The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 144. Carl Jung (Part 1)

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00:02:35.060 So, I think the best way to continue to walk you through the thinkers that we're planning to cover

00:02:45.680 is to do that with examples. They stick better, and they're more interesting, and it's very difficult

00:02:52.420 to understand Jung outside of a narrative context, and so I'm going to walk you through The Lion King

00:02:57.900 today. How many of you have seen The Lion King? Yes, so how many of you haven't? Right, okay, so you

00:03:05.680 obviously were raised in a box somewhere out in the middle of the field. So, anyways, you know,

00:03:11.540 it's an amazingly popular animated movie. I think it was the most highest-grossing animated movie ever

00:03:17.560 made until Frozen, which I absolutely detested. But The Lion King is actually consciously influenced

00:03:25.380 by archetypes as well as unconsciously influenced by them. So, it's a bit of a cheat, I would say,

00:03:30.660 in some sense, but it doesn't, I don't, for the purposes that we're using it for, I think it's

00:03:34.880 just fine. And so, partly what you might think about is that it's relationship to archetypal themes

00:03:42.720 that made it so overwhelmingly popular. Same being the case with, say, books and movies like Harry

00:03:49.140 Potter or the entire Marvel series. The Marvel series is quite interesting. I know somebody who wrote

00:03:54.340 for Batman and for Wolverine, I know Batman isn't a Marvel comic, but one of the things that he told

00:03:59.900 me that was quite interesting was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their

00:04:04.780 own, they have a backstory, which becomes part of the mythology that's collectively held by the

00:04:09.220 readers. And if you, you can invent an alternative universe where you can muck about with the backstory,

00:04:14.320 but otherwise you better stick with it or the readers are going to write you and tell you that

00:04:17.480 you've got the story wrong. And so, there's a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the

00:04:21.680 readers after these things take on a life of their own. And so, and of course, the, they,

00:04:27.440 they tend to, the, the comic books in particular tend to, tend towards mythological themes very,

00:04:32.500 very rapidly. And so, anyways, Carl Jung was a fascinating person, I think. You can read his

00:04:38.700 biography, autobiography slash biography, which is called Memories, Dreams and Reflections, which

00:04:43.840 in many ways I think is an unfortunate book because it's usually the only book that people read that's,

00:04:49.020 that is more or less by Jung. But, and it is more popularly accessible, which is probably a good

00:04:55.520 thing, but it's also, it's not as rigorous as his other books. And so, the problem with someone like

00:05:02.420 Jung is you kind of have to read him as much as you can in the original because interpreting him is not

00:05:07.400 a very straightforward matter. He was a very visionary person, by which I mean he had an incredible

00:05:13.840 visual imagination. And he used that a lot. He used it in his therapy practice. I believe that most of

00:05:19.420 his therapy clients were high in trait openness. I have a lot of clients who are high in trait

00:05:24.860 openness. They kind of seek me out because I'm high in trait openness and, you know, they watch my

00:05:29.180 videos and that sort of thing and they're interested in what I'm doing. And many of them are, are astute

00:05:34.980 dreamers and prolific dreamers. And many open people, in my experience, have archetypal dreams.

00:05:40.340 Whereas people who are lower in openness, they either don't dream at all or they don't remember

00:05:44.600 their dreams as much or they're not interested in them and they're not interested in the

00:05:48.760 mythological underpinnings of them. So, I've taught psychology, roughly speaking, to many different

00:05:55.980 types of people, including lawyers and lawyers and physicians. And they tend to be higher in trait

00:06:00.940 conscientiousness than in openness. And they're much more interested in the practical applications of

00:06:06.040 psychology and maybe the big five theories than they are in the narrative underpinnings. And

00:06:09.860 you know, people say that when they went to Jung, they had Jungian dreams, but I don't. And then

00:06:15.820 when they went to Freud, they had Freudian dreams. And I don't really believe that's exactly true. I

00:06:19.920 think it was a matter of selection bias, a priori selection bias on the part of the people who were

00:06:24.560 likely to go see either of those two. And so, but I've been struck by some clients in particular,

00:06:31.340 how unbelievably continually they can generate deep archetypal dreams with a really coherent narrative

00:06:37.520 structure. It's really phenomenal and how revealing those dreams are. Problem with archetypal dreams is

00:06:43.020 that they're not really personal, right? So, if you're looking for a personal way out of a situation,

00:06:47.420 an archetypal dream doesn't help you that much because it gives you the general pattern rather

00:06:51.180 than a specific solution to your problem. But a good dream will do both at once.

00:06:54.920 Anyways, Jung was an astute student of Freud's. We'll cover Freud next, although generally in

00:07:03.100 personality courses, the order is reversed. Freud first and then Jung because of their temporal,

00:07:09.520 of the temporal order of their thought. But I think it's better to start with Jung because

00:07:14.040 it's as if Freud excavated into the basement and then Jung excavated into many, many floors underneath

00:07:21.160 the basement of the mind. And so, from, if you're transitioning from an archaic understanding of

00:07:26.860 archaic modes of thinking towards Freud, it's better to go through Jung because Jung is, I think,

00:07:32.120 I think Freudian theory is a subset of Jungian theory fundamentally, just like Newtonian physics

00:07:36.860 is a subset of Einsteinian physics. And I think that Freud knew that even to some degree, although he was

00:07:43.120 very much opposed to any sort of religious thinking, mythological, religious thinking, I would say.

00:07:49.080 He was a real 19th century materialist. And he didn't like the fact that Jung's work started

00:07:54.320 to delve into religious themes in a manner that actually, in some sense, validated those themes.

00:08:00.520 And so, that's actually why they split. They split when Jung published a book called Symbols

00:08:04.100 of Transformation. Jung was also a deep student of Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote a book called Thus

00:08:09.600 Spake Zarathustra, which is kind of an Old Testament revelation poetry kind of book. It's a strange

00:08:14.940 one. And I wouldn't recommend, if you want to read Nietzsche, that you start with that one. But

00:08:18.940 most people do. But Jung did a seminar on Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is about, I've got this wrong,

00:08:26.220 it's somewhere between 700 and 1100 pages long. And it only covers the first third of the book. And

00:08:31.380 Thus Spake Zarathustra is actually quite a short book. And so, well, so you can imagine how much Jung had

00:08:37.940 to know about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words. And Nietzsche was a, well,

00:08:44.260 an absolute genius. And Jung was actually trying to answer the question that Nietzsche posed,

00:08:50.940 fundamentally. Which is why, part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a

00:08:56.000 Freudian. He was, so Nietzsche basically stated, let's say explicitly, that scientific empiricism

00:09:04.020 slash rationalism had resulted in the death of the mythological tradition of the West, roughly

00:09:09.220 speaking. That's Nietzsche's comment on the death of God. And in that comment, he also said that the

00:09:15.240 fact that God was dead was going to produce tremendous ideational and social historical

00:09:20.780 upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people. That, that, he didn't say all

00:09:25.840 that in one place. It's, it's spread between, part of it's in will to power. And, and I can't

00:09:31.980 remember the source of the other one. Some of it's referenced in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

00:09:36.280 But Nietzsche believed that in order to overcome the collapse of traditional values, with the idea,

00:09:42.080 say, of God as its cornerstone, people would have to become creatures that could produce their own

00:09:48.180 values as a replacement, that we would have to become capable of generating autonomous values. And

00:09:54.060 Jung, but, but that's easier said than done, because trying to impose a set of values on yourself is

00:10:00.080 very difficult because you're not very cooperative. And you know that if you try to get yourself to do

00:10:04.080 something that you don't want to do, or that's hard, you just won't do it. And so it's not like

00:10:08.600 you can just invent your own values and then go along with that. That just doesn't work. And so what

00:10:12.980 Jung and the Freudians did, Freud first, I would say, was to start looking into people's fantasies,

00:10:19.060 autonomous fantasies, unconscious fantasies, to see if they could, to, and, and discovered that

00:10:25.340 values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies. And you can imagine, for example, if

00:10:31.340 you've become enamored of someone, that you might start fantasizing about them. And if you read off

00:10:36.020 the fantasy, then you can tell what you're after and what you're up to. And so the motivational force

00:10:40.540 composes the fantasy. And Freud was more interested in that in a personal sense. So in, in so far as

00:10:47.120 your fantasies might reveal your personal history. So for example, if you have a burst of negative emotion

00:10:52.140 in a clinical session, there'll be a fantasy that goes along with that. And an association of ideas

00:10:56.480 that, that, that kind of manifest themselves of their own accord. And they're not necessarily

00:11:01.160 coherent and logical. They're linked by emotion. That's the free association technique in Freudian

00:11:05.820 psychology. And they also might manifest themselves in dreams and fantasies. And so Freud started doing

00:11:10.620 the analysis of these spontaneous, let's call them fantasies. And Jung linked that more. Freud did this

00:11:17.420 first with the Oedipal complex, but then Jung linked up spontaneous fantasies and dreams with,

00:11:23.200 with myth, mythology and fantasy across history. And of course, Piaget did the same thing from a

00:11:29.480 completely different standpoint. So, and then a lot of that's embedded in this movie. So we might as

00:11:33.260 well just walk through it. So the first question might be, well, why is a lion a king, right? And

00:11:40.220 because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king. And of course, a lion is an apex predator.

00:11:44.980 And so, which means it's at the top of the food chain, roughly speaking. And it's sort of golden

00:11:49.540 like the sun. So that's also useful. And you know, it has that mane that makes it look majestic. And of

00:11:54.600 course, it's very physically powerful. And it's, it's, and, and, and it's intimidating. And so it's

00:12:01.140 something that you run away from as well, right? Or you're awestruck by. So the fact that, you know,

00:12:05.880 it's like snail king just doesn't make any sense, right? But lion king, that works. And, and you got to

00:12:10.900 think about those things because it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king.

00:12:14.980 But a, but a snail wouldn't, but it fits in with the, your metaphorical understanding of the way the

00:12:20.700 world works much better. And so the lion king makes sense. And well, and when things like that,

00:12:26.260 that aren't rationally self-evident make sense, you have to ask yourself in what metaphorical

00:12:31.660 context do they make sense? So you have the lion king. Now the movie opens with a sunrise and the

00:12:37.920 sunrise is equivalent to the dawn of consciousness. So that in many archaic stories, the sun was a hero,

00:12:43.760 like Horus, if I remember correctly, was a solar king. But, but Apollo in particular, but Apollo,

00:12:52.860 Greek, Greek myth. The idea was that the sun was the, was the, the hero, the hero who illuminated the

00:13:00.960 sky in the day. And so heroism and illumination and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically.

00:13:06.780 And then at night, what would happen would be that sun would fight with the, with the dragon of

00:13:10.920 darkness basically, or with evil all night and then rise again, victorious in the morning. And so it's a

00:13:16.760 death and rebirth theme. And it's very, very, very, very common mythological theme. And the reason the sun is

00:13:22.300 associated with consciousness, as far as I can tell, is that we're not nocturnal creatures, right? We're awake

00:13:27.360 during the day and we're very, very visual. Half our brain is devoted to visual processing and to be

00:13:32.320 enlightened and illuminated means to devout, to move towards a higher state of consciousness. And we

00:13:37.840 naturally use light symbolism to, to represent that, you know, like the light bulb on the top

00:13:43.060 of someone's head. You know, you don't say, I was in darkened when you learn something new. And so

00:13:48.860 again, that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that, that's, I think, deeply biologically

00:13:54.700 grounded, but, but also socially grounded. So it's a new day. It's the start of a new day. And a day,

00:14:00.940 day actually means like French, journey means day, the day trek in some sense. And how to comport

00:14:08.180 yourself during the day is the fundamental question. The day is the canonical unit of time.

