In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson begins a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. Dr. Peterson's new series provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire.plus/thejordanpetersonpodcast and start watching Dr. B.B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Happy Easter! Happy New Year, everyone! - Dr. Michael M. Peterson Season 3, Episode 1: Introduction to the Idea of God. This episode is a continuation of the Biblical Lecture Series, also available on YouTube. These lectures are taken from Dad's Biblical series, which is also available here on YouTube, so some of you may have listened to these before. I thought it would be a good way to start Easter Sunday, and I m using this episode to start Season 3 of the podcast. I hope you enjoy this episode as a way to kick off the new season. - Mikayla Peterson. Thank you all very much for coming, and may God bless you all! Thanks for listening, Michael, for listening and supporting the podcast, and for sharing it with the world. - Sincerely, Michael and I, MJP. - MJP - Thank you, MJB.P. (and all the love and support you all around the world! - EACHONE (and your support is so appreciated! - MJBP and all of your support and support is greatly appreciated. - Thankyou, MJBP, for all of the love & support and appreciation, and thank you for all your support, you're being a blessing. - M. P. and support, all of it's worth it. - P.S. & appreciation, Thank you. - - MJB - ETC. - JB & MJBP. - R. & JB. . Thankyou. - AJE - Michael and JB, M. (and the rest will be back in the future episodes will be more than appreciated, ETC - J. (Thank you, JB (and so much more)
00:00:00.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.000Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.000We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:19.000With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.000He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.000If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.000Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.000Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.000Welcome to Season 3, Episode 1 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:02.000Technically, this is Episode 54, if anyone's still keeping track.
00:01:08.000I hope you enjoy this episode. It's called Introduction to the Idea of God.
00:01:12.000I'm using this episode to start Season 3 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:01:16.000These lectures are taken from Dad's Biblical series, also available on YouTube, so some of you may have listened to these before.
00:01:22.000I thought it would be a good way to start Easter Sunday.
00:01:25.000Happy Easter, everyone. Hope you're enjoying your turkey. I'll be having steak.
00:01:34.000Season 3, Episode 1. Introduction to the Idea of God. A Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.
00:01:41.000Well, thank you all very much for coming. It's really shocking to me that you don't have anything better to do on a Tuesday night.
00:02:02.000No, seriously though, it is. I mean, you know, it's very strange in some sense that there's so many of you here to listen to a sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.
00:02:15.000It isn't something I've wanted to do for a long time, but it still does surprise me that there's a ready audience for it.
00:02:24.000And so that's good. So we'll see how it goes. And I'll start with this, because this is the right question.
00:02:31.000The right question is, why bother doing this? And I don't mean, why should I bother doing it?
00:02:36.000I have my own reasons for doing it, but you might think, well, why bother with this strange old book at all?
00:02:43.000And that's a good question, you know. It's a contradictory document that's been cobbled together over thousands of years.
00:02:57.000It's outlasted kingdoms, many, many kingdoms, you know. It's really interesting that it turns out that a book is more durable than stone.
00:03:05.000It's more durable than a castle. It's more durable than an empire. And that's really interesting, you know, that it's something in some sense so evanescent, can be so long living.
00:03:18.000So there's that. That's kind of a mystery. I'm approaching this whole scenario, the Biblical stories, as if they're a mystery, fundamentally.
00:03:28.000Because they are. There's a lot we don't understand about them. We don't understand how they came about.
00:03:34.000We don't really understand how they were put together. We don't understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization.
00:03:43.000We don't understand how people could have believed them. We don't understand what it means that we don't believe them now, or even what it would mean if we did believe them.
00:03:52.000And then, on top of all that, there's the additional problem, which isn't specific to me, but is certainly relevant to me, that no matter how educated you are,
00:04:05.000you're not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.
00:04:11.000But I'm going to do my best, partly because I want to learn more about them, and one of the things I've learned is that the best way to learn about something is to talk about it.
00:04:24.000And when I'm lecturing, I'm thinking, you know, I'm not trying to tell you what I know for sure to be the case, because there's lots of things I don't know for sure to be the case.
00:04:33.000I'm trying to make sense out of this, and I have been doing this for a long time.
00:04:37.000Now, you know, you may know, you may not, that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche.
00:04:44.000Nietzsche was a devastating critic of, I would say, dogmatic Christianity, Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions, I suppose.
00:04:55.000Although he's a very paradoxical thinker, because, for example, one of the things Nietzsche said was that he didn't believe that the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground
00:05:06.000if it hadn't been for Christianity, and more specifically for Catholicism, because he believed that over the course of, really, a thousand years,
00:05:17.000the European mind, so to speak, had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single coherent framework.
00:05:30.000Coherent, if you accept the initial axioms. A single coherent framework.
00:05:34.000And so, Nietzsche believed that that Catholicization of the phenomena of life and of history
00:05:42.000produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations, and then concentrating on something else,
00:05:50.000which, in this particular case, happened to be the natural world.
00:05:53.000And so, Nietzsche believed that, in some sense, Christianity died at its own hand.
00:05:58.000It had spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth.
00:06:05.000You know, absent the corruption and all of that, that's always part of any human endeavor.
