The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Biblical Series： Introduction to the Idea of God

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.000 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 1 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:02.000 Technically, this is Episode 54, if anyone's still keeping track.

00:01:06.000 I'm Mikayla Peterson, Jordan's daughter.

00:01:08.000 I hope you enjoy this episode. It's called Introduction to the Idea of God.

00:01:12.000 I'm using this episode to start Season 3 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:16.000 These lectures are taken from Dad's Biblical series, also available on YouTube, so some of you may have listened to these before.

00:01:22.000 I thought it would be a good way to start Easter Sunday.

00:01:25.000 Happy Easter, everyone. Hope you're enjoying your turkey. I'll be having steak.

00:01:34.000 Season 3, Episode 1. Introduction to the Idea of God. A Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.

00:01:41.000 Well, 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.

00:02:02.000 No, 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.

00:02:15.000 It 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.

00:02:24.000 And so that's good. So we'll see how it goes. And I'll start with this, because this is the right question.

00:02:31.000 The right question is, why bother doing this? And I don't mean, why should I bother doing it?

00:02:36.000 I have my own reasons for doing it, but you might think, well, why bother with this strange old book at all?

00:02:43.000 And that's a good question, you know. It's a contradictory document that's been cobbled together over thousands of years.

00:02:57.000 It's outlasted kingdoms, many, many kingdoms, you know. It's really interesting that it turns out that a book is more durable than stone.

00:03:05.000 It'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.

00:03:18.000 So 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.

00:03:28.000 Because they are. There's a lot we don't understand about them. We don't understand how they came about.

00:03:34.000 We don't really understand how they were put together. We don't understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization.

00:03:43.000 We 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.

00:03:52.000 And 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,

00:04:05.000 you're not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.

00:04:11.000 But 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.

00:04:24.000 And 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.

00:04:33.000 I'm trying to make sense out of this, and I have been doing this for a long time.

00:04:37.000 Now, you know, you may know, you may not, that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche.

00:04:44.000 Nietzsche was a devastating critic of, I would say, dogmatic Christianity, Christianity as it was instantiated in institutions, I suppose.

00:04:55.000 Although 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

00:05:06.000 if it hadn't been for Christianity, and more specifically for Catholicism, because he believed that over the course of, really, a thousand years,

00:05:17.000 the European mind, so to speak, had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single coherent framework.

00:05:30.000 Coherent, if you accept the initial axioms. A single coherent framework.

00:05:34.000 And so, Nietzsche believed that that Catholicization of the phenomena of life and of history

00:05:42.000 produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending its dogmatic foundations, and then concentrating on something else,

00:05:50.000 which, in this particular case, happened to be the natural world.

00:05:53.000 And so, Nietzsche believed that, in some sense, Christianity died at its own hand.

00:05:58.000 It had spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth.

00:06:05.000 You know, absent the corruption and all of that, that's always part of any human endeavor.

00:06:10.000 And then the truth, the spirit of the truth that was developed by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity,

00:06:16.000 and everyone woke up and said something like, or thought something like,

00:06:20.000 well, how is it that we came to believe any of this?

00:06:23.000 It's like waking up one day and noting that you really don't know why you put a Christmas tree up,

00:06:28.000 but you've been doing it for a long time, and that's what people do.

00:06:32.000 And, 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.

00:06:43.000 So, now, Nietzsche, although he was a critic of Christianity and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity,

00:06:54.000 because, you see, the other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free, in some sense,

00:06:59.000 unless you had been a slave, and by that he meant that you don't go from childhood to full-fledged adult individuality.

00:07:10.000 You 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, 0.98

00:07:20.000 where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific before you might be able to reattain the generality that you had as a child.

00:07:30.000 And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization.

00:07:36.000 But, in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead, and you often hear of that as something triumphant. 0.98

00:07:46.000 But for Nietzsche, it wasn't, because he was too nuanced a thinker to be that simple-minded.

00:07:52.000 See, Nietzsche understood that, and this is something I'm going to try to make clear, is that

00:07:58.000 there's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience, that we don't know about reality,

00:08:08.000 and 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,

00:08:16.000 and 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.

00:08:23.000 Here's an example, you know, sometimes you're arguing with someone close to you, and they're in a bad mood, you know,

00:08:29.000 and they're being touchy and unreasonable, and you keep the conversation up, and maybe all of a sudden they get angry,

00:08:37.000 or maybe they cry, and then when they cry, they figure out what they're angry about, and it has nothing to do with you,

00:08:42.000 even though you might have been what precipitated the argument.

00:08:45.000 You know, and that's an interesting phenomenon, as far as I'm concerned, because it means that people can know things,

00:08:50.000 at one level, without being able to speak what they know at another.

00:08:54.000 And 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,

00:09:02.000 and we have all sorts of ways that we understand before we understand in a fully articulated manner.

00:09:08.000 And 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,

00:09:17.000 and 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.

00:09:23.000 And then outside of that is what we don't know anything about at all.

00:09:26.000 And 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.

00:09:36.000 And, 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,

00:09:47.000 and that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say, if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream,

00:09:53.000 then we become dissociated internally.

00:09:57.000 We 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,

00:10:04.000 and that sickness of the spirit, you see, its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation.

00:10:15.000 And then people turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure,

00:10:21.000 to try to organize their thinking, and then that's a catastrophe.

00:10:24.000 And that's what Nietzsche foresaw, you see, he knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization, 0.97

00:10:31.000 by destroying this representation, this God ideal, let's say,

00:10:36.000 that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism, let's say, and the extremes of ideology.

00:10:43.000 He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, you know, and believed and predicted this in the late 1800s,

00:10:50.000 which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude,

00:10:54.000 predicted that in the 20th century that hundreds of millions of people would die

00:10:58.000 because of the replacement of these underlying dreamlike structures with this rational,

00:11:05.000 rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world.

00:11:09.000 And, you know, we've been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since,

00:11:14.000 and, you know, with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there and despair,

00:11:18.000 and in some sense that's the situation of the modern Western person,

00:11:22.000 and increasingly of people in general.

00:11:26.000 You know, I think part of the reason that Islam has its back up with regards to the West to such a degree, 1.00

00:11:32.000 I mean, there's many reasons and not all of them are valid, that's for sure,

00:11:35.000 but one of the reasons is that, you know, being still grounded in a dream, let's say,

00:11:42.000 they can see that the rootless, questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture.

00:11:50.000 Now, and it does, I mean, Westerners, us, we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect,

00:11:57.000 I'm not complaining about that, you know, I mean, there isn't anything easy that can be done about it,

00:12:04.000 but it's still a sort of fruitful catastrophe.

00:12:09.000 And, you know, it has real effects on people's lives, it's not some abstract thing, you know, I mean,

00:12:15.000 lots of times when I've been treating people for depression, for example, or anxiety,

00:12:20.000 they have existential issues, you know, it's not just some psychiatric condition,

00:12:24.000 it's not just that they're tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty,

00:12:29.000 although, you know, sometimes that happens to be the case,

00:12:32.000 it's that they are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life,

00:12:36.000 and they're not sure why it's reasonable to continue with it.

00:12:40.000 You know, they can feel the terrible negative meanings of life,

00:12:44.000 but are skeptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings.

00:12:48.000 I had one client who was a very brilliant artist, and as long as he didn't think, he was fine,

00:12:53.000 you know, because he'd go and create, and he was really good at being an artist.

00:12:57.000 He just, you know, he had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant,

00:13:02.000 although he was self-denigrating.

00:13:03.000 But as soon as he started to think about what he was doing,

00:13:07.000 then, you know, it's like a drill or a thaw or something like that.

00:13:14.000 He'd saw the branch off that he was sitting on because he'd start to criticize what he was doing,

00:13:19.000 even the utility of it, even though it was sort of self-evidently useful,

00:13:22.000 and then it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create.

00:13:27.000 And he always struck me as a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being,

00:13:40.000 divorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your being.

00:13:44.000 And it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing.

00:13:47.000 And it's really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathology,

00:13:54.000 but also in social psychopathology.

00:13:56.000 And that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of as,

00:14:02.000 they're like crippled religions. That's the right way to think about them. 1.00

00:14:06.000 They're like a religion that's missing an arm and a leg, but can still hobble along. 1.00

00:14:10.000 And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, 0.73

00:14:13.000 but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent, 0.75

00:14:16.000 and it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.

00:14:20.000 And that's how it looks to me anyways.

00:14:22.000 And so I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.

00:14:28.000 I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done than that.

00:14:34.000 I've thought that for a long, long time, probably since the early 80s,

00:14:40.000 when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.

00:14:48.000 Because you can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.

00:14:55.000 It's like, why the hell do they care exactly?

00:14:58.000 What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?

00:15:04.000 Like, people get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.

00:15:10.000 And it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, obvious why.

00:15:15.000 But there's some, it's like, there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.

00:15:20.000 It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs, you know.

00:15:25.000 And they're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.

00:15:27.000 It's like, drown in what?

00:15:29.000 And what are the logs protecting themselves, protecting them from?

00:15:32.000 And why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?

00:15:38.000 And these are not obvious things.

00:15:40.000 So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.

00:15:44.000 And I've done some lectures about that, that are on YouTube.

00:15:47.000 Most of you know that.

00:15:48.000 And some of what I'm going to talk about in this series, you'll have heard if you've listened to the YouTube videos.

00:15:54.000 But, you know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.

00:15:57.000 And so, okay, so Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.

00:16:04.000 Now, he understood that we had bodies and that we had motivations and emotions.

00:16:08.000 Like, he was a romantic thinker in some sense, but way ahead of his time.

00:16:11.000 Because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul, but was embedded in our physiology.

00:16:19.000 Constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.

00:16:23.000 He understood that.

00:16:24.000 But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves

00:16:31.000 to become something akin to God and to create their own values.

00:16:35.000 And he thought that the person, he talked about the person who could create their own values as the over-man or the super-man.

00:16:42.000 And that was one of the parts of Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context

00:16:48.000 and used to fuel their, you know, superior man ideology.

00:16:53.000 So, and we know what happened with that.

00:16:56.000 That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.

00:16:59.000 And, see, I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.

00:17:03.000 And it was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who's a developmental psychologist,

00:17:07.000 that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream.

00:17:15.000 And that that dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act.

00:17:20.000 So, you know, we act out things we don't understand all the time.

00:17:25.000 And if that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that

00:17:30.000 because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.

00:17:32.000 And we're clearly not.

00:17:34.000 So, we're much more complicated than we understand.

00:17:37.000 Which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.

00:17:42.000 And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge

00:17:46.000 has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave

00:17:50.000 and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

00:17:54.000 Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity

00:17:59.000 and trying to represent them partly through imitation

00:18:03.000 but also through drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that

00:18:07.000 to represent what we're like so that we can understand what we're like.

00:18:10.000 And that process of understanding is what I see unfolding at least in part in the biblical stories.

00:18:16.000 And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that

00:18:22.000 which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.

00:18:24.000 But I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears say

00:18:32.000 and to become conscious of what it means to be human.

00:18:34.000 And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are, what we are, where we came from, or any of those things.

00:18:40.000 And, you know, the light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.

00:18:45.000 It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.

00:18:47.000 Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.

00:18:52.000 It's absolutely unbelievable.

00:18:54.000 We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are conscious but not knowing.

00:19:00.000 And we're trying to figure out who we are.

00:19:02.000 And a story that we've been telling or a set of stories that we've been telling for 3,000 years seems to me to have something to offer.

00:19:09.000 And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I would say in some sense with a beginner's mind.

00:19:17.000 It's a mystery, this book, how the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it,

00:19:22.000 how it happened to motivate an entire culture for 2,000 years and to transform the world.

00:19:28.000 Like, what's going on? How did that happen?

00:19:30.000 It's by no means obvious.

00:19:32.000 And one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.

00:19:39.000 And it's a serious phenomena.

00:19:40.000 I mean, not least because people have the capacity for religious experience and no one knows why that is.

00:19:46.000 And I mean, you can induce it reliably in all sorts of different ways.

00:19:49.000 You can do it with brain stimulation.

00:19:51.000 You can certainly do it with drugs.

00:19:53.000 There's especially the psychedelic variety.

00:19:55.000 They produce intimations of the divine extraordinarily regularly.

00:20:00.000 People have been using drugs like that for, God only knows how long, 50,000 years, maybe more than that,

00:20:06.000 to produce some sort of intimate union with the divine.

00:20:10.000 It's like, we don't understand any of that when we discovered the psychedelics in the late 60s.

00:20:14.000 It shocked everybody so badly that they were instantly made illegal and abandoned in terms of research for like 50 years.

00:20:21.000 And it's no wonder, because who the hell expected that?

00:20:24.000 Nobody.

00:20:25.000 Nobody.

00:20:26.000 Now, Jung was a student of Nietzsche's, you see.

00:20:32.000 And he was also, I would say, a very astute critic of Nietzsche.

00:20:36.000 He was educated by Freud.

00:20:38.000 And Freud, I suppose, in some sense, started to collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream.

00:20:49.000 You know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind.

00:20:53.000 And we take this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the idea was.

00:20:59.000 Like, 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.

00:21:06.000 And, you know, now when we think about Freud, we just think about the husk, because that's everything that's been discarded.

00:21:12.000 But 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,

00:21:20.000 what would you say, informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control.

00:21:28.000 And that's a very, very strange thing. It's one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories.

00:21:35.000 Because the psychoanalytic theories are something like, you're a loose collection of living subpersonalities,

00:21:41.000 each with its own set of motivations and perceptions and emotions and rationales, all of that.

00:21:47.000 And you have limited control over that, so you're like a plurality of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity.

00:21:56.000 You 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.

00:22:04.000 So Jung didn't believe that, especially not after interacting with Freud,

00:22:08.000 because he saw that human beings were affected by things that were deeply, deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control.

00:22:15.000 And no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.

00:22:18.000 You know, the cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines.

00:22:23.000 And the ancient people, I think, thought of them as gods, although it's more complex than that.

00:22:27.000 Like rage would be a god.

00:22:29.000 Mars, the god of rage, that's the thing that possesses you when you're angry.

00:22:33.000 You know, it has a viewpoint and it says what it wants to say.

00:22:37.000 And that might have very little to do with what you want to say when you're being sensible.

00:22:41.000 And it doesn't just inhabit you, it inhabits everyone and it lives forever and it even inhabits animals.

00:22:47.000 And so it's this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body politic like a thought inhabits the brain.

00:22:57.000 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:22:59.000 It's a very strange way of thinking, but it certainly has its merits.

00:23:03.000 And so, and those things, well in some sense those are deities, although it's not that simple.

00:23:09.000 And so Jung, Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.

00:23:17.000 Because he would see in his clients dreams echoes of stories that he knew because it was deeply read in mythology.

00:23:24.000 And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth.

00:23:28.000 And that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.

00:23:34.000 And well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.

00:23:38.000 And some people remember dreams all the time.

00:23:41.000 Like two or three a night, I've had clients like that.

00:23:43.000 And they often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.

00:23:47.000 I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable at the time.

00:23:53.000 Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty.

00:23:57.000 And to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.

00:24:03.000 So, it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking.

00:24:06.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:24:07.000 And so, because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.

00:24:11.000 It's doing its best to formulate something.

00:24:13.000 That was Jung's notion.

00:24:15.000 As opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.

00:24:21.000 That's not what Jung believed.

00:24:23.000 He believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.

00:24:32.000 Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right?

00:24:36.000 That's obvious.

00:24:37.000 Bang! 1.00

00:24:38.000 It's nothing you ever ask about.

00:24:39.000 But what the hell does that mean?

00:24:41.000 A thought appears in your head. 1.00

00:24:43.000 What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? 0.99

00:24:45.000 You know, it just doesn't help with anything. 0.99

00:24:49.000 Where does it come from?

00:24:51.000 Well, nowhere.

00:24:52.000 It just appears in my head.

00:24:54.000 Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation as it turns out, you know?

00:24:58.000 And so you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?

00:25:03.000 Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?

00:25:05.000 Someone long dead.

00:25:06.000 That might be part of it.

00:25:07.000 Just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.

00:25:12.000 And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors.

00:25:16.000 That's one way of looking at it.

00:25:17.000 And your motivations speak to you.

00:25:19.000 And your emotions speak to you.

00:25:20.000 And your body speaks to you.

00:25:22.000 And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.

00:25:26.000 And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.

00:25:31.000 They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?

00:25:34.000 They have a developmental origin.

00:25:36.000 And God only knows how lengthy that origin is.

00:25:39.000 Even to say something like, I am conscious.

00:25:42.000 You know, that's taken...

00:25:44.000 Chimpanzees don't say that. 0.79

00:25:46.000 You know, it's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees.

00:25:51.000 Something like that from the common ancestor.

00:25:53.000 You know, they have no articulated knowledge at all.

00:25:55.000 They have very little self-representation in some sense.

00:25:58.000 And very little self-consciousness.

00:26:00.000 And that's not the case with us at all.

00:26:02.000 And we had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.

00:26:08.000 And I think some of that's represented and captured in some sense in these ancient stories.

00:26:16.000 Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories in Genesis.

00:26:20.000 Which is the stories we're going to start with.

00:26:22.000 That they were...

00:26:24.000 That some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories.

00:26:30.000 And it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.

00:26:33.000 I can give you just a quick example.

00:26:35.000 You know, there's an idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament.

00:26:39.000 And it's pretty barbaric, you know.

00:26:41.000 I mean, the story of Abraham and Isaac is a good example of that.

00:26:44.000 Because Abraham is called on to actually sacrifice his own son.

00:26:47.000 Which doesn't really seem like something that a reasonable God would ask you to do, right?

00:26:51.000 The God in the Old Testament is frequently cruel and arbitrary and demanding and paradoxical.

00:26:57.000 Which is one of the things that really gives the book life.

00:27:00.000 Because it wasn't edited by a committee.

00:27:03.000 You know, a committee that was concerned with not offending anyone.

00:27:07.000 That's for sure.

00:27:09.000 So Jung believed that the dream was the birthplace of thought.

00:27:26.000 And I've been extending that idea because one of the things I wondered about deeply was.

00:27:31.000 You know, you have a dream and then someone interprets it.

00:27:34.000 You can argue about whether or not an interpretation is valid.

00:27:37.000 Just like you can argue about whether your interpretation of a novel or movie is valid, right?

00:27:43.000 It's a very difficult thing to determine with any degree of accuracy.

00:27:47.000 Which counts in part for the postmodern critique.

00:27:49.000 But my observation has been that people will present a dream.

00:27:54.000 And sometimes we can extract out real useful information from it that the person didn't appear to know.

00:28:00.000 You know, and they get a flash of insight.

00:28:03.000 And to me that's a marker that we've stumbled on something that unites part of that person that wasn't united before.

00:28:09.000 It pulls things together.

00:28:10.000 Which is often what a good story will do or sometimes a good theory.

00:28:14.000 You know, things snap together for you and there's a little light goes on.

00:28:18.000 And that's one of the markers that I've used for accuracy in dreams.