00:14:13.580 And so you have to know how to comport yourself during the day. And part of that is a journey from

00:14:17.900 consciousness into unconsciousness. And that's, and that return. So like Apollo, you, you, you descend

00:14:24.140 into unconsciousness and then reemerge. And of course, that's not metaphorical at all. That's exactly what

00:14:29.040 you do. You descend into the underworld of darkness and dreams and strange things happened

00:14:33.880 down there. And so, and then you awake, if you're fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your state

00:14:38.560 of mind, you awake in the morning and it's a new day, right? And so the dream world seems to help you

00:14:45.180 sort out your thoughts, by the way, if you keep people awake for an extended period of time, then

00:14:49.860 they, they, they, they, they lose their minds, essentially. The dream, the unconsciousness and the

00:14:56.260 dream state seem absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health. Although people

00:14:59.740 don't exactly understand why it looks like dreams might help you forget because forgetting is really

00:15:05.380 important. You just can't re you just can't remember everything that happened to you gets

00:15:09.380 so damn cluttered that, that you, you'd fall apart. And so you reduce things to the gist. And when

00:15:14.600 you're doing that, you pack them in, it's like you compress them in some sense, you pack them into a

00:15:18.900 smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant. And the dream seems to not be part of

00:15:24.020 that. It also seems to be a place where you deeply encode learning that might have been done that

00:15:28.040 day, which is something that Freud actually noted in his interpretation of dreams, which is a great

00:15:32.340 book. If you're ever going to read a book that Freud wrote, the interpretation of dreams is the proper

00:15:36.680 one to read. In my estimation, it's a brilliant book. And it laid the groundwork for a lot of what

00:15:41.120 Jung did. And so anyways, that's how the movie starts. And the animals come out into the light. And

00:15:46.240 that's, that's a metaphor for the dawning of consciousness to come out into the light where you can see.

00:15:51.000 And so this is a baby giraffe and babies emerge into the light, roughly speaking. And that's,

00:15:56.760 that's, like I said, that, that's a representation of, of the emergence or expansion of consciousness.

00:16:02.120 And so this is how the movie starts. It starts with very expansive music as well, celebratory music.

00:16:07.420 And that's to indicate to you, to set the tone for the movie, but also to indicate to you

00:16:11.640 that you're about to watch something of import. And the opening scene is actually a real scene of

00:16:16.920 genius in my estimation. The animators did a great job, and it goes along very nicely with the music.

00:16:21.580 And so you see this lit place, and then you see this rock, pride rock, I believe it's called,

00:16:27.500 in the middle of it. And it's the center. It's the center. It's like the spot that's marked by a

00:16:31.780 cathedral, which is an X or a cross, and you're right in the middle of that. And so it's the center

00:16:36.160 of the light. That's another way of thinking about it. Or it's the center of the territory, or it's the home,

00:16:41.200 or it's the fire in the wilderness, or it's the tree in the center where you live. It's all of

00:16:46.720 those things at once. It's inhabited territory with you at the center. And the rock represents

00:16:52.100 tradition, because people tend to inscribe their traditions on rock, right? Or to build them into

00:16:58.860 rock like the pyramids. So you could think about that as a pyramid, as an Egyptian pyramid, and it's

00:17:03.360 the right way to think about it. You could also think about it as a dominance hierarchy with the apex

00:17:07.560 predator at the top, and that's the lion. So it makes sense that the lion would be in the light

00:17:12.180 on the rock. That's a pyramid in the middle of the territory, right? That makes sense to people

00:17:16.840 psychologically. So, because that's what the state is. The state is a hierarchy with something at the

00:17:23.000 top that occupies a space that has been illuminated and made safe by consciousness. That's what the state

00:17:28.840 is. And that's all represented right away in this movie. And all the animals come to observe what's

00:17:35.220 happening in the pyramid and at the top, because they need to know what happens at the top, partly

00:17:40.260 to organize their world, that's the pyramid, but also to see how the organizational principle works.

00:17:46.320 And that's why they're all gathering. And so they're gathering in the light in the morning

00:17:49.840 to observe something new that's going to be born that's of significant importance, and that's the

00:17:55.500 birth of the hero. And this little bird here, Zazu, right? Zazu is like Horus, the Egyptian god,

00:18:02.200 who was a falcon and an eye at the same time. And he is the king's eye in this, king's eyes in this

00:18:08.720 movie, right? He flies up above, outside of the pyramid, so he can see everything that goes on

00:18:13.460 and reports to the king. And so partly what that indicates is that the thing that's at the top of

00:18:18.580 the pyramid needs to be an eye. And that's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the

00:18:23.460 back of the American dollar bill. It's exactly the same idea. Or if you look at the Washington

00:18:27.580 monument, which is a pyramid at the top, you see that it's capped with aluminum. And you think,

00:18:32.380 well, why aluminum? And the answer to that was it was the most expensive metal at that time.

00:18:36.540 And so the notion is, is that at the top of the pyramid, there's something that actually doesn't

00:18:40.500 belong in the pyramid. It's something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything.

00:18:46.080 And so you could think about it this way, is that you're going to be in a lot of pyramids in your

00:18:49.620 life. Dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that. And they'll arrange

00:18:54.900 themselves into a hierarchy and there'll be something at the top. And the top is the thing

00:18:59.400 that can do well across hierarchies. So it's not stuck in any one pyramid. And it's partly associated

00:19:05.380 with vision and the ability to see a long, long distance. Also to see what you don't want to see

00:19:10.840 and to report that back to the king. And so the king, fundamentally, as far as you guys are concerned

00:19:17.260 from a psychological perspective, that's your super ego. That's the Freudian perspective. Or it might be

00:19:22.320 the moral system by which you comport yourself. But your eyes are the thing that updates that,

00:19:27.740 right? You need it to orient yourself in the world. You need it to orient yourself among other people.

00:19:32.700 But your eye and your capacity to pay attention, especially to what you don't want to pay attention

00:19:37.900 to, is the thing that continually updates that model, exactly as Piaget laid out with children.

00:19:43.400 So, and all of that's packed into the imagery in the first, you know, few minutes of this movie.

00:19:48.220 And that's actually why it relies on imagery. Why this isn't just a lecture by a psychologist,

00:19:53.640 you know, when you go to see the movie. It's because the images, they say a picture is worth

00:19:57.660 a thousand words, but, and there's thousands of pictures in this movie, obviously. But maybe a

00:20:02.840 picture is worth more words than you can actually use to describe it, if the picture is profound enough.

00:20:09.420 And we have many, many pictures like that. Any deeply symbolic picture is virtually inexhaustible

00:20:15.260 in terms of its, semantically, with regards to its explanation. Images are very, very dense. So

00:20:21.680 anyways, the animals all gather. Now, the animals are also id representations from the Freudian

00:20:26.720 perspective. And the id is the part of your psyche from the Freudian perspective that's

00:20:31.160 animalistic and full of implicit drives, sexual and aggressive in particular, as far as Freud was

00:20:38.920 concerned. And that's because those two drives, say, unlike thirst or hunger, are much more difficult

00:20:44.500 to integrate into proper social being and tend to be excluded and left unconscious. And so a lot of

00:20:50.980 Freudian psychology, and I would say psychology in general, is focused on the integration of sexual

00:20:56.760 impulses and aggressive impulses into the psyche. I would also add to that anxiety, because anxiety is

00:21:02.600 also a major problem. Anxiety and negative emotion that's pain-like is also a major problem for

00:21:08.740 people. And so the animals represent those id-like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically

00:21:14.520 before you can become an integrated being in precisely the Piagetian manner, right? Because Piaget would say,

00:21:20.260 well, the child comes into the world with reflexes, and maybe a more modern psychologist would also

00:21:25.200 concentrate on the implicit motivations. And those have to be organized inside the child into some kind of

00:21:31.380 hierarchy of unity before the child can organize him or herself into the broader unity of the state. And that's

00:21:37.800 basically what's being represented here. And so, so Zazu, the eyes of the king, comes to check out the

00:21:45.560 king, and that's, what's his name? What's the king's name? Mufasa, yeah. And he's a very regal-looking

00:21:52.440 person, lion. And he stands up straight and tall, and that means that he's high in serotonin, because

00:21:58.200 serotonin governs postural flexion. And if so, if you're dominant and near the top of hierarchies,

00:22:02.960 you tend to expand so that you look bigger than you could if you shrunk down. And so,

00:22:07.680 if you're a low-dominant person, you wander around like this so that you look small and weak,

00:22:12.520 and you don't pose a threat to anybody. But if you're at the top, you expand yourself so that

00:22:16.300 you can command the space. And that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture. And if you

00:22:21.120 look at his facial expression, you see that it's quite severe. Like, he's capable of kindness,

00:22:26.780 but he's also harsh and judgmental. And that's what society is like. That's what the super-ego is like.

00:22:31.340 And what that means is that he's integrated his aggression. And I've seen this happen in my

00:22:35.340 clinical clients, when they come in and they're too agreeable. They look like Simba looks later in

00:22:40.700 the movie when he's an adolescent, and he's sort of like a deer in the headlights. Everything is

00:22:45.020 coming in and nothing is coming out. But when the person integrates their shadow and gets the

00:22:50.040 aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality, their face is hardened. And if you look

00:22:54.440 at people, you can tell, because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and innocent,

00:22:58.560 and the people who, well, a hyper-aggressive person will look mean and cruel. But I've seen

00:23:04.260 people's face change in the course of therapy, men and women. And what happens is they start to look

00:23:12.140 more mature. And it's more like they're judging the world as well as interacting with it properly

00:23:17.880 once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them. It's very, very necessary. And that's part of

00:23:22.820 the incorporation of the Jungian shadow or the incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian

00:23:27.740 perspective. But old Muzafa there, he's already got that. He's already got that covered.

00:23:35.600 So, and he's capable, like obviously he can smile and he's capable of the full range of

00:23:40.200 expressions, but he's a tough looking character. And now this, the baboon here, who's supposed to be

00:23:46.220 basically just a fool when the story was first written, he turned into what's essentially a shaman

00:23:50.560 across time. And so he represents the self from the Jungian perspective. Now the self is

00:23:56.400 everything you could be across time. So you imagine that there's you and there's the potential

00:24:01.160 inside you, whatever that is, you know, and potential is an interesting idea because it's

00:24:06.100 represents something that isn't yet real, yet we act like it's real. Because people will say to you,

00:24:11.080 you should live up to your potential. And that potential is partly what you could be if you

00:24:15.960 interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information, right? Because you build

00:24:21.720 yourself out of the information in the Piagetian sense. But it's deeper than that too, because we

00:24:26.280 know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment, new genes turn on in your

00:24:31.000 nervous system. They encode for new proteins. And so you're full of biological potential that won't be

00:24:36.880 realized unless you move yourself around in the world into different challenging circumstances. And

00:24:42.200 that'll turn on different circuits. So it's not merely that you're incorporating information from

00:24:46.640 the outside world in the constructivist sense. It's that by exposing yourself to different

00:24:51.080 environments, you put different physiological demands on yourself all the way down to the

00:24:56.440 genetic level. And that manifests new elements of you. And so one of the things that happens to

00:25:02.140 people, and this is a very common cultural notion, is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point

00:25:07.740 to somewhere central. And that would be, say, like the rock in the Pride Rock in the Lion King.

00:25:12.940 Because you take yourself out of your dopey little village, and that's just a little bounded you that

00:25:17.560 everyone knows and that isn't very expanded. And then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the

00:25:22.520 central place. And while you do that, you have adventures and they toughen you and pull more out

00:25:27.420 of you. Like partly because you're becoming informed, which means information. It means you're becoming

00:25:34.220 more organized at every level of analysis. But there's also more of you too. And so that's a very

00:25:39.200 classic idea. And then in cathedrals in Europe, especially at Chartres, there's a big maze on the floor,

00:25:44.680 a circular maze, which is a symbolic representation of the pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it.

00:25:50.260 And so it's a huge circle divided into quadrants, which is a Jungian Mandela. And you enter the maze

00:25:55.920 at one point, and then you have to walk through the entire maze, north, east, west, and south,

00:26:01.040 before you get to the center. And the center is symbolized by a flower that's carved in stone.

00:26:06.240 It looks like this. It's big, this maze, eh? It's large, so that you can walk it. And that's a symbolic

00:26:11.880 pilgrimage. It takes you to the center. That's the center of the cross, because it's in a cathedral,

00:26:16.520 and that's the point of acceptance of voluntary suffering. That's what that means. And so you walk

00:26:22.640 through, Jung called that a circumambulation. You go to all the quarters of the world to find yourself.

00:26:29.000 And so, well, the self is the baboon in this particular, in this, I think he's a mandrill,

00:26:34.840 actually, in this particular representation. And he lives in the tree. He lives in the tree of life.