00:06:10.000And then the truth, the spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity,
00:06:16.000and everyone woke up and said something like, or thought something like,
00:06:20.000well, how is it that we came to believe any of this?
00:06:23.000It's like waking up one day and noting that you really don't know why you put a Christmas tree up,
00:06:28.000but you've been doing it for a long time, and that's what people do.
00:06:32.000And, you know, there are reasons that Christmas trees came about, but the, what would you say, the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.
00:06:43.000So, now, Nietzsche, although he was a critic of Christianity and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity,
00:06:54.000because, you see, the other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free, in some sense,
00:06:59.000unless you had been a slave, and by that he meant that you don't go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality.
00:07:10.000You go from childhood to a state of discipline, which you might think is akin to slavery, to self-imposed slavery, that would be the best scenario,
00:07:20.000where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific before you might be able to reattain the generality that you had as a child.
00:07:30.000And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization.
00:07:36.000But, in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead, and you often hear of that as something triumphant.
00:07:46.000But for Nietzsche, it wasn't, because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded.
00:07:52.000See, Nietzsche understood that, and this is something I'm going to try to make clear, is that
00:07:58.000there's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience, that we don't know about reality,
00:08:08.000and we have our articulated representations of the world, and then, you can think of, outside of that, there are things we know absolutely nothing about,
00:08:16.000and there's a buffer between them, and those are things we sort of know something about, and we don't know them in an articulated way.
00:08:23.000Here's an example, you know, sometimes you're arguing with someone close to you, and they're in a bad mood, you know,
00:08:29.000and they're being touchy and unreasonable, and you keep the conversation up, and maybe all of a sudden they get angry,
00:08:37.000or maybe they cry, and then when they cry, they figure out what they're angry about, and it has nothing to do with you,
00:08:42.000even though you might have been what precipitated the argument.
00:08:45.000You know, and that's an interesting phenomenon, as far as I'm concerned, because it means that people can know things,
00:08:50.000at one level, without being able to speak what they know at another.
00:08:54.000And so, in some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body, and they do that in moods, and they do that in images, and they do that in actions,
00:09:02.000and we have all sorts of ways that we understand before we understand in a fully articulated manner.
00:09:08.000And so, we have this articulated space that we can all discuss, and then outside of that, we have something that's more akin to a dream that we're embedded in,
00:09:17.000and it's an emotional dream that we're embedded in, and that's based, at least in part, on our actions, and I'll describe that later.
00:09:23.000And then outside of that is what we don't know anything about at all.
00:09:26.000And in that dream, that's where the mystics live, and that's where the artists live, and they're the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure.
00:09:36.000And, you see, what that means, in some sense, is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don't really understand,
00:09:47.000and that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say, if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream,
00:09:53.000then we become dissociated internally.
00:09:57.000We think things we don't act out, and we act out things we don't dream, and that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit,
00:10:04.000and that sickness of the spirit, you see, its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation.
00:10:15.000And then people turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure,
00:10:21.000to try to organize their thinking, and then that's a catastrophe.
00:10:24.000And that's what Nietzsche foresaw, you see, he knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization,
00:10:31.000by destroying this representation, this God ideal, let's say,
00:10:36.000that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism, let's say, and the extremes of ideology.
00:10:43.000He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, you know, and believed and predicted this in the late 1800s,
00:10:50.000which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude,
00:10:54.000predicted that in the 20th century that hundreds of millions of people would die
00:10:58.000because of the replacement of these underlying dreamlike structures with this rational,
00:11:05.000rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world.
00:11:09.000And, you know, we've been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since,
00:11:14.000and, you know, with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there and despair,
00:11:18.000and in some sense that's the situation of the modern Western person,
00:11:22.000and increasingly of people in general.
00:11:26.000You know, I think part of the reason that Islam has its back up with regards to the West to such a degree,
00:11:32.000I mean, there's many reasons and not all of them are valid, that's for sure,
00:11:35.000but one of the reasons is that, you know, being still grounded in a dream, let's say,
00:11:42.000they can see that the rootless, questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture.
00:11:50.000Now, and it does, I mean, Westerners, us, we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect,
00:11:57.000I'm not complaining about that, you know, I mean, there isn't anything easy that can be done about it,
00:12:04.000but it's still a sort of fruitful catastrophe.
00:12:09.000And, you know, it has real effects on people's lives, it's not some abstract thing, you know, I mean,
00:12:15.000lots of times when I've been treating people for depression, for example, or anxiety,
00:12:20.000they have existential issues, you know, it's not just some psychiatric condition,
00:12:24.000it's not just that they're tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty,
00:12:29.000although, you know, sometimes that happens to be the case,
00:12:32.000it's that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life,
00:12:36.000and they're not sure why it's reasonable to continue with it.
00:12:40.000You know, they can feel the terrible negative meanings of life,
00:12:44.000but are skeptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings.
00:12:48.000I had one client who was a very brilliant artist, and as long as he didn't think, he was fine,
00:12:53.000you know, because he'd go and create, and he was really good at being an artist.
00:12:57.000He just, you know, he had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant,
00:20:38.000And Freud, I suppose, in some sense, started to collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream.