00:28:22.000 And I know in my own family, when I was first married, you know, I'd have fights with my wife.

00:28:29.000 Arguments about this and that.

00:28:31.000 And I'm fairly hot-headed and so I'd get all puffed up and, you know, agitated about whatever we were arguing about.

00:28:39.000 And she'd go to sleep, which was really annoying.

00:28:42.000 You know, so annoying.

00:28:44.000 Because I couldn't sleep, right?

00:28:46.000 I was like chewing off my fingernails and she'd be like sleeping peacefully beside me.

00:28:51.000 It's like maddening.

00:28:52.000 So, but often she'd have a dream, you know.

00:28:55.000 And then the next morning she'd discuss it with me and then we could unravel what was at the bottom of our argument.

00:29:00.000 And that was unbelievably useful even though it was extraordinarily aggravating.

00:29:04.000 So, you know, I was convinced by Jung.

00:29:07.000 It looked to me like his ideas about the relationship between dreams and mythology and drama and literature made sense to me.

00:29:14.000 And the relationship between that and art.

00:29:17.000 I know this native carver.

00:29:19.000 He's a Kwakwaka'wak guy. 1.00

00:29:21.000 He's carved a bunch of wooden sculptures, totem poles and masks that I have in my house.

00:29:27.000 And he's a very interesting person.

00:29:29.000 Not literate.

00:29:30.000 Not particularly literate.

00:29:31.000 And really still steeped in this ancient 13,000 year old tradition.

00:29:35.000 He's an original language speaker.

00:29:37.000 And the fact that he isn't literate has sort of left him with the mind of someone who's pre-literate. 0.92

00:29:43.000 And pre-literate people aren't stupid. 0.99

00:29:45.000 They're just not literate. 0.99

00:29:46.000 So their brains are organized differently in many ways.

00:29:49.000 And I've asked him about his intuition for his carvings.

00:29:53.000 And he's told me that he dreams like you've seen the Haida masks.

00:29:58.000 You know what they look like.

00:29:59.000 Well, his people are closely related to the Haida.

00:30:03.000 So it's the same kind of style.

00:30:05.000 He said he dreams in those animals and can remember his dreams.

00:30:10.000 And he also talks to his grandparents who taught him how to carve in his dreams.

00:30:15.000 Quite often if he runs into a problem with carving, his grandparents will come and he'll talk to them.

00:30:19.000 But he sees the creatures that he's going to carve living in an animated sense in his imagination.

00:30:26.000 And, I mean, it's not that difficult.

00:30:28.000 First of all, I have no reason to disbelieve him.

00:30:30.000 He's a very, very straightforward person.

00:30:32.000 He doesn't have the motivation or the guile, I would say, in some sense, to invent a story like that.

00:30:38.000 There's just no reason he would possibly do it.

00:30:40.000 I don't think he's told that many people about it.

00:30:42.000 He thinks it's kind of crazy, you know.

00:30:44.000 He said when he was a kid, he thought he was insane because he'd had those dreams all the time.

00:30:49.000 About these creatures and so forth.

00:30:51.000 And so it wasn't something he was trumpeting.

00:30:54.000 But I found it fascinating because I can see in him part of the manifestation of this unbroken tradition.

00:31:01.000 We have no idea how traditions like that are really passed along for thousands and thousands of years, right?

00:31:06.000 Part of it's oral and memory.

00:31:08.000 Part of it's acted out and dramatized.

00:31:10.000 And then part of it's going to be imaginative.

00:31:12.000 And people who aren't literate, they store information quite differently than we do.

00:31:16.000 We don't remember anything.

00:31:17.000 It's all written down in books, right?

00:31:19.000 But if you're from an oral culture, especially if you're trained in that way,

00:31:22.000 you have all of that information at hand.

00:31:24.000 Both so you can speak it, you can tell the stories, and you really know them.

00:31:28.000 And, you know, modern people don't really know what that's like anymore.

00:31:31.000 I doubt if there's more than maybe two of you in the audience that could spout from memory like a thirty-line poem.

00:31:37.000 You know, and poetry was written so that people could do that.

00:31:40.000 That's why we have that form is so that people could remember it and have it with them.

00:31:46.000 And we don't do any of that anymore.

00:31:48.000 Anyways, back to Jung.

00:31:50.000 Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I noted that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.

00:31:57.000 And then I thought, well, how the hell can that be?

00:31:59.000 How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know?

00:32:04.000 How does that make any sense?

00:32:06.000 First of all, why don't you understand it?

00:32:09.000 Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream?

00:32:12.000 It's like you're not, there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?

00:32:16.000 The dream happens to you just like life happens to you.

00:32:19.000 I mean, there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control.

00:32:25.000 But most of the time it's, you're laying there asleep, and this crazy complicated world manifests itself inside you.

00:32:33.000 And you don't know how, you can't do it when you're awake, and you don't know what it means.

00:32:38.000 It's like, what the hell is going on?

00:32:40.000 And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts.

00:32:43.000 Because, 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.

00:32:54.000 You 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.

00:33:04.000 And you don't control it. And what does?

00:33:07.000 Is 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.

00:33:19.000 You 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.

00:33:28.000 Like, those things are complicated.

00:33:30.000 And then also, I've seen so often that people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure.

00:33:36.000 Now, they're fully developed in some sense, and so that just doesn't, that theory just doesn't go anywhere with me.

00:33:41.000 I just can't see that as useful at all.

00:33:44.000 And so, I'm more likely to take the phenomena seriously and say, well, there's something to dreams.

00:33:51.000 Well, you dream of the future, and then you try to make it into a reality.

00:33:54.000 That seems to be an important thing.

00:33:56.000 You 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.

00:34:04.000 I mean, that manifests itself in terrible fantasies. You know, those are dreams, then people go act them out.

00:34:10.000 These things are powerful. You know, and whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams.

00:34:15.000 That's what happened to the Nazis. That's what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

00:34:19.000 It was absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle.

00:34:24.000 And the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. The same thing happened in China.

00:34:28.000 It's like, we have to take these things seriously, you know, and try to understand what's going on.

00:34:33.000 So, Jung believed that the dream could contain more information than was yet articulated.

00:34:41.000 You think, artists do the same thing, you know.

00:34:44.000 Like, people go to museums and they look at paintings, Renaissance paintings or modern paintings.

00:34:49.000 And they don't exactly know why they're there.

00:34:51.000 You know, I was in this room in New York. I don't remember which museum.

00:34:56.000 But it was a room full of Renaissance art. You know, great painters. The greatest painters.

00:35:01.000 And thought maybe that room was worth a billion dollars or something outrageous because there was like 20 paintings in there, you know.

00:35:07.000 So, priceless. And the first thing is, well, why are those paintings worth so much?

00:35:11.000 And why is there a museum in the biggest city in the world devoted to them?

00:35:15.000 And why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What the hell are those people doing?

00:35:19.000 One of them was of the Assumption of Mary, you know, beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art.

00:35:26.000 And there's like 20 people standing in front of it looking at it and think, what are those people up to?

00:35:31.000 You know, they don't know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting?

00:35:35.000 It's not like they know. Why is it worth so much?

00:35:38.000 I mean, I know there's a status element to it too, but that begs the question.

00:35:41.000 Why did those items become such high status items? What is it about them that's so absolutely remarkable?

00:35:48.000 Well, we're strange creatures.

00:35:51.000 So, I was trying to figure out in part, well, where did the information that's in the dream come from?

00:35:57.000 Because it has to come from somewhere and you could think about it as a revelation.

00:36:01.000 You know, because it's like it springs out of the void and it's new knowledge and it's a revelation.

00:36:06.000 You didn't produce it, it just appears.

00:36:09.000 But 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

00:36:16.000 I like to have an explanation for things that's rational and empirical before I look for any other kind of explanation.

00:36:22.000 And 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.

00:36:31.000 But in so far as it's possible to do that reduction, I'm going to do that.

00:36:36.000 And I'm going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air because they can't be pinned down.

00:36:41.000 And in that category I would put the category of mystical or religious experience which we don't understand at all.

00:36:47.000 So, artists observe one another.

00:36:53.000 They observe people and they represent what they see.

00:36:56.000 And they transmit the message of what they see to us and they teach us to see.

00:36:59.000 And we don't necessarily know what it is that we're learning from them.

00:37:03.000 But we're learning something or at least we're acting like we're learning something.

00:37:07.000 We go to movies, we watch stories, we immerse ourselves in fiction constantly.

00:37:12.000 That's an artistic production.

00:37:14.000 And for many people the world of the arts is a living world.

00:37:17.000 And that's particularly true if you're a creative person.

00:37:20.000 And it's the creative artistic people that do move the knowledge of humanity forward.

00:37:25.000 And they do that with their artistic productions first.

00:37:28.000 They're on the edge.

00:37:29.000 And the dancers do that. 1.00

00:37:30.000 And the poets do that.

00:37:31.000 And the visual artists do that.

00:37:33.000 And the musicians do that.

00:37:34.000 And we're not sure what they're doing.

00:37:36.000 We're not sure what musicians are doing.

00:37:38.000 What the hell are they doing?

00:37:39.000 Why do you like music?

00:37:40.000 You know, it gives you deep intimation of the significance of things.

00:37:44.000 And no one questions it.

00:37:46.000 You go to a concert, you're thrilled.

00:37:47.000 It's a quasi-religious experience.

00:37:49.000 Particularly if the people really get themselves together and get the crowd moving.

00:37:54.000 You know, there's something incredibly intense about it.

00:37:56.000 But it makes no sense whatsoever.

00:37:58.000 It's not an easy thing to understand.

00:38:00.000 Music is deeply patterned.

00:38:02.000 And patterned in layers.

00:38:04.000 And I think that has something to do with it.

00:38:07.000 Because reality is patterned and deeply patterned in layers.

00:38:10.000 And so I think music is representing reality in some fundamental way.

00:38:14.000 And that we get into the sway of that.

00:38:16.000 And sort of participate in being.

00:38:18.000 And that's part of what makes it such an uplifting experience.

00:38:22.000 But we don't really know that's what we're doing.

00:38:24.000 We just go do it.

00:38:25.000 And it's nourishing for people.

00:38:28.000 Right?

00:38:29.000 I mean, young people in particular.

00:38:31.000 Lots of them live for music.

00:38:33.000 It's where they derive all their meaning.

00:38:35.000 Their cultural identity.

00:38:36.000 Everything that's nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music.

00:38:40.000 And it's part of their cultural identity.

00:38:42.000 So that's an amazing thing.

00:38:46.000 The question still remains.

00:38:48.000 Where does the information in dreams come from?

00:38:50.000 And I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out.

00:39:00.000 We've watched that forever.

00:39:02.000 And we've got some representations of those patterns.

00:39:05.000 That's part of our cultural history.

00:39:06.000 That's what's embedded in stories.

00:39:08.000 In fictional accounts of the story between good and evil.

00:39:11.000 The bad guy and the good guy.

00:39:12.000 And the romance.

00:39:13.000 You know, these are canonical patterns of being for people.

00:39:16.000 And they deeply affect us.

00:39:17.000 Because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world.

00:39:21.000 And then we flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people.

00:39:25.000 And so, it's like there's waves of behavioral patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd across time.

00:39:35.000 The great dramas are played on the crowd across time.

00:39:39.000 And the artists watch that.

00:39:41.000 And they get intimations of what that is.

00:39:43.000 And they write it down and they tell us.

00:39:45.000 And then we're a little clearer about what we're up to.

00:39:47.000 You know, like a great dramatist like Shakespeare, let's say.

00:39:50.000 We know that what he wrote is fiction.

00:39:52.000 And then we say, well, fiction isn't true.

00:39:54.000 But then you think, well, wait a minute.

00:39:56.000 Maybe it's true like numbers are true.

00:39:58.000 You know, numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality.

00:40:02.000 But no one in their right mind would really think numbers aren't true.

00:40:06.000 You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent.

00:40:11.000 Right?

00:40:12.000 Because the abstraction is so insanely powerful.

00:40:14.000 Once you have mathematics, you're just deadly.

00:40:17.000 You can move the world with mathematics.

00:40:19.000 And so, it's not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality.

00:40:26.000 And you take a work of fiction like Hamlet.

00:40:29.000 And you think, well, is that, it's not true because it's fiction.

00:40:33.000 But then you think, wait a minute.

00:40:34.000 What kind of explanation is that?

00:40:36.000 Maybe it's more true than non-fiction.

00:40:38.000 Because it takes what, the story that needs to be told about you.

00:40:41.000 And the story that needs to be told about you.

00:40:43.000 And you, and you, and you.

00:40:45.000 And abstracts that out.

00:40:46.000 And says, look, here's something that's a key part of the human experience as such.

00:40:51.000 Right?

00:40:52.000 So, it's an abstraction from this underlying noisy substrate.

00:40:57.000 And people are affected by it.

00:40:59.000 Because they see that the thing that's represented is part of the pattern of their being.

00:41:04.000 That's the right way to think about it.

00:41:05.000 And then, with these old stories.

00:41:07.000 These ancient stories.

00:41:08.000 It seems to me like that process has been occurring for thousands of years.

00:41:12.000 It's like, we watched ourselves and we extracted out some stories.

00:41:16.000 We imitated each other and we represented that in drama.

00:41:19.000 And then we distilled the drama.

00:41:21.000 And we got a representation of the distillation.

00:41:24.000 And then we did it again.

00:41:25.000 And at the end of that process.

00:41:27.000 That took, God only knows how long.

00:41:29.000 I think some of these stories.

00:41:31.000 They've traced fairy tales back 10,000 years.

00:41:35.000 Some fairy tales.

00:41:36.000 In relatively unchanged form.

00:41:38.000 And it certainly seems to me that the archeological evidence, for example.

00:41:42.000 Suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with.

00:41:46.000 Are at least that old.

00:41:48.000 And likely embedded in a prehistory that's far older than that.

00:41:51.000 And you might think, well.

00:41:53.000 How can you be so sure?

00:41:55.000 And the answer to that in part is that.

00:41:57.000 Cultures that don't change.

00:41:59.000 Like the ancient cultures. 0.89

00:42:00.000 Right?

00:42:01.000 They didn't change as fast as this.

00:42:02.000 They stay the same.

00:42:03.000 That's the answer.

00:42:05.000 So they keep their information moving generation to generation.

00:42:08.000 That's how they stay the same.

00:42:10.000 And so we know again in the archeological record.

00:42:13.000 There are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years.

00:42:18.000 It was discovered in caves in Japan.

00:42:20.000 That were set up for a particular kind of bear worship. 0.98

00:42:23.000 That was also characteristic of Western Europe.

00:42:26.000 So these things can last for very long periods of time.

00:42:29.000 We're watching each other act in the world.

00:42:35.000 And then the question is.

00:42:36.000 Well, how long have we been watching each other?

00:42:39.000 And the answer to that in some sense is.

00:42:41.000 Well, as long as there's been creatures with nervous systems.

00:42:44.000 And that's a long time.

00:42:46.000 You know, that's some hundreds of millions of years.

00:42:48.000 Perhaps longer than that.

00:42:50.000 We've been watching each other.

00:42:51.000 Trying to figure out what we're up to across that entire span of time.

00:42:55.000 Some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies.

00:42:57.000 Which is why we can dance with each other, for example, right?

00:43:00.000 Because understanding isn't just something that you have as an abstraction.

00:43:06.000 It's something that you act out, you know?

00:43:08.000 That's what children are doing when they're learning to rough and tumble plays.

00:43:11.000 They're learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else.

00:43:15.000 In a harmonious way.

00:43:16.000 Learning to cooperate and compete.

00:43:17.000 And that's all instantiated right into their body.

00:43:20.000 It's not abstract knowledge.

00:43:22.000 They don't know that they're doing that.

00:43:24.000 They're just doing it.

00:43:25.000 And so we can even use our body as a representational platform.

00:43:29.000 So we've been studying each other for a long time.

00:43:32.000 Abstracting out what is it that we're up to.

00:43:35.000 And that's...

00:43:36.000 What is it we're up to?

00:43:38.000 What should we be up to?

00:43:39.000 That's even a more fundamental question.

00:43:41.000 If you're going to live in the world and you're going to do it properly.

00:43:44.000 What does properly mean?

00:43:46.000 And how is it that you might go about that?

00:43:48.000 Well, it's the right question, right?

00:43:50.000 It's what everyone wants to know.

00:43:52.000 How do you live in the world?

00:43:53.000 Not what is the world made of.

00:43:55.000 It's not the same question.

00:43:56.000 How do you live in the world?

00:43:57.000 It's the eternal question of human beings.

00:44:00.000 And I guess we're the only species that has ever really asked that question.

00:44:03.000 Because all the other animals, they just go and do whatever they do.

00:44:06.000 Not us.

00:44:07.000 It's a question for us.

00:44:09.000 We've had to...

00:44:10.000 We have to become aware of it.

00:44:12.000 We have to be able to speak it.

00:44:13.000 God only knows why.

00:44:15.000 But that seems to be the situation.

00:44:18.000 So...

00:44:20.000 We act.

00:44:21.000 That acting is shaped by the world.

00:44:23.000 That acting is shaped by society into something that we don't understand.

00:44:26.000 But that we can model.

00:44:28.000 That we can model.

00:44:29.000 We model it in our stories.

00:44:31.000 We model it with our bodies.

00:44:33.000 And that's where the dream gets its information.

00:44:36.000 The dream is part of the process that's watching everything.

00:44:39.000 And then trying to formulate it.

00:44:41.000 And trying to say, well...

00:44:42.000 Trying to get the signal out from the noise.

00:44:44.000 And to portray it in dramatic form.

00:44:46.000 Because a dream is little drama.

00:44:47.000 And then...

00:44:48.000 You get the chance to talk about what that dream is.

00:44:52.000 And then you have it...

00:44:53.000 You have something like articulated knowledge at that point.

00:44:56.000 And so the Bible, I would say, is...

00:44:59.000 Is...

00:45:00.000 It's sort of...

00:45:01.000 It exists in that space that's half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge.

00:45:05.000 It's something like that.

00:45:07.000 And...

00:45:08.000 Going into it to find out what the stories are about.

00:45:10.000 Can...

00:45:11.000 What can...

00:45:13.000 It can aid our self-understanding.

00:45:15.000 And then...

00:45:16.000 The other issue is...

00:45:17.000 Is that if...

00:45:18.000 Nietzsche was correct. 0.98

00:45:19.000 And if...

00:45:20.000 Dostoevsky...

00:45:21.000 Or...

00:45:22.000 Jung was correct.

00:45:23.000 And Dostoevsky as well.

00:45:24.000 We...

00:45:25.000 Without the...

00:45:26.000 Cornerstone...

00:45:27.000 That that understanding provides.

00:45:29.000 We're lost.

00:45:30.000 And that's not good.

00:45:32.000 Because then we're susceptible to psychic pathology.

00:45:35.000 That's psychological pathology.

00:45:37.000 You know, the people who are adamant anti-religious thinkers seem to believe that if we abandoned our

00:45:47.000 Immersement in the underlying dream that we'd all instantly become rationalists like Descartes or Bacon or...

