Genesis - Chaos and Order
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 39 minutes
Words per Minute
182.69467
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson continues the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series with a lecture on Genesis, Chaos and Order. Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto, Canada. You can find tickets for future events in this biblical series in the description of this episode or at the description on the website, or at J.B. Peterson's self-development program, Self-Authorizing, which can be found at JB.Peterson.org/BibleSeries. In this lecture, he will discuss the parallels between Genesis and Genesis in the Old Testament, and the story of the creation of the world as we know it in Genesis. He will also explore the idea that the Bible is a work of fiction, and how it can be understood in relation to our own ideas of God and creation, and what it means to be a Christian in the context of the Old and New Testaments. This lecture is part two of a six-part lecture series that will run through the summer of the Bible and the New Testament, which will conclude with a sermon from John 1:14. Dr. John the Baptist. If you're struggling with anxiety, depression, or stress, or another major event in your life, or just want to know what to do about it, then this lecture is for you! Listen to this episode of Bible and Mythology, wherever you can find it. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to stay up to date with the latest episodes of this podcast on all things Bible, Mythology and Psychology. and all things related to religion, spirituality, spirituality and the Bible, check out our social meditations, and much more! Subscribe today using the link below to get immediate access to all the latest updates on our newest episodes of the series. We post polls, polls, questions and thoughts on the podcast, and comments on our social media platforms! We'll be posting them on the episodes, and other links to the latest posts on the Podcasts, too! v=1s, comments, tweets, and posts to the podcast and other things like that you can help spread the word out there about the podcast! Thanks for listening to others listening to our podcast. The opinions expressed in the podcast are those of our podcast, the podcast is not related to this podcast? Thank you for listening and sharing it!
Transcript
00:00:00.000
This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.
00:00:06.080
Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service,
00:00:11.900
destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore.
00:00:17.860
And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos.
00:00:28.620
Real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:33.040
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:39.380
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be,
00:00:42.680
and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:49.160
Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:54.420
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy,
00:00:58.320
it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:01:02.000
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone.
00:01:05.060
There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:01:08.340
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:01:14.000
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:25.740
You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,
00:01:30.120
the link to which can be found in the description.
00:01:34.180
Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com.
00:01:40.620
This is part two of the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series that's running throughout the summer.
00:01:49.700
This lecture is entitled Genesis, Chaos and Order.
00:01:54.700
Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series every Tuesday throughout the remainder of the summer
00:02:06.180
You can find tickets for future events in this biblical series in the description of this episode
00:02:19.720
Okay, well, I thought this time that I would actually cover some of the biblical stories.
00:02:29.820
As I said last time, I'm going to go through this, well, as fast as I am able to.
00:02:38.400
And, of course, the probability that I'll get through the entire Bible is very low.
00:02:43.000
But we'll get through a lot of the major stories in the beginning of it, and that's a good start.
00:02:47.160
And then, you know, assuming that this all goes well, then maybe I'll try to do the same thing again,
00:02:54.280
So, assuming I'm, that everything is still working out properly next year.
00:03:08.400
So, last week, I talked to you about a line in the New Testament that was from John.
00:03:14.400
And it was a line that was designed to parallel the opening of Genesis.
00:03:18.000
And it's a really important line, and I thought I would re-emphasize it.
00:03:23.180
Because the Bible is a book that's been written forward and backwards in time, in some sense, like most books.
00:03:32.140
Because if you write a book, of course, when you get to the end, if you're the writer, you can adjust the beginning and so on.
00:03:36.660
And so, it has this odd, it has this appearance of linearity, but it really, it isn't linear.
00:03:42.200
It's like you're God, in some sense, standing outside of time.
00:03:45.920
That's your book, and you can play with time anywhere along it.
00:03:49.120
And the people who put the book together, or the books together, took full advantage of that.
00:03:56.320
And that makes the story, it gives the story odd parallels in many, many places, in a very large number of places.
00:04:05.660
And this is one of the major parallels, at least from the perspective of the Christian interpretation of the Bible.
00:04:13.760
And so, there's this strange idea that Christ was the same factor or force that God used at the beginning of time to speak habitable order into being.
00:04:31.620
You know, it's not something that can be just easily dismissed as superstition, partly because it's so strange.
00:04:38.400
It doesn't even fit the definition of, like, a superstitious belief.
00:04:47.100
And what I see many of the ideas in the Bible as is these dream-like ideas that underlie our normative cognition.
00:04:56.660
And that constitute the ground from which our more articulated and explicit ideas have emerged.
00:05:06.360
This idea is so complicated that it's still mostly embedded in dream-like form.
00:05:10.660
But it seems to have something to do with the primacy of consciousness.
00:05:13.480
And this is one of the biggest issues regarding the structure of reality, as far as I can tell.
00:05:19.340
Because everyone, from physicists to neurobiologists, debates this.
00:05:23.200
There's the stumbling block for a purely objective view of the world seems to me to be consciousness.
00:05:30.540
And consciousness has all sorts of strange properties.
00:05:33.000
For example, it isn't obvious what constitutes time, or at least duration, in the absence of consciousness.
00:05:39.700
And it isn't also easy to understand what constitutes being in the absence of consciousness.
00:05:48.060
Well, if a movie is running and there's no one to watch it.
00:05:51.240
I know it sounds like the tree in the forest idea, but it's not that idea at all.
00:05:55.340
If a movie is running and no one's watching it, in what sense can you say that there's even a movie running?
00:06:02.940
Because the movie seems to be the experience of the movie, not the objective elements of the movie.
00:06:08.620
And there's something about the world, at least insofar as we're in it as human beings, that is dependent on conscious experience of the world.
00:06:18.600
Now, of course, you can take consciousness out of the world and say,
00:06:21.060
Well, if none of us were here, if there was no such thing as consciousness, then the cosmos would continue running the way it is running.
00:06:28.400
But, of course, it depends on what exactly you mean by the cosmos when you make a statement like that.
00:06:33.820
Because there's something about the subjective experience of reality that gives it reality.
00:06:41.980
And since we're all pretty enamored of our own consciousnesses, although they're painful because they define our being,
00:06:48.000
it's not unreasonable to give consciousness a kind of metaphysical primacy.
00:06:53.480
Now, and it's deeper than that, you know, it's a deeper idea than that.
