What To Do When Resentment Is Eating You Alive
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 32 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
sentences flagged
Toxicity
14
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Hate speech
65
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Summary
The story of Moses and the Israelites is an archetypal story. And what that means is that it s a story that has been stripped to its essence. The essence of the story is that is always happening, that s how it's true, and it will continue to happen. And that is the truth of the eternal narrative.
Transcript
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That's supersure.com. You can thank me later. Paid for by Supersure Insurance Agency, LLC,
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a licensed insurance agency. Hi, everybody. I hope you find this week's lecture
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interesting, compelling, and useful. I've also written and posted a diatribe against the climate
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change apocalypse mongers, outlining the true ecological significance of industrial carbon
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dioxide production. It's not what you think. It's certainly not what you've been told.
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Anyways, check it out if you're interested. I think it's one of the better journalism
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pieces that I've written. I have been writing a bit lately, so I think that's a good thing. I hope
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you agree. Note, the essay, the diatribe, is available on X at Jordan B. Peterson and on my
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blog. If you sign up to my newsletter, you'll get notified of these essays early. You can do that
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and that's a very interesting form of truth that's the the truth of the eternal narrative
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it's the truth of the story of of the individual and and and man and god
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always and forever that's a good way of thinking about it
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now there's a particular reason that moses gets the commandments
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and this is perhaps how they should be most deeply understood
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after the israelites are led away from tyranny and across the the chaos of the red sea
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they enter the desert where they wander for three generations 40 years
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it can take you forever to get to where you're headed
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also reflects something that's very much worth knowing
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Every person has to contend with the reality of tyranny
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in slavery so for example you might be the slave of your habits or the slave of your presumptions
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or the slave of your pride or the slave of your appetites those are all forces that
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tyrannize over you but that you enable with your slavish habits that's a good way of thinking
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about it you might be a tyrant in your marriage you might be a tyrant in your workplace you might
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be a tyrant in your utterances on X. You might be a tyrant to your children. You
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might live under a political tyranny. And you have to contend with the fact of
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And so, the landscape of tyranny and slavery
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is the landscape that everyone, by necessity, traverses.
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And the genuine leader, which is what Moses is,
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is the man who learns to stand up against the forces of tyranny
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and who forever leads those who are enslaved away from the tyrant across the sea of chaos
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into the desert and toward the promised land and the reason for that is is that
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we're always moving to some destination that we desire that's the journey of life is to move from
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the state or condition that we presently occupy to the next highest mountaintop and then after
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that to the mountaintop above that and then past that to the mountaintop past that and so on
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until the journey comes to an end. And then you might ask as well, why do you cross the Red Sea
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before you enter the desert after freeing yourself from tyranny? And the answer is,
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that's the inevitable bloody aftermath of the collapse of a tyranny and then in a period of
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chaos and confusion that can last for decades or lifetimes in the aftermath of that and if you
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want to know why people are willing to be the slaves even of their own tyranny one answer to
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that is that they're very loath to experience the red sea chaos and the sojourn in the desert
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lost that's the inevitable consequence of moving beyond even the foolish assumptions of a tyrannical
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state sometimes before you move from bad to better you move from bad to worse and the fact that you
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can move from bad to worse before moving to better is one of the things that forever keeps
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you locked in the kingdom of of what's undesirable it's a great mystery right because it's a very
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curious thing that it's unlikely that people will stand up against tyranny or reject even in the
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microcosm of their own life within the confines of their own mind within the strictures of their
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own marriage if you understand that when you leave tyranny you're lost then you understand
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why people are afraid to move forward even beyond that which is not desirable or acceptable to them
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and moses is the person who leads he's the embodiment of the spirit that forever leads people
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away from tyranny, across the Red Sea, and then through the lost desert.
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Now, what happens in the desert is that the Israelites lose faith.
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Well, it means that when you're lost, it's easy for you to despair,
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to lose the faith in the future that's a necessary precondition
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Even to lose faith in the goodness of not only being, but also of transformation itself.
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And the lost Israelites lose faith continually and in consequence.
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And because they were slaves for so long, they no longer know how to take responsibility for themselves.