00:20:49.000You know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind.
00:20:53.000And we take this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the idea was.
00:20:59.000Like, what's happened with Freud is that we've taken all the marrow out of his bones, so to speak, and left the husk behind.
00:21:06.000And, you know, now when we think about Freud, we just think about the husk, because that's everything that's been discarded.
00:21:12.000But so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception now, including the idea that your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all,
00:21:20.000what would you say, informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control.
00:21:28.000And that's a very, very strange thing. It's one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories.
00:21:35.000Because the psychoanalytic theories are something like, you're a loose collection of living subpersonalities,
00:21:41.000each with its own set of motivations and perceptions and emotions and rationales, all of that.
00:21:47.000And you have limited control over that, so you're like a plurality of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity.
00:21:56.000You know that because you can't control yourself very well, which is one of Jung's objections to Nietzsche's idea that we could create our own values.
00:22:04.000So Jung didn't believe that, especially not after interacting with Freud,
00:22:08.000because he saw that human beings were affected by things that were deeply, deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control.
00:22:15.000And no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.
00:22:18.000You know, the cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines.
00:22:23.000And the ancient people, I think, thought of them as gods, although it's more complex than that.
00:32:40.000And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts.
00:32:43.000Because, and you get this both from Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
00:32:54.000You know, there's a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
00:33:04.000And you don't control it. And what does?
00:33:07.000Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd because there's nothing random about dreams.
00:33:19.000You know, they're very, very structured and very, very complex, and they're not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio.
00:33:56.000You know, or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality because people do that too if they're hell-bent on revenge, for example, and full of hatred and resentment.
00:34:04.000I mean, that manifests itself in terrible fantasies. You know, those are dreams, then people go act them out.
00:34:10.000These things are powerful. You know, and whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams.
00:34:15.000That's what happened to the Nazis. That's what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
00:34:19.000It was absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle.
00:34:24.000And the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. The same thing happened in China.
00:34:28.000It's like, we have to take these things seriously, you know, and try to understand what's going on.
00:34:33.000So, Jung believed that the dream could contain more information than was yet articulated.
00:34:41.000You think, artists do the same thing, you know.
00:34:44.000Like, people go to museums and they look at paintings, Renaissance paintings or modern paintings.
00:34:49.000And they don't exactly know why they're there.
00:34:51.000You know, I was in this room in New York. I don't remember which museum.
00:34:56.000But it was a room full of Renaissance art. You know, great painters. The greatest painters.
00:35:01.000And thought maybe that room was worth a billion dollars or something outrageous because there was like 20 paintings in there, you know.
00:35:07.000So, priceless. And the first thing is, well, why are those paintings worth so much?
00:35:11.000And why is there a museum in the biggest city in the world devoted to them?
00:35:15.000And why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What the hell are those people doing?
00:35:19.000One of them was of the Assumption of Mary, you know, beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art.
00:35:26.000And there's like 20 people standing in front of it looking at it and think, what are those people up to?
00:35:31.000You know, they don't know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting?
00:35:35.000It's not like they know. Why is it worth so much?
00:35:38.000I mean, I know there's a status element to it too, but that begs the question.
00:35:41.000Why did those items become such high status items? What is it about them that's so absolutely remarkable?
00:35:51.000So, I was trying to figure out in part, well, where did the information that's in the dream come from?
00:35:57.000Because it has to come from somewhere and you could think about it as a revelation.
00:36:01.000You know, because it's like it springs out of the void and it's new knowledge and it's a revelation.
00:36:06.000You didn't produce it, it just appears.
00:36:09.000But that's, see, one of the things I want to do with this series is like I'm scientifically minded and I'm quite a rational person
00:36:16.000I like to have an explanation for things that's rational and empirical before I look for any other kind of explanation.
00:36:22.000And I don't want to say that everything that's associated with divinity can be reduced in some manner to biology or to an evolutionary history or anything like that.
00:36:31.000But in so far as it's possible to do that reduction, I'm going to do that.
00:36:36.000And I'm going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air because they can't be pinned down.
00:36:41.000And in that category I would put the category of mystical or religious experience which we don't understand at all.
00:51:56.000Because what we're trying to get at is, in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning, properly social, and properly competent individual.
00:52:07.000We're trying to figure out what that means.
00:52:11.000You need an ideal that's abstracted that you could act out that would enable you to understand what that means.
00:52:18.000And that's what we've been driving at.
00:52:20.000So that's the first hypothesis, in some sense.
00:52:23.000I'm going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we've formalized as God.
00:52:29.000But that's the first sort of hypothesis, is that a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself first as a concrete pattern of behavior that's characteristic of a single individual.
00:52:49.000So here's a political implication, for example.
00:52:53.000One of the debates, we might say, between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire was whether or not an emperor could be God, literally, right?
00:53:09.000And you can see why that might happen, because that's someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy who has a tremendous amount of power and influence.
00:53:17.000But the Christian response to that was, never confuse the specific sovereign with the...
00:53:24.000Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:53:30.000Most of the time, you'll probably be fine.
00:53:32.000But what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:53:38.000In our hyperconnected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:53:43.000Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with the technical know-how to intercept it.