00:06:56.600
Because there are physicists, and they're not trivial physicists like John Wheeler,
00:07:00.820
who believes that in some sense consciousness plays a constitutive role in transforming the chaotic potential of being into the actuality of being.
00:07:10.060
And he actually thinks about it, he's not alive anymore, but he actually thought about it as playing a constitutive role.
00:07:16.620
You know, and then from the neurobiological perspective, or from the scientific perspective,
00:07:21.940
it's like consciousness is not something we understand.
00:07:26.360
It's something we can't get a handle on with our fundamental materialist philosophy.
00:07:34.520
But it isn't clear to me that we've made any progress whatsoever in understanding consciousness,
00:07:39.240
even though, well, we've been trying to understand it for hundreds of years.
00:07:42.720
And even though psychologists and neurobiologists and so forth have really,
00:07:46.560
like, put a lot of effort into understanding consciousness from a scientific perspective in the last 50 years.
00:07:51.440
So, anyways, what it seems to me is the idea that God used the word to extract habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time,
00:08:05.480
which is roughly the right way of thinking about it,
00:08:07.440
seems to me deeply allied with the idea that what it is that we do as human beings is encounter something like a formless and potential chaos.
00:08:16.900
I mean, we're not omniscient, obviously, and we can't just do whatever we want.
00:08:19.880
But we encounter a formless and chaotic potential.
00:08:26.180
And somehow, we use our consciousness to give that form.
00:08:31.420
Like, if you look at how they regard themselves, it's how they act.
00:08:35.300
Because you say things to people like, well, you should live up to your potential.
00:08:39.700
And you make a case that there's something about a person that's more than what is,
00:08:44.340
that yet could be, if only they participated in the process properly.
00:08:50.120
And no one acts like a mystery has been uttered when you say that.
00:08:54.020
And, you know, you can see a situation in your own life that's full of potential.
00:08:57.880
You're often extremely excited when you encounter something that's full of potential.
00:09:01.940
Because what you see is something that could be, you see a future beckoning for you,
00:09:06.900
that could be, if only you interacted with it properly.
00:09:09.520
And it activates your nervous system, right, in a very basic way.
00:09:13.340
And we even understand how that happens to the degree that we understand how the nervous system works.
00:09:17.820
Because the systems that mediate positive emotion, which are governed roughly by the neurochemical dopamine,
00:09:25.880
and which have their roots way down in the ancient hypothalamus,
00:09:29.200
a very, very archaic and fundamental part of the brain,
00:09:32.380
that responds to potential, which is the possibility of accruing something new and valuable.
00:09:38.800
It responds to potential with active movement forward and engagement.
00:09:43.560
And so we're engaged in the world as potential.
00:09:48.120
And so there's this idea that, and this is the main idea that I think is being put forth in Genesis 1,
00:09:53.820
it's something like, and you see this in mythology, like, from what I've been able to gather,
00:09:59.480
there's always three causal elements that make up being at the bottom of world mythology.
00:10:05.620
And one is the formless potential that makes up being once it's interacted with,
00:10:13.120
And I think that's because it's like the source from which all things emerge and rise.
00:10:19.400
It's more complicated than that, but it's something like that.
00:10:21.680
And then there's some kind of interpretive structure that has to grapple with that formless potential.
00:10:27.380
And that's, I think that's the sort of thing that was alluded to by Immanuel Kant
00:10:30.900
when he was criticizing the notion that all of our information comes from sense data,
00:10:35.640
which would be the pure empirical perspective, right?
00:10:40.100
you encounter it with a cognitive structure that already has shape.
00:10:48.860
you wouldn't be able to take the formless potential and give it structure.
00:10:54.200
it's akin in some way to the idea of God the Father.
00:10:59.340
It's the notion that there's something in all of us that transcends all of us,
00:11:07.740
well, I would say evolutionary and cultural process,
00:11:10.580
that enables us to grapple with the formless potential
00:11:19.440
and that element seems to be something like consciousness itself,
00:11:22.980
the consciousness that actually inheres in the individual.
00:11:28.220
it's that the structure has the capacity for action in the world.
00:11:33.440
it's you're the spirit that gives the dead structure life.
00:11:40.060
the Trinitarian notion that characterizes Christianity
00:11:45.900
which is never given the status of a deity in Christianity.
00:11:49.160
And then the notion that there's an a priori interpretive structure
00:11:53.080
that's a consequence of our ancient existence as beings.
00:12:09.080
and that interacts with the world and gives it reality.
00:12:26.200
that is the active principle that turns chaos into order.
00:12:40.700
and you couldn't understand anything without it.
00:12:42.420
Your very body is an interpretive structure, right?
00:12:49.920
Without that, you wouldn't be able to perceive anything.
00:12:52.080
And it's taken a lot of death and struggle and tragedy
00:12:55.640
to produce you the thing that's capable of encountering
00:13:06.560
that's deeply embedded in the first chapters of Genesis,
00:13:13.380
that human beings were made in the image of God.
00:13:16.300
Both male and female were made in the image of God.
00:13:19.160
And that's, of course, a very difficult thing to understand.
00:13:36.880
Because I don't really think that when we think about each other,
00:13:41.880
You know, the notion that every single human being,
00:13:45.440
regardless of their peculiarities and strangenesses
00:13:59.220
in the creation of habitable order out of chaos.
00:14:11.540
I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system.
00:14:14.480
That's the notion that everyone is equal before God.
00:14:22.120
how anybody could have ever come up with that idea.
00:14:24.340
Because the manifold differences between people
00:14:54.160
the idea of the individual sovereignty developed,
00:15:07.260
had something of transcendent value about them.
00:15:43.820
is that there's this God of tradition and structure.
