In this lecture, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson finishes the story of Noah and the Tower of Babel, and attempts to understand how God appears to Abraham multiple times in the Old Testament. He also discusses the possibility that God is in fact manifest in multiple forms, and how we can begin to understand this in the context of the Abrahamic stories. Dr. Peterson is a clinical psychologist, author, speaker, and author. He is the author of several books, including The Disappearance of God: A Guide to Understanding God's Real Presence. He is also the founder of the self-development program, Self-Authorizing, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times bestselling book, The God Who Wasn t There, as well as other publications such as The Huffington Post and The New York Post. With decades of experience helping patients with depression and anxiety, he offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and 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. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. B.P. Peterson's PODCAST by making a donation to his project, The Jordan B Peterson Project, which can be found at the link to his website, here. Go to which can help you support the project, Daily Wire Plus. . Go to Dailywireplus.org/thejordanepersonal/the-plus to become a supporter of the project and get a free copy of his latest book, "The Disappearance Of God." by clicking on the link below. Thank you, and let me know what you think of the book you've been listening to this episode? and share it with a friend! Thanks for listening and sharing it with someone you've listened to it on your social media or sharing it on the podcast, and I hope it helps someone else. Thank you! and I'll read it on Insta- . thank you, I'm looking forward to hearing from you. -J.B. Peterson -Jonotha Peterson, Jonotha,
00:00:00.000Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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00:00:52.000Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
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00:01:13.000Hello, everyone. Thank you again for showing up.
00:01:34.000So, tonight, we're going to finish off the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel.
00:08:02.000And I think the meaning of this story stood out for me.
00:08:08.000Sometimes, when you read complicated material, sometimes a piece of it will stand out.
00:08:13.000It's, for some reason, it's like it glitters, I suppose.
00:08:17.000That might be one way of thinking about it.
00:08:19.000It's, you're in sync with it, and you can understand what it means.
00:08:23.000I've really experienced that reading the Dao Te Ching, which is a document I would really like to do a lecture on at some point.
00:08:29.000Because some of the verses I don't understand, but others stand right out, and I can understand them.
00:08:33.000And I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant.
00:08:36.000And I think it means, you know, we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve.
00:08:42.000And the idea, essentially, was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability.
00:08:49.000The physical, your physical boundaries in time and space, and your physiological, your fundamental physiological insufficiencies as they might be judged by others.
00:09:03.000So, there's biological insufficiency that's sort of built into you because you're a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half-insane creature.
00:09:10.000And that's, that's just an existential truth.
00:09:12.000And then, of course, even merely as a human being, even with all those faults, there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be judged harshly by the group.
00:09:23.000Well, might be, will definitely be judged harshly by the group.
00:09:27.000And so, to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious, and to know your limits, and to know your vulnerability.
00:09:34.000And that's what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked.
00:09:41.000And so, the question is, what does it mean to see your father naked?
00:09:46.000And it seems to me, and especially in an inappropriate manner like this, it, it, it, it's, it's, it's as if Ham, he does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth.
00:10:00.000When, when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first gods, they're, they're the father of the eventual deity of redemption, Marduk.
00:10:11.000They're very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse.
00:10:17.000And that makes Tiamat enraged, and so she bursts forth from the darkness to, to do them in.
00:10:24.000It's, it's like a precursor to the flood story, or, or an analog to the flood story.
00:10:28.000And I, I see the same thing happening here with Ham, is that he's, he's insufficiently respectful of his father.
00:10:35.000And, and the question is exactly, what does the father represent?
00:10:38.000And you could say, well, there's, there's, there's the father that you have, and that's a human being, that's, that's a man like other men, a man among men.
00:10:46.000But then there's the father as such, and that's the spirit of the father.
00:10:49.000And, in so far as you have a father, you have both at the same time.
00:10:53.000You have the personal father, that's a man among other men, just like any one other's father.
00:10:59.000But, in so far as that man is your father, that means that he's something different than just another person.
00:11:06.000And what he is, is the incarnation of the spirit of the father.
00:11:11.000And, to see that, to take it, to what? To disrespect that carelessly.
00:11:17.000Maybe even, like, Noah makes a mistake, right? He, he produces wine and gets himself drunk.
00:11:23.000And, you might say, well, you know, if he's sprawled out there for everyone to see, it's hardly Ham's fault if he stumbles across them.
00:11:30.000But, the, the, the book is laying out a danger.
00:11:34.000And, the danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment.
00:11:40.000And, if you're disrespectful, then you transgress against the spirit of the father.
00:11:46.000And, if you transgress against the spirit of the father, and lose respect for the spirit of the father.
00:11:52.000Then, that is likely to transform you into a slave.
00:13:14.000Insofar as you're a cultural construction, then you're inhabited by the spirit of the father.
00:13:18.000And, to be disrespectful towards that, means to undermine the very structure that makes you, not all of what you are, certainly, certainly not all of what you are.
00:13:28.000But, a good portion of what you are, insofar as you're a socialized cultural entity.
00:15:33.000And, so maybe, the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify humiliating him.
00:15:40.000And, you know, I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an ark.
00:20:24.000It's only hinted at in very brief passages.
