each one operating in the moment, and each one only concerned with the satiation of its particular aim, we'll say.

00:10:21.840 And the problem with that is that while you live for more than the moment, you live across many moments, you stretch yourself across time.

00:10:29.480 And we know, human beings know that they stretch across time, and so actually have to consider not only the organization of their behavior in the short term,

00:10:39.700 but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, so that it also works across weeks, and across months, and across years,

00:10:47.440 and maybe even for longer spans of time than that.

00:10:49.760 And also, equally and similarly, it has to work across people.

00:10:54.580 And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is there actually isn't much difference between establishing a value structure that works for you now,

00:11:04.280 and next week, and next month, and into the future, and establishing a value structure that works for you and other people simultaneously.

00:11:11.360 Because you could say that whoever you are in a year is sort of like another person.

00:11:17.880 And so insofar as you can organize yourself so that other people find what you're doing, let's say, acceptable and valuable,

00:11:24.520 you're also organizing yourself so that perhaps you're acting in the best interests of your future self.

00:11:29.360 And so then you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can organize your being such that you can satiate, satisfy your most basic needs,

00:11:43.420 why do you need the rest of the brain?

00:11:45.640 And the answer to that is, well, it looks like it's to solve the problem of more complex forms of being.

00:11:52.300 So these fundamental biological subsystems have to interact with each other in a productive way.

00:11:58.960 They can't just cycle unidimensionally from motivated state to motivated state.

00:12:03.820 It's not a very effective solution.

00:12:05.940 And not only that, you have to learn to operate in a world with time and with other people.

00:12:10.820 And so that makes the adaptation problem much, much more complex.

00:12:16.220 And it's for that reason, as far as I can tell, and no doubt for other reasons as well,

00:12:20.320 that there's utility in the provision of extra subcortical and cortical resources.

00:12:27.580 And I think the right way to think about the cortex, in some ways,

00:12:30.380 is actually as living space for the hypothalamus and the subcortical structures.

00:12:34.540 So, you know, what happens when you develop as a young child,

00:12:38.660 especially in the very early stages of development,

00:12:41.680 the underlying subcortical systems, including the systems for the senses,

00:12:45.740 more or less compete for dominion over the cortical territory.

00:12:51.460 So, for example, if you take a kitten and you close one of its eyes shortly after birth

00:12:56.260 and you leave it covered for a number of months,

00:12:58.480 what will happen is the remaining eye will invade both hemispheres' visual representation systems.

00:13:05.980 So that eye becomes, this single remaining eye becomes much more acute and more cortically dominant,

00:13:12.700 like an invader, really, like an invader, than the other one does.

00:13:15.820 And then if you uncover the other eye, the cat, after a critical period of development,

00:13:19.180 the cat will never learn to see out of that eye.

00:13:21.740 And so, you know, you've got these underlying biological systems, motivational and sensory,

00:13:27.120 and they're looking to expand themselves as the organism manifests itself in the world.

00:13:33.320 And it does that by occupying cortical territory in a competitive process. 0.70

00:13:37.400 So, for example, if you're deaf, your visual cortex will become occupied by auditory and tactile processing.

00:13:47.940 Because why not?

00:13:49.500 You know, I mean, you can basically see with your hands, you know, and you can...

00:13:54.320 Well, I wouldn't say it's not so easy to hear with your eyes.

00:13:58.100 That's harder.

00:13:58.800 Although you can hear to some degree with touch, right?

00:14:01.200 Because you can feel vibration.

00:14:02.460 All of your senses overlap to a substantial degree.

00:14:06.800 And if one of them is missing, it's perfectly reasonable for the others to occupy the territory

00:14:10.620 that would otherwise be given over to that sense.

00:14:14.920 And this actually has some practical implications, even.

00:14:18.000 So, silent reading is actually a relatively new ability, evolutionarily speaking.

00:14:25.240 Certainly, literacy is a relatively new invention from an evolutionary perspective.

00:14:31.400 But to silent read is to use your eyes as ears.

00:14:36.520 So, you know, when you read silently, you can hear the words, so to speak, in your head.

00:14:40.520 And the reason for that, as it turns out, is that the part of the brain that you use to read silently with

00:14:45.540 is right between the visual and the auditory cortexes, right where they overlap.

00:14:49.280 So, you are literally, literally, you are using your eyes as ears.

00:14:54.480 And so, that's quite the thing, that you can figure out how to do that.

00:14:58.340 So, anyways, so you can think about these hypothalamic systems being in place,

00:15:04.840 more or less ready to go at birth, and then having to organize themselves into a sophisticated and integrated

00:15:10.360 single ego that acts across time and in the social environment.

00:15:14.600 And, you know, when Piaget originally started talking about child development,

00:15:20.920 he regarded the child as something that was born into the world with just a set of very primordial reflexes,

00:15:26.780 mostly sucking reflexes and some primary motor reflexes.

00:15:30.740 He was very much a constructionist.

00:15:32.660 But I would say, you know, had he been alive now, his constructionism would have been modified

00:15:37.840 by the relevant neurophysiological data, showing that there's a lot more built into us right from the beginning

00:15:44.540 than Piaget expected.

00:15:45.980 You still might need experience to catalyze the development.

00:15:49.600 But, obviously, children are born with the ability to hear and to see and to sense with touch.

00:15:55.180 And they're hungry and tired and angry, like they have the whole range of emotions at hand.

00:16:01.420 And they also come into the world with their motivation already in place.

00:16:06.360 Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to form a relationship with them.

00:16:08.820 And that's modified by the development of the higher cortical systems through play and through social negotiation.

00:16:15.480 But the biology is there to begin with.

00:16:17.920 And so that's a good way to think about it with regards to understanding how the fundamental biological systems operate

00:16:29.520 and how they manifest themselves in personality and in story.

00:16:33.940 Because you do that all the time.

00:16:35.120 You tell a story about how you got angry.

00:16:37.980 And it's basically a story about being dominated by a particular kind of sub-personality,

00:16:42.740 which would be hypothalamic, and exactly how you manifested that and what the consequences were.

00:16:47.520 And, you know, I was very mad at this person, but I knew I couldn't get too upset because...

00:16:53.200 And that's a good story that indicates both the highly motivated nature of the original response tenancy

00:16:59.920 and then your immediate proclivity to have to figure out how to negotiate that expression within a social space

00:17:05.760 so that the medium-to-long-term consequences are positive rather than negative.

00:17:09.800 And people are very interested in such bits of information, such units of information,

00:17:15.100 because we need to know how to conduct ourselves in complex environments.

00:17:19.940 And so if someone's willing to share their experience, and they can narrate it in an interesting story,

00:17:25.100 we're absolutely more than happy to listen.

00:17:27.720 Because in some sense, we're assembling our identities out of those stories.

00:17:31.380 And then you can think that there are patterns across stories, which is really a useful thing to understand,

00:17:36.920 because that gives you real insight into what constitutes an archetype.

00:17:41.160 Because an archetype is what's common across sets of stories.

00:17:45.340 That might be one way of looking at it.

00:17:46.980 So an archetype is like a meta-story.

00:17:49.580 And so part of what we're going to turn to now in this discussion is a description of certain meta-stories.

00:17:58.500 And there's a particular meta-story that I'm most interested in,

00:18:02.880 and that's the story about how stories transform themselves.

00:18:06.800 And so that, I think, is the most fundamental story that characterizes human beings.

00:18:12.740 There's the story, I was here, I implemented some behaviors, and I went there.

00:18:18.900 There was better than here.

00:18:20.320 That's the fundamental unit.

00:18:21.560 But the thing about structures like that is that they may work in one situation and not in another,

00:18:28.740 or at one time and not in another.

00:18:30.480 And thus, they have to be modified.

00:18:32.680 And it was partly for this reason that Piaget, as his career as a developmental psychologist progressed,

00:18:38.940 started to understand that it was more important not so much to understand the given structure of a knowledge structure,

00:18:45.760 but to understand the manner in which knowledge structures transformed.

00:18:49.060 And that was partly illustrated in his description of stage theory,

00:18:54.560 because stages were really movement from one set of axiomatic presuppositions

00:19:00.820 that through with which the child was structuring the world into a state where that system failed

00:19:08.420 because it wasn't sufficiently comprehensive,

00:19:10.520 and then into the development of a new stage that could do everything the previous stage could,

00:19:16.800 plus account for all the things that the previous stage couldn't.

00:19:20.540 So that's also why Piaget believed that knowledge actually accumulated,

00:19:24.620 because each time there was a transformation,

00:19:27.640 the new structure could, had a wider range of application than the previous structure,

00:19:33.100 even though it kept all the advantages of the previous structure.

00:19:35.640 And so that's a good way of, that's a good way of conceptualizing progress,

00:19:38.820 because it's not that easy.

00:19:40.080 You know, if you're a relativist, fundamentally,

00:19:42.960 you don't believe in difference between knowledge structures, say,

00:19:45.940 and you certainly don't believe in the idea of progress.

00:19:47.880 But if you think about a more sophisticated structure as being able to do more things properly,

00:19:55.260 then you can certainly map out progress with no problem.

00:19:58.660 And, you know, you know that,

00:19:59.940 because you see people operating the world who are less competent, generally speaking,

00:20:03.960 and more competent, generally speaking.

00:20:06.540 And there doesn't seem to be much debate about that.

00:20:09.560 You can recognize people like that very, very easily.

00:20:12.380 So that's the basic structure, and we've talked about that at length.

00:20:16.780 And I suggested that while you're occupying a structure like that,

00:20:20.060 the world manifests itself to you not as objects,

00:20:23.860 but as, number one, things to ignore, which is the major category.

00:20:28.260 I was talking to some guy yesterday who is working, I think he was in San Diego,

00:20:32.640 on artificial intelligence and neural networks.

00:20:35.540 And he was working with someone who's actually started to...

00:20:38.640 So a neural network will learn how to weight certain stimulus features, let's say,

00:20:45.420 in order to identify an image.

00:20:47.940 So the thing will be trained up on a whole set of diverse images,

00:20:51.400 and it learns through feedback to discriminate between them.

00:20:54.740 But the problem with the neural network is that it's not easy to understand

00:20:57.800 what's actually going on inside of them, because it's self-generated.

00:21:02.580 So we could easily end up, for example, creating fully conscious machines

00:21:06.400 and not understanding at all how they work.

00:21:09.120 That's the most likely outcome, in my estimation.

00:21:11.320 But this guy was working with another guy who had figured out how to model the weights.

00:21:15.860 And one of the things he told me was that a tremendous amount of what the neural network is doing

00:21:20.400 is learning what's not relevant.

00:21:22.560 Right?

00:21:23.000 Which is exactly...

00:21:24.120 And these, by the way, these neural network models produce output

00:21:27.240 that's analogous to the output that's produced by sections of cortical tissue.

00:21:31.700 It's not identical, but partly they make the same kind of mistakes,

00:21:35.840 which is an indication that they're functioning in the same way.

00:21:38.700 So one of the things that a neural net does when you're training it

00:21:41.920 is learn to figure out which things it can ignore.

00:21:44.440 And that's mostly what you're doing, is what can be ignored.

00:21:47.380 And that's a tremendous realization, too.

00:21:49.900 Because it highlights, again, how important the structure within which you exist...

00:21:55.980 How importantly the structure within which you exist determines what manifests itself

00:22:02.220 to you as you move through the world.

00:22:03.720 Because you ignore almost everything.

00:22:05.060 So, you ignore almost everything, but then you concentrate on things that move you along

00:22:09.640 your way, or obstacles that get in your way.

00:22:12.920 And those things have emotional significance.

00:22:15.160 They're valenced.

00:22:15.940 And the reason they're valenced is because they're conceptualized in relationship to the journey.

00:22:21.280 You know, if you run across a tool or something positive, an opportunity, we could say,

00:22:26.120 which is like an abstract tool, then that moves you forward.

00:22:28.760 And the fact that it's moving you forward is signaled by the incentive-reward system,

00:22:33.380 dopaminergically-mediated incentive-reward system, that's grounded in the hypothalamus,

00:22:38.120 the same system that you use when you explore, the same system that's activated by psychomotor

00:22:42.960 stimulants like cocaine and heroin and most of the drugs that people abuse.

00:22:47.040 That system indicates to you that this entity is non-ignorable because it's positively

00:22:55.420 functionally-related to the transformation of the world that you're attempting to accomplish.

00:23:00.540 So that makes you happy.

00:23:01.940 That makes you...

00:23:02.880 That provides you with hope and incentive to move forward.

00:23:08.660 A fundamental motivating force of life for human beings, with the possible exception,

00:23:13.120 say, of aggression and sexuality, which I would say operate much more sporadically.

00:23:17.960 This is pretty much continual.

00:23:19.640 And then, of course, the negative emotions are generated when you encounter something that

00:23:25.420 gets in the way, which can require a small detour, let's say, or can blow apart the frame

00:23:31.180 that you're inhabiting completely.

00:23:32.780 And part of what we're trying to do is understand how you compute how emotional to get about certain

00:23:41.260 classes of events.

00:23:42.260 And the reason that it's so complicated is because often when you run into a tool or an

00:23:48.680 opportunity, generally speaking, it's not too hard to compute how useful it is.

00:23:53.200 Although sometimes something can happen to you, like, let's say you win a lottery, where

00:23:57.400 the possibility space is so great that it's of indefinite positive significance, you know?

00:24:03.580 And you're going to be overwhelmed by that sort of thing.

00:24:05.960 It's pretty rare that something like that happens.

00:24:08.740 It does happen to me.

00:24:09.640 Maybe it happens when someone that you're desperately chasing for amorous purposes agrees to go out

00:24:15.180 with you.

00:24:15.560 That's another place where that sort of excitement occurs.

00:24:18.220 It seems to occur to football players, you know, when they make a touchdown on TV, too,

00:24:22.800 because they do their little touchdown and dance around like mad dogs.

00:24:25.860 And, you know, scientists never do that when they get a paper published.

00:24:29.660 So there's something about scoring a goal that's really got that incentive reward blast,

00:24:34.260 you know?

00:24:34.500 So, anyhow, the positive emotion systems are operating, roughly speaking, because you have

00:24:43.660 encountered something that moves you forward on your path.

00:24:46.220 And we could say that, given, as we've discussed, that your value structure is a nested entity,

00:24:53.820 right?

00:24:54.120 With small goals nested inside larger goals, or small personalities nested inside of larger

00:24:59.500 personalities, a positive thing that's really positive has implications for what you're

00:25:04.080 doing right now that are positive, but also has positive implications higher up the abstraction

00:25:09.200 chain.

00:25:10.240 You know, so, for example, let's say you study really hard for an exam, and you get a really

00:25:14.720 good grade on it, and you're surprised.

00:25:16.920 You think, well, that's extraordinarily useful.

00:25:19.100 I passed the grade.

00:25:20.140 I passed the exam.

00:25:21.420 I did well in the course, but that means that maybe I'm a better student than I thought.

00:25:25.560 And given what I'm aiming for in the future, maybe I'm a more competent person than I had

00:25:29.960 believed.

00:25:30.500 And so you can see that the positive emotion would echo through those levels of analysis,

00:25:34.860 because it has implications on each level.

00:25:38.140 Now, you're also trying, when you encounter something negative, to constrain its propagation

00:25:44.460 across those levels.

00:25:45.560 Because let's say you study really hard, and you fail, dismally, and so then you think,

00:25:50.920 well, I messed up this course.

00:25:52.520 I messed up this exam.

00:25:53.940 I messed up this course.

00:25:55.280 I'm not as good a student as I think I am.

00:25:57.600 Maybe I'm a failure as a person.

00:25:59.720 And that can take you out completely, right?

00:26:02.500 And of course, there are certainly more traumatic events that can befall you than that.

00:26:07.680 A typical one that really will wipe someone out.

00:26:10.900 Imagine someone who's naive, and dependent, and over-sheltered.

00:26:15.580 And so they're off into the world, although they're not prepared for it.

00:26:19.620 And their axiomatic presuppositions aren't sophisticated enough to allow for the existence

00:26:28.340 of radical uncertainty or malevolence.

00:26:31.180 And then one day they're attacked. 0.66

00:26:32.740 When maybe they're out, they get mugged, or maybe they get raped, or something worse.

00:26:36.280 And they develop post-traumatic stress disorder from that.

00:26:39.180 And the reason for that is that the event is so anomalous, especially combined with its

00:26:44.280 malevolence, that it demolishes the interpretation frames from the local level all the way out

00:26:51.160 to the superordinate level.

00:26:52.480 And then the person is cast into this chaotic state.

00:26:55.840 And they're terrified, and angry, and vengeful, and paralyzed, and depressed, and all of those

00:27:02.440 things simultaneously.

00:27:03.740 And maybe they never put the pieces back together, right?

00:27:06.700 They descend into chaos, and that's that.

00:27:09.520 And if you're in a situation like that long enough, you know, the cortisol that's produced

00:27:14.520 can produce permanent neurophysiological changes.

00:27:17.480 Shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that moves information from

00:27:22.500 short-term attention to long-term storage, shrinkage of the hippocampus, and growth of

00:27:27.220 the amygdala, which is something that seems to tag stimuli, roughly speaking, with emotional

00:27:32.980 significance more or less permanently, right?

00:27:36.000 Because if you really encounter something traumatic, the hippocampus restricts information

00:27:42.180 with regards to its application in a certain time and place.

00:27:46.200 So it's sort of situation-specific.

00:27:48.080 But if you encounter something truly dangerous, your brain is set up so that you will be afraid

00:27:52.900 of it regardless of context.

00:27:57.160 So the amygdala can produce context-independent fears.

00:28:01.880 And those are basically, well, they can be part of post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:28:05.360 They can be part of a very, very serious phobia.

00:28:08.560 And so you can't contextualize them.

00:28:10.440 What you really do with someone who has a problem like that is you try to walk them through

00:28:15.220 a recontextualization process.

00:28:17.300 So, you know, maybe if they're afraid of snakes, so afraid of them they can't even

00:28:20.900 really think of snakes.

00:28:22.220 You have them, well, first maybe you have them sit for one second and think of a cartoon snake.

00:28:27.360 You know, and what happens is their brain notices that they can hold that image and nothing

00:28:31.080 negative happens.

00:28:31.920 And so then in some sense it's built an inhibitory structure that partially inhibits, which is

00:28:40.700 what inhibitory structures do, that partially inhibits the otherwise context-independent fear

00:28:45.640 that would constitute the phobia.

00:28:47.020 And so you basically build up contexts of safety around the phobia until the context signifies

00:28:54.120 lack of danger and the person can progress forward.

00:28:56.520 If they're really damaged, it's really hard to do that, especially if the trauma was really

00:29:00.200 severe.

00:29:02.200 So, okay.

00:29:03.200 So, you see, you don't see irrelevant things, that's most things.

00:29:07.400 You do see things that move you forward, and you do see things that get in your way.

00:29:11.240 And in the class of things that get in your way are indeterminate occurrences, novel or

00:29:16.960 anomalous occurrences.

00:29:18.560 And almost everything that gets in your way is in some sense a novel occurrence.

00:29:22.580 Because you usually structure your behavior so that you don't go anywhere where something

00:29:27.120 wildly anomalous is likely to occur.

00:29:29.120 So, if you encountered an obstacle, two things happen at the same time.

00:29:34.320 And one is that your movement forward to your specific goal or sets of goals is blocked.

00:29:39.120 But the second thing that happens is you're faced with a mystery.

00:29:42.120 And the mystery is this thing wasn't supposed to exist, but it does exist.

00:29:47.120 So, what implication does that have for everything I think?

00:29:51.120 And that's very, very hard on people.

00:29:52.640 They do not like that at all.

00:29:54.120 And no wonder.

00:29:55.120 Because it's the constrained chaos that's underneath everything, inhibited by your contextual knowledge,

00:30:03.120 that suddenly popped its head up into your world.

00:30:07.120 It's like the shark in the movie Jaws, which is, of course, a mythological story.

00:30:12.120 It's exactly that.

00:30:13.120 And it's exactly what that movie signified.

00:30:17.120 A safe vacation, paradise, all of a sudden threatened by some subterranean thing that

00:30:23.120 can pull you down and that destroys the peace and the harmony of that particular community.

00:30:28.120 It's a dragon story.

00:30:29.120 It's a hero myth.

00:30:30.120 It's the story that people have been telling forever.

00:30:33.120 So, and what you can think, you can think of that thing that reemerges, that shark that

00:30:39.120 rises up from the depths, or that whale, or that dragon, or that predator, or the foreign

00:30:45.120 invader, for that matter, or the barbarian.

00:30:47.120 They all fit into the same category.

00:30:49.120 That's what had been deemed irrelevant, suddenly manifesting itself.

00:30:56.120 And when you think about how much is deemed irrelevant, the fact that it suddenly manifests itself,

00:31:02.120 that's exactly the purpose, the reason for the trauma.

00:31:06.120 It's like, well, I've eradicated from my conceptualizations 99.99% of everything.

00:31:12.120 It's zeroed out.

00:31:13.120 And all of a sudden, I've made a mistake.