00:45:53.000 You know, intelligent, clear-thinking, rational, scientific people.

00:45:57.000 And I don't believe that for a moment because I don't think there's any evidence for it.

00:46:00.000 I think we would become so irrational so rapidly that the weirdest mysteries of Catholicism would seem positively rational by contrast.

00:46:09.000 And I think that's already happening.

00:46:11.000 So...

00:46:20.000 Okay.

00:46:21.000 So this is the idea, essentially.

00:46:23.000 You know, that...

00:46:24.000 You have the unknown world.

00:46:26.000 That's just what you don't know at all.

00:46:28.000 That's...

00:46:29.000 That's the outside.

00:46:30.000 That's the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit.

00:46:32.000 Something like that.

00:46:33.000 It's chaos itself.

00:46:34.000 And then...

00:46:36.000 You act in that world.

00:46:37.000 And you act in ways you don't understand.

00:46:39.000 There's more to your actions than you can understand.

00:46:42.000 One of the things Jung said.

00:46:43.000 I loved this when I first understood it.

00:46:45.000 He said,

00:46:46.000 Everybody acts out a myth.

00:46:47.000 But very few people know what their myth is.

00:46:50.000 And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy.

00:46:53.000 And maybe you don't want it to be.

00:46:55.000 And that's really worth thinking.

00:46:57.000 Because...

00:46:58.000 Thinking about.

00:46:59.000 Because you're...

00:47:00.000 You have a pattern of behavior that characterizes you.

00:47:02.000 You know?

00:47:03.000 And God only knows where you got it.

00:47:04.000 Partly it's biological.

00:47:05.000 Partly it's from your parents.

00:47:06.000 It's your unconscious assumptions.

00:47:08.000 It's the way the philosophy of your society has shaped you.

00:47:11.000 And it's...

00:47:12.000 It's aimed...

00:47:13.000 It's aiming you somewhere.

00:47:15.000 Well...

00:47:16.000 Is it aiming you somewhere you want to go?

00:47:18.000 That's a good question.

00:47:19.000 That's part of self-realization.

00:47:21.000 You know?

00:47:22.000 We know we don't understand our actions.

00:47:24.000 That's...

00:47:25.000 Almost every argument you have with someone is about that.

00:47:28.000 It's like...

00:47:29.000 Why did you do that?

00:47:30.000 You come up with some half-baked reasons why you did it.

00:47:32.000 You're flailing around in the darkness.

00:47:34.000 You know?

00:47:35.000 You try to give an account for yourself.

00:47:36.000 But...

00:47:37.000 You can only do it partially.

00:47:38.000 It's very, very difficult.

00:47:39.000 Because...

00:47:40.000 You're in...

00:47:41.000 You're... 0.99

00:47:42.000 You're a complicated animal with the... 0.98

00:47:44.000 The beginnings of an articulated mind. 0.74

00:47:46.000 Something like that.

00:47:47.000 And...

00:47:48.000 You're just way more than you can handle.

00:47:49.000 And...

00:47:50.000 And...

00:47:51.000 Alright.

00:47:52.000 So you act things out.

00:47:53.000 Right?

00:47:54.000 You act things out.

00:47:55.000 And...

00:47:56.000 That's a kind of competence.

00:47:57.000 And then...

00:47:58.000 You imagine what you act out.

00:47:59.000 And you imagine what everyone else acts out.

00:48:01.000 And so...

00:48:02.000 There's a tremendous amount of information in your action.

00:48:05.000 And then...

00:48:06.000 That information is translated up into the dream.

00:48:08.000 And into art.

00:48:09.000 Into mythology and literature.

00:48:10.000 And there's a tremendous amount of information in that.

00:48:13.000 And then some of that is translated into articulated thought.

00:48:17.000 And...

00:48:18.000 I'll give you a quick example of something like that.

00:48:20.000 I think this is partly what happens in Exodus.

00:48:22.000 When Moses comes up with the law.

00:48:24.000 You know...

00:48:25.000 He's wandering around with the Israelites forever in the desert. 1.00

00:48:27.000 And they're...

00:48:28.000 They're like going left and going right.

00:48:29.000 And worshipping idols.

00:48:30.000 And like...

00:48:31.000 Having a hell of a time.

00:48:32.000 And...

00:48:33.000 You know...

00:48:34.000 Getting rebellious.

00:48:35.000 And...

00:48:36.000 Moses goes up in the mountain.

00:48:37.000 And...

00:48:38.000 He has this tremendous revelation.

00:48:39.000 Sort of in the sight of God.

00:48:40.000 And...

00:48:41.000 It illuminates him.

00:48:42.000 And he comes down with the law.

00:48:43.000 You think...

00:48:44.000 Well...

00:48:45.000 You know...

00:48:46.000 Moses acted as a judge.

00:48:47.000 I know this is a mythological story.

00:48:48.000 Moses acted as a judge in the desert.

00:48:50.000 He was continually mediating between people who were having problems.

00:48:53.000 Constantly trying to keep peace.

00:48:55.000 And so what are you doing when you're trying to keep peace?

00:48:57.000 Is you're trying to understand what peace is.

00:48:59.000 Right?

00:49:00.000 You have to apply the principles.

00:49:02.000 Well, what are the principles?

00:49:03.000 Well, you don't know.

00:49:04.000 The principles are whatever satisfies people enough to make peace.

00:49:08.000 And maybe you do that 10,000 times.

00:49:10.000 And then you get some sense of...

00:49:11.000 Oh, here's the principles that bring peace.

00:49:13.000 And then one day it blasts into your consciousness.

00:49:16.000 Like...

00:49:17.000 Like a revelation.

00:49:18.000 Here's the rules that we're already acting out.

00:49:21.000 Well, that's the Ten Commandments.

00:49:22.000 It's...

00:49:23.000 They're there to begin with.

00:49:24.000 And Moses comes forward and says,

00:49:26.000 Look...

00:49:27.000 This is already basically what we're doing.

00:49:28.000 But now it's codified.

00:49:30.000 Right?

00:49:31.000 And...

00:49:32.000 Like that's all...

00:49:33.000 A historical process that's condensed into a single story.

00:49:36.000 But obviously that happened because we have written law.

00:49:39.000 Right?

00:49:40.000 That emerged in good legal systems.

00:49:42.000 That emerges from the bottom up.

00:49:44.000 That's...

00:49:45.000 English common law is exactly like that.

00:49:46.000 Right?

00:49:47.000 It's single decisions that are predicated on principles.

00:49:50.000 That are then articulated and made into the body of law.

00:49:54.000 And the body of law is something you act out.

00:49:57.000 That's why it's a body of law.

00:49:59.000 If you're a good citizen, you act out the body of law.

00:50:02.000 And the body of law has principles.

00:50:04.000 Okay, so the question is...

00:50:06.000 There's principles that guide our behavior.

00:50:08.000 What are those principles?

00:50:10.000 Well, I think when you...

00:50:12.000 If you want the initial answer of what the archaic Israelites meant by God.

00:50:18.000 That's something like what they meant.

00:50:20.000 Now, it's not a good enough explanation.

00:50:22.000 But...

00:50:23.000 Look...

00:50:24.000 Imagine that you have a... 0.57

00:50:26.000 That you're a chimpanzee.

00:50:27.000 And you have a powerful, dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society.

00:50:33.000 That represents power.

00:50:35.000 Now, more than that.

00:50:36.000 Because it's not sheer physical prowess that keeps a chimp at the top of the hierarchy. 1.00

00:50:40.000 It's much more complicated than that.

00:50:42.000 But you could say...

00:50:43.000 Well, there's...

00:50:44.000 There's a principle that the dominant person manifests.

00:50:48.000 And then you might say...

00:50:50.000 Well...

00:50:51.000 That principle shines forth even more brightly if you know ten people who are dominant.

00:50:56.000 Powerful.

00:50:57.000 Then you can extract out what dominance means from that.

00:51:00.000 You can extract out what power means from that.

00:51:02.000 And then you can divorce the concept from the people.

00:51:06.000 And we had to do that at some point.

00:51:08.000 Because we can say power in a human context.

00:51:11.000 And we can imagine what that means.

00:51:13.000 But it's divorced from any specific manifestation of power.

00:51:17.000 Well, how the hell did we do that?

00:51:19.000 Like, that's so complicated. 0.99

00:51:21.000 If you're a chimp, the power is in another chimp. 1.00

00:51:25.000 It's not some damn abstraction. 0.99

00:51:27.000 Well, so the question is... 0.96

00:51:29.000 Think about it.

00:51:30.000 We're in these hierarchies.

00:51:31.000 Many of them across centuries.

00:51:33.000 We're trying to figure out what the guiding principle is.

00:51:36.000 We're trying to extract out the core of the guiding principle.

00:51:39.000 And we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being.

00:51:43.000 Well, it's something like that.

00:51:45.000 That's God.

00:51:46.000 It's an abstracted ideal.

00:51:48.000 And it's put in personified form.

00:51:52.000 It manifests itself in personified form.

00:51:55.000 But that's okay.

00:51:56.000 Because 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.

00:52:07.000 We're trying to figure out what that means.

00:52:09.000 You need an embodiment.

00:52:11.000 You need an ideal that's abstracted that you could act out that would enable you to understand what that means.

00:52:18.000 And that's what we've been driving at.

00:52:20.000 So that's the first hypothesis, in some sense.

00:52:23.000 I'm going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we've formalized as God.

00:52:29.000 But 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.

00:52:41.000 And then it's a set of individuals.

00:52:43.000 And then it's an abstraction from that set.

00:52:46.000 And then you have the abstraction.

00:52:48.000 It's so important.

00:52:49.000 So here's a political implication, for example.

00:52:53.000 One 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?

00:53:05.000 To be deified, to be put in a temple.

00:53:09.000 And 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.

00:53:17.000 But the Christian response to that was, never confuse the specific sovereign with the...

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00:55:01.000 Principle of sovereignty itself.

00:55:06.000 It's brilliant.

00:55:07.000 You see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that.

00:55:10.000 So that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to something else.

00:55:14.000 Subordinate to, let's call it a divine principle, for lack of a better word.

00:55:19.000 So that even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. 0.99

00:55:23.000 And we still believe that because we believe that our president, our prime minister, is subordinate to the damn law. 0.97

00:55:29.000 Whatever the body of law, right? 0.96

00:55:31.000 There's a principle inside that, that even the leader is subordinate to.

00:55:35.000 And 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.

00:55:43.000 And I mean that's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in Maoist China and what happened in Nazi Germany.

00:55:50.000 Because there was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to.

00:55:54.000 You're supposed to be subordinate to God.

00:55:56.000 So what does that mean?

00:55:58.000 Well 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.

00:56:06.000 And then the question is, what the hell is the principle of sovereignty?

00:56:10.000 You could say, we have been working that out for a very long period of time.

00:56:14.000 And so that's one of the things that we'll talk about.

00:56:16.000 Because the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting, dramatic ideas about that.

00:56:25.000 So, just for example, very briefly there was a deity known as Marduk.

00:56:31.000 And Marduk, he was a Mesopotamian deity.

00:56:34.000 And 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.

00:56:44.000 All these tribes came together and these tribes each had their own deity, their own image of the ideal.

00:56:49.000 But then they started to occupy the same territory, right?

00:56:52.000 And 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.

00:57:01.000 But 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.

00:57:07.000 Something like that.

00:57:08.000 So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priority.

00:57:13.000 Which ideal is going to take priority.

00:57:15.000 And what seems to happen is that's represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in sort of celestial space.

00:57:21.000 But from a practical perspective, it's more like an ongoing dialogue.

00:57:25.000 You believe this, I believe this.

00:57:27.000 You believe that, I believe this.

00:57:29.000 How are we going to meld that together?

00:57:31.000 So you take God A, and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God C from them.

00:57:37.000 And you say, well, God C now has the attributes of A and B.

00:57:41.000 And then some other tribes come in, and then C takes them over too. 0.82

00:57:45.000 And so you get, like with Marduk, for example, he has a multitude of names.

00:57:49.000 Fifty different names.

00:57:50.000 Well, those are names, at least in part, of the subordinate gods that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization.

00:57:58.000 That's part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted.

00:58:02.000 You think this is important, and it works, because your tribe's alive.

00:58:05.000 And you think this is important, and it works, because your tribe is alive.

00:58:08.000 And so we'll take the best of both, if we can manage it.

00:58:12.000 And extract out something that's even more abstract, that covers both of us, if we can do it.

00:58:17.000 And one of the things that's really interesting about Marduk, I'll just give you a couple of his features.

00:58:23.000 But he has eyes all the way around his head.

00:58:26.000 He's elected by all the other gods to be king gods.

00:58:28.000 So that's the first thing.

00:58:29.000 That's quite cool.

00:58:30.000 And they elect him because they're facing a terrible threat.

00:58:34.000 Sort of like a flood and a monster combined.

00:58:36.000 Something like that.

00:58:37.000 And Marduk basically says that if they elect him top god, then he'll go out and stop the flood monster.

00:58:43.000 And they won't all get wiped out.

00:58:45.000 It's a serious threat.

00:58:46.000 It's chaos itself making its comeback.

00:58:49.000 And so all the gods agree.

00:58:51.000 And Marduk has a new manifestation.

00:58:53.000 He's got eyes all the way around his head.

00:58:55.000 And he speaks magic words.

00:58:57.000 And then he also goes out, and when he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat.

00:59:02.000 And we need to know that, because the word Tiamat is associated with the word Tehom.

00:59:08.000 T-E-H-O-M. 1.00

00:59:09.000 And Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis. 0.90

00:59:15.000 So it's linked very tightly to this story.

00:59:17.000 And Marduk, with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words, goes out to confront Tiamat, who's like a watery sea dragon. 0.54

00:59:25.000 Something like that.

00:59:26.000 It's a classic St. George story.

00:59:30.000 Go out and wreak havoc on the dragon.

00:59:34.000 And he cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world out of her pieces.

00:59:38.000 And that's the world that human beings live in.

00:59:40.000 And the Mesopotamian emperor acted out Marduk.

00:59:43.000 He was allowed to be emperor insofar as he was a good Marduk. 0.96

00:59:46.000 And so that meant that he had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magic.

00:59:50.000 He could speak properly.

00:59:52.000 And so that we're starting to understand there, at that point, the essence of leadership, right?

00:59:56.000 Because what's leadership?

00:59:57.000 It's the capacity to see what the hell's in front of your face, and maybe in every direction.

01:00:02.000 And then the capacity to use your language properly in a transformative manner, and to transform chaos into order.

01:00:09.000 And God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out.

01:00:13.000 And the best they could do is dramatize it.

01:00:15.000 But it's staggeringly brilliant.

01:00:18.000 You know, it's by no means obvious.

01:00:20.000 And this chaos, this chaos is a very strange thing.

01:00:23.000 And this is the chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time.

01:00:27.000 Chaos is what, it's half psychological and half real.

01:00:31.000 There's no other way to really describe it.

01:00:34.000 The chaos is what you encounter when you're thrown into deep confusion.

01:00:38.000 Right? When your world falls apart.

01:00:40.000 When you encounter something that blows you into pieces.

01:00:43.000 When your dreams die.

01:00:44.000 When you're betrayed.

01:00:45.000 It's the chaos that emerges.

01:00:47.000 And the chaos is everything at once.

01:00:49.000 And it's too much for you.

01:00:50.000 And that's for sure.

01:00:52.000 It pulls you down into the underworld.

01:00:54.000 And that's where the dragons are.

01:00:55.000 And all you've got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open.

01:00:59.000 And to speak as carefully and clearly as you can.

01:01:02.000 And maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get through it that way and come out the other side.

01:01:06.000 And it's taken people a very long time to figure that out.

01:01:09.000 And it looks to me like the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors.

01:01:15.000 Maybe tens of millions of years ago.

01:01:17.000 Because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply.

01:01:22.000 Using the same system that we use to represent like serpentile or other carnivorous predators.

01:01:29.000 And it, you know, we're biological creatures, right?

01:01:33.000 So, when we've formulated our capacity to abstract.

01:01:36.000 Our strange capacity to abstract and use language.

01:01:39.000 We still have all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals.

01:01:44.000 And we have to use those systems.

01:01:46.000 They're part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking.

01:01:51.000 Part of the reason we can demonize our enemies who upset our axioms is because we perceive them as if they're carnivorous predators.

01:01:58.000 We do it with the same system.

01:02:00.000 And that's chaos itself.

01:02:02.000 The thing that always threatens us, right?

01:02:04.000 The snakes that came to the trees when we lived in them like 60 million years ago. 0.99

01:02:08.000 It's the same damn systems. 0.96

01:02:10.000 So, the Marduk story is partly the story of using attention and language to confront those things that most threaten us. 0.98

01:02:21.000 And some of those things are real, real-world threats.

01:02:24.000 But some of them are psychological threats, which are just as profound but far more abstract.

01:02:29.000 But we use the same systems to represent them.

01:02:32.000 That's why you freeze if you're frightened, right?

01:02:35.000 You're a prey animal. 0.98

01:02:36.000 You're like a rabbit. 0.82

01:02:37.000 You've seen something that's going to eat you.

01:02:40.000 You freeze.

01:02:41.000 And that way you're paralyzed.

01:02:43.000 You're turned to stone, which is what you do when you see a Medusa with a head full of snakes, right?

01:02:48.000 You turn to stone.

01:02:49.000 You're paralyzed.

01:02:50.000 And the reason you do that is because you're using the predator detection system to protect yourself.

01:02:56.000 Your heart rate goes way up.

01:02:57.000 And you get ready to move.

01:03:01.000 Things that upset us rely on that system.

01:03:04.000 And 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,

01:03:15.000 the 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.

01:03:21.000 And it's staggering.

01:03:22.000 When I read that story and started to understand it, it just blew me away that it's such a profound idea.

01:03:28.000 And 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.

01:03:38.000 And 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,

01:03:45.000 and then to encounter them one by one and master them.

01:03:49.000 And so you're teaching this process of eternal mastery over the strange and chaotic world.

01:03:54.000 And all of that makes up some of the background.

01:03:57.000 We haven't even got to the first sentence of the biblical stories yet.

01:04:00.000 But all of that makes up the background.

01:04:09.000 So 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.

01:04:23.000 And it's the best we've been able to do.

01:04:26.000 I know there are other religious traditions.

01:04:29.000 I'm not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an example.

01:04:34.000 But it's the best we've been able to do.

01:04:36.000 And 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.

01:04:44.000 And I hope that that will be the case.

01:04:47.000 And as I said, I'll approach it as rationally as I possibly can.

01:04:50.000 So, well, this is the idea to begin with, you know.

01:04:53.000 We have the unknown as such and then we act in it like animals act.

01:04:57.000 They act first. They don't think. They don't imagine. They act.

01:05:01.000 And that's where we started. We started by acting.

01:05:05.000 And then we started to be able to represent how we acted.

01:05:08.000 And then we started to talk about how we represented how we acted.