00:53:53.000And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:53:56.000With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:54:03.000Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:55:31.000There's a principle inside that, that even the leader is subordinate to.
00:55:35.000And without that you could argue you can't even have a civilized society because your leader immediately turns into something that's transcendent and all powerful.
00:55:43.000And I mean that's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in Maoist China and what happened in Nazi Germany.
00:55:50.000Because there was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to.
00:55:54.000You're supposed to be subordinate to God.
00:55:58.000Well we're going to tear that idea apart, but partly what it means is that you're subordinate even if you're sovereign to the principle of sovereignty itself.
00:56:06.000And then the question is, what the hell is the principle of sovereignty?
00:56:10.000You could say, we have been working that out for a very long period of time.
00:56:14.000And so that's one of the things that we'll talk about.
00:56:16.000Because the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting, dramatic ideas about that.
00:56:25.000So, just for example, very briefly there was a deity known as Marduk.
00:56:31.000And Marduk, he was a Mesopotamian deity.
00:56:34.000And imagine this is sort of what happened is that as an empire grew out of the post-Ice Age age, say 15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago.
00:56:44.000All these tribes came together and these tribes each had their own deity, their own image of the ideal.
00:56:49.000But then they started to occupy the same territory, right?
00:56:52.000And so then, one tribe had God A, and one tribe had God B, and one could wipe the other one out, and then it would just be God A who wins.
00:57:01.000But that's not so good because, well, maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war.
01:03:01.000Things that upset us rely on that system.
01:03:04.000And then the story, the Marduk story, for example, is the idea that if there are things that upset you, chaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous, underworld things that threaten you,
01:03:15.000the best thing to do is to open your eyes and get your speech organized and go out and confront the thing and make the world out of it.
01:03:22.000When I read that story and started to understand it, it just blew me away that it's such a profound idea.
01:03:28.000And we know it's true, too, because we know in psychotherapy, for example, that you're much better off to confront your fears head on than you are to wait and let them find you.
01:03:38.000And so partly what you do if you're a psychotherapist is you help people break their fears into little pieces, the things that upset them,
01:03:45.000and then to encounter them one by one and master them.
01:03:49.000And so you're teaching this process of eternal mastery over the strange and chaotic world.
01:03:54.000And all of that makes up some of the background.
01:03:57.000We haven't even got to the first sentence of the biblical stories yet.
01:04:00.000But all of that makes up the background.
01:04:09.000So you have to think that we've extracted this story, this strange collection of stories with all its errors and its repetitions and its peculiarities out of the entire history that we've been able to collect ideas.
01:04:23.000And it's the best we've been able to do.
01:04:26.000I know there are other religious traditions.
01:04:29.000I'm not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an example.
01:04:34.000But it's the best we've been able to do.
01:04:36.000And what I'm hoping is that we can return to the stories in some sense with an open mind and see if there's something there that we actually need.
01:04:44.000And I hope that that will be the case.
01:04:47.000And as I said, I'll approach it as rationally as I possibly can.
01:04:50.000So, well, this is the idea to begin with, you know.
01:04:53.000We have the unknown as such and then we act in it like animals act.
01:04:57.000They act first. They don't think. They don't imagine. They act.
01:05:01.000And that's where we started. We started by acting.
01:05:05.000And then we started to be able to represent how we acted.
01:05:08.000And then we started to talk about how we represented how we acted.
01:05:12.000And that enabled us to tell stories because that is what a story is.
01:05:16.000It's to tell about how you represent how you act.
01:05:20.000And so you know that because if you read a book, what happens?
01:05:23.000You read the book and images come to mind of the people in the book behaving, right?
01:05:38.000And that's part of the development of the prefrontal cortex.
01:05:40.000It's part of the capacity for human abstract thought.
01:05:42.000Is that you can pull the behavior, the representation of the behavior, away from the behavior and manipulate the representation before you enact it.
01:07:18.000And to throw it away because of resentment and hatred and bitterness and historical ignorance and jealousy and the desire for destruction and all of that.
01:16:44.000It's very depressing, because if things are so chaotic that you can't get a handle on them, your body defaults into emergency preparation mode.
01:16:52.000And your heart rate goes up, and your immune system stops working.
01:17:07.000And even more than that, it turns out that the way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim.
01:17:17.000And we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim.
01:17:20.000It isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy.
01:17:25.000As you all know, if you've ever attained anything, because as soon as you attain it, then the whole little game ends.
01:17:31.000Then you have to come up with another game, right?
01:17:54.000So what happens is that human beings are weird creatures, because we're much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment.
01:18:03.000And what that means is you have to have an aim.
01:18:05.000And that means you have to have an interpretation.
01:18:07.000And it also means that the nobler the aim, that's one way of thinking about it, the better your life.
01:18:13.000And that's a really interesting thing to know, because, you know, you've heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person.
01:35:30.000And so if you know that what the Bible stories and stories in general are trying to represent is
01:35:36.000the lived experience of conscious individuals.
01:35:39.000Like the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals.
01:35:43.000Then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding.
01:35:48.000And eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and, let's say, the claims of religious stories.
01:49:08.000Because, you know, the feminists are always criticizing Christianity, for example, as being, what, inexorably patriarchal.
