Maps of Meaning 7, 8, & 9
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 26 minutes
Words per Minute
151.13493
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson discusses the similarities between the creation myth of Genesis and the story of the Buddha s enlightenment, and how they are related in a fundamental way. Dr. Peterson also discusses the dualistic nature of the individual, and the role of the archetypal son in the creation of the world, as well as the connection between the two stories, and why people would turn more or less voluntarily away from the good and embrace what can only be described as its polar opposite: evil. This episode is an amalgamation of episodes 7-9 of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TVOntario. You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Petra's "Patreon" account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson's Patreon, or by finding a link in the description. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. If you're struggling with anxiety, depression, or another mental health problem, please know that you are not alone. With decades of experience helping patients, and a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, Dr Peterson offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. . We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. Peterson on a new series that could be a lifeline to help those listening. Dr. B. Peterson on the journey to feeling better. and a path to feel better and help them find a brighter future that they deserve a brighter, more peaceful existence. Thanks to Daily Wire Plus now. - a program that could help them feel better, a brighter and more peaceful future you can be a better version of themselves. Thank you for listening to the podcast, and thank you for supporting the show, and I hope you re feeling better! - Dylan, Caitlyn Mclean, Sarah, and Sarah, for being kind enough to share this podcast with others who are feeling better than they deserve it. (Thank you, too, for listening, and for sharing their voices, and sending it out into the world. xoxo, Caitie, for sharing it out there. Sarah,
Transcript
00:00:01.000
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.000
Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.000
We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:19.000
With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.000
He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.000
If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.000
Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.000
Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:58.000
This episode is an amalgamation of episodes seven to nine of Maps of Meaning, recorded by TVOntario.
00:01:06.000
You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account,
00:01:12.000
which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon or by finding a link in the description.
00:01:19.000
Dr. Peterson's self-development program's self-authoring can be found at self-authoring.com.
00:01:27.000
I think of all the stories that we've investigated so far, all the fundamental myths of creation that we've investigated so far,
00:01:35.000
the two that we're going to talk about in detail today are probably the two stories that have had more impact on the course of world history than any other two.
00:01:44.000
I'm going to talk in some detail today about the story of creation laid out in Genesis and also the story of the Buddha's enlightenment.
00:01:52.000
Both stories are also characterized by a kind of depth that's virtually illimitless.
00:01:57.000
And I think in some ways that the topics we're going to discuss today are the most enlightening of all the many ideas that we've traveled through so far in this series.
00:02:13.000
So we're going to be concentrating on an analysis of this schema again.
00:02:20.000
The idea of being here, of course, that the world of experience, which is the world that mythology is attempting to describe,
00:02:26.000
has these fundamental constituent elements, one associated with chaos or nature or the unknown,
00:02:34.000
one associated with culture or the great father or the predictable,
00:02:39.000
and another associated with the archetypal son, the individual who's the offspring of the interplay of these two fundamental forces.
00:02:49.000
Now, given that part of the purpose of this series is to elucidate the causes of war and motivation for war,
00:02:57.000
attention paid to the dualistic nature of the individual is of paramount importance.
00:03:02.000
So we could say that just as nature has its terrible side and just as culture has its terrible side,
00:03:07.000
so the individual has his or her terrible side.
00:03:11.000
And the depth of that capacity, say for atrocity and vengefulness,
00:03:16.000
is just as deep as the depth of terror that the unknown itself holds.
00:03:21.000
I think this is a difficult fact for normal individuals to grasp,
00:03:29.000
given that we're highly motivated to view ourselves as, if not precisely good, at least as relatively harmless.
00:03:35.000
But the evidence that as individuals we are relatively harmless is very, very thin indeed.
00:03:40.000
And I don't think it's possible to understand the depth of motivation for atrocity and social conflict
00:03:49.000
without coming to terms with the capacity for evil that's characteristic of the individual.
00:03:54.000
Now, both the story in Genesis and the story of the Buddhist enlightenment lay bare in many ways
00:04:00.000
the nature of the structure of individual evil and also not only its structure but its motivation,
00:04:05.000
why it is that people would turn more or less voluntarily away from the good
00:04:10.000
and embrace what can only be described as its polar opposite.
00:04:15.000
So, in addition to making reference to this structural schema, of course,
00:04:22.000
we're also going to be discussing the typical mode of interaction of these elements of experience.
00:04:30.000
You may note, for example, that this diagram with which you're now very familiar,
00:04:36.000
the notion of order, chaos and reestablishment of order,
00:04:39.000
also parallels the structure of the story in Genesis, the creation myth,
00:04:43.000
where human beings are created first and exist in a paradisal state,
00:04:47.000
that that paradise is disrupted as a consequence of some event of virtually cosmic significance,
00:04:55.000
that as a consequence of that disruption, people are destined to live a profane existence
00:05:12.000
So, just as this is a fundamental archetypal structure,
00:05:16.000
so that fundamental archetypal structure constitutes the basic grammar for the story in Genesis.
00:05:22.000
Now, what we're going to do to begin with is to describe precisely how this idea of paradise descent
00:05:30.000
and the search for paradise is illustrated symbolically in Genesis
00:05:33.000
and exactly what those symbolic representations mean.
00:05:36.000
The idea here being that the reason that the authors of Genesis,
00:05:39.000
the multiple authors of Genesis extending over thousands and thousands of years,
00:05:43.000
chose those symbols is not because they were laboring to be obscure
00:05:47.000
or not because they were establishing a pre-empirical representation of reality,
00:05:55.000
but because these symbols have an elusive or metaphorical richness
00:06:00.000
that enables a story, although short, to be characterized by an almost infinite depth.
00:06:06.000
The other part of the reason is that when you say something profound,
00:06:10.000
you say it using the language, the clearest language that you have access to,
00:06:15.000
and if the story is almost unutterably profound,
00:06:18.000
then the images in which it is enshrouded are almost incomprehensibly complex.
00:06:24.000
It has to be that way because if the target of the investigation is reality itself,
00:06:31.000
something so complex that we cannot conceptualize it fully,
00:06:35.000
then the language that we use to represent that reality
00:06:38.000
has to stretch us to the limits of our ability to understand.
00:06:42.000
And it is the case that the story in Genesis say,
00:06:44.000
as much as the story of the Buddhist enlightenment,
00:06:47.000
constitutes an artistic endeavor on the part of the human race
00:06:54.000
and to explain the behavioral and philosophical consequences of that reality.
00:06:59.000
That being a tall order, perhaps we should forgive the multiple authors
00:07:03.000
for only being able to manage it in a way that's essentially imagistic and dramatic
00:07:08.000
rather than explicit, logical, philosophical, and fully developed.