00:26:39.820 It's a baobab tree in this particular. So he's the spirit that inhabits the tree of life. And he's

00:26:44.940 the eternal wise man. That's a way of thinking. So is the king. But he's sort of a superordinate

00:26:50.960 king or an outside king, in some sense. He's the repository of ancient wisdom. And the king is the

00:26:56.720 manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the world. And so they're friends. And that

00:27:01.160 means that the king is a good king. Because if the king was a bad king, he would be alienated from

00:27:07.180 himself. And that would make him shallow and one-dimensional. And that would make him a bad

00:27:11.720 ruler. No union with the traditions of the past. To be a good ruler, you have to rescue your father

00:27:17.200 from the underworld. And integrate that. And of course, that's a main theme in this entire movie.

00:27:23.080 So, okay. So the hero is born. And that's what the rising sun represents. And everybody goes,

00:27:28.340 oh, isn't that cute? And the reason for that is because you're biologically wired,

00:27:32.560 especially if you're agreeable, to respond with caretaking activity to cuteness. And cuteness is

00:27:38.300 button nose, big eyes, small mouth, round head, symmetry, and helpless movements. And you'll

00:27:44.420 respond to that across the entire class of mammalian creatures. Even maybe down to lizards,

00:27:50.080 you know. Isn't that cute? No, it's a lizard. But, you know. So that's an archetype as well. That's

00:27:56.860 the archetype of the vulnerable hero newly born. And that should invoke a desire mostly on the part

00:28:06.340 of males to encourage and mostly on the part of females to nurture. But males and females are

00:28:12.380 quite cross-wired among human beings. And so there's encouragement from the women. And there's

00:28:16.900 also nurturing from the men. And of course, those curves in some sense overlap. So there's more

00:28:22.540 nurturing males and more encouraging females. But that's roughly the archetype. And so he looks cute

00:28:27.940 and everybody goes, oh, and that's because the animators nailed that. They caught the essential

00:28:31.860 features of cuteness. And he's also in the light, right? And so then the shaman, Mandrill,

00:28:39.360 basically baptizes him. That's essentially what he's doing. And he uses something that's symbolic of

00:28:44.040 the sun, which is this ripe fruit. And fruits are symbolic of the sun because, of course, they need the

00:28:49.000 sun to ripen. And they're round like the sun. And people know that they need light. And so

00:28:55.020 anyways, the animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to break and

00:29:01.500 the sun. And so he's also being baptized into the sun. And that means that he's being baptized into the

00:29:06.460 light or that he's being transformed into a hero. And so then everyone's happy. And that's basically,

00:29:12.120 you know, the divine father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self who's taking care of

00:29:16.940 that. And there's a union between the baby and the wise old man because the baby is all the potential

00:29:22.740 that's realized in the self. And there's an old idea that the way to full maturity is to find what

00:29:30.600 you lost as a child and regain it. It's a brilliant idea. And that echoes through myths all over the

00:29:36.520 world. And that means you have to regain your capacity. Once you're disciplined and you know how

00:29:41.200 to do something, you have to regain your capacity for play and sort of for wide-eyed wonder. And that's

00:29:46.220 maybe the childlike part of your spirit. And the reintegration of that childlike part with the

00:29:52.260 adult grown-up part revivifies the adult grown-up part and allows the child to manifest itself in a

00:29:58.460 disciplined way in the world. And so that's all being hinted at there. And then they show the shaman

00:30:05.080 shows the baby, the newborn hero to the crowd. And it's very cool what happens in the movie. All the

00:30:10.360 animals spontaneously kneel. And I can give you an example of that kind of spontaneous action in a

00:30:15.420 crowd. So imagine you're watching a gymnastics performance, right? And it's like a high-level,

00:30:23.120 world-class performance. And someone comes out there and they do this routine that's just dead

00:30:27.600 letter perfect, you know? And they stop and everybody claps like mad, right? And it's perfect.

00:30:33.440 And so then the next contestant comes out and they're basically in real trouble because, you

00:30:37.020 know, this person just got 9.7 out of 10 and it was perfect. So how do you beat perfect? And so

00:30:42.960 they come out there and then you watch them and you're right on the edge of your seat because what

00:30:46.440 you see them do is something extraordinarily disciplined, just like the last person did.

00:30:51.700 But they push themselves into that zone that's just beyond their disciplined capacity. And you

00:30:56.640 can tell every second you're watching it that they're that close to disaster. And so you're right

00:31:01.280 on the edge of your seat and you know that they're doing a high-wire act without a net.

00:31:05.940 And so when they finally land triumphantly, you'll all stand up and clap spontaneously. And it's because

00:31:11.160 you've just witnessed someone who's a master at playing a game, who's also a master at improving

00:31:16.560 how to play that game at the same time. And people love that more than anything to see

00:31:20.620 that. It's just absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to the human spirit. And you'll

00:31:25.200 respond automatically and unconsciously to that. And that's why that's an analogy to why the animals

00:31:31.060 all spontaneously bow when now what happens is they, he shows the lion king and the sun breaks

00:31:38.100 and shines on the hero at the same time. So there's this concordance between an earthly

00:31:43.420 event and a so-called heavenly event. And Jung would call that synchronous. That's his idea

00:31:48.480 of synchronicity, where something important subjectively is also signified by something

00:31:53.760 that appears in narrative keeping with that in the outside world. That's one of the most

00:31:58.440 controversial elements of his theory. But I've experienced a variety of synchronous events

00:32:03.280 and they often happen in therapy, especially around dreams. But they're very hard to communicate

00:32:08.320 because they're so specific to the context in which it occurs, they're very difficult to

00:32:13.080 explain. So anyways, it's the synchronous event that make drops all the animals to their

00:32:18.360 knees. So there's the sun coming out and there's shining on them and all the primates go mad for

00:32:24.100 that. And that's, of course, exactly what we do when we applaud. And then we switch to Scar.

00:32:29.560 Now, Scar is Mufasa's brother, evil brother. The king always has an evil brother. And so does the

00:32:36.300 hero. The hero always has an adversary. And the reason for that is the king always has an evil

00:32:40.800 brother. And that means that the state always has a tyrannical element. And the tyrannical element

00:32:46.580 exists for two reasons. One is the state deteriorates of its own accord. And that's an entropy

00:32:54.000 observation. What that means is that the state is a construction of the past, right? But the

00:32:59.500 present isn't the same as the past. And to the degree that the past is mismatched with the

00:33:04.860 demands of the present, then it's tyrannical. It's malfunctioning. And so it's a continual

00:33:11.920 problem with the state. It's always two steps behind the environment. And so then that means

00:33:17.980 that the awareness of living people has to update the state. And so Eliade, Mircea Eliade, who's a great

00:33:23.700 historian of religions, looked at flood stories from all over the world because there are flood stories

00:33:28.200 from all over the world. Partly because there are floods all over the world. But there's a

00:33:32.420 psychological reason too. So you imagine that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane, right? A

00:33:37.940 flood. And you say, well, that was an act of God. But then you think, wait a second, wait a second.

00:33:43.100 They knew those damn dikes weren't going to hold. They knew they weren't built strong enough.

00:33:47.160 They took the money that was allocated to the dikes and spent it badly. And that was willful blindness.

00:33:52.060 And so you could say that it was God who caused the flood, so to speak, metaphorically.

00:33:56.840 But you could also say that it was the degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of the

00:34:02.700 politicians that caused the flood. In Holland, they build the dikes to withstand the worst storm

00:34:07.700 in 10,000 years. In the southern U.S., they built them to withstand the worst storm in 100 years.

00:34:13.800 And they knew that that was insufficient. And so the flood, if there's a flood, well, you can say,

00:34:19.040 well, that's an act of nature. But you can also say, just wait a sec. Maybe there was a flood because

00:34:23.720 we looked the other way and because our systems were out of date. And that's why in flood stories,

00:34:29.080 there's a continual theme, which is the people get wiped out by the flood because God judges them

00:34:35.520 harshly for their senility and their willful blindness. And it's a story that's very much,

00:34:43.080 you'll have a flood in your life, right? It'll be a flood of chaos. And you'll find of one form or

00:34:48.980 another. And you'll find when you investigate the causes of the flood, that some of it will be,

00:34:53.920 and sometimes this is the case, it's just random. You just got singled out. You got a terrible disease

00:34:59.440 and that's the end of you or something like that. But there'll be other situations where the flood

00:35:03.360 comes and you're surrounded by chaos and you'll look into it. You'll think, I knew this was coming.

00:35:08.340 I knew I wasn't paying attention. I knew I hadn't sorted things out. And the consequences of that will

00:35:14.060 have cascaded and wiped you out. And then you're in real trouble because not only did you get wiped

00:35:18.840 out, but you also know it's your fault. And that is not a good thing. That makes you bitter and

00:35:23.780 resentful and murderous when that happens. So anyway, Scar is scarred, right? So what that implies is he's

00:35:30.760 had a pretty rough life and he's kind of skinny. And he said he was born in the low end of the gene pool.

00:35:35.340 And so he has reasons to be resentful. He's also hyper intelligent and rational. And it's one of the

00:35:40.620 things you see very commonly about the evil adversary of the state or of the individuals,

00:35:46.440 often intelligent and hyper rational. And the best commentator on that was probably John Milton

00:35:52.420 in Paradise Lost because that's how he represents Lucifer or Satan, who's the spirit of rationality

00:35:58.240 and enlightenment. Strangely enough, hence Lucifer, the bringer of light. And the reason for that,

00:36:03.540 as far as I can tell, and this is something that Milton figured out when he compiled all these

00:36:07.620 ancient stories about evil and tried to make them coherent was that the problem with irrationality

00:36:12.820 with rationality is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions, right? And so then it

00:36:19.000 comes up with a theory and it makes that a totality and then it won't let go. So the rational mind has

00:36:24.080 a totalitarian element. And we know that to some degree because that kind of rationality seems more

00:36:29.520 left hemisphere focused and the left hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world and be

00:36:35.760 updated by the right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere generally updates it with negative

00:36:40.000 information and with fantasy. And so the left hemisphere will impose a coherent structure on

00:36:45.040 the world, which is really necessary for you to live in it. But the problem is there's a tension

00:36:49.600 between coherence and completeness. And that's partly why you need two hemispheres. You need one to

00:36:54.580 represent the world and you need one to keep track of the exceptions and to feed those slowly into

00:37:00.120 the representational system so that it, so that it can stay updated without collapsing into complete

00:37:05.420 chaos. So anyways, Scar, and he's, he's got this like droopy mouth and this whiny, arrogant voice,

00:37:12.940 and he feels hard done by, and he's resentful. And, and in, in classic hero stories, stories of the state

00:37:19.280 as well, the, so this is an Egyptian take on it. Osiris was, was the god of the state and set who later

00:37:26.100 became Satan. That name became Satan as it transformed through Coptic Christianity.

00:37:32.480 Osiris had a brother named Set and Set, he, he didn't pay attention to Set, enough attention. And Set

00:37:38.720 was always scheme, scheming to overthrow the kingdom, just like Scar is. And, uh, the Egyptians said

00:37:45.220 straightforwardly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by Set, he got chopped into pieces and his

00:37:50.440 pieces distributed throughout the state in the mythological representation. And those pieces were

00:37:55.460 actually the provinces of Egypt, technically speaking. So, and, and that's what the Egyptians

00:37:59.940 thought. So that's quite cool. But the Egyptians said explicitly that the reason that Osiris got

00:38:05.400 overthrown by Set was because he was willfully blind. Old, senile, and willfully blind. Same idea as the

00:38:11.500 flood myth. You don't see that quite here because Mufasa is sort of on to Set or to Scar, but Scar is more

00:38:18.380 treacherous than Mufasa believes. And he gets at, he gets at, uh, Mufasa by going through his son by, by, by,

00:38:25.460 by playing on the, on the impulsivity and, and juvenile qualities of his son. And so, obviously

00:38:32.320 there's some antagonism between these two, as you can see by their facial expressions there. And, uh,

00:38:37.440 there's the good example of Scar. You know, he's got that droopy kind of whiny, malevolent face and

00:38:42.820 that malevolent voice that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly well. And, uh, he's, he's always skulking.