00:15:57.400
because it's associated not with thought precisely,
01:00:04.000
looking at the way they saw the world and a lot
01:07:49.600
but a constant haul of terrible carnage and and
01:07:58.780
would be better if it was never existed at all and that's a very
01:08:04.340
interesting that's a very very interesting idea and I do believe and I've seen this in
01:08:09.040
people many times that in the depths of despair especially when you've been
01:08:13.180
betrayed for example and you wander into the wrong subdivision of the
01:08:16.840
underworld that's something that comes to mind if you know you have a very sick
01:08:20.260
child for example or maybe your whole family is suffering as whole families do
01:08:24.520
sometimes an idea is going to come to you it's like good God who put this mess
01:08:28.540
together and is it really worth it is it really worth the suffering suicidal
01:08:32.980
people you know they say no they say no enough of this you know and you have to
01:08:37.300
be pushed a long way generally speaking before you'll actually commit suicide you
01:08:40.960
have to be in very very desperate straits but your answer under those
01:08:44.920
conditions is that being is such that it would be better if it had never been and
01:08:49.300
that's a very it's I think I think it's a very it's a terrible philosophy I
01:08:54.580
believe because I think what happens if you act it out is that you make the very
01:08:59.260
things that led you to despair far worse and I can't see that if it's
01:09:04.660
reasonable to draw a logical conclusion that suffering should justifies your
01:09:10.720
desire to make being end that the answer to that can't be to produce more
01:09:14.900
suffering that just doesn't make sense and my observation has been that people
01:09:19.900
who act out the Mephistophelian philosophy inevitably make suffering far
01:09:24.640
worse and so and then that raises the other spectre of well do they want being
01:09:29.980
just to cease or are they just out for bloody revenge at every at any cost and my
01:09:34.480
conclusion has always been that is that the mask is well being shouldn't exist
01:09:39.100
because it's too terrible but the true motivation is I'm going to make everyone
01:09:43.060
suffer as much as I possibly can before I say goodbye to this place if you read the
01:09:47.680
writings of people like the kids who shot up the Columbine High School they'll
01:09:51.280
tell you exactly that that's precisely and exactly what they concluded and then
01:09:55.840
acted out so anyways but in this God says that it was good and I thought about
01:10:00.460
that a lot is like and because the question is something like well is is
01:10:03.820
something better than nothing because that's a really good question you know
01:10:08.620
and I thought about two things in relationship to that and one is one is
01:10:13.940
well maybe it depends on how it is that you are right because it could be that there
01:10:19.120
are ways of being in the world that justify the world and there are ways of
01:10:23.200
being in the world that make the world unbearable and I believe that the
01:10:26.920
narrative that runs through the biblical stories is precisely a dialogue between
01:10:30.820
between those two types of being and the optimistic part of the story is that
01:10:35.740
being requires limitation and suffering there's no escape from that but there are
01:10:40.540
modes of being that allow that to be perhaps even more than tolerable perhaps
01:10:45.060
there are modes of being that allow that to be good and it's a straight and
01:10:49.420
narrow road it's a very difficult road to tread so so I think well that that's
01:10:54.060
possible you know I'm not an optimist by nature and but that's that's one of the
01:10:59.260
things that I've conceptualized and read about that I actually find plausible
01:11:03.400
because it's certainly the case everyone knows this that there are ways that you
01:11:06.760
can act that make things worse everyone knows that and so if that's the case
01:11:11.260
there has to be the opposite right there has to be ways that you could act that make
01:11:15.160
things better and obviously you can act in ways that make things really way worse
01:11:21.020
and so the question is well are there ways that you can act that make things
01:11:25.040
really much better and I think that's the question is can we have our cake and eat
01:11:29.580
it too can we have the being that requires limitation and suffering and also
01:11:34.660
simultaneously transcend that by our mode of being and I believe that the biblical
01:11:39.260
stories and perhaps not only the biblical stories but the biblical stories are the
01:11:44.180
human imagine one of the human imaginations best attempts to address and
01:11:49.100
answer that question that's what the entire story is about so the first of it is
01:11:53.900
is the catastrophe of the collapse of self-consciousness and the entrance of
01:11:58.040
humanity into history and the rest of it is okay now we're in history now we know
01:12:02.780
that we're going to die we know about our mortality we're conscious of our own
01:12:06.740
being is there a mode of acting in the world that allows that to be justifiable or
01:12:11.960
maybe even more that allows that to be triumphant and then I would also say
01:12:16.400
maybe it's worth finding out you know that that's the other thing that's so
01:12:21.200
interesting because you've got this short time on earth and there's lots of
01:12:24.560
things that are very very difficult to contend with and and you have the problem
01:12:29.000
of tolerating yourself even in all your insufficiency and one of the things that
01:12:33.500
seems to me to be the case is that if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of
01:12:37.760
being if you attempt to do that then the mere act of lifting up that weight is
01:12:43.100
enough to justify the fact that you're insufficient and mortal and and and and bound by
01:12:49.100
tragedy and I believe that and I believe people believe that because if you watch
01:12:54.140
how people act they look for people they admire and they do admire people right
01:12:59.120
it's it's a natural it's a natural phenomenon you see it starting with
01:13:03.080
children be children admire and then they imitate and we look to people who seem
01:13:07.520
to be able to bear the burden of being in a heroic manner and there's something
01:13:11.840
inside of us that calls to that and that makes us want to to mimic that and to
01:13:16.580
follow it and I think that that's a I think that that's the deepest and most
01:13:20.900
profound of instincts and I think it's right and even if you're not so
01:13:24.820
convinced on the positive end you know because it's more difficult to be
01:13:28.280
convinced of the positive you can certainly be convinced on the negative
01:13:31.700
end because there are ways of being that are so brutal and so reprehensible
01:13:36.680
that merely to read about them is enough to traumatize you and I think that if
01:13:41.180
you're a person who hasn't lost their soul completely you can't help but
01:13:45.560
encounter stories like that and shudder away from them and you know
01:13:50.000
Alexander Solzhenitsyn who who was the person who did most to unmask the
01:13:55.700
absolute horrors of communist totalitarianism said that he believed that the
01:14:01.700
Nuremberg judgments were the most important event of the 20th century and that
01:14:05.240
was the judgment at the end of World War II that there were certain actions that no
01:14:10.040