00:07:14.000
So, the first thing I'd like to point out to you is a statement made by Lucia Eliade,
00:07:21.000
which I think is one of the most enlightening things I ever read.
00:07:24.000
Now, the first thing that Eliade does is describe the universality of flood mythology,
00:07:30.000
but then he puts a twist on it, so the idea behind flood mythology is something like this.
00:07:35.000
If societies deviate from an emergent, a necessarily emergent kind of morality,
00:07:42.000
a kind of morality that takes the viewpoint of all the inhabitants of a given society into account,
00:07:47.000
if a society deviates from that viewpoint sufficiently, it dooms itself to annihilation,
00:07:52.000
that annihilation being represented mythologically as the flooding of the society by the pre-cosmogonic waters,
00:08:02.000
So, societies that are tyrannical doom themselves to eradication by chaos, a simple equation,
00:08:08.000
but made more complicated by Eliade's observation that more than one factor plays a role in the establishment of a tyranny.
00:08:15.000
On the one hand, there's straight degeneration of cultural presuppositions in that if you establish a state or a game which has particular rules,
00:08:26.000
because the environment is constantly transforming itself, the rules by necessity become out of date.
00:08:32.000
So, merely as a consequence of the progression of time, the presuppositions on which any state are founded tend to become less and less relevant to the current environment.
00:08:42.000
So, there's this aging and senility merely as a consequence of thermodynamic processes.
00:08:47.000
But then, Eliade also points out that there's one additional factor which has to be attributed not to society,
00:08:53.000
but to the individuals that make up that society, which is that the strictures and rules on which society is founded
00:09:00.000
can be constantly and carefully updated when necessary, if all the individuals that make up that society
00:09:07.000
are perfectly willing to confront exemplars of emerging chaos in their own lives when those exemplars emerge,
00:09:14.000
which is to say that it's perfectly reasonable to be guided in your personality by the structures of your state,
00:09:19.000
but if you face something unknown that those rules cannot handle, it's a moral necessity, an obligation on your part,
00:09:25.000
to face that emergent anomaly forthrightly, to solve it if you can,
00:09:30.000
and then to communicate the consequences of your solution to the rest of the members of your society.
00:09:35.000
Now, what Eliade points out is that the individual who removes him or herself from the responsibility of confronting their own anomaly
00:09:48.000
So, the decay of the state and the possibility for the emergence of chaos is an interaction between the tendency of the state to archaism and senility merely as a consequence of change,
00:10:00.000
and the voluntary unwillingness of the citizens that comprise that state to face the unknown courageously when it confronts them.
00:10:08.000
So, Eliade says the deluge myth is almost universally disseminated.
00:10:12.000
It is documented in all the continents, although very rarely in Africa, probably because of the relative shortage of water,
00:10:21.000
A certain number of variants seem to be the result of dissemination, first from Mesopotamia and then from India.
00:10:27.000
It is equally possible that one or several diluvial catastrophes gave rise to fabulous narratives,
00:10:33.000
but it would be risky to explain so widespread a myth by phenomena of which no geological traces have been found.
00:10:39.000
The majority of the flood myths seem, in some sense, to form part of the cosmic rhythm.
00:10:43.000
The old world, peopled by a fallen humanity, is submerged under the water,
00:10:48.000
and sometime later a new world emerges from the aquatic chaos.
00:10:52.000
In a large number of variants, the flood is the result of the sins or ritual faults of human beings.
00:10:58.000
Sometimes it results simply from the wish of a divine being to put an end to mankind.
00:11:03.000
The chief causes lie at once, therefore, in the sins of men and the decrepitude of the world.
00:11:09.000
By the mere fact that it exists, that is, that it lives and produces,
00:11:13.000
the cosmos gradually deteriorates and ends up falling into decay.
00:11:20.000
In other words, the flood realizes on a macrocosmic scale what is symbolically affected during the New Year festival,
00:11:26.000
the end of the world and the end of a sinful humanity in order to make a new creation possible.
00:11:32.000
So then the question might arise, logically enough, what is it that would motivate an individual to work,
00:11:43.000
to avoid anomaly when it emerges in his or her own life, and to risk an eventual flood?
00:11:48.000
And even more profoundly, what would motivate an individual, perhaps, to work for the antithesis of order,
00:11:56.000
to work to promote the emergence of chaos, since we know that people are relatively ambivalent
00:12:03.000
Is it possible that we can create a compelling motivational story for the desire of the individual, as such,
00:12:12.000
to work against the emergence of the good, rather than for it?
00:12:17.000
So let's take a look at what Genesis says about the creation of experience.
00:12:21.000
So first of all, remember we're taking a phenomenological stance on this story,
00:12:25.000
which is to say that this story is not an objective retelling of materialistic emergence.
00:12:36.000
It describes the nature of human experience, okay?
00:12:41.000
And in fact, the creation story in Genesis lays explicit stress on individual consciousness,
00:12:47.000
literally, as a precondition for being itself, which is to say that underlying the story in Genesis
00:12:53.000
is the notion that without whatever consciousness is, there would be no segregated entities,
00:13:00.000
So this is one manner in which Genesis attempts to put human beings at the center of the cosmos,
00:13:06.000
so to speak, which is the idea that the world, independently of consciousness,
00:13:12.000
whatever that world is, absolutely needs to be reflected by consciousness in order to exist
00:13:18.000
in any sense that existence could reasonably be defined.
00:13:24.000
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,
00:13:27.000
and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.
00:13:31.000
Now, the idea that the earth was without form and void takes us back to the Mesopotamian creation myth
00:13:37.000
and Marduk, and Tiamat, because the word for void, the Hebrew word for void is Teom.
00:13:46.000
And the void, the chaos that constitutes the unformed condition of the cosmos
00:13:52.000
prior to the elaboration of being is assimilated to the same category as Tiamat,
00:13:58.000
which is this terrible, unformed, and frightening, a priori condition
00:14:03.000
that has to be courageously confronted in order to manifest itself as being.
00:14:07.000
And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.
00:14:11.000
So, now you see another interplay of opposites here between matter and water, the primordial element.
00:14:18.000
So, first of all, it's heaven and earth, and then it's earth and water and the height and the deep.
00:14:24.000
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water.
00:14:27.000
So, another opposite representation between spirit and whatever it is
00:14:32.000
that the pre-cosmogonic water or chaos constitutes.
00:14:36.000
And God said, let there be light, and there was light.
00:14:39.000
And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.
00:14:43.000
And then a prototypical division between light, which is associated with illumination and enlightenment,
00:14:49.000
and consciousness, because we're conscious during the day, and the sun and life,
00:14:54.000
that emerges nested inside the initial opening lines of this sentence.