00:20:27.000And Milton wrote his poem to justify the ways of God to man, which is quite an ambition.
00:20:36.000Really, it's an amazing, profound ambition to try to produce something, to produce a literary work that justifies being to human beings.
00:20:48.000Because that's what Milton was trying to do.
00:20:50.000One of my readers here sent me a link the other day, for viewers, to a work of philosophy by an Australian philosopher,
00:20:58.000whose name I don't remember, who basically wrote a book saying that being as such, human experience is so corrupt and so permeated by suffering,
00:21:08.000that it would be better if it had never existed at all.
00:21:12.000It's sort of the ultimate expression of nihilism.
00:21:14.000And Goethe, in Faust, his Mephistopheles, who's a satanic character, obviously, has that as a credo.
00:21:22.000That's Satan's fundamental motivation is his objection to creation itself,
00:21:29.000is that creation is so flawed and so rife with suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all.
00:21:34.000And so that's his motivation for attempting to continue to destroy it.
00:21:39.000In Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan is an intellectual figure.
00:21:45.000And you see that motif emerge very frequently, by the way, in popular culture.
00:21:50.000So, for example, in The Lion King, the figure of Scar, who's a satanic figure, is also hyper-intellectual.
00:21:57.000And that's very common that, you know, it's the evil scientist motif, or the evil advisor to the king, the same motif.
00:22:04.000It encapsulates something about rationality, and what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that rationality, like Satan,
00:22:11.000is the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom.
00:22:14.000It's a psychological idea, you know, that the most powerful sub-element of the human psyche is the intellect.
00:22:21.000And it's the thing that shines out above all, within the domain of humanity, and maybe across the domain of life itself.
00:22:31.000The human intellect, there's something absolutely remarkable about it, but it has a flaw.
00:22:35.000And the flaw is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions, and to assume that they're total.
00:22:40.000Solzhenitsyn, when he was writing The Gulag Archipelago, had a warning about that, with regards to totalitarian ideology.
00:22:48.000And he said that, the price of selling your God-given soul to the entrapments of human dogma was slavery and death, essentially.
00:22:59.000And Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan decides that he can do without the transcendent.
00:23:11.000He can do without God, and that's why he foments rebellion.
00:23:14.000It's something like that. And the consequence of that, the immediate consequence from Milton's perspective was that,
00:23:20.000as soon as Satan decided that what he knew was sufficient, and that he could do without the transcendent,
00:23:28.000which you might think about as the domain outside of what you know, something like that,
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00:34:01.000And I think the meaning of this story stood out for me.
00:34:07.000Sometimes, when you read complicated material, sometimes a piece of it will stand out.
00:34:13.000It's, for some reason, it's like it glitters, I suppose.
00:34:16.000That might be one way of thinking about it.
00:34:18.000It's, you're in sync with it, and you can understand what it means.
00:34:22.000I've really experienced that reading the Dao Te Ching, which is a document I would really like to do a lecture on at some point.
00:34:28.000Because some of the verses I don't understand, but others stand right out, and I can understand them.
00:34:32.000And I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant.
00:34:35.000And I think it means, you know, we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve.
00:34:41.000And the idea, essentially, was that to know yourself naked, is to become aware of your vulnerability.
00:34:48.000The physical, your physical boundaries in time and space, and your physiological, your fundamental physiological insufficiencies, as they might be judged by others.
00:35:02.000So, there's biological insufficiency that's sort of built into you, because you're a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half-insane creature.
00:35:11.000And then, of course, even merely as a human being, even with all those faults, there are faults that you have that are particular to you, that might be judged harshly by the group.
00:35:22.000Well, might be, will definitely be judged harshly by the group.
00:35:26.000And so, to become aware of your nakedness, is to become self-conscious, and to know your limits, and to know your vulnerability.
00:35:33.000And that's what is revealed to Ham, when he comes across his father naked.
00:35:40.000And so, the question is, what does it mean to see your father naked?
00:35:44.000And it seems to me, and especially in an inappropriate manner like this, it's as if Ham...
00:35:55.000He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth, when Taimat and Apsu give rise to the first gods.
00:36:04.000They're the father of the eventual deity of redemption, Marduk.
00:36:10.000They're very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse.
00:36:16.000And that makes Taimat enraged, and so she bursts forth from the darkness to do them in.
00:36:23.000It's like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story.
00:36:27.000And I see the same thing happening here with Ham, is that he's insufficiently respectful of his father.
00:36:34.000And the question is, exactly what does the father represent?
00:36:37.000And you could say, well, there's the father that you have, and that's a human being, that's a man like other men.
00:39:42.000You know, it's just not possible. You're a cultural creation.
00:39:47.000And so Ham makes this desperate error and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father, something like that.
00:39:58.000He does it without sufficient respect.
00:40:00.000And the judgment is that not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants.
00:40:06.000And he's contrasted with the other two sons who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt, something like that.
00:40:14.000And so when they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect and don't capitalize on it.
00:40:23.000And maybe that makes them strong. That's what it seems to me.
00:40:27.000And so I think that's what that story means.
00:41:33.000And so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify humiliating him.
00:41:40.000And you know, I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an ark.
00:41:49.000Right? And that's the ark that, you can think about that as the ark that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers.