00:38:49.320 He's a creature of the night. He always skulks around. He's not a creature of the day in any sense of the

00:38:54.160 word. And, you know, obviously, uh, Mufasa is golden like the sun and, and Scar is dark like

00:39:00.300 the night. That's another thing, another clue, another hint. Okay. There's the tree. That's the

00:39:05.480 tree of life. We already talked about that. I think that represents the multiple levels at which you

00:39:10.520 exist simultaneously all the way from the subatomic, all the way up to the cosmic, so to speak. And

00:39:15.900 that's a different kind of dimension. And that's the, that's the place that the self inhabits.

00:39:20.440 And it can kind of move up and down those dimensions. But anyways, um, that the shaman

00:39:25.560 lives inside that tree and, and, uh, that's our first introduction to him basically. But he's the

00:39:31.560 spirit of the ancient tree. That's another way of thinking about it. It's a very, very common

00:39:35.500 element in stories, right? The spirit of the ancient tree. And so, all right. So now, uh, Mufasa has

00:39:42.320 taken, taken Simba up to the top of the pyramid, right? So that's the, the aluminum place,

00:39:47.720 let's say, or the place of the eye where you can really see a long ways. And he's explaining

00:39:52.400 to him what his kingdom is going to be. And you see the sun, of course, appears at that

00:39:56.940 to begin with. And that's another hint about being at the top. That's the illuminated part

00:40:01.200 of the pyramid. And so they're up there talking. And what Mufasa tells Simba is that his kingdom

00:40:06.660 is every place the light has touched. And that's so brilliant. So one of the things you'll

00:40:11.880 notice if you move into a new apartment, you're like a cat. Cats don't like changing houses

00:40:16.840 and they have to zoom around in every corner to see exactly what the hell is going on there

00:40:21.000 before they calm down. They need to know where they can hide and where the potential dangers

00:40:25.520 are. And what you'll find if you move into a new place that you will not be comfortable

00:40:29.620 there until you've investigated, potentially cleaned and repaired every single square inch

00:40:35.480 of it. The more attention you pay to it, the more it'll become yours. And that's far more

00:40:40.820 than mere like material ownership, which is also relevant. But in order to feel comfortable

00:40:46.020 somewhere and to dominate that place, to be enmeshed in that place, you have to attend

00:40:51.960 to it. You have to shine light on every corner. And you have to do that with yourself and with

00:40:56.620 your relationships as well. And so anyways, Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything

00:41:02.160 that the light shines on. And that's exactly right. And then there's a metaphor there too,

00:41:06.320 which is that what you've shone light on, which is what you've come to understand and master

00:41:10.880 is surrounded by an other world of all the things that you don't understand. And some

00:41:15.940 of those would be natural things. And some of them would be tyrannical things. And some

00:41:19.680 of those would be things you don't want to know about yourself, but they're outside of

00:41:23.480 where you've managed to shine the light. And so that's exactly what Mufasa tells Simba.

00:41:27.500 He says, we live in this pyramid. We're at the top. There's a domain of light around it.

00:41:31.940 That's explored territory outside of that. There's unexplored territory. And that's partly

00:41:37.780 the unconscious because you fill it with fantasy. And it's partly what you just don't know.

00:41:43.620 And then Mufasa tells Simba, and it's sort of like God telling Adam and Eve in the Garden

00:41:48.340 of Eden not to eat the apple. Mufasa tells Simba, there's this outside place that's dark,

00:41:54.280 that's not part of your kingdom, and you should not go there. And that's really interesting because

00:41:58.960 Simba doesn't even know about that place yet. And so Mufasa is doing something very contradictory

00:42:04.220 there. It's like telling him that it exists and heightening his curiosity, but also saying that

00:42:09.960 he should go there. Almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do. You see this in

00:42:15.680 the Pinocchio movie too, where Pinocchio is planning to jump into the ocean to go get Geppetto from the

00:42:23.040 underworld. And he's following, his conscience is along with him, Jiminy Cricket. And the cricket is

00:42:28.020 warning him about all the dangers that he'll face down there and telling him that he will be fish food

00:42:33.020 personally. And while he's doing that, Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail, around a rock,

00:42:38.720 so he can sink. And the little cricket helps him tie the knot. So while he's warning him about the

00:42:43.740 adventure he's going to undertake, at the same time he's encouraging him to do it. And there's that

00:42:47.740 paradoxical thing, which is that if you go outside what you know, it will cause a fall. Because it'll

00:42:53.500 damage your knowledge structures, and you'll go down into chaos. And that can really destroy you,

00:42:57.840 so you shouldn't do it. But by the same token, if you do do it, and you do it successfully,

00:43:02.680 then the new you that re-arises can be stronger and more complete than the previous you. So you

00:43:08.300 should do it, and you shouldn't do it. And that's, anyone sensible says, look, don't bother. Right?

00:43:13.680 But sensible isn't enough. That's the thing. You have to also be not sensible enough in order to

00:43:18.960 live. And your typical hero, and Harry Potter is a really good example, is always a rule breaker.

00:43:23.800 Always. But he, you know, the rules he breaks are, like, there's judiciousness behind the rule

00:43:29.980 breaking. The hero breaks a rule in the service of a higher good, but he's still breaking the rules.

00:43:35.360 And that's what puts him outside the boundary of the social establishment. So, now, at this point,

00:43:43.520 Simba also gets introduced to Scar. And that has two meanings. One is that Scar is the tyrannical

00:43:50.140 element of the state. And so, as a child, when you're being socialized, you encounter the tyranny

00:43:55.520 of the state. And one of the best, you can't, there's no way around it. One of the best examples

00:44:00.540 of that is that children are always running around having fun, and they're really bubbly, and

00:44:04.380 impulsive, and joyous, and playful. And that causes a lot of trouble, because positive emotion

00:44:10.600 is very disruptive. They'll run around and break things, and they'll hurt themselves, and they'll get

00:44:14.360 into trouble. And so, you're always saying, calm down, sit down, behave, don't do that. And it's

00:44:19.780 not because they're crying or angry. It's because they're so damn happy and impulsive that no one

00:44:24.500 can stand them. And so, and so, that's a tyranny. It's like the state puts pressure on you to regulate

00:44:30.860 your emotions, positive, negative, and positive. And it crushes you. It crushes the life out of you,

00:44:36.480 a lot of it. And so, you end up, you know, your age, and you're all mopey, because the whole,

00:44:40.740 especially because you've been forced to sit down in school for like 17 years, you're all mopey. And

00:44:46.140 it's no wonder, you know, you've had the spirit taken out of you by the process of discipline. But

00:44:50.520 without that, you'd be completely useless. So, it's another one of those paradoxical, you know,

00:44:56.400 gifts and catastrophes that you encounter as you move through life. So, anyways, Simba, look at how

00:45:02.460 happy he is, you know. I mean, he doesn't know a damn thing. He's so naive, you can tell by,

00:45:06.620 oh, look, it's my uncle Scar. It's like, you know, and this is not a guy you smile at, clearly.

00:45:13.060 But he's all positive emotion, and joy, and enthusiasm. And that's not good, because that

00:45:18.160 means this character can take serious advantage of it. And that's exactly what he does. And so,

00:45:23.060 Scar pretends to be on his side, which is what a good pedophile always does, by the way.

00:45:27.420 And so, you know, you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and openness in order to

00:45:32.780 exploit them. And that's what horrible people do that all the time, including the parents of

00:45:37.520 children, and other children themselves. So, you know, there's this false, I mean, look at the

00:45:42.640 animators are so damn brilliant, eh? Look at that expression. Really? Like, you know, you just look

00:45:48.020 at that, and you think, well, that's just a facial expression. But of course, it's not. Some damn

00:45:51.900 animators worked really hard to get that. They're really observant. And they distill the facial,

00:45:57.060 look how big the face is, right? It covers the whole head. And they've got the eyebrow lifts

00:46:02.400 proper, and they've got this horrible, sanctimonious smile, and the tilt of the head. And, you know,

00:46:07.460 and he's sort of crushing him while he's hugging him at the same time. And really, really. And,

00:46:12.360 you know, it took a lot of thought for every single one of these frames to be put together,

00:46:16.180 right? There's a tremendous amount of cognitive effort that went into that. So none of this is

00:46:20.640 accidental. Yeah, well, that pretty much says everything. It's like, I hate that kid, and I can

00:46:25.680 hardly wait till he's gone. And didn't I pull one over on him, you know? It's a real testament to an

00:46:30.920 adult's genius when he can fool a kid. So then Simba encounters the anima. That's the anima,

00:46:37.020 the Jungian anima. And the anima is the feminine counterpart in the soul. And she, well, yeah,

00:46:44.100 you can tell what she does to him, right? Because she's got this supercilious and, what would you

00:46:49.740 say, judgmental and teasy look on her face. And she's really trying to put him down. And it's

00:46:54.240 working like bad. He's not very happy about that at all. And she's the thing, this is what the anima

00:46:59.100 does, the soul. She's the thing that teaches the exploratory hero that it's not everything

00:47:05.320 it could be, right? And that's part of, this can be read multiple ways, but it's part of

00:47:09.780 the eternal tendency of women to make men self-conscious by their sexual selectivity.

00:47:15.500 That's part of it, because that makes men self-conscious like nothing else. And it's also

00:47:19.740 perhaps been one of the phenomena that's produced the evolutionary arms race in this, in the sexes

00:47:25.720 among human beings that's caused our rapid cortical expansion and our quick movement away from

00:47:31.360 chimpanzees, who aren't selective maters, by the way. So look at him. Jesus, you just want to slap

00:47:37.420 him, right? He's the son of a kid.

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00:51:55.620 So I think the best way to continue to walk you through the thinkers that we're planning to cover

00:52:19.020 is to do that with examples. They stick better, and they're more interesting. And it's very

00:52:25.460 difficult to understand Jung outside of a narrative context. And so I'm going to walk

00:52:30.320 you through The Lion King today. How many of you have seen The Lion King? Yes. So how many of you

00:52:35.460 haven't? Right. Okay. So you obviously were raised in a box somewhere out in the middle of the field.

00:52:43.220 So anyways, you know, it's an amazingly popular animated movie. I think it was the most highest

00:52:49.360 grossing animated movie ever made until Frozen, which I actually absolutely detested. But The Lion

00:52:56.020 King, The Lion King is actually consciously influenced by archetypes as well as unconsciously

00:53:01.060 influenced by them. So it's a bit of a cheat, I would say in some sense, but it doesn't, I don't,

00:53:05.880 for the purposes that we're using it for, I think it's just fine. And so partly what you might think

00:53:12.840 about is that it's, it's relationship to archetypal themes that made it so overwhelmingly popular.

00:53:19.380 Same being the case with, say, books and movies like Harry Potter or the entire Marvel series.

00:53:24.940 The Marvel series is quite interesting. I know somebody who wrote for Batman and for Wolverine,

00:53:29.780 I know Batman isn't a Marvel comic, but one of the things that he told me that was quite

00:53:33.800 interesting was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their own, they have a

00:53:38.840 backstory and which becomes part of the mythology that's collectively held by the readers.