00:31:15.120 Bang! 1.00

00:31:16.120 I don't know where I am.

00:31:17.120 Well, what's relevant when you don't know where you are?

00:31:20.120 And the answer to that is, since you don't know, everything is relevant.

00:31:24.120 And you can imagine the sort of terror that people who experience paranoid schizophrenia

00:31:29.120 are living in perennially, because what happens to them is precisely that.

00:31:33.120 They undergo neurophysiological transformations that makes everything that they once depended

00:31:38.120 on disappear.

00:31:40.120 And everything comes back as relevant.

00:31:43.120 And that puts them in the early stages of schizophrenia.

00:31:46.120 That's extraordinarily stressful neurophysiologically.

00:31:49.120 So they're overwhelmed with cortisol.

00:31:51.120 And their brains deteriorate as a consequence of that.

00:31:54.120 It's just too much.

00:31:56.120 So, and unsurprisingly, right?

00:31:58.120 Because you can't deal with...

00:32:00.120 You can hardly deal with anything, let alone with everything.

00:32:03.120 Now, and often what you see, and it's rarely conceptualized this way in the training of clinical

00:32:10.120 therapists, but often what you see when you are dealing with people who are in crisis

00:32:16.120 isn't people who have a mental illness.

00:32:18.120 In fact, in my experience, that's actually quite rare.

00:32:21.120 What's far more common is that the person that you're talking to has become overwhelmed

00:32:26.120 by catastrophe.

00:32:28.120 So their life has fallen apart in some way that makes what they're doing actually impossible.

00:32:33.120 You know?

00:32:34.120 So maybe someone very close to them in their family that they were depending on has developed

00:32:38.120 a very serious illness.

00:32:39.120 And that's thrown their entire financial state into utter chaos.

00:32:43.120 Or maybe they've developed a condition that makes it impossible for them to work.

00:32:46.120 Or, you know, you can imagine the potential range of catastrophes.

00:32:50.120 And they're coming to see you because they're anxious and depressed.

00:32:53.120 But the reason they're anxious and depressed is because everything they have ignored has popped

00:32:58.120 its head back up and is hell-bent on their destruction.

00:33:02.120 And often you see people who are being attacked by five or six of these monsters at the same time.

00:33:07.120 And it isn't their mental illness that stops them from being able to deal with it.

00:33:11.120 Although that, you know, whatever weaknesses you have are going to interfere. 0.96

00:33:15.120 It's the fact that what they're facing is no damn joke.

00:33:18.120 And if you were facing it, you'd feel exactly the same way.

00:33:21.120 So then you're trying to come up with practical solutions to these tremendously complex problems.

00:33:27.120 And that's a very, a very, well, it's extraordinarily difficult, generally speaking.

00:33:33.120 People often don't come to a therapist until they've exhausted their entire range of resources.

00:33:38.120 They cannot figure out what to do.

00:33:41.120 And so, you know, in a situation like that, you can administer antidepressants.

00:33:45.120 And maybe that'll help the person increase their stress resistance.

00:33:49.120 But as a, and it may be that because they're depressed and have been brought down,

00:33:53.120 that they are in fact exaggerating the danger of some of the smaller monsters that are after them.

00:33:58.120 But making the person more stress resilient doesn't give them, for example, a new job.

00:34:03.120 And it certainly doesn't bring back the person they've been living with for two years

00:34:07.120 who has a degenerating neurological disease or some form of cancer.

00:34:11.120 Like these things are major, you know, I often see people who, well, they're in a relationship.

00:34:17.120 Maybe they're rather isolated, older, older people.

00:34:20.120 One of the partners is dying and their entire financial situation has become catastrophic.

00:34:25.120 It's like, that's not a mental illness, man.

00:34:29.120 I mean, they may have got into that situation because of...

00:34:34.120 Season three, episode 22, Maps of Meaning, part seven.

00:34:38.120 Images of story and metastory.

00:34:40.120 A Jordan B. Peterson lecture.

00:34:42.120 So I'm back in Toronto.

00:34:44.120 I came back two weeks early to set up everything for dad coming back.

00:34:47.120 I'm Michaela Peterson, by the way, his daughter, if you didn't know that.

00:34:50.120 The Petersons are coming back to Canada. 0.99

00:34:53.120 Being home is such a relief.

00:34:55.120 Living out of a suitcase in a foreign country really is quite stressful, even if you pretend it's not. 0.99

00:35:00.120 I could feel my body relax when I got home.

00:35:02.120 So that's incredible news.

00:35:03.120 We haven't been home since January 4th.

00:35:06.120 Some other news.

00:35:08.120 I finagled a discount on dad's Understand Myself personality test if you guys want to try it.

00:35:14.120 With the code SEPTEMBER15, you save 15%, so I believe that means it's $8 for the test.

00:35:20.120 It's incredibly accurate.

00:35:22.120 I would highly recommend screening your roommates or future girlfriends or boyfriends with it.

00:35:27.120 I scored zero percentile in politeness, but 89 percentile in compassion, the two facets of the trait agreeableness.

00:35:34.120 Anyway, again, if you're interested, the code is SEPTEMBER15, uppercase, but believe it has to be uppercase.

00:35:40.120 And the website is understandmyself.com.

00:35:43.120 I hope you guys are doing well.

00:35:44.120 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:35:46.120 We're so happy to be home.

00:35:47.120 I'm so excited for my dad to be back.

00:35:51.120 Paid for by NHTSA.

00:35:52.120 Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk.

00:35:55.120 You could get in a crash.

00:35:56.120 People could get hurt or killed.

00:35:58.120 But let's take a moment to look at some surprising statistics.

00:36:01.120 Almost 29 people in the United States die every day in alcohol impaired vehicle crashes.

00:36:06.120 That's one person every 50 minutes.

00:36:08.120 Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades,

00:36:13.120 drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year.

00:36:17.120 Drunk driving can have a big impact on your wallet too.

00:36:20.120 You could get arrested and incur huge legal expenses.

00:36:23.120 You could possibly even lose your job.

00:36:25.120 So what can you do to prevent drunk driving?

00:36:28.120 Plan a safe ride home before you start drinking.

00:36:31.120 Designate a sober driver or call a taxi.

00:36:33.120 If someone you know has been drinking,

00:36:35.120 take their keys and arrange for them to get a sober ride home.

00:36:38.120 We all know the consequences of driving drunk.

00:36:40.120 But one thing's for sure.

00:36:42.120 You're wrong if you think it's no big deal.

00:36:44.120 Drive sober or get pulled over.

00:36:47.120 If you've been listening to the show for a while,

00:36:49.120 you've probably heard me talk about my Helix mattress.

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00:37:49.120 To find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com slash Jordan.

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00:38:00.120 We should all be optimizing our health right now.

00:38:03.120 And one of the most important ways to do that is by getting proper sleep.

00:38:06.120 For many of us, that depends on having a good mattress.

00:38:09.120 This is why I choose Helix Sleep.

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00:38:14.120 It's awesome.

00:38:16.120 You forget what it's like not sleeping with a good mattress and it's great.

00:38:20.120 Thank goodness I'm back to it.

00:38:22.120 Helix Sleep is rated the number one mattress by GQ and Wired and CNN called it the most comfortable mattress they've ever slept on.

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00:39:06.120 Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.

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00:39:17.120 But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?

00:39:23.120 In our hyperconnected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.

00:39:26.120 It's a fundamental right.

00:39:28.120 Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know how to intercept it.

00:39:37.120 And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.

00:39:40.120 With some off the shelf hardware, even a tech savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins and credit card details.

00:39:47.120 Now, you might think, what's the big deal?

00:39:50.120 Who want my data anyway?

00:39:51.120 Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.

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00:39:56.120 There's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.

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00:41:54.120 All right.

00:42:11.120 So, I want to go through a lot of material today.

00:42:14.120 And hopefully, that'll work out.

00:42:18.120 It should.

00:42:19.120 So, so far what we've been doing is laying out an argument that you inhabit what you might describe as a frame of reference or a story.

00:42:32.120 Or that you're occupied by sequential sub-personalities.

00:42:37.120 That's another reasonable way of thinking about it.

00:42:39.120 Might be the most reasonable way of thinking about it, really.

00:42:42.120 And that these frames of reference or sub-personalities have a point of view and associated thoughts and associated memories.

00:42:51.120 And that most importantly, perhaps, as well as directing your behavior and emotions, they also structure your perceptions.

00:42:59.120 And I think that's the most critical, that's the most critically important realization about the frames that you bring to bear on the world.

00:43:09.120 Because they, it's through them that the world manifests itself.

00:43:15.120 And what that means, to some degree, is that you have an indeterminate role to play as a consequence of your moral choices.

00:43:24.120 Because these are essentially value-based structures.

00:43:26.120 As a consequence of your moral choices, you determine, to an indeterminate degree, the manner in which the world manifests itself to you.

00:43:35.120 So, in that sense, you're a co-creator of your own being.

00:43:38.120 And then, you're also a co-creator through your action and your communication for the being of other people, as well.

00:43:45.120 And for the external world, insofar as you act upon it.

00:43:50.120 So, it's a non-trivial realization to understand that, to what degree your value structures filter the world for you, and shape it.

00:44:01.120 And so, we've been talking, so far, about the structure of that world.

00:44:05.120 And I introduced some neurophysiological ideas last time.

00:44:09.120 The idea being that you come into the world, obviously, embodied with a set of inbuilt, we'll call them sub-personalities, at hand.

00:44:17.120 Most of those are regulated by very archaic, ancient brain systems that you share with many other creatures on the evolutionary chain.

00:44:28.120 Which is partly why you can communicate with and understand other creatures.

00:44:32.120 Because, if you didn't share that underlying biological structure, they would be opaque to you, in the same way that, perhaps, an octopus is relatively opaque to you.

00:44:42.120 You know, you can't understand it, because you don't share an embodied platform.

00:44:46.120 And its experience is, therefore, entirely foreign to you.

00:44:49.120 But you share your embodied platform, certainly, very specifically, with all mammals.

00:44:55.120 And, of course, you can understand mammals quite well.

00:44:58.120 But you can even really understand lizards, to some degree.

00:45:01.120 And especially the more social ones.

00:45:03.120 And so, there's this tremendous degree of inbuilt biological structure and biological commonality.

00:45:09.120 And we talked about it most particularly in reference to the hypothalamus.

00:45:13.120 Which seems to be the built-in initial sub-personality generator.

00:45:19.120 Something like that.

00:45:20.120 And the hypothalamus is responsible for regulating what you might regard as the most fundamental biological elements of behavior.

00:45:28.120 The things, the systems that not only keep you alive, which is obviously very important.

00:45:35.120 But also, impel you to do such things as defend yourself.

00:45:39.120 Obviously, part of survival.

00:45:41.120 And also, to reproduce, and to explore.

00:45:43.120 And the exploration element's quite interesting.

00:45:45.120 Because you think of that as a very sophisticated form of behavior.

00:45:48.120 And it is.

00:45:49.120 But it's rooted in an unbelievably archaic neurophysiology.

00:45:53.120 So, the hypothalamus roughly sets you into motivated frames.

00:45:58.120 And then, when those frames either fail.

00:46:00.120 Or when they're all quiescent, because they've been satiated.

00:46:03.120 It pops you into an exploratory state of mind.

00:46:06.120 And you wander around exploring foraging for information, roughly speaking.

00:46:11.120 So that you can update all the sub-personalities that you use to organize your perceptions.

00:46:18.120 And frame your emotions, and so forth.

00:46:20.120 So the hypothalamus throws up these frames.

00:46:23.120 It makes you hungry.

00:46:24.120 It makes you thirsty.

00:46:26.120 It makes you defensively aggressive.

00:46:28.120 It helps regulate your temperature through behavior, and all of those things.

00:46:32.120 Now, the problem with that is that it's a set of impulsive, unidimensional systems.

00:46:38.120 Each one operating in the moment.

00:46:40.120 And each one only concerned with the satiation of its particular aim, we'll say.

00:46:47.120 And the problem with that is that while you live for more than the moment, you live across many moments.

00:46:53.120 You stretch yourself across time.

00:46:55.120 And we know, human beings know that they stretch across time.

00:46:59.120 And so actually have to consider not only the organization of their behavior in the short term, but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, so that it also works across weeks and across months and across years.

00:47:13.120 And maybe even for longer spans of time than that.

00:47:15.120 And also, equally and similarly, it has to work across people.

00:47:20.120 And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is there actually isn't much difference between establishing a value structure that works for you now, and next week, and next month, and into the future.

00:47:32.120 And establishing a value structure that works for you simultaneously.

00:47:37.120 Because you could say that whoever you are in a year is sort of like another person.

00:47:43.120 And so insofar as you can organize yourself so that other people find what you're doing, let's say, acceptable and valuable, you're also organizing yourself so that perhaps you're acting in the best interests of your future self.

00:47:55.120 And so then you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can organize your being such that you can satiate, satisfy your most basic needs, why do you need the rest of the brain?

00:48:11.120 And the answer to that is, well, it looks like it's to solve the problem of more complex forms of being.

00:48:18.120 So these fundamental biological subsystems have to interact with each other in a productive way.

00:48:24.120 They can't just cycle unidimensionally from motivated state to motivated state.

00:48:29.120 It's not a very effective solution.

00:48:31.120 And not only that, you have to learn to operate in a world with time and with other people.

00:48:36.120 And so that makes the adaptation problem much, much more complex.

00:48:41.120 And it's for that reason, as far as I can tell, and no doubt for other reasons as well, that there's utility in the provision of extra subcortical and cortical resources.

00:48:53.120 And I think the right way to think about the cortex in some ways is actually as living space for the hypothalamus and the subcortical structures.

00:49:00.120 So, you know, what happens when you develop as a young child, especially in the very early stages of development,

00:49:07.120 the underlying subcortical systems, including the systems for the senses, more or less compete for dominion over the cortical territory.

00:49:17.120 So, for example, if you take a kitten and you close one of its eyes shortly after birth and you leave it covered for a number of months,

00:49:24.120 what will happen is the remaining eye will invade both hemispheres' visual representation systems.

00:49:32.120 So that eye becomes... this single remaining eye becomes much more acute and more cortically dominant, like an invader, really, like an invader, than the other one does.

00:49:41.120 And then if you uncover the other eye, the cat, after a critical period of development, the cat will never learn to see out of that eye.

00:49:47.120 And so, you know, you've got these underlying biological systems, motivational and sensory,

00:49:53.120 and they're looking to expand themselves as the organism manifests itself in the world,

00:49:59.120 and it does that by occupying cortical territory in a competitive process. 0.70

00:50:03.120 So, for example, if you're deaf, your visual cortex will become occupied by auditory and tactile processing, because why not?

00:50:15.120 You know, I mean, you can basically see with your hands, you know, and you can...

00:50:21.120 Well, I wouldn't say it's not so easy to hear with your eyes, that's harder.

00:50:24.120 Although you can hear to some degree with touch, right, because you can feel vibration.

00:50:28.120 All of your senses overlap to a substantial degree, and if one of them is missing,

00:50:33.120 it's perfectly reasonable for the others to occupy the territory that would otherwise be given over to that sense.

00:50:40.120 And this actually has some practical implications, even.

00:50:43.120 So, silent reading is actually a relatively new ability, evolutionarily speaking.

00:50:51.120 Certainly, literacy is a relatively new invention from an evolutionary perspective.

00:50:56.120 But to silent read is to use your eyes as ears.

00:51:02.120 So, you know, when you read silently, you can hear the words, so to speak, in your head.

00:51:06.120 And the reason for that, as it turns out, is that the part of the brain that you use to read silently with

00:51:11.120 is right between the visual and the auditory cortexes, right where they overlap.

00:51:15.120 So you are literally, literally, you are using your eyes as ears.

00:51:20.120 And so that's quite the thing, that you can figure out how to do that.

00:51:23.120 So, anyways, so you can think about these hypothalamic systems being in place, more or less ready to go at birth,

00:51:31.120 and then having to organize themselves into a sophisticated and integrated single ego that acts across time and in the social environment.

00:51:40.120 And, you know, when Piaget originally started talking about child development,

00:51:46.120 he regarded the child as something that was born into the world with just a set of very primordial reflexes,

00:51:52.120 mostly sucking reflexes and some primary motor reflexes.

00:51:56.120 He was very much a constructionist, but I would say, you know, had he been alive now, his constructionism would have been modified

00:52:04.120 by the relevant neurophysiological data showing that there's a lot more built into us right from the beginning than Piaget expected.

00:52:11.120 You still might need experience to catalyze the development.

00:52:15.120 But obviously, children are born with the ability to hear and to see and to sense with touch.

00:52:21.120 And they're hungry and tired and angry.

00:52:24.120 And like, they have the whole range of emotions at hand.

00:52:27.120 And they also come into the world with their motivation already in place.

00:52:32.120 Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to form a relationship with them.

00:52:34.120 And that's modified by the development of the higher cortical systems through play and through social negotiation.

00:52:41.120 But the biology is there to begin with.

00:52:43.120 And so that's a good way to think about it with regards to understanding how the fundamental biological systems operate

00:52:55.120 and how they manifest themselves in personality and in story.

00:52:59.120 Because you do that all the time.

00:53:00.120 You tell a story about how you got angry.

00:53:03.120 And it's basically a story about being dominated by a particular kind of subpersonality, which would be hypothalamic,

00:53:10.120 and exactly how you manifested that and what the consequences were.

00:53:13.120 And, you know, I was very mad at this person, but I knew I couldn't get too upset because...

00:53:18.120 And that's a good story that indicates both the highly motivated nature of the original response tenancy

00:53:25.120 and then your immediate proclivity to have to figure out how to negotiate that expression within a social space

00:53:31.120 so that the medium to long-term consequences are positive rather than negative.

00:53:35.120 And people are very interested in such bits of information, such units of information,

00:53:40.120 because we need to know how to conduct ourselves in complex environments.

00:53:45.120 And so if someone's willing to share their experience and they can narrate it in an interesting story,

00:53:50.120 we're absolutely more than happy to listen, because in some sense we're assembling our identities out of those stories.

00:53:56.120 And then you can think that there are patterns across stories, which is really a useful thing to understand,

00:54:02.120 because that gives you real insight into what constitutes an archetype.

00:54:06.120 Because an archetype is what's common across sets of stories.

00:54:10.120 That might be one way of looking at it.

00:54:12.120 So an archetype is like a meta-story.

00:54:14.120 And so part of what we're going to turn to now in this discussion is a description of certain meta-stories.

00:54:24.120 And there's a particular meta-story that I'm most interested in,

00:54:28.120 and that's the story about how stories transform themselves.

00:54:32.120 And so that, I think, is the most fundamental story that characterizes human beings.

00:54:38.120 There's the story, I was here, I implemented some behaviors, and I went there.

00:54:44.120 There was better than here. That's the fundamental unit.

00:54:47.120 But the thing about structures like that is that they may work in one situation and not in another,

00:54:54.120 or at one time and not in another.

00:54:56.120 And thus they have to be modified.

00:54:58.120 And it was partly for this reason that Piaget, as his career as a developmental psychologist progressed,

00:55:04.120 started to understand that it was more important not so much to understand the given structure of a knowledge structure,

00:55:11.120 but to understand the manner in which knowledge structures transformed.

00:55:15.120 And that was partly illustrated in his description of stage theory,

00:55:20.120 because stages were really movement from one set of axiomatic presuppositions

00:55:26.120 through with which the child was structuring the world into a state where that system failed,

00:55:34.120 because it wasn't sufficiently comprehensive,

00:55:36.120 and then into the development of a new stage that could do everything the previous stage could,

00:55:42.120 plus account for all the things that the previous stage couldn't.

00:55:46.120 So that's also why Piaget believed that knowledge actually accumulated,

00:55:50.120 because each time there was a transformation, the new structure had a wider range of application

00:55:57.120 than the previous structure, even though it kept all the advantages of the previous structure.

00:56:01.120 And so that's a good way of conceptualizing progress, because it's not that easy.

00:56:06.120 You know, if you're a relativist, fundamentally, you don't believe in difference between knowledge structures, say,

00:56:11.120 and you certainly don't believe in the idea of progress.

00:56:13.120 But if you think about a more sophisticated structure as being able to do more things properly,

00:56:21.120 then you can certainly map out progress with no problem.

00:56:24.120 And, you know, you know that, because you see people operating in the world

00:56:27.120 who are less competent, generally speaking, and more competent, generally speaking,

00:56:32.120 and there doesn't seem to be much debate about that.

00:56:35.120 You can recognize people like that very, very easily.

00:56:38.120 So that's the basic structure, and we've talked about that at length.

00:56:42.120 And I suggested that while you're occupying a structure like that, the world manifests itself to you not as objects,

00:56:49.120 but as, number one, things to ignore, which is the major category.

00:56:54.120 I was talking to some guy yesterday who is working, I think he was in San Diego,

00:56:58.120 on artificial intelligence and neural networks.

00:57:01.120 And he was working with someone who's actually started to...

00:57:04.120 So a neural network will learn how to weight certain stimulus features, let's say, in order to identify an image.

00:57:13.120 So the thing will be trained up on a whole set of diverse images, and it learns through feedback to discriminate between them.