00:41:55.000That's the tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit.
00:44:14.000Behold, the people is one, and they all have one language, and now this they begin to do.
00:44:19.000And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
00:44:23.000Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
00:44:30.000So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth, and they left off to build the city.
00:44:37.000Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.
00:44:44.000And from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
00:44:49.000It's a very difficult story to understand.
00:44:52.000On the face of it, it doesn't seem to show God in a very good light.
00:44:56.000Although that happens fairly frequently in the Old Testament, as far as I can tell.
00:45:00.000But, you know, the thing to do, if you're reading in the spirit of the text, let's say, is to remember that it's God that you're talking about.
00:45:11.000And so, even though you might think that he's appearing in a bad light, your duty, as a reader, I suppose, is to assume that you're wrong and that what he did was right.
00:45:23.000And then you're supposed to figure out, well, how could it possibly be right?
00:45:26.000Because the axiomatic presupposition is that it's God, and whatever he does is right.
00:45:30.000And you might say, well, you can disagree with that.
00:45:32.000And it's also the case that some of the people that God talks to in the Old Testament actually disagree with him and convince him to alter his actions.
00:45:40.000But the point still remains that it's God, and if he's doing it, then, by definition, there's a good reason.
00:45:51.000There's an idea much later that John Milton develops in Paradise Lost, which is an amazing poem.
00:46:00.000It's a profound enough poem so that it's almost being incorporated into the biblical structure, I would say.
00:46:08.000So, the corpus of Christianity, post-Milton, was saturated by the Miltonic stories of Satan's rebellion.
00:46:19.000None of that's in the biblical texts. It's only hinted at in very brief passages.
00:46:26.000And Milton wrote his poem to justify the ways of God to man, which is quite an ambition, really.
00:46:36.000It's an amazing, profound ambition to try to produce something, to produce a literary work that justifies being to human beings.
00:46:47.000Because that's what Milton was trying to do. One of my readers here sent me a link the other day, or viewers, to a work of philosophy by an Australian philosopher,
00:46:57.000whose name I don't remember, who basically wrote a book saying that, being as such, human experience is so corrupt and so permeated by suffering,
00:47:07.000that it would be better if it had never existed at all.
00:47:11.000It's sort of the ultimate expression of nihilism.
00:47:13.000And Goethe, in Faust, his Mephistopheles, who's a satanic character, obviously, has that as a credo.
00:47:21.000That's Satan's fundamental motivation, is his objection to creation itself, is that creation is so flawed and so rife with suffering,
00:47:31.000that it would be better if it had never existed at all.
00:47:34.000And so that's his motivation for attempting to continue to destroy it.
00:47:39.000In Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan is an intellectual figure, and you see that motif emerge very frequently, by the way, in popular culture.
00:47:50.000So, for example, in The Lion King, the figure of Scar, who's a satanic figure, is also hyper-intellectual.
00:47:57.000And that's very common, that, you know, it's the evil scientist motif, or the evil advisor to the king, the same motif.
00:48:04.000It encapsulates something about rationality, and what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that rationality, like Satan, is the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom.
00:48:13.000It's a psychological idea, you know, that the most powerful sub-element of the human psyche is the intellect.
00:48:20.000And it's the thing that shines out above all, within the domain of humanity, and maybe across the domain of life itself.
00:48:30.000The human intellect, there's something absolutely remarkable about it, but it has a flaw.
00:48:34.000And the flaw is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions, and to assume that they are total.
00:48:39.000Solzhenitsyn, when he was writing The Gulag Archipelago, had a warning about that, with regards to totalitarian ideology.
00:48:48.000And he said that, the price of selling your God-given soul to the entrapments of human dogma was slavery and death, essentially.
00:48:57.000And Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan decides that he can do without the transcendent, he can do without God.
00:49:11.000And that's why he foments rebellion. It's something like that.
00:49:14.000And the consequence of that, the immediate consequence from Milton's perspective, was that as soon as Satan decided that what he knew was sufficient,
00:49:24.000and that he could do without the transcendent, which you might think about as the domain outside of what you know, something like that, immediately he was in hell.
00:49:34.000And, when I read Paradise Lost, I was studying totalitarianism, and I thought, you know, the poet, the true poet, like a prophet, is someone who has intimations of the future.
00:49:48.000And maybe that's because the poetic mind, the philosophical or prophetic mind, is a pattern detector, and there are people who can detect the underlying, it's like the melody of a nation.
00:50:00.000Melody, as in song, the song of a nation, and can see how it's going to develop across the centuries.
00:50:05.000You see this, you see that in Nietzsche, because Nietzsche, for example, in the mid, you know, around 1860 or so, I mean, he prophesied what was going to happen in the 20th century.
00:50:14.000He said that, he said specifically that the specter of communism would kill millions of people in the 20th century.
00:50:21.000It's an amazing prophecy. He said that in the notes that became Will to Power.
00:50:25.000And Dostoevsky was of the same sort of mind, someone who was in touch enough with the fundamental patterns of human movement that they could extrapolate out into the future and see what was coming.
00:50:39.000And, I mean, some people are very good at detecting patterns, you know, and Milton, I think, was of that sort.
00:50:47.000And, I think he had intimations of what was coming as human rationality became more and more powerful and technology became more and more powerful.