01:49:16.000Of course, they criticize everything like that.
01:49:20.000So it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance.
01:49:22.000But I think it's an absolute miracle that right at the beginning of the document, it says straightforwardly, like, with no hesitation whatsoever, that the divine spark, which we're associating with the word that brings forth being, is manifest in men and women equally.
01:49:50.000That's, read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
01:49:54.000That's the best, the best investigation of that tactic that's ever been produced.
01:50:02.000Because what happens in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is that the main character, whose name is Raskolnikov, decides that there's no intrinsic value to other people.
01:50:11.000And that, as a consequence, he can do whatever he wants.
01:50:14.000It's only cowardice that stops him from acting.
01:50:40.000And he finds out something after he kills her, which is that the post-killing Raskolnikov and the pre-killing Raskolnikov are not the same person, even a little bit.
01:50:50.000Because he's broken a rule, like he's broken a serious rule, and there's no going back.
01:50:54.000And Crime and Punishment is the best investigation I know of, of what happens if you take the notion that there's nothing divine about the individual seriously.
01:51:05.000Most of the people I know who are deeply atheistic, and I understand why they're deeply atheistic, they haven't contended with people like Dostoevsky.
01:52:21.000So, well, so the question is, do you contend seriously with the idea that, A, there's something cosmically constitutive about consciousness,
01:52:32.000and B, that that might well be considered divine, and C, that that is instantiated in every person.
01:52:40.000And then ask yourself, if you're not a criminal, if you don't act it out.
01:52:45.000And then ask yourself what that means.
01:53:30.000Look, I want to read you a couple of things that we'll use as a prodroma for the next lecture.
01:53:35.000Because I'll just bounce through a collection of ideas that's associated with the notion of divinity, okay?
01:53:41.000And then we'll turn back to the first lines when we start the next lecture.
01:53:45.000I have no idea how far I'm going to get through the biblical stories, by the way.
01:53:48.000Because I'm trying to figure this out as I go along.
01:53:51.000Okay, so, you know, there's an idea in Christianity that the image of God is a trinity, right?
01:53:58.000There's the Father, there's the element of the Father, there's the element of the Son, and there's the element of the Holy Spirit.
01:54:03.000And it's something like tradition, the spirit of tradition.
01:54:07.000It's something like the human being as the newest incarnation of that tradition, like the living incarnation of that tradition.
01:54:15.000And then it's something like the spirit in people that makes relationship with this and this possible, the spirit in individuals.
01:54:24.000And so I'm going to bounce my way quickly through some of the classical metaphorical attributes of God.
01:54:31.000So that we kind of have a cloud of notions about what we're talking about when we return to Genesis 1 and talk about the God who spoke chaos into being.
01:55:19.000And the sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time and now they're psychological.
01:55:24.000We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present and expect that you're negotiating with something that represents the transcendent future.
01:55:32.000And that's an amazing human discovery.
01:55:35.000Like, no other creature can do that to act as if the future is real.
01:55:39.000To know that you can bargain with reality itself and that you can do it successfully.
01:56:01.000You see, the thing that's one of the things that's weird about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God and nature are not the same thing at all.
01:56:08.000Whatever God is partially manifest in this Logos is something that stands outside of nature.
01:56:13.000And I think that's something like consciousness as abstracted from the natural world.
01:56:19.000So, it built Eden for mankind and then banished us for disobedience.
01:58:55.000Because now we're ready to take a tentative step into the very first part of this book.
01:59:01.000And it's important to have your conceptual framework properly organized so that you can appreciate where it's going and what it might possibly mean.
01:59:11.000And so, well, I've done what I can today to, what would you say, elaborate on this single word, I suppose.
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02:03:50.000I had an experience in grad school, two English degrees, and the way you described the humanities in my experience helped me understand my experience back then.
02:04:26.000But you said something, you described the Bible, the collection of stories in the Bible in an interesting way, and I wonder if it was on purpose.
02:04:32.000You described it as created by an assembly of stories created by many people over time that's hyperlinked into itself.
02:04:43.000And it sounds a lot like how a description of, like, the Internet and, like, how that works.
02:04:51.000I mean, because the Internet's also a collective, it's a collective endeavor.
02:04:56.000God only knows what personality it's going to manifest.
02:04:59.000You know, but it's going to manifest some personality because it's learning to understand us very, very rapidly.
02:05:04.000So, I think you could, there's no reason not to think about it as a precursor.
02:05:09.000I mean, the distance between the Bible and the Internet is a lot less than the distance between a chimpanzee and a human being.
02:05:16.000So, you know, it's a, and the difference between a book and the Internet is, it's also, it's, in some sense, it's a matter of, matter of degree rather than kind.
02:05:28.000So, I, I can't speculate, you know, because God only knows what's going to happen in the next 20 years.
02:05:55.000I'm curious about the connection between aesthetic beauty and religious experience.
02:06:00.000I think you've hinted at it once or twice over the course of this lecture.
02:06:04.000Is it possible for something that's incredibly beautiful to evoke a religious or mystical experience or something kind of in the same ballpark as that?
02:06:28.000My tag on to that question, the next part was, is that why we have cathedrals built like a spectacular buildings as opposed to like a whole box or something?