one was to undertake no matter what their cultural background was because they
01:14:13.700
were let's say crimes against humanity that there was such a thing as universal
01:14:18.080
evil and you can debate that you know I mean and people certainly have but the
01:14:24.500
problem is is if you debate that then you have to say that there are conditions
01:14:28.400
under which the sorts of things that happen say in the concentration camps which
01:14:31.880
would be the gassing of children after their torture and and their their
01:14:35.840
forcible removal from their parents and all the terrible things that went along with
01:14:39.500
that that that's just okay it's just an opinion it's just something that
01:14:43.160
happened and there are circumstances under which that's justifiable if there's
01:14:47.540
no transcendent good and evil underneath that argument it's only a matter of
01:14:51.440
practicality and and and and it seems to me that that's that's not the right
01:14:56.420
conclusion to draw that's how it seems to me and that's what Solzhenitsyn
01:15:01.340
concluded when he looked at the Nuremberg trials so the notion that the notion
01:15:07.640
that it was good well even if you don't believe that and you know because maybe
01:15:12.620
it's not as good as it could be I would say it's incumbent on you as someone who
01:15:17.240
participates in the process of a furthering creation to act as if it
01:15:22.460
could be good at least and to further that with with all of your efforts
01:15:26.300
partly because what the hell else do you have to do that could possibly be better
01:15:30.320
than that that could possibly justify your existence more than that and you know
01:15:34.580
perfectly well if you if you if you have any sense at all if you think clearly
01:15:38.240
about it at all is that that's what you want to see in everyone else you know
01:15:42.260
it's you're you're desperate and maybe you're cynical and now and then someone
01:15:46.160
appears that acts at least momentarily like a light in the darkness and that
01:15:49.700
lifts your spirit up and gives you a little bit of hope and maybe helps you
01:15:53.340
continue on it's well that's obviously a call to being it's it's a it's a
01:15:57.980
statement from your own soul that says well there's something about that
01:16:01.160
that that's how you should be and maybe then well we get a chance to to
01:16:07.520
participate in what is good I thought too you know well we'll leave that for a
01:16:14.960
little later and God said let the earth sprout vegetation plants yielding seed
01:16:20.240
and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed each according to its kind on
01:16:24.080
the earth and it was so and the earth brought forth vegetation plants yielding
01:16:28.880
seed according to their own kind and trees bearing fruit in which is their
01:16:32.540
seed each according to its kind and God saw that it was good and there was
01:16:36.060
evening and there was morning the third day I like that that's you see it's
01:16:45.320
interesting these old pictures hey because if you look here you got you got
01:16:48.860
this halo around God's head and you've got the split again between night and
01:16:54.320
darkness and God's right on the on the border between the two and that's the
01:16:58.520
Sun right that's what that's what a halo is halo is the Sun or the moon sometimes
01:17:03.620
it's like a coin you know you have the Queen's head on the coin and that's the
01:17:06.920
Queen on the moon and it's silver and it's a symbol of value because of course the
01:17:11.120
Queen is sovereign and the moon is the sovereign of the night sky and and gold of
01:17:15.220
course is the Sun and gold is pure because it doesn't mix with other metals and
01:17:19.280
it shines like the Sun so it partakes of the Sun and God partakes of the Sun because
01:17:23.900
there's something about whatever he represents that's associated with
01:17:27.560
consciousness and illumination and enlightenment and it's that force of
01:17:31.160
illumination enlightenment that's that's right on the border between these two
01:17:34.760
sets of phenomena and that's that's kind of what that picture is trying to
01:17:37.940
present and so you know it's a metaphor that's one way of thinking about it but it
01:17:42.920
does again allude to the underlying idea that there's something about
01:17:46.880
consciousness that's integral to to being itself and God said let there be lights in
01:17:52.820
the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for
01:17:56.420
signs and for seasons and for days and for years I mean that's a that's a
01:18:00.580
remarkable bit of a bit of writing there too because you just think about how
01:18:04.760
bloody long it took our caveman ancestors to look at the night sky and start to
01:18:09.440
figure out that there were repeating patterns across years that enabled them
01:18:13.700
to mark the seasons I mean I just can't imagine how they figured that out it's
01:18:17.360
that that the degree of careful observation that it took and I mean we
01:18:21.860
know people figured that out a long time ago because you know those great
01:18:26.120
megalithic monuments like Stonehenge seem to be astronomical observatories
01:18:32.120
essentially and you see the same thing with the pyramids I mean people were
01:18:35.240
looking at the damn sky trying to figure out looking at God you know because
01:18:38.480
that's kind of what you're doing when you're looking at the night sky trying to
01:18:41.360
figure out the regularity and order in the universe and that's all compacted into
01:18:45.380
this little line you know and let them be for signs and for seasons to be
01:18:49.520
oriented by the stars amazing and that let them be lights in the expanse of
01:18:54.500
heavens to give light upon the earth and it was so and God made the two great
01:18:58.280
lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night
01:19:02.240
and the stars and God set them in the expanse of heavens to give light on the
01:19:05.720
earth to rule over the day and over the night and so there's an idea of
01:19:09.860
sovereignty there too right that that there's an analogy between the ruler and
01:19:14.540
the and the heavenly bodies that that light up the that light up the darkness
01:19:18.680
essentially and that's a really interesting idea too because it took us a
01:19:22.160
long time to come to terms with as I mentioned last week to come to terms with
01:19:26.120
the idea of sovereignty itself and to decide what constituted valid power it's
01:19:31.580
not power it's not power it's authority and competence and not power it's not
01:19:36.740
dominance either it's more sophisticated than that because the people that you want
01:19:41.240
to rule aren't people who have power because power just means I can hurt you
01:19:45.620
and you can't hurt me back that's that's not that that's not what you need from a
01:19:50.840
ruler even though it devolves into that from time to time what you want is the
01:19:55.100
kind of wisdom that illuminates the darkness and to associate the sovereign with
01:19:59.560
the with the heavenly kings of the light is a perfectly reasonable thing to do from a
01:20:03.980
metaphoric perspective and that's an ancient ancient idea you know and another
01:20:08.600
example of how we're grounded in a dream and God set them in the expanse of
01:20:13.340
heavens to give light on the earth to rule over the day and the night and to
01:20:16.580
separate the light from the darkness and God saw that it was good another
01:20:19.880