00:53:42.840 And if you, you can invent an alternative universe where you can muck about with the backstory,

00:53:47.660 but otherwise you better stick with it or the readers are going to write you and tell you that

00:53:50.820 you've got the story wrong. And so there's a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the

00:53:55.000 readers after these things take on a life of their own. And so, and of course, the, they,

00:54:00.760 they tend to, the comic books in particular tend to, tend towards mythological themes very,

00:54:05.740 very rapidly. And so anyways, Carl Jung was a fascinating person, I think. You can read his

00:54:12.040 biography, autobiography slash biography, which is called Memories, Dreams and Reflections,

00:54:17.020 which in many ways I think is an unfortunate book because it's usually the only book that people

00:54:21.740 read that's, that is more or less by Jung. But, and it is more popularly accessible, which is

00:54:28.160 probably a good thing, but it's also, it's not as rigorous as his other books. And so the problem

00:54:35.120 with someone like Jung is you kind of have to read him as much as you can in the original because

00:54:38.900 interpreting him is not a very straightforward matter. He was a very visionary person, by which

00:54:45.860 I mean he had an incredible visual imagination and he used that a lot. He used it in his therapy

00:54:50.780 practice. I believe that most of his therapy clients were high in trait openness. I have a lot

00:54:56.960 of clients who are high in trait openness. They kind of seek me out because I'm high in trait

00:55:01.080 openness and, you know, they watch my videos and that sort of thing and they're interested in what I'm

00:55:04.800 doing. And many of them are, are astute dreamers and prolific dreamers. And many open people in my

00:55:12.200 experience have archetypal dreams. Whereas people who are lower in openness, they either don't dream

00:55:16.600 at all or they don't remember their dreams as much, or they're not interested in them and they're not

00:55:21.360 interested in the mythological underpinnings of them. So I've, I've taught psychology, roughly speaking,

00:55:27.940 to many different types of people, including lawyers and lawyers and physicians. And they tend to be

00:55:33.600 higher in trait conscientiousness than in openness. And they're much more interested in the practical

00:55:38.420 applications of psychology and maybe the big five theories than they are in the narrative

00:55:42.380 underpinnings. And, you know, people say that when they went to Jung, they had Jungian dreams,

00:55:48.140 but I don't. And then when they went to Freud, they had Freudian dreams. And I don't really believe

00:55:52.140 that's exactly true. I think it was a matter of selection bias, a priori selection bias on the part of

00:55:56.920 the people who were likely to go see either of those two. And so, but I've been struck by

00:56:03.560 some clients in particular, how unbelievably continually they can generate deep archetypal

00:56:08.520 dreams with a really coherent narrative structure. It's really phenomenal. And how revealing those

00:56:14.120 dreams are. Problem with archetypal dreams is that they're not really personal, right? So if you're

00:56:18.340 looking for a personal way out of a situation, an archetypal dream doesn't help you that much

00:56:22.660 because it gives you the general pattern rather than a specific solution to your problem. But a good

00:56:27.060 dream will do both at once. Anyways, Jung was an astute student of Freud's. We'll cover Freud next,

00:56:35.520 although generally in personality courses, the order is reversed. Freud first and then Jung because of

00:56:41.780 their temporal, of the temporal order of their thought. But I think it's better to start with Jung

00:56:46.980 because it's as if Freud excavated into the basement and then Jung excavated into many, many floors

00:56:54.060 underneath the basement of the mind. And so from, if you're transitioning from an archaic understanding

00:57:00.020 of archaic modes of thinking towards Freud, it's better to go through Jung because Jung is,

00:57:04.600 I think, I think Freudian theory is a subset of Jungian theory fundamentally, just like Newtonian

00:57:09.920 physics is a subset of Einsteinian physics. And I think that Freud knew that even to some degree,

00:57:15.900 although he was very much opposed to any sort of religious thinking, mythological,

00:57:20.840 religious thinking, I would say. He was a real 19th century materialist and he didn't like the

00:57:26.240 fact that Jung's work started to delve into religious themes in a manner that actually in

00:57:31.940 some sense validated those themes. And so that's actually why they split. They split when Jung published

00:57:36.540 a book called Symbols of Transformation. Jung was also a deep student of Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote a book

00:57:42.420 called Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is kind of an Old Testament revelation poetry kind of book.

00:57:47.640 It's a strange one. And I wouldn't recommend, if you want to read Nietzsche, that you start with

00:57:51.740 that one, but most people do. But Jung did a seminar on Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is about,

00:57:58.480 I've got this wrong, it's somewhere between 700 and 1100 pages long, and it only covers the first

00:58:03.780 third of the book. And Thus Spake Zarathustra is actually quite a short book. And so, well, so you can

00:58:09.920 imagine how much Jung had to know about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words.

00:58:15.600 And Nietzsche was a, well, an absolute genius. And Jung was actually trying to answer the question

00:58:23.060 that Nietzsche posed fundamentally, which is why, part of the reason why it's incorrect historically

00:58:28.440 to consider him a Freudian. He was, so Nietzsche basically stated, let's say explicitly, that

00:58:35.620 scientific empiricism slash rationalism had resulted in the death of the mythological tradition of the

00:58:41.940 West, roughly speaking. That's Nietzsche's comment on the death of God. And in that comment, he also

00:58:47.580 said that the fact that God was dead was going to produce tremendous ideational and social historical

00:58:54.120 upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people. He didn't say all that in one

00:58:59.700 place. It's spread between, part of it's in will to power, and I can't remember the source of the other

00:59:06.360 one. Some of it's referenced in Thus Spake Zarathustra. But Nietzsche believed that in

00:59:11.320 order to overcome the collapse of traditional values with the idea, say, of God as its cornerstone,

00:59:17.600 people would have to become creatures that could produce their own values as a replacement,

00:59:23.500 that we would have to become capable of generating autonomous values. And Jung, but that's easier said

00:59:30.280 than done, because trying to impose a set of values on yourself is very difficult, because you're not

00:59:34.580 very cooperative. And you know that if you try to get yourself to do something that you don't want

00:59:38.280 to do, or that's hard, you just won't do it. And so it's not like you can just invent your own

00:59:43.120 values and then go along with that. That just doesn't work. And so what Jung and the Freudians

00:59:47.300 did, Freud first, I would say, was to start looking into people's fantasies, autonomous fantasies,

00:59:53.460 unconscious fantasies, to see if they could, and discovered that values bubbled up of their own

01:00:01.960 accord into those fantasies. And you can imagine, for example, if you've become enamored of someone,

01:00:06.540 that you might start fantasizing about them. And if you read off the fantasy, then you can tell what

01:00:10.720 you're after and what you're up to. And so the motivational force composes the fantasy. And

01:00:16.020 Freud was more interested in that in a personal sense. So in so far as your fantasies might reveal

01:00:21.680 your personal history. So for example, if you have a burst of negative emotion in a clinical session,

01:00:26.680 there'll be a fantasy that goes along with that. And an association of ideas that kind of

01:00:31.600 manifest themselves of their own accord. And they're not necessarily coherent and logical.

01:00:35.680 They're linked by emotion. That's the free association technique in Freudian psychology.

01:00:40.020 And they also might manifest themselves in dreams and fantasies. And so Freud started doing

01:00:43.940 the analysis of these spontaneous, let's call them fantasies. And Jung linked that more.

01:00:50.140 Freud did this first with the Oedipal complex. But then Jung linked up spontaneous fantasies and

01:00:55.980 dreams with mythology and fantasy across history. And of course, Piaget did the same thing from a

01:01:02.800 completely different standpoint. And a lot of that's embedded in this movie. So we might as well

01:01:06.680 just walk through it. So the first question might be, well, why is a lion a king? Right? And because

01:01:13.900 it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king. And of course, a lion is an apex predator.

01:01:18.960 And so, which means it's at the top of the food chain, roughly speaking. And it's sort of golden like the sun.

01:01:23.700 So that's also useful. And, you know, it has that mane that makes it look majestic. And of course,

01:01:28.160 it's very physically powerful. And it's intimidating. And so it's something that you run away from as

01:01:35.880 well. Right? Or you're awestruck by. So the fact that, you know, it's like snail king just doesn't

01:01:40.780 make any sense. Right? But lion king, that works. And you got to think about those things because

01:01:45.300 it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king, but a snail wouldn't. But it fits in with

01:01:51.680 your metaphorical understanding of the way the world works much better. And so the lion

01:01:56.520 king makes sense. And well, and when things like that, that aren't rationally self-evident

01:02:01.840 make sense, you have to ask yourself, in what metaphorical context do they make sense? So

01:02:06.680 you have the lion king. Now the movie opens with a sunrise. And the sunrise is equivalent

01:02:12.260 to the dawn of consciousness. So that in many archaic stories, the sun was a hero like

01:02:17.420 Horus, if I remember correctly, was a solar king. But Apollo in particular. But Apollo,

01:02:26.200 Greek myth. The idea was that the sun was the hero who illuminated the sky in the day. And

01:02:35.340 so heroism and illumination and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically. And

01:02:40.180 then at night, what would happen would be that sun would fight with the dragon of darkness,

01:02:44.680 basically, or with evil, all night and then rise again victorious in the morning. And

01:02:49.740 so it's a death and rebirth theme. And it's very, very, very, very common mythological

01:02:53.840 theme. And the reason the sun is associated with consciousness, as far as I can tell, is

01:02:58.020 that we're not nocturnal creatures, right? We're awake during the day. And we're very,

01:03:02.200 very visual. Half our brain is devoted to visual processing. And to be enlightened and illuminated

01:03:06.800 means to develop, to move towards a higher state of consciousness. And we naturally use

01:03:12.040 light symbolism to represent that, you know, like the light bulb on the top of someone's

01:03:16.900 head. You know, you don't say, I was in darkened when you learn something new. And so again,

01:03:22.440 that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that's, I think, deeply biologically

01:03:28.040 grounded, but also socially grounded. So it's a new day. It's the start of a new day. And

01:03:33.940 the day, day actually means, like French, journey, means day, the day trek in some sense. And how

01:03:40.900 to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question. The day is the canonical unit of

01:03:45.960 time. And so you have to know how to comport yourself during the day. And part of that is

01:03:50.540 a journey from consciousness into unconsciousness and that return. So like Apollo, you descend into

01:03:57.860 unconsciousness and then reemerge. And of course, that's not metaphorical at all. That's exactly

01:04:02.160 what you do. You descend into the underworld of darkness and dreams and strange things happen

01:04:07.160 down there. And so, and then you awake if you're fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your state

01:04:11.900 of mind, you awake in the morning and it's a new day, right? And so the dream world seems

01:04:17.980 to help you sort out your thoughts, by the way, if you keep people awake for an extended

01:04:21.800 period of time, then they lose their minds, essentially. The dream, the unconsciousness and

01:04:29.480 the dream state seem absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health. Although

01:04:32.800 people don't exactly understand why. It looks like dreams might help you forget. Because

01:04:37.880 forgetting is really important. You just can't, you just can't remember everything that happened

01:04:42.340 to you. You get so damn cluttered that, that you, you'd fall apart. And so you reduce things

01:04:47.020 to the gist. And when you're doing that, you pack them in. It's like you compress them

01:04:50.600 in some sense. You pack them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant.

01:04:54.420 And the dream seems to not be part of that. It also seems to be a place where you deeply

01:04:59.460 encode learning that might have been done that day, which is something that Freud actually noted

01:05:03.600 in his interpretation of dreams, which is a great book. If you're ever going to read a book that

01:05:07.460 Freud wrote, the interpretation of dreams is the proper one to read. In my estimation, it's a

01:05:11.820 brilliant book. And it laid the groundwork for a lot of what Jung did. And so anyways, that's how

01:05:16.680 the movie starts. And the animals come out into the light. And that's, that's a metaphor for the

01:05:21.160 dawning of consciousness to come out into the light where you can see. And so this is a baby

01:05:26.040 giraffe and babies emerge into the light, roughly speaking. And that's, that's, like I said,

01:05:30.960 that that's a representation of, of the emergence or expansion of consciousness. And so this is how

01:05:36.140 the movie starts. It starts with very expansive music as well, celebratory music. And that's to

01:05:41.700 indicate to you to set the tone for the movie, but also to indicate to you that you're about to

01:05:46.560 watch something of import. And the opening scene is actually a real scene of genius in my estimation.

01:05:51.500 The animators did a great job and it goes along very nicely with the music. And so you see this

01:05:56.360 lit place and then you see this rock, pride rock, I believe it's called, in the middle of it. And

01:06:01.800 it's the center. It's the center. It's like the spot that's marked by a cathedral, which is an X or a

01:06:06.560 cross. And you're right in the middle of that. And so it's the center of the light. That's another way

01:06:10.880 of thinking about it. Or it's the center of the territory, or it's the home, or it's the fire in

01:06:16.180 the, in the wilderness, or it's the tree in the center where you live. It's all of those things at

01:06:20.660 once. It's inhabited territory with you at the center. And the, the rock represents tradition

01:06:26.240 because people tend to inscribe their traditions on rock, right? Or to, to build them into rock like

01:06:32.660 the pyramid. So you could think about that as a pyramid, as an Egyptian pyramid, and it's the right

01:06:36.980 way to think about it. You could also think about it as a dominance hierarchy with the apex

01:06:40.860 predator at the top, and that's the lion. So it makes sense that the lion would be in the light

01:06:45.520 on the rock. That's a pyramid in the middle of the territory, right? That makes sense to people

01:06:50.180 psychologically. So, because that's what the state is. The state is a hierarchy with, with

01:06:55.620 something at the top that occupies a space that has been illuminated and made safe by

01:07:00.760 consciousness. That's what the state is. And that's all represented right away in this

01:07:04.620 movie. And all the animals come to, to observe what's happening in the pyramid and at the

01:07:10.280 top, because they need to know what happens as at the top, partly to organize their world.