01:05:12.000 And that enabled us to tell stories because that is what a story is.

01:05:16.000 It's to tell about how you represent how you act.

01:05:20.000 And so you know that because if you read a book, what happens?

01:05:23.000 You read the book and images come to mind of the people in the book behaving, right?

01:05:29.000 It's one step from acting it out.

01:05:31.000 You don't act it out because you can abstract.

01:05:33.000 You can represent action without having to act it out.

01:05:37.000 It's an amazing thing.

01:05:38.000 And that's part of the development of the prefrontal cortex.

01:05:40.000 It's part of the capacity for human abstract thought.

01:05:42.000 Is that you can pull the behavior, the representation of the behavior, away from the behavior and manipulate the representation before you enact it.

01:05:52.000 That's why you think. 1.00

01:05:54.000 So that you can generate a pattern of action and test it out in a fictional world before you embody it and die because you're foolish. 1.00

01:06:01.000 Right? 0.98

01:06:02.000 You let the representation die, not you.

01:06:05.000 And that's why you think.

01:06:07.000 And so that's partly what we're trying to do with these stories.

01:06:13.000 What do I hope to accomplish?

01:06:15.000 I hope to end this 12 lecture series knowing more than I did when I started.

01:06:21.000 That's my goal.

01:06:22.000 Because I said that, you know, I'm not telling you what I know.

01:06:25.000 I'm trying to figure things out.

01:06:27.000 And this is part of the process by which I'm doing that.

01:06:33.000 And so I'm doing my best to think on my feet.

01:06:36.000 You know, I'm going to come prepared.

01:06:38.000 But I'm trying to stay on the edge of my capacity to generate knowledge.

01:06:42.000 And to make this continually clearer.

01:06:44.000 And to get to the bottom of things.

01:06:46.000 And so I'm hoping that that's what I want to accomplish.

01:06:50.000 And it seems like people are interested in that.

01:06:52.000 So then we're going to try to accomplish that together.

01:06:55.000 And so that's the plan.

01:06:57.000 And the idea is to see if there's something at the bottom of this amazing civilization that we've managed to construct.

01:07:06.000 That I think is in peril for a variety of reasons. 0.98

01:07:10.000 And maybe if we understand it a little bit better, we won't be so prone just to throw the damn thing away. 0.98

01:07:16.000 Which I think would be a big mistake. 0.93

01:07:18.000 And 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.

01:07:27.000 It's like, I don't want to go there.

01:07:29.000 It's a bad idea to go there.

01:07:31.000 And we need to be grounded better.

01:07:33.000 And so, hopefully, well, we'll see how this works.

01:07:39.000 Alright, so how do I approach this?

01:07:41.000 Well, first of all, I think in evolutionary terms.

01:07:44.000 You know, as far as I'm concerned, the cosmos is 15 billion years old.

01:07:50.000 And the world is four and a half billion years old.

01:07:52.000 And there's been life for three and a half billion years.

01:07:55.000 And there were, you know, there were creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems 300 to 600 million years ago.

01:08:01.000 And we were living in trees as small mammals 60 million years ago.

01:08:06.000 And we were down on the plains between 60 million and 7 million years ago.

01:08:11.000 And that's about when we split from chimpanzees.

01:08:13.000 And modern human beings seemed to emerge about 150,000 years ago.

01:08:17.000 And civilization pretty much after the last ice age.

01:08:20.000 Something after 15,000 years ago.

01:08:23.000 Not very long ago at all, you know.

01:08:25.000 And that's the span across which I want to understand.

01:08:30.000 That's the span across which I want to understand.

01:08:32.000 I want to understand why we are the way we are looking at life in its continual complexity.

01:08:38.000 Right? From the beginning of life itself.

01:08:40.000 And there's some real utility in that.

01:08:42.000 Because we share attributes with other animals.

01:08:44.000 Even apple animals.

01:08:46.000 As simple as crustaceans, for example.

01:08:49.000 Have nervous system properties that are very much like ours.

01:08:52.000 And it's very much worth knowing that.

01:08:54.000 And so, I think in an evolutionary way.

01:08:57.000 I think it's a grand and remarkable way to think.

01:09:00.000 Because it has this incredible time span.

01:09:02.000 Right?

01:09:03.000 It's this amazing.

01:09:04.000 I mean, people at the end of the 19th century.

01:09:08.000 Middle of the 19th century.

01:09:10.000 Say.

01:09:11.000 Thought the world.

01:09:12.000 Really thought the world was about 6,000 years old.

01:09:14.000 I mean.

01:09:15.000 15 billion years old.

01:09:16.000 That's a lot more.

01:09:17.000 Right?

01:09:18.000 It's a lot grander.

01:09:19.000 It's a lot bigger.

01:09:20.000 More frightening.

01:09:21.000 And alienating.

01:09:22.000 In some sense.

01:09:23.000 Because, you know.

01:09:24.000 The cosmos has become so vast.

01:09:25.000 It's either easy for human beings to think of themselves as trivial specks.

01:09:29.000 On a trivial speck.

01:09:31.000 Out in some misbegotten hell hole end of the galaxy.

01:09:35.000 Among hundreds of millions of galaxies.

01:09:37.000 Right?

01:09:38.000 It's very easy to see yourself as nothing in that span of time.

01:09:41.000 And that's a real challenge for people.

01:09:43.000 And I think it's a mistake to think that way.

01:09:47.000 Because I think consciousness is far more than we think it is.

01:09:50.000 But it's still something we have to grapple with.

01:09:54.000 I'm a psychoanalytic thinker.

01:09:56.000 And what that means is that I believe that people are collections of sub-personalities.

01:10:01.000 And that those sub-personalities are alive.

01:10:04.000 They're not machines.

01:10:06.000 They have their viewpoint.

01:10:08.000 They have their wants.

01:10:09.000 They have their perceptions.

01:10:11.000 They have their arguments.

01:10:12.000 They have their emotions.

01:10:13.000 They're like low resolution representations of you.

01:10:16.000 You know.

01:10:17.000 When you get angry.

01:10:18.000 It's a very low resolution representation of you.

01:10:21.000 It only wants rage.

01:10:22.000 Or it only wants something to eat.

01:10:23.000 Or it only wants water. 0.97

01:10:25.000 It only wants sex. 0.96

01:10:26.000 It's you but shrunk and focused in a specific direction.

01:10:31.000 And all those motivational systems are very, very ancient.

01:10:36.000 Very archaic.

01:10:37.000 And very, very powerful.

01:10:38.000 And they play a determining role in the manner in which we manifest ourselves.

01:10:43.000 As Freud pointed out with the id.

01:10:45.000 We have to figure out how to take all those underlying animalistic motivations and emotions.

01:10:51.000 And civilize them in some way.

01:10:53.000 So that we can all live in the same general territory without tearing each other to shreds.

01:10:58.000 Which is maybe the default position of both chimpanzee and humanity.

01:11:03.000 So I take that seriously.

01:11:06.000 The idea that we're a loose collection of spirits.

01:11:09.000 And that, you know, it says in the Old Testament somewhere that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

01:11:15.000 And I think this is akin to that.

01:11:17.000 If you know that you're not in control of yourself thoroughly.

01:11:20.000 And that there are other factors behind the scenes.

01:11:23.000 Like the Greeks thought that human beings were the playthings of the gods.

01:11:28.000 That's the way they conceptualized the world.

01:11:30.000 And they sort of meant the same thing.

01:11:32.000 They meant that there are these great forces that move us.

01:11:36.000 That we don't create.

01:11:37.000 That we're subordinate to in some sense.

01:11:40.000 Not entirely.

01:11:41.000 But we can be subordinate to them.

01:11:43.000 And they move our destinies.

01:11:44.000 That was the Greek view.

01:11:45.000 And there's something.

01:11:47.000 It teaches you humility to understand that.

01:11:50.000 That there's a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes.

01:11:53.000 And you're the driver of a very complex vehicle.

01:11:56.000 But you don't understand the vehicle very well.

01:11:58.000 And it's got its own motivations and methods.

01:12:01.000 And sometimes you think it's doing something.

01:12:03.000 And it's doing something completely, completely different.

01:12:06.000 You see that in psychotherapy all the time.

01:12:08.000 Because, you know, you help someone unwind a pattern of behavior that they've manifested forever.

01:12:13.000 First of all, they describe it.

01:12:15.000 Then they become aware of it.

01:12:16.000 Then maybe they start to see what the cause is.

01:12:18.000 They had no idea why they were acting like that.

01:12:20.000 You know, they have to have the memory that produced the behavioral pattern to begin with.

01:12:25.000 It has to be brought back to mind.

01:12:28.000 And then it has to be analyzed and assessed.

01:12:30.000 And then they have to think about a different way of acting.

01:12:32.000 And it's extraordinarily complex.

01:12:34.000 So, psychoanalytic literary.

01:12:39.000 Well, there's this new, there's this post-modern idea about literature.

01:12:49.000 And about the world, for that matter.

01:12:51.000 That if you take a complex piece of literature like a Shakespeare play.

01:12:56.000 There's no end to the number of interpretations that you can make of it.

01:13:00.000 You know, you can interpret each word.

01:13:02.000 You can interpret each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph.

01:13:05.000 You can interpret the entire play.

01:13:07.000 The way you interpret it depends on how many other books you've read.

01:13:10.000 Depends on your orientation in the world.

01:13:13.000 It depends on a very, very large number of things.

01:13:16.000 How cultured you are or how much culture you lack.

01:13:19.000 All of those things.

01:13:20.000 It opens up a huge, a huge vista for potential interpretation.

01:13:25.000 And so the post-modernists sort of stubbed their toe on that.

01:13:28.000 And thought, well, if there's this vast number of interpretations of any particular literary work.

01:13:34.000 How can you be sure that any interpretation is more valid than any other interpretation?

01:13:39.000 And if you can't be sure, then how do you even know those are great works?

01:13:42.000 How do you know they can't?

01:13:43.000 Maybe they're just works that the people in power have used to facilitate their continual accession of power.

01:13:50.000 Which is really a post-modern idea.

01:13:53.000 And a very, very cynical one.

01:13:55.000 But it has its point.

01:13:56.000 But the thing is, it's grounded in something real, right?

01:13:59.000 It's like, yes, you can interpret things forever.

01:14:01.000 I want to show you something here, just briefly.

01:14:04.000 We'll go back to it later.

01:14:05.000 Look at this.

01:14:06.000 This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

01:14:09.000 So, at the bottom here, every single one of those lines is a biblical verse.

01:14:14.000 Okay?

01:14:16.000 Now, the length of the line is proportionate to how many times that verse is referred to in some way by some other verse.

01:14:26.000 So you say, well, this is the first hyperlinked book.

01:14:30.000 Right?

01:14:31.000 I'm dead serious about that.

01:14:32.000 Like, you can't click and get the hyperlinks, obviously.

01:14:35.000 But it's a thoroughly hyperlinked book.

01:14:37.000 And it's because, well, the people who worked on these stories that are hypothetically at the end.

01:14:41.000 Right?

01:14:42.000 Which is, the end can't affect the beginning.

01:14:44.000 That's the rule of time, right?

01:14:46.000 What happens now can't affect what happened to you ten years ago.

01:14:49.000 Even though it actually can.

01:14:51.000 But, whatever.

01:14:52.000 Well, you reinterpret things, right?

01:14:54.000 And then they're not the same.

01:14:55.000 But, whatever.

01:14:56.000 We won't get into that.

01:14:57.000 But, technically speaking, the present cannot affect the past.

01:15:01.000 But, if you were looking at a piece of literature, that's not right.

01:15:04.000 Because, when you write the end, you know what was at the beginning.

01:15:07.000 And when you write the beginning, or edit it, you know what's at the end.

01:15:10.000 And so, you can weave the whole thing together.

01:15:12.000 And there's 65,000 cross-references.

01:15:15.000 And that's what this map shows.

01:15:17.000 And so, that's a great visual representation of the book.

01:15:20.000 And then you can see, well, why is it deep?

01:15:22.000 Why is the book deep?

01:15:23.000 Well, just imagine how many pathways you could take through that.

01:15:26.000 Right?

01:15:27.000 I mean, you'd just journey through that forever.

01:15:30.000 You'd never ever get to the end of it.

01:15:32.000 There's permutations and combinations.

01:15:34.000 And every phrase is dependent on every other phrase.

01:15:37.000 And every verse is dependent on every other phrase.

01:15:39.000 Not entirely, but 65,000 is not a bad start.

01:15:43.000 And so...

01:15:46.000 Okay, well, so that's another issue, in some sense, that seems to make the postmodernist critique even more correct.

01:15:53.000 How in the world are you going to extract out a canonical interpretation of something like that?

01:15:58.000 It's like it's not possible.

01:16:00.000 But here's the issue, as far as I can tell.

01:16:03.000 The interpret...

01:16:04.000 So, the postmodernists extended that critique to the world.

01:16:06.000 They said, look, while a text is complicated enough, you can't extract out a canonical interpretation.

01:16:11.000 What about the world?

01:16:13.000 The world's way more complicated than a text.

01:16:15.000 And so, there's an infinite number of ways that you can look at the world.

01:16:18.000 And so, how do we know that any one way is better than any other way?

01:16:22.000 And that's a good question.

01:16:25.000 Now, the postmodern answer was, we can't.

01:16:28.000 And that's not a good answer, because you drown in chaos under those circumstances, right?

01:16:33.000 You can't make sense of anything.

01:16:35.000 And that's not good, because...

01:16:38.000 It's not neutral to not make sense of things.

01:16:42.000 It's very anxiety-provoking.

01:16:44.000 It'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.

01:16:52.000 And your heart rate goes up, and your immune system stops working.

01:16:55.000 And, like, you burn yourself out.

01:16:57.000 You age rapidly, because you're surrounded by nothing you can control.

01:17:01.000 It's varying.

01:17:02.000 It's not an existential crisis, right?

01:17:03.000 It's anxiety-provoking and depressing.

01:17:05.000 Very hard on people.

01:17:07.000 And 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.

01:17:17.000 And we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim.

01:17:20.000 It isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy.

01:17:25.000 As you all know, if you've ever attained anything, because as soon as you attain it, then the whole little game ends.

01:17:31.000 Then you have to come up with another game, right?

01:17:33.000 So it's Sisyphus.

01:17:35.000 And that's okay.

01:17:36.000 But it does show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives you, because it collapses the game.

01:17:41.000 That's what happens when you graduate from university.

01:17:43.000 It's like, you're king of the mountain for one day, and then you're like, surf at Starbucks for the next five years, you know?

01:17:52.000 So, yeah.

01:17:54.000 So 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.

01:18:03.000 And what that means is you have to have an aim.

01:18:05.000 And that means you have to have an interpretation.

01:18:07.000 And it also means that the nobler the aim, that's one way of thinking about it, the better your life.

01:18:13.000 And 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.

01:18:19.000 And you shouldn't lie, for example.

01:18:21.000 And you might think, well, why the hell should I act like a good person, and why not lie?

01:18:26.000 I mean, even a three-year-old can ask that question, because smart kids learn to lie earlier, by the way.

01:18:32.000 And they think, well, why not twist the fabric of reality so that it serves your specific short-term needs?

01:18:39.000 I mean, that's a great question. Why not do that? Why act morally?

01:18:43.000 If you can get away with something, and it brings you closer to something you want, well, why not do it?

01:18:48.000 These are good questions. It's not self-evident.

01:18:51.000 Well, it seems to me tied in with what I just mentioned.

01:18:54.000 It's like, you destabilize yourself, and things become chaotic. That's not good.

01:18:59.000 And if you don't have a noble aim, then you have nothing but shallow, trivial pleasures, and they don't sustain you.

01:19:09.000 And that's not good, because life is so difficult. It's so much suffering. It's so complex.

01:19:15.000 It ends, and everyone dies, and it's painful.

01:19:18.000 It's like, without a noble aim, how can you withstand any of that?

01:19:22.000 You can't. You become desperate. And once you become desperate, things go from bad to worse very rapidly when you become desperate.

01:19:29.000 And so there's the idea of the noble aim.

01:19:32.000 And it's not something, it's something that's necessary.

01:19:35.000 It's the bread that people cannot live without, right?

01:19:38.000 That's not physical bread. It's the noble aim. And what is that?

01:19:42.000 Well, it was encapsulated in part in the story of Marduk.

01:19:46.000 It's to pay attention. It's to speak properly. It's to confront chaos. It's to make a better world. It's something like that.

01:19:54.000 And that's enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without, you know, cringing at the very thought of your own existence,

01:20:01.000 so that you can do something that's worthwhile to justify your wretched position on the planet.

01:20:07.000 So, now there's a, the literary issue is that, so, look.

01:20:13.000 You take a text, you can interpret it a variety of ways, but that's not right.

01:20:17.000 This is where the postmodernists went wrong.

01:20:19.000 Because what you're looking for in a text, and in the world for that matter, is sufficient order and direction.

01:20:27.000 So then we have to think, well, what does sufficient order and direction mean?

01:20:30.000 Well, you don't want to suffer so much that your life is unbearable, right?

01:20:35.000 That just seems self-evident. Pain argues for itself.

01:20:40.000 I think of pain as the fundamental reality, because no one disputes it, right?

01:20:44.000 I mean, even if you say that you don't believe in pain, it doesn't help when you're in pain.

01:20:49.000 You still believe in it, right? It's, it's, it's, you can't pry it up with logic and rationality.

01:20:56.000 It just stands forth as, as what the fundament of existence, and that's actually quite useful to know.

01:21:01.000 Say, well, you don't want any more of that than is absolutely necessary.

01:21:05.000 And I think that's self-evident.

01:21:06.000 And then you say, wait a minute, it's more complicated than that.

01:21:09.000 You don't want any more of that that's necessary today.

01:21:12.000 But also not tomorrow, and not next week, and not next month, and not next year.

01:21:16.000 So however you act now, better not compromise how you're going to be in a year.

01:21:21.000 Because that would just be counterproductive.

01:21:24.000 That's part of the problem with short-term pleasures, right?

01:21:26.000 It's like, act in haste, repent at leisure. Everyone knows exactly what that means.

01:21:31.000 So you have to act in a way that works now, and tomorrow, and next week, and next month, and so forth.

01:21:36.000 And so you have to take your future self into account.

01:21:39.000 And human beings can do that.

01:21:40.000 And taking your future self into account isn't much different than taking other people into account.

01:21:46.000 Right, because I remember there's this Simpson episode.

01:21:50.000 And Homer downs a quart of mayonnaise and vodka.

01:21:57.000 He says, someone, Marge says, you know, you shouldn't really do that.

01:22:03.000 And Homer says, that's a problem for future Homer.

01:22:06.000 I'm sure glad I'm not that guy.

01:22:13.000 That's so ridiculously comical, you know.

01:22:15.000 But, okay, but you see, we have to grapple with that.

01:22:18.000 And so the you that's out there in the future is sort of like another person.

01:22:22.000 And so figuring out how to conduct yourself properly in relationship to your future self

01:22:27.000 isn't much different than figuring out how to conduct yourself in relationship to other people.