emphasis on the fact that it was better that there was something than nothing and
01:20:24.080
you know maybe you could maybe you could consider that the declaration of the
01:20:28.520
cosmos is something like well it's better that there's something than nothing and
01:20:32.600
well how do you know that and I guess the answer to that is that there's
01:20:35.360
something instead of nothing and I know that that's not proof but but it's still
01:20:40.580
a remarkable fact that it happens to be the case and no one does know why that
01:20:44.120
is and so maybe we should go along with it and see what we can do with it you
01:20:48.080
know and see how we could make it better because we certainly could if we were if
01:20:53.100
we were really committed to it and we shook our resentment and our our anger and
01:20:58.100
our hatred and I know there's reason for all of that because people do suffer
01:21:01.640
terribly but you know God only knows what being could be like if we all
01:21:06.140
contributed it contributed to it to the best of our ability God only knows what
01:21:11.600
we could conquer and what sort of magnificent cities we could produce and
01:21:14.760
what things we could we could eradicate from from from the suffering of the world
01:21:19.400
and there was you know there's this guy I read about this is this is amazing and I
01:21:32.720
don't remember his name but he he found out about this worm that was called the
01:21:36.560
guinea worm and guinea worm is a really horrible thing and you can look it up if
01:21:40.040
you want but I'll tell you a little bit about it even though it's very
01:21:42.200
distasteful so a guinea worm is a parasite that lives in Africa that burrs under your
01:21:46.940
skin and it's quite long it's about that long and it's you know about that wide
01:21:50.960
and so it'll burrow underneath your leg and then it's in there you know and
01:21:54.620
maybe it pokes its little head out a hole which is one of its delightful
01:21:57.800
tendencies and then if you want to pull it out it breaks right because obviously
01:22:03.020
because otherwise you just pull it out and it would be dead and so it doesn't
01:22:05.600
like that so it just breaks off and many many people had this horrible disease you
01:22:10.060
know and it well you can't imagine what that would be like because you're part of
01:22:14.480
the one percent and you live in North America and thank God for that but you
01:22:18.140
know just a little imagine you don't even want to think about it let alone have
01:22:21.380
it and he went to Africa and wiped the damn thing out it's like well great you
01:22:25.400
know it seems to me the planet's a lot better off without any guinea worms on it
01:22:28.760
even though that's like guinea worm genocide talk I'm still you know pretty
01:22:33.080
happy about it and so that was that was one guy who thought well we don't need
01:22:37.520
these things and yeah well fair enough you know and yeah well so good for him
01:22:44.960
like you know I mean he can die thinking that the world's a better place than it
01:22:48.080
was when he first popped out and so so good for that then that's I think that's
01:22:52.220
a good that's a good aim you know I think is to think that when you're on your
01:22:57.260
deathbed and you can look back and think well there's a little less suffering in
01:23:01.020
the world from here on out than there would be if I had never existed and that's a
01:23:04.820
a lot better than the opposite because it's certainly possible say if you're
01:23:08.120
Stalin to ensure that there's a hell of a lot more suffering in the world than
01:23:11.720
there would have been if you hadn't lived and we perfectly well know that
01:23:14.780
people can manage that and that many many people try to do nothing but in that
01:23:19.400
but manage precisely that so and it's hard for me not to think about that as
01:23:24.340
some sort of metaphysical evil and I think it's the right way to look at it
01:23:28.280
and there was evening and there was morning the fourth day
01:23:32.620
so yeah you have the sun here and then the moon here as far as I can tell
01:23:42.740
yeah actually I think this is the moon over here but
01:23:47.780
but so yeah and that's part of the Sistine Chapel which is you know an
01:23:54.460
no part of the reason too and the part of the reason I'm teaching about these
01:23:58.320
biblical stories is because you know I'm thinking because the humanities have been
01:24:02.480
decimated so badly and and and again I think that has mostly to do with
01:24:06.400
resentment and hatred more than anything else but I don't really think that you
01:24:09.720
can get a grip on the humanities and what they have to offer without knowing the
01:24:13.760
biblical stories because they're the they're the dream out of which the
01:24:16.900
humanities emerge and so unless you have that background knowledge that dream
01:24:21.400
then there's all sorts of things that are utterly profound that that don't open
01:24:25.320
themselves up to you and Dante's Inferno would be one of those and Milton's
01:24:28.680
Paradise Lost which is an absolutely amazing piece of work I mean Milton wrote
01:24:32.860
it because he wanted to justify the ways of God to man you know what an ambition
01:24:37.760
that is and I mean he was serious about that he took the problem seriously it's
01:24:41.280
like it's the Mephistophelian problem is that well this is a rough business that
01:24:45.300
we're involved in and you know maybe maybe we should just give it up and I think
01:24:49.220
the world the whole world I think was deciding that in the 1980s when we were
01:24:52.660
deciding whether we're going to engage in the ultimate nuclear catastrophe you
01:24:57.220
know and we were very very close to that a number of times and I think it was a
01:25:00.700
collective decision in some sense on the part of humanity that we might as well
01:25:04.120
keep the whole awful game going rather than just demolish it but but you know
01:25:10.000
Milton he wrote Paradise Lost to its dream again it's a dream and trying to
01:25:14.800
explain the nature of being and the nature of evil and you can't crack the damn
01:25:19.060
thing without knowing the underlying stories and that's really too bad because
01:25:23.020
it's utterly profound and the reason you need profound things as far as I can tell
01:25:27.280
you need profound knowledge is because life is actually a profound problem for
01:25:31.720
everyone I mean you can shelter back and live a very conservative existence and
01:25:36.040
look like more power to you I understand why you would do that but it
01:25:39.520
doesn't stop you from having to face the ultimate questions of life right they're
01:25:43.720
right there in everyone's face and at least at some point in your life and it
01:25:47.620
would be better if you could I think if you could confront them full-on and and
01:25:51.880
to deal with them properly and to be a beacon of strength as a consequence of
01:25:55.420
that it's and it's and I think that wisdom that's what the humanities are
01:26:00.700
supposed to teach is wisdom and wisdom is what enables you to deal honorably with
01:26:04.780
the tragedy of life and I think you I can't see how you could think that that was a
01:26:09.100
bad idea because they're going to be times when you're in an emergency room and you
01:26:13.360
know prone to panic and to and to cry and to break down and to and to collapse and to be of
01:26:18.160
no use to anyone around you and that's not the right way to be it's the right way to be in a
01:26:22.660