02:06:46.000And this is something that people do not take seriously.
02:06:49.000And this is especially something we don't take seriously in Canada.
02:06:52.000I mean, one of the, you think about, you think about all the hundreds of millions of dollars that were invested into beauty in Europe.
02:06:59.000I mean, spectacular, excessive investment in beauty that's paid back.
02:07:06.000God only knows how many multiples of times people make pilgrimages to Europe constantly because it's so beautiful that it just, it staggers you.
02:07:15.000Beauty is so valuable and we're so afraid of it.
02:07:18.000And I think we're afraid of it because it does, it's a pathway.
02:07:21.000It's not the only pathway to the divine.
02:07:23.000I mean, there's a lot, there's pathways to the divine.
02:08:46.000I have a bit of a similar question, actually.
02:08:48.000I know one of the ways in which the Bible is appreciated, even by some of its harshest critics and deeply atheistic people, is as a work of literature and is something, at least the King James or the authorized translation of the Bible, is something very aesthetically beautiful and a great work of literature and a great work of poetry.
02:09:07.000And I'm wondering, just from your study of it and from your personal perspective, if there's any particular passages or parts of it that you find particularly have struck you in that way or that you cherish more than any others that you'd be able to share?
02:09:22.000Well, the ones that have really opened up to me, I think, are the stories in Genesis, right up to the Tower of Babel, because I think, well, and hopefully I'll be able to talk to all of you about that, but I think I've got some sense of what they mean and why.
02:09:37.000I mean, I know it's not exhaustive, obviously, but, like, and then the story in Exodus as well, I also feel that, like, I've got a handle on that.
02:09:46.000And so those have hit me really, really hard.
02:09:49.000And, you know, I mean, just trying to understand this first part of Genesis, to try to understand what these concepts mean, has been, especially when I started to understand that the concept that human beings are made in God's image, that God has all those attributes that we just described,
02:10:05.000that human beings are made in God's image, that that's actually the cornerstone of our legal system.
02:10:10.000That really rattled me, because I didn't understand that clearly, that our body of laws has that metaphysical presupposition without which the laws fall apart.
02:10:22.000And that's starting to happen. It really is, you know, like the postmodern critique of law.
02:10:27.000The law schools are, I would say, they're overrun by postmodernists who are undermining the structure of Western law as fast as they possibly can, because they don't buy any of this.
02:10:38.000And so they're much more likely to just think of the law as something like a casual, pragmatic tool to be manipulated for the purposes of bringing forth the utopia.
02:10:48.000It's a really, really, really bad idea. So, it's very strange to me that we go off track when that metaphysical foundation starts to get rattled.
02:10:58.000So, do you think your appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of it comes from a belief in, like, the truth of its underlying propositions?
02:11:05.000I mean, that's, because, like, even the atheistic critics I'm thinking of, like, even Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens,
02:11:10.000really appreciate the Bible as just a piece of really beautiful literature, and I guess the quality of their writing,
02:11:16.000and the sort of exalted themes behind it, even if they totally reject the underlying premises of it.
02:11:21.000Yeah, well, I don't think that you can see it as beautiful and poetic, and reject the underlying premises,
02:11:28.000because if you see it as beautiful and poetic, you're accepting the underlying premises with your experience of the beauty and the poetics,
02:11:36.000even though you may be fighting it with your articulated rationality.
02:11:40.000So, I think all that indicates is a disintegrated perspective on the book.
02:11:45.000And I'm not, it's not surprising that that's the case.
02:11:48.000I mean, it's the perspective that everyone has on the book.
02:11:52.000Except with them, it's more well developed and well thought through.
02:11:55.000But, I think it's fundamentally, they're not approaching the thing with enough respect.
02:12:01.000That's my sense, is that, and who knows, right?
02:12:04.000Because I don't, I don't know, but what I've tried to do is to think,
02:12:07.000there's probably more to this than I know.
02:12:10.000And then try to understand it from that perspective, rather than to think, for example,
02:12:14.000well, it's a collection of superstitions that we've somehow outgrown.
02:12:19.000It's like, no, it's just, sorry, that's not a deep enough analysis.
02:12:24.000Because it's got some truth, but it doesn't take into account the fact
02:12:30.000that the propositions still stand at the foundation of our culture.
02:12:35.000It doesn't address Nietzsche's central concern, which is that if you blow out the notion of God,
02:15:17.000And so, I'm going to make it rational.
02:15:19.000I'm going to try to provide an answer to, and it is, I think you're right about speaking about Nietzsche and his capacity for prophecy.
02:15:25.000And Dostoevsky's in the same category.
02:15:27.000It's like, there are prophetic elements to the Old and New Testament that seem to stretch over much vaster spans of time.
02:15:34.000And I'm going to try to produce a rational account of that.
02:15:38.000But, I mean, one of the reasons that I think the New Testament is psychologically true, let's say, is because, and this is one of the things that's deeply embedded in the structure of the Bible.
02:15:49.000In the Old Testament, there's this idea, and I'm skipping ahead, that through a succession of states, the people who behave properly will eventually establish the proper state.
02:16:02.000And so, the state is viewed, in some sense, as the entity of salvation.