01:22:31.000 But then we could expand the constraints.

01:22:34.000 Not only does the interpretation that you extract have to protect you from suffering and give you an aim,

01:22:40.000 but it has to do it in a way that's iterable.

01:22:43.000 So it works across time.

01:22:45.000 And then it has to work in the presence of other people.

01:22:47.000 So that you can cooperate with them and compete with them in a way that doesn't make you suffer more.

01:22:52.000 And people are, they're not that tolerant.

01:22:55.000 You know, I mean, they have choices.

01:22:58.000 They don't have to hang around with you.

01:22:59.000 They can hang around with any one of these other primates.

01:23:01.000 And so if you don't act properly, at least within certain boundaries, it's like you're just cast aside.

01:23:08.000 And so people are broadcasting information at you all the time about how you need to interpret the world

01:23:13.000 so they can tolerate being around you. 0.98

01:23:15.000 And you need that because socially isolated, you're insane and then you're dead.

01:23:20.000 No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time.

01:23:23.000 We can't maintain our own sanity without continual feedback from other people because it's too damn complicated.

01:23:29.000 So you're constrained by your own existence and then you're constrained by the existence of other people.

01:23:34.000 And then you're also constrained by the world.

01:23:37.000 You know, if I read Hamlet and what I extract out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge.

01:23:43.000 It's like it puts my interpretation to an end rather quickly.

01:23:48.000 It doesn't seem to be optimally functional, let's say.

01:23:52.000 And so an interpretation is constrained by the reality of the world.

01:23:57.000 It's constrained by the reality of other people.

01:23:59.000 And it's constrained by your reality across time.

01:24:02.000 And there's only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space.

01:24:08.000 And so that's part of the reason that the postmodernists are wrong.

01:24:12.000 It's also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who've been trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in a body.

01:24:18.000 Because it turns out that you just can't make something intelligent in some sense without it being embodied.

01:24:23.000 And it's partly for the reasons that I just described.

01:24:26.000 You need constraints on the system before...

01:24:30.000 You need constraints on the system so that the system doesn't drown in an infinite sea of interpretation.

01:24:35.000 It's something like that.

01:24:37.000 So, that's the literary end of it.

01:24:39.000 Moral.

01:24:41.000 Well, morality for me is about action.

01:24:43.000 And I'm an existentialist in some sense.

01:24:45.000 And what that means is that I believe that what people believe to be true is what they act out, not what they say.

01:24:52.000 And so, there's lots of definitions of truth.

01:24:55.000 I mean, truth is a very expansive word.

01:24:57.000 And you can think of objective truth.

01:24:59.000 But behavioral truth isn't the same as objective truth.

01:25:02.000 What you should do isn't the same as what is.

01:25:05.000 As far as I can tell, people debate that.

01:25:07.000 But I think the reason that that has to be the case is because...

01:25:11.000 Think about it this way.

01:25:13.000 You're standing in front of a field.

01:25:15.000 And you can see the field.

01:25:17.000 But the field doesn't tell you how to walk through it.

01:25:20.000 There's an infinite number of ways you could walk through it.

01:25:23.000 And so, you can't extract out an inviolable guide to how you should act from the array of facts that are in front of you.

01:25:30.000 Because there's just too many facts.

01:25:32.000 And they don't have directionality.

01:25:34.000 But you, you need to know.

01:25:36.000 You need to know how not to suffer.

01:25:38.000 And you need to know what your aim is.

01:25:40.000 And so, you have to overlay that objective reality with some interpretive structure.

01:25:45.000 And it's the nature of that interpretive structure that we're going to be aiming at hard.

01:25:49.000 I've given you some hints about it already.

01:25:51.000 We've extracted it in part from observations of our own behavior and other people's behavior.

01:25:56.000 And we've extracted it in part by the nature of our embodiment that's been shaped over hundreds of millions of years.

01:26:02.000 But we see the infinite plane of facts.

01:26:05.000 And we impose a moral interpretation on it.

01:26:08.000 And the moral interpretation is what to do about what is.

01:26:13.000 And that's associated both with security, because you just don't need too much complexity.

01:26:18.000 And also with aim.

01:26:19.000 And so, we're mobile creatures, right?

01:26:21.000 We need to know where we're going.

01:26:23.000 Because all we're ever concerned about, roughly speaking, is where we're going.

01:26:28.000 That's what we need to know.

01:26:29.000 Where are we going?

01:26:30.000 What are we doing?

01:26:31.000 And why?

01:26:32.000 And that's not the same question as, what is the world made of objectively?

01:26:36.000 It's a different question.

01:26:37.000 It requires different answers.

01:26:39.000 And so, that's the domain of the moral, as far as I'm concerned.

01:26:42.000 Which is, what are you aiming at?

01:26:44.000 And that's the question of the ultimate ideal, in some sense.

01:26:47.000 Even if you have trivial, little, you know, fragmentary ideals.

01:26:51.000 There's something trying to emerge out of that that's more coherent and more integrated.

01:26:57.000 And more applicable and more practical.

01:27:00.000 And that's the other thing, is that, you know, you think about literature and you think about art.

01:27:06.000 And you think those aren't very tightly tied to the earth.

01:27:09.000 They're imperian and airy and spiritual.

01:27:12.000 And they don't seem practical.

01:27:13.000 But I'm a practical person.

01:27:16.000 And part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary and aesthetic and evolutionary perspective.

01:27:23.000 Is to extract out something of value.

01:27:26.000 Something of real value.

01:27:27.000 That's practical.

01:27:29.000 You know, something.

01:27:30.000 Because one of the rules that I have when I'm lecturing.

01:27:33.000 Is that I don't want to tell anybody anything that they can't use.

01:27:37.000 Because I think of knowledge as a tool.

01:27:39.000 It's something to implement in the world.

01:27:41.000 We're tool-using creatures.

01:27:43.000 And our knowledge is tools.

01:27:45.000 And we need tools to work in the world.

01:27:47.000 We need tools to regulate our emotions.

01:27:48.000 And to make things better.

01:27:49.000 And to put an end to suffering to the degree that we can.

01:27:52.000 And to live with ourselves properly.

01:27:54.000 And to stand up properly.

01:27:56.000 And you need the tools to do that.

01:27:58.000 And so I don't want to do anything in this lecture series that isn't practical.

01:28:02.000 You know, I want you to come away having things put together in a way that you can immediately imply.

01:28:09.000 Not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction.

01:28:14.000 Rational.

01:28:15.000 Well, it's got to make sense, you know.

01:28:18.000 Because the more restrictions on your theory, the better.

01:28:22.000 And so, I want it all laid out causally.

01:28:26.000 So that A, or B follows A.

01:28:29.000 And B precedes C.

01:28:31.000 And in a way that's understandable.

01:28:33.000 And doesn't require a leap.

01:28:35.000 Any unnecessary leap of faith.

01:28:38.000 You know, because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship.

01:28:42.000 With a collection of books like the Bible.

01:28:45.000 Is that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe.

01:28:49.000 And that's no good.

01:28:50.000 Because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell.

01:28:52.000 And then, well, then you have to scrap the whole thing.

01:28:54.000 Because in principle, the whole thing is about truth.

01:28:56.000 And if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies.

01:29:00.000 Then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that?

01:29:02.000 And so, I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.

01:29:07.000 Or, I don't want any more than I have to leave in it.

01:29:11.000 Because I can't get any farther than that.

01:29:13.000 And so, it's going to make sense rationally.

01:29:16.000 I don't want it to be pushing up against what we know to be scientifically untrue.

01:29:22.000 Even though science is in flux.

01:29:24.000 And that's, you know, somewhat of a dangerous parameter.

01:29:27.000 If it isn't working with evolutionary theory, for example.

01:29:32.000 Then I think that it's not a good enough solution.

01:29:34.000 So, and then finally, it's phenomenological.

01:29:41.000 Modern people, you know, we think of reality as objective.

01:29:46.000 And that's very powerful.

01:29:49.000 But that isn't how we experience reality.

01:29:52.000 We have our domain of experience, you know.

01:29:55.000 And it's, this is a hard thing to get a grip on.

01:29:59.000 Even though it should be the most obvious thing.

01:30:01.000 For the phenomenologists, everything that you experience is real.

01:30:05.000 And so, they're interested in the structure of your subjective experience.

01:30:09.000 And you say, well, you have subjective experience.

01:30:11.000 And you have subjective experience.

01:30:12.000 And so do you.

01:30:13.000 And there's commonalities across all of those.

01:30:15.000 Like for example, you're, you're likely to experience the same set of emotions.

01:30:20.000 You know, we've been able to identify canonical emotions.

01:30:23.000 And canonical motivations.

01:30:25.000 And without that, we couldn't even communicate.

01:30:27.000 Because you wouldn't know what the other person was like.

01:30:29.000 You'd have to explain infinitely.

01:30:31.000 There's nothing you can take for granted.

01:30:33.000 But you can.

01:30:34.000 You know, and phenomenology is the fact that in the center of my vision, my hands are very clear.

01:30:39.000 And then out in the periphery, they get, they disappear.

01:30:41.000 And phenomenology is the way things smell.

01:30:44.000 And the way things taste.

01:30:45.000 And the fact that they matter.

01:30:46.000 And so you could say in some sense that phenomenology is the study of what matters rather than matter.

01:30:55.000 And it's a given from the phenomenological perspective that things have meaning.

01:31:00.000 That, you know, even if you're a rationalist, say, and a cynic and a nihilist.

01:31:06.000 And you say, well, nothing has any meaning.

01:31:08.000 You still run into the problem of pain.

01:31:10.000 Because pain undercuts your arguments and has a meaning.

01:31:14.000 So there's no escaping from the meaning.

01:31:17.000 You can pretty much demolish all the positive parts of it.

01:31:19.000 But trying to think your way out of the negative parts, man, good luck with that.

01:31:23.000 Because that just doesn't work.

01:31:25.000 So, phenomenology is, and the Bible stories, and I think this is true of fiction in general, is phenomenological.

01:31:34.000 And it concentrates on trying to elucidate the nature of human experience.

01:31:41.000 And that is not the same as the objective world.

01:31:44.000 But it's also a form of truth.

01:31:46.000 Because it is truth that you have a field of experience.

01:31:49.000 And that it has qualities.

01:31:50.000 The question is, what are the qualities?

01:31:52.000 Now, ancient representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomena.

01:31:59.000 Things that we would consider objective facts.

01:32:01.000 And subjective truth.

01:32:03.000 The projection of subjective truth.

01:32:05.000 And I'll show you, for example, I'll show you how the Mesopotamians viewed the world.

01:32:11.000 They had a model.

01:32:13.000 Basically, the world was a disk.

01:32:15.000 You know, if you go out in a field at night, what does the world look like?

01:32:19.000 Well, it's a disk.

01:32:20.000 It's got a dome on top of it.

01:32:22.000 Well, that was basically the Mesopotamian view of the world.

01:32:25.000 And that view of the world that the people who wrote the first stories in the Bible believed, too.

01:32:29.000 And on top of the dome, there was water.

01:32:32.000 Well, obviously, it's like it rains, right?

01:32:34.000 Where does the water come from?

01:32:35.000 Well, there's water around the dome.

01:32:37.000 And then there's land.

01:32:38.000 That's the disk.

01:32:39.000 And then underneath that, there's water.

01:32:41.000 How do you know that?

01:32:42.000 Well, drill. 0.98

01:32:43.000 You'll hit water.

01:32:44.000 Well, it's under the earth, obviously.

01:32:46.000 Because otherwise, how would you hit the water?

01:32:48.000 And then what's under that?

01:32:49.000 There's fresh water.

01:32:50.000 And then what's under that?

01:32:51.000 Well, if you go to the edge of the disk, you hit the ocean.

01:32:54.000 It's salt water.

01:32:55.000 So it's a dome with water outside of it.

01:32:59.000 And then it's a disk that the dome sits on.

01:33:02.000 And then underneath that, there's fresh water.

01:33:04.000 And then underneath that, there's salt water.

01:33:06.000 And that was roughly the Mesopotamian world.

01:33:08.000 And you see, that's a mix of observation and imagination, right?

01:33:14.000 Because that isn't the world, but it is the way the world appears.

01:33:18.000 It's a perfectly believable cosmology.

01:33:21.000 And the sun rises and the sun sets on that dome.

01:33:25.000 It's not like the thing is bloody well spinning.

01:33:27.000 Who would ever think that up?

01:33:29.000 It's obviously the sun comes up and goes down and then travels underneath the world and comes back up again.

01:33:35.000 There's nothing more self-evident than that.

01:33:38.000 Well, that's that strange intermingling of subjective fantasy, let's say,

01:33:43.000 right at the level of perception and actual observable phenomena.

01:33:46.000 And a lot of the cosmology that's associated with the biblical stories is exactly like that.

01:33:51.000 It's half psychology and half reality.

01:33:56.000 Although the psychological is real as well.

01:33:59.000 And to know that the biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing.

01:34:07.000 Because, you know, the poor fundamentalists, they're trying to cling to their moral structure.

01:34:14.000 And, you know, I understand why.

01:34:16.000 Because it does organize their societies and it organizes their psyche.

01:34:19.000 So they've got something to cling to.

01:34:21.000 But, you know, they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth.

01:34:27.000 And they try to gerrymander the biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory.

01:34:33.000 You know, promoting creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory.

01:34:39.000 It's like, that just isn't going to go anywhere, you know. 0.98

01:34:43.000 Because the people who wrote these damn stories weren't scientists to begin with. 0.98

01:34:47.000 There weren't any scientists back then. 0.99

01:34:49.000 There's hardly any scientists now.

01:34:51.000 You know, it's really, it's hard to think scientifically, man.

01:34:54.000 It's like, it takes a lot of training.

01:34:56.000 And even scientists don't think scientifically once you get them out of the lab.

01:35:00.000 And hardly even when they're in the lab, you know.

01:35:02.000 You've got to get peer-reviewed and criticized.

01:35:04.000 Like, it's hard to think scientifically.

01:35:07.000 So, and however the people who wrote these stories thought was more like dramatists think.

01:35:11.000 More like Shakespeare thought.

01:35:13.000 But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it.

01:35:15.000 It just means that you have to be a little bit more sophisticated about your ideas of truth.

01:35:19.000 And that's okay, you know.

01:35:21.000 There are truths to live by.

01:35:23.000 Okay, well, fine.

01:35:25.000 Then we want to figure out what those are.

01:35:26.000 Because we need to live.

01:35:27.000 And maybe not to suffer so much.

01:35:29.000 So, so.

01:35:30.000 And so if you know that what the Bible stories and stories in general are trying to represent is

01:35:36.000 the lived experience of conscious individuals.

01:35:39.000 Like the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals.

01:35:43.000 Then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding.

01:35:48.000 And eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and, let's say, the claims of religious stories.

01:35:56.000 So, okay.

01:35:57.000 Okay.

01:35:58.000 So let's, let's, let's take a look at the structure of the book itself.

01:36:02.000 So the first thing about the Bible is that it's a comedy. 0.55

01:36:05.000 And a comedy has a happy ending.

01:36:07.000 Right?

01:36:08.000 So that's a strange thing.

01:36:09.000 Because the Greek God stories were almost always tragic.

01:36:13.000 Now, the Bible is a comedy. 0.97

01:36:15.000 It has a happy ending.

01:36:16.000 Everyone lives.

01:36:17.000 There's a heaven.

01:36:18.000 So, now, what you think about that is a completely different issue.

01:36:22.000 I'm just telling you the structure of the story.

01:36:24.000 It's something like there was paradise at the beginning of time.

01:36:27.000 And then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history.

01:36:31.000 And history is limitation and mortality and suffering and self-consciousness.

01:36:35.000 But there's a mode of being or potentially the establishment of a state that will transcend that.

01:36:41.000 And that's what time is aiming at.

01:36:43.000 So that's the, that's the idea of the story.

01:36:46.000 Now, it's a funny thing that the Bible has a story because it wasn't written as a book.

01:36:52.000 Right?

01:36:53.000 It was assembled from a whole bunch of different books.

01:36:55.000 And the fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable.

01:37:00.000 And what the question is then, well, what is that story about?

01:37:06.000 And how did it come up as a story?

01:37:08.000 And then I suppose as well, is there anything to it?

01:37:10.000 It constitutes a dramatic record of self-realization or abstraction.

01:37:15.000 I already mentioned that.

01:37:16.000 It's like the idea, for example, of the formulation of the, let's say, the image of God is an abstraction.

01:37:23.000 That's how we're going to handle it to begin with.

01:37:25.000 I want to say though, because I said I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary.

01:37:31.000 I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible.

01:37:38.000 But it's not explicable.

01:37:40.000 And so I don't want to explain it away.

01:37:42.000 I want to just leave it as a fact.

01:37:44.000 And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well, we'll leave that as a fact and a mystery.

01:37:49.000 But we'll look at this, we're going to look at this from a rational perspective.

01:37:53.000 And say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal.

01:37:58.000 And to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation.

01:38:03.000 So, and that's good enough.

01:38:05.000 That's an amazing thing, if it's true.

01:38:07.000 But I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say.

01:38:12.000 It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors.

01:38:16.000 So what does that mean?

01:38:17.000 Many people wrote it.

01:38:18.000 There's many different books.

01:38:20.000 Even, and they're interwoven together, especially in the first five books.

01:38:24.000 By people who, I suspect, took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization.

01:38:35.000 And tried to make their accounts coherent.

01:38:38.000 And so, they took a little of this, and they took a little of that, and they took a little of this.

01:38:43.000 And they tried not to lose anything because it seemed valuable.

01:38:46.000 Or it was certainly valuable to the people who had collected the stories.

01:38:49.000 They weren't going to, you know, tolerate too much editing.

01:38:53.000 But they also wanted it to make sense to some degree.

01:38:56.000 So it wasn't completely logically contradictory and completely absurd.

01:39:02.000 And so, many people wrote it.

01:39:05.000 And many people edited it.

01:39:06.000 And many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time.

01:39:10.000 And we have very few documents like that.

01:39:12.000 And so, just because we have a document like that is sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena.

01:39:20.000 And try to understand what it is that it's trying to communicate, let's say.

01:39:24.000 And then I said, it's also the world's first hyperlinked text.

01:39:27.000 Which is, which is that again.

01:39:29.000 And very much worth thinking about for quite a long time.

01:39:32.000 Alright.

01:39:33.000 There's four sources in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible.

01:39:39.000 Four stories that we know came together.

01:39:41.000 One was called the Priestly.

01:39:42.000 There's a source called the Priestly.

01:39:44.000 And it used the name Elohim or El Shaddai for God.

01:39:48.000 And I believe El is the root word for Ella as well.

01:39:52.000 So, and that's usually translated as God or the gods.

01:39:56.000 Because Elohim is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible.

01:40:02.000 And it's newer than the Yahwist version. 0.97

01:40:05.000 Now, the reason I'm telling you that is because Genesis 1, which is the first story, isn't as old as Genesis 2.