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they can't regulate their own behavior they're hedonistic they're desirous of power and they
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fight amongst themselves because they don't have the experience or the good sense or the wisdom
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or even the desire to adopt responsibility for regulating their own conduct and that's part of
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the attraction of the hedonism that makes itself manifest in the story that i'll talk to you about
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tonight and instead of stepping forward to take responsibility so that they can adjudicate their
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own conflicts they call upon moses to act as their judge and that's how fractious infantile
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dependent slaves rekindle tyranny around them and so they ask moses to sit as judge
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and he's already somewhat contemptuous of them because they're so faithless and hedonistic and
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immature and puerile and whiny and impossible to lead and pining for the tyranny and and
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and irresponsible and he agrees to sit as judge and the israelites bring their troubles to him
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from dawn till midnight for a decade and all he does is hear their squabbles and adjudicate their
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disputes like the father of of fighting siblings imagine your favorite lecture dial that up on max
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put that on steroids and then add some cinematic elements to it that's the best way i could
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describe a peterson academy lecture i went to college because i had to i go to peterson academy
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because i want to i'm still paying off college from 10 years ago and i'm also still questioning
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The traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.
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They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.
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It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to
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If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.
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That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and
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You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.
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Now, you could understand that if you perform that role, as perhaps you do, in your positions
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of responsibility as parents and in the broader community, that in order to render a judgment
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that holds, you have to abide by the principles of natural justice.
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So if I'm sitting as a psychotherapist and I'm speaking to two married individuals who
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having a conflict and i'm listening to their planes in order for me to mediate between them
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so that they can come together without further tension and and turmoil i have to render a judgment
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let's say if i'm acting in the role of moses in that situation i have to render a judgment that
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they actually both find not only acceptable but perhaps even desirable which is a very difficult
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thing to manage a judge whose judgment stands isn't someone who forces either party to abide
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by an arbitrary dictate but someone who mediates the conflict such that both parties who are
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disagreeing view the new arrangement as preferable to the previous arrangement and to the conflict
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and even perhaps if the judgment isn't perfect it will stand if they themselves can't come up with
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better solution and so now imagine moses becomes the master of such judgment and he does that for
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a generation he builds up a tremendous amount of implicit knowledge about the structure of
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social psychological and social order itself and that sets the stage
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now his father-in-law jethro comes to him during this time and says something of extraordinary
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importance for the entire history of western civilization and likely the world he says you
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can't continue to do this and moses says why not and he says well first of all you're wearing
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yourself out you're taking responsibility for a hundred a hundred thousand people or more and
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no one can bear that burden and survive and so it's not good for you and it can't sustain itself
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and so that's not acceptable it's certainly not ideal and it's not even acceptable and then
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jethro says but it's worse than that what you're doing because by mediating the israelites disputes
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for them you take away from them the necessity for their own maturation that development you
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leave them as slaves and you're setting yourself up again as a pharaoh in the desert and so he
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tells Moses, in essence, that the man who's supposed to be the prophet of God is being
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tempted by the offer of power, and that that's a spiritual danger to him and a catastrophe
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for the Israelites, even though they might be happy about it, because it means they wouldn't
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have to bear any responsibility for determining their own way forward. And so, Jethro tells
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so if you and your wife can't get along you can go to the local representative of 10 and perhaps
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he can render a judgment and if he's unable to solve the problem then he can bump it up the
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new hierarchy of distributed responsibility to his representative and if that doesn't work then
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it can go up the chain of command another level and if it goes all the way up to the 10 thousands
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then Moses, who's the prophet of God, can step in
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And that is the erection of a distributed hierarchy of responsibility
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as the alternative to the tyrant and the slave.
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And that model only works if people take responsibility
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And to the degree that they take responsibility, they don't need a tyrant.
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And that means that the absence of tyranny in your country and the absence of slavery is not a consequence of the fact that you have rights,
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but a reflection of the fact that you bear the responsibility for governing yourself.
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And the politicians who wish to turn the polity into a nanny state that does nothing but cater to hedonistic infants should remember that all that does is call forth the spirit of tyranny.
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so moses is well prepared for the revelation of the law because he's put himself in a position
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to understand the structure of the law by rendering judgment in a professional capacity for
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for many many years for thousands and thousands of hours and he receives the revelation of the
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Ten Commandments and the Ten Commandments are the law and you might ask yourself well what is the
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law and you could say well it's the word received from on high and there's truth in that but it's
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an incomplete truth because the law is also a reflection of the customs and the behaviors of
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the people of any people who've managed to organize a mature self and a collective community that
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in the present that increase the probability of your future well-being and continued growth.