00:57:20.120 But the problem with the neural network is that it's not easy to understand what's actually going on inside of them,

00:57:25.120 because it's self-generated.

00:57:28.120 So we could easily end up, for example, creating fully conscious machines and not understanding at all how they work.

00:57:34.120 That's the most likely outcome in my estimation.

00:57:37.120 But this guy was working with another guy who had figured out how to model the weights.

00:57:41.120 And one of the things he told me was that a tremendous amount of what the neural network is doing is learning what's not relevant.

00:57:48.120 Right? Which is exactly...

00:57:50.120 And these, by the way, these neural network models produce output that's analogous to the output that's produced by sections of cortical tissue.

00:57:57.120 It's not identical, but partly they make the same kind of mistakes, which is an indication that they're functioning in the same way.

00:58:04.120 So one of the things that a neural net does when you're training it is learn to figure out which things it can ignore.

00:58:10.120 And that's mostly what you're doing, is what can be ignored.

00:58:13.120 And that's a tremendous realization, too, because it highlights, again, how important the structure within which you exist...

00:58:22.120 How importantly the structure within which you exist determines what manifests itself to you as you move through the world.

00:58:29.120 Because you ignore almost everything.

00:58:31.120 So, you ignore almost everything, but then you concentrate on things that move you along your way, or obstacles that get in your way.

00:58:38.120 And those things have emotional significance.

00:58:40.120 They're valenced.

00:58:41.120 And the reason they're valenced is because they're conceptualized in relationship to the journey.

00:58:46.120 You know, if you run across a tool or something positive, an opportunity, we could say, which is like an abstract tool, then that moves you forward.

00:58:54.120 And the fact that it's moving you forward is signaled by the incentive reward system, dopaminergically mediated incentive reward system, that's grounded in the hypothalamus.

00:59:04.120 The same system that you use when you explore, the same system that's activated by psychomotor stimulants like cocaine and heroin and most of the drugs that people abuse.

00:59:13.120 And that system indicates to you that this entity is non-ignorable because it's positively functionally related to the transformation of the world that you're attempting to accomplish.

00:59:26.120 So that makes you happy. That provides you with hope and incentive to move forward.

00:59:34.120 A fundamental motivating force of life for human beings, with the possible exception, say, of aggression and sexuality, which I would say operate much more sporadically.

00:59:43.120 This is pretty much continual. And then, of course, the negative emotions are generated when you encounter something that gets in the way,

00:59:52.120 which can require a small detour, let's say, or can blow apart the frame that you're inhabiting completely.

00:59:58.120 And part of what we're trying to do is understand how you compute how emotional to get about certain classes of events.

01:00:08.120 And the reason that it's so complicated is because often when you run into a tool or an opportunity, generally speaking, it's not too hard to compute how useful it is.

01:00:19.120 Although sometimes something can happen to you, like let's say you win a lottery, where the possibility space is so great that it's of indefinite positive significance.

01:00:29.120 You know, and you're going to be overwhelmed by that sort of thing. It's pretty rare that something like that happens.

01:00:34.120 But it does happen. Maybe it happens when someone that you're desperately chasing for amorous purposes agrees to go out with you.

01:00:41.120 That's another place where that sort of excitement occurs.

01:00:44.120 It seems to occur to football players, you know, when they make a touchdown on TV, too, because they do their little touchdown and dance around like mad dogs.

01:00:51.120 And, you know, scientists never do that when they get a paper published.

01:00:55.120 So there's something about scoring a goal that's really got that incentive reward blast, you know.

01:01:00.120 So anyhow, the positive emotion systems are operating, roughly speaking, because you have encountered something that moves you forward on your path.

01:01:11.120 And we could say that given, as we've discussed, that your value structure is a nested entity, right, with small goals nested inside larger goals, or small personalities nested inside of larger personalities,

01:01:26.120 a positive thing that's really positive has implications for what you're doing right now that are positive, but also has positive implications higher up the abstraction chain.

01:01:35.120 You know, so for example, let's say you study really hard for an exam, and you get a really good grade on it, and you're surprised.

01:01:42.120 You think, well, that's extraordinarily useful. I passed the grade, I passed the exam, I did well in the course, but that means that maybe I'm a better student than I thought.

01:01:51.120 And given what I'm aiming for in the future, maybe I'm a more competent person than I had believed.

01:01:56.120 And so you can see that the positive emotion would echo through those levels of analysis, because it has implications on each level.

01:02:03.120 Now, you're also trying, when you encounter something negative, to constrain its propagation across those levels.

01:02:11.120 Because let's say you study really hard, and you fail, dismally, and so then you think, well, I messed up this course, I messed up this exam, I messed up this course,

01:02:21.120 I'm not as good a student as I think I am, maybe I'm a failure as a person.

01:02:25.120 And that can take you out completely, right? And of course, there are certainly more traumatic events that can befall you than that.

01:02:33.120 A typical one that really will wipe someone out, imagine someone who's naive, and dependent, and over-sheltered.

01:02:40.120 You know, and they, and so they're off into the world, although they're not prepared for it.

01:02:45.120 And, you know, their axiomatic presuppositions aren't sophisticated enough to allow for the existence of radical uncertainty or malevolence.

01:02:56.120 And then one day they're attacked, when they're, maybe they're out, they get mugged, or maybe they get raped or something worse.

01:03:02.120 And they develop post-traumatic stress disorder from that.

01:03:05.120 And the reason for that is that the event is so anomalous, especially combined with its malevolence,

01:03:11.120 that it demolishes the interpretation frames from the local level, all the way out to the superordinate level.

01:03:18.120 And then the person is cast into this chaotic state, and they're terrified and angry and vengeful and paralyzed and depressed,

01:03:27.120 and all of those things simultaneously, and maybe they never put the pieces back together, right?

01:03:32.120 They descend into chaos, and that's that. And if you're in a situation like that long enough,

01:03:38.120 you know, the cortisol that's produced can produce permanent neurophysiological changes.

01:03:43.120 Shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that moves information from short-term attention to long-term storage.

01:03:50.120 Shrinkage of the hippocampus, and growth of the amygdala, which is something that seems to tag stimuli, roughly speaking,

01:03:57.120 with emotional significance more or less permanently, right?

01:04:01.120 Because if you really encounter something traumatic, the hippocampus restricts information with regards to its application in a certain time and place.

01:04:12.120 So it's sort of situation-specific.

01:04:14.120 But if you encounter something truly dangerous, your brain is set up so that you will be afraid of it regardless of context.

01:04:22.120 So the amygdala can produce context-independent fears.

01:04:27.120 And those are basically, while they can be part of post-traumatic stress disorder, they can be part of a very, very serious phobia.

01:04:34.120 And so you can't contextualize them.

01:04:36.120 What you really do with someone who has a problem like that is you try to walk them through a recontextualization process.

01:04:43.120 So, you know, maybe if they're afraid of snakes, so afraid of them they can't even really think of snakes.

01:04:48.120 You have them, well, first maybe you have them sit for one second and think of a cartoon snake.

01:04:53.120 You know, and what happens is their brain notices that they can hold that image and nothing negative happens.

01:04:58.120 And so then in some sense it's built an inhibitory structure that partially inhibits,

01:05:06.120 which is what inhibitory structures do, that partially inhibits the otherwise context-independent fear that would constitute the phobia.

01:05:12.120 And so you basically build up contexts of safety around the phobia until the context signifies lack of danger and the person can progress forward.

01:05:22.120 If they're really damaged, it's really hard to do that, especially if the trauma was really severe.

01:05:26.120 So, okay, so you see, you don't see irrelevant things.

01:05:31.120 That's most things.

01:05:32.120 You do see things that move you forward and you do see things that get in your way.

01:05:36.120 And in the class of things that get in your way are indeterminate occurrences, novel or anomalous occurrences.

01:05:44.120 And almost everything that gets in your way is in some sense a novel occurrence.

01:05:48.120 Because you usually structure your behavior so that you don't go anywhere where something wildly anomalous is likely to occur.

01:05:55.120 So if you encountered an obstacle, two things happen at the same time.

01:06:00.120 And one is that your movement forward to your specific goal or sets of goals is blocked.

01:06:05.120 But the second thing that happens is you're faced with a mystery.

01:06:08.120 And the mystery is this thing wasn't supposed to exist, but it does exist.

01:06:13.120 So what implication does that have for everything I think?

01:06:16.120 And that's very, very hard on people.

01:06:18.120 They do not like that at all.

01:06:20.120 And no wonder.

01:06:21.120 Because it's the constrained chaos that's underneath everything, inhibited by your contextual knowledge,

01:06:29.120 that suddenly popped its head up into your world.

01:06:33.120 It's like the shark in the movie Jaws, which is, of course, a mythological story.

01:06:38.120 It's exactly that.

01:06:39.120 And it's exactly what that movie signified.

01:06:43.120 A safe vacation, paradise, all of a sudden threatened by some subterranean thing that can pull you down,

01:06:50.120 and that destroys the peace and the harmony of that particular community.

01:06:54.120 It's a dragon story.

01:06:55.120 It's a hero myth.

01:06:56.120 It's the story that people have been telling forever.

01:06:59.120 So, and what you can think, you can think of that thing that reemerges,

01:07:04.120 that shark that rises up from the depths, or that whale, or that dragon, or that predator,

01:07:09.120 or the foreign invader, for that matter, or the barbarian.

01:07:13.120 They all fit into the same category.

01:07:15.120 That's what had been deemed irrelevant suddenly manifesting itself.

01:07:22.120 And when you think about how much is deemed irrelevant,

01:07:25.120 the fact that it suddenly manifests itself, that's exactly the purpose, the reason for the trauma.

01:07:32.120 It's like, well, I've eradicated from my conceptualizations 99.99% of everything.

01:07:38.120 It's zeroed out.

01:07:39.120 And all of a sudden, I've made a mistake.

01:07:41.120 Bang! 1.00

01:07:42.120 I don't know where I am.

01:07:43.120 Well, what's relevant when you don't know where you are?

01:07:46.120 And the answer to that is, since you don't know, everything is relevant.

01:07:50.120 And you can imagine the sort of terror that people who experience paranoid schizophrenia

01:07:55.120 are living in perennially, because what happens to them is precisely that.

01:07:59.120 They undergo neurophysiological transformations that makes everything that they once depended on disappear.

01:08:06.120 And everything comes back as relevant.

01:08:08.120 And that puts them in the early stages of schizophrenia.

01:08:12.120 That's extraordinarily stressful neurophysiologically.

01:08:15.120 So they're overwhelmed with cortisol.

01:08:17.120 And their brains deteriorate as a consequence of that.

01:08:20.120 It's just too much.

01:08:22.120 So, and unsurprisingly, right?

01:08:24.120 Because you can't deal with, you can hardly deal with anything, let alone with everything.

01:08:29.120 Now, and often what you see, and it's rarely conceptualized this way in the training of clinical therapists,

01:08:36.120 but often what you see when you are dealing with people who are in crisis isn't people who have a mental illness.

01:08:44.120 In fact, in my experience, that's actually quite rare.

01:08:47.120 What's far more common is that the person that you're talking to has become overwhelmed by catastrophe.

01:08:53.120 So their life has fallen apart in some way that makes what they're doing actually impossible.

01:08:58.120 You know, so maybe someone very close to them in their family that they were depending on has developed a very serious illness.

01:09:04.120 And that's thrown their entire financial state into utter chaos.

01:09:08.120 Or maybe they've developed a condition that makes it impossible for them to work.

01:09:12.120 Or, you know, you can imagine the potential range of catastrophes.

01:09:15.120 And they're coming to see you because they're anxious and depressed.

01:09:19.120 But the reason they're anxious and depressed is because everything they have ignored has popped its head back up and is hell-bent on their destruction.

01:09:28.120 And often you see people who are being attacked by five or six of these monsters at the same time.

01:09:33.120 And it isn't their mental illness that stops them from being able to deal with it.

01:09:37.120 Although that, you know, whatever weaknesses you have are going to interfere. 0.96

01:09:41.120 It's the fact that what they're facing is no damn joke.

01:09:44.120 And if you were facing it, you'd feel exactly the same way.

01:09:47.120 So then you're trying to come up with practical solutions to these tremendously complex problems.

01:09:53.120 And that's a very, a very, well, it's extraordinarily difficult, generally speaking.

01:09:59.120 People often don't come to a therapist until they've exhausted their entire range of resources.

01:10:04.120 They cannot figure out what to do.

01:10:07.120 And so, you know, in a situation like that, you can administer antidepressants.

01:10:11.120 And maybe that'll help the person increase their stress resistance.

01:10:15.120 But as a, and it may be that because they're depressed and have been brought down that they are, in fact, exaggerating the danger of some of the smaller monsters that are after them.

01:10:24.120 But making the person more stress resilient doesn't give them, for example, a new job.

01:10:29.120 And it certainly doesn't bring back the person they've been living with for two years who has a degenerating neurological disease or some form of cancer.

01:10:37.120 Like, these things are major, you know, I often see people who, well, they're in a relationship.

01:10:43.120 Maybe they're rather isolated, older people. 0.99

01:10:46.120 One of the partners is dying, and their entire financial situation has become catastrophic.

01:10:51.120 It's like, that's not a mental illness, man.

01:10:55.120 I mean, they may have got into that situation because of one inadequacy or another.

01:10:59.120 But you don't even want to push that too far, because that sort of thing can happen to anyone.

01:11:04.120 And will, in fact, happen to most people in one form or another, at least at some point in their lives.

01:11:09.120 So you want to be damn prepared for that.

01:11:12.120 You want to be prepared for that, because it's bitter and harsh and anxiety-provoking and painful. 0.94

01:11:19.120 But if you're not ready, then it's also hell.

01:11:22.120 And often you can stop things from becoming hell, even though you can't stop them from being bitter and painful and anxiety-provoking and all of that.

01:11:30.120 You can at least delimit the catastrophe enough so that it doesn't permanently bring you and the people around you down.

01:11:37.120 And that's not so bad, right?

01:11:39.120 Or at least it's a lot better than the alternative.

01:11:42.120 So, this is the problem, you know?

01:11:45.120 Things object.

01:11:46.120 Things are obstacles.

01:11:48.120 Well, how big is the obstacle?

01:11:50.120 It's the same question as how big is the predator that's lurking outside the door of our cave.

01:11:56.120 It's exactly the same problem, except conceptualized abstractly.

01:12:01.120 And I would say exactly the same systems that your distant ancestors used to conceptualize the lurking predator are the systems that are activated now when you encounter the re-emergence of all the monsters that you've ignored.

01:12:15.120 It's the same neurological platform.

01:12:18.120 You think, well, how could it be otherwise?

01:12:19.120 Because evolution is a conservative process.

01:12:23.120 Everything about you is built on ancient foundations, right?

01:12:27.120 Very little new, certainly very little radically new comes into existence.

01:12:31.120 It's mostly tinkering with structures that have been around forever.

01:12:34.120 Like your body plan, for example.

01:12:36.120 That's unbelievably old.

01:12:38.120 I mean, you share that with lizards, roughly speaking.

01:12:41.120 So, it's incredibly ancient.

01:12:43.120 So, you know, when you share bilateral symmetry, even with most invertebrates.

01:12:48.120 So, those things are extraordinarily old.

01:12:51.120 And so, for our ancestors, what was down out of the tree, let's say, down in the grass, that was the thing that lurked in the unknown.

01:13:02.120 Well, for us, the idea of the unknown has become much more abstractly conceptualized.

01:13:07.120 Like, we can think of the unknown as such, things we don't know.

01:13:11.120 And so, then we can think of the abstract predator.

01:13:13.120 And the abstract predator is the thing that lurks in the unknown that always confronts us.

01:13:18.120 Now, because people are strange and complex creatures, and because we're partly predators and partly prey animals,

01:13:26.120 we don't only conceptualize the thing that lurks in the unknown as a devouring predator.

01:13:32.120 We also conceptualize it as something that offers possibility.

01:13:36.120 Because we've learned that if we go into the unknown, we can find things that we need for now and for the medium and for the long term.

01:13:43.120 It can be beneficial for us to confront the things that we don't know.

01:13:47.120 And that's human beings in a nutshell.

01:13:49.120 That's what we do.

01:13:51.120 And so, that's the basis.

01:13:53.120 That's why I believe that's the most archetypal story.

01:13:56.120 Because it fundamentally characterizes our mode of being in the world.

01:14:00.120 We're information foragers.

01:14:01.120 We go out into the unknown, the terrifying unknown, and we gather things of value.

01:14:06.120 It's not much different than squirrels foraging for nuts, really.

01:14:11.120 And we use exactly the same biological systems to go out and forage for information that squirrels use when they go out and forage for nuts.

01:14:21.120 I guess the system developed in part because we were fruit eaters as well.

01:14:28.120 And so, we found trees that had ripe fruit in them and learned where they were and how to gather them.

01:14:34.120 And then you see a tight relationship there between information and food, right?

01:14:39.120 There's almost no difference between eating and knowing where the food is.

01:14:43.120 And as soon as this...

01:14:44.120 So, our systems of knowing where things are grew massively.

01:14:47.120 And so, that turned us into the kind of abstract creatures that we are.

01:14:51.120 So, we're always looking for ways of producing more of what we need.

01:14:55.120 That's a good way of thinking about it.

01:14:57.120 And we do that abstractly.

01:14:59.120 So...

01:15:00.120 All right.

01:15:01.120 So, when you encounter something that's anomalous, something unexpected.

01:15:06.120 So, oh...

01:15:09.120 You're in a relationship that you're not that happy about.

01:15:13.120 It's a good example.

01:15:14.120 And the person that you're with is suddenly much colder to you than usual.

01:15:18.120 Okay.

01:15:19.120 Now the question is, is that good news or bad news?

01:15:22.120 And the answer is, well, it's good news insofar as you're not that happy with the relationship.

01:15:27.120 And it's bad news insofar as you want the relationship to continue.

01:15:31.120 And so, very frequently, it's the case that you're somewhat ambivalent about the frame that you inhabit.

01:15:36.120 And so, anomalous information has a two-fold meaning.

01:15:39.120 It's like, well, now I can finally get out of this.

01:15:41.120 That's one way of thinking about it.

01:15:43.120 And if the person is particularly cold and distant to you, and maybe even insulting,

01:15:48.120 then half of you is going to be very upset because this is happening.

01:15:52.120 And the other half is, roughly speaking, is going to be saying, oh, this is just the opportunity I wanted.

01:15:57.120 And what that means is, you're in your frame that constitutes the relationship, let's say,

01:16:02.120 in the story you've laid out about it, the novel event occurs, and it produces activation in two competing systems.

01:16:09.120 One is the positive system that explores for new opportunities,

01:16:13.120 and the other is the threat system that paralyzes you because your current mode of conceptualization is no longer valid.

01:16:20.120 And so, anomaly has this deeply ambivalent nature.

01:16:25.120 And one of the things that I've tried to understand for a long time is how you compute that.

01:16:30.120 And it seems to me that you need to consider it in relationship to this hierarchical value structure that we've talked about before.

01:16:37.120 So you might say that, imagine your nervous system is tuned,

01:16:42.120 so that if anomalous things happen at high-resolution levels,

01:16:48.120 you produce a very small amount of negative emotion and a comparatively large amount of curiosity.

01:16:56.120 Because the thing that's being threatened by the anomalous event isn't that big,

01:17:00.120 and so the possibility that information lurks there, that might be useful, is high compared to the threat.

01:17:07.120 Whereas, generally speaking, if you encounter something, maybe you, I don't know, maybe you go into a store one day, 0.81

01:17:14.120 one day, and on a whim, you shoplift something in a, you know, a fit of stupid impulsivity, and you get caught.

01:17:21.120 That happened to a, there was an NDP member of parliament, 20 years ago, who did exactly that. 0.97

01:17:28.120 You know, he had a pretty good reputation.

01:17:30.120 He went into a department store, swiped something, some gloves or something, I don't even remember what it was, and got caught.

01:17:36.120 Like, well, you know, that's a sufficiently anomalous behaviour, or occurrence, to make you question whether or not you're actually a good person.

01:17:44.120 And so, it's almost as if, at the higher resolution levels of the value structure, if something anomalous occurs,

01:17:50.120 then it's either neutral or tilted slightly towards positive, and at the higher levels, at the more abstract and comprehensive levels,

01:17:58.120 if something anomalous happens, then it's more likely to blow out large portions of your, of the systems you use to organise the world,

01:18:06.120 and it's going to be experienced as negative.

01:18:08.120 And partly what you're trying to do when something anomalous occurs is to do a search up and down this value structure.

01:18:13.120 You have an argument with someone that you love.

01:18:15.120 Well, what does that mean?

01:18:17.120 Maybe you're arguing about how you interact with each other when one of you comes home.

01:18:22.120 Like, a kiss and a hug at the door, and they'd just as soon sit there and watch TV.

01:18:26.120 So you have an argument about that.

01:18:28.120 Okay, what does the argument mean?

01:18:29.120 Does it mean that some little thing has to be adjusted at the level of micro-detail?