00:15:00.000
Northrop Fry notes that there's tremendous emphasis on the notion of a repetitive cycling of days and nights
00:15:08.000
in the opening sentences of Genesis, even though, from a formal perspective,
00:15:12.000
this emphasis is paradoxical because the notion of the day emerges before the creation of the sun.
00:15:18.000
And Fry's point is not that this is some careless gesture on the part of the people who authored Genesis,
00:15:24.000
but more that it's an attempt to emphasize the idea of a cyclical relationship between consciousness and light,
00:15:30.000
and darkness and chaos, and to highlight the idea that this cyclical relationship is somehow absolutely vital to being itself.
00:15:39.000
So, Genesis 1-5 says, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night,
00:15:46.000
and the evening and the morning were the first day.
00:15:48.000
Fry says, the central metaphor underlying beginning is not really birth at all.
00:15:53.000
It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears, a world of virtuality and potential,
00:16:04.000
We know that at the end of the day we shall return to the world of sleep,
00:16:08.000
and that's a notion that has a metaphorical resonance,
00:16:11.000
because there's the sleep that punctuates periods of consciousness,
00:16:14.000
and then there's the great sleep at the end of life,
00:16:17.000
which is characterized by the complete cessation of consciousness.
00:16:21.000
We know that at the end of the day we shall return to the world of sleep,
00:16:24.000
but in the meantime there's a sense of self-transcendence,
00:16:27.000
of a consciousness getting up from an unreal into a real, or at least more real world.
00:16:33.000
This sense of awakening into a greater degree of reality is expressed by Heraclitus,
00:16:37.000
as a passing from a world where everyone has his own logos,
00:16:40.000
into a world where there's a common logos, the experience that we all share.
00:16:46.000
Genesis presents the creation as a sudden coming into being of a world through articulate speech,
00:16:54.000
because logos incorporates the idea of creative exploration,
00:16:58.000
and then the formulation of the consequences of that exploration in verbally communicable categories,
00:17:04.000
which give aspects of our being their defined boundaries and parameters,
00:17:10.000
and enable us to establish a shared mode of social being.
00:17:13.000
Through articulate speech, conscious perception, light, and stability.
00:17:18.000
Something like this metaphor of awakening may be the real reason for the emphasis on days,
00:17:24.000
and the evening and the morning were the first day,
00:17:26.000
even before the day as we know it was established with the creating of the sun.
00:17:36.000
The most fundamental pair of conflicting and cyclically interacting pairs of opposites
00:17:42.000
that is portrayed in Genesis is essentially the pairing of chaos versus order,
00:17:50.000
and a poem expresses this idea extremely well and very powerfully,
00:17:57.000
When sacred night sweeps heavenward, she takes the glad, the winsome day,
00:18:02.000
and folding it, rolls up its golden carpet that had been spread over an abysmal pit.
00:18:11.000
and man, a homeless orphan, has to face in utter helplessness,
00:18:15.000
naked, alone, the blackness of immeasurable space.
00:18:19.000
Upon himself he has to lean with mind abolished,
00:18:23.000
thought unfathered in the dim depths of his soul.
00:18:26.000
He sinks, for nothing comes from outside to support or limit him.
00:18:33.000
While in the substance of the night, unraveled, alien,
00:18:37.000
he now perceives a fateful something that is his by right.
00:18:41.000
Absolutely brilliant poetic statement, I think,
00:18:45.000
laying out very nicely, very richly the fundamental nature of the existential paradox
00:18:51.000
that constitutes human life, pointing to a very profound sense of futility and fear,
00:18:57.000
but then beyond that to the notion that in the depths of the unknown,
00:19:02.000
in the depths of the darkness, and in the depths of all that that's fundamentally unfaceable,
00:19:08.000
there still lurks something that can be discovered given sufficient courage.
00:19:14.000
Another fundamental division portrayed indirectly in Genesis,
00:19:21.000
So what you have in Genesis is an absolutely stellar idea.
00:19:26.000
I think perhaps the most fundamental contribution of archaic Jewish thinking to Western and world civilization,
00:19:33.000
which is that although it is easier in some ways to consider the actual matrix of things,
00:19:39.000
their material substrate as the strata from which they emerge,
00:19:43.000
it is equally reasonable and perhaps more pragmatically useful,
00:19:47.000
to note that things only exist because of the interaction between the logos,
00:19:53.000
the word that characterizes consciousness, and whatever this matrix is.
00:19:57.000
So in Jewish thought and then Christian thought, and of course in thoughts of that sort echoed throughout the world,
00:20:03.000
there's the idea that consciousness associated with the transcendent, directly associated with the deity,
00:20:10.000
is actually the thing that in interaction with this matrix gives rise to being.
00:20:16.000
Genesis places stress on this notion of the internal logos,
00:20:22.000
the individual consciousness in two very complex ways.
00:20:25.000
It first says that it's the word of God, the logos of God that gives order to chaos and makes being emerge.
00:20:34.000
But then even more particularly, it's the self-conscious logos of individual humans,
00:20:42.000
their capacity not just to see the world as an object,
00:20:45.000
but also to see themselves as an object that gives the world the particular value slant that it has for us,
00:20:52.000
which is to say that not only are we in a world where the subject and the object are separated,
00:20:59.000
and therefore experience and suffer the consequences of that separation,
00:21:03.000
but even more particularly, we are the only creatures who are so conscious that we can observe ourself as objects.
00:21:11.000
And the consequence of that is that because we've extended our consciousness to ourself,
00:21:16.000
we're capable of conceptualizing things that other creatures cannot conceptualize,
00:21:20.000
such as the infinite possibility that lays manifest in the unknown,
00:21:24.000
but also the fact that as individuals we're subject to our finite limitations, right?
00:21:31.000
That we can become diseased, that we can become mentally ill, and that finally we'll die.
00:21:36.000
And so the idea here is that something like the extension of logos to the object, to the subject,
00:21:49.000
And Genesis refers to this as essentially the heritable sin of Adam,
00:21:54.000
because we're aware of our own vulnerability as a genetic consequence merely of being human.
00:22:01.000
There's a transformation in the nature of experience that has essentially cosmic significance.
00:22:07.000
Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching makes a comment on the formless chaos that constitutes the matrix of things,
00:22:22.000
There was something formless, yet complete, that existed before heaven and earth,
00:22:31.000
Dependent on nothing, unchanging, all-pervading, unfailing.
00:22:35.000
One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.
00:22:38.000
The idea here being that whatever experience is in the absence of a delimited human consciousness
00:22:45.000
is something that's outside the boundaries of time, because temporality is a human attribute,
00:22:51.000
and it's outside the boundaries of spatial limitation,
00:22:54.000
because only human beings, with their delimited and fixed size,
00:23:02.000
So, whatever it is that exists without us is so comprehensive, and so complete,
00:23:09.000
and transcends temporal dimensions to such a great degree,
00:23:12.000
that it can't be conceptualized as being at all.
00:23:17.000
It's something that transcends being to such a degree that it's not even nameable,
00:23:21.000
but still exists as the mother of all things under heaven.
00:23:24.000
Now, Genesis formally associates the human being with logos,
00:23:33.000
and this is a determinative move in human history,
00:23:37.000
just as the Mesopotamians first hypothesized that their emperor was equivalent to Marduk,
00:23:43.000
the force that confronted time at and carved her into pieces and made the world.
00:23:47.000
And just as the Egyptians conceptualized their pharaoh as the intermingling between Osiris,
00:23:53.000
the stability of the state, and Horus, the exploratory hero,
00:23:57.000
and then disseminated that identity down the aristocratic levels,
00:24:07.000
and God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
00:24:12.000
Now, it could be said that the logical derivation of that statement is that God looks like human beings,
00:24:20.000
or conversely that God is an old man with a beard,
00:24:22.000
but it means something, I think, that's more sophisticated than that,
00:24:26.000
which is that the central aspect that's associated with this transcendent deity,
00:24:31.000
the logos, which is the thing that gives rise to order as a consequence of its confrontation with chaos,
00:24:37.000
is also the thing that centrally characterizes human consciousness.
00:24:41.000
And so with that, there's this transcendent notion that inside each human being is a spark of genuine divinity,
00:24:49.000
and it's the manifestation of that divinity in human temporal and spatial parameters
00:25:10.000
And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
00:25:12.000
and the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,
00:25:15.000
and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
00:25:18.000
Now, fundamentalist Christians read this as an injunction, right?
00:25:22.000
This is what human beings should do, dominate all other living things.
00:25:26.000
But it's more like a description, which is that the consequence of the embeddedness of this spark of divinity
00:25:32.000
in the individual is precisely what gave rise to the human ability to dominate the planet,
00:25:37.000
which is an ability that at least at the moment seems fundamentally unparalleled with no limit in sight.
00:25:43.000
So it's not an injunction so much as a cold-hearted description.
00:25:47.000
There's a very profound idea underlying the necessity of the creation of the individual human being.
00:25:55.000
There's a line of archaic Jewish speculation that runs something like this.
00:26:00.000
Why is the creation of a limited subject necessary if God's omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent?
00:26:08.000
Why would he bother creating anything outside of himself?
00:26:14.000
The one thing that a being that is complete in all regards, even all hypothetical regards,
00:26:24.000
And as a consequence of that, anything that's absolute is not complete and can't be complete without limitation.
00:26:31.000
And so there's an emergent idea in Genesis and most notions of the emergence of human consciousness
00:26:38.000
that the absolute needs the reflection point of a delimited being to actually spring into some kind of defined actuality
00:26:46.000
so that being itself becomes an interplay between the necessary limitations of the finite
00:26:56.000
And so being is something that emerges because of the fact, as another ancient Jewish tradition has it,
00:27:04.000
God and man are, in a sense, twins, mutually dependent on one another for their defined being.
00:27:11.000
From such a perspective, being has the same nature as a game.
00:27:17.000
When you're playing a game, you have to play by rules,
00:27:19.000
which means that there are things that you can do while playing the game,
00:27:24.000
and that the game could not exist without the limitations.
00:27:28.000
Also predicated on the idea that the imposition, the Nietzschean idea,
00:27:32.000
that the imposition of limitations on a structure actually gives rise to the possibility of diverse new forms,
00:27:39.000
which is also a very sophisticated way of conceptualizing the world.
00:27:43.000
So from the perspective of Genesis, the individual is the locale of the experiential drama,
00:27:50.000
and the fact that the individual is limited is a necessary precondition for being.
00:30:17.900
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Jordan, and you can get an extra three months free.
00:30:26.820
Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront
00:30:36.660
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business,
00:30:40.900
from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders
00:30:47.500
Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy
00:30:52.200
it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:30:55.980
With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful
00:31:00.560
tools, alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing,
00:31:07.500
Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout,
00:31:11.800
up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:31:15.280
No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control
00:31:22.280
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:31:28.240
Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in.
00:31:38.220
So let's take a look at the structure of Paradise as it's presented in the, in Genesis.
00:31:44.580
So the first aspect of the initial paradisal state is unself-consciousness.
00:31:50.220
Now, if you look at factor and analytic studies of human personality, you note that self-consciousness,
00:31:56.600
although it is arguably our greatest gift, also loads almost entirely on the factor that
00:32:03.680
And you might also notice that when you say, I became self-conscious, you generally put a
00:32:09.560
negative cast on that in that I was talking before a group of people and suddenly I was
00:32:15.580
And as a consequence of that, I was flooded by negative emotion and was fundamentally immobilized.
00:32:21.080
So it's a very paradoxical, a very paradoxical state of being that our highest rational gift,
00:32:28.060
And the only one that clearly distinguishes us from animals is also that which, when
00:32:33.640
manifested, makes us almost unbearably anxious.
00:32:37.900
The initial paradisal state, when Adam and Eve first walk in the Garden of Eden, is characterized
00:32:46.460
Adam and Eve, whatever they are, are not clearly segregated from the rest of the world.
00:32:51.140
They have no idea, for example, of their own nakedness.
00:32:54.820
And if you think about what nakedness means, you immediately understand that that's also
00:33:03.380
You know, with children that around the age of three or four, many of them, regardless of
00:33:07.640
their mode of upbringing, start to become very concerned about privacy, say, with regards
00:33:12.220
to bodily functions, and also very concerned about ever showing themselves without clothing.
00:33:17.160
And it's perfectly reasonable to presume that that's a consequence of their emergent self-consciousness,
00:33:24.500
an event that takes place somewhere between the ages of two and five.
00:33:29.840
That makes them segregatable, say, from their mother.
00:33:33.600
And so you also have images of paradise that float through Western history that are characterized
00:33:39.700
by the image of the unconscious union between the mother and child, right?
00:33:44.740
Which is an imagistic representation that eradicates the tension of self-consciousness, both for
00:33:54.900
So the notion that the child is living in a paradisal condition that's somehow lost as
00:34:01.020
he or she approaches adulthood gives another sort of symbolic layer to the notion of the
00:34:08.180
It's also a place where order and chaos are in perfect balance.
00:34:13.300
And you know that because what paradise means is para, around, deza, a wall, while Eden means
00:34:25.060
Para-deza, paradise, is a walled garden, a walled place of delight.
00:34:29.680
And a garden is precisely that place where the forces of nature or chaos and the forces
00:34:42.000
And it's a place that's archetypally pleasant, a place where the intervention of human activity
00:34:47.200
has produced a kind of stability that transcends that of nature because it's a cultural construct,
00:34:53.900
but also that transcends that of culture because all of the plants and the other growing things
00:34:58.520
that constitute a garden are somehow transcendent, even though they're under the cultivating
00:35:09.100
If you look at the manner in which the fall story is represented, you can also see that
00:35:15.060
the place of previous stability can be regarded as a kind of paradise.
00:35:20.340
So if you remember the story of Moses leading his people through the desert, it's clearly the
00:35:25.000
case that when the Israelites were in the desert, even though they got away from the
00:35:28.500
tyranny, it was easy to look back and say, well, you know, tough as it was, the place
00:35:33.680
that we were before was much better than the place we are now.
00:35:36.900
So it's perfectly reasonable and expectable for people who are caught in a crisis to look
00:35:42.980
back to the time prior to the dawn of that crisis with longing, even if the crisis that
00:35:48.660
they're presently experiencing is a necessary precondition for further development of personality.
00:35:53.200
So the story that's laid out in Genesis has its structure something like this.
00:35:59.240
Before we became self-conscious, the world was perfect.
00:36:03.220
As a consequence of the rise of self-consciousness, we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, out
00:36:07.760
of paradise, and destined to live the profane existence that characterizes our present mode
00:36:12.980
of being, where we're subject to knowledge of mortality and the possibility of illness and
00:36:19.300
And wouldn't it be ever so great if we could only return to that condition of unself-consciousness
00:36:27.000
And you see this kind of pathological paradisal reminiscence manifesting itself in the most
00:36:33.260
banal forms of conservatism, which are always projecting the ideal past somewhere back into
00:36:40.180
the unattainable reaches of time, and also in those situations that obtain psychologically
00:36:46.360
when people are absolutely possessed by depression and anxiety, and wish for their consciousness
00:36:52.880
to come to an end, if not metaphorically, so they desire to sleep, then actually so that
00:36:58.680
suicide is viewed as a kind of unconsciousness whose paradisal nature, the absence of all opposition,
00:37:06.860
is viewed as clearly preferable to the difficulties of actually maintaining being.
00:37:15.620
Iliadis says, the idea of paradise once and then paradise lost is not something unique to
00:37:23.620
Western or great Eastern societies, it's a widespread motif, just as wide as the flood motif.
00:37:31.860
Regardless of where you go in the world, you find this notion.
00:37:34.880
When heaven had been abruptly separated from the earth, that is, when it had become remote
00:37:41.260
as in our days, when the tree or vine connecting earth to heaven had been cut, or the mountain
00:37:47.380
which used to touch the sky had been flattened out, then the paradisal stage was over, and
00:37:56.160
In effect, all myths of paradise show us primordial man enjoying a beatitude, a spontaneity, and
00:38:02.540
freedom, which he has unfortunately lost in consequence of the fall, that is, of what followed
00:38:08.880
upon the mythical event that caused the rupture between heaven and earth.
00:38:13.160
As I said, Eden is delight, a place of delight, by terminological definition, whereas paradise
00:38:27.540
I want to show you what knowing that does for analysis of the relationship between Eastern
00:38:37.540
So let me tell you quickly the story of the Buddha, and I'm going to represent it fundamentally
00:38:46.920
Buddha starts his life in what's essentially a walled garden by all reasonable comparative
00:38:52.720
analysis, and as a consequence of his emergent self-consciousness, the unself-conscious childlike
00:39:00.000
perfection of that early state is permanently disrupted.
00:39:04.720
So you have a situation where the greatest redemption story of the East follows precisely
00:39:08.740
the same grammatical track as the greatest creation story of the West.
00:39:15.240
Buddha's father is visited by an angel who tells him that his son is going to grow up to
00:39:19.520
be the greatest temporal, profane ruler the world has ever seen, or a great spiritual leader.
00:39:25.980
And his father, being a pragmatic and conservative man, decides that there's no possible way I'm
00:39:31.680
going to allow my son to take the ambivalent road of spiritual enlightenment.
00:39:36.900
I'm going to allow him to fall completely in love with the world so that he will remain
00:39:45.960
So prior to Buddha's birth, his father constructs a great city with walls around it.
00:39:52.640
And inside that city, he removes all signs of pain, frustration, and disappointment, any
00:40:01.120
The only people that are allowed to exist within this city are those who are in perfect mental
00:40:06.620
and physical health, who are paragons of beauty and virtue.
00:40:11.060
And the idea that lurks behind that archetypal story is that when a father has a child, his
00:40:19.820
moral obligation is to shield the developing consciousness of that child from contact with
00:40:25.540
any of the horrors of life that could provide the child with an experience too traumatic for
00:40:34.300
And so, because it's an archetypal story, it relates to the development of all people, not
00:40:40.840
And that's the motif that the Buddha's story initially follows.
00:40:43.720
A good father makes his child fall in love with life by enticing that child into a direct
00:40:52.980
Buddha grows up within this walled garden, this unselfconscious paradise.
00:40:57.920
But precisely because he's been shielded to this degree and allowed to mature, his consciousness
00:41:06.320
And the world outside, the boundaries that his parents have established for him, starts
00:41:13.280
Now we know already that the forbidden fruit, right, the lure of what's outside the walls is
00:41:18.900
something that human beings just can't keep their mangy little paws off, right?
00:41:26.400
And the best way to make sure that we investigate something is to lay down a stricture that says,
00:41:30.840
whatever you do under whatever circumstances, never look there, right?
00:41:35.800
And then the automatic systems that underlie our orienting and that motivate our seeking
00:41:40.420
experience are constantly pulling our attention precisely to that forbidden spot, compelling us
00:41:45.600
to investigate exactly that which has been forbidden.
00:41:48.920
So because Buddha is a consciousness developing in a healthy manner, he immediately becomes curious
00:41:56.180
about what lies beyond the limits that have been established with him and he makes a decision
00:42:04.060
Which seems a particularly ridiculous thing to do given that in principle he has everything
00:42:10.780
But then again, we have the troublesome notion of the original sin of Adam, right?
00:42:15.600
Which is that if any of you were offered a forbidden fruit, again under circumstances mythologically
00:42:22.960
equivalent to those that obtained in the beginning, you'd immediately reach your hand out and take
00:42:27.200
it because what we haven't got for human beings is always far more compelling than what we have
00:42:33.780
So Buddha goes outside the walls, but his father, who's a good father, although somewhat conservative,
00:42:44.600
decides he's going to rig the game a little bit so he gets rid of everybody that's diseased
00:42:49.020
or unhappy or uncomfortable or ugly or old or anything that could possibly disturb the Buddha.
00:42:54.100
And he lines the streets with flower-waving women and puts pedals on the road and sends his
00:43:01.360
But the gods who are lurking around, right, the trouble-making gods who represent chaos
00:43:06.360
and disorder and the unknown, decide to send in front of Buddha a sick man who hobbles unsteadily
00:43:14.100
And Buddha asks his retainer precisely what this phenomena represents, and his retainer says,
00:43:22.100
well, you know, human beings like you, since you're human, are subject to the deterioration
00:43:30.320
And this man is one person who's been so afflicted, and so Buddha is completely disenchanted by his
00:43:37.560
exploratory move out into the terrible unknown and runs back into the castle walls and shuts
00:43:42.440
the door and is perfectly happy to think of nothing for months.
00:43:46.320
And then, as his anxiety habituates and his curiosity grows, he can't stand the notion of never going
00:43:52.660
outside the walls again, and outside he goes again.
00:43:55.320
And this time, after his father prepares the route ever so carefully, the godsend insight,
00:44:03.320
And Buddha looks at him in shock and horror and says to his retainer, just precisely what's
00:44:09.320
going on here, and his retainer says, well, that's an old man, and everybody gets old,
00:44:15.320
and you're going to get old too, and that's the way of all humanity, and that's the point
00:44:20.320
at which Buddha's self-consciousness expands, not to only include the possibility of degeneration,
00:44:26.940
but to include the temporal horizon that's characteristic of life, and he finds that so terribly shocking
00:44:33.900
that he runs back into the castle and shuts the walls down and plays with his friends for
00:44:38.420
another six months, or maybe a year, till his anxiety finally habituates, and he goes
00:44:44.240
And this time, the godsend a funeral parade for him, and he sees his first dead body,
00:44:50.900
and this is such a terrible shock to him that he can't even go back to the castle.
00:44:55.040
So his father prepares for him a great party in the woods near the castle, full of nude dancing
00:45:01.100
women who are perfectly willing to flaunt themselves and to offer themselves to him.
00:45:05.000
Buddha is so absolutely and catastrophically shocked by this notion of emergent death that
00:45:10.500
he can't take any pleasure whatsoever in what's being offered to him, and he leaves the kingdom
00:45:16.020
once and for all, and you think, well, that's exactly what happens to you when you grow up,
00:45:21.260
If you're reasonably well socialized and properly looked after, then your curiosity gets the
00:45:25.540
better of you, and you keep going out into the world until what your parents have established
00:45:30.000
for you is no longer sufficient for you, and as a consequence of that movement out into
00:45:34.920
the world, you find out all sorts of things, characteristic of your own life, that not only
00:45:39.980
your parents can't precisely explain to you, but even the broader formal structures of your
00:45:49.060
And when you finally do encounter such realities and allow their effect on you to fully manifest
00:45:55.000
itself, well, then you're finally independent, and you no longer can return home.
00:46:01.100
But from that point forward, you're also burdened as Adam is burdened when he loses his paradisal
00:46:06.680
unself-consciousness with the full revelation of what it means to be limited and alive.
00:46:13.120
So what happens to Buddha as a consequence of this revelation?
00:46:16.840
He becomes an apprentice, and the chronicles of the Buddhist adventure are careful to say
00:46:23.400
that he becomes the world's most proficient practitioner of samkhya, which was a philosophical
00:46:33.020
So he masters all the positions in the asanas until he's disciplined physically to an almost
00:46:39.440
And then he decides that he'll adopt a stance of world renunciation, which is also something
00:46:44.180
he's remarkably good at, and he starves himself until the chroniclers say he resembles nothing
00:46:51.680
And then having exhausted all the disciplinary structures that his sophisticated culture has
00:46:57.560
to offer him, but still not precisely finding the answer that he's looking for, he retreats
00:47:03.000
into the forest, a place of the unknown, and sits himself at the base of a tree.
00:47:08.840
Underneath the tree, he's visited by visions and temptations.
00:47:15.400
Life itself tempts him back out of his self-conscious state into the domain of pure physical pleasure,
00:47:24.340
And one that's powerful enough so that Hindu philosophers say, as their churches and cathedrals
00:47:30.180
are covered with erotic drawings, if you can't get past the erotic drawings into the church,
00:47:35.660
that's the domain that you should still inhabit, right?
00:47:38.220
In the dawning phases of life, at least till middle age, that's the appropriate mode of
00:47:42.420
being, to be enticed and seduced by the physical pleasures that life has to offer.
00:47:47.780
But in the final analysis, those are not sufficient to solve the problem of emergent self-consciousness.
00:47:53.640
And so the angel of death visits him and offers him the opportunity to exist permanently in
00:48:01.060
a state of nirvana, a very, very interesting twist on the story because you have to wonder,
00:48:06.120
given the association, say, between suicidality and the notion of paradise that exists underneath
00:48:12.220
that, if what Buddha isn't being offered by the angel of death is, in fact, death and
00:48:16.820
the cessation of all the problems of being regardless.
00:48:20.540
He rejects that, attains enlightenment briefly, and then decides to return to the world to share
00:48:26.060
what he's discovered with all of suffering humanity.
00:48:29.400
The idea being that the Buddha, who is the awakened or enlightened one, is capable of attaining
00:48:36.060
a transcendent state but also knows fully that because human beings have a shared social aspect,
00:48:44.000
it is not possible for any one person to attain redemption until all people attain redemption.
00:48:49.500
The reason being that it's very difficult to be transcendent and enlightened when you see
00:49:02.720
So then we shift from that back to Genesis and the tempted fall of man and read the third
00:49:11.520
chapter and they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
00:49:17.540
Well Freud pointed out that one of human beings most common nightmares is to be stripped of clothing
00:49:26.640
Well, your naked self is the most vulnerable aspect of you, right?
00:49:34.140
Partly that's protection from the terrible natural world, right?
00:49:37.860
But it also offers us the possibility of placing a barrier between ourselves, our vulnerable selves,
00:49:44.640
and the searching and critical gaze of the community, right?
00:49:48.360
Because not only are we vulnerable to the rigors of nature, we're also vulnerable to the depredations
00:49:56.300
And the notion that a man and a woman could exist naked and not know it is a clear, is a
00:50:02.800
clear finger pointing in the direction of a story that says these people were not conscious,
00:50:10.300
Or if conscious, they certainly were not self-conscious.
00:50:15.180
The serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.
00:50:20.180
And he said unto the woman, yea, hath God said, you shall not eat of every tree of the garden.
00:50:25.620
And the woman said unto the serpent, well, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden,
00:50:30.520
but of the fruit of the tree which is in the center of the garden, God hath said, you should
00:50:36.060
not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest ye die.
00:50:39.460
And the serpent said to the woman, you won't die.
00:50:44.700
For God knows that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, right?
00:50:49.800
A clear pointing to the notion of an awakening and an illumination.
00:50:56.200
And you shall be like gods, knowing good and evil, right?
00:50:59.540
Which attributes to humanity a dawning sense of morality, explicit morality, a faculty for
00:51:05.880
comprehension that we do not share with any other animal.
00:51:09.880
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes
00:51:13.700
and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat and
00:51:29.400
So you say, well, if you look at the structure of experience from this particular perspective
00:51:35.240
and you think about that in a vertical plane, with the layers one on top of another, then
00:51:40.240
you can imagine the tree as the thing that unites these three layers.
00:51:44.020
The tree is the domain that unites chaos and order and the individual.
00:51:48.640
The structure running up through the middle of it.
00:51:51.020
And you see a representation of that, interestingly enough, from Norse mythology.
00:52:00.160
The tree that stands in the middle of the Norse paradise.
00:52:04.040
And one of the things that's very interesting about this particular tree is that if you look
00:52:07.320
at its roots, the roots are covered with snakes and serpents, and underneath the snakes and
00:52:13.980
And so that you see that the tree that stands at the center of the world is rooted in chaos
00:52:21.020
It's rooted in whatever it is that constitutes the pre-cosmogonic matrix of being.
00:52:28.080
And then the central aspects of this domain are nicely laid out as the domain of territoriality,
00:52:36.460
the ends of the borders that the individual understands and the habitual territory that
00:52:42.280
And then the tree in the center represents whatever it is that's central to this, to our mode of
00:52:50.220
And so let's take a look at that in some detail and flesh it out symbolically.
00:52:55.980
We find Iliadis saying the tree that stands hypothetically at the center of the world is
00:53:03.400
precisely that structure that shaman climb when they make their transition from the normal
00:53:08.800
mode of earthly being into their transcendent mode of being.
00:53:12.160
So Iliadis says the symbolism of the ascension into heaven by means of a tree is clearly illustrated
00:53:17.740
by the ceremony of initiation of the Buryat shaman.
00:53:21.180
The candidate climbs up a post in the middle of his yurt, his tent, reaches the summit and
00:53:27.520
But we know that this opening, made to let out the smoke, is likened to the hole made
00:53:34.400
So you can imagine there's a conceptualization of the world as centered around a particular
00:53:39.280
axis and that the tent is regarded as at least transitory as a symbolic equivalent of
00:53:49.020
Among other peoples, the tent pole is called the pillar of the sky and is compared to the
00:53:52.420
pole star around which the world rotates, at least from the visual perspective, and is
00:53:59.780
Thus, the ritual post set up in the middle of the yurt is an image of the cosmic tree which
00:54:04.140
is found at the center of the world with the pole star shining directly above it.
00:54:09.000
By ascending it, the candidate enters into heaven.
00:54:12.280
That is why as soon as he comes out of the smoke hole of the tent he gives a loud cry invoking
00:54:29.060
And it seems to me most likely that it represents the structure of the nervous system.
00:54:34.220
I think a structure that's rooted not so much in the spinal sensory motor structures but
00:54:39.740
deeply in the autonomic structures stretching down into the center of the body and planting
00:54:46.180
the mind firmly in its material substrate so that the autonomic system and its projections
00:54:51.740
up into the amygdala and the limbic system and then up into the cortex constitute the interface
00:54:57.040
between the spiritual domain that our psyche inhabits and the material domain that constitutes
00:55:12.100
Well there are multiple medieval representations that are quite peculiar showing Christ for
00:55:17.100
example as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit of the tree of
00:55:23.980
It means that conceptualizations like the hero are products of whatever it is that this tree
00:55:37.160
And as Eric Newman point out, wherever liquor, fruit, herbs, etc. appear as the vehicles of
00:55:48.100
life and immortality, including the water and bread of life, the sacrament of the host,
00:55:53.060
and every form of food cult down to the present day, we have an ancient mode of human expression
00:55:58.900
So imagine the idea of the Piagetian idea of assimilation and then accommodation and then
00:56:05.900
understand its assimilative, nutritive, underlying metaphorical nature.
00:56:11.100
The idea being that there's a tight analogy between ingesting something material and undergoing
00:56:16.760
a transformation of energy attendant upon that, right, which is what happens when you eat,
00:56:23.020
ingesting a piece of information, which offers you a new mode of doing things.
00:56:28.120
So you can say, well, people will trade work for information.
00:56:35.180
There must be a kind of equivalence between work and information and food and information,
00:56:39.900
because otherwise the trade wouldn't make sense.
00:56:42.060
And then you realize that if you're informed, you can undertake transformations of yourself and
00:56:48.220
the material world in a much more efficient manner, because that's what being informed means.
00:56:53.360
And that means that being informed, acquiring some information, and eating something are all
00:56:58.620
tied up in a complex way into the same metaphorical structure.
00:57:02.720
Eat something forbidden, transform as a consequence.
00:57:07.880
Conscious realization is acted out in the elementary scheme of nutritive assimilation, and the ritual
00:57:13.380
act of concrete eating is the first form of assimilation known to man.
00:57:18.180
The assimilation and ingestion of the content, the eaten food, produces an inner change.
00:57:24.820
Transformation of the body cells through food intake is the most elementary of animal changes
00:57:31.420
How a weary, enfeebled, and famished man can be turned into an alert, strong, and satisfied
00:57:36.320
being, or a man perishing of thirst can be refreshed or even transformed by an intoxicating
00:57:42.360
This is, and must remain, a fundamental experience, so long as man shall exist.
00:57:47.800
Eric Newman's point being that our psychological experience of the capacity of psychological
00:57:55.560
transformation through eating is a metaphor waiting to be applied to the equivalent experience
00:58:01.920
that we obtain, the equivalent excitement and sense of transformative possibility that
00:58:06.660
we acquire as a consequence of coming across some new and truly valuable piece of information.
00:58:13.260
So you have the idea that the tree that stands at the center of the world, the individual
00:58:21.440
And the ingestion of that fruit, that idea say, or that piece of information is something
00:59:03.360
We know that the snake is utilized conceptually and metaphorically as representation of transformation, right?
00:59:11.100
Because the snake is something that can shed its skin and be reborn.
00:59:15.040
We know that a snake is something that's innately attractive and terrifying to human beings and other primates.
00:59:21.600
So that if you come across a snake, you're likely to be at least startled, if not horrified by it,
00:59:27.700
but also attracted to it in a way that is underneath your voluntary consciousness, right?
00:59:33.240
Because snakes attract orienting reflexes, and they activate the systems underneath your consciousness
00:59:38.660
that actually govern the structure of that consciousness.
00:59:41.920
We know that the snake can be well represented as well as internal chaos.
00:59:48.040
Imagine that it's not unreasonable for a self-conscious mind searching for a mode of self-representation
00:59:55.440
to remark on the parallels between the structure of the snake and the spine in the brain,
01:00:00.660
given that a snake is essentially a spine with a brain.
01:00:04.580
And then imagine as well that the most archaic aspects of our nervous system, those that govern novelty
01:00:10.800
and orienting and anxiety responses, are in fact precisely those that were described by McLean
01:00:19.980
And then imagine along with the Hindu yogis that the purpose of kundalini yoga is to activate
01:00:25.660
the circuitry that's associated with that snake, so to speak, to produce a permanent state of alert wakefulness
01:00:40.960
Imagine an animal like a zebra grazing mindlessly in the herd with no consciousness whatsoever.
01:00:49.080
And then imagine its relatively undeveloped cortical structures activated suddenly by the movement of a lion
01:00:58.120
And then imagine for that brief moment that that zebra is actually conscious, a state that requires a tremendous amount of energy
01:01:06.380
But because the threat and the uncertainty manifest itself within the zebra's mode of consciousness,
01:01:15.440
And then imagine that human beings are like that zebra always.
01:01:20.100
Because we've become self-conscious, because we know that the unknown is around us all the time,
01:01:25.440
even when we think we're safe, we're never safe.
01:01:28.660
Imagine that the reason we're so conscious is because as a consequence of our discovery of the possibility
01:01:34.500
of our own mortality, all this underlying circuitry that in other animals is only apparent when they're startled
01:01:41.420
or afraid or interested or curious, in human beings it's on all the time.
01:01:47.280
And the reason for that is because we developed enough cortical elaboration to note that we're always threatened
01:01:55.640
And then imagine that, well, that's pretty awful, isn't it?
01:01:59.020
Because it's at the basis of all our innate existential terror.
01:02:02.840
But then imagine as well that without that terror pushing us forward and our constant reference
01:02:09.620
to the dangerous aspect of the unknown, we would have never been motivated to produce the kind of societies
01:02:15.360
that we've produced, which are essentially very remarkably elaborated devices
01:02:21.580
that enable us to find some protection from that unknown and to manipulate it effectively.
01:02:28.340
And then remembering that story, we'll return to Genesis.
01:02:35.100
Jung says the snake was regarded by early Gnostic Christians as a kind of deity
01:02:40.800
whose faculties were more developed and advanced than the original deity that actually structured the world.
01:02:47.040
The idea there being that the world initially was a pretty dismal place.
01:03:00.820
And the movement from that state of unselfconsciousness paradise
01:03:10.720
but as an ascent of sorts, even though a painful one.
01:03:13.920
And then you have Goethe's commentary from Mephistopheles,
01:03:20.380
his representation of Satan and his capacity for temptation,
01:03:28.320
from dreams of godlike knowledge you will wake to fear
01:03:34.920
A statement associating the human tendency to attribute
01:03:41.060
to all revolutionary sources of new information
01:03:51.740
Now we know that within the context of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
01:03:56.100
women have unduly suffered for their role in tempting humanity
01:04:00.620
in the embodied form of Adam towards higher order self-consciousness.
01:04:05.840
And then you think, well, let's just take a look
01:04:08.020
at how human beings and their mating relationships
01:04:12.900
like chimpanzees to whom we are very closely genetically related.
01:04:16.560
And if you look at the mating strategies of female chimpanzees,
01:04:19.660
you see that they really don't care who they sleep with, so to speak.
01:04:26.020
Now, the less dominant male chimps tend to be chased away
01:04:31.540
but if a female and less dominant chip can get the hell away
01:04:34.700
from the watchful gaze of the dominance hierarchy,
01:04:43.700
And there's a tremendous body of evolutionary psychological information
01:04:47.660
that suggests that although both genders value intelligence
01:04:51.740
and physical appearance, females value the ability
01:04:56.400
to attain dominance hierarchy status in men far more
01:05:00.840
than men admire the ability to attain dominance status in women,
01:05:05.580
which is to say that men don't care what a woman has
01:05:09.640
with regards to potential for attaining status,
01:05:12.200
whereas with women, it's one of the strong determinants
01:05:16.440
So then let's say, look, we don't know why the hell
01:05:30.380
the whole human species had to exaggerate its cortical growth
01:05:37.860
just so that the men had an even hand in the competition, right?
01:05:41.940
So women put tremendous selection pressure on the human being
01:05:50.820
Now, we already know that from the mythological perspective
01:05:53.720
that women are frequently cast into the same conceptual domain,
01:05:58.040
the temptress domain, as the benevolent aspect of the unknown.
01:06:01.880
And we know as well from representations of hero mythology
01:06:04.660
that it is the individual who goes out to confront chaos
01:06:13.080
say, in the case of mythological representations
01:06:38.880
So Milton puts words into God's mouth and says,
01:07:10.380
of fundamentalist Southern Baptist lunatics, right?
01:07:33.940
Well, it's because that's how the story lays itself out.
01:07:42.460
You have multiple medieval representations of Eve
01:08:26.400
that that means a quick magnification of consciousness.
01:09:15.000
So before Adam and Eve figure out that they're naked,
01:09:21.060
They don't take any thought for the future, right?
01:09:30.200
Well, what happens after they become self-conscious?
01:09:48.020
Enraptured entirely by the actions of automatic instinct,
01:09:52.840
governed by processes that are completely transcendent.
01:09:59.080
There's no opposition between the animal and the world.
01:10:34.500
You think that whatever you are is so vulnerable
01:10:46.320
well, that's a pretty logical presupposition, right?
01:11:31.820
with the identity of logos and the individual, right?
01:11:44.580
A relationship between the limited and the limitless
01:11:57.200
Because you are a being with a tremendous history
01:12:04.980
What would cause you to hide from that destiny?
01:12:21.160
when I'm susceptible to social alienation, right?
01:12:38.420
Which is precisely what this little story says.