situation like that is to be strong and reliable and I don't think you can do
01:26:26.020
that without being wise and you can't be wise without putting yourself together
01:26:29.620
without knowing something about where you came from and what you're like and
01:26:34.000
that that's history and the humanities and so this isn't optional it's it's it's more
01:26:38.920
necessary the man does not live by bread alone and that's exactly the issue here
01:26:43.000
so you see these magnificent works you know I mean there's a there's it's not
01:26:49.060
like Michelangelo thought of this literally you know he was a genius for
01:26:52.900
God's sake and he's trying to get at something and and he's trying to get at
01:26:56.860
the profundity of human culture I suppose that's why you have this
01:26:59.860
patriarchal figure here and and that the cosmic role that consciousness and
01:27:04.180
tradition plays in in being itself and and it's ennobling and you know you
01:27:08.260
think people religious or not people hundreds of millions of people come from
01:27:12.820
all over the world to Rome and go through this little tiny chapel to look at
01:27:16.480
this there's something in it that everyone needs to see you know it's not
01:27:20.380
just beauty it's more than beauty it's it's that which feeds the soul and and
01:27:25.900
everyone feels that even if they can't explain it so and God said let the water
01:27:31.840
swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across
01:27:35.740
the expanse of the heavens so God created the great sea creatures and
01:27:39.160
every living creature that moves with which the water swarm according to their
01:27:42.940
kinds and every winged bird according to its kind and God saw that it was good
01:27:47.440
and God blessed them saying be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the
01:27:51.640
seas and that birds multiply on the earth and there was evening and there was
01:27:55.240
morning the fifth day and God said let the earth bring forth living creatures
01:28:00.080
according to their kinds livestock and creeping beasts creeping things and
01:28:04.280
beasts of the earth according to their kinds and it was so and God made the
01:28:08.220
beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their
01:28:11.360
kinds and everything that creeps on the ground according to its
01:28:15.020
kind kind right that's kin right and to be kind is to treat others as if they're
01:28:19.700
your kid and so according to its kind and God saw that it was good
01:28:24.060
That's continually, continually re-presented over and over.
01:28:28.720
God said that's the thing that calls being into existence.
01:28:33.820
And that's the fundamental judgment about the nature of reality.
01:28:36.600
And, you know, one of the things that happens in the translation, in the movement, let's say, from the Old Testament to the New Testament,
01:28:43.360
is God is obviously blessing creation in the beginning of this story.
01:28:51.180
Because he'll give you good smiting if you get out of line.
01:28:56.500
And, you know, lots of modern people think, well, how could you believe in a God like that?
01:28:59.980
And it's like, when I read that, I think, well, the Old Testament people, that isn't how they thought.
01:29:05.460
They thought, you better look the hell out because life is really difficult.
01:29:09.000
And if you step out of line, you're going to get flattened.
01:29:11.120
And God doesn't care, in some sense, whether you approve of him.
01:29:14.500
It's like, what the hell does that have to do with anything?
01:29:18.460
It's like, you better pay attention, though, because otherwise you're going to be in real trouble.
01:29:24.020
Nietzsche thought that, Nietzsche really admired the Old Testament as a work of literature.
01:29:28.540
Because he thought that the representation of the divine, let's say, as a representation of the essential nature of being was extraordinarily accurate.
01:29:40.180
You know, it wasn't following a morality that human beings could really understand as moral.
01:29:48.740
But what happens in the New Testament is quite interesting.
01:29:51.500
Because there's an insistence, all of a sudden, in the New Testament, that you're supposed to act towards God as if he's nothing but good.
01:30:02.300
Because, you know, you look at the world and you think, yeah, really?
01:30:07.240
Well, the cancer and the earthquakes is kind of hard to fit into that picture.
01:30:11.860
And, you know, the terrible things that happen to children and all of that is very difficult to square with the notion of a good God, obviously.
01:30:18.420
But then the underlying idea is that if you act in that manner, it makes it more likely to be true.
01:30:30.140
And so it's, I would consider that in some sense an act of both courage and faith.
01:30:34.600
It's like you're going to make the case, like God makes at the beginning of the Bible, that being is, in fact, good.
01:30:42.100
Now, you can't see it because, well, you get to see all the things about it that aren't so good.
01:30:47.660
It's a metaphysical presupposition, something like that.
01:30:54.160
I'm going to act as if being is good and to further that.
01:30:58.280
And then the implicit idea is, well, there isn't any way that you can make things work out better than to do that.
01:31:06.620
And so there's a courageous element to it, which I think is also expressed to some degree in the idea of Christ's, like, voluntary sacrifice of his own life.
01:31:15.560
His presupposition was something like, I'm going to act as if God is good and I'm going to play that out right to the end.
01:31:22.260
And now that becomes something like a divine pattern.
01:31:24.840
And I believe there's wisdom in that because, again, most of the time that I've been wrestling with this sort of thing, I've always been looking at the opposite.
01:31:36.320
Because evil is easier to believe, especially after the 20th century.
01:31:39.680
It's like, I think you have to be blind not to think about the things that happened in the 20th century as evil.
01:31:47.840
And some of the things that happened were so brutal.
01:32:00.460
And then I think, well, if there's something that's that terrible, it indicates as clearly as anything can that there's also something that's its opposite.
01:32:10.520
And that's whatever it is that's the farthest away possible from that outcome.
01:32:15.620
Now, that doesn't mean we can exactly say what it is.
01:32:17.980
Because it's easier to grip, in some sense, what it means to torture and break and hurt.
01:32:24.060
And not to be able to conceptualize so clearly how you would have to act if you were acting in the exact opposite manner.
01:32:32.560
And I see that pattern being laid out in this dreamlike manner in the New Testament.
01:32:37.500
And it has something to do with, well, it has something to do, and this is for sure, with the voluntary acceptance of mortality.
01:32:45.260
Because, of course, that's the poisoned apple, right?
01:32:48.120
The fact that everybody looks forward into the future to know that you're finite, and so is everything that you love.
01:32:53.420
And it's very difficult for that not to poison your existence.
01:32:57.000
And, well, there's no getting out of it, as far as we can tell.
01:33:00.600
But there might be something like switching your attitude to it.
01:33:03.440
And you could say, well, that's the price you pay for being.
01:33:06.580
And the heroic thing to do is to accept that, and not even to accept it grudgingly.
01:33:10.820
To say, all right, I'm going to go along with that.