01:18:34.120 Or does it mean, you know, the person that you've tangled up your life with really doesn't care for you at all, 1.00

01:18:39.120 and is a complete jerk, and you should leave? 0.99

01:18:41.120 Well, a big part of the argument is going to be, how do we construe the occurrence? 1.00

01:18:46.120 How do we construe the occurrence?

01:18:48.120 Is it a major event or a minor event?

01:18:50.120 And my advice would be, unless there's strong reason, presume it's a minor event, and start operating in that level.

01:19:00.120 Because otherwise, every argument becomes a catastrophe.

01:19:03.120 And if that's the case, you actually can't solve any problems.

01:19:06.120 You won't be able to discuss anything, right?

01:19:08.120 Because as soon as you bring up an anomaly, something unpleasant,

01:19:11.120 the other person will assume that everything's over, and get so shorted out that you won't be able to talk with them.

01:19:18.120 So those are the sort of people who will cry if you bring up anything negative, right?

01:19:23.120 And so they're threatened by their value, you might say, their value structure so fragile-y constructed,

01:19:30.120 they're not standing on enough pillars, so that anything you toss at them that's a question is enough to shake the entire structure to its foundations.

01:19:38.120 Or maybe they're acting that out just to manipulate you, that's another option.

01:19:42.120 So, anyways, partly what you seem to be doing, when you're thinking about something, is to shift your frames of reference up and down your value hierarchy,

01:19:51.120 to constrain the occurrence, and to determine the degree to which it's positive, and the degree to which it's negative.

01:19:58.120 It's also complicated, too, because whether something is positive or negative depends on the frame of reference that you bring to bear on it, right?

01:20:05.120 And so that's why I was saying earlier about the relationship, if you're ambivalent about the relationship and something negative happens,

01:20:11.120 you know, something disruptive, it's certainly possible to adopt a frame of reference almost immediately that makes that into something positive.

01:20:18.120 You say, well, I was done with this anyways, I'm glad you said that, because it gives me the excuse I needed to terminate this.

01:20:24.120 And so, it's a very strange thing that you can shift the emotional valence of almost anything, almost anything, by shifting your frame of reference.

01:20:34.120 There are boundaries. You can teach animals pleasure to electric shocks, painful electric shocks,

01:20:43.120 if you pair them reliably with the provision of something intensely rewarding, cocaine, for example, or hypothalamic stimulation.

01:20:50.120 They can learn to associate pain with something good, and respond positively to it, to work for it.

01:20:57.120 So when you see this in you, even a little bit, some of you have no doubt learned to eat foods that aren't really edible,

01:21:02.120 like olives are a good example of that, or coffee. They're bitter.

01:21:07.120 And generally speaking, bitter, poisonous things tend to be bitter.

01:21:11.120 And people don't really like bitter things. But if you train yourself, you can get to the point where...

01:21:17.120 I taught my daughter how to eat olives when she was very young. And like the... I bet her, I think...

01:21:23.120 I think she was only three. I bet her that she couldn't eat 20 olives over the next week or something. 0.98

01:21:27.120 She'd always respond to a challenge. And so, you know, the first three olives, it was not a fun experience for her,

01:21:33.120 because her face... kids have a lot of taste buds. Her face would get all crinkled up, and she just wasn't enjoying it now. 1.00

01:21:39.120 But I paid for that desperately later in my life, because I used to go to this specialty shop and buy these particularly good spicy olives,

01:21:46.120 you know, by the court. And if they were in the fridge, she'd come home and just devour the entire court like a mad bulimic. 1.00

01:21:55.120 I mean, on olives, for God's sake. And so then I never got any of them. So it served me right. Exactly.

01:22:00.120 But the point is, you can rewire yourself quite completely by placing negative things in a positive context.

01:22:07.120 And the degree to which you can do that is quite remarkable.

01:22:10.120 You know, you can't... there seems to be limits beyond which your ability to turn pain into pleasure, for example, is compromised.

01:22:17.120 I don't think anybody's ever going to learn how to associate being seriously burnt by something hot with something pleasurable, right?

01:22:25.120 There's... and I don't know how the systems exactly adjust themselves so that there are limits to, you know,

01:22:31.120 how you can transform an emotional stimulus, because you can transform them quite remarkably.

01:22:36.120 But obviously, there's some boundaries that we don't understand very well.

01:22:40.120 So... all right. So... no, so roughly speaking, we could say that the degree to which something is experienced as utter chaos

01:22:48.120 is proportionate to the level of the value hierarchy that that anomalous event is construed or experienced to disrupt.

01:22:58.120 And you really see this happening in people who are depressed.

01:23:02.120 Because you might think... here's another way of thinking about it.

01:23:05.120 You might think, well, am I a good cook? You're asking yourself. You fail at cooking something.

01:23:11.120 So you think, well, am I capable of completing a meal? And you might say, well, if all you've done is set the table badly,

01:23:20.120 probably the right thing to do is to learn how to set the table and not to question your ability to complete a meal.

01:23:27.120 So then you might say, okay, well, when should you move up one level of abstraction?

01:23:33.120 We might say, well, imagine there's five things that you need to do at this level in order to successfully complete that level.

01:23:39.120 So you have to cut vegetables, you have to set the table, you have to do the dishes in order to complete a meal.

01:23:45.120 And so you break six dishes, you burn the soup, and I don't know... but you set the table properly.

01:23:54.120 You got two out of three wrong.

01:23:56.120 Well, maybe at that point, it's time to start wondering if you're actually capable of completing a meal.

01:24:02.120 But you don't want to jump from a single mistake at the higher level to the... sorry, at the higher resolution level.

01:24:12.120 You don't want to jump from a single mistake at that level to the next level.

01:24:15.120 And the reason for that is that you'll get a cascade.

01:24:18.120 Oh, I set the table badly. Error. That means I can't complete a meal. Error.

01:24:23.120 That means I can't take care of my family. Error. That means I'm not a good parent. Error.

01:24:28.120 That means I'm not a good person. That's what happens to depressed people.

01:24:32.120 And I think what happens is their serotonin levels fall, right?

01:24:37.120 They fall like serotonin levels fall if you're brought down a dominance hierarchy.

01:24:42.120 Now, we already know that if you live at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, you live where it's dangerous.

01:24:47.120 And the reason for that is everything around you is already not good, and you don't have a lot of social support.

01:24:52.120 So you're sort of clinging desperately to the underside of life.

01:24:55.120 And what that means is you probably can't even afford a single mistake.

01:24:59.120 Your serotonin levels fall, and that allows error signals to propagate up the value system,

01:25:05.120 so that every little thing becomes a catastrophe.

01:25:08.120 Now, that in itself is a catastrophe, because if you're living at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy,

01:25:13.120 and you're already super stressed, the additional stress that you're likely to experience as a consequence of an additional error

01:25:20.120 is going to be, maybe push you over the limits.

01:25:22.120 But the thing is, is that it is dangerous there.

01:25:25.120 Now, what seems to happen to people who are depressed is that their serotonin levels fall, roughly speaking,

01:25:31.120 as if they plummeted down a dominance hierarchy, without actually having plummeted down it.

01:25:37.120 So they're still competent and capable and ensconced in their relatively productive environment,

01:25:44.120 but they're reacting as if every little thing has become a catastrophe.

01:25:48.120 And so partly what happens is, if you provide people with serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

01:25:53.120 is that the propagation of negative emotion across these levels of value hierarchy seems to be reduced.

01:26:00.120 So maybe then it takes, if it takes two errors at this level to trigger off an error message at that level,

01:26:06.120 while you're in a lot better shape, right?

01:26:08.120 That's, it's like a definition of resilience.

01:26:10.120 So, now you can also do that with people cognitively, to some degree, you know,

01:26:15.120 because maybe somebody will come to you in therapy and say,

01:26:18.120 I had a bad day at work, my boss hates me, I'm going to lose my job, and then my marriage is going to dissolve.

01:26:25.120 And so, you walk them through it at a micro level, okay, what exactly happened to you at work?

01:26:31.120 And then they lay out this specific story.

01:26:33.120 You say, well, what are the multiple ways that might be interpreted?

01:26:37.120 And is it, is there some possibility that it's not the catastrophe that you're envisioning, right?

01:26:42.120 You get them to contextualize it, and help them build up micro defenses.

01:26:47.120 That might be one way of thinking about it.

01:26:49.120 A lot of people who are prone to depression are not good at defending themselves, right?

01:26:53.120 They don't have at hand the mechanisms to forgive themselves, or even really to understand their own failure.

01:26:59.120 Or even more importantly sometimes, they radically underestimate,

01:27:05.120 they radically overestimate their own incompetence, and radically overestimate the competence of everyone else.

01:27:12.120 And so that's also another reason why it's sometimes useful for people to seek therapy,

01:27:17.120 because they'll come in and say, well, I'm anxious and nervous, and you know,

01:27:21.120 I have this amount of negative emotion, and I make these sorts of mistakes.

01:27:24.120 And you listen and you think, yeah, so does everybody else.

01:27:29.120 That's par for the course.

01:27:32.120 But they're so isolated, and so afraid of the things that have been happening to them,

01:27:36.120 and so unwilling to expose themselves to social evaluation,

01:27:40.120 that they never really communicate with anyone else,

01:27:43.120 and find out that the level of misery that characterizes their existence is pretty much normal and average.

01:27:50.120 And so just helping people learn that can often be of tremendous advantage to them,

01:27:55.120 because the real issue isn't precisely whether or not you're a good person.

01:28:01.120 That's an absolute idea, right?

01:28:03.120 You could say, well, are you a good person compared to the absolute ideal?

01:28:06.120 And the answer to that is no.

01:28:08.120 But it's also not exactly, it's not a useful comparison across most situations.

01:28:13.120 What you really want to know is, well, how do you stack up against other people?

01:28:18.120 You know, if you're at your job, the issue isn't whether or not you're competent.

01:28:23.120 The issue is whether you're competent compared to the other people around you

01:28:27.120 who are supposed to be doing the same thing. 0.99

01:28:29.120 Because in an absolute sense, you're completely incompetent.

01:28:32.120 But in a relative sense, you might be at the top of the pack or even in the middle, and that's generally okay.

01:28:37.120 So, and if you don't know what the relative status is, that's not good at all.

01:28:42.120 So, alright.

01:28:45.120 Now, if...

01:28:48.120 So here's a way of thinking about it.

01:28:51.120 Let's say...

01:28:57.120 You're in a class that's near the beginning of the semester.

01:29:00.120 You write an exam, or you hand in an essay, and you don't get the mark that you desired.

01:29:04.120 Okay, so what are your options?

01:29:06.120 Well, one option would be, so you've hit an anomaly.

01:29:08.120 Things didn't happen the way you wanted them to happen. 1.00

01:29:11.120 And so maybe you say, geez, that was a boring and stupid class anyways. 0.96

01:29:15.120 This gives me an excuse to get out, and so that's not such a negative thing. 0.99

01:29:19.120 Or you think, oh, well, I really better buckle down and study.

01:29:22.120 And you decide to stay in the class.

01:29:24.120 So basically, what you've done is maintained your framework.

01:29:27.120 I'm going to work through this class.

01:29:29.120 But you've decided to modify some of the subroutines that make up that frame.

01:29:35.120 You say, well, I should study more next time, or I have to prioritize this class compared to other classes.

01:29:39.120 So it's a micro-alteration within the overarching framework.

01:29:43.120 But another thing you can do is say, to hell with the class.

01:29:48.120 I just won't... I'll just drop it.

01:29:51.120 And so the advantage to that is problem gone.

01:29:55.120 The disadvantage is, well, now you have a different problem.

01:29:57.120 Which is, okay, fine.

01:29:59.120 You drop the class.

01:30:00.120 Do you have another class that you can replace it with?

01:30:03.120 Is that a good way of dealing with a micro-failure?

01:30:05.120 You know, to move up a level of analysis and throw out the whole frame.

01:30:09.120 Because you could also say, well, maybe I should just drop out of university.

01:30:13.120 And maybe I should go hang myself. 0.64

01:30:15.120 You know, that's... 0.99

01:30:16.120 Well, it's the same line of logic.

01:30:17.120 It's just taken up to a higher degree of abstraction.

01:30:20.120 And so, generally speaking, you don't want to solve a problem by moving up a level

01:30:25.120 and wiping out the frame within which the problem was experienced.

01:30:29.120 You want to do that carefully.

01:30:31.120 Because in principle, the frame that you were working within had already...

01:30:35.120 You'd already assigned value to it and worked at it.

01:30:38.120 You've already invested in it.

01:30:39.120 It's a big sacrifice to blow out the whole frame.

01:30:42.120 Now, sometimes you can do it.

01:30:44.120 So, anyways, what happens is, well, you get the bad grade and you're upset about it.

01:30:50.120 And so, you've been plunged from your happy, satiated state, let's say, into a state of relative chaos.

01:30:57.120 And the chaos is, oh, I hit an obstacle, I didn't expect it, and now I don't know what to do.

01:31:04.120 And so, what does it mean to not know what to do?

01:31:07.120 It can mean I need to study harder.

01:31:11.120 It can mean I should drop this course.

01:31:14.120 It can mean I should major in a different subject.

01:31:17.120 It could mean maybe I shouldn't be in university.

01:31:19.120 It could mean maybe my future plans have been formulated badly.

01:31:23.120 It can mean my future plans have been formulated badly because I don't understand myself very well and I've been telling lies about my past.

01:31:30.120 Right?

01:31:31.120 The thing can really expand on you.

01:31:33.120 And that's what the chaotic domain is.

01:31:35.120 That's the re-manifestation of those things that you had considered irrelevant.

01:31:39.120 Right?

01:31:40.120 Because when you go to pick up the exam, you've got your identity as a competent student intact.

01:31:45.120 You're not questioning whether you should be in the course or whether you should be in that major or whether you should be in university.

01:31:51.120 None of that.

01:31:52.120 That's all in the implicitly accepted category.

01:31:55.120 And as soon as the anomalous event emerges, all of those things that you had rendered axiomatic start to become questionable.

01:32:04.120 And that's like the shark coming up from the depths to pull you down.

01:32:09.120 And that's the classic way of representing that and of symbolizing it.

01:32:13.120 That's Jonah and the whale, for example.

01:32:15.120 So it's something that manifests itself from the deep unknown and pulls you under.

01:32:20.120 Like an alligator at a waterhole.

01:32:22.120 Which is, I'm sure, one of the sources from which we derived that particular kind of mythological representation.

01:32:28.120 Because you can imagine that when we were on the Velt, after living on trees, we had to go down to the dam waterholes.

01:32:35.120 And you've watched enough nature programs to know what a Nile crocodile can do to a water buffalo.

01:32:41.120 It's not pretty.

01:32:42.120 And so to go down to the water, the chaotic water, and the source of all life as well, right,

01:32:48.120 is to risk an encounter with the terrible thing that lurks in the depths.

01:32:51.120 And so we use that as a central metaphor for mapping the sorts of things that happen to us in a much more abstract space.

01:33:00.120 And you know that, because one of the things you're going to do...

01:33:03.120 Let's say that the professor...

01:33:07.120 There's a professor, obviously, who gave you the bad grade.

01:33:11.120 Okay, so one logical presupposition is that you're in some sense insufficient in relationship to the course.

01:33:19.120 But another logical and instantaneous categorization is to throw that person into the category of malevolent predator.

01:33:27.120 And you'll do that by becoming upset and cursing the person in your imagination.

01:33:32.120 Cursing is exactly right, and I can tell you why.

01:33:35.120 So, I don't know if I told you this or not, but primates of various sorts, like vervet monkeys, have predator alarm cries.

01:33:45.120 They have one...

01:33:46.120 If you look across a vast array of predators, or primates, they have one for things that attack from the sky.

01:33:53.120 And so those would be predatory birds.

01:33:55.120 They have one for, like, cats that climb into the trees to get you.

01:33:59.120 And that means hit the little branches, because the cat can't be out there.

01:34:03.120 And they have one for things that rustle through the grass.

01:34:07.120 Snakes, for example.

01:34:09.120 And so each of those produces a distinctive alarm cry.

01:34:12.120 And so that's the same alarm...

01:34:15.120 That alarm cry system is the same system that we use to swear with.

01:34:20.120 We use short, guttural words.

01:34:23.120 So they're archaic words, because short words tend to be very, very old.

01:34:27.120 And so that's... and we have a separate system that utters those sorts of vocalizations.

01:34:32.120 And that's the system that's disinhibited in Tourette's.

01:34:35.120 Which is why people with Tourette's swear.

01:34:37.120 And so when you curse the professor for giving you the bad grade, you are using the same bloody linguistic system

01:34:43.120 that your ancestors used to categorize snakes in the grass or predators that swoop down from the sky.

01:34:50.120 That's very, very interesting.

01:34:52.120 So when people regard that as quite rude, right?

01:34:54.120 If you swear at someone, then they'll be taken aback by that.

01:34:58.120 They considered insulting to be thrown into the arbitrary predator category.

01:35:02.120 And so that also turns the world into a good versus evil story very rapidly,

01:35:06.120 with the oppressive person who's judging you, playing the role of, you know, malevolent predator,

01:35:12.120 and you playing the role of innocent prey, essentially.

01:35:18.120 Very, very easy for that to happen.

01:35:20.120 So, okay, so...

01:35:24.120 Where's my little clicker?

01:35:26.120 So if the anomaly... if you can't... you might say, okay, so...

01:35:38.120 You're thinking through the fact that you didn't get a good mark on the exam.

01:35:42.120 And you think, I don't know what I can do about that, because I've already got six classes, say, or seven.

01:35:49.120 Maybe you're overloaded.

01:35:50.120 You're working part-time.

01:35:52.120 You're studying as hard as you can.

01:35:54.120 And so, you try to do a micro... fix, rearranging your priorities, concentrating more on your studies,

01:36:02.120 but maybe you're already operating at top capacity, and it's not easy...

01:36:06.120 It's not straightforward for you to calculate how you might reconstruct your micro-priorities so the problem goes away.

01:36:13.120 So it's under those circumstances that it's reasonable to pop up one level of abstraction and to say,

01:36:18.120 okay, I have to give something up.

01:36:20.120 That's a sacrificial motif.

01:36:22.120 I have to sacrifice something.

01:36:24.120 What's it going to be?

01:36:25.120 Well, maybe you can't afford to have the part-time job, even though that's going to put you under financial stress.

01:36:30.120 Or maybe you have to hire a tutor, even though that's going to put you under financial stress.

01:36:34.120 Or maybe you have to drop out of the course and only take six, even though that's going to, say, delay your graduation for one semester.

01:36:41.120 There's going to be costs.

01:36:43.120 But so what's happening when you're thrown into the chaotic state by the anomaly is that the problem space magnifies itself.

01:36:51.120 And you have to do a micro-analysis, which is the best place to start.

01:36:55.120 Let's look at fixing things that are subordinate to this frame.

01:36:59.120 But you may have to leap up a level or two and fix something that's superordinate.

01:37:02.120 So it may be the case that you fail two classes, and one of your parents develops a very fatal disease.

01:37:08.120 And so you have to go home and take care of them.

01:37:10.120 It's like, okay, fine.

01:37:11.120 Too much chaos.

01:37:12.120 Bang.

01:37:13.120 You're done with your university career for now.

01:37:15.120 You have to go up a number of levels.

01:37:17.120 Blow apart that frame, and that'll alleviate the problem.

01:37:21.120 Even though it, by letting all the snakes out of the basket, it causes all sorts of other problems.

01:37:26.120 You're going to have to think, okay, well, what am I going to do instead?

01:37:29.120 What does this mean for my future?

01:37:30.120 And so forth.

01:37:31.120 So there's a cost.

01:37:32.120 There's a definite cost to moving up the abstraction hierarchy.

01:37:36.120 But the reason that a sufficient anomaly places you in chaos is because it makes all sorts of things that you've already considered alive again.

01:37:44.120 And that can be extraordinarily chaotic.

01:37:47.120 And so the anomaly knocks you flat.

01:37:50.120 You can't sustain the frame anymore.

01:37:52.120 You plunge into a chaotic state.

01:37:54.120 And, you know, your life, your whole life is a sequence of those things at a micro level and at a macro level.

01:38:00.120 You know, every time you encounter something you don't understand, you have to retool the framework of interpretation that you were using prior to encountering that.

01:38:10.120 Now, sometimes it's just a small modification.

01:38:12.120 Like, at least in principle, when you're in a class and you're learning things, you're undoing what you already knew and sewing it back together constantly.

01:38:22.120 But it's at a small enough level so that maybe it only feels exhilarating.

01:38:26.120 Right?

01:38:27.120 You're releasing just enough novelty to activate your exploratory systems because there's value in the information, but not enough to knock you flat.

01:38:37.120 And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about the whole safe space phenomena is that people differ in the threshold that they have with regards to the receipt of anomalous information.

01:38:49.120 You know, and if you're, especially if you're a naive person and a sheltered person, to be exposed to anything that has a hint of real malevolence in it might be enough to destabilize you quite badly.

01:38:59.120 And that's a real problem if you're pursuing, well, education in history or literature because history and literature is nothing but a sequence of absolute, you know, moral catastrophes thrown at you one after the other.