01:07:15.020 That's the pyramid, but also to see how the organizational principle works. And that's why

01:07:20.100 they're all gathering. And so they're gathering in the light in the morning to observe something

01:07:24.700 new that's going to be born. That's of significant importance. And that's the birth of the hero.

01:07:29.520 And this little bird here, Zazu, right? Zazu is like Horus, the Egyptian god, who was a falcon

01:07:36.360 and an eye at the same time. He is the king's eye in this, king's eyes in this movie, right? He flies

01:07:43.160 up above, outside of the pyramid, so he can see everything that goes on and reports to the king.

01:07:48.260 And so, partly what that indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be

01:07:53.040 an eye. And that's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the back of the American

01:07:57.460 dollar bill. It's exactly the same idea. Or if you look at the Washington Monument, which is a pyramid

01:08:02.200 at the top, you see that it's capped with aluminum. And you think, well, why aluminum? And the answer to

01:08:07.100 that was it was the most expensive metal at that time. And so the notion is, is that at the top of the

01:08:12.040 pyramid, there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid. It's something that goes up

01:08:17.100 above the pyramid and can see everything. And so you could think about it this way, is that you're going to be

01:08:21.820 in a lot of pyramids in your life. Dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that.

01:08:27.460 And they'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy. And there'll be something at the top. And the top

01:08:32.140 is the thing that can do well across hierarchies. So it's not stuck in any one pyramid. And it's

01:08:37.840 partly associated with vision and the ability to see a long, long distance. Also to see what you

01:08:43.460 don't want to see and to report that back to the king. And so the king, fundamentally, as far as you

01:08:49.900 guys are concerned from a psychological perspective, that's your super ego. That's the Freudian

01:08:54.280 perspective. Or it might be the moral system by which you comport yourself. But your eyes are the thing that

01:09:00.080 updates that, right? You need it to orient yourself in the world. You need it to orient yourself among other

01:09:05.480 people. But your eye and your capacity to pay attention, especially to what you don't want to pay attention to, is

01:09:11.920 the thing that continually updates that model, exactly as Piaget laid out with children. So, and all of that's

01:09:17.920 packed into the imagery in the first, you know, few minutes of this movie. And that's actually why it relies on

01:09:23.760 imagery. Why this isn't just a lecture by a psychologist, you know, when you go to see the movie. It's because the

01:09:29.240 images, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but, and there's thousands of pictures in this movie, obviously,

01:09:35.340 but maybe a picture is worth more words than you can actually use to describe it, if the picture is, is, is profound

01:09:42.320 enough. And we have many, many pictures like that. Any deeply symbolic picture is virtually inexhaustible

01:09:48.600 in terms of its, of semantically, with regards to its explanation. Images are very, very dense. So

01:09:55.020 anyways, the animals all gathered. Now, the animals are also id representations from the Freudian

01:10:00.060 perspective. And the id is the part of your psyche from the Freudian perspective that's animalistic and,

01:10:05.640 and, and full of, of, of implicit drives, sexual and aggressive in particular, as far as Freud was

01:10:12.260 concerned. And that's because those two drives, say, unlike thirst or hunger, are much more difficult

01:10:17.820 to integrate into proper social being and tend to be excluded and left unconscious. And so a lot of

01:10:24.320 Freudian psychology, and I would say psychology in general, is focused on the integration of sexual

01:10:30.100 impulses and aggressive impulses into the psyche. I would also add to that anxiety, because anxiety is

01:10:35.940 also a major problem. Anxiety and, and negative emotion that's pain-like is also a major problem for

01:10:42.080 people. And so the animals represent those id-like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically

01:10:47.860 before you can become an integrated being in precisely the Piagetian manner, right? Because Piaget

01:10:53.040 would say, well, the child comes into the world with reflexes, and maybe a more modern psychologist

01:10:58.020 would also concentrate on the implicit motivations. And those have to be organized inside the child into

01:11:04.120 some kind of hierarchy of unity before the child can organize him or herself into the broader unity of

01:11:10.200 the state. And that's basically what's being represented here. And so, so Zazu, the eyes of the

01:11:16.600 king, comes to check out the king. And that's, what's his name? What's the king's name? Mufasa.

01:11:24.100 Yeah. And he's a very regal-looking person, lion. And he stands up straight and tall. And that means

01:11:29.840 that he's high in serotonin, because serotonin governs postural flexion. And if so, if you're dominant

01:11:34.660 and near the top of hierarchies, you tend to expand so that you look bigger than you could

01:11:39.580 if you shrunk down. And so if you're a low-dominant person, you wander around like this so that you

01:11:44.160 look small and weak, and you don't pose a threat to anybody. But if you're at the top, you expand

01:11:48.840 yourself so that you can command the space. And that's why he has that particular kind of regal

01:11:53.680 posture. And if you look at his facial expression, you see that it's quite severe. Like he's capable of

01:11:59.660 kindness, but he's also harsh and judgmental. And that's what society is like. That's what the

01:12:03.920 superego is like. And what that means is that he's integrated his aggression. And I've seen this

01:12:08.100 happen in my clinical clients. When they come in and they're too agreeable, they look like Simba

01:12:13.060 looks later in the movie when he's an adolescent. And he's sort of like a deer in the headlights.

01:12:17.880 Everything is coming in and nothing is coming out. But when the person integrates their shadow

01:12:22.740 and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality, their face is

01:12:26.460 hardened. And if you look at people, you can tell. Because the people who are too agreeable

01:12:30.680 look childlike and innocent. And the people who, well, a hyper-aggressive person will look

01:12:35.020 mean and cruel. But I've seen people's face change in the course of therapy. Men and women.

01:12:43.820 And what happens is they start to look more mature. And it's more like they're judging the

01:12:48.860 world as well as interacting with it properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part

01:12:54.100 of them. It's very, very necessary. And that's part of the incorporation of the Jungian shadow

01:12:58.500 or the incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective. But old Musafa there,

01:13:03.660 he's already got that. He's already got that covered. So, and he's capable, like obviously he can

01:13:10.760 smile and he's capable of the full range of expressions, but he's a tough looking character.

01:13:16.020 And now this, the baboon here, who's supposed to be basically just a fool when the story was first

01:13:21.700 written, he turned into what's essentially a shaman across time. And so he represents the self

01:13:27.380 from the Jungian perspective. Now the self is everything you could be across time. So imagine

01:13:32.520 that there's you and there's the potential inside you, whatever that is, you know. And potential is

01:13:37.780 an interesting idea because it represents something that isn't yet real, yet we act like it's real.

01:13:43.260 Because people will say to you, you should live up to your potential. And that potential is partly what

01:13:48.100 you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information,

01:13:54.020 right? Because you build yourself out of the information in the Piagetian sense.

01:13:57.700 But it's deeper than that too, because we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new

01:14:02.040 environment, new genes turn on in your nervous system. They encode for new proteins. And so you're

01:14:07.660 full of biological potential that won't be realized unless you move yourself around in the world

01:14:13.140 into different challenging circumstances. And that'll turn on different circuits. So it's not

01:14:17.900 merely that you're incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense.

01:14:22.320 It's that by exposing yourself to different environments, you put different physiological

01:14:26.060 demands on yourself all the way down to the genetic level. And that manifests new elements of you.

01:14:33.800 And so one of the things that happens to people, and this is a very common cultural notion,

01:14:38.200 is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central. And that would be,

01:14:43.260 say, like the rock in the Pride Rock in the Lion King, because you take yourself out of your dopey

01:14:48.160 little village. And that's just the little bounded you that everyone knows, and that isn't very

01:14:52.420 expanded. And then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place. And while you do

01:14:57.280 that, you have adventures and they toughen you and pull more out of you, like partly because you're

01:15:02.640 becoming informed, which means information. It means you're becoming more organized at every level

01:15:09.120 of analysis. But there's also more of you, too. And so that's a very classic idea. And then in

01:15:13.880 cathedrals in Europe, especially at Chartres, there's a big maze on the floor, a circular maze,

01:15:19.020 which is a symbolic representation of the pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it.

01:15:23.580 And so it's a huge circle divided into quadrants, which is a Jungian Mandela. And you enter the

01:15:28.720 maze at one point, and then you have to walk through the entire maze, north, east, west,

01:15:33.440 and south, before you get to the center. And the center is symbolized by a flower that's carved in

01:15:39.160 stone. It looks like this. It's big, this maze, eh? It's large, so that you can walk it. And that's

01:15:44.680 a symbolic pilgrimage. It takes you to the center. That's the center of the cross, because it's in a

01:15:49.480 cathedral, and that's the point of acceptance of voluntary suffering. That's what that means.

01:15:54.320 And so you walk through, Jung called that a circumambulation. You go to all the quarters

01:15:59.780 of the world to find yourself. And so, well, the self is the baboon in this particular,

01:16:06.640 in this, I think he's a mandrill, actually, in this particular representation. And he lives in the tree.

01:16:11.980 He lives in the tree of life. It's a baobab tree in this particular. So he's the spirit that inhabits

01:16:16.900 the tree of life. And he's the eternal wise man. That's a way of thinking. So is the king. But

01:16:22.320 he's sort of a superordinate king, or an outside king, in some sense. He's the repository of ancient

01:16:28.360 wisdom. And the king is the manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the world.

01:16:33.300 And so they're friends. And that means that the king is a good king. Because if the king was a bad

01:16:38.540 king, he would be alienated from himself. And that would make him shallow and one-dimensional. And that

01:16:44.260 would make him a bad ruler. No union with the traditions of the past. To be a good ruler, you have to

01:16:49.560 rescue your father from the underworld. And integrate that. And of course, that's a main

01:16:54.280 theme in this entire movie. So, okay. So the hero is born. And that's what the rising sun

01:17:00.480 represents. And everybody goes, oh, isn't that cute? And the reason for that is because

01:17:04.380 you're biologically wired, especially if you're agreeable, to respond with caretaking activity

01:17:09.200 to cuteness. And cuteness is button nose, big eyes, small mouth, round head, symmetry,

01:17:15.880 and helpless movements. And you'll respond to that across the entire class of mammalian

01:17:20.520 creatures. Even maybe down to lizards, you know. Isn't that cute? No, it's a lizard. But, you

01:17:26.000 know. So that's an archetype as well. That's the archetype of the vulnerable hero at

01:17:32.320 the vulnerable hero newly born. And that should invoke a desire mostly on the part of males to

01:17:40.260 encourage and mostly on the part of females to nurture. But males and females are quite

01:17:45.940 cross-wired among human beings. And so there's encouragement from the women. And there's also

01:17:50.500 nurturing from the men. And of course, those curves in some sense overlap. So there's more

01:17:55.880 nurturing males and more encouraging females. But that's roughly the archetype. And so he looks

01:18:00.980 cute and everybody goes, oh, and that's because the animators nailed that. They caught the essential

01:18:05.180 features of cuteness. And he's also in the light, right? And so then the shaman Mandrill

01:18:12.100 basically baptizes him. That's essentially what he's doing. And he uses something that's symbolic

01:18:17.100 of the sun, which is this ripe fruit. And fruits are symbolic of the sun because, of course, they need

01:18:22.180 the sun to ripen. And they're round like the sun. And so, and people know that they need light. But,

01:18:27.620 and so anyways, the animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to break

01:18:34.380 and the sun. And so he's also being baptized into the sun. And that means that he's being baptized

01:18:39.260 into the light or that he's being transformed into a hero. And so then everyone's happy. And

01:18:44.620 that's basically, you know, the divine father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self

01:18:49.340 who's taking care of that. And there's a union between the baby and the wise old man because

01:18:53.860 the baby is all the potential that's realized in the self. And there's an old idea that

01:19:00.420 the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain it. It's a brilliant idea.