01:33:14.400
And I'm going to act, nonetheless, as if being is good.
01:33:26.780
There's an act of courage that's associated with that transformation of attitude.
01:33:30.940
And even with regards to the notion that the world is good.
01:33:35.620
Especially given that there's so much evidence that makes that conclusion difficult to continually draw.
01:33:42.100
But the alternative seems to me to be far worse.
01:33:50.040
Because he's associated with the solar consciousness.
01:33:54.120
And he's creating all these strange, wonderful creatures.
01:34:00.720
And people say, well, you know, the idea of God as an old man in the sky, let's say.
01:34:07.100
It's much more better to think about it as a...
01:34:14.120
It's more sophisticated to think of the divine essence as a disembodied spirit or something like that.
01:34:22.340
Because, as I already pointed out, there isn't anything that's more complicated than a human being.
01:34:27.980
And so, the idea that the divine is something that's at least as complicated as a human being strikes me as something that's actually quite reasonable.
01:34:38.580
Although I don't know to what degree it is a metaphor.
01:34:43.740
That's also a very interesting notion, you know.
01:34:45.820
Because it's become increasingly obvious as we've tried to do such things as produce artificial intelligence.
01:34:51.620
That it's very difficult to produce an intelligence or perhaps a consciousness that isn't embodied in some manner.
01:35:03.600
And I think that's part of the reason, too, why Christianity put so much emphasis at the end of time on the resurrection of the body.
01:35:10.320
Because there's a drive in there to ennoble the idea of the body.
01:35:17.820
Not just the spirit, the consciousness that floats abstractly above the body.
01:35:25.020
You can't just shed that part of you that's heavy and material, so to speak.
01:35:33.520
And that idea is also linked to the representation of God as a human being.
01:35:43.800
And so, at least from the metaphorical perspective.
01:35:46.760
I don't think it's reasonable just to brush your hands across it and say, well, that's primitive.
01:35:57.020
And then God said, let us make man in our image.
01:36:01.460
And it's our, because, well, this is part of the priestly story.
01:36:06.740
There's, as I said, a number of sources for the Old Testament.
01:36:09.480
And in the priestly version, if I remember correctly, it's Elohim.
01:36:17.620
Because the notion is that the God who's in the background of this story has a kind of plurality of being.
01:36:25.020
And it looks like the idea of monotheism arose with great difficulty across time.
01:36:32.820
And the idea that there's a power of powers was something that it wasn't easy for people to figure out.
01:36:38.940
Because what's constant across sources of power?
01:36:46.780
And that's what's being represented by the movement, as far as I can tell, from polytheism to monotheism.
01:36:53.000
It's the first, the observation that there are powers that determine the destiny of people, at least in part, that you're subject to.
01:37:00.600
And then the idea that there's something common across all those powers that you can represent, partly, say, with the idea of the sun rising in the morning and fighting its way out of the darkness at night.
01:37:10.220
And that that's associated with consciousness and sovereignty.
01:37:15.000
One of the things that bothers me about simple-minded atheism, and I would say the simple-minded atheism is of the sort that regards these stories as nothing but simple superstitions, is that it's very, very poorly informed.
01:37:28.220
Because whatever these stories are, they are not merely simple superstitions.
01:37:32.320
They weren't conjured up by some cabal of priests to bamboozle the masses, even though they were used for that purposes from time to time.
01:37:42.780
They have a very ancient lineage, and they're tied together with all sorts of other stories.
01:37:49.820
And I think the right way to view them is as the birthplace of sophisticated philosophical ideas.
01:37:58.940
And I said already that I'm going to be as rational as I possibly can in my discussion of these stories, and not refer to anything metaphysical, except when that's absolutely necessary.
01:38:07.460
Even though I don't want to eliminate the possibility of a metaphysical reality, because I think that's premature.
01:38:14.280
But you have to take the story seriously if you're going to approach the problem properly.
01:38:31.040
And like I said, it's not easy to understand how it was that human beings came up with the idea that us lowly creatures were...
01:38:38.420
So with the Mesopotamians, for example, and the Greeks were like this too.
01:38:48.100
The gods just tortured us for their amusement, you know.
01:38:51.080
Love and hatred and anger and all those powerful forces.
01:38:57.040
There wasn't anything particularly divine about us.
01:38:59.240
The notion that, in some sense, we partake of the divineness.
01:39:04.780
And you don't want to underestimate the difficulty that there was in abstracting that.
01:39:09.640
Or the utility of that idea for our current mode of being.
01:39:12.380
Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and all the earth.
01:39:18.300
And over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
01:39:30.880
That's interesting because there is more than one creation story in Genesis.
01:39:34.840
And in this story, males and females are basically created at the same time.
01:39:44.240
It's the two sexes are generated simultaneously.
01:39:46.760
And they both carry within them the divine stamp.
01:39:49.800
Which is very egalitarian and very appropriate.
01:40:00.260
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.
01:40:02.840
And have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens.
01:40:06.060
And over every living thing that moves on the earth.
01:40:13.420
And they're looking pretty happy about the whole thing.
01:40:18.180
And that's Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel representation.
01:40:38.540
And so there's been some interesting answers to that.
01:40:43.440
So there was a group of scientists about 20 years ago.
01:40:46.160
That were remarked on the precise analogy between this structure.
01:40:56.460
And, of course, Michelangelo was one of the first people who did detailed dissections.
01:41:01.460
And so they felt that Michelangelo had put God inside the brain for some reason.
01:41:09.560
And that seems to me to be associated with the notion that there's, you know, there's an analogy or a metaphorical identity between the notion of whatever God is and the structures that give rise to consciousness.
01:41:21.160
And I think we really underestimate the degree to which consciousness is both, say, miraculous and not understood.
01:41:31.680
I mean, you know, you have what appears to be an entirely material substrate.
01:41:36.860
Yet here you are aware and self-aware and able to generate the world merely in some sense by looking at it.
01:41:44.540
And that consciousness is dependent on something that wells up from deep within that material substrate that we don't understand at all.
01:41:51.940
It's really a crazily remarkable thing, you know, and you hear a lot about scientific reductionism.
01:41:59.760
But I'll tell you something that's kind of interesting.