01:39:11.120 So you have to be pretty solid to be able to withstand that.

01:39:21.120 So you collapse from your stable state into an unstable state, and that's where everything comes up to haunt you.

01:39:28.120 Now, it can really be bad in a chaotic state because this often also happens to people who are depressed, but it can happen to people under normal circumstances, too.

01:39:38.120 It's like, well, let's say you've been happily married or you think you were happily married, and then one day you come home and your partner is gone.

01:39:47.120 Well, then what do you think? Well, you think malevolent predator, that's one thing. You think useless you, that's another thing.

01:39:58.120 You think the past is unstable, the present is unstable, and the future is unstable, that's another thing.

01:40:05.120 But then things can really get out of hand, so then you're just in chaos, let's say. 0.98

01:40:09.120 But then you start thinking at 3 o'clock in the morning about all the stupid things you've done in your life that led you to this point. 0.84

01:40:16.120 And that can just take you completely apart, because, you know, if you go back over your past experiences, it's easy for you to remember, because people do remember these things, where you made errors, right? 0.96

01:40:28.120 And maybe you're not torturing yourself to begin with about the specific errors that you made in that relationship, although you probably will.

01:40:35.120 You know, you'll think, oh, well, you know, I kind of knew this was coming.

01:40:39.120 And then your mind will say, well, you kind of knew when it started.

01:40:42.120 And then it'll tell you, well, maybe you should have done this back then, and you actually knew it.

01:40:46.120 And you'll think, yeah, I actually did know it, and I didn't do it.

01:40:49.120 And then that'll trigger off a whole host of other memories about just exactly what you knew and didn't act on. 0.93

01:40:55.120 And that'll trigger off a bunch of other memories about stupid things that you've made and mistakes that you've hidden and make you question just exactly what sort of creature you are and how all your moral insufficiencies defined by yourself have led you to this dismal state. 0.96

01:41:11.120 And there's very little difference between that and hell. 0.97

01:41:15.120 And so there's a mythology of the underworld, right?

01:41:17.120 The underworld is partly a place of chaos.

01:41:20.120 And that's a place where people go when things fall apart.

01:41:22.120 But part of that is there's a subdivision in chaos that's hell.

01:41:26.120 And that subdivision is the place that you go when you take yourself apart because of your recognition of your own moral failings.

01:41:32.120 Now, that can be useful because maybe you have some things to learn, and likely you do, but it can also be something that's so devastating that you just can't recover from it.

01:41:42.120 So, because you may conclude, well, the reason my relationship collapsed precipitously is because I'm so blind and malevolent that there's absolutely no hope for my recovery.

01:41:53.120 And, you know, sometimes that's actually true.

01:41:56.120 So, distinguishing, you never know, right, is when things happen to you that aren't what you want or expect.

01:42:03.120 It's an open question how much you're responsible for it.

01:42:06.120 Now, a conscientious person under those circumstances will just take themselves apart.

01:42:10.120 Because the conscientious person is liable to presume that if something bad happens to them, it's because they did something wrong.

01:42:17.120 And you can see that's useful.

01:42:19.120 If something bad happened to you because you did something wrong, and you can learn what you did wrong and fix it, then the bad thing won't happen to you again.

01:42:28.120 So, hooray. It's a wonderful way of thinking.

01:42:30.120 But it's very tricky, because there is a random element to life, and sometimes you get knocked flat by circumstances that are really beyond any reasonable person's control.

01:42:41.120 And this happens to conscientious people, for example, when they get laid off en masse at work.

01:42:46.120 You know, their company starts to fail.

01:42:48.120 A thousand people are laid off sort of arbitrarily.

01:42:51.120 Some of those people are truly industrious and conscientious.

01:42:55.120 Even though there is very little relationship between their work habits and the consequences for their job continuity, they'll go home and brood about it and take themselves apart.

01:43:05.120 And those are the people who end up catastrophically depressed, because they can't stand not being in a situation where they're functional and productive.

01:43:14.120 So, nasty.

01:43:16.120 So, you know, it's a cognitive response that can be very useful.

01:43:20.120 But it's actually only useful when it is what you did that resulted in that end, and not merely the blind random forces of nature happening to focus on you.

01:43:32.120 And that's also a problematic issue, too, because, you know, there's actually some relief in concluding that it's your fault.

01:43:41.120 Because the alternative is that it just happened, right?

01:43:45.120 And that means that there are whole swaths of terrible things that might happen to you that are completely beyond your control.

01:43:51.120 So it's not like deciding that you weren't at fault leaves you sitting pretty. 1.00

01:43:57.120 It just says, well, you weren't brought to your knees because of your own stupidity and malevolence. 1.00

01:44:03.120 Instead, you were brought to your knees by the absolute uncaring forces of society and nature. 1.00

01:44:08.120 It's like, well, that's not much of a consolation, I wouldn't say.

01:44:14.120 Although sometimes it's exactly the right thing to conclude.

01:44:17.120 And it is part of, I think, being mature to understand that you are prey to random forces.

01:44:23.120 And you need to be able to distinguish between when you're at fault from something and when something just happened to you.

01:44:29.120 And I would also say that the right rule of thumb is to start with the assumption that something just happened to you.

01:44:37.120 And only then start to investigate the degree to which you had something to do with it.

01:44:42.120 Situational analysis first. Personal analysis second.

01:44:47.120 It's safer.

01:44:48.120 Because if you start with the first one, you'll take yourself apart morally, continually.

01:44:53.120 And that's very, very, very, very stressful.

01:44:59.120 You should leave that for emergencies.

01:45:01.120 So, okay.

01:45:02.120 So, down you are in chaos.

01:45:06.120 Right?

01:45:07.120 And so that's part of the classic human story.

01:45:09.120 The classic human story is, I was going from point A to point B.

01:45:14.120 And I wanted to get to point B. And here's how I did it.

01:45:16.120 But then along the way, something popped up unexpectedly and stopped me.

01:45:23.120 And it threw me for a loop.

01:45:25.120 Everything fell apart.

01:45:26.120 That's another metaphorical way of representing it.

01:45:29.120 Everything fell apart.

01:45:30.120 And I didn't know up from down.

01:45:33.120 Right?

01:45:34.120 I lost myself.

01:45:35.120 It was like I was wandering in a desert.

01:45:37.120 And it lasted for years.

01:45:39.120 And that's the situation where people are also likely to turn to such things as alcohol and other drugs.

01:45:44.120 Alcohol, particularly, being a good one.

01:45:46.120 Because it suppresses anxiety and increases incentive reward.

01:45:51.120 And so, down there in a chaotic state, you can medicate yourself.

01:45:55.120 And you'll be inclined to, too.

01:45:57.120 You'll think, well, there's no hope for the future, for example.

01:45:59.120 I can't see any way out of this.

01:46:01.120 Well, under those circumstances, what else do you have to turn to?

01:46:04.120 So, very...

01:46:06.120 That's to be in the belly of the whale.

01:46:09.120 That's another way of thinking about it.

01:46:10.120 You remember, in the Pinocchio story, that's where Geppetto ended up.

01:46:14.120 And that was because he had severed his relationship with the exploratory hero.

01:46:18.120 That was Pinocchio.

01:46:20.120 Or lost the relationship.

01:46:26.120 You could call that an involuntary encounter with the dragon of chaos.

01:46:30.120 That's really what it is.

01:46:32.120 It's your home happy and the predator invades your lair.

01:46:37.120 That's the story of the Garden of Eden.

01:46:42.120 That's the story of the Garden of Eden.

01:46:44.120 There's no place that's so safe that there isn't a snake in it.

01:46:47.120 Right?

01:46:48.120 It's the fundamental story of mankind.

01:46:51.120 Even God himself can't define a space so tightly and absolutely

01:46:56.120 that a predator can't...

01:46:58.120 The predator of the unknown can't make itself manifest within.

01:47:04.120 Now, I read a book here a while back on dragons.

01:47:09.120 It was only a week or two ago.

01:47:10.120 I just found this book.

01:47:11.120 It was published in 2002.

01:47:13.120 It's an interesting book.

01:47:15.120 It's flawed, but it's an interesting book.

01:47:17.120 I'll find the name of it for you.

01:47:19.120 But the person who wrote this book was very interested in the fact

01:47:24.120 that representations of dragons can be found worldwide.

01:47:27.120 Really.

01:47:28.120 Like, no matter where you go, that representation seems to exist.

01:47:32.120 It's the winged-legged serpent.

01:47:35.120 And he was very interested in trying to puzzle out why.

01:47:38.120 And he had an interesting hypothesis.

01:47:40.120 And I do believe there's some truth to it.

01:47:42.120 He said, like in the case of the vervet monkeys, that there were three class of predators

01:47:47.120 on tree-dwelling primates.

01:47:49.120 Winged.

01:47:51.120 Bodied like a cat.

01:47:53.120 Because cats, in particular, like to eat tree-dwelling primates.

01:47:58.120 And snakes.

01:48:00.120 So you might think, well, cats, birds of prey, and predatory, and snakes are all different.

01:48:12.120 But then you might think, well, what do you mean by different exactly?

01:48:15.120 Because categories are constructed in relationship to their functional significance.

01:48:20.120 They're all the same if the category is things that eat you if you're not careful.

01:48:25.120 And so there's absolutely no reason for human beings not to have produced a category

01:48:29.120 that's an exemplar of things that eat you if you're not careful.

01:48:34.120 And so it's an amalgam.

01:48:36.120 Snake.

01:48:37.120 Predatory cat.

01:48:39.120 Predatory bird.

01:48:41.120 Winged serpent with legs.

01:48:43.120 Right?

01:48:44.120 And often it has claws.

01:48:46.120 You see the claws on it, on this one, are like telons.

01:48:52.120 And they're often like that in dragon representations.

01:48:54.120 Or sometimes they're more like the claws of predators.

01:48:57.120 But the telon representation is quite common.

01:48:59.120 Often, like this one, the thing has two legs. 0.83

01:49:03.120 Like a bird.

01:49:04.120 Not always, because sometimes dragons don't have any legs at all.

01:49:07.120 They're mostly snakes with wings.

01:49:09.120 And sometimes they have four legs.

01:49:11.120 But they often also have two legs.

01:49:13.120 And so you think, you need a representation of predator.

01:49:18.120 You don't need a differentiated representation precisely of type of predator.

01:49:22.120 That would come second.

01:49:23.120 You know, it's like the kid who points at the cat, little kid, points at the cat walking down the street

01:49:28.120 and says, doggy.

01:49:29.120 It's like, that's not a dog.

01:49:31.120 It's like, no, no.

01:49:32.120 That's not right.

01:49:33.120 The child's use of dog isn't representation of dog.

01:49:39.120 It's representation of four-legged, pettable entity.

01:49:42.120 And cat is an exemplar of that category.

01:49:45.120 And so is dog.

01:49:46.120 And so is bunny rabbit, for that matter.

01:49:48.120 And you might say, well, so that's the category of pet.

01:49:51.120 And it's a perfectly reasonable category.

01:49:53.120 You could say you should differentiate it into bunny rabbit, dog, and cat.

01:49:57.120 Because there's important information lost in the low representation representation of pet.

01:50:03.120 But there's some bloody useful information conserved.

01:50:08.120 Now, so that's the walled garden and the dragon of chaos.

01:50:12.120 I'm going to tell you something interesting about Genesis, about the story in Genesis.

01:50:15.120 This took me like 30 years to figure out.

01:50:17.120 I could not figure it out for the longest period of time.

01:50:19.120 It's a segue, but it'll give you an idea of how these things operate across vast spans of time.

01:50:25.120 So in the Garden of Eden, there's Adam and Eve, right?

01:50:29.120 The primordial human beings.

01:50:31.120 And there's a walled garden.

01:50:34.120 That's paradise.

01:50:35.120 Paradise means walled garden.

01:50:36.120 And Eden means well-watered place.

01:50:38.120 And so there's this idea that the proper habitat of human beings is an amalgam of social structure and nature.

01:50:44.120 And that's exactly right.

01:50:46.120 Because that's what we live in, right?

01:50:48.120 We never live in nature.

01:50:50.120 And we never live in society.

01:50:53.120 We live in an amalgam of society and nature.

01:50:55.120 That's the human environment.

01:50:56.120 So it's a walled garden.

01:50:58.120 All right?

01:50:59.120 And so it's a productive, well-watered place where we could thrive.

01:51:03.120 It's safe.

01:51:04.120 And it's ruled over by a father figure in this particular story.

01:51:09.120 And that's like the...

01:51:11.120 You could think about that as the spirit of civilization.

01:51:13.120 That's at least one way of considering it.

01:51:16.120 So, well, there's a snake in the garden.

01:51:20.120 And it's there unbeknownst to God, roughly speaking.

01:51:25.120 Although he knows everything.

01:51:27.120 So I guess he probably knows about the snake, too.

01:51:29.120 And he tells Adam and Eve not to interact with it.

01:51:33.120 Fine.

01:51:34.120 And they do.

01:51:35.120 And the snake wakes them up, right?

01:51:36.120 Because when they interact with the snake, they're given a fruit that opens their eyes

01:51:40.120 and makes them aware that they're naked and vulnerable.

01:51:43.120 And then dooms them to work.

01:51:44.120 Well, I'll tell you the whole story much later in the course.

01:51:47.120 But I want to give you an overview of it now.

01:51:49.120 But then there's this really strange idea that developed over the course of the development of not only Christianity,

01:51:56.120 but Judaism and a number of other religions that fed into the mainstream of Christian ideas, including Zoroastrianism.

01:52:03.120 There's an idea that emerged across a very long period of time that the snake in the garden was the same as Satan, the source of all evil.

01:52:12.120 And I've been trying to figure out for the longest period of time why in the world the manifestation of what's essentially a representation of a predator.

01:52:20.120 So that's the snake.

01:52:21.120 And, you know, the snake is associated with trees.

01:52:25.120 Well, yes.

01:52:26.120 The reason for that, in all likelihood, is that we dwelt in trees, right?

01:52:30.120 And snakes like trees.

01:52:31.120 And they're around trees.

01:52:32.120 And they can climb trees.

01:52:33.120 And the snake was a typical predator on our ancient relatives.

01:52:38.120 And so that's fine.

01:52:39.120 So you can see that that representation makes perfect sense.

01:52:42.120 There's predators that lurk in the garden.

01:52:44.120 Yes, obviously.

01:52:45.120 If you interact with them, they wake you up.

01:52:47.120 Well, they better wake you up.

01:52:49.120 Because if they don't wake you up when you interact with them, then you get eaten.

01:52:52.120 So it's probably just as well to wake up, even though there's painful consequences associated with becoming conscious.

01:52:58.120 And that manifests itself immediately in the story of Adam and Eve.

01:53:04.120 But then there's this weird association.

01:53:06.120 It's very undeveloped in the biblical stories that are part and parcel of this line of thinking.

01:53:13.120 It was more like a consequence of a cloud of mythological stories that surrounded it.

01:53:18.120 But the reason for that, I think, is that imagine that what human beings were trying to puzzle out was the nature of the predator.

01:53:25.120 Okay, so on one level of analysis, the predator is the thing that slinks along the ground and that threatens you.

01:53:31.120 And also, it's the thing that's your mortal enemy and that wakes you up.

01:53:34.120 But then, that's one conceptualization of predator.

01:53:37.120 And fair enough.

01:53:38.120 You can identify it and you can take precautionary measures.

01:53:41.120 But a better conceptualization of predator might be, where does it come from?

01:53:47.120 Let's say it's a snake.

01:53:48.120 Well, there's a layer of snakes somewhere.

01:53:50.120 And so if we want to get rid of the snake, we shouldn't be conceptualizing it as a snake.

01:53:55.120 We should be conceptualizing it as one manifestation of a layer of snakes. 0.98

01:54:01.120 And what we should do is go down, follow the damn snake wherever it goes, and find its layer, and wipe out all of the snakes. 0.98

01:54:07.120 And that's a more abstract representation, right? 0.99

01:54:10.120 It's not predator anymore.

01:54:11.120 It's the source of predation.

01:54:14.120 And so if you want to solve the predator problem permanently, you don't kill the snake.

01:54:20.120 You get rid of all the snakes.

01:54:22.120 Okay, so fine.

01:54:23.120 And people are pretty damn good at that.

01:54:25.120 And that's why you have stories of people like Saint Patrick who chased all the snakes out of Ireland.

01:54:30.120 And all sorts of saints were snake eradication saints.

01:54:34.120 And, well, there's a variety of reasons for that.

01:54:37.120 But then you might think, okay, well, the worst predator is the lair of snakes, right?

01:54:42.120 But then you might think, well, wait a minute.

01:54:44.120 The worst predator isn't the lair of snakes.

01:54:46.120 Maybe the worst predator is the enemies that come to attack us.

01:54:50.120 And those are human enemies.

01:54:51.120 And so what we do is we defend ourselves against the human enemies.

01:54:54.120 We put walls around our cities.

01:54:56.120 We fortify our land.

01:54:58.120 And we defend ourselves against the evil that's lurking in other people's hearts.

01:55:02.120 And so that's like a higher order snake.

01:55:04.120 And then we build these walls around us.

01:55:07.120 And what's inside gets larger and larger and larger.

01:55:10.120 And then what happens is the snakes start popping up inside the cities.

01:55:14.120 Because, you know, we've pushed all the...

01:55:17.120 We've protected ourselves from all the evil that lurks outside.

01:55:21.120 But we've now created a space where that evil can manifest itself inside.

01:55:26.120 So there's criminals inside the city.

01:55:28.120 And there's people who want to bring you down.

01:55:30.120 And there's malevolence within the city, not only outside.

01:55:33.120 So then there's the problem of the snake that's closer to you.

01:55:37.120 And then there's the ultimate problem, which is the snake that lives in your heart.

01:55:41.120 Right?

01:55:42.120 And that's each individual's capacity for evil.

01:55:45.120 And then that was conceptualized as a transcendent spirit.

01:55:49.120 Right?

01:55:50.120 So that's the spirit of Satan, who's the adversary of the hero.

01:55:54.120 The adversary of the hero.

01:55:56.120 And that's why there's an association between the snake in the garden and this great series of mythologies about the existence of evil itself.

01:56:03.120 It's a consequence of our continued capacity to abstract.

01:56:07.120 We started using the predator detection system to detect snakes and maybe, you know, predatory cats and maybe birds of prey and all that.

01:56:15.120 But that didn't solve the bloody problem.

01:56:17.120 Because just because you hid from the predatory bird today didn't mean the bloody thing wasn't going to be back tomorrow.

01:56:23.120 And tomorrow starts to matter as you get smarter.

01:56:26.120 And then once you're on that pathway and you're starting to think abstractly about the predator, the nature of what constitutes the predator starts to become...

01:56:35.120 Because you're trying to solve it across all situations simultaneously, it starts to become very much more abstract.

01:56:42.120 And it ends up being something like a personality.

01:56:44.120 Like an eternal personality.

01:56:46.120 And an eternal personality that has its effect on everyone all the time.

01:56:50.120 And so it's so interesting to see those ideas, because they basically evolved.

01:56:55.120 People did not understand those ideas as they produced them.

01:56:58.120 Right?

01:56:59.120 It was all put forward in a massive mythological context, in a rich storied context.

01:57:05.120 And the stories were as conscious as the information got.

01:57:10.120 It was never articulated past the level of story.

01:57:13.120 So, remarkable.

01:57:16.120 Absolutely remarkable.

01:57:17.120 Okay, so let's take a break for 15 minutes.

01:57:19.120 Now, we're going to make things complicated.

01:57:24.120 So this...

01:57:28.120 I showed you this map before.

01:57:30.120 And I wanted to...

01:57:31.120 I produced this map because I was trying to understand the fundamental substructure of the mythological world.

01:57:39.120 I think that's the right way of thinking about it.

01:57:41.120 And I'm not claiming that this is the only way it can be represented, because I know full well that it can be represented other ways.

01:57:48.120 But it's a pretty good schema.

01:57:50.120 And so, the idea...

01:57:53.120 It maps onto...

01:57:55.120 Yeah, it maps onto this idea.

01:57:57.120 So you can imagine that when you're here, you're in explored territory.

01:58:01.120 Okay, so explored territory...

01:58:03.120 You can...

01:58:04.120 Explored territory, in an archaic way, is the fires at the center, the campfire.

01:58:12.120 And the tribal boundary surrounds that space.

01:58:16.120 And that's safe space.

01:58:19.120 Okay, so it's a place...

01:58:21.120 In nature, obviously...

01:58:23.120 Within which there's a pyramid.

01:58:25.120 And there's a fire at the center of the pyramid.

01:58:27.120 And the pyramid is the dominance hierarchy.

01:58:29.120 The social dominance hierarchy.

01:58:31.120 And that's where people live.

01:58:33.120 That's the world.

01:58:34.120 And so you could say, well, that's circumscribed space, where you understand...

01:58:38.120 See, it's the...

01:58:40.120 It's explored territory, not only because you understand the natural world that prevails there...