02:16:07.000But, what happens in the New Testament is that idea gets, you could say, deconstructed.
02:16:13.000And instead of a state being the place of redemption, a state of being becomes the state of redemption.
02:16:21.000And so, the idea that human beings will be redeemed moves from the utopian state vision to the responsibility of the individual.
02:17:12.000I'm going to keep you on the creation story.
02:17:15.000And if you don't mind, because we know this editing that was done, there was the purpose for the editing.
02:17:21.000Can you give us your thoughts about the difference in the story of creation, especially pertaining to men, from the first chapter, which is very godlike, you know, by a word, and to the second one, which is more like a fatherly type of creation.
02:17:46.000Well, I think, you know, the more cynical, what you call, criticisms of the Bible and the religious tradition.
02:17:54.000Criticisms like Marx's or Freud's even, for that matter, make the case that it's a power, it's a manifestation of power in politics.
02:18:03.000And that there's always a political or economic motivation behind the construction of the stories.
02:18:08.000And I think that that's true to some degree.
02:18:10.000But I don't think that it's true enough so that you can take that particular interpretive tack and be done with it.
02:18:18.000And I would say that, to the degree that there are political and economic motivations that have shaped the stories, the fact that multiple stories have come together, they're sort of corrective in some sense.
02:18:29.000And so, even if at the level of detail, there's political intrigue and politics, say, with regards to the ascendancy of Israel, when you step away from it, it becomes something that's more universal and escapes from that.
02:20:01.000Right, so I've been really interested in a lot of the stuff that you've been saying about dreams.
02:20:11.000Because I've been lucid dreaming a lot for many years.
02:20:15.000But always in a sort of atheistic way as sort of like a game or something like that.
02:20:20.000But because of seeing your talks and everything, I'm starting to think of it from a different perspective.
02:20:25.000Like you're now interfacing with something beyond the narrow scope of your conscious awareness or something like that.
02:20:33.000Maybe mythological or maybe something like God.
02:20:35.000And so, what I've been thinking about and what I maybe wonder what you think about it is that, in some ways when you're lucid dreaming you're kind of,
02:20:45.000you're getting beyond the limitations of an ordinary dream.
02:20:48.000You're sort of transcending limitations which maybe is, like it's not the purpose of people, right?
02:20:55.000Because as a person you're supposed to be limited in some way as opposed to like God who's like not limited.
02:21:00.000And how, but on the other hand it's a good opportunity to kind of have control over your interactions with this like very special and like interesting thing.
02:21:08.000So, I guess the conundrum is that on one hand like you can, you can control your interactions but on the other hand like you are controlling them.
02:21:15.000So, I guess, I'm wondering what you think about that and also just in general what do you think about lucid dreaming as a thing?
02:26:11.000It exists as the living individual in time and space.
02:26:15.000And then it exists as the spirit and as consciousness.
02:26:21.000Something like that, that we all share.
02:26:23.000Which, you know, Jung would have thought about that as something like the capacity for the individual to realize the tragedy and redemption of Christ in their individual life.
02:26:34.000And that's something like your capacity to voluntarily accept the tragic conditions of your existence and to move forward to something resembling paradise regardless of that.
02:26:46.000You know, as something that's intrinsic to you.
02:26:48.000And I think that's associated with the idea of the Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, all of that.
02:27:35.000And there's something, it rests, it has to rest on something inside that's like this mediator between what we articulate and what we don't understand.
02:28:44.000You have to leave space for what you kind of know and for what you don't know.
02:28:48.000And, I mean, you know, in the story of the Tower of Babel, human beings make this massive building that's supposed to reach up to the heavens so that it'll take the place of God.
02:28:59.000Well, that's the earliest warning we have of the danger of making things so big that you confuse them with God.
02:29:08.000And God gets irritated and comes down and makes everybody speak different languages and scatters them.
02:29:12.000It's like, well, that's what happens when you try to make something a totality, is that it starts to fragment inside and disintegrates into catastrophe.
02:29:21.000And so it's almost as if we have to maintain this articulated space inside the dream, inside the custom, something like that, because otherwise it doesn't work.
02:29:30.000And I think that's the same as having respect for the fact that we have bodies.
02:29:34.000You know, we're not just abstract creatures that follow rules.
02:30:08.000You spoke about dreams as like a representation of truths and universal truths that can be interpreted into like myths and religion.
02:30:20.000And as you say, it's very beneficial for the individual.
02:30:24.000And it sounds like also for the society as well, because not everyone can as easily remember their dreams or interpret their dreams like that.
02:30:37.000And also, it's like broadcasted to all of society for their benefits.
02:30:43.000So, I guess I'm wondering what the evolutionary advantage of dreams are.
02:30:48.000And my question would be, do you think that dreams suggest some sort of evolutionary group selection, such as like groups that don't have these dreams that are represented into myths and religion?
02:31:03.000Do you think they didn't survive as well?
02:31:06.000So, I'm not going to answer the second part of that question, because I'd have to go far too far off on a tangent for me to manage right now.
02:31:15.000I mean, what happens when you're dreaming, there's a little switch, so to speak, in your brain that shuts off when you're dreaming, and it stops you from moving.