01:42:06.520
And it's Watson and Crick, but I don't remember who wrote this book.
01:42:12.980
He believed that DNA was so complicated that it had to come from space.
01:42:16.820
He didn't believe it could have possibly evolved on Earth.
01:42:19.020
And so, like a lot of these people who are used as exemplars of scientific reductionism aren't like that at all.
01:42:26.780
When you actually read what they had to say, right?
01:42:28.540
They were very aware of the limits of their own knowledge.
01:42:31.520
And, I mean, DNA is something really quite spectacularly remarkable.
01:42:38.940
And the idea that we understand it is a very stupid idea.
01:42:42.060
And I would say that the same thing applies to the brain.
01:42:45.980
Like, we're scratching away at the surface of something we don't understand at all.
01:42:51.980
I think that maybe Michelangelo had enough gall to do that.
01:42:56.340
I mean, he had enough gall to do dissections when the cost of that was death.
01:43:01.460
You know, he had to rob corpses, essentially, to go and do it.
01:43:04.480
So, he was, he wasn't, I would say, not particularly politically correct.
01:43:12.440
And there's another representation of the same thing.
01:43:21.040
But there's, there's, there's this joke in the atheistic, atheist community.
01:43:25.600
I think it might have been started by Richard Dawkins.
01:43:28.680
That it was just as reasonable to believe in the flying spaghetti monster as it was to believe in Gott.
01:43:33.620
And that's the flying spaghetti monster, by the way.
01:43:35.900
And so, that's, that's called touched by his noodley appendage.
01:43:42.280
And anyways, it's not very sophisticated, but it is funny.
01:43:48.280
In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace.
01:43:55.400
Prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind.
01:44:03.300
As the number one prayer and meditation app, Hallow is launching an exceptional new series called How to Pray.
01:44:09.580
Imagine learning how to use scripture as a launch pad for profound conversations with God.
01:44:17.340
And how to incorporate prayers reaching far back in church history.
01:44:23.720
It's a comprehensive two-week journey into the heart of prayer,
01:44:27.100
led by some of the most respected spiritual leaders of our time.
01:44:30.240
From guests including Bishop Robert Barron, Father Mike Schmitz, and Jonathan Rumi,
01:44:35.260
known for his role as Jesus in the hit series The Chosen,
01:44:38.300
you'll discover prayer techniques that have stood the test of time,
01:44:41.500
while equipping yourself with the tools needed to face life's challenges with renewed strength.
01:44:48.540
You can check out the new series, as well as an extensive catalog of guided prayers,
01:44:54.140
Just go to hallow.com slash jordan and download the Hallow app today for an exclusive three-month trial.
01:45:07.000
Viking. Committed to exploring the world in comfort.
01:45:10.940
Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship.
01:45:14.960
With thoughtful service, cultural enrichment, and all-inclusive fairs.
01:45:21.660
So, and God blessed them, and God said to them,
01:45:25.940
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it,
01:45:29.520
and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heaven,
01:45:32.680
and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
01:45:36.040
Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth,
01:45:43.820
And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the heavens,
01:45:56.420
And there was evening, and there was morning the sixth day.
01:45:59.300
Thus, the heavens and the earths were finished,
01:46:02.880
And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done,
01:46:05.680
and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.
01:46:09.180
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy,
01:46:11.760
because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
01:46:18.500
One of the, I did a lot of counselling work with people who were,
01:46:22.200
coaching work, I guess, with people who were fairly spectacularly successful,
01:46:28.700
they're the sort of people that were, like, they'd work 80 hours a week,
01:46:33.500
And one of the things we were always trying to figure out was,
01:46:38.320
Because one answer is, you just work till you die, right?
01:46:45.200
And then you have to figure out why that isn't a good idea.
01:46:50.720
you don't want to do so much work that the amount of work you do
01:46:53.380
interferes with the amount of work that you could still do.
01:46:59.900
and then you, like, you have to lie in a hospital bed for a month,
01:47:04.820
So you have to figure out how much you can work diligently,
01:47:12.420
And, you know, that's, people have basically settled on something like this,
01:47:16.220
and given it the divine imprimatur, that's one way of thinking about it,
01:47:19.520
which is, well, you can toil away for six days,
01:47:23.700
but you should rest at least one day out of seven,
01:47:26.180
because otherwise, well, you don't appreciate life,
01:47:30.340
and plus, I think it's more a matter of iterability.
01:47:34.000
You know, because one of the things that defines morality
01:47:39.520
So if something is properly structured in a moral manner,
01:47:42.820
then you can do it over and over and over again
01:47:51.760
and then you can have a relationship that lasts for a long time.
01:47:54.080
You can do it today, and next week, and next month, and next year.
01:47:59.740
And this, I would say, is the wisdom that's been garnered over
01:48:06.220
to say, well, look, I mean, even God needed to take a break
01:48:10.620
and it's not such a bad thing for people to follow that pattern.
01:48:14.280
And that's a good thing for modern people to know
01:48:22.300
our capacity to relax isn't exactly what it could be,
01:48:36.840
because I think it's worth dwelling on a little bit
01:48:42.100
what it is that people were trying to formulate
01:48:44.900
when they were formulating these representations.
01:48:53.520
the nature of power from specific aspects of power,
01:48:57.260
and there's some attempt to associate that with consciousness
01:49:03.560
and there's some attempt to associate that consciousness
01:49:10.340
and it's a statement that it has a cosmic quality
01:49:16.400
It's a mere statement that there's something about consciousness
01:49:21.920
and also the implication that it's associated with human beings as well.
01:49:29.580
and I don't believe that they're simply refutable.
01:49:34.580
even though it's primarily made metaphorically.
01:49:38.280
I want to build up the framework of associations
01:50:26.460
you can kind of zero in on what the idea might mean.
01:50:43.300
and I think often that can be unbelievably useful,
01:50:53.880
it's like you can speed along its transformation
02:38:56.180
thank you for listening to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast
02:39:08.000
to support these podcasts you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account
02:39:13.940
the link to which can be found in the description of this episode
02:39:17.080
Dr. Peterson's self-development programs can be found at self-authoring.com
02:39:24.820
Viking committed to exploring the world in comfort journey through the heart of Europe
02:39:32.360
on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service cultural enrichment and all-inclusive