01:58:50.120 And the cumulative effort of all of your compatriots keeps all the terrible animals at bay,

01:58:56.120 so it's actually safe from a natural perspective.

01:58:59.120 And you understand it, so it's explored.

01:59:01.120 When you're there, you're safe.

01:59:03.120 And good things happen to you, mostly.

01:59:05.120 And then...

01:59:06.120 But it isn't just the natural space construed as the environment.

01:59:10.120 It's the natural space construed of the relationship between you and all the other primates that inhabit that space.

01:59:16.120 Which is also...

01:59:17.120 It's society, obviously, but it's also part of nature.

01:59:21.120 And so...

01:59:22.120 That explored territory...

01:59:24.120 Is...

01:59:25.120 Your understanding of the natural world...

01:59:30.120 And the social world, but more importantly, the concordance of your understanding with what's happening in that space.

01:59:38.120 So...

01:59:39.120 Like, take this place, for example, right now.

01:59:42.120 Every one of you has expectations about what's going to happen in this classroom.

01:59:46.120 And you bring those...

01:59:48.120 They're desires, actually.

01:59:49.120 They're not merely expectations, because it's goal-directed.

01:59:52.120 And you bring those with you into the classroom.

01:59:54.120 And as long as what's happening is in concordance with those desires, then you're safe and calm.

02:00:00.120 And maybe at least mildly interested.

02:00:02.120 Which would be the point.

02:00:03.120 Right?

02:00:04.120 So...

02:00:05.120 It's explored territory, because...

02:00:07.120 What you understand matches what's happening.

02:00:10.120 And that's a place.

02:00:12.120 And it's a place that you strive to be.

02:00:15.120 And you strive to maintain.

02:00:17.120 And maybe you even strive to expand.

02:00:19.120 Which is a slightly different thing.

02:00:21.120 But you certainly strive to maintain it.

02:00:23.120 That's this.

02:00:24.120 That's one place.

02:00:25.120 Another place, which is where you end up when that doesn't work.

02:00:28.120 And you can think about that as...

02:00:30.120 Well, you know, in The Lion King, for example, when Mufasa...

02:00:36.120 Mufasa brings Simba up to the top of Pride Rock, just when the sun is either rising or setting.

02:00:43.120 And so, they're on top of the rock.

02:00:45.120 And the top of the rock is lit.

02:00:47.120 And they're sitting at the top, in the light.

02:00:50.120 And Mufasa tells Simba that his territory is everything that the light touches.

02:00:55.120 And everything that the light touches is everything that you've understood.

02:00:59.120 It's everything that your capacity for illumination and enlightenment has turned into habitable space.

02:01:06.120 And so, you're the king of that domain.

02:01:08.120 Right?

02:01:09.120 Especially insofar as you're guided by the light.

02:01:11.120 That's what that little scene meant.

02:01:13.120 And Mufasa tells Simba not to go out beyond where the light has touched into the dark territories.

02:01:19.120 And that's where the elephant graveyard is in that story.

02:01:22.120 Right?

02:01:23.120 And Simba and Nella go out there.

02:01:26.120 Because, of course, as soon as you tell a human being not to do something...

02:01:30.120 Those little lions being human beings, after all...

02:01:33.120 They immediately run off and do it.

02:01:35.120 And that's an echo of the story, say, in Genesis, where God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the apple.

02:01:40.120 And this is the first thing they immediately do.

02:01:42.120 Because if you want someone not to do something, you first specify what it is that they shouldn't do.

02:01:48.120 And then give them some sort of incomprehensible reason for why they shouldn't do it.

02:01:52.120 And they'll just do it instantly.

02:01:53.120 Because that's what we're like.

02:01:55.120 Right?

02:01:56.120 That's why the Catholics are convinced that people suffer from original sin.

02:02:00.120 And it's a very intelligent way of looking at things, although it also has its problems.

02:02:05.120 So anyways, there's the known territory.

02:02:08.120 And then outside of that, there's unknown territory.

02:02:11.120 And those are the most fundamental elements of existence.

02:02:14.120 There's the place you are when you know what's going on.

02:02:17.120 And there's the place you are when you don't know what's going on.

02:02:20.120 And that can be mapped onto geographic territory.

02:02:23.120 If you go beyond the borders of your society, then you're in unknown territory.

02:02:27.120 But it can also be mapped conceptually.

02:02:29.120 So that, for example, we're all sitting in this room, and someone leaps in with a weapon.

02:02:36.120 It's like this was known territory a second ago, and now it's not known territory at all.

02:02:44.120 Even though you'd say, well, many things have remained the same.

02:02:46.120 It's like, yeah, but all the relevant things have suddenly changed.

02:02:49.120 Right?

02:02:50.120 So part of the way of conceptualizing that is that you can manifest a geographic transformation

02:02:58.120 by moving from genuine geographic explored territory into genuine geographic unexplored territory.

02:03:05.120 But you can do that in time as well, because we exist in time as well as space.

02:03:10.120 And so a space that's stable and unchanging can be transformed into something completely other than it is

02:03:17.120 by the movement forward of time.

02:03:19.120 So, well, so why am I telling you that?

02:03:24.120 It's because we've mapped the idea of the difference in space between the known and the unknown

02:03:35.120 to the difference in time between a place that works now and a place that no longer works.

02:03:40.120 Even though it's the same place.

02:03:42.120 It's the same thing.

02:03:44.120 It's just extended across time.

02:03:46.120 All right.

02:03:47.120 And so that's order versus chaos.

02:03:49.120 And that's the chaos that can manifest itself within the order.

02:03:52.120 The thing that's represented in the yin and yang symbol, right?

02:03:55.120 Because you see the black paisley with the white dot in it, and the white paisley with

02:03:59.120 the black dot in it.

02:04:00.120 Order can turn into chaos at a moment's notice.

02:04:03.120 And in the same way, chaos can turn to order in a moment's notice, at a moment's notice.

02:04:08.120 And so we're trying to map the geography onto something that's more abstract and comprehensive.

02:04:16.120 And we do that using conceptual schemes that we evolved over vast spans of time and have just moved up one level of abstraction.

02:04:26.120 That's known territory or what's explored.

02:04:29.120 Unknown territory or what's not explored.

02:04:31.120 The transformation or the dissolution of one into the other, and then the reconstitution of that.

02:04:37.120 That's what an election does, right?

02:04:39.120 It's like, okay, we have our leader, who's the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, and defines the nature of this particular structure.

02:04:49.120 There's an election.

02:04:50.120 It's regulated chaos.

02:04:52.120 No one knows what's going to happen.

02:04:54.120 It's the death of the old king.

02:04:55.120 Bang! 1.00

02:04:56.120 We go into a chaotic state.

02:04:58.120 Everyone argues for a while.

02:04:59.120 And then out of that argument, they produce a consensus, and poof, we're in a new state.

02:05:04.120 Right?

02:05:05.120 That's the meta story, right?

02:05:07.120 Order, chaos, order.

02:05:08.120 But it's partial order, chaos, reconstituted and revivified order.

02:05:13.120 That's the thing, is that this order is better than that order.

02:05:17.120 So there's progress.

02:05:18.120 And that's partly why I think the idea of moral relativism is wrong.

02:05:22.120 There's progress in moral order.

02:05:24.120 And it was defined properly by Piaget.

02:05:27.120 The new moral order does everything the old moral order did, and some additional things.

02:05:33.120 That's what constitutes progress.

02:05:35.120 Now, here's a strange idea.

02:05:38.120 And we'll talk about this more as we progress through the class.

02:05:42.120 What's the ultimate in order?

02:05:45.120 Well, it's not this, obviously.

02:05:48.120 Because it can collapse.

02:05:50.120 And it's not this, because it can collapse.

02:05:53.120 And so then you think, well, there's no ultimate order, even though there's progression.

02:05:57.120 But then you have to move it up one level of abstraction.

02:06:00.120 What's the ultimate order?

02:06:02.120 Doing this.

02:06:03.120 Willingness to do that.

02:06:06.120 That's the ultimate order.

02:06:08.120 Right?

02:06:09.120 It's order at a different level of analysis.

02:06:11.120 And you can see that's what's represented in that idea.

02:06:15.120 That's what that idea means.

02:06:16.120 That's the phoenix, right?

02:06:17.120 The phoenix is something that lives, ages, and then allows itself to be consumed by fire, and then reemerges.

02:06:25.120 The old phoenix gets old and burns.

02:06:29.120 And the new phoenix reemerges.

02:06:31.120 And so the real phoenix is the thing that's constant across those transformations.

02:06:35.120 That's the Jungian self.

02:06:38.120 That's what he meant.

02:06:40.120 The self is the element of the psyche that remains intact across transformations.

02:06:46.120 Yeah.

02:06:47.120 Yeah.

02:06:48.120 It's a bloody amazing idea.

02:06:50.120 That's for sure.

02:06:52.120 And you can think about that.

02:06:54.120 That's why Jung claimed, for example, in Ion, primarily, that Christ was a symbol of the self.

02:07:01.120 That was his consequence of decades of meditation on the structure of Christianity.

02:07:08.120 Because it's the dying and resurrecting part of the psyche that remains constant across the transformation.

02:07:15.120 So the ultimate order isn't to identify with this.

02:07:21.120 That's your current state of being.

02:07:23.120 And it isn't to identify with that, because, well, you can't, by definition.

02:07:28.120 And it isn't even to identify with that.

02:07:31.120 It's to let these things go as they need to go.

02:07:34.120 That's a sacrifice.

02:07:36.120 And to allow this continual process of transformation to occur.

02:07:40.120 And part of that is the admission that you're wrong.

02:07:43.120 And so partly what you're doing is, at micro levels and at macro levels, where are you not what you could be?

02:07:50.120 And when you realize that, it'll take you apart a little bit.

02:07:53.120 And burn you down to your core a little bit.

02:07:57.120 And then allow you to regenerate.

02:07:59.120 And if you do that continually, then everything that you don't need burns away.

02:08:04.120 Right?

02:08:06.120 And that's what this means.

02:08:09.120 You remember in Harry Potter, you may remember, that Harry goes down.

02:08:14.120 So in the second volume and in the second movie, Harry's at Hogwarts.

02:08:19.120 So it's the school where you learn how to be magic, because that's what you really are.

02:08:23.120 And there's something that threatens the school.

02:08:25.120 Well, part of what threatens the school?

02:08:27.120 Evil.

02:08:28.120 Right?

02:08:29.120 Voldemort.

02:08:30.120 That's one thing.

02:08:31.120 But at the same time, it's also the snake that lurks underneath.

02:08:33.120 It's the basilisk that threatens the school.

02:08:36.120 And so the basilisk is the dragon.

02:08:38.120 And when the basilisk looks at you, then you're paralyzed because you're a prey animal.

02:08:43.120 And if a predator captures you in its gaze, you freeze.

02:08:47.120 And the reason you freeze is because your body reacts to the predator as something that should turn you to stone.

02:08:57.120 Sorry about that.

02:09:02.120 So what do you do about the basilisk?

02:09:03.120 Well, one thing you do is you run and hide.

02:09:06.120 But the other thing you do is go confront it in its lair.

02:09:08.120 And that's what Harry Potter does now.

02:09:10.120 And what's interesting about him is he's also touched by evil, right?

02:09:14.120 And that means that he's an embodiment of what Jung would regard as someone who's integrated the shadow.

02:09:19.120 And without that capacity, he isn't able to communicate, say, with snakes.

02:09:23.120 And that's not so good, because since there are snakes, it's not such a bad idea to know how to communicate with them.

02:09:28.120 And he goes down into the underground, right?

02:09:31.120 Into the chaotic domain that's underneath the school in order to find the snake in its lair.

02:09:36.120 Now, if I remember correctly, you tell me if I'm wrong.

02:09:39.120 Doesn't he go down through a bathroom?

02:09:41.120 Through a toilet?

02:09:43.120 Right.

02:09:44.120 Well, so that's an indication of the Jungian dictum that what you need most is to be found where you least want to look.

02:09:52.120 I had a client once who actually had a dream like that.

02:09:55.120 He dreamt that he had to go into the underground world through an outhouse.

02:09:59.120 Right.

02:10:00.120 It was very, very interesting.

02:10:02.120 And it was an elaboration of precisely this theme.

02:10:04.120 It's what you've thrown away as of little value to you.

02:10:08.120 And maybe what you hate and hold in contempt and fear is exactly what you have to face if you want to go down to the place where the transformations occur.

02:10:16.120 So what happens in Harry Potter?

02:10:18.120 Well, this basilisk is wandering around, paralyzing everyone who isn't able to communicate with snakes.

02:10:24.120 And he doesn't fight the basilisk precisely.

02:10:26.120 He goes down into its lairs, the underground world.

02:10:28.120 And that, what down there is that snake has got Ginevra. 0.79

02:10:33.120 Right.

02:10:34.120 His girlfriend.

02:10:35.120 That's her name.

02:10:36.120 Right.

02:10:37.120 It's a variant of Virginia.

02:10:38.120 That's a variant of virgin. 0.97

02:10:40.120 And the snake always has a virgin. 0.58

02:10:41.120 That's one of its characteristics.

02:10:43.120 Right.

02:10:44.120 Like gold.

02:10:45.120 He goes down there to rescue her.

02:10:46.120 What happens to him?

02:10:47.120 He gets bit.

02:10:48.120 And he's going to die.

02:10:50.120 So what happens?

02:10:51.120 The phoenix comes along and cries tears into his wounds and cures him.

02:10:57.120 And that's...

02:10:59.120 So the idea is that what saves you in the encounter with the snake is your capacity to let things go and die and come back to life.

02:11:10.120 Right.

02:11:11.120 It's so interesting, eh, that that story's told in that way, in that series of volumes.

02:11:18.120 Because the plot structure is perfect in a mythological sense.

02:11:24.120 It's exactly right.

02:11:26.120 And the phoenix actually happens to be the pet of the main wizard, which is also perfect.

02:11:31.120 It's exactly right.

02:11:32.120 So, you know, what's his name?

02:11:34.120 Dumbledore.

02:11:35.120 Yeah.

02:11:36.120 He's basically, for all intents and purposes, God the Father.

02:11:39.120 And his pet, his close ally, is the thing that can die and that transforms.

02:11:45.120 Well, you can see the echoes of Christian thought in that, but that isn't exactly right.

02:11:50.120 It's that Christian thought and the mythological substructure upon which the Harry Potter volume is based are drawing from the same underlying pool of ideas and symbols.

02:12:00.120 And they're universally accessible.

02:12:02.120 And you can tell that because if they weren't, that book wouldn't have sold.

02:12:06.120 How many million copies?

02:12:07.120 How many million copies did it sell?

02:12:10.120 And the movies.

02:12:11.120 It's unbelievably, overwhelmingly powerful.

02:12:14.120 She got kids to read 600-page books, like multiple volumes lining up for them.

02:12:20.120 You gotta ask yourself, why? 0.89

02:12:22.120 Silly stories about magical orphans. 0.92

02:12:25.120 It's like, well, maybe not. 1.00

02:12:26.120 Maybe people aren't so stupid. 1.00

02:12:28.120 And certainly, if they happen to be reading relatively complex books, attributing that to stupidity seems to be rather counterproductive. 1.00

02:12:46.120 All right, so that's the chaotic domain. 0.99

02:12:51.120 Now, we gotta think about the chaotic domain for a minute.

02:12:55.120 The chaotic domain is where you don't know what's going to happen.

02:12:59.120 And anything could happen, positive or negative.

02:13:01.120 Anything can happen.

02:13:03.120 And so you can think about the chaotic domain as the birthplace of order.

02:13:07.120 It's the place from which order emerges.

02:13:09.120 Well, it's akin in some sense.

02:13:12.120 Remember what happens in Pinocchio.

02:13:17.120 So Pinocchio goes down into the depths, and then into the whale, to rescue his father.

02:13:23.120 He goes to the most frightening place possible.

02:13:26.120 And he tests himself against it.

02:13:28.120 And he rescues his father, and he brings him up to the surface.

02:13:30.120 But the consequence of that is that he dies. 1.00

02:13:33.120 But what dies is the stupid puppet. 1.00

02:13:36.120 And so the question is, well, to the degree that you're a stupid puppet, are you willing to let that die? 1.00

02:13:43.120 And the answer to that is, it depends on the degree to which you're actually a stupid puppet. 1.00

02:13:48.120 Because the more that's true, the more of you has to die. 1.00

02:13:52.120 And it's not something trivial.

02:13:54.120 That's why these myths insist upon the horror of the thing that lurks, so to speak.

02:13:59.120 Is that that death might be enough to actually kill you if you're not properly prepared for it.

02:14:04.120 And that's what happens to people who are extraordinarily traumatized, for example.

02:14:08.120 It's like huge parts of them are killed.

02:14:11.120 And they often don't recover.

02:14:13.120 So it's no joke.

02:14:15.120 Well, and then, of course, this is often acted out in the real world, too.

02:14:18.120 If, you know, this can happen on a psychological basis.

02:14:21.120 And so your own psychological experiences can be enough to radically disrupt and hurt you.

02:14:27.120 But it can be worked out in the real world, too.

02:14:29.120 Because if you're wandering around naively, with your eyes closed, and you run into someone who's really psychopathic,

02:14:35.120 they'll take you apart.

02:14:36.120 And you'll have no defense against it whatsoever. 1.00

02:14:39.120 Because you're too blind and naive.

02:14:41.120 And if you encounter someone like that, and they leave you in the ashes, which they might,

02:14:45.120 it's certainly possible that you'll never recover from it.

02:14:47.120 You just will not be able to handle the aftermath.

02:14:51.120 But also, you won't be able to handle the fact that something like that could actually happen.

02:14:55.120 And that's really the nature of trauma.

02:14:58.120 You cannot believe that that could actually happen.

02:15:01.120 And that's an encounter.

02:15:03.120 It's almost always, and this has been the case, certainly be my clinical experience.

02:15:08.120 What traumatizes people is malevolence.

02:15:11.120 It's not tragedy.

02:15:13.120 Although tragedy can traumatize people, if it's severe enough.

02:15:17.120 But generally, no.

02:15:18.120 People can withstand tragedy.

02:15:20.120 They are done in by real malevolence.

02:15:23.120 And so sometimes it's the realization of their own malevolence that does them in.

02:15:27.120 But when that isn't the case, they encounter someone who's out there in the world,

02:15:31.120 who's actually operating to hurt them.

02:15:34.120 And if the person is psychopathic enough, and this actually goes beyond pure psychopathy,

02:15:39.120 because at least the psychopath has the sense to be self-interested.

02:15:43.120 You can go far farther than that, where you're perfectly willing to hurt yourself

02:15:47.120 as long as you hurt the other person at the same time.

02:15:50.120 And that's where you go when you're doing something like conjuring up the idea

02:15:53.120 that you might shoot up a school. 0.97

02:15:55.120 Because those people always kill themselves at the end.

02:15:57.120 And you might think, well, why don't they just save everyone a lot of trouble 0.99

02:16:00.120 and kill themselves at the beginning? 0.97

02:16:02.120 Well, that wouldn't exactly be the point, would it?

02:16:04.120 What they want to say is, life means nothing to me.

02:16:07.120 Nothing.

02:16:08.120 But I'm perfectly willing to make as many people as I possibly can suffer

02:16:13.120 before I demonstrate that.

02:16:14.120 And so that's a step past psychopathy.

02:16:16.120 And if you encounter that in someone, or in yourself,

02:16:20.120 that's going to be a deeply unsettling experience.

02:16:23.120 An idea behind many of these stories is that you cannot figure out what to do about that

02:16:28.120 before you have an encounter like that.

02:16:31.120 And if you think about that properly, that's as horrifying an experience as you can imagine.

02:16:37.120 Right?

02:16:38.120 It's precisely that.

02:16:39.120 It's as horrifying an experience as you can imagine.

02:16:41.120 So, alright, so, back.

02:16:45.120 This chaos, this is the birthplace of things.

02:16:48.120 That's why often it's represented as feminine.

02:16:53.120 Because feminine things are the birthplace of things. 1.00

02:16:56.120 Now again, you know, people are stuck with the necessity of interpreting their experience

02:17:03.120 through the biological platform of interpretation that they evolved.

02:17:08.120 And so we could say, well, we recognize feminine. 0.98

02:17:10.120 We recognize masculine.

02:17:12.120 We recognize parent.

02:17:13.120 We recognize child.

02:17:14.120 And that's ancient, right?

02:17:16.120 That's as ancient as mammals.

02:17:18.120 And so those are fundamental social cognitive categories.

02:17:22.120 And we had to exploit those categories to represent the world beyond that

02:17:27.120 when we started to be able to represent the world beyond that.

02:17:30.120 Just as a primate, like a chimpanzee or a tree-dwelling primate, a complex primate,

02:17:35.120 almost all of their categories are social cognitive.

02:17:38.120 Right?

02:17:39.120 Why?

02:17:40.120 Because they live in complex social environments.

02:17:41.120 And there's a relationship between the size of the social environment

02:17:45.120 that a primate inhabits and its brain size.

02:17:48.120 The bigger the brain, the larger the environment.

02:17:50.120 And you could think, there's a loop there, right?