02:31:46.000But what seems to be happening at night is that you're running the underlying architecture of your cognitive ability in different simulations.
02:31:55.000And it's cost-free, because you're paralyzed.
02:31:58.000You're not running around there out in the world investigating.
02:32:01.000So, it's part of the manner in which your brain experiments with the way the world can be represented.
02:32:08.000And so, and it seems absolutely necessary.
02:32:11.000And, I mean, if you deprive people of REM sleep, they don't stay sane very long.
02:32:16.000There's something necessary about the dreaming process to maintenance of articulated sanity.
02:32:24.000So, you're doing some kind of organization at night when you descend into that chaos.
02:32:29.000And partly what seems to happen is that your categorical, you know, your categories have boundaries, right?
02:32:35.000But sometimes you don't have the categories correct.
02:32:37.000And so the boundaries have to loosen, and other things need to be put in the categories, or some things shunted away.
02:32:43.000And in the dream, the category structure loosens, which is why dreams are so peculiar.
02:32:48.000But they're experimenting, it's your mind is experimenting with the underlying categorical structure of imagination.
02:32:55.000And trying to update your mode of being in the world.
02:33:00.000Dreams often concentrate on things that provoke anxiety.
02:33:03.000So, if you wake people up when they're dreaming, the most commonly reported emotion is anxiety.
02:33:08.000And so the dream is like the first stages of the attempt to contend with the unknown.
02:33:13.000And so the dream is half unknown and half known.
02:33:17.000Which is also why it's so peculiar, you know, because you kind of understand it, but you don't really.
02:33:22.000And it partakes of the unknown and of the known.
02:33:25.000And it's the bridge between the two, something like that.
02:33:28.000Okay, so my question is kind of two parts.
02:33:40.000The first one is just like a general question, and then just the application of the question.
02:33:44.000So my first question is, do you think that consciousness and beinghood are inextricably linked?
02:33:50.000And then secondly, so if there was something like a super computer that one could house theoretically a perfect brain of a person in it.
02:33:58.000Does that thing then become the same person as the person who was before?
02:34:03.000So is there a transcendency to beinghood but not to consciousness?
02:34:06.000Okay, so the first question is, well I would say that the kind of being that these stories are concerned with is absolutely dependent on consciousness.
02:34:14.000Now whether or not that means that being as such is dependent on consciousness actually depends on how you define being.
02:34:20.000Right, so it's always tricky when you ask an if is an example of be.
02:34:27.000Those are tricky questions because it depends on how you define the two.
02:34:30.000But for our purposes, the being that we're discussing that's represented in these stories is intrinsically associated with conscious experience.
02:34:39.000And consciousness is given this constitutive role.
02:34:44.000It says that the experience that we're talking about would not exist if consciousness did not exist.
02:34:49.000So you can think about it as a kind of game in a way.
02:34:52.000And then you have to decide for yourself whether that's a game that can be generalized.
02:34:55.000And I won't answer the second part, okay? If you don't mind.
02:35:04.000So, two part question. First one is very quick, almost admin.
02:35:07.000If we want to read the biblical stories that kind of you're referring to, is there a particular version edition source publisher that we should refer to?
02:35:13.000Oh, I'll bring the thing I like next week which is a, I think the Reader's Digest published it of all things.
02:35:19.000But it's a, it lays out the narratives in a different format.
02:35:25.000It's easier, I find it much easier to read.
02:35:27.000So I'll show it to you and I'll bring it next time and show it to you.
02:35:29.000One of the main reasons why I'm interested in so much of your work and I think that many people are as well is that you kind of leave literalism at the door and you open up another door to a much more deeper meaning.
02:35:37.000In your interview with transliminal media, you mentioned Liz Eibel's book, The Serpent, The Tree, The Serpent and Vision.
02:36:51.000I mean, Isbel in her books plays with that idea metaphorically, but she never really takes it seriously, which is no problem.
02:36:57.000I mean, there's only so much you can take seriously, and she did a fine job of what she did.
02:37:01.000But I'll talk about that a lot, because that's a very complicated issue.
02:37:05.000I mean, I would say, to begin with, that the systems that you use to deal with radical uncertainty are the same systems that your primate ancestors evolved to deal with snakes.
02:37:25.000I'm an aerospace science engineer and an expert computer programmer, and I have three rapid-fire questions, so I'm gonna get through them quick.
02:37:32.000Based on your opinion of where the universities now stand in terms of humanities and social sciences, is mathematics more powerful than articulated speech?
02:37:46.000I'm not sure, I'm not exactly sure how the first-
02:37:48.000Does it make you more powerful to study mathematics and art science in universities?
02:37:53.000Oh, well, it depends on what you mean by power, I guess.
02:37:58.000I mean, obviously, studying mathematics and computer science makes you insanely powerful.
02:40:59.000If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos.
02:41:12.000Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
02:41:17.000See jordanbpeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.
02:41:23.000Remember to check out jordanbpeterson.com slash personality for information on his new course, which is now 50% off.
02:41:30.000I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.
02:41:32.000If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review.
02:41:35.000Next week's episode is a continuation of the Biblical series and delves into Genesis, so stay tuned for that.
02:42:08.000My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at selfauthoring.com.