01:19:07.620 And that, that, that echoes through myths all over the world. And that means you have to regain your

01:19:11.840 capacity. Once you're disciplined and you know how to do something, you have to regain your capacity

01:19:16.480 for play and sort of for wide eyed wonder. And that's maybe the childlike part of your spirit.

01:19:21.740 And the reintegration of that childlike part with the adult grownup part revivifies the adult grownup

01:19:29.040 part and allows the child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world. And so that's all

01:19:34.020 being hinted at there. And then they show the, the, the shaman shows the baby, the newborn hero to the

01:19:40.780 crowd. And it's very cool. What happens in the movie, all the animals spontaneously kneel. And I can give

01:19:46.320 you an example of that kind of spontaneous action in a crowd. So imagine you're watching a

01:19:50.740 gymnastics performance, right? And, and it's like a high level world-class performance. And someone comes

01:19:58.080 out there and they do this routine that's just dead letter perfect, you know, and they stop and everybody

01:20:03.880 claps like mad, right? And it's perfect. And so then the next contestant comes out and they're basically in

01:20:09.440 real trouble because, you know, this person just got 9.7 out of 10 and it was perfect. So how do you beat

01:20:14.960 perfect? And so when they come out there and then you watch them and you're right on the edge of your

01:20:18.940 seat, because what you see them do is something extraordinarily disciplined, just like the last

01:20:24.260 person did, but they push themselves into that zone. That's just beyond their disciplined capacity.

01:20:29.400 And you can tell every second you're watching it, that they're that close to disaster. And so you're

01:20:34.420 right on the edge of your seat and, and you know that they're doing a high wire act without a net.

01:20:39.260 And so when they finally land triumphantly, you'll all stand up and clap spontaneously. And it's because

01:20:44.500 you've just witnessed someone who's a master at playing a game, who's also a master at improving

01:20:49.880 how to play that game at the same time. And people love that more than anything to see that. It's just

01:20:54.640 absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to the human spirit and you'll respond automatically

01:21:00.000 and unconsciously to that. And that's why that's an analogy to why the animals all spontaneously

01:21:05.440 bow. When now what happens is they, he shows the lion king and the sun breaks and shines on the,

01:21:12.920 the hero at the same time. So there's this concordance between an earthly event and a so-called

01:21:18.160 heavenly event. And Jung would call that synchronous. That's his idea of synchronicity where

01:21:22.980 something important subjectively is also signified by something that appears in narrative keeping with

01:21:29.580 that in the outside world. That's one of the most controversial elements of his theory, but

01:21:33.780 I've experienced a variety of synchronous events and they often happen in therapy, especially around

01:21:39.420 dreams. But they're very hard to communicate because they're so specific to the context in

01:21:44.780 which it occurs. They're very difficult to explain. So anyways, it's the synchronous event

01:21:49.920 that make drops all the animals to their knees. So there's the sun coming out and there's shining

01:21:55.300 on them and all the primates go mad for that. And that's of course exactly what we do when we

01:21:59.640 applaud. And then we switch to Scar. Now Scar is Mufasa's brother, evil brother. The king always has an evil

01:22:08.280 brother. And so does the hero. The hero always has an adversary. And the reason for that is the king

01:22:13.140 always has an evil brother. And that means that the state always has a tyrannical element. And the

01:22:19.120 tyrannical element exists for two reasons. One is the state deteriorates of its own accord. And that's an

01:22:27.000 entropy observation. What that means is that the state is a construction of the past, right? But the

01:22:32.860 present isn't the same as the past. And to the degree that the past is mismatched with the demands

01:22:38.500 of the present, then it's tyrannical. It's malfunctioning. And so it's a continual problem

01:22:45.740 with the state. It's always two steps behind the environment. And so then that means that the

01:22:51.660 awareness of living people has to update the state. And so Eliade, Mircea Eliade, who's a great historian of

01:22:57.580 religions, looked at flood stories from all over the world because there are flood stories from all over

01:23:01.960 the world. Partly because there are floods all over the world. But that's, there's a psychological

01:23:06.080 reason too. So you imagine that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane, right? A flood. And you

01:23:11.820 say, well, that was an act of God. But then you think, wait a second, wait a second. They knew those

01:23:17.180 damn dikes weren't going to hold. They knew they weren't built strong enough. They took the money that

01:23:21.320 was allocated to the dikes and spent it badly. And that was willful blindness. And so you could say that

01:23:26.780 it was God who caused the flood, so to speak, metaphorically. But you could also say that it was the

01:23:31.740 degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of the politicians that caused the flood. In

01:23:38.140 Holland, they built the dikes to withstand the worst storm in 10,000 years. In the southern U.S.,

01:23:44.140 they built them to withstand the worst storm in 100 years. And they knew that that was insufficient.

01:23:49.460 And so the flood, if there's a flood, well, you can say, well, that's an act of nature. But you can

01:23:53.940 also say, just wait a sec. Maybe there was a flood because we looked the other way and because our

01:23:59.480 systems were out of date. And that's why in flood stories, there's a continual theme, which is the

01:24:05.580 people get wiped out by the flood because God judges them harshly for their senility and their

01:24:13.240 willful blindness. And it's a story that's very much, you'll have a flood in your life, right? It'll

01:24:19.360 be a flood of chaos. And you'll find, of one form or another, and you'll find when you investigate the

01:24:24.580 causes of the flood, that some of it will be, and sometimes this is the case, it's just random.

01:24:29.860 You just got singled out. You got a terrible disease and that's the end of you or something

01:24:34.140 like that. But there'll be other situations where the flood comes and you're surrounded by chaos and

01:24:38.460 you'll look into it. You'll think, I knew this was coming. I knew I wasn't paying attention. I knew I

01:24:44.120 hadn't sorted things out. And the consequences of that will have cascaded and wiped you out. And then

01:24:50.060 you're in real trouble because not only did you get wiped out, but you also know it's your fault.

01:24:54.220 And that is not a good thing. That makes you bitter and resentful and murderous when that happens. So

01:24:59.500 anyway, Scar is scarred, right? So what that implies is he's had a pretty rough life and he's

01:25:05.340 kind of skinny and he said he was born in the low end of the gene pool. And so he has reasons to be

01:25:10.260 resentful. He's also hyper intelligent and rational. And it's one of the things you see very commonly about

01:25:15.740 the evil adversary of the state or of the individuals, often intelligent and hyper rational.

01:25:22.160 And the best commentator on that was probably John Milton in Paradise Lost because that's how

01:25:27.820 he represents Lucifer or Satan, who's the spirit of rationality and enlightenment, strangely enough,

01:25:33.520 hence Lucifer, the bringer of light. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, and this is

01:25:38.160 something that Milton figured out when he compiled all these ancient stories about evil and tried to

01:25:42.760 make them coherent, was that the problem with irrationality, with rationality, is that it tends

01:25:48.500 to fall in love with its own productions, right? And so then it comes up with a theory and it makes

01:25:53.660 that a totality and then it won't let go. So the rational mind has a totalitarian element.

01:25:59.140 And we know that to some degree because that kind of rationality seems more left hemisphere focused

01:26:04.220 and the left hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world and be updated by the right

01:26:10.240 hemisphere. And the right hemisphere generally updates it with negative information and with

01:26:14.340 fantasy. And so the left hemisphere will impose a coherent structure on the world, which is really

01:26:19.240 necessary for you to live in it. But the problem is there's a tension between coherence and

01:26:24.400 completeness. And that's partly why you need two hemispheres. You need one to represent the world and you

01:26:29.260 need one to keep track of the exceptions and to feed those slowly into the representational system

01:26:35.240 so that it can stay updated without collapsing into complete chaos. So anyways, Scar, and he's got this

01:26:43.360 like droopy mouth and this whiny, arrogant voice and he feels hard done by and he's resentful. And

01:26:48.880 in classic hero stories, stories of the state as well, so this is an Egyptian take on it, Osiris was the

01:26:57.280 god of the state and Set, who later became Satan, that name became Satan as it transformed through Coptic

01:27:03.440 Christianity. Osiris had a brother named Set and Set, he didn't pay attention to Set, enough attention.

01:27:11.740 And Set was always scheming to overthrow the kingdom, just like Scar is. And the Egyptians said

01:27:18.560 straightforwardly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by Set, he got chopped into pieces and

01:27:23.620 his pieces distributed throughout the state in the mythological representation. And those pieces were

01:27:28.800 actually the provinces of Egypt, technically speaking. So, and that's what the Egyptians

01:27:33.260 thought, so that's quite cool. But the Egyptians said explicitly that the reason that Osiris got

01:27:38.740 overthrown by Set was because he was willfully blind. Old, senile, and willfully blind. Same idea as the

01:27:44.840 flood myth. You don't see that quite here because Mufasa is sort of on to Set or to Scar, but Scar is

01:27:51.320 more treacherous than Mufasa believes. And he gets at, he gets at Mufasa by going through his son, by, by,

01:27:58.480 by playing on the, on the impulsivity and, and juvenile qualities of his son. And so, obviously there's

01:28:05.920 some antagonism between these two, as you can see by their facial expressions there. And there's the

01:28:11.220 good example of Scar, you know, he's got that droopy kind of whiny, malevolent face and that malevolent

01:28:16.820 voice that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly well. And, uh, he's, he's always skulking. He's a

01:28:22.960 creature of the night. He always skulks around. He's not a creature of the day in any sense of the

01:28:27.480 word. And, you know, obviously, uh, Mufasa is golden like the sun and, and Scar is dark like the

01:28:33.800 night. That's another thing, another clue, another hint. Okay. There's the tree. That's the tree of life.

01:28:39.480 We already talked about that. I think that represents the multiple levels at which you exist

01:28:44.260 simultaneously all the way from the subatomic, all the way up to the cosmic, so to speak.

01:28:48.780 And that's a different kind of dimension. And that's the, that's the place that the self inhabits

01:28:53.760 and it can kind of move up and down those dimensions. But anyways, um, that the shaman lives inside that

01:28:59.740 tree and, and, uh, that's our first introduction to him basically, but he's the spirit of the ancient

01:29:05.940 tree. That's another way of thinking about it's a very, very common element in stories, right? The spirit

01:29:10.920 of the ancient tree. And so, all right. So now, uh, Mufasa has taken, taken Simba up to the top of

01:29:18.340 the pyramid, right? So that's the, the aluminum place, let's say, or the place of the eye where

01:29:22.660 you can really see a long ways. And he's explaining to him what his kingdom is going to be. And you see

01:29:28.380 the sun of course appears at that to begin with. And that's another hint about being at the top.

01:29:32.980 That's the illuminated part of the pyramid. And so they're up there talking. And what Mufasa tells

01:29:38.460 Simba is that his kingdom is every place the light has touched. And that's so brilliant. So

01:29:44.120 one of the things you'll notice if you move into a new apartment, you're like a cat. Cats don't like

01:29:49.340 changing houses and they have to zoom around in every corner to see exactly what the hell is going

01:29:53.940 on there before they calm down. They need to know where they can hide and where the potential dangers

01:29:58.860 are. And what you'll find if you move into a new place that you will not be comfortable there

01:30:03.340 until you've investigated, potentially cleaned and repaired every single square inch of it.

01:30:09.280 The more attention you pay to it, the more it'll become yours. And that's far more than mere,

01:30:14.580 like material ownership, which is also relevant. But in order to feel comfortable somewhere and to

01:30:20.420 dominate that place, to be enmeshed in that place, you have to attend to it. You have to shine light on

01:30:26.960 every corner. And you have to do that with yourself and with your relationships as well.

01:30:31.160 And so anyways, Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything that the light shines on.

01:30:36.920 And that's exactly right. And then there's a metaphor there too, which is that what you've

01:30:41.360 shone light on, which is what you've come to understand and master is surrounded by an other

01:30:45.920 world of all the things that you don't understand. And some of those would be natural things. And some

01:30:50.960 of them would be tyrannical things. And some of those would be things you don't want to know about

01:30:54.880 yourself, but they're outside of where you've managed to shine the light. And so that's exactly what

01:30:59.700 Mufasa tells Simba. He says, we live in this pyramid. We're at the top. There's a domain of

01:31:04.240 light around it that's explored territory. Outside of that, there's unexplored territory. And that's

01:31:10.840 partly the unconscious because you fill it with fantasy. And it's partly what you just don't know.