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That's part of maturation. But that's not the only part of maturation. The other part of
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maturation is that you learn to take turns, let's say, when you're somewhere between two and four,
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and learning to be a social creature or a communal creature. And what that means is that you
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sacrifice your immediate demands for the sake of the reciprocal relationship with others.
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And then you could imagine that the pattern of sacrifice that serves you as an individual best
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in the future and you as an individual in communal relationship with other people is the same
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pattern. And that's the pattern of maturity. And that pattern of future sacrifice and communal
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maturity is the essence of the behavioral patterns of a sustainable, productive,
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hospitable and generous society. And there's nothing about that that's
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morally relative. It's very unlikely that that situation, balanced that well, will
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emerge. Just as unlikely as it is that you'll attain a continual state of
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Productive and generous harmony within the confines of your marriage or your family, but that doesn't mean that it that state
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Has no existence and it doesn't mean that the pattern of that existence is arbitrary quite the contrary
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It means that the harmony that prevails between your current self and your future self and you as an isolated
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individual and everyone else is a is the straight narrow path that leads up Jacob's ladder to the kingdom of God
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right and that's built into the structure of that's built into the structure of reality itself
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and the law that comes to moses is an explicit representation of that underlying reality
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and moses has access to it first because he sits his judge and second because in a burst of
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revelatory intuition he can make explicit what up till then has only been implicit
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ritual and custom the emergence of the law is the description of the customs and rituals that
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unite a society and that constitute maturity and that's what Moses offers his people
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it takes Moses 40 days to journey up the mountain and to confer with God and to receive the
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revelation and to descend. And during that time, the state
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falls into the hands of Aaron. And Aaron is Moses' political
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wing. So when Moses is called upon to be a leader, which
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happens when he encounters the burning bush, which is a symbol
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of life, it's a symbol of life and its transformations, he
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objects to the call telling god that he's not the right man for the job because he's incapable of
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speaking in a manner that is attractive to the public and god says to moses
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two things nothing is impossible when it comes to god and second that
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Moses inadequacy is no excuse for his failure to
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Not least because the abandonment of that responsibility
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when moses leaves so this is when god vanishes right because moses is the prophetic voice
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when moses leaves the fractious slaves conspire with the political voice
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to regress into a state of materialistic hedonism that's what the worship of the golden calf
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signifies so a calf is a form of a calf in a in a in a tribal community in a nomadic tribal
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community of herders wealth is flock and a calf is a sig a calf is a symbol of stored value
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do you have a calf you have something to eat do you have a calf you have something to offer your
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guests it's wealth a golden calf is wealth as such and the worship of the golden calf is the worship
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of material wealth it's the worship of the treasure that rusts on earth the worship of the
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treasure that moths can destroy and not the worship of the treasure that's properly stored
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in heaven that nothing earthly can demolish right the worship of the golden calf that emerges as a
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consequence of the absence of the divine word mediated through moses is accompanied by
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orgaistic hedonistic celebration because moses returns to find the israelites not only
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worshipping an idol which is the idol of materialistic wealth but also dancing
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drunkenly naked in a manner that makes them the laughingstock of their enemies
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and if you can't see the relevance of that situation to the current state of
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the west then you're part of the problem and not part of the solution
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so moses is enraged as a consequence of the faithlessness of his people now you have to
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understand too that the israelites conspire with aaron to bring about this state of worship and
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that what that means is that the political voice unmoored from its concordance with the
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divine will serve as the handmaid of the materialist hedonist materialistic hedonism
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of the masses right that's the danger of an unbridled populism right it's consensus to the
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whim unmoored by respect for tradition and upward aim and it's it's also the invitation to tyranny
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because just as the slavish israelites attempted to transform moses into the pharaoh being unwilling
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as they were to bear the responsibility for their own life so the hedonistic materialists of the
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golden calf worship look to aaron to become the tyrant that has to regulate everyone if they
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insist upon acting like impulsive toddlers. Right.