02:17:52.120 If your brain's too small, you can't handle the larger environment.

02:17:55.120 So the environment grows, and it selects for people, for creatures that are complex enough

02:18:01.120 to compute the environment.

02:18:03.120 And then that gives a selective advantage to creatures that are acute,

02:18:06.120 or are sharp enough to compute the environment.

02:18:08.120 And so there's more of them, and it loops.

02:18:11.120 And the brain grows.

02:18:12.120 I mean, it's not the only thing driving the evolution of the brain among primates,

02:18:15.120 but it's a primary source.

02:18:17.120 So we have those categories to begin with.

02:18:20.120 And then we have to view the world as it manifests itself outside those primary categories

02:18:25.120 through the lens of those categories.

02:18:27.120 And so what happens is we use the symbolism of sex differentiation

02:18:32.120 and the symbolism of parent-child relationships

02:18:35.120 to begin to account for the manner in which the world manifests itself.

02:18:40.120 Masculine.

02:18:41.120 Why?

02:18:42.120 Well, that's the patriarchy.

02:18:44.120 Chaos. 0.98

02:18:45.120 Feminine.

02:18:46.120 Why?

02:18:47.120 Well, partly it's conceived of in opposition to the patriarchy,

02:18:50.120 but more importantly, it's the thing from which order rises.

02:18:53.120 So it's perfectly reasonable to consider it feminine. 0.64

02:18:56.120 And then order again.

02:18:57.120 And then the question is, well, you have order, father, chaos, mother.

02:19:06.120 And then you have this, this transformational process.

02:19:09.120 Well, that's the mythological hero.

02:19:11.120 And those are the three fundamental characters of mythology.

02:19:14.120 Individual.

02:19:15.120 Culture.

02:19:16.120 Nature.

02:19:17.120 Nature.

02:19:18.120 Right?

02:19:19.120 It's the universal world.

02:19:20.120 And then that's differentiated further.

02:19:21.120 Positive individual.

02:19:22.120 Negative individual.

02:19:23.120 Hero and adversary. 0.99

02:19:25.120 Tyrant.

02:19:26.120 And wise king.

02:19:27.120 King.

02:19:28.120 The destructive element of nature and the creative element of nature.

02:19:32.120 And those are perfectly reasonable categories.

02:19:34.120 They do a lovely job of actually representing how the world does manifest itself to us in the domains that are permanent.

02:19:44.120 There's always a conscious observer who's ambivalent about the nature of the world.

02:19:48.120 There's always a social structure that's half tyrannical and half order producing.

02:19:53.120 And there's always the nature that gives rise to everything and that destroys it at the same time.

02:19:59.120 Always.

02:20:00.120 It's permanent.

02:20:01.120 And so that's another reason.

02:20:02.120 It's so interesting.

02:20:03.120 That's another reason why the mythological representations are hyper real.

02:20:08.120 Because they, you think, what makes something real?

02:20:12.120 Let's say protons are real.

02:20:14.120 Why?

02:20:15.120 Because at one level of analysis, every single thing is made out of protons.

02:20:21.120 So you can use it as an explanatory tool, the concept.

02:20:25.120 You can use it as an explanatory tool for every possible situation.

02:20:29.120 And it's true across all possible spans of time.

02:20:32.120 Although protons do decay, but it takes billions and billions of years.

02:20:35.120 So real means works now and works forever, applies now and applies everywhere.

02:20:42.120 Well, that's exactly what this map means.

02:20:45.120 It's that there's always an observer.

02:20:47.120 There's always a framework of interpretation.

02:20:49.120 And there's always that which is being observed.

02:20:51.120 There's always the individual.

02:20:54.120 There's always the social environment.

02:20:56.120 The dominance hierarchy.

02:20:58.120 And there's always the nature that exists outside of that.

02:21:00.120 There's always the knower, the known, and the unknown.

02:21:03.120 Always.

02:21:07.120 So then the question is, well, how do those things interrelate?

02:21:10.120 Well, you differentiate them into their positive and negative elements, because there's always the positive and negative element.

02:21:16.120 And then you tell stories about how the different categories interact.

02:21:19.120 And that's what the stories do.

02:21:21.120 And the more mythological the story, the more that underlying schema is self-evident in the plot.

02:21:30.120 And you especially see that, I think, in stories for children.

02:21:36.120 And maybe that's because children can't understand stories unless they're archetypal.

02:21:41.120 Like, blatantly archetypal.

02:21:42.120 And that would make sense, right?

02:21:43.120 Because the stories have to appeal to the instinctive knowledge of the child.

02:21:48.120 Or the child wouldn't be able to comprehend them.

02:21:50.120 And so, you know, I saw this quite dramatically with my own kids.

02:21:54.120 Watching them watch Disney movies, for example.

02:21:57.120 My son was absolutely obsessed with Pinocchio.

02:22:00.120 And particularly obsessed with the scene where Pinocchio and his father are escaping from the whale.

02:22:06.120 And the whale turns into this sort of smoke-belching locomotive thing that's chasing them through the water.

02:22:11.120 He would rewind that and watch it and rewind it and watch it and rewind it and watch it.

02:22:15.120 Like, over and over and over.

02:22:17.120 And you think, what the hell's that kid up to?

02:22:19.120 Well, you know, it took us, what, six hours to do a brief run-through through Pinocchio still by still.

02:22:26.120 There's a lot of information in that movie.

02:22:28.120 A tremendous amount of information.

02:22:30.120 And then what the kid's trying to do is to incorporate it.

02:22:34.120 To understand it.

02:22:36.120 To embody it.

02:22:37.120 And that's all happening in some sense, I would say, unconsciously.

02:22:41.120 It's like, it's unconscious in that he couldn't articulate what he was doing.

02:22:44.120 And neither could anyone else.

02:22:46.120 But that doesn't mean he wasn't doing something.

02:22:50.120 He was definitely doing something.

02:22:51.120 He was doing the same thing that enabled my nephew to put on the night suit when he did that.

02:22:58.120 The little night hat and the sword.

02:23:00.120 And figure out how to go after the great dragon of chaos.

02:23:02.120 And so, I want to tell you a little bit more about this idea of chaos.

02:23:06.120 So, here's the schema.

02:23:09.120 You have the archetypal son.

02:23:11.120 And we'll get to why it's masculine and not feminine.

02:23:15.120 And that's also taken me a long time to crack.

02:23:17.120 Because the women in this class have always asked me,

02:23:20.120 well, the hero in mythological stories is male.

02:23:22.120 Where does that leave women? 1.00

02:23:24.120 And I never knew what to say about that exactly.

02:23:26.120 You can look at Sleeping Beauty, for example.

02:23:29.120 That story.

02:23:30.120 And Sleeping Beauty is rescued by a prince.

02:23:33.120 And you can think of that prince at two levels of analysis simultaneously.

02:23:37.120 You can think about it as an actual male who plays that role.

02:23:40.120 But you can also think about it as the exploratory, and exploratory, assertive, and courageous part of the feminine psyche 0.66

02:23:48.120 that's necessary to bring unconsciousness up into consciousness.

02:23:53.120 And the story works perfectly across both those levels of analysis.

02:23:57.120 And that is the classic way, I would say, of explaining this particular mode of representation.

02:24:04.120 But it came to my attention.

02:24:06.120 This was so interesting.

02:24:07.120 This is what triggered this for me, finally.

02:24:11.120 I was reading this book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts.

02:24:14.120 That was written by a bunch of engineers at Google.

02:24:17.120 And they were looking at billions of search... billions of Google searches.

02:24:22.120 And, you know, there's no shortage of pornography on the internet.

02:24:25.120 And there's much less, by proportion, than there was when the internet was first invented.

02:24:30.120 And it's so interesting, because it actually turned out that one of the things that drove the development of the internet

02:24:36.120 and the technology was the proclivity of young men to search out sexually provocative images.

02:24:42.120 That was what was at the forefront of the development of the nets. Extraordinarily interesting.

02:24:46.120 They were motivated to... they were motivated to use it for that purpose.

02:24:51.120 And that provided the platform from which it emerged. Amazing.

02:24:55.120 Anyways, the Google engineers looked at pornographic search processes.

02:25:01.120 And then segregated male searches from female searches.

02:25:05.120 And what they found was that the males searched out images.

02:25:07.120 Surprise, surprise. No one... no one considers that, you know, particularly interesting.

02:25:12.120 But the females searched out literary representations of pornography. 1.00

02:25:15.120 It was written.

02:25:16.120 And so, I can give you an example of that.

02:25:18.120 If you know about harlequin romances, does everybody still know about those?

02:25:22.120 Anybody not know about those?

02:25:24.120 Okay.

02:25:25.120 Well, they're mass market romances.

02:25:27.120 And of a very stereotypical type.

02:25:29.120 And the original ones were pretty harmless in terms of no violence and no real sexual content.

02:25:37.120 But that was 40 years ago.

02:25:39.120 And they've differentiated tremendously.

02:25:41.120 And now there's hardcore harlequin romances.

02:25:45.120 And with particularly garish covers.

02:25:47.120 And then there's the old, you know, more tame, basic sexless and aggressionless romances.

02:25:54.120 Where everything is implied and not explicit.

02:25:57.120 But the explicit ones exist.

02:25:58.120 So they did a plot analysis of the typical pornographic female fantasy. 0.97

02:26:04.120 Well, and it was so... it's so comical.

02:26:09.120 Because engineers did this.

02:26:10.120 And social scientists would never do this. 0.98

02:26:12.120 Because they'd be probably too concerned about the ethics of it or some damn thing.

02:26:16.120 But engineers, you know, they'll just plow ahead with no concern whatsoever for such things. 0.93

02:26:21.120 And they actually discover things that way.

02:26:23.120 And so they discovered the basic plot of the female pornographic literary product.

02:26:30.120 And they identified...

02:26:32.120 So basically what happened was that an innocent, well-meaning, and attractive young woman encounters a male who's a bit of a monster.

02:26:41.120 And the monster... there's five types of classic male monster.

02:26:44.120 For all you males who want to know, this is what you can become. 0.83

02:26:47.120 Vampire.

02:26:49.120 That's a good one.

02:26:50.120 Werewolf. 0.82

02:26:51.120 Billionaire.

02:26:54.120 Pirate.

02:26:55.120 And Surgeon.

02:26:56.120 Okay.

02:26:57.120 So that's very interesting.

02:26:59.120 Because...

02:27:00.120 Well, first of all, there's a dominance thing.

02:27:02.120 There's a...

02:27:03.120 Now, you're actually blushing.

02:27:04.120 You know, you're actually blushing about that.

02:27:06.120 That's very, very funny.

02:27:08.120 So...

02:27:09.120 Sorry to point it out.

02:27:10.120 But it's so comical, you know.

02:27:12.120 I know, I know.

02:27:13.120 It's so funny.

02:27:14.120 I was reading this.

02:27:15.120 I was reading this.

02:27:16.120 It was just cracking me up.

02:27:17.120 I thought, oh my god, really?

02:27:19.120 Pirate. 0.75

02:27:20.120 Vampire.

02:27:21.120 Oh, that explains it. 1.00

02:27:22.120 What about all these damn vampire shows? 1.00

02:27:24.120 Right? 1.00

02:27:25.120 They're so popular online.

02:27:26.120 They're so popular on Netflix.

02:27:28.120 Oh yes.

02:27:29.120 And then there's the werewolf.

02:27:30.120 There's nothing sexier than a werewolf, apparently.

02:27:32.120 But I mean...

02:27:33.120 So there's predatory dominance that's implicit in that.

02:27:36.120 Right?

02:27:37.120 With the billionaire, it's more abstract.

02:27:39.120 But clearly, that's an indication of very high success in the male dominance hierarchy.

02:27:44.120 So...

02:27:45.120 But there's this desire for aggression that's in that.

02:27:47.120 A real aggression.

02:27:48.120 Right?

02:27:49.120 And it's not surprising to me at all.

02:27:51.120 It makes perfect sense.

02:27:52.120 But the basic plot is that the woman encounters this mysterious and aggressive male and tames him.

02:28:04.120 That's the female hero myth, as far as I can tell. 0.99

02:28:07.120 It's beauty and the beast.

02:28:09.120 And so it's...

02:28:11.120 Because...

02:28:12.120 Well, there's no fun in taming someone who's already tame.

02:28:16.120 And what makes you think you really want someone who's tame anyways?

02:28:19.120 There's no interest in that.

02:28:20.120 Plus, when chaos manifests itself, what makes you think that someone tame is going to be good for anything?

02:28:29.120 And it's a real question.

02:28:30.120 And so that aggression is absolutely vital.

02:28:33.120 It's absolutely necessary.

02:28:35.120 But because it's incredibly dangerous, which of course it is, it has to be civilized.

02:28:40.120 And so what happens is that the archetypal female in these pornographic romances seduces and tames the aggressive male.

02:28:48.120 And that's her encounter with chaos.

02:28:51.120 Now, it's more...

02:28:53.120 Of course, females, they're more complicated. 1.00

02:28:56.120 And that's exactly how it is.

02:28:57.120 And it's no wonder, because their lives are more complicated.

02:29:00.120 But...

02:29:01.120 Okay, so back to this.

02:29:02.120 So...

02:29:03.120 So this map isn't predicated on the beauty and beast story.

02:29:07.120 And I don't know what to do about that at the moment.

02:29:10.120 But whatever.

02:29:11.120 We're gonna go with this map for the time being, because it's been the dominant one.

02:29:14.120 You have the archetypal son, who's hero and adversary.

02:29:17.120 That's Cain versus Abel, for example.

02:29:20.120 That's Abel versus Cain.

02:29:22.120 Hero versus adversary.

02:29:23.120 And then that dyad, that hostile brothers, that's the motif, mythological motif that that lays out. 0.88

02:29:29.120 It's a very common mythological motif.

02:29:32.120 That's nested inside the social order of order versus tyranny. 0.82

02:29:35.120 And that's nested inside the destruction and creation of nature.

02:29:39.120 And then all of that is nested inside the dragon of chaos.

02:29:44.120 And so it's interesting, because you say, this is...

02:29:51.120 You have the entity that knows, and that's the hero.

02:29:56.120 And then you have the structure within which that entity is operating.

02:30:00.120 And then you have the unknown.

02:30:02.120 It's the son.

02:30:03.120 It's the father.

02:30:04.120 It's the mother.

02:30:05.120 The mother stands for chaos.

02:30:06.120 But outside of that, there's this additional chaos that's paradoxical.

02:30:11.120 And you might say, well, why do you need to have two kinds of chaos?

02:30:17.120 And that's where things get ridiculously complicated.

02:30:21.120 The littler chaos is what's defined in relationship to what you already know.

02:30:26.120 So it's manageable in some sense.

02:30:28.120 It's that which, combined with what you already know, can bring something forth.

02:30:32.120 There's a sexual metaphor in that.

02:30:33.120 You take what you know.

02:30:34.120 You take something you don't know.

02:30:36.120 You put them together.

02:30:37.120 This isn't enough to overwhelm this.

02:30:39.120 And this isn't enough to suppress this.

02:30:41.120 The two come together in a creative union, and something new is born from it.

02:30:45.120 So that's the holy father, the holy mother, bang, and the hero that emerges out of that.

02:30:50.120 Okay, but then there's the chaos that's so overwhelming that it just demolishes everything.

02:30:55.120 And it's the ultimate source of what's known and what's unknown in relationship to what's known and the knower itself.

02:31:03.120 And that's symbolized by this dragon of chaos.

02:31:08.120 And I'm going to show you another way of thinking about it.

02:31:11.120 It's the most primordial of symbols.

02:31:18.120 Here's the Piagetian idea.

02:31:20.120 Child occupies a circumscribed domain of knowledge.

02:31:24.120 The child applies that domain of knowledge to the world.

02:31:27.120 Generally that works.

02:31:28.120 Sometimes it doesn't.

02:31:29.120 Something unexpected happens.

02:31:31.120 Okay.

02:31:32.120 And that unexpected thing can be of different cataclysmic significance, let's say.

02:31:38.120 If it's too overwhelming, the child will just cry.

02:31:41.120 And then the parent comes in and fixes up the anomalous thing.

02:31:44.120 But the child's investigating and playing.

02:31:47.120 You know, pushes his food off the table.

02:31:50.120 Or pushes his spoon off the table and watches it fall.

02:31:53.120 And is playing.

02:31:54.120 And he's playing at the edge of order and chaos.

02:31:56.120 Trying to expand his knowledge domains at the rate that is most palatable to him, we'll say.

02:32:06.120 So what's happening precisely?

02:32:09.120 Well, you can say that the child is in a specific place and is doing a specific thing with a specific outcome.

02:32:15.120 Or you can generalize from that.

02:32:17.120 And you can say, well, the child is occupying a structured...

02:32:21.120 Is occupying a structure.

02:32:23.120 A cognitive structure.

02:32:24.120 And there's that which is outside the cognitive structure.

02:32:28.120 And then you might say, well, how do you conceptualize that which is outside the cognitive structure?

02:32:33.120 And the answer to that is, you can't.

02:32:35.120 Because it's outside the cognitive structure.

02:32:37.120 But it still exists.

02:32:39.120 And so here's a way of conceptualizing it.

02:32:45.120 What's outside the cognitive structure is latent information.

02:32:50.120 It's a domain of latent information.

02:32:54.120 And information means in-formation.

02:32:57.120 Right?

02:32:58.120 And so what you're trying to do when you go beyond your knowledge structure is to look for new regularities in the environment that you can map and incorporate them into your structure.

02:33:07.120 But that domain of latent information, that's chaos itself.

02:33:12.120 And that's what's symbolized by the dragon of chaos.

02:33:15.120 That's why it's predator.

02:33:17.120 Multidimensional predator.

02:33:18.120 Plus thing that holds treasure at the same time.

02:33:21.120 Because in order for us to guard ourselves...

02:33:24.120 Here's a way of thinking about it.

02:33:25.120 In order for us to guard ourselves properly against the eternal existence of the absolute unknown.

02:33:33.120 We had to conceptualize it first.

02:33:35.120 I can say absolute unknown.

02:33:37.120 It's like, well, God, you think?

02:33:38.120 That's such a strange category.

02:33:40.120 It's the category of all things that have not yet been categorized.

02:33:44.120 It's like zero.

02:33:45.120 You know?

02:33:46.120 It's like the antithesis of zero.

02:33:47.120 It took people a long time to come up with the idea of zero.

02:33:50.120 It's such...

02:33:51.120 It's the category that contains nothing.

02:33:53.120 Well, what do you need a category like that for?

02:33:55.120 Well, to do mathematics, as it turns out.

02:33:57.120 This category is the category of all things that have not yet been mastered.

02:34:02.120 And your job is to be a master of the category of all things that have not yet been mastered.

02:34:07.120 And you're not going to do that until you can conceptualize it.

02:34:10.120 You conceptualize it with the gold-hoarding meta-predator.

02:34:17.120 Because that's your opponent.

02:34:18.120 And your job is not to...

02:34:20.120 Your job is to know how to confront that continually, and to extract out from it what it holds as value.

02:34:26.120 And that's the permanent solution to the problem.

02:34:29.120 Because it's never going to go away.

02:34:30.120 Right?

02:34:31.120 It's an eternal thing.

02:34:32.120 All you can do is master it the same way that a surfer masters a wave.

02:34:36.120 You master it in the process of mastering it.

02:34:40.120 There's no solution to the problem except the solution of continual mastery.

02:34:45.120 And so that's what you are.

02:34:46.120 You're a shape-transforming wizard that's doing its best to keep up with the continual transformation of that which you do not yet understand.

02:34:55.120 And I think there's absolutely no difference between that, by the way, and this thing that women chase in their pornographic fantasies. 0.92

02:35:03.120 It's the same thing.

02:35:05.120 It's the same thing.

02:35:06.120 The werewolf's a good example of that.

02:35:07.120 And the vampire.

02:35:08.120 Right?

02:35:09.120 There's this capacity for what's normal to transform into something that's extraordinarily aggressive, and to manifest mastery as a consequence of that.

02:35:18.120 So it's the transforming spirit, and it can transform itself without bound, and certainly in directions that aren't socially acceptable, let's say.

02:35:29.120 There's a line you want to be able to push.

02:35:32.120 And that's, again, why in the Harry Potter stories, Harry, first of all, is touched by evil, and second is always breaking rules.

02:35:38.120 Constantly.

02:35:39.120 Right?

02:35:40.120 And he's the most favored.

02:35:41.120 So interesting, because he's the most favored of Dumbledore, precisely because he knows when to break rules.

02:35:47.120 And so it's so interesting, because Dumbledore, of course, is the spirit of, let's call it the patriarchy, for all intents and purposes.

02:35:54.120 And his favorite is that child that refuses to abide by the rules of the patriarchy.

02:36:01.120 But only under the proper circumstances.

02:36:03.120 Right?

02:36:04.120 You don't sacrifice the old rule unless you have a reason for doing so.

02:36:09.120 The thing you're doing has to be better than the thing that you would be compelled to do by the old rule.

02:36:15.120 And then you have to dare to do it.