00:50:56.000And the intimation was that we would produce systems that dispensed with God, that were completely rational and completely total, that would immediately turn everything they touched into something indistinguishable from hell.
00:51:10.000And Milton's warning was, it's embodied in the poem, is that the rational mind that generates a production and then worships it as if it's absolute immediately occupies hell.
00:51:25.000So what does that have to do with the Tower of Babel?
00:51:29.000Well, you know what, back in 2008, when we had that economic collapse, this strange idea emerged politically, and that was the idea of too big to fail.
00:51:44.000And I thought about that idea for a long time, because I thought, there's something deeply wrong with that.
00:51:50.000Because one of the things that made Marx wrong was, Marx believed that capital would flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
00:52:01.000And that the dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed.
00:52:07.000And, like so many things that Marx said, that's, it's kind of true.
00:52:14.000It's kind of true in that, the distribution of wealth, in fact, the distribution of anything that's produced, follows a Pareto pattern.
00:52:24.000And the Pareto pattern, basically, is that a small proportion of people end up with the bulk of the goods.
00:52:29.000And it isn't just money, it's anything that people produce creatively, ends up in that distribution.
00:52:37.000And that's actually, the economists call that the Matthew Principle, and they take that from a statement in the New Testament.
00:52:43.000And the statement is, to those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.
00:52:49.000And it's, it's a map of the manner in which the world manifests itself, where human creative production is involved.
00:52:57.000And the map seems to indicate that as you start to produce, and you're successful, the probability that you will continue to be successful or accelerate increases as you're successful.
00:53:06.000And as you fail, the probability that you will fail starts to accelerate.
00:53:10.000So, your progress through life looks like this, or like this, something like that.
00:53:16.000And the reason that Marx was right, was because he noted that as a feature of the capitalist system.
00:53:24.000The reason that he was wrong is that it's not a feature that's specific to a capitalist system.
00:53:29.000It's a feature that's general to all systems of creative production that are known.
00:53:34.000And so it's like a natural law, and it's enough of a natural law, by the way, that the distribution of wealth can be modeled by physical models,
00:53:42.000using the same equations that govern the distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum.
00:53:47.000So it's a really profound, it's a fundamentally profound observation about the world, the way the world lays itself out.
00:53:54.000And it's problematic, because if resources accrue unfairly to a small minority of people, and there's a natural law-like element to that, that has to be dealt with from a social perspective.
00:54:10.000Because if the inequality becomes too extreme, then the whole system will destabilize.
00:54:17.000And so you can have an intelligent discussion about how to mitigate the effects of the transfer of creative production into the hands of a small number of people.
00:54:29.000Now, the other reason, however, having said that, the other reason that Marx was wrong, there's a number of them.
00:54:36.000One is that, even though creative products end up in the hands of a small number of people, it's not the same people consistently across time.
00:54:49.000It's the same proportion of people. And that's not the same thing.
00:54:53.000You know, like, imagine that there's water going down a drain, and you say, well, look at the spiral.
00:54:58.000It's permanent. You think, well, the spiral's permanent, but the water molecules aren't. They're moving through it.
00:55:03.000And it's the same, in some sense, with the Pareto distribution, is that there's a 1%, and there's always a 1%, but it's not the same people.
00:55:10.000And the stability of it differs from culture to culture.
00:55:16.000But there's a lot of movement in the upper 1%, a tremendous amount of movement.
00:55:20.000And one of the reasons for that movement is that things get large, and then they get too large, and then they collapse.
00:55:29.000And so, in 2008, when the politicians said, too big to fail, they got something truly backwards, as far as I can tell.
00:55:38.000And that was, it was a reverse, the statement was reversed. It should have been, so big it had to fail.
00:55:48.000And that's what I think the story of the Tower of Babel is about. It's a warning against the expansion of a system until it encompasses everything.
00:56:01.000It's a warning against totalitarian presumption.
00:56:04.000So what happens, for example, when people set out to build the Tower of Babel, is they want to build a structure that reaches to Heaven.
00:56:11.000Right? So the idea is that it can replace the role of God. It's something like that.
00:56:19.000It can erase the distinction between Earth and Heaven. And so there's a utopian kind of vision there, as well.
00:56:25.000We can build a structure that's so large and encompassing, that it can replace Heaven itself.
00:56:34.000And that's an interesting, the fact that that doesn't work, and that God objects to it, is also extraordinarily interesting.
00:56:40.000And it's an indication to me of the unbelievable profundity of these stories.
00:56:44.000It's like, I think one thing we should have learned from the 20th century, but of course didn't, was that there's something extraordinarily dangerous about totalitarian utopian visions.
00:56:54.000That's something Dostoevsky wrote about, by the way, in his great book, Notes from Underground.
00:56:59.000Because Dostoevsky had figured out, by the early 1900s, that there was something very, very pathological about a utopian vision of perfection.
00:57:10.000And in Notes from Underground, he demolishes the notion of utopia.
00:57:15.000One of the things he says that I loved, it's so brilliant.
00:57:18.000He said, imagine that you brought the socialist utopia into being.
00:57:22.000And Dostoevsky says that human beings had nothing to do, except eat, drink, and busy themselves with the continuation of the species.
00:57:35.000He said that the first thing that would happen, under circumstances like that, would be that human beings would go mad and break the system.
01:30:43.500And so, we don't understand how it can be that that occurs.
01:30:49.500But it's nicely documented by Griffiths' team.
01:30:52.500In this experiment, he gave psilocybin to people who were dying of cancer.
01:30:58.500Cancer patients often develop chronic, clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety.
01:31:05.500Previous studies suggest that psilocybin may decrease depression and anxiety in cancer patients.
01:31:10.500Aldous Huxley took LSD on his deathbed, by the way.
01:31:13.500So, the idea that there was something about psychedelic substances that could buffer people against the catastrophes of mortality is an idea that's as old as experimentation with the drug itself.
01:31:31.500The effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life-threatening diagnoses.
01:31:37.500And symptoms of depression and or anxiety.
01:31:41.500I don't really know if it's reasonable to describe the emotional state of people diagnosed with cancer of uncertain prognosis or mortal significance as depression, precisely.
01:31:58.500You know what I mean, is that if you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have intractable fatal cancer.
01:32:04.500The normative response is to be rather upset and anxious about that.
01:32:09.500And so, one of the things that bothers me about clinical psychiatry and clinical psychology is the automatic presupposition that even overwhelming states of negative emotion are properly categorized as depression.
01:32:20.500Because I don't think you're depressed when you get a cancer diagnosis.
01:32:24.500I don't think that's the right way to think about it.
01:32:52.500We're gonna take people who have uncertain diagnosis of cancer that are potentially life-threatening and we're going to give them psychedelics.
01:34:25.500And that's an interesting, it's a subtle and scientifically sparse statement, but it's a very interesting one.
01:34:32.500It was the, there's a, there's an intimation of a causal relationship here.
01:34:39.500Increases in quality of life, life meaning and decreases in death anxiety.
01:34:44.500I mean the intimation there is that one of the ways of decreasing your anxiety about death is to increase the felt meaning in your life.
01:34:53.500And the psilocybin dosages potentiate that, but it's a good thing to know in a general manner if it happens to be a generalizable truth, right?
01:35:02.500If you're terrified of mortality, terrified of vulnerability.
01:35:06.500There's always the possibility that the life path that you're following isn't rich enough to buffer you against the negative element of existence.
01:35:20.500And an optimistic one I think, although a difficult one.
01:35:23.500At six month follow-up, these changes were sustained.
01:35:26.500With about 80% of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety.
01:35:34.500Steven Ross, commenting about this, he was a co-investigator, said,
01:35:37.500It is simply unprecedented in psychiatry that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results.
01:35:44.500Right, which means we have no idea why this happens.
01:35:51.500Participants attributed improvements in attitudes about life, self, mood, relationships, and spirituality to the high dose experience with more than 80% endorsing moderately or greater increased wellbeing and life satisfaction.
01:36:09.500Mystical type psilocybin experience on session day mediated the effect of psilocybin dose on therapeutic outcomes.
01:36:17.500What that means is that, well, when researchers were trying to look at a causal relationship between drug ingestion and the positive outcome.
01:36:25.500The causal relationship was drug ingestion, mystical experience, positive outcome.
01:36:30.500It wasn't drug ingestion, positive outcome.
01:36:33.500There had to be the experience produced by the pharmaceutical agent in order for the pharmaceutical agent to have had its effect.
01:36:40.500Now, we don't, again, we don't know why that is either.
01:36:43.500I mean, maybe some people needed a higher dose.
01:39:27.500And you know, there's been other neurological experiments, too.
01:39:30.500There's, there's a researcher, a Canadian researcher, if I remember correctly, who invented something he called the God Helmet.
01:39:36.500And it used electromagnetic stimulation, brain stimulation, to induce mystical experiences.
01:39:43.500Now, I don't remember what part of the brain he was shutting off, or activating with that particular gadget.
01:39:48.500But, and you know, there's, there's, there's all, there's all sorts of other indications of this sort of thing,
01:39:56.500that have cropped up in a, in other domains of the neurological literature, for example.
01:40:02.500It's very common for people who are epileptic, to have religious experiences, as part of the prodroma to the actual seizure.
01:40:12.500That was the case with Dostoevsky, for example.
01:40:14.500Who had incredibly intense religious experiences, that would culminate in epileptic seizure.
01:40:20.500And he said that they were of sufficient quality, that he would give up his whole life, to have had them.
01:40:26.500And the funny thing, too, is that, in my reading of Dostoevsky, at least, is that,
01:40:31.500I think that epileptic seizures, and the associated mystical experiences, were part of what made him a transcendently brilliant author.
01:40:39.500I don't think that he would have broken through, into the domains of insight, that he possessed, without those strange neurological experiences.
01:40:47.500And it was certainly not the case, that his epilepsy, or the experiences that were associated with it,
01:40:52.500produced, what you might describe as an impairment in his cognitive functions.
01:40:57.500Quite the contrary, at least that's how it looks to me.
01:41:00.500Here's another, here's another something worth considering.
01:41:08.500And I don't know how important it is, but it might be really important.
01:41:11.500Depends on how important, this is something that Carl Jung said, so it depends on how important Jung is.
01:41:17.500Now, Freud established the field of psychoanalysis, and with it, investigation, I would say.
01:41:26.500Rigorous investigation into the contents of the unconscious.
01:41:29.500A modern psychologist and psychiatrist like to, what would you say, denigrate Freud.
01:41:35.500But, and I think there's a reason for that.
01:41:37.500I think that Freud's fundamental insights were so profound, and so valuable, that they got immediately absorbed into our culture.
01:41:43.500And now they seem self-evident, and so that all that's left of Freud is his errors.
01:41:47.500You know, because we believe everything else, we believe all the profound things he discovered.
01:41:52.500We just take them for granted, and so we don't believe the things that he said that weren't quite on the money.
01:41:57.500And that's all we credit him with now.
01:42:00.500But he was certainly the first person who brought up the idea of the unconscious in a rigorous manner.
01:42:06.500And he was the first person to do a rigorous examination of dreams.
01:42:10.500Because the interpretation of dreams is a great book, it's well worth reading.
01:42:13.500And he was the first person to note that people were, in some sense, inhabited by sub-personalities that had a certain degree of autonomy and independent life.
01:42:23.500Brilliant observation. The cognitive psychologists haven't caught up with that at all yet.
01:42:28.500Jung was profoundly affected by Freud. Jung was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and by Freud. Those were his two main intellectual influences.
01:42:41.500I don't think one more than the other.
01:42:44.500He split with Freud on the religious issue. That was what caused the disruption in their relationship.
01:42:51.500And I think it's an extremely interesting historical occurrence. It might be of profound significance.
01:42:57.500Freud believed that the fundamental myth of the human being was the Oedipal myth.
01:43:03.500And the Oedipal myth, from a broader perspective, is a failed hero story.
01:43:08.500So the Oedipal myth is the myth of a man who develops, who grows up, but then accidentally becomes too close to his mother, sleeps with her.
01:43:20.500He doesn't know who she is and, as a consequence, blinds himself.
01:43:23.500And there's a warning about human development gone wrong in that story.
01:43:30.500And I think that Freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well.
01:43:33.500Because human beings have a very long period of dependency.
01:43:37.500And one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that many people's problems are associated with their inability to break free of their family.
01:43:48.500Like they're consumed by the family drama, right?
01:43:51.500They can't get beyond what happened to them in their family.
02:27:28.500He said that the image of God dwells within.
02:27:30.500That's not the same thing as God dwelling within, right?
02:27:33.500Because we could, I mean, all of these capacities that we have for transcendent consciousness could be a byproduct of biological evolution.
02:27:49.500The transcendent reality seems to manifest itself as an element of experience.
02:27:52.500But that doesn't mean that it has a reality outside of the subjective.
02:27:55.500Even if it's, even if it exists, as it clearly does.
02:27:59.500But, Friedman suggests that what's happening in the biblical narrative is the sequential emergence of the individual as a redemptive force.
02:28:20.500And that the Old Testament documents that implicitly, unconsciously, as a consequence of descriptive fantasy.
02:28:29.500And that that's what's going on in the book.
02:28:31.500And that, so, the cosmos is under the control of generic deity to begin with, something like that.
02:28:40.500And then that control shifts to localized, identifiable, increasingly personal and detailed individuals.
02:28:49.500And you see that in Noah, and then you see it in Abraham, and then you see it in Moses.
02:28:54.500And then there's this working out of what it would mean to be a fully developed individual.
02:28:59.500And that's what these stories, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're like prototypes.
02:29:04.500They're, they're attempts to, to, to bring about the proper mode of being.
02:29:09.500Right? And so Abraham is a, is a manifestation of that.
02:29:12.500Because he enters into a covenant with God.
02:29:14.500He's selected by God, or enters into a partnership with God.
02:29:57.500They're still put forth as potential modes of proper, models of potential, proper being in the world.
02:30:04.500And the entire corpus of the Bible seems to be nothing but an attempt to keep throwing up variants of the personality.
02:30:12.500Trying to experiment to find out what personality works in the world.
02:30:18.500And, of course, from a Christian perspective, that culminates in the figure of Christ as the redemptive word.
02:30:24.500And that's associated, as we've already talked about, with the force that brought order out of chaos at the beginning of time.
02:30:32.500And so, well, that's my attempt to provide proper context for the understanding of the Abrahamic stories.
02:30:44.500And so, hopefully, with that context, we can move forward, being able to swallow the camel, so to speak, of the initial presence of God in the stories.
02:30:57.500And so, we'll return to all of that, next week.
02:31:21.500Okay, until people have an opportunity to leave.
02:31:24.500I would very much like to ask the people who are asking the questions, to take a few seconds before they ask the question, and make sure that the mic is positioned properly, so that everyone can hear you.
02:31:35.500Because people keep writing and complaining that, while they're very happy with the questions, and I would say the questions have been of very high caliber so far, but they're not very happy that they can't hear them.
02:31:45.500So, I know that, you know, you're obviously nervous and in a hurry when you want to ask a question, but take a second or two to set the mic up properly, and make sure that everyone can hear you.
02:32:00.500Tonight, I'd like to ask you about two different psychological disorders.
02:32:04.500The first being borderline personality disorder.
02:32:07.500So, two lectures ago, somebody asked you about it, and you gave a very sparse answer.
02:32:14.500I can't remember exactly what you said, but it seemed like it was, there was too much complexity to just answer it right there and then.
02:32:23.500And then somebody else also asked you about the same disorder in your Patreon livestream recently.
02:32:30.500And when they asked you that, you kind of stopped for a moment, and something, I don't know, something kind of flicked on in your head, it seemed like.
02:32:40.500And you thought for a couple seconds, and then you said, you know what, I don't think that I can answer that right now, because it's just too, it's just too bloody complex.
02:32:49.500And I was wondering, just like many young men have gravitated towards your lectures, do you think that there's something about this particular disorder that, there's something about people with this particular disorder that might gravitate to your insights and your lectures?
02:33:08.500Okay, okay, so, I would say probably no to the second one, but I could comment more about borderline personality disorder.
02:33:15.500I think I have enough mental energy to do that tonight.
02:33:18.500So, technically speaking, it's often considered the female variant of antisocial personality disorder.
02:33:26.500So, it's classified in the domain of externalizing disorders, acting out disorders.
02:33:35.500And I think what happens, we don't understand borderline personality disorder very well.
02:33:41.500And it's characterized by tremendous impulsivity, radical confusion of identity, and then this pattern of idealization of people with whom the person afflicted with the disorder is associating with radical idealization of those people, and then radical devaluation of them.
02:34:07.500And then there's another theme that sort of weaves along with it, which is the proclivity of people with borderline personality disorder to presume that they will be abandoned.
02:34:18.500And then to act in a manner that makes such abandonment virtually certain.
02:34:23.500And so, it's a very complicated disorder, but that, I think, gets at the crux of it.
02:34:31.500One of the things that's interesting about people with borderline personality disorder, in my experience, is that they're often quite intelligent.
02:34:40.500And you see in the person with borderline personality disorder something like the waste or the squandering of tremendous potential.
02:34:50.500They seem capable of thinking through the nature of their problems, and analyzing them, and discussing it, but not capable whatsoever of implementing any solutions.
02:35:01.500Technically, there's no relationship between IQ and conscientiousness.
02:37:43.500And the funny thing is, when a two-year-old does it, it's like it's, you know, it's a little off-putting.
02:37:48.500But when an adult does it, it's completely bloody terrifying.
02:37:53.500And it happens very frequently with borderlines.
02:37:55.500And so, I would also say to some degree, they didn't get properly socialized between that critical period of development between two and four.
02:38:03.500And you see the same thing with adult males who grow up to be antisocial.
02:38:06.500Because a large proportion of adult males who grow up to be antisocial are aggressive as children.
02:39:44.500But I don't know if a higher proportion of the ones who show up at protests and sort of creep me out are...
02:39:49.500I don't know if there's a higher proportion of people like that at the protests or not.
02:39:54.500I mean, I suspect in general that regardless of the protest,
02:39:59.500the proportion of people who have personality disorders among protestors is higher than the proportion of people who have personality disorders in the general population.
02:40:07.500Because you just expect that. You just expect that kind of acting out behavior.
02:40:11.500I'm not, believe me, I'm not saying that all protest is associated with personality disorder.
02:40:15.500I'm not saying that at all. There's plenty of reason for protest.
02:40:18.500But some of the reason for protests are credible reasons and some of them aren't credible reasons.
02:40:23.500And I was just thinking that, like, the social justice hierarchy, so to speak, would be one of the last that these confused men...
02:40:31.500That's, that's, that's a different issue. You know, there are, there are analysis of the dangers of agreeableness.
02:40:38.500So agreeableness is a personality trait that underlies the radical egalitarian ethos.
02:40:44.500Because agreeable people want everything to be shared equally.
02:40:47.500And it's a good, I think it's a good ethos for a small group, for a family.
02:40:51.500Because a family is kind of a communist system in some sense, right?
02:40:55.500It's like, you want the food to be divided up equally among the children, clearly.
02:40:59.500And you want all the children, sort of regardless of their inherent abilities, to have the same opportunities and perhaps even the same outcomes.
02:41:06.500So I think agreeableness, which is associated, at least in part, with maternal, maternal, the maternal instinct, let's say.
02:41:13.500Maternal patterns of behavior. I think it's a, it's a good first-pass motivational approximation to a localized familial ethic.
02:41:23.500I think it's a catastrophe at larger scales. I don't think it scales at all.
02:41:28.500I actually think that's why we evolved conscientiousness.
02:41:31.500Because conscientiousness is the principle that allows larger scale organizations to exist.
02:41:48.500We don't have a pharmacological model.
02:41:50.500And we really only have one way of assessing it, which is self and other reports of personality proclivity.
02:41:56.500So, anyways, the problem with agreeableness, this has been modeled by game theorists, is that a population of cooperative people can be dominated by a single shark.
02:42:11.500So, agreeableness is insufficient as a principle.
02:42:16.500Because it opens itself up to, um, what do you call that?
02:42:50.500I had, uh, one quick comment and a question.
02:42:52.500Uh, so my comment was about your idea of, um, sub-personalities as, uh, one-eyed monsters.
02:42:57.500Now, there's the idea of, uh, multiple personality or split personality disorders controversial as to whether or not it exists.
02:43:04.500But there's some research, recent research that suggests that, um, you may actually have multiple personalities that use different parts of the brain.
02:43:13.500So they have differential access to the hippocampus.
02:43:16.500And, um, they can, um, they, they use the brain differently.
02:43:20.500But that seems to be an exaggeration of, um, sub-personalities to me, which is quite interesting.
02:43:26.500Um, the question I had was about, um, so you talked about Jung and how, um, you should confront that which you don't want to confront the most or you're most afraid of or disgusted by.
02:43:41.500Um, so, but we were talking about psychedelics and, uh, and the experience of hell.
02:43:46.500So, uh, at least some of the people I've talked to, they describe negative trips as, um, an experience of, uh, of constant fear, prolonged fear.
02:43:58.500And, um, some of the most, um, dramatic and personalized fear that they've ever experienced.
02:44:04.500So, shouldn't, uh, negative, um, psychedelic trips elicit the kind of confrontation that, uh, Jung thought you should engage in?
02:44:17.500You know, it, it, I, it's conceivable that, I read this strange book once that made the claim that what was in the Ark of the Covenant was a mixture
02:44:33.500that was made from Amanita Muscaria mushrooms.
02:44:37.500And that's not as far-fetched as you might think.
02:44:40.500Because there was a mycologist, an amateur mycologist named Gordon Wasson,
02:44:45.500who established credibly the notion that it was Amanita Muscaria potions that was the soma of the Rig Veda.
02:44:56.500And so, it's a strange idea, but, it's not an idea that's completely outside of the realm of possibility.
02:45:05.500Um, and the Amanita Muscaria is the fly agaric, a red mushroom with white dots.
02:45:14.500And it's used in shamanic rituals in across Asia.
02:45:17.500And it's apparently not toxic in its dried form, although that is not a recommendation.
02:45:24.500You know, this is serious, serious and dangerous speculation and material.
02:45:31.500One of the things that the priests had to do before they communed with what was ever in the Ark of the Covenant was purify themselves.
02:45:42.500And so, one possibility is that the bad psychedelic experience is a involuntary confrontation with what Jung would describe as the shadow.
02:45:56.500It's like, so, beware of experimenting with substances that produce divine revelations if you're in a serious state of disorder.
02:46:08.500And I do think that is what happens to people, is that they encounter everything about them that's chaotic and out of place.
02:46:17.500And some people get trapped in that and they can't get beyond it.
02:46:20.500And that's because there's so much of it.
02:46:23.500And so, but we don't know enough to know.
02:46:59.960It's about inspiration, because you talk about inspiration quite a bit in this lecture series.
02:47:04.560And also, I wanted to point out, you have, I guess, a 45-minute armchair discussion,
02:47:10.520which you have a video of, of one paragraph of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, which you posted.
02:47:15.240And it seems like you're awestruck at the structure and the choices and, I guess, the ideas contained in various layers of this paragraph.
02:47:26.620And you're inspired, and that inspires you to, I guess, do your work that you do.
02:47:31.980I encountered, I guess, a similar phenomenon here with one sentence written by the great Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.
02:47:41.040And, I mean, this one sentence answers the question, why do people search for God?
02:47:47.820And if you could read it out and then deconstruct it, it's one sentence.
02:47:56.340It's at the end of page 105, if you want to read it from the book, or I just...
02:48:00.600That's the question that human existence not only poses, but itself is.
02:48:07.840The inconclusiveness inherent in it, the bounds it comes up against, and that yet yearn for the unbounded.
02:48:14.640More or less in the sense of Nietzsche's assertion that all pleasure yearns for eternity, yet experiences itself as a moment.
02:48:20.760This simultaneity of being limited and of yearning for the unbounded and open has always prevented man from resting in himself.
02:48:29.040Made him sense that he is not self-sufficient, but only comes to himself by going outside himself and moving toward the entirely other and infinitely greater.
02:51:20.440Or do you want to strive towards what's better?
02:51:23.940And this young man, this Australian, he said that the reason that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had such an impact on him was because...
02:51:31.120Because he wasn't happy with his current mode of being, right?
02:51:34.760He didn't consider the manner in which he conducted himself sufficient.
02:51:40.160And the fact that the author of Zen and it was Persig laid out the notion that you could make qualitative distinctions.
02:51:47.960And there really was a difference between good things and bad things or great things and evil things.
02:51:54.900It gives you the possibility of moving upward.
02:51:58.420And Ratzinger is pointing out, at least to some degree, that human beings are insufficient in and of themselves and need the movement upward.
02:52:06.980And so they need to conceptualize something like the highest good.
02:52:11.740And the thing is, is that there isn't any difference between conceptualizing the good and being judged.
02:52:20.020Because if you're going to conceptualize the good and move towards it, what you have to do is separate from yourself all those things that aren't good and leave them behind.
02:52:28.940And that's why the Redeemer and the Judge are the same thing.
02:52:32.500And one of the things that's really appalling, I think, about our modern world is that we're rejecting the notion of qualitative distinctions.
02:52:39.540You say, well, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying that one thing is better than another.