01:40:11.000 Genesis 2 contains, the Yahwist version contains the story, for example, of Adam and Eve. 0.97

01:40:17.000 And that's older than the very first book in the Bible.

01:40:20.000 But they decided to put the newer version first.

01:40:23.000 And I think it's because it deals with more fundamental abstractions.

01:40:28.000 It's something like that.

01:40:29.000 It's like it deals with the most basic of abstractions.

01:40:31.000 How the universe was created.

01:40:33.000 And then segues into what the human environment is like.

01:40:37.000 And so that seems to be the logic behind it.

01:40:40.000 The Yahwist version uses the name YHWH. 0.92

01:40:45.000 Which apparently people didn't say.

01:40:47.000 But we believe was pronounced something like Yahwah.

01:40:50.000 And it has a strongly anthropomorphic God.

01:40:54.000 So one that takes human form.

01:40:56.000 It begins with Genesis 2.4.

01:40:58.000 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when.

01:41:01.000 And it contains the story of Adam and Eve.

01:41:03.000 And Cain and Abel and Noah.

01:41:04.000 And the Tower of Babel and Exodus. 0.74

01:41:06.000 And Numbers along with the priestly version.

01:41:08.000 It also contains the law in the form just the form of the Ten Commandments.

01:41:13.000 Which is like a truncated form of the law.

01:41:17.000 There's the Elohist source. 0.79

01:41:22.000 It contains the stories of Abraham and Isaac.

01:41:24.000 It's concerned with a heavenly hierarchy that includes angels.

01:41:28.000 It talks about the departure from Egypt.

01:41:30.000 And it presents the covenant code.

01:41:32.000 Which is this idea of that, you know, that society is predicated.

01:41:35.000 This was Israeli society.

01:41:37.000 It was predicated on a covenant with God.

01:41:39.000 And that's laid out in a sequence of rules.

01:41:41.000 Some of which are the Ten Commandments.

01:41:42.000 But many of which are much more extensive than that.

01:41:45.000 And then the final one is the Deuteronomist code.

01:41:48.000 And it contains the bulk of the law.

01:41:51.000 And what's called the Deuteronomic history.

01:41:54.000 And it's independent of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

01:41:58.000 And so, we know that at least four.

01:42:00.000 Now there's debate about this.

01:42:01.000 Like there is about everything, you know.

01:42:03.000 So I'm brushing over a very large area of scholarship.

01:42:06.000 But people generally assume that there were multiple authors.

01:42:10.000 Over multiple periods of time.

01:42:12.000 And the way they've concluded that is by looking at textual analysis, you know.

01:42:16.000 Trying to see where there are chunks of the stories that have the same kind of style.

01:42:21.000 Or the same reference.

01:42:22.000 And people argue about that.

01:42:24.000 Because, you know, obviously it's difficult to recreate something ancient.

01:42:28.000 But that's the basic idea.

01:42:30.000 So it is an amalgam of viewpoints about these initial issues.

01:42:35.000 And that's important to know.

01:42:37.000 So it's like a collective, it's a collective story.

01:42:40.000 And, okay.

01:42:44.000 Now, to understand the first part of Genesis.

01:42:47.000 I'm going to turn, strangely enough, to something that's actually part of the New Testament.

01:42:58.000 And this is a central element of Christianity.

01:43:01.000 And it's a very strange idea.

01:43:03.000 And it's going to take a very long time to unpack.

01:43:06.000 But the idea, this is what John said about Christ.

01:43:09.000 He said, in the beginning was the Word.

01:43:12.000 And so that relates back to Genesis 1.

01:43:14.000 In the beginning was the Word.

01:43:15.000 And the Word was with God.

01:43:17.000 And the Word was God.

01:43:19.000 Some...

01:43:20.000 Well, you know.

01:43:21.000 Three sentences like that take a lot of unpacking.

01:43:23.000 Because, well, none of that seems to make any sense whatsoever, really.

01:43:27.000 Right?

01:43:28.000 In the beginning was the Word.

01:43:29.000 And the Word was both with God.

01:43:31.000 And the Word was God.

01:43:32.000 So the first question might be, what in the world does that mean?

01:43:35.000 In the beginning was the Word.

01:43:37.000 That's the Logos, actually.

01:43:39.000 And the Logos is embodied in the figure of Christ.

01:43:42.000 So there's this idea in John that whatever Christ is, the Son of God, is not only instantiated in history.

01:43:48.000 Say, at a particular time and place as a carpenter in some backwoods part of the world.

01:43:53.000 But also something eternal that exists outside of time and space that was there right at the beginning.

01:43:59.000 And as far as I can tell, what that Logos represents is something like modern people...

01:44:04.000 It's something like what modern people refer to when they talk about consciousness.

01:44:08.000 It's something like that.

01:44:10.000 It's more than that.

01:44:11.000 It's like consciousness and its capacity to be aware and its capacity to communicate.

01:44:17.000 It's something like that.

01:44:18.000 And there's an idea underneath that, which is that being, especially from a phenomenological perspective...

01:44:23.000 So the being that is experienced cannot exist without consciousness.

01:44:27.000 It's like consciousness shines a light on things to bring it into being.

01:44:32.000 Because without consciousness, what is there?

01:44:35.000 No one experiences anything.

01:44:37.000 It's like, is there anything when no one experiences anything?

01:44:41.000 That's the question.

01:44:42.000 And the answer that this book is presenting is that...

01:44:45.000 No, you have to think about consciousness as a constituent element of reality.

01:44:50.000 It's something that's necessary for reality itself to exist.

01:44:54.000 Now, of course, it depends on what you mean by reality.

01:44:57.000 But the reality that's being referred to here, I told you already, is this strange amalgam of the subjective experience and the world.

01:45:04.000 But the question is deeper than that, too, because it is by no means obvious what there is if there's no one to experience it.

01:45:12.000 I mean, the whole notion of time itself seems to collapse, at least in terms of something like felt duration.

01:45:18.000 And the notion of size disappears, essentially, because there's nothing to scale it.

01:45:24.000 And the causality seems to vanish.

01:45:26.000 And so...

01:45:28.000 And we don't understand consciousness.

01:45:30.000 Not in the least.

01:45:32.000 We don't understand what it is that is in us that gives illumination to being.

01:45:37.000 And what happens in the Old Testament, at least in part, is that that consciousness is associated with the divine.

01:45:43.000 Now you think, well, is that a reasonable proposition?

01:45:48.000 And that's a very complicated question.

01:45:50.000 But at least we might note that there's something to the claim.

01:45:54.000 Because there is a miracle of experience and existence that's dependent on consciousness.

01:45:59.000 I mean, people try to explain it away constantly, but it doesn't seem to work very well.

01:46:04.000 And here's something else to think about, I think, that's really worth thinking about.

01:46:08.000 People do not like it when you treat them like they're not conscious.

01:46:12.000 Right?

01:46:13.000 They react very badly to that.

01:46:15.000 And then, you don't like it if someone assumes that you're not conscious.

01:46:18.000 And you don't like it if someone assumes that you don't have free will.

01:46:21.000 You know, that you're just absolutely determined in your actions.

01:46:26.000 And there's nothing that's going to repair you.

01:46:28.000 And that you don't need to have any responsibility for your actions.

01:46:31.000 It's like, our culture, the laws of our culture are predicated on the idea.

01:46:35.000 Something like, people are conscious.

01:46:37.000 People have experience.

01:46:39.000 People make decisions and can be held responsible for them.

01:46:42.000 That there's a free will element to it.

01:46:44.000 And you can debate all that philosophically, and fine.

01:46:47.000 But the point is, is that, that is how we act.

01:46:50.000 And that is the idea that our legal system is predicated on.

01:46:54.000 And there's something deep about it.

01:46:55.000 Because, you know, you're subject to the law.

01:47:00.000 But the law is also limited by you.

01:47:03.000 Which is to say that, in a well-functioning, properly grounded, democratic system.

01:47:10.000 You have intrinsic value.

01:47:13.000 That's the source of your rights.

01:47:15.000 Even if you're a murderer.

01:47:17.000 We have to say, the law can only go so far.

01:47:20.000 Because there's something about you that's divine.

01:47:22.000 Well, what does that mean?

01:47:24.000 Well, partly it means that there's something about you that's conscious.

01:47:27.000 And capable of communicating.

01:47:29.000 Like you're a whole world unto yourself.

01:47:31.000 And you have that to contribute to everyone else.

01:47:34.000 And that's valuable.

01:47:35.000 I mean, that you can learn new things.

01:47:37.000 You can transform the structure of society.

01:47:39.000 You can invent a new way of dealing with the world.

01:47:42.000 You're capable of all that.

01:47:44.000 It's an intrinsic part of you.

01:47:45.000 And that's associated with this.

01:47:47.000 It's associated...

01:47:49.000 That's the idea there.

01:47:50.000 Is that there's something about the logos.

01:47:54.000 That is necessary for the absolute chaos of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality.

01:48:03.000 That's an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos.

01:48:09.000 And you can debate that.

01:48:11.000 But, you know, it's not...

01:48:12.000 You can't just bloody well brush it off.

01:48:14.000 Because, first of all, we are the most complicated things there are that we know of by a massive amount.

01:48:22.000 We're so complicated that it's unbelievable.

01:48:24.000 And so, you know, there's a lot of cosmos out there.

01:48:27.000 But there's a lot of cosmos in here, too.

01:48:30.000 And which one is greater is by no means obvious unless you use something trivial like relative size.

01:48:35.000 Which, you know, really isn't a very sophisticated approach.

01:48:38.000 And whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it.

01:48:45.000 Which is a very strange thing, you know.

01:48:47.000 You can conceptualize a future in your imagination.

01:48:50.000 And then you can work and make that manifest.

01:48:53.000 You participate in the process of creation.

01:48:56.000 That's one way of thinking about it.

01:48:58.000 And so that's why I think in Genesis 1, it relates the idea that human beings are made in the image of the divine.

01:49:06.000 Men and women.

01:49:07.000 Which is interesting, too.

01:49:08.000 Because, you know, the feminists are always criticizing Christianity, for example, as being, what, inexorably patriarchal. 1.00

01:49:16.000 Of course, they criticize everything like that. 0.78

01:49:20.000 So it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance.

01:49:22.000 But 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.

01:49:39.000 That's a very cool thing.

01:49:41.000 And you've got to think, well, like I said, you actually take that seriously.

01:49:45.000 Well, what you've got to ask is, what happens if you don't take it seriously?

01:49:49.000 Right?

01:49:50.000 That's, read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

01:49:54.000 That's the best, the best investigation of that tactic that's ever been produced.

01:50:02.000 Because 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.

01:50:11.000 And that, as a consequence, he can do whatever he wants.

01:50:14.000 It's only cowardice that stops him from acting.

01:50:16.000 Right?

01:50:17.000 Because, why would it be anything else if the value of other people is just an arbitrary superstition?

01:50:23.000 Then why can't I do exactly what I want, when I want?

01:50:26.000 Which is the psychopath's viewpoint.

01:50:28.000 Well, so Raskolnikov does. 0.78

01:50:30.000 He kills someone who's a very horrible person, and he has very good reasons for killing her.

01:50:34.000 And he's half-starved and a little bit insane and possessed by this ideology.

01:50:38.000 It's brilliant, brilliant layout.

01:50:40.000 And 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.

01:50:50.000 Because he's broken a rule, like he's broken a serious rule, and there's no going back.

01:50:54.000 And 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.

01:51:05.000 Most 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.

01:51:13.000 Not as far as I can tell.

01:51:15.000 Because I don't see logical flaws in Crime and Punishment.

01:51:18.000 I think he got the psychology exactly right.

01:51:20.000 And Dostoevsky's amazing for this, because in one of his books, The Devils, for example,

01:51:26.000 he describes a political scenario that's not much different than the one we find ourselves in now.

01:51:31.000 And there are these people who are possessed by rationalistic, utopian, atheistic ideas.

01:51:36.000 And they're very powerful.

01:51:37.000 They give rise to the communist revolution, right?

01:51:39.000 I mean, they're powerful ideas.

01:51:41.000 And his character, Stavrigan, also acts out the presupposition that human beings have no intrinsic nature and no intrinsic value.

01:51:51.000 And it's another brilliant investigation, and Dostoevsky prophesies, that's what I would say,

01:51:57.000 what will happen to a society if it goes down that road?

01:52:01.000 And he was dead exactly accurate.

01:52:03.000 It's uncanny to read Dostoevsky's The Possessed, or The Devils, depending on the translation.

01:52:08.000 And then to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

01:52:12.000 Because one is fiction and prophecy, and the second is, hey, look, it turned out exactly the way that Dostoevsky said it would,

01:52:18.000 for exactly the same reasons.

01:52:20.000 So it's quite remarkable.

01:52:21.000 So, well, so the question is, do you contend seriously with the idea that, A, there's something cosmically constitutive about consciousness,

01:52:32.000 and B, that that might well be considered divine, and C, that that is instantiated in every person.

01:52:40.000 And then ask yourself, if you're not a criminal, if you don't act it out.

01:52:45.000 And then ask yourself what that means.

01:52:47.000 Is that reflective of a reality?

01:52:49.000 You know, is it a metaphor?

01:52:50.000 Like, maybe it's a metaphor, a complex metaphor that we have to use to organize our societies.

01:52:55.000 Could well be.

01:52:56.000 But, even as a metaphor, it's true enough so that we mess with it at our peril.

01:53:02.000 And it also took people a very long time to figure out.

01:53:07.000 This is Genesis 1.

01:53:09.000 You know what, I'm probably going to stop there.

01:53:12.000 Because I believe it's 9.30.

01:53:14.000 And so we didn't even get to the first line.

01:53:17.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:53:30.000 Look, I want to read you a couple of things that we'll use as a prodroma for the next lecture.

01:53:35.000 Because I'll just bounce through a collection of ideas that's associated with the notion of divinity, okay?

01:53:41.000 And then we'll turn back to the first lines when we start the next lecture.

01:53:45.000 I have no idea how far I'm going to get through the biblical stories, by the way.

01:53:48.000 Because I'm trying to figure this out as I go along.

01:53:51.000 Okay, so, you know, there's an idea in Christianity that the image of God is a trinity, right?

01:53:58.000 There'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.

01:54:03.000 And it's something like tradition, the spirit of tradition.

01:54:07.000 It's something like the human being as the newest incarnation of that tradition, like the living incarnation of that tradition.

01:54:15.000 And then it's something like the spirit in people that makes relationship with this and this possible, the spirit in individuals.

01:54:24.000 And so I'm going to bounce my way quickly through some of the classical metaphorical attributes of God.

01:54:31.000 So 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.

01:54:41.000 So, there's a fatherly aspect.

01:54:44.000 So here's what God as a Father is like.

01:54:48.000 You can enter into a covenant with it.

01:54:50.000 So you can make a bargain with it.

01:54:51.000 Now, you think about that.

01:54:53.000 Money is like that.

01:54:54.000 Because money is a bargain you make with the future.

01:54:57.000 Right?

01:54:58.000 So we structured our world so that you can negotiate with the future.

01:55:02.000 And I don't think that we would have got to the point where we could do that without having this idea to begin with.

01:55:08.000 You can act as if the future is a reality.

01:55:11.000 There's a spirit of tradition that enables you to act as if the future is something that can be bargained with.

01:55:16.000 That's why you make sacrifices.

01:55:18.000 Right?

01:55:19.000 And the sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time and now they're psychological.

01:55:24.000 We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present and expect that you're negotiating with something that represents the transcendent future.

01:55:32.000 And that's an amazing human discovery.

01:55:35.000 Like, no other creature can do that to act as if the future is real.

01:55:39.000 To know that you can bargain with reality itself and that you can do it successfully.

01:55:43.000 It's unbelievable.

01:55:45.000 It responds to sacrifice.

01:55:47.000 It answers prayers.

01:55:49.000 I'm not saying that any of this is true, by the way.

01:55:51.000 I'm just saying what the cloud of ideas represents.

01:55:55.000 It punishes and rewards.

01:55:57.000 It judges and forgives.

01:55:59.000 It's not nature.

01:56:01.000 You 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.

01:56:08.000 Whatever God is partially manifest in this Logos is something that stands outside of nature.

01:56:13.000 And I think that's something like consciousness as abstracted from the natural world.

01:56:19.000 So, it built Eden for mankind and then banished us for disobedience.

01:56:24.000 It's too powerful to be touched.

01:56:26.000 It granted free will.

01:56:28.000 Distance from it is hell.

01:56:30.000 Distance from it is death.

01:56:31.000 It reveals itself in dogma and in mystical experience.

01:56:35.000 And it's the law.

01:56:37.000 So that's sort of like the fatherly aspect.

01:56:39.000 And then the sun-like aspect.

01:56:41.000 It speaks chaos into order.

01:56:43.000 It slays dragons and feeds people with the remains.

01:56:46.000 It finds gold.

01:56:47.000 It rescues virgins.

01:56:48.000 It's the body and blood of Christ.

01:56:50.000 It's a tragic victim and scapegoat and eternally triumphant redeemer simultaneously.

01:56:56.000 It cares for the outcast.

01:56:58.000 It dies and is reborn.

01:57:00.000 It's the king of kings and hero of heroes.

01:57:02.000 It's not the state.

01:57:04.000 But is both the fulfillment and critic of the state.

01:57:08.000 It dwells in the perfect house.

01:57:10.000 It is aiming at paradise or heaven.

01:57:12.000 It can rescue from hell.

01:57:14.000 It cares for the outcast.

01:57:16.000 It's the foundation stone and the cornerstone that was rejected.

01:57:19.000 And it's the spirit of the law.

01:57:23.000 And then it's spirit-like.

01:57:25.000 It's akin to the human soul.

01:57:27.000 It's the prophetic voice.

01:57:29.000 It's the still small voice of conscience.

01:57:32.000 It's the spoken truth.

01:57:34.000 It's called forth by music.

01:57:36.000 It is the enemy of deceit, arrogance, and resentment.

01:57:40.000 It's the water of life.

01:57:41.000 It burns without consuming.

01:57:43.000 And it's a blinding light.

01:57:45.000 Okay, so that's a very well-developed set of poetic metaphors, essentially, right?

01:57:51.000 So these are all, what would you say, glimpses of the transcendent ideal.

01:57:56.000 That's the right way of thinking about it.

01:57:58.000 They're glimpses of the transcendent ideal.

01:58:00.000 And all of them have a specific meaning.

01:58:02.000 And, well, in part, what we're going to do is go over that meaning as we continue with this series.

01:58:08.000 And so what we've got now is a brief description, at least, of what this is.

01:58:14.000 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

01:58:18.000 We know it's associated with the logos in this sequence of stories.

01:58:22.000 We know it's associated with the word and with consciousness.

01:58:24.000 And we know that it's associated with whatever God is.

01:58:29.000 And then I laid out the metaphoric landscape that, at least in part, describes God.

01:58:34.000 And so now we have some sense of the being that does this.

01:58:37.000 Creates the heavens and the earth.

01:58:39.000 The earth was without form and void.

01:58:41.000 That's that chaotic state of intermingled confusion.