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Moses is enraged by what's happened and by the faithlessness of his people. And this is
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also reflective of something that happens politically. So you could imagine that as
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the mob degenerates into hedonism and materialism the rulers called upon to bear the responsibility
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that the infantile rabble has abdicated become increasingly contemptuous of them and more and
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more likely to tyrannize over them in a manner that is reflective of nothing but the power that's
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granted to them by the abdication of responsibility and so there's a vicious spiral right as the
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populist degenerates into short-term immature materialist hedonism and the rulers gather up
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all the responsibility and use it as power they become simultaneously contemptuous
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of the people they're called upon to regulate and treat them worse and worse and that's the spiral
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the temptation to power is always the temptation of the person who's called to lead.
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And it's the temptation of power that's actually Moses' Achilles' heel
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and the eventual reason why he's forbidden to enter the Promised Land.
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There's another meaning of the dashing of the tablets.
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And what that means is that as individuals and societies degenerate,
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into an immature and infantile power mad materialistic hedonism their ability to attend
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to the divine voice of adventure and truth that calls them force calls them forth and
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the willingness and capacity to attend to the dictates of their own conscience
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becomes muddied and unclear in the gospels christ tells those who search for the sins of others to
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take the beam out of their own eye the log before searching for the dust mode in the eye of their
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neighbor and it's a reflection of the same idea that as you practice what is immature and narrowly
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self-serving, instead of aiming upward and sacrificing responsibly, your ability to maintain
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contact with the divine instinct that moves you properly forward is damaged and possibly beyond
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repair. And even in the aftermath of your foolishness, if you repent and atone, it's not
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necessarily the case that you'll be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together. And what happens in
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the Exodus story is that the Israelites get a second set of commandments, but this time they're
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written by man and not God. And that's an indication of the fact, twofold fact, that God
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has decided to recede into the distance as a consequence of the faithlessness and sin of the
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israelites and a consequence of the fact that the secondary covenant that's thereby generated by
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even moses the prophet of god is of secondary value compared to the genuine voice of adventure
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and calling and conscience that speaks to everyone from within that would guide them properly
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even in the absence of law if they refuse to pervert their own vision right
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god tells the israelites at the same time well first of all he threatens to destroy them which
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he does quite with some stunning regularity and that's a characteristic of the old testament god
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that makes the atheist materialists of the modern age into prideful critics of the spirit of the
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old testament claiming as they might that no good god would act in such a way and it's an absolute
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mystery to me that in the aftermath of the bloody and catastrophic 20th century where we saw
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the dismal descent of states of of massive states like nazi germany and maoist china and soviet
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divine order that would properly guide them
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that the necessary and inevitable consequence of that is the opening up of the abyss of hell and
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everyone's descent into it and that is a reality that threatens continually that's portrayed in
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the old testament corpus as the inevitable consequences of departure from the straight
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narrow path and there's nothing about that however terrible that might be that isn't 100
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percent true it's like walk off the path not only at your peril but at the peril of everyone you
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love and everything you hold dear right and you people in the united states have remembered that
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well for some 250 years and god help us all if you forget it
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moses maintains faith with god and that means that the fate of the israelites themselves is now
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dependent on the unmarred relationship between one man and the divine pathway forward and that's a
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terrifying state but there's a psychological truth that's embedded in it as well which is that
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it's akin to the realization that the pathway forward specified by the christian sacrifice
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is the hoisting of the cross of ultimate responsibility
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who are true followers of the spirit of divinity.
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It's the same idea, and that means everyone, right?
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Because these stories represent human beings as such.