01:31:16.960 And then Mufasa tells Simba, and it's sort of like God telling Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

01:31:22.020 not to eat the apple. Mufasa tells Simba, there's this outside place that's dark, that's not part of

01:31:28.440 your kingdom. And you should not go there. And that's really interesting because Simba doesn't

01:31:32.860 even know about that place yet. And so Mufasa is doing something very contradictory there.

01:31:38.340 It's like telling him that it exists and heightening his curiosity, but also saying that he should go

01:31:43.840 there. Almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do. You see this in the Pinocchio

01:31:49.540 movie too, where Pinocchio is planning to jump into the ocean to go get Geppetto from the underworld.

01:31:56.720 And he's following, his conscience is along with him, Jiminy Cricket. And the cricket is warning

01:32:01.740 him about all the dangers that he'll face down there and telling him that he will be fish food

01:32:06.360 personally. And while he's doing that, Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail, around a rock

01:32:11.980 so he can sink. And the little cricket helps him tie the knot. So while he's warning him about the

01:32:17.060 adventure he's going to undertake, at the same time he's encouraging him to do it. And there's that

01:32:21.080 paradoxical thing, which is that if you go outside what you know, it will cause a fall

01:32:25.580 because it'll damage your knowledge structures and you'll go down into chaos. And that can really

01:32:30.520 destroy you. So you shouldn't do it. But by the same token, if you do do it and you do it successfully,

01:32:35.600 then the new you that are re-arises can be stronger and more complete than the previous you. So you should

01:32:41.900 do it and you shouldn't do it. And that's anyone sensible says, look, don't bother. Right? But sensible

01:32:47.600 isn't enough. That's the thing. You have to also be not sensible enough in order to live. And your

01:32:53.200 typical hero, and Harry Potter is a really good example, is always a rule breaker. Always. But he,

01:32:58.860 you know, the rules he breaks are like there's judiciousness behind the rule breaking. The hero

01:33:05.080 breaks a rule in the service of a higher good, but he's still breaking the rules. And that's what puts

01:33:09.340 him outside the boundary of the social establishment. So now at this point, Simba also gets

01:33:17.580 introduced to scar. And that, that, that has two meanings. One is that scar is the tyrannical

01:33:23.460 element of the state. And so as a child, when you're being socialized, you encounter the tyranny

01:33:28.840 of the state. And one of the best, you can't, there's no way around it. One of the best examples

01:33:33.880 of that is that children are always running around having fun and they're really bubbly

01:33:37.480 and, and impulsive and joyous and playful. And that causes a lot of trouble because positive

01:33:43.560 emotion is very disruptive. They'll run around and break things. They'll hurt themselves and

01:33:47.420 they'll get into trouble. And so you're always saying, calm down, sit down, behave, don't do

01:33:52.340 that. And it's, it's not because they're crying or angry. It's because they're so damn happy and

01:33:56.700 impulsive that no one can stand them. And so, and so that's a tyranny. It's like the, the state puts,

01:34:02.680 puts pressure on you to regulate your emotions, positive, negative, and positive. And it crushes you.

01:34:08.500 It crushes the life out of you, a lot of it. And so you end up, you know, your age and you're all

01:34:12.760 mopey because the whole, especially because you've been forced to sit down in school for like 17

01:34:17.580 years, you're all mopey. And it's no wonder, you know, you've had the spirit taken out of you by the

01:34:22.560 process of discipline, but without that, you'd be completely useless. So it's another one of those

01:34:27.100 paradoxical, you know, gifts and, and catastrophes that you encounter as you move through life.

01:34:33.760 So anyways, Simba, look at how happy he is, you know, I mean, he doesn't know a damn thing. He's

01:34:38.580 so naive. You can tell by, Oh, look, it's my uncle Scar. It's like, you know, and this is not a guy you

01:34:44.700 smile at clearly, but he's all positive emotion and joy and enthusiasm. And that's not good because

01:34:51.240 that means this character can take serious advantage of it. And that's exactly what he does. And so Scar

01:34:56.600 pretends to be on his side, which is what a good pedophile always does, by the way. And so, you know,

01:35:02.000 you, you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and openness in order to exploit them.

01:35:06.920 And that's, that's what horrible people do that all the time, including the parents of children

01:35:11.240 and other children themselves. So, you know, there's this false, I mean, look at the animators

01:35:16.520 are so damn brilliant. Hey, look at that expression. Really? Like, you know, you just look at that and

01:35:21.680 you think, well, that's just a facial expression, but of course it's not. Some damn animators worked

01:35:26.040 out really hard to get that. They're really observant and they distill the facial. Look how big the face

01:35:31.280 is, right? It covers the whole head and, and they've, they've got the eyebrow lifts proper and

01:35:36.300 they've got this horrible sanctimonious smile and the tilt of the head. And, you know, and he's sort

01:35:41.520 of crushing him while he's hugging him at the same time. Really, really. And, you know, it took a lot

01:35:46.520 of thought for every single one of these frames to be put together, right? There's a tremendous amount

01:35:51.140 of cognitive effort that went into that. So none of this is accidental. Yeah. Well, that pretty much

01:35:55.960 says everything. It's like, I hate that kid and can hardly wait till he's gone. And didn't I pull

01:36:01.600 one over on him? You know, it's a real testament to an adult's genius when he can fool a kid.

01:36:06.420 So then Simba encounters the anima. That's the anima, the Jungian anima. And the anima is the feminine

01:36:13.260 counterpart in the soul. And she, well, yeah, you could tell what she does to him, right? Because

01:36:19.560 she's got this supercilious and, and what would you say, judgmental and teasy look on her face.

01:36:25.480 And she's really trying to put him down and it's working like bad. He's not very happy about that

01:36:29.780 at all. And she's the thing, this is what the anima does, the soul. She's the thing that teaches the

01:36:35.460 exploratory hero that it's not everything it could be, right? And that's part of, this can be read

01:36:41.720 multiple ways, but it's part of the eternal tendency of women to make men self-conscious by their

01:36:47.560 sexual selectivity. That's part of it because that makes men self-conscious like nothing else.

01:36:52.360 And it's also perhaps been one of the phenomena that's produced the evolutionary arms race in this,

01:36:58.200 in the sexes among human beings that's caused our rapid cortical expansion and our, our, our quick

01:37:03.880 movement away from chimpanzees who aren't selective maters, by the way. So look at him, Jesus, you just

01:37:10.120 want to slap him, right? He's a, he's the son of a king. So he's very, very privileged and he confuses

01:37:15.600 his privilege with competence, which of course, all of you do because you're all sons of the king,

01:37:20.400 which is why you can sit here in the university and you confuse your privilege with competence as

01:37:25.600 well, because it's not, has nothing to do with any of you that the lights are on and this place is so

01:37:30.920 peaceful, right? But you take that for granted and it can make you false and arrogant. Like,

01:37:35.460 like Jesus, that's just so sad. You look at that kid, you think he's, he's in for real trouble,

01:37:40.500 man. He thinks he knows everything. And of course, then he has a wrestling match with,

01:37:45.240 what's her name? What's it? Was it? Nala. Yeah. He has a wrestling match with Nala and she just pins

01:37:51.500 him every time, right? Got you again, pin you again. And that's basically right. One of the

01:37:56.480 things that happens with men when they meet a woman who they really desire and admire is they

01:38:00.960 project an ideal onto her immediately. That's an anima projection. And then that anima projection

01:38:05.760 judges them and they act all inferior and stupid. And it's partly because they are, that's why.

01:38:10.820 And so then they, they, they go down and defeat constantly to this thing that they're projecting,

01:38:15.900 which at least has some concordance with the actual woman, but not that much. So, okay,

01:38:20.500 they keep wrestling and then they're on the fringe of the kingdom. This wrestling match between this

01:38:25.060 pairs of opposites takes them to the edge of the kingdom and they end up in the elephant's graveyard,

01:38:30.360 right? And, and there's, there's bones everywhere. And so now they're out into the kingdom of death

01:38:35.320 and what that means is that these two kids, as they've grown up, encounter death, right? They go

01:38:41.240 outside the light and it's very, very shocking for them. They're very curious about it, obviously.

01:38:46.720 They go to explore the skeletons and all of that, even though they were told not to,

01:38:50.560 but their curiosity, they can't stay away from death. They're too curious about it. And so they

01:38:55.700 develop knowledge of death and that, and then of course out there in the dead lands is where the

01:39:00.860 hyenas are. And that's exactly right because hyenas are scavengers, right? And they can break

01:39:05.100 bones with their teeth. They're really, really quite the animal. And, you know, you kind of

01:39:09.620 have a shudder of repugnance when you see those things. And I think it's partly, I mean, we shared

01:39:14.720 an evolutionary landscape with the ancestors of hyenas for a very, very long time and like vultures

01:39:19.860 too, you know, you couldn't imagine something that would be more well-designed to look like it was a

01:39:25.600 horrible thing than a vulture, right? And there's this weird concordance and crows and ravens are like

01:39:31.260 that too, carrion eaters, you know. Eagles are kind of an exception, but they look just as creepy as

01:39:36.400 they are, which is really quite interesting. And of course hyenas fall into that category and they

01:39:41.080 laugh too, which is, you know, really? You also have to laugh, really? With all these other things you

01:39:47.140 have going for you? And anyways, the hyenas, and hyenas are enemies of lions and they can take lions

01:39:52.360 down. They're tough things and, you know, they're, they, not one hyena obviously, but a bunch of hyenas

01:39:57.260 can give a lion a pretty damn rough time. And so, and these little lions are really no match for

01:40:02.960 the hyenas. And so they get threatened very, very rapidly. And one of the hyenas of course is just

01:40:08.380 completely out of its mind. And one of the things that's really interesting, and you see this with

01:40:13.060 the Muppets too, there was often a puppet that was like a crazy puppet and its eyes would move in

01:40:17.180 different directions. You know, and one of the things that happens with people who are schizophrenic is

01:40:21.280 they show involuntary eye movements. And it's because you have a brain center that controls your

01:40:25.960 eyes voluntarily. And you have another one that controls them involuntarily. So you can see that

01:40:30.460 look ahead and try to move your eyes smoothly back and forth. You can't do it. You'll see that they

01:40:35.560 jerk. Hey, but if you watch, put a finger in front of your face and then do this, they'll move

01:40:40.720 perfectly smoothly. And that's because you're using different eye control centers, one voluntary and

01:40:45.760 one more involuntary. And the involuntary one is actually more sophisticated. And so in

01:40:50.680 schizophrenics, the involuntary eye control centers tend to disrupt the voluntary eye control centers.

01:40:56.680 And that's likely part of the hallucinatory process, you know, because you have the ego in

01:41:02.280 the schizophrenic that's being disrupted by processes underneath, fantasies and that sort of thing.

01:41:07.100 And that looks like it's reflected in involuntary eye movements, like dream movements. So anyway,

01:41:12.640 so much for the crazy hyena. And they're in real trouble. Now the king's eye, who's supposed to be

01:41:17.140 keeping an eye on this and was supposed to be watching Simba, is trying to intervene. But I

01:41:21.240 mean, look at him. He's like a delicious little bird. And so that's not working out very well.

01:41:26.800 Anyways, and then you see this immediate juxtaposition of the domain of death and the

01:41:32.840 hyenas with hell, right? And everyone looks at that and they think, well, they know exactly what

01:41:37.440 that means. It's no surprise to anyone that that happens. And I suppose that's partly because

01:41:41.780 on the veld where we evolved in large part, but not by no means all part, fire was an ever present

01:41:47.920 danger in the grasslands, right? And so, and so that's a good, that's a good example of hell. So,

01:41:56.020 huh. Well, I guess that's it. We'll do some more of this when we meet on Tuesday. Bye.

01:42:03.500 Bye.

01:42:04.740 Bye.

01:42:05.840 Bye.

01:42:17.620 Bye.

01:42:20.560 Bye.

01:42:22.600 ¶¶

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 08, 2020

144. Carl Jung (Part 1)

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