01:58:44.000 And darkness was over the face of the deep.

01:58:47.000 And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

01:58:50.000 And God said, let there be light.

01:58:52.000 And there was light.

01:58:53.000 And so we'll stop with that.

01:58:55.000 Because now we're ready to take a tentative step into the very first part of this book.

01:59:01.000 And 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.

01:59:11.000 And so, well, I've done what I can today to, what would you say, elaborate on this single word, I suppose.

01:59:18.000 But it's a big word, you know.

01:59:22.000 So, it's not so unreasonable that it takes a long time to get to the point where you have any sense of what it means at all.

01:59:30.000 All right.

01:59:32.000 That is nowhere near, that is not, I thought I would get a lot farther.

01:59:37.000 All right.

01:59:38.000 So thank you very much.

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02:01:06.000 So, we do have time for some questions.

02:01:12.000 We have to be out of here at 10.30, it's 9.30, so maybe we'll have questions until someone crazy grabs the microphone. 0.99

02:01:19.000 Or maybe we'll have questions for half an hour, something like that.

02:01:23.000 And so, if anybody has any questions, then there's a microphone there and there's a microphone there.

02:01:28.000 And I'll try to answer them to the best that I can, best of my ability.

02:01:34.000 So, let's, sure, let's start.

02:01:40.000 Okay. So, you talked about the idea of when you're confronting something that you fear, you, like, you face it head on and you destroy it.

02:01:50.000 But then you said that the idea is when you're confronting something, you make the world out of it.

02:01:56.000 And I was wondering if you could just, I mean, generally expound on what that means.

02:02:00.000 You make your marriage out of the arguments.

02:02:02.000 Okay.

02:02:03.000 You know, you have arguments with your wife.

02:02:05.000 You have arguments with your children.

02:02:06.000 That's that chaotic state.

02:02:08.000 Because no one's been able to formulate a habitable order from that domain of controversy and confusion.

02:02:16.000 And then, through dialogue, you erect a structure that's a house that you can both live in.

02:02:21.000 And so, that's the idea of making the world out of that chaos.

02:02:25.000 And it's frightening because, you know, if you really have, and this is why people often avoid having disputes with people they love.

02:02:32.000 Because it's frightening, right?

02:02:33.000 You find out what the person's like and you find out what you're like.

02:02:36.000 It's like, God, who wants to do that?

02:02:38.000 Nobody.

02:02:39.000 And so, you know, your heart rate goes up and it's confrontation and conflict.

02:02:44.000 And that's because you're encountering that domain that hasn't been properly mapped or configured.

02:02:51.000 And so, and you're doing that with your predator detection systems, essentially.

02:02:56.000 And so, that chaos that threatens the stability, say, of the marriage is equivalent to, well, it's equivalent to the serpent in the tree.

02:03:03.000 That's one form of equivalence.

02:03:05.000 And then, by dialogue, through dialogue and negotiation, you formulate the problem.

02:03:11.000 What exactly is going on here?

02:03:12.000 Where exactly are we?

02:03:13.000 What exactly is the problem?

02:03:15.000 And so, you keep talking until you reach a consensus about that.

02:03:19.000 One that you can live with.

02:03:20.000 One that you can act out.

02:03:21.000 Right?

02:03:22.000 And then you, then maybe you come up with a solution to the problem and you've established peace again.

02:03:27.000 And peace, that's the house that you can both live in.

02:03:30.000 And that's the chaos.

02:03:31.000 That's the chaos that people can fall into all the time and often do.

02:03:35.000 And it's the chaos that makes a marriage wash up on the shores and transform into like, you know, 15 year divorce court.

02:03:42.000 Very horrible thing.

02:03:43.000 So, that's the idea.

02:03:45.000 Okay, thank you.

02:03:46.000 Okay.

02:03:47.000 Hi, Dr. Peterson.

02:03:48.000 Thank you so much for the talk and thanks for your teachings.

02:03:49.000 It's really helped me a lot.

02:03:50.000 I 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.

02:04:07.000 So, thank you.

02:04:09.000 That's too bad.

02:04:10.000 That's too bad that that happens to be the case.

02:04:13.000 Really, like that, you know, it's really not good.

02:04:16.000 But...

02:04:17.000 You don't have to tell me that.

02:04:18.000 Yeah.

02:04:19.000 Yeah.

02:04:20.000 But, you know, I survived and I learned a lot.

02:04:21.000 Yeah.

02:04:22.000 And, you know, I'm not, you know, ungrateful for my experience.

02:04:25.000 I've learned a lot.

02:04:26.000 But 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.

02:04:32.000 You described it as created by an assembly of stories created by many people over time that's hyperlinked into itself.

02:04:43.000 And it sounds a lot like how a description of, like, the Internet and, like, how that works.

02:04:49.000 Yeah.

02:04:50.000 Well, it's not, it's not accidental.

02:04:51.000 I mean, because the Internet's also a collective, it's a collective endeavor.

02:04:56.000 God only knows what personality it's going to manifest.

02:04:59.000 You know, but it's going to manifest some personality because it's learning to understand us very, very rapidly.

02:05:04.000 So, I think you could, there's no reason not to think about it as a precursor.

02:05:09.000 I mean, the distance between the Bible and the Internet is a lot less than the distance between a chimpanzee and a human being.

02:05:16.000 So, 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.

02:05:28.000 So, I, I can't speculate, you know, because God only knows what's going to happen in the next 20 years.

02:05:35.000 I certainly don't.

02:05:36.000 And so, I don't know what the preconditions are for consciousness.

02:05:40.000 I have no idea.

02:05:41.000 And I don't think anybody knows.

02:05:43.000 So, I guess we're going to find out.

02:05:45.000 Yeah.

02:05:46.000 So, yeah.

02:05:47.000 Thank you.

02:05:48.000 Hey, Dr. Peterson.

02:05:55.000 I'm curious about the connection between aesthetic beauty and religious experience.

02:06:00.000 I think you've hinted at it once or twice over the course of this lecture.

02:06:04.000 Is 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?

02:06:16.000 I think that's what they're for.

02:06:17.000 Yeah, actually.

02:06:18.000 In some sense, you know.

02:06:19.000 I mean, if you look at the structure of like a, like a Renaissance cathedral, you know.

02:06:22.000 That's literally what I was just going to.

02:06:24.000 Right, right.

02:06:25.000 That was my, my tag on to, I apologize.

02:06:27.000 I'm going to interrupt.

02:06:28.000 My 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?

02:06:37.000 Right.

02:06:38.000 Well, it's, if you're going to house the ultimate ideal, you build something beautiful, right, to, to represent its dwelling place.

02:06:45.000 And it should be beautiful.

02:06:46.000 And this is something that people do not take seriously.

02:06:49.000 And this is especially something we don't take seriously in Canada.

02:06:52.000 I mean, one of the, you think about, you think about all the hundreds of millions of dollars that were invested into beauty in Europe.

02:06:59.000 I mean, spectacular, excessive investment in beauty that's paid back.

02:07:06.000 God only knows how many multiples of times people make pilgrimages to Europe constantly because it's so beautiful that it just, it staggers you.

02:07:15.000 Beauty is so valuable and we're so afraid of it.

02:07:18.000 And I think we're afraid of it because it does, it's a pathway.

02:07:21.000 It's not the only pathway to the divine.

02:07:23.000 I mean, there's a lot, there's pathways to the divine.

02:07:25.000 Love is one of them, I suppose.

02:07:27.000 But beauty, especially for people who have an affinity for beauty, it's like music.

02:07:32.000 It's one of those things that you can't argue against, right?

02:07:35.000 You can't even understand.

02:07:36.000 It just hits you.

02:07:37.000 And it does, it shows you, well, it shows you the ideal.

02:07:42.000 That's one way of thinking about it.

02:07:43.000 But it also shows you, I think, it's like a vision of the potential future.

02:07:48.000 It's something like that as well.

02:07:49.000 That if we just got our act together and beautified things, that that's the place that we can inhabit and that would ennoble us.

02:07:56.000 And that's why this Jerusalem, the heavenly city, is paved with gemstones.

02:08:00.000 You know, they're crystalline, they emit light.

02:08:02.000 Yeah, it's the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness.

02:08:07.000 Beauty is the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness.

02:08:10.000 And we ignore it at our spiritual and economic peril.

02:08:15.000 It's like, it's obvious that beauty, there's almost nothing more valuable than beauty.

02:08:21.000 Economically, practically, right?

02:08:23.000 So, yeah.

02:08:24.000 Why that is, I mean, I don't, it's very, who knows?

02:08:29.000 You know, I mean, why we experience gemstones, for example, is beautiful.

02:08:34.000 It's very mysterious, but there are deep reasons for it.

02:08:38.000 So, yeah.

02:08:45.000 Hi.

02:08:46.000 I have a bit of a similar question, actually.

02:08:48.000 I 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.

02:09:07.000 And 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?

02:09:22.000 Well, 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.

02:09:37.000 I 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.

02:09:46.000 And so those have hit me really, really hard.

02:09:49.000 And, 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,

02:10:05.000 that human beings are made in God's image, that that's actually the cornerstone of our legal system.

02:10:10.000 That 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.

02:10:22.000 And that's starting to happen. It really is, you know, like the postmodern critique of law.

02:10:27.000 The 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.

02:10:38.000 And 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.

02:10:48.000 It'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.

02:10:58.000 So, do you think your appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of it comes from a belief in, like, the truth of its underlying propositions?

02:11:05.000 I mean, that's, because, like, even the atheistic critics I'm thinking of, like, even Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens,

02:11:10.000 really appreciate the Bible as just a piece of really beautiful literature, and I guess the quality of their writing,

02:11:16.000 and the sort of exalted themes behind it, even if they totally reject the underlying premises of it.

02:11:21.000 Yeah, well, I don't think that you can see it as beautiful and poetic, and reject the underlying premises,

02:11:28.000 because if you see it as beautiful and poetic, you're accepting the underlying premises with your experience of the beauty and the poetics,

02:11:36.000 even though you may be fighting it with your articulated rationality.

02:11:40.000 So, I think all that indicates is a disintegrated perspective on the book.

02:11:45.000 And I'm not, it's not surprising that that's the case.

02:11:48.000 I mean, it's the perspective that everyone has on the book.

02:11:52.000 Except with them, it's more well developed and well thought through.

02:11:55.000 But, I think it's fundamentally, they're not approaching the thing with enough respect.

02:12:01.000 That's my sense, is that, and who knows, right?

02:12:04.000 Because I don't, I don't know, but what I've tried to do is to think,

02:12:07.000 there's probably more to this than I know.

02:12:10.000 And then try to understand it from that perspective, rather than to think, for example,

02:12:14.000 well, it's a collection of superstitions that we've somehow outgrown.

02:12:19.000 It's like, no, it's just, sorry, that's not a deep enough analysis.

02:12:24.000 Because it's got some truth, but it doesn't take into account the fact

02:12:30.000 that the propositions still stand at the foundation of our culture.

02:12:35.000 It doesn't address Nietzsche's central concern, which is that if you blow out the notion of God,

02:12:40.000 the entire structure crumbles.

02:12:42.000 You know, and you can debate that, fine.

02:12:45.000 But I'd, you know, just assume that you debated it with Nietzsche,

02:12:47.000 because he's a pretty tough customer to tangle with.

02:12:50.000 So, and I don't think the atheist types, insofar as there's a type,

02:12:56.000 I don't think they've wrestled with the real problems.

02:12:58.000 So, yeah.

02:13:07.000 So I appreciate you set out some ground rules, keep things rational.

02:13:11.000 And I think that's going to help us.

02:13:13.000 What I'm wondering is, so for instance, you had said elsewhere,

02:13:18.000 the New Testament from the best, from what you can see, it's psychologically correct.

02:13:23.000 And that's, you know, quite astounding, I would say.

02:13:26.000 There's a lot of truth, and in your depictions of these stories elsewhere,

02:13:30.000 you've pointed out, like, deep truths, you know, real powerful.

02:13:34.000 So what my question would be is, if we can say Nietzsche took a, like,

02:13:41.000 an order of magnitude of, you know, intelligence and, you know, depth

02:13:46.000 to be able to predict what would happen in the next century, you know, rationally,

02:13:51.000 if the Bible's not the inherent word of God, what's going on?

02:13:57.000 That's a good question. That's a really good question.

02:14:00.000 I mean, I'm going to try to answer that rationally.

02:14:03.000 But as we move forward, but as I said, I don't want to leave people with the notion,

02:14:08.000 because, you know, in some ways, this is something I've thought about,

02:14:12.000 what I've been thinking about for a long time, is I can't tell if I'm a, like, an advocate of the religious viewpoint,

02:14:17.000 or its worst possible critic.

02:14:19.000 Because I am doing my best to make it rational, and there's a reductionistic element to that,

02:14:24.000 but I think that I'm doing that while also leaving the door open to things that I don't understand,

02:14:29.000 because I know that there's more to this story than I understand or can understand.

02:14:35.000 And I'm laying out what I can understand, and I'm making it rational.

02:14:38.000 But I do not believe for an instant that that exhausts the realm.

02:14:43.000 It's like, there are ways of interpreting these stories that work in the conceptual universe we inhabit right now.

02:14:50.000 But there's a lot of things that we don't understand.

02:14:53.000 And one thing I've found about digging into these stories is that the deeper you dig, the more you find.

02:14:58.000 And that's pretty damn, that's one of the things that convinced me that there was more to them that I had originally suspected.

02:15:04.000 Because things would click, and I'd think, wow, that's really something. 0.96

02:15:08.000 And then I would take it apart further, and I'd think, oh, well, I thought that was something.

02:15:12.000 But this is, this is even more remarkable.

02:15:15.000 It just keeps opening and opening.

02:15:17.000 And so, I'm going to make it rational.

02:15:19.000 I'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.

02:15:25.000 And Dostoevsky's in the same category.

02:15:27.000 It's like, there are prophetic elements to the Old and New Testament that seem to stretch over much vaster spans of time.

02:15:34.000 And I'm going to try to produce a rational account of that.

02:15:38.000 But, 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.

02:15:49.000 In 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.

02:16:02.000 And so, the state is viewed, in some sense, as the entity of salvation.

02:16:07.000 But, what happens in the New Testament is that idea gets, you could say, deconstructed.

02:16:13.000 And instead of a state being the place of redemption, a state of being becomes the state of redemption.

02:16:21.000 And so, the idea that human beings will be redeemed moves from the utopian state vision to the responsibility of the individual.

02:16:30.000 And I think that's correct.

02:16:32.000 I mean, I believe that that's the right answer.

02:16:36.000 And I think that the West, in particular, is predicated on that idea.

02:16:40.000 Because it makes the state subservient to the individual.

02:16:44.000 I mean, there's a, there's a what?

02:16:47.000 A dialogue, a continual dialogue.

02:16:49.000 But in the final analysis, the locus of the divine is the individual, not the state.

02:16:54.000 And I believe that, that's so true, that if we don't act it out and believe it, then we all die painfully.

02:17:01.000 And that's true enough for me.

02:17:03.000 So.

02:17:04.000 Thank you.

02:17:05.000 Yeah.

02:17:06.000 Hi.

02:17:07.000 Thank you for the illuminating talk.

02:17:12.000 I'm going to keep you on the creation story.

02:17:15.000 And if you don't mind, because we know this editing that was done, there was the purpose for the editing.

02:17:21.000 Can 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.

02:17:39.000 Is it the selling point?

02:17:41.000 What was the reason for this type of editing to put the two together?

02:17:45.000 Why not?

02:17:46.000 Well, I think, you know, the more cynical, what you call, criticisms of the Bible and the religious tradition.

02:17:54.000 Criticisms 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.

02:18:03.000 And that there's always a political or economic motivation behind the construction of the stories.

02:18:08.000 And I think that that's true to some degree.

02:18:10.000 But I don't think that it's true enough so that you can take that particular interpretive tack and be done with it.

02:18:18.000 And 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.

02:18:29.000 And 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.

02:18:45.000 And how that happened, I don't know.

02:18:48.000 I mean, I think it's safe to say, it's reasonably safe to say that the people who put this document together, they did two things.

02:18:55.000 I think they were guided by their aesthetic taste and their conscience.

02:18:59.000 I truly believe that.

02:19:00.000 And the reason I believe that is because I think anything that was propagandistic would have been forgotten.

02:19:07.000 Because you can't remember propaganda.

02:19:09.000 No one likes it.

02:19:10.000 It's like it's dead 10 years after you write it, or 20 years.

02:19:13.000 And it isn't only that these books were assembled and written.

02:19:17.000 It was that they were preserved and remembered.

02:19:20.000 And to me, that means they have an affinity with the structure of memory.

02:19:23.000 I mean, you think about it.

02:19:25.000 How does a story last 10,000 years unless it's the kind of story you can remember?

02:19:29.000 It doesn't.

02:19:30.000 Because you forget all the forgettable stuff.

02:19:32.000 And all you remember is the memorable stuff.

02:19:34.000 And so there's this interplay between the document itself and its audience that shapes the document.

02:19:44.000 And so, now I don't know how specifically I answered your question.

02:19:49.000 We're going to hit these different stories as they come up in sequence.

02:19:54.000 And I think I'll shed some more light on the relationship between them doing that.

02:19:58.000 And we'll start with that next week.

02:20:00.000 Okay.

02:20:01.000 Right, so I've been really interested in a lot of the stuff that you've been saying about dreams.

02:20:11.000 Because I've been lucid dreaming a lot for many years.

02:20:15.000 But always in a sort of atheistic way as sort of like a game or something like that.

02:20:20.000 But because of seeing your talks and everything, I'm starting to think of it from a different perspective.

02:20:25.000 Like you're now interfacing with something beyond the narrow scope of your conscious awareness or something like that.

02:20:33.000 Maybe mythological or maybe something like God.

02:20:35.000 And 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,

02:20:45.000 you're getting beyond the limitations of an ordinary dream.

02:20:48.000 You're sort of transcending limitations which maybe is, like it's not the purpose of people, right?

02:20:55.000 Because as a person you're supposed to be limited in some way as opposed to like God who's like not limited.

02:21:00.000 And 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.

02:21:08.000 So, 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.

02:21:15.000 So, 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?

02:21:21.000 Like should you do it or?

02:21:22.000 I had a client who could really lucid dream, you know?

02:21:25.000 And one of the things, she used them now and then to solve problems even though she didn't always pay attention to the answer.

02:21:31.000 Sometimes she did.

02:21:33.000 She, one of her, in one of her dreams, one of the characters told her that she would have to learn to live in a slaughterhouse.

02:21:41.000 She was very afraid of life and one of the consequences of that was that we went and watched an embalming.

02:21:47.000 So, so the dreams were, but one of the things she did, she'd ask the characters what they were up to.

02:21:54.000 You know, she was, instead of controlling, she would inquire.

02:21:57.000 And so, but I don't know what to say about lucid dreaming beyond that.

02:22:01.000 Like I know it's a well documented phenomena and many people can do it and women seem to be able to do it better than men.

02:22:06.000 That's what the research indicates.