02:36:17.120 And you'd say, well, you're not going to do that unless you're already touched to some degree by the spirit of the snake.

02:36:22.120 And that's exactly right.

02:36:29.120 Okay, here's another way of thinking about it.

02:36:34.120 The winged reptile is a thing of the earth and a thing of the sky.

02:36:39.120 So you could think about it as a thing of matter and a thing of spirit.

02:36:43.120 Okay, so then the question is, well, what exactly does that mean?

02:36:46.120 It's a symbol of the union of spirit and matter.

02:36:49.120 Okay, so what's matter?

02:36:52.120 Well, the world.

02:36:54.120 But it isn't just the world.

02:36:55.120 It's also what matters.

02:36:58.120 And what's spirit?

02:36:59.120 Well, it's the thing that flies free of the material world that's above the ground, that's in the ethereal space that's up in heaven.

02:37:07.120 But it's also whatever it is in us that's psyche or spirit.

02:37:10.120 Okay, so then you might say, well, what's the origin of that?

02:37:14.120 Chaos.

02:37:15.120 And we can actually...

02:37:17.120 I don't want to put that out as a metaphysical proposition.

02:37:20.120 I want to put it out as an extension of what we've been saying.

02:37:23.120 So the child bootstraps itself up from nothing, roughly speaking.

02:37:29.120 Right?

02:37:30.120 Through its developmental processes.

02:37:31.120 It emerges.

02:37:32.120 It has a fully-fledged nervous system.

02:37:34.120 And it produces cognitive structures within which it exists and views the world.

02:37:38.120 But there's something outside of the cognitive structures.

02:37:41.120 And that's this latent information, we'll say.

02:37:43.120 Well, then we could say that latent information is properly conceptualized as matter and spirit.

02:37:49.120 Why?

02:37:50.120 Because when you investigate it, when you interact with it, you parse it into the world and into you.

02:37:57.120 That's what it means to be informed by your contact with the unknown.

02:38:00.120 It informs you.

02:38:02.120 It makes you more than you are.

02:38:04.120 So it's like you're...

02:38:05.120 That's the resource you're extracting from the absolute unknown.

02:38:09.120 It's the information that allows you to reconstitute your being.

02:38:12.120 At the same time, you differentiate your knowledge of the world.

02:38:16.120 So matter emerges from the latent information and what matters.

02:38:21.120 And you emerge from the latent information in this dialogical process that involves your continual exploration.

02:38:28.120 You build yourself and you build the world.

02:38:30.120 And so the dragon of chaos, the winged dragon of chaos that guards the gold,

02:38:35.120 is the latent information that, when you explore, enables you to build yourself and to differentiate the world.

02:38:42.120 I'll tell you a story to end this.

02:38:44.120 This is one of the great stories of mankind.

02:38:50.120 And it's not...

02:38:51.120 This isn't the only variant of this story.

02:38:54.120 There's many variants of it, but...

02:38:58.120 But this variant is useful for our purposes.

02:39:03.120 That's a story I stumbled across a long time ago.

02:39:07.120 I'm going to tell you the second story first, because I don't have the energy to tell you the first story.

02:39:12.120 So this is a story that the ancient Egyptians predicated their society on.

02:39:18.120 And to understand this story, the first thing you have to know is what the characters were.

02:39:22.120 And these characters were gods.

02:39:24.120 There's four of them.

02:39:25.120 Although the Egyptians had far more than four gods.

02:39:28.120 You might think of these as the central gods.

02:39:31.120 And you might think, what is a central god?

02:39:33.120 And then you might think, well, imagine that the gods compete for dominance across time.

02:39:38.120 In people's imaginations.

02:39:40.120 And some gods win.

02:39:42.120 And they occupy the primary position of dominance in the hierarchy.

02:39:46.120 In the dominance hierarchy of gods.

02:39:48.120 And those are ideals.

02:39:50.120 And ideals compete across time for dominance.

02:39:53.120 And they're embodied.

02:39:54.120 And so when diverse tribal people come together,

02:39:58.120 they throw all their gods into the ring and they fight across time.

02:40:02.120 And something emerges as a victor.

02:40:04.120 And that's the emergence of monotheism out of polytheism.

02:40:08.120 And it parallels the development of a unified morality within each of us as we develop across time.

02:40:21.120 And the god that emerges as dominant across time bears a substantial resemblance.

02:40:30.120 Imagine you have a set of gods in this locale that are competing across time and something emerges as dominant.

02:40:36.120 And then over here you have another set of gods that compete across time for dominance and something emerges.

02:40:40.120 You'll see major commonalities across the two things that emerge.

02:40:44.120 And the reason for that is because the process of emergence that gives rise to both of them is similar in both situations.

02:40:51.120 And that's part of what accounts for the cross-cultural similarity of high-order religious ideas.

02:40:59.120 All right, anyways, you need to know the characters.

02:41:02.120 Osiris.

02:41:03.120 Osiris is the old king.

02:41:07.120 He's Dumbledore for all intents and purposes.

02:41:10.120 He's the old king.

02:41:11.120 He's the spirit that established the Egyptian state when he was young.

02:41:17.120 He was a great hero, but now he's old.

02:41:19.120 And he's archaic and he's willfully blind. 0.74

02:41:22.120 That's Osiris.

02:41:24.120 He has a brother, Seth.

02:41:26.120 Seth is Set.

02:41:28.120 And Set is Satan.

02:41:30.120 Because the word Satan comes from the word Seth and Set via the Coptic Christians. 0.90

02:41:35.120 So he's a precursor to the Western idea of Satan.

02:41:40.120 You have Isis. 0.90

02:41:42.120 Isis is queen of the underworld.

02:41:44.120 And Isis was the goddess of a religious structure that prevailed across thousands and thousands of years.

02:41:53.120 Isis.

02:41:54.120 And you have Horus.

02:41:56.120 Horus is a falcon.

02:41:58.120 And the Egyptian eye. 0.55

02:42:00.120 Everyone knows that eye, right?

02:42:02.120 The eye with the open pupil.

02:42:04.120 That's Horus.

02:42:05.120 And Horus is a falcon because falcons can see way better.

02:42:08.120 They can see better than us.

02:42:10.120 They can see better than anything else except for perhaps eagles.

02:42:12.120 And they fly above everything.

02:42:14.120 Zazu in Lion King is Horus.

02:42:17.120 Right?

02:42:18.120 And Mufasa is Osiris.

02:42:21.120 And Scar is Seth.

02:42:27.120 And there's no specific representation of Isis.

02:42:30.120 But the closest there is in that story is probably the queen of the hyenas that's played by...

02:42:36.120 Who's the actress? 1.00

02:42:39.120 Hmm?

02:42:40.120 Whoopi Goldborg.

02:42:41.120 Yes.

02:42:42.120 Whoopi Goldborg.

02:42:43.120 That's right.

02:42:44.120 That's right.

02:42:45.120 Because they inhabit...

02:42:46.120 She's like the queen of the underworld. 1.00

02:42:47.120 Right?

02:42:48.120 She's the queen of the hyenas that live out among the death. 0.76

02:42:50.120 But...

02:42:51.120 Okay.

02:42:52.120 Anyways.

02:42:53.120 Seth.

02:42:54.120 Seth.

02:42:55.120 Isis.

02:42:56.120 And Horus.

02:42:57.120 Here's how the story goes.

02:42:59.120 Osiris is a great king.

02:43:02.120 He established the Egyptian state.

02:43:04.120 You could think about him as the embodiment of Egyptian custom and tradition.

02:43:09.120 You could think about him as the thing that the pyramid represents.

02:43:12.120 All right?

02:43:13.120 But he was great when he was young.

02:43:15.120 But he's not young anymore.

02:43:16.120 He's old.

02:43:17.120 And he's willfully blind.

02:43:18.120 And what that means is that he doesn't see what he could see.

02:43:21.120 He refuses to see what he could see.

02:43:23.120 Why is Osiris old and willfully blind?

02:43:26.120 Because that's what culture is.

02:43:28.120 It's a paternal spirit that's old and willfully blind.

02:43:31.120 And it's always that way.

02:43:32.120 Always that way.

02:43:33.120 And the reason for that is because it's a construction of the dead.

02:43:36.120 The dead aren't alive.

02:43:38.120 They can't...

02:43:39.120 They can't update themselves anymore.

02:43:41.120 And you inhabit their corpse.

02:43:43.120 And that's actually what happens in an earlier story that I'll tell you next week.

02:43:47.120 The early Mesopotamian gods inhabited the corpse of their father, roughly speaking.

02:43:52.120 Anyway, so Osiris was great when he was young.

02:43:56.120 But he isn't young anymore.

02:43:57.120 He's old.

02:43:58.120 And he's willfully blind.

02:43:59.120 He won't look where he knows he should look.

02:44:01.120 He doesn't have the energy.

02:44:02.120 Or maybe he doesn't have the spirit.

02:44:04.120 His brother Seth is not a good guy.

02:44:07.120 And Osiris knows it, but he underestimates his malevolence and power.

02:44:12.120 And so Seth wants to rule the kingdom.

02:44:14.120 So what does that mean?

02:44:15.120 It's easy.

02:44:16.120 Every stable society is threatened by willful blindness and malevolence.

02:44:22.120 Always.

02:44:23.120 Every bureaucracy has that proclivity.

02:44:26.120 To stagnate and to become blind.

02:44:28.120 That's why corporations die all the time. 0.94

02:44:30.120 That's why a Fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years.

02:44:34.120 It's why we have to have elections. 0.99

02:44:36.120 To stop the dead from staying in control for too long.

02:44:41.120 Seth...

02:44:42.120 Osiris turns a blind eye to Seth.

02:44:43.120 Seth is happy about that.

02:44:44.120 Same thing happens in the Lion King, roughly speaking.

02:44:47.120 Seth, one day, waits for Osiris to make a mistake and to be weak.

02:44:51.120 And he attacks him.

02:44:52.120 And he chops him up into pieces.

02:44:54.120 And he distributes the pieces across the entire Egyptian state.

02:44:57.120 In fact, the Egyptians regarded their provinces as pieces of Osiris' body.

02:45:02.120 Okay.

02:45:03.120 So...

02:45:04.120 Now, you can't kill Osiris because he's a god.

02:45:07.120 And why is he a god?

02:45:08.120 A god?

02:45:09.120 Because he represents the spirit of structure.

02:45:11.120 And there's always structure.

02:45:13.120 It can't be destroyed.

02:45:14.120 It always reconstitutes itself.

02:45:16.120 It can be hurt and broken into pieces.

02:45:19.120 Which is exactly what happens to Osiris.

02:45:21.120 Things fall apart.

02:45:22.120 Why?

02:45:23.120 Because they get old.

02:45:25.120 And because malevolence undermines them.

02:45:27.120 That's what the Egyptians were trying to sort out. 0.91

02:45:29.120 Okay.

02:45:30.120 So...

02:45:31.120 Seth distributes his Osiris all over Egypt, so he can't get himself back together. 0.80

02:45:36.120 Right?

02:45:37.120 Things fall apart, and they can't be brought back together.

02:45:40.120 But the spirit of Osiris still lives in the pieces.

02:45:43.120 So what happens?

02:45:44.120 Order is demolished.

02:45:46.120 What would you expect?

02:45:47.120 Chaos emerges.

02:45:48.120 That's Isis. 0.62

02:45:49.120 Isis is queen of the underworld.

02:45:52.120 She's Osiris' wife.

02:45:54.120 Order and chaos, just like the yin and the yang.

02:45:57.120 Order collapses.

02:45:59.120 Up comes the queen of the underworld. 1.00

02:46:01.120 She's looking for order.

02:46:02.120 Chaos cries out for order.

02:46:04.120 She's looking for order.

02:46:05.120 She goes all around Egypt, trying to put Osiris back together.

02:46:09.120 It's a state of chaos.

02:46:11.120 She finds this phallus.

02:46:12.120 She makes herself pregnant with it. 0.95

02:46:14.120 And what does that mean?

02:46:16.120 Well, it means...

02:46:17.120 It's like...

02:46:18.120 It's like...

02:46:19.120 Geppetto in the belly of the whale.

02:46:21.120 That thing has the potential to reemerge. 0.73

02:46:24.120 The thing that collapses into its pieces is still alive.

02:46:28.120 It can unite with the chaos and produce something new.

02:46:32.120 That's the story of the dissolution of structure into chaos and then its revivification.

02:46:38.120 Isis makes herself pregnant. 0.99

02:46:40.120 She goes back down to the underworld. 0.54

02:46:41.120 She gives birth to Horus.

02:46:43.120 Horus is the Egyptian eye. 0.97

02:46:45.120 He's the son of the great father and the great mother.

02:46:48.120 He's a messianic figure.

02:46:50.120 And in fact, much of the mythology that described Horus was extracted without much modification

02:46:58.120 and then attributed to Christ.

02:47:00.120 Very much...

02:47:01.120 And you can read about the parallels.

02:47:02.120 You can read about it online if you want.

02:47:04.120 There's any number of parallels.

02:47:06.120 And of course, there is the mythology that the Jews came out of Egypt.

02:47:09.120 And of course, the Christians emerged from the Jews. 0.90

02:47:11.120 And so there was a tremendous influence of Egyptian thinking on the development of these later ideas.

02:47:17.120 And you see pictures of Isis with Horus on her lap that are virtually identical in content and form

02:47:23.120 to the later pictures of Mary with the infant Christ.

02:47:26.120 And that's the holy mother of God and the hero.

02:47:29.120 It's not a Christian motif.

02:47:31.120 It's far deeper than a Christian motif.

02:47:33.120 It's a human motif.

02:47:34.120 So Isis, queen of the underworld, gives birth to Horus. 0.74

02:47:38.120 And Horus grows up outside the kingdom.

02:47:40.120 Why?

02:47:41.120 In the underworld.

02:47:42.120 Because that's what human beings do.

02:47:44.120 You're alienated from your culture.

02:47:46.120 Always.

02:47:47.120 Why? 0.97

02:47:48.120 It's old and dead and corrupt.

02:47:50.120 And so that leaves you growing up in chaos.

02:47:53.120 What would you call?

02:47:54.120 Alienated from your fundamental culture. 0.99

02:47:57.120 That's the story of adolescence.

02:47:59.120 Horus grows up.

02:48:01.120 He can see.

02:48:02.120 That's what differentiates him from Osiris.

02:48:04.120 That's why he's a falcon.

02:48:06.120 He goes and has a fight with Seth.

02:48:08.120 And now the difference between Osiris and Horus is that Horus does not underestimate Seth.

02:48:13.120 He knows exactly what he's up against.

02:48:14.120 He goes and has a terrible battle with him, trying to get his kingdom back.

02:48:18.120 Something else that's echoed in the Lion King story.

02:48:20.120 And while Horus and Seth are fighting, Seth tears out one of his eyes.

02:48:27.120 Now, why?

02:48:29.120 Because Seth is the embodiment of destruction and malevolence.

02:48:32.120 And no matter how conscious you are, if you encounter that, even voluntarily, the probability that it's going to damage your consciousness is extraordinarily high.

02:48:41.120 That's why people don't do it.

02:48:44.120 So the eye is torn out.

02:48:46.120 But Seth is defeated.

02:48:48.120 And Horus banishes him to the nether regions of the kingdom.

02:48:52.120 You can't kill him.

02:48:53.120 Why?

02:48:54.120 Because the malevolent, destructive force that threatens states never dies.

02:48:58.120 It's always there.

02:49:00.120 You can only remove it temporarily.

02:49:03.120 Now Horus is king.

02:49:06.120 Pharaoh, king, God.

02:49:08.120 He's got his eye.

02:49:09.120 And so you think, well, he's going to just pop that back in his head.

02:49:12.120 And then he's going to be able to lead...

02:49:15.120 He's going to be able to take his place at the uppermost pantheon of gods properly.

02:49:21.120 But that isn't what he does.

02:49:23.120 He takes his eye, and he goes back to the underworld.

02:49:26.120 Just like Pinocchio, going into the depths to rescue Geppetto.

02:49:29.120 And down there is the spirit of Osiris, who's extant as a kind of half-dead ghost.

02:49:36.120 And he gives Osiris his eye.

02:49:40.120 Now Osiris can see.

02:49:43.120 So what does that mean?

02:49:46.120 You go down into the chaotic...

02:49:48.120 When threatened by malevolence.

02:49:50.120 Even to the point of damage to your consciousness.

02:49:54.120 You go down into the chaos, and you find the dead spirit of your tradition.

02:49:59.120 And you give it vision.

02:50:01.120 And so, provided with vision, Osiris regenerates.

02:50:05.120 And then Osiris and Horus go back up to the world.

02:50:10.120 Linked together, and rule jointly.

02:50:14.120 And the Egyptians believed that the pharaoh, who had an immortal spirit.

02:50:19.120 Was the embodiment of the conjunction of Horus and Osiris.

02:50:23.120 And that's what gave him sovereignty.

02:50:26.120 And so you think about how brilliant that is.

02:50:28.120 The Egyptians are trying to puzzle out who should lead.

02:50:31.120 Who should be pharaoh?

02:50:33.120 And what do you have to be, if you're going to be pharaoh, in order for things to work?

02:50:37.120 You have to be awake to malevolence and chaos.

02:50:42.120 And you have to embody your tradition.

02:50:45.120 And that puts you at the highest pinnacle of the dominant structure.

02:50:50.120 And that's the same as...

02:50:52.120 It's the same thing.

02:50:54.120 It's the same thing as the battle between the gods across centuries or eons.

02:50:59.120 And the emergence of the highest possible moral virtue as a consequence of that competition.

02:51:06.120 It's the eye on the top of the pyramid.

02:51:09.120 Right?

02:51:10.120 It's...

02:51:11.120 You know, in the Washington Monument, there's a cap on the Washington Monument.

02:51:14.120 The top of the Washington Monument is a pyramid.

02:51:17.120 At the top of the pyramid is a cap.

02:51:18.120 It's made out of aluminum.

02:51:20.120 And the reason it's made out of aluminum is because when they made the Washington Monument, it was the most valuable metal known.

02:51:26.120 And so what does it mean?

02:51:27.120 It means there's a pyramid.

02:51:29.120 And there's something at the top of it.

02:51:30.120 But the thing that's at the top of the pyramid isn't the same as the rest of the pyramid.

02:51:35.120 That's the thing.

02:51:36.120 The pyramid exists.

02:51:38.120 There's a dominance hierarchy.

02:51:39.120 Something climbs up to the top.

02:51:40.120 But it's not just at the top of one pyramid.

02:51:43.120 It's at the top of all of them.

02:51:45.120 The thing that rises to the top of any given pyramid is the same thing that can dominate all pyramids.

02:51:51.120 It isn't good enough to be the best at a dominance hierarchy.

02:51:56.120 What you want to be is the best at the set of all possible dominance hierarchies.

02:52:01.120 Right.

02:52:02.120 And that's the thing that's gold at the top of the pyramid.

02:52:05.120 And that's the eye.

02:52:06.120 That's what the Egyptians figured out. 0.51

02:52:08.120 And what does that mean?

02:52:09.120 It means the thing that puts you at the top is attention.

02:52:14.120 Pay attention.

02:52:16.120 Keep your eyes open.

02:52:17.120 It's not the same as thinking.

02:52:19.120 It's not the same thing.

02:52:21.120 It's like watching.

02:52:23.120 And the thing about human beings is we can see.

02:52:27.120 We can see better than any other creature except birds of prey.

02:52:32.120 And so our capacity to see is, in fact, what we use in the world.

02:52:37.120 Our brains are actually organized around vision, unlike most animals.

02:52:40.120 Their brains are organized around smell.

02:52:42.120 Not us.

02:52:43.120 We can see.

02:52:44.120 We stand upright so we can see a long distance.

02:52:46.120 And in our ability to see is what saves us and what saves our communities.

02:52:50.120 And that's what these stories are trying to portray.

02:52:55.120 And you might say, well, why didn't people just say so?

02:52:57.120 And the answer to that is because they didn't know.

02:53:01.120 It took a long time to figure it out.

02:53:04.120 Forever.

02:53:05.120 It's taken forever to figure it out.

02:53:08.120 It's part of what I hoped when I wrote this book.

02:53:14.120 And part of the reason that I'm teaching it is because it seems to me that it would be useful for everyone to actually understand this.

02:53:21.120 Instead of just having it told as a story.

02:53:23.120 It's like, that's great, man.

02:53:24.120 Yes.

02:53:25.120 You need the story.

02:53:26.120 But why not also just understand it?

02:53:30.120 So...

02:53:31.120 Well, so that's what we're trying to do.

02:53:35.120 We're trying to understand this.

02:53:38.120 So...

02:53:39.120 That's good enough for today.

02:53:50.120 If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

02:53:59.120 Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

02:54:04.120 See jordanbpeterson.com for audio ebook and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

02:54:10.120 Remember to check out jordanbpeterson.com slash personality for information on his personality course.

02:54:16.120 I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

02:54:18.120 If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review.

02:54:21.120 Talk to you next week.

02:54:34.120 See you next week.

02:54:36.120 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - September 06, 2020

135. Maps of Meaning 07： Images of Story & Metastory

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