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And so the fact that Moses maintains his connection with the divine
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even in the presence of the corruption of his people
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and that that's sufficient to guide the world properly forward
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is a model for the manner in which you're to conduct your life
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as the voluntary acceptance of the responsibility of the distributed responsibility of the state
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that's the alternative to tyranny and slavery those are the same ideas now
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as a reward for moses faithfulness god reveals himself even more fully to his prophet and he
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hides moses in the cleft of a rock and shields him and walks by and allows moses to
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get a glimpse of his back and the back of something is where it's already been and the
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idea there is that as moses deepens his relationship with the spirit that calls
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him forward as leader his ability to apprehend the manifestations of the divine in the workings of
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the world increases and deepens to the point where it's virtually unbearable but that his intrinsic
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goodness and willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to transform as a leader protects him
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against the destruction that would otherwise visit him when exposed to cataclysmically to
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moses sets up the tabernacle which is the the church around which the community is founded on
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the edge of the israelite encampments because they've departed so badly from their relationship
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their covenantal relationship with god and he continues his dialogue with the spirit that guides
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him and in consequence of that and the israelites forthright decision to repent and to return to
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the proper path god relents and either emerges to lead the israelites again or sends an angel
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to guide them if it's the angel or god himself it's a worthy replacement for the secondary
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tablets and it's an indication of the fact that even in the aftermath of egregious error
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meditation on upward aim and willingness to confess repent and atone can re-establish
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the relationship between the spirit of adventure calling and conscience that serves as the
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alternative to subjugation to a tyrant right and this is a good thing to know in your own life
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because it means that even if you've lost your way and are in the desert wandering blindly and
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hopelessly and ridden with anxiety and in a contentious and fractious and faithless mood if
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you make the sacrifices necessary to put yourself back together and approach the problem with
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sufficient humility and that would be a humility proportionate to the magnitude of your sins
00:38:26.100
unfortunately then you have the the offer for you to reattain the relationship with the even
00:38:35.740
what would you say divine forces of instinct that would otherwise lead you forward properly
00:38:40.840
you have the option of re-establishing that relationship and that's a wonderful thing to
00:38:48.340
understand because it means that even when if and when you wander which is a certainty that
0.75
00:38:56.180
there is still the possibility of return to the straight and narrow path and so the israelites
00:39:33.500
which is spiritual food and the quails which are
00:39:37.160
which represent food as such in its material form
00:39:42.200
the sustenance of the Israelites being the balance
00:39:51.740
the Israelites are provided with sufficient sustenance
00:40:18.080
the sufficiency with which they've been provided
00:40:29.200
and to demand even a return to the tyranny of Egypt
00:40:55.240
with what's strictly and appropriately necessary and so they fall prey again to the pull of
00:41:05.000
this immature demand for immediate gratification and the punishment that god brings forward is
00:41:11.560
twofold the first is that he provides them with so many with so much food in the form of quails
00:41:24.760
that it's literally stacked three feet high as far as they can see and coming out of their nostrils
00:41:35.400
and so the consequence of their cultivation of their narcissistic desire is the production of a
00:41:46.120
surfeit that's so overwhelming that it destroys appetite itself that's what
00:41:56.380
we're doing with pornography after the excess plague of the quails comes a
00:42:08.740
genuine plague and the Israelites not only perish in large numbers as a
0.95
00:42:14.820
consequence of their reversion to ingratitude and immaturity hedonistic
0.99
00:42:24.180
gluttony but they also move further into the desert and what's the consequence
00:42:32.460
of that they encounter a drought now Christ describes himself as the living
00:42:51.420
water and the image of the drought in the biblical corpus has a twofold
00:42:57.660
meaning it's this it's the emergent sterility of the environment you
00:43:03.980
remember in the lion king most of you have seen that when scar emerges to rule
00:43:09.100
the landscape parches and all the provision disappears and what that means
00:43:15.420
is that when the state deteriorates the natural resources vanish and the reason
00:43:23.520
for that is there's no such thing as a natural resource there's the provision of what's necessary
00:43:30.280
as a consequence of the establishment of the state that's functional enough to provide everyone
00:43:37.220
within it what's sufficient including water for most of human history it's been impossible for
00:43:46.240
people to get access to clean water because water is not a natural resource if you have a large
00:43:52.160
population it takes a tremendous amount of organization to structure society such that
00:43:58.200
a sufficient degree of technological expertise that's true can be devoted to the problem of
00:44:05.740
the provision of water and so that water can be distributed without corruption without enslavement
00:44:11.680
and without excess cost and you might think that that's a technological issue with the
00:44:17.760
technological solution but it's not it's a moral issue with a moral solution because if the state
00:44:25.220
organizes itself in accordance with the principles that we already described which is the adoption of
00:44:33.720
maximal responsibility by the individuals within the state by their sacrifice of their current
00:44:40.420
whims to the benefit of their future selves and to the community, then the state organizes itself
00:44:48.140
so that even the deserts can bloom. And that's a moral effort and not a technological effort,
00:44:54.100
even though the technological effort can aid the moral effort if the foundation is laid properly,
00:45:00.700
which is what's happened again in your country in the maid.
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00:45:12.900
because they've gone deeper into the desert
1.00
00:45:24.820
and complainy and victimy and bitter and miserable
0.89
00:45:30.320
because they always turn to Moses when times are tough
00:45:53.620
he specifies a location a rocky location in the desert and he tells Moses to go to that location
00:46:04.080
with his people and speak to the rocks and ask them to bring forth water and Moses listens and
00:46:13.300
he tells the Israelites and they follow them follow him to the place of rocks and Moses
00:46:46.860
and the consequence of that is that the rocks do indeed bring forth water
00:46:53.520
but god tells moses that as a consequence of his disobedience despite the fact that he's led the
00:47:00.900
israelites for his whole life away from tyranny across the red sea and through the desert for
00:47:06.860
40 years that he will die before he enters the promised land and here's the reason if you use
0.76
00:47:13.340
force when you're called upon to use invitation you will corrupt the state and you will fail to
00:47:21.040
lead your people to the promised land and that includes you right and we've seen plenty of that
00:47:28.060
too so it's worse than that because not only does is moses now forbidden to enter the promised land
00:47:38.640
even though he can see it in front of him aaron dies and what that means is that the state itself
00:47:45.680
is in peril when it turns to force when invitation will suffice right all policy based on force is
00:47:53.280
bad policy right it it undermines trust and it's the gateway to tyranny aaron dies worse
00:48:13.040
in the desert before the episode with the rocks
00:48:27.400
and the rebellion is extremely interesting
0.72
00:48:30.760
so the Israelites are all fractious and whiny and resentful
0.72
00:48:37.280
and faithless and without courage and cora comes along and he offers them a revolution
00:48:45.720
and this is how he justifies the revolution he tells moses and aaron that what they claim as
00:48:53.000
divine authority is nothing other than their use of arbitrary power right it's exactly the same
00:49:03.580
refrain you hear now. This is exactly the refrain that you hear from your so-called institutions of
00:49:09.580
higher learning that insist that all manifestations of your culture, male ambition, marriage, family,
00:49:20.120
patriarchal community, business, state, and government are nothing but the manifestations
00:49:26.340
of power, and that that power is arbitrary, oppressive, and victimizing, and all of those
00:49:33.920
who don't have, who aren't basking in success, are not failing in consequence of their own
00:49:43.880
unwillingness to make the necessary sacrifices, but virtuous victims of arbitrary power.
00:49:53.880
now the thing is is his accusation is justified to some degree because the primary temptation
0.76
00:50:01.000
of moses is the use of force right early in his life when he sees one of his hebrew brothers when
00:50:08.700
he's an adolescent in egypt slayed or beaten by an egyptian aristocrat he kills the egyptian
00:50:16.000
that's why he has to flee from egypt moses has a proclivity to use force and this is the eternal
00:50:50.780
manifest when he misuses his authority because he has this power granted to him not by power but by
00:51:00.520
his alliance with the underlying structure of the moral world itself and when he uses force when it's
00:51:09.260
not required he validates the revolutionary tendencies of the usurpers and puts the state
0.74
00:51:16.140
in danger now the counter position to the notion that moses is nothing but a wielder of power
00:51:23.800
an objection to which he uh an accusation to which he objects i've never taken anything for my
00:51:31.020
services is the counter proposition that it's of unbelievable convenience to those who fail to make
00:51:41.280
the proper sacrifices, like Cain, who become bitter and resentful in consequence of their
00:51:48.560
inevitable failure, who degenerate into a homicidal vengefulness as a consequence of
00:51:55.260
their misery, and who strive to destroy the notion of success itself, it enables those,
00:53:31.720
Brink of the promised land he said scouts out into Canaan which is the promised land already inhabited to
00:53:40.400
Scope out the territory and to report and the scouts come back and they divide themselves into two camps
00:53:47.800
One camp is allied with Joshua and Caleb and the other camp is
00:53:52.600
Allied with the faithless scouts and the faithless scouts report of the future that it's a land
00:53:58.860
and inhabited by giants who cannot be defeated,
00:54:02.160
and that the best pathway forward for the Israelites
00:54:08.100
And that's what you're being told about your future.
00:54:15.660
there's no doubt that the state of your future
1.00
00:54:18.600
is already inhabited by the pathologized descendants of Canaan,
1.00
00:54:25.600
But the insistence in the Old Testament stories is that you are required to maintain faith in the ability of the human spirit to prevail even in the face of the worst possible obstacles if it is guided by the spirit that's capable of standing up against tyranny and freeing the slaves.
00:54:50.860
And so they observe the future and they tell the Israelites that with faith and goodwill,
00:55:01.220
that the chosen people of God can move into the future with courage and faith
00:55:06.440
and make of it the place of the land of milk and honey and the place of life more abundant.
00:55:12.860
and that's how we're called upon to conceptualize the future as a function of our courageous faith
00:55:21.000
right and that's what joshua and caleb do and they're allowed to cross the river jordan and
00:55:28.420
to lead the israelites into the promised land and that's a description of the attitude that's the
00:55:35.460
opposite of cynicism but is not naivety that you're called upon to make manifest in relationship
00:55:41.960
to the future and as you can tell the faithless scouts who tell the israelites to free in terror
0.84
00:55:49.820
fail to enter the promised land and invite them to return to tyranny which is exactly the offer
00:55:57.040
that's on the table to you at the moment right right the future is nothing but climate apocalypse
00:56:03.940
right give us all the power right that's not how the people of this generation will enter the
00:56:13.140
caleb is faithful and loyal his his name means faithfulness and loyalty it also means
00:56:29.760
it means dog and the dog that caleb embodies is loyalty faithfulness and optimistic voyaging
00:56:40.460
forward and joshua is the type of christ that leads forever towards the heavenly jerusalem
00:56:50.300
that's how the story lays itself out and then it does something stunningly remarkable in its
00:56:55.900
further investigation of the characterization of the spirit that must make itself manifest
00:57:01.900
for the promised land to to be occupied the israelites become even more fractious and
0.88
00:57:13.260
immature and whiny and contemptible than they ever have been right on the very cusp of their movement
0.94
00:57:20.780
to the place that's been promised to them and god is at his wit's end and decides in a fit of
0.99
00:57:31.900
just retribution to take the annoying miserable victimy whiny complainy faithless immature
0.98
00:57:42.600
israelites who are already having a pretty miserable time of it in their self-imposed
0.99
00:57:49.420
terror and cowardice and he visits a plague of poisonous snakes upon them and you might say
1.00
00:57:59.340
well why would a good god do that and the answer is there is no situation so dire that some stupid
1.00
00:58:05.700
son of a bitch can't make it worse right and i mean that and that's why hell is a bottomless pit
1.00
00:58:12.600
and even if your material circumstances are dire you can be absolutely sure that your reversion to
1.00
00:58:19.380
a faithless hedonistic power mad immaturity will do nothing but open up a new pit of hell underneath
00:58:26.800
the hell that you're already occupying and that you can continue that far you can continue that
00:58:33.680
in a manner that literally has no end right which is why hell is a bottomless pit and so
0.95
00:58:42.320
that's what happens is the israelites fall apart and more misery makes itself manifest
1.00
00:58:48.880
and so the snakes bite them a lot which is exactly what they deserve and they eventually get to the
1.00
00:58:58.340
point where instead of conducting themselves so that even more snakes appear which is what the
00:59:04.800
Pharaoh did by the way when he was called upon to repent they decide that they've had enough
00:59:10.160
yet again they call themselves to order and they go to Moses and they say to him we know you have
00:59:16.980
pipeline to the divine do you think you could find it in your heart to have a chat with god
00:59:21.620
and get him to call off the snakes and moses says i'll see what i can do and so he has a chat with
00:59:31.220
god and god says something extraordinarily strange he says he doesn't say all right i'm pretty sick
00:59:38.980
of these people but they put themselves together yet again and i kind of like you so you know
00:59:43.780
i'll call off the snakes which is the most straightforward way out of the conundrum
00:59:48.340
and also something akin to what's happened previously when god and the israelites are
00:59:53.300
having a scrap but that isn't what happens and it's partly because the story is now setting the
00:59:58.900
pathway for the adoption of a new mode of being in the promised land the mode of being that's
01:00:05.220
characterized by the emergence of joshua as the new leader god says to moses take your brazen
0.77
01:00:13.060
your bronze items take the bronze items of your people and cast a staff and put a serpent on it
01:00:26.900
so that all the israelites can see it so this is a a substantial sculpture so that all the
01:00:34.900
israelites can see it and if they come and gaze upon it they will be immune to the poison of the
01:00:41.220
the serpents okay what does that mean the first thing it means is the same thing that the symbol
01:00:49.560
of the physician has meant for 3 000 years right because the symbol of the physician is a staff
01:00:56.480
with a serpent wrapped around it and that's the asclepius symbol of healing and it's a
01:01:04.260
representation of the snake and tree motif that's also characteristic of moses staff
01:01:11.620
because in the story of moses when he encounters the magicians of the egyptian court
01:01:18.260
moses throws his staff upon the ground that's tradition it transforms itself into chaos that's
01:01:26.700
the serpent and moses is the master of order in chaos and the egyptian magicians duplicate the
01:01:35.340
feet throwing their staffs to the ground turning them into serpents and the serpent from moses
01:01:41.180
staff eats all the serpents of the egyptian magicians which indicates that the real thing
01:01:47.740
is more than the real thing is more than the match for the propagandistic magic of the corrupt court
01:01:55.340
right all that's all that's echoed in the image of the serpent on the staff
01:02:04.720
there's an idea associated with healing that comes from the Greeks
01:02:10.580
embodied in the word pharmakon which is the source of the word pharmacy and
01:02:15.700
pharmakon means poison and cure and what it means is a little bit of what poisons
01:02:21.620
you cures you and what that means is that you'll grow and develop in proportion to your ability
01:02:28.980
to face the things that terrify you right and that's what moses calls upon his people to do
01:02:38.820
inspired by the word of god not to become the inhabitants of a
01:02:59.560
to the worst things that can possibly be thrown at them
01:03:03.200
which is what you do when you encourage your children
01:03:11.380
that's what encouragement means and that's what happens symbolically when god calls upon the
01:03:18.840
israelites to face what terrifies them so they can become immune to the poison even of their own sins
01:03:32.580
that's a development of the theme of joshua who bears the same name as christ
01:03:39.980
Now, thousands of years later, Christ himself says something exceptionally mysterious and virtually incomprehensible
01:03:51.100
that relates back to the brazen serpent, to the idea of the pharmakon,
01:03:56.560
to the notion that a little bit of poison redeems you if it's administered voluntarily.
01:04:08.580
unless i'd be unless i'd be lifted up like the serpent in the desert
01:04:14.540
no man can be redeemed now that's a unbelievably strange thing for anyone to say
01:04:23.880
first of all the notion that christ would associate himself with a crucified serpent
01:04:31.500
is strange enough in itself but the illusion itself is very difficult to comprehend
01:04:38.680
unless you understand it in which case it becomes deep beyond comprehension in a manner that's
01:04:47.260
as close to miraculous as anything i've ever seen in print what does it mean
01:04:53.100
one of the oldest stories we have is the story of the encounter with the dragon
01:05:04.720
talks about creation as the encounter with the serpent of chaos the the story of saint george
01:05:13.680
is the story of the man who confronts the dragon that threatens the state and frees
01:05:19.760
the treasure that the dragon guards what's the theme confront what is terrifying and find what
01:05:28.220
is redeeming that's the story of human development that's the story of the movement up jacob's ladder
01:05:35.080
that's the story of the ascent to the city on the hill that's the story of taking your life
01:05:41.060
out from under into the bushel that hides it and revealing it to the world that's the story of
01:05:46.000
courage and adventure and truth it's the redemptive story why does christ assimilate himself to the
0.57
01:05:53.640
serpent the israelites are called upon to look forthrightly and voluntarily at that which poisons
0.73
01:06:01.140
them christ's life is a hydra of serpents why because it's an archetypal tragedy what does
01:06:16.000
that mean it's a distillation of catastrophe itself imagine that you had a hundred people
01:06:22.720
tell you the worst thing that had ever happened to them in their life and then you gathered all
01:06:27.920
those terrible things, which is what occurs, for example, in the story of Job. You gathered
01:06:34.480
all those terrible things and you visited that fate on one person. That would be the
01:06:41.380
archetypal tragedy. What's the archetypal tragedy? What's a tragedy? A terrible thing
01:06:46.060
befalls someone. What if he's a criminal? Well, then it's not so tragic. Maybe then
01:06:52.660
it's justice. A terrible thing befalls someone innocent. The worst set of possible things
01:06:59.220
befalls the person who is most innocent. The archetypal tragedy. What's the worst thing?
01:07:10.180
Death. No. Pain and death. No. Prolonged pain and death at the hands of a tyrant. No. Prolonged
01:07:