02:22:08.000 But I think that what we don't know about lucid dreaming could fill a lot of books.

02:22:13.000 So, I think you do.

02:22:15.000 There is some danger in controlling it, I think, because you lose the spontaneous revelation.

02:22:20.000 Although not completely, because you can't control it completely.

02:22:23.000 But I, like, you see, you might be interested in reading Jung's works on active imagination.

02:22:29.000 Because he kind of learned to dream when he was awake.

02:22:32.000 And he spent a lot of time in the world of imagination when he was awake.

02:22:38.000 The red books, for example.

02:22:39.000 The red book is a document of his experiences with awake dreaming.

02:22:44.000 But he was very interactive with the dream.

02:22:46.000 You know, instead of trying to bend it to his whim or his will.

02:22:50.000 He was exploring it, in some sense, like you'd explore a video game.

02:22:55.000 You know, which are forms of dreams in and of themselves.

02:22:59.000 So, yeah, I would say do it with an exploratory purpose in mind.

02:23:03.000 And you could always ask yourself what you could learn, too.

02:23:06.000 Which is a very dangerous question to ask a dream.

02:23:08.000 Because sometimes you'll find out what you have to learn.

02:23:11.000 That's not so pleasant.

02:23:13.000 But it's really worthwhile.

02:23:15.000 Okay.

02:23:16.000 Yeah.

02:23:20.000 Okay, so I think, I think I'm going to take four more questions only.

02:23:24.000 Because I'm running out of brain. 0.99

02:23:26.000 And I don't want to say stupid things. 1.00

02:23:28.000 Or stupider things than I've already said. 1.00

02:23:30.000 So... 0.99

02:23:31.000 So...

02:23:32.000 Yeah, thank you for the talk.

02:23:33.000 In the beginning of your lecture, you talked about how society needed this kind of...

02:23:37.000 Dreamlike religious base.

02:23:40.000 So we don't go between left and right violently.

02:23:43.000 And we can kind of have this base.

02:23:45.000 And then you also said you admired Nietzsche for kind of chopping down these...

02:23:50.000 These ideological and kind of dogmatic weeds coming up from the base of Christianity.

02:23:55.000 I was wondering how...

02:23:57.000 What your thoughts are on how society can have this kind of religious base

02:24:01.000 without having these kind of dangerous ideologies that can spring up once in a while.

02:24:06.000 That's what I'm trying to figure out.

02:24:09.000 No, really.

02:24:10.000 I mean, that really...

02:24:11.000 That's the serious answer to that question.

02:24:13.000 You know, I mean...

02:24:14.000 The reason that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche is because...

02:24:17.000 He was the spirit of his times.

02:24:19.000 That's a good way of thinking about it.

02:24:21.000 It's not like Nietzsche killed God.

02:24:23.000 It's that Nietzsche gathered what was in the air and articulated it.

02:24:29.000 Right?

02:24:30.000 Incredibly profoundly.

02:24:31.000 And so he put his finger on the spot.

02:24:34.000 And in doing so, he announced the problem.

02:24:37.000 And once you announce the problem, then maybe you can come up with a solution.

02:24:41.000 Because you can't solve a problem unless you know what it is.

02:24:43.000 And the fact that he made it so stark and so clear is horrifying in some sense.

02:24:49.000 But at least we know where we stand.

02:24:52.000 And so since then, I would say particularly with...

02:24:57.000 In many ways, particularly with the work of Jung and everything that's come out of that,

02:25:02.000 which is the deeper study of mythology and its meanings.

02:25:05.000 And we've been trying to address that...

02:25:07.000 The issue that Nietzsche brought up and trying to solve the problem.

02:25:10.000 And the problem is something like the reunification of the spirit of mankind.

02:25:14.000 It's something like that.

02:25:15.000 Well, we're slogging through it, man.

02:25:18.000 And that's...

02:25:19.000 That's why you're all here, at least in part.

02:25:22.000 So we'll see how far we can get.

02:25:24.000 By this rate, we'll get to like the 12th verse in the first...

02:25:28.000 But that's the aim, you know?

02:25:30.000 Okay.

02:25:31.000 I'll talk about that more next time.

02:25:39.000 I mean, I think that...

02:25:41.000 The best answer to that is I'll talk more about that next time.

02:25:44.000 I mean, I think of them as overlapping metaphorical domains.

02:25:48.000 You know, in the descriptions I put of the fatherly aspect, the son aspect, and the spirit aspect,

02:25:53.000 you could swap a lot of those.

02:25:55.000 You know, it's kind of arbitrary.

02:25:56.000 But I think the Trinitarian idea is trying to get forward the notion that the locus of the divine is...

02:26:04.000 It's the same thing in its essence, but it exists in a multiplicity.

02:26:09.000 It exists as the spirit of tradition.

02:26:11.000 It exists as the living individual in time and space.

02:26:15.000 And then it exists as the spirit and as consciousness.

02:26:21.000 Something like that, that we all share.

02:26:23.000 Which, 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.

02:26:34.000 And 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.

02:26:46.000 You know, as something that's intrinsic to you.

02:26:48.000 And I think that's associated with the idea of the Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, all of that.

02:26:54.000 It's...

02:26:56.000 So, that's as good as I can do in a short period of time.

02:26:58.000 So...

02:26:59.000 Thank you.

02:27:00.000 Yep.

02:27:01.000 So, my question to you is, why can't a social contract or a legal system replace religion as a moral framework and a way we ought to act?

02:27:17.000 I think it's because, it's because of the gap between what we articulate and what we don't know.

02:27:24.000 Something has to fill that gap.

02:27:26.000 Like, I think the law could be, could replace it if the law was total.

02:27:31.000 But it isn't.

02:27:32.000 It's bounded and incorrect.

02:27:35.000 And 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.

02:27:43.000 It's something like custom.

02:27:44.000 It's something like expectation.

02:27:46.000 It's something like the intrinsic sense of justice, you know, that the law itself is aiming at.

02:27:52.000 And those aren't fully articulated.

02:27:54.000 But without them, there'd be no grounding.

02:27:57.000 Like, without the body, the law would be a dictionary.

02:28:01.000 You know, and if you don't know what a word means, using the dictionary is helpful, but not that helpful.

02:28:07.000 Because, like, unless you've had the experience of anger, the dictionary can't tell you what anger means.

02:28:12.000 It just refers to other words.

02:28:14.000 But the words themselves refer to something else.

02:28:17.000 And the law refers to something else.

02:28:20.000 And without that, it has to be in tune with that something else, and it has to be in accordance with it.

02:28:25.000 And so I don't think we can ever delineate that proper body of laws.

02:28:31.000 And that's also why you, like, ideological utopias, see, the ideological utopias dispense with the transcendent.

02:28:38.000 They say, this is what we need to do.

02:28:41.000 It's like, no, you don't know.

02:28:43.000 That's not good.

02:28:44.000 You have to leave space for what you kind of know and for what you don't know.

02:28:48.000 And, 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.

02:28:59.000 Well, that's the earliest warning we have of the danger of making things so big that you confuse them with God.

02:29:08.000 And God gets irritated and comes down and makes everybody speak different languages and scatters them. 0.99

02:29:12.000 It'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.

02:29:21.000 And 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.

02:29:30.000 And I think that's the same as having respect for the fact that we have bodies.

02:29:34.000 You know, we're not just abstract creatures that follow rules.

02:29:37.000 We're not that at all.

02:29:39.000 We only follow certain rules.

02:29:42.000 We won't follow the other ones.

02:29:44.000 And our societies will crumble.

02:29:46.000 And so, and we just don't know enough to articulate the entire landscape of behavior with articulated rules.

02:29:53.000 Not at all.

02:29:54.000 We can't do it.

02:29:55.000 It's beyond us.

02:29:56.000 Yeah.

02:29:57.000 Yeah.

02:30:04.000 Hi, thanks for the talk.

02:30:05.000 My question is also about dreams.

02:30:07.000 You spoke about dreams.

02:30:08.000 You spoke about dreams as like a representation of truths and universal truths that can be interpreted into like myths and religion.

02:30:20.000 And as you say, it's very beneficial for the individual.

02:30:24.000 And it sounds like also for the society as well, because not everyone can as easily remember their dreams or interpret their dreams like that.

02:30:37.000 And also, it's like broadcasted to all of society for their benefits.

02:30:43.000 So, I guess I'm wondering what the evolutionary advantage of dreams are.

02:30:48.000 And 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?

02:31:03.000 Do you think they didn't survive as well?

02:31:05.000 Okay.

02:31:06.000 So, 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.

02:31:13.000 But I can answer the first part.

02:31:15.000 I 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.

02:31:22.000 Right?

02:31:23.000 It shuts everything off, except your eyes.

02:31:25.000 Because, you know, if you're moving your eyes back and forth, you're not going to run around and get eaten by a lion.

02:31:30.000 It's okay to move your eyes.

02:31:31.000 But the rest of you is staying exactly where it is.

02:31:34.000 Then you can run these simulations.

02:31:36.000 And so what's happening at night, and this is a fairly well-accepted theory of dreaming.

02:31:41.000 We know that dreams update memories and help consolidate memories.

02:31:44.000 They also help you forget.

02:31:46.000 But what seems to be happening at night is that you're running the underlying architecture of your cognitive ability in different simulations.

02:31:55.000 And it's cost-free, because you're paralyzed.

02:31:58.000 You're not running around there out in the world investigating.

02:32:01.000 So, it's part of the manner in which your brain experiments with the way the world can be represented.

02:32:08.000 And so, and it seems absolutely necessary.

02:32:11.000 And, I mean, if you deprive people of REM sleep, they don't stay sane very long.

02:32:16.000 There's something necessary about the dreaming process to maintenance of articulated sanity.

02:32:24.000 So, you're doing some kind of organization at night when you descend into that chaos.

02:32:29.000 And partly what seems to happen is that your categorical, you know, your categories have boundaries, right?

02:32:35.000 But sometimes you don't have the categories correct.

02:32:37.000 And so the boundaries have to loosen, and other things need to be put in the categories, or some things shunted away.

02:32:43.000 And in the dream, the category structure loosens, which is why dreams are so peculiar.

02:32:48.000 But they're experimenting, it's your mind is experimenting with the underlying categorical structure of imagination.

02:32:55.000 And trying to update your mode of being in the world.

02:33:00.000 Dreams often concentrate on things that provoke anxiety.

02:33:03.000 So, if you wake people up when they're dreaming, the most commonly reported emotion is anxiety.

02:33:08.000 And so the dream is like the first stages of the attempt to contend with the unknown.

02:33:13.000 And so the dream is half unknown and half known.

02:33:17.000 Which is also why it's so peculiar, you know, because you kind of understand it, but you don't really.

02:33:22.000 And it partakes of the unknown and of the known.

02:33:25.000 And it's the bridge between the two, something like that.

02:33:28.000 Okay, so my question is kind of two parts.

02:33:40.000 The first one is just like a general question, and then just the application of the question.

02:33:44.000 So my first question is, do you think that consciousness and beinghood are inextricably linked?

02:33:50.000 And then secondly, so if there was something like a super computer that one could house theoretically a perfect brain of a person in it.

02:33:58.000 Does that thing then become the same person as the person who was before?

02:34:03.000 So is there a transcendency to beinghood but not to consciousness?

02:34:06.000 Okay, 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.

02:34:14.000 Now whether or not that means that being as such is dependent on consciousness actually depends on how you define being.

02:34:20.000 Right, so it's always tricky when you ask an if is an example of be.

02:34:27.000 Those are tricky questions because it depends on how you define the two.

02:34:30.000 But for our purposes, the being that we're discussing that's represented in these stories is intrinsically associated with conscious experience.

02:34:39.000 And consciousness is given this constitutive role.

02:34:44.000 It says that the experience that we're talking about would not exist if consciousness did not exist.

02:34:49.000 So you can think about it as a kind of game in a way.

02:34:52.000 And then you have to decide for yourself whether that's a game that can be generalized.

02:34:55.000 And I won't answer the second part, okay? If you don't mind.

02:34:59.000 Alright.

02:35:04.000 So, two part question. First one is very quick, almost admin.

02:35:07.000 If 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?

02:35:13.000 Oh, I'll bring the thing I like next week which is a, I think the Reader's Digest published it of all things.

02:35:19.000 But it's a, it lays out the narratives in a different format.

02:35:25.000 It's easier, I find it much easier to read.

02:35:27.000 So I'll show it to you and I'll bring it next time and show it to you.

02:35:29.000 One 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.

02:35:37.000 In your interview with transliminal media, you mentioned Liz Eibel's book, The Serpent, The Tree, The Serpent and Vision.

02:35:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:35:44.000 And you note that we as a species are very good at recognizing camouflage patterns of snakes, particularly in the lower field of vision.

02:35:51.000 And you further note that visual locality is correlated with that and that it co-evolved.

02:35:56.000 And you summarize thusly by saying the following, I'm paraphrasing you, you say, what gives you vision? Snakes do.

02:36:01.000 That's what it says in Genesis. What else gives you vision? Fruit. That's also right.

02:36:05.000 That's why we have color vision. What makes you self-conscious if you are a man? Woman. That's Eve. 0.99

02:36:09.000 And so I understand at the elementary level some of the concepts that you have about representations, dreams, abstractions, etc.

02:36:15.000 But kind of raises the question for me, you know, I'm not accusing you of any creationism or literalism.

02:36:20.000 Yeah.

02:36:21.000 You know, what's your point? Why did you make that connection?

02:36:23.000 What's the meaning of the story of Genesis vis-a-vis Liz Eibel's book?

02:36:27.000 No problem. We're gonna, as soon as I get past this first Genesis 1, we're gonna hit that hard.

02:36:34.000 So, so...

02:36:36.000 What is one saying about the...

02:36:38.000 Well, partly...

02:36:40.000 And are you at all suggesting that one foreshadowed, you know, the discovery, the scientific discovery?

02:36:46.000 Yes, I'm suggesting that it foreshadowed it.

02:36:49.000 And I think they're the same thing.

02:36:51.000 I mean, Isbel in her books plays with that idea metaphorically, but she never really takes it seriously, which is no problem.

02:36:57.000 I mean, there's only so much you can take seriously, and she did a fine job of what she did.

02:37:01.000 But I'll talk about that a lot, because that's a very complicated issue.

02:37:05.000 I 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.

02:37:16.000 That's a good start.

02:37:18.000 So, okay?

02:37:20.000 Okay. One more, and then we're done.

02:37:22.000 Good morning.

02:37:25.000 I'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.

02:37:32.000 Based on your opinion of where the universities now stand in terms of humanities and social sciences, is mathematics more powerful than articulated speech?

02:37:46.000 I'm not sure, I'm not exactly sure how the first-

02:37:48.000 Does it make you more powerful to study mathematics and art science in universities?

02:37:53.000 Oh, well, it depends on what you mean by power, I guess.

02:37:58.000 I mean, obviously, studying mathematics and computer science makes you insanely powerful.

02:38:03.000 The question is, to what end?

02:38:05.000 And I don't think that you can extract an answer to that from the study of mathematics.

02:38:09.000 The humanities are there to ground people in proper citizenhood.

02:38:13.000 That's a way of thinking about it.

02:38:15.000 And so, yes, it makes you powerful, but then the question is, who has the power?

02:38:19.000 Because it might not be you.

02:38:21.000 It might be the mathematics, so to speak.

02:38:24.000 You know, because you never know what you're an agent of, precisely.

02:38:28.000 And so...

02:38:29.000 Yeah, well, look, I've got nothing against computer programmers.

02:38:32.000 I mean, more power to you guys, and mathematicians as well, but...

02:38:35.000 Mathematics would be a tool, not both of them.

02:38:37.000 Yes, and it has to be a tool...

02:38:39.000 To force forward.

02:38:40.000 Right, it has to be a tool of something.

02:38:42.000 And what the humanities were for, was to tell people what the tools should be used for.

02:38:47.000 And so, the tools themselves are crazily powerful.

02:38:51.000 But that's not necessarily, you know, an untrammeled good.

02:38:56.000 So, I have to stop, because...

02:38:59.000 One more about art.

02:39:00.000 Okay, quick.

02:39:01.000 You love art.

02:39:02.000 I know you love art.

02:39:03.000 Okay.

02:39:04.000 You want to answer this question.

02:39:05.000 Okay.

02:39:06.000 Okay, you were in this, I guess, one room in a museum in New York.

02:39:09.000 Yeah.

02:39:10.000 Where you've seen some original Renaissance artwork masterpieces.

02:39:12.000 Yeah.

02:39:13.000 These are generally accepted as amazing artifacts, okay?

02:39:17.000 Does an original work of art, as opposed to a high fidelity reproduction, contain the spirit of the artist who created it?

02:39:26.000 And does this account for the disparity in how much you'd have to pay for an original?

02:39:30.000 It does, in part.

02:39:31.000 I know a good portrait artist, eh?

02:39:33.000 And one of the things he pointed out about a great portrait is that it actually contains time.

02:39:38.000 So, you know, because a photograph is one instant.

02:39:42.000 But a portrait is you, layered on you, layered on you, layered on you, so it's got a thickness.

02:39:48.000 You know, and I think you can see that thickness in the original, but it's also a direct manifestation of that creative act of perception.

02:39:55.000 And I don't think you get that.

02:39:57.000 You just can't get the fidelity of the original with the reproduction.

02:40:01.000 But there's more to it than that, too, because the painting doesn't end with the frame.

02:40:05.000 You know, like, we tend to think of the painting itself as the object, but most objects are densely innervated with historical context.

02:40:15.000 And you can say, well, the historical context isn't the object, but it depends on what you mean by the object.

02:40:21.000 And often people, when they buy a piece of painting, are buying the historical context.

02:40:26.000 And you just don't get that with the reproduction.

02:40:28.000 It's a kind of magic.

02:40:29.000 It's like, do you want to have Elvis Presley's guitar or another guitar just like it?

02:40:34.000 Well, you want to have Elvis's guitar.

02:40:36.000 That's why.

02:40:37.000 You can't tell it's Elvis's guitar by looking at it.

02:40:40.000 Yeah, but why would you want it?

02:40:41.000 Was there any rational reason you wanted the original?

02:40:44.000 I mean, it's exactly the same.

02:40:45.000 It's a perfect fidelity reproduction, isn't it, such a thing?

02:40:48.000 Well, it is at the level of detail, but not at the level of context.

02:40:52.000 That's how it looks to me.

02:40:54.000 Okay, we've got to go.

02:40:55.000 Thank you.

02:40:59.000 If 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.

02:41:12.000 Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

02:41:17.000 See jordanbpeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

02:41:23.000 Remember to check out jordanbpeterson.com slash personality for information on his new course, which is now 50% off.

02:41:30.000 I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

02:41:32.000 If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review.

02:41:35.000 Next week's episode is a continuation of the Biblical series and delves into Genesis, so stay tuned for that.

02:41:41.000 Talk to you next week.

02:42:08.000 My 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.

02:42:21.000 That's selfauthoring.com.

02:42:25.000 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 12, 2020

Biblical Series： Introduction to the Idea of God

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