In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson talks about his new series, "Depression and Anxiety: A Guide to Recovery from Depression and Anxiety," which is a new series Dr. Peterson has created to help others struggling with anxiety and depression. With decades of experience helping patients with similar conditions, Dr Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and a roadmap towards healing. He provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. J.B. Peterson's new series on depression and anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. You can support these podcasts by donating to his PODCAST, which can be found in the description of his new project, "Self-Authoring: The Journey to Finding Your Way Forward". His self-development programs, self-authoring programs, Self-development and self-coaching programs, are found at selfauthoring.co.nz/thejordanpeterson and his podcast, "The Journey to a Brighter Future You Deserve", which is available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, Audio Book, and Audio Book format. and on Audible. . If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron! Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes, Podcharts or wherever else you re listening to this podcast can help spread the word about what you re consuming this podcast. listening to the podcast. It helps us spread awareness about what we re listening and sharing it everywhere else. Thank you, and spreading the word to others can be helpful, and we can help others do more of what we can do more effectively, everywhere we can be a better of a better day to others do better, more of a good day to you, everywhere else can help us connect more of that. Thanks for listening and more of us help us all benefit from this, more opportunities to reach more people like this, everywhere you can help more of this, thank you, more like that, more people everywhere and we re more of your voice matters more of it.
00:00:56.860Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating
00:01:01.800to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's
00:01:07.600self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.
00:01:12.020So I've been thinking this week about doing this once a month on a continuing basis. So I think if I do that,
00:01:40.160I think it'll be here, although it's harder to rent this theatre during the academic year. But if it isn't here,
00:01:45.100it'll be somewhere else. And because I'd like to continue doing this. I'm learning an awful lot from doing it. And once a month would really be good because then I could really do the background work and I could probably do that for a couple of years because obviously this isn't going very quickly.
00:02:01.160But that's okay. You know, I mean, it shouldn't go any faster than it can go. And that's how it seems to me anyways.
00:02:08.160Anyways, so this has been a very steep learning curve for me with regards to these stories because I didn't understand them very well.
00:02:21.920And I've got better at using the resources online to help me do my background investigation.
00:02:27.480I have a lot of books. And some of you may have noticed that online I posted a conversation I had with Jonathan Paggio and his brother, Matthew.
00:02:38.460I hope it's Matthew I renamed, escaped me so badly, but I believe that's right. He just finished a book on the Bible.
00:02:46.280And so I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories, trying to understand what they're about.
00:02:53.000And then there's all these commentaries. There's a great site, I think it's called Bible Hub, that has every single verse of the Bible is listed there.
00:03:02.460And then with each verse, there are like, they've aggregated 10 commentaries from, about 10 commentaries from over the last 400 years.
00:03:11.120And so there's like a dense page on every line.
00:03:15.500And that's one of the things that's really interesting about this book too, is that it's aggregated so much commentary that it's much bigger than it looks.
00:03:24.420The book is much bigger than it looks. And so it's been very interesting to become familiar with those too.
00:03:28.900And the fact that this site is set up with all the commentaries split up by verses means you can rapidly compare the commentaries and get a sense of, you know, how people have interpreted this over, well, at least several hundred years.
00:03:39.520But of course, much longer than that, because the people who wrote the commentaries were, of course, reading things that were older than that.
00:03:45.440So that's been very, very interesting.
00:03:51.380So last week we talked about a couple of things.
00:03:54.580We talked about how you might understand the idea of a divine encounter.
00:03:59.420And then we also paralleled that with the idea that God disappears in the Old Testament.
00:04:08.140And that seems to be an emergent property of the sequencing of the stories, right?
00:04:12.460Because all the books were written by independent people, different people.
00:04:16.020And then they were aggregated by other people.
00:04:18.200And so the narrative continuity is some kind of emergent property that's a consequence of this interaction between people, readers and writers over centuries.
00:04:27.920And it's strange that given that there are also multiple coherent narratives that unite it, you know?
00:04:33.380It's really not that easy to understand that, but it does at least seem to be the case.
00:04:37.700And so, and the third thing we talked about was that as God bows out, so to speak, the individual personality seems, of the characters that are involved, the human characters that are involved, seems to become more and more developed.
00:04:54.480And it isn't exactly clear what that, I mean, what it means is that God steps away and man steps forward.
00:05:00.640But why it's arranged like that, or the, say, ultimate significance of that is by no means clear.
00:05:07.480And so, so Abraham, who we're going to concentrate on today, is quite a well-developed character.
00:05:14.940And I would say there are two, there are multiple endings and beginnings in the biblical stories.
00:05:21.260The most important ending, I suppose, is the ending of the Garden of Paradise and the disenchantment of the world and the sending forth of Adam and Eve into history, right?
00:05:34.400Into the future, into a mode of being that has a future as part of it and that has history as part of it and that has the necessity of sacrifice and toil as part of it.
00:05:44.960That's obviously crucial and then that's, that is replayed with the story of Noah because everything is destroyed and then the world is created anew and then sacrifices have to be made in order for the world to begin.
00:05:56.120And then you see the same thing happen again after the Noah story in the Tower of Babel because history, as we really understand history, seems to start with Abraham because the stories of Abraham sound like historical stories.
00:06:08.900And, you know, scholars debate about the historical accuracy of the Bible and I suppose there's, there's no way of ever determining, once and for all, the degree to which you might regard the, the accounts as equivalent to modern empirical history.
00:06:22.860But, this is a psychological interpretation of the biblical stories, not a historical interpretation and it certainly does seem to be the case that from a psychological perspective, we enter something like the domain of the modern conceptualization, relatively modern conceptualization of history with Abraham.
00:06:40.940Beyond the accounts of divine commands that Abraham carries out, this is from Friedman, the man I mentioned in the last lecture, who wrote The Disappearance of God and a variety of other books that are well worth reading.
00:06:51.840The narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham acts on his own initiative.
00:06:56.640He divides land with his nephew Lot, he battles kings, he takes concubines, he argues with his wife Sarah.
00:07:02.640On two occasions he tells kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife.
00:07:10.160In the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness, there are, in the case of Abraham, the stories of a man's life.
00:07:15.340And one of the things I was really struck by, reading this in depth, and reading the commentary, is how much like a story about a person it is.
00:07:25.300You know, Abraham isn't a divine figure in any archetypal sense precisely.
00:07:30.840I mean, he has archetypal elements because he's also obviously the founder of a nation.
00:07:35.720But fundamentally, he's a human being, and he makes, he has the adventures, and he makes the mistakes of a human being.
00:07:42.640And that's, it's the mistake part that really struck me, you know, because I was talking with a friend of mine this week,
00:07:50.940Norman Doidge, who's a very remarkable person in many ways.
00:07:55.260And he was taking me to task, he was reading my book, which I'm going to publish, which will be out in January.
00:08:00.580And in the book, in one section, I contrasted the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament,
00:08:06.280and made the case, sort of based on Northrop Frye's ideas, that the God of the Old Testament was really harsh and judgmental, you know,
00:08:14.100and that the God of the New Testament was more merciful and, you know, at least to some degree, more sweetness and light.
00:08:20.880And Norman took me to task about that, saying that that was an overly Christianized interpretation,
00:08:26.860which would make sense because I derived it in part from Northrop Frye.
00:08:30.020And I really have come to understand that more, that he's right, because, that he's right about that,
00:08:35.360because the God in the Old Testament is actually far more merciful than he's generally made out to be.
00:08:41.180And you really see this with, it's good news, fundamentally, if you regard the representation of God as somehow key to the description of being itself.
00:08:50.080I mean, Abraham makes a lot of mistakes, you know, serious mistakes, and yet he has a life,
00:08:55.620and he's blessed by God, despite the fact that he's pretty deeply flawed and engages in deceptive practice.
00:09:01.360I mean, he's a good man, but he's not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination,
00:09:05.120and things work out really well for him, and he's the founder of a nation and all of that.
00:09:09.020And that's good news for everyone, because perfect people are very, very hard to find,
00:09:13.040and if the only pathway to having a rich and meaningful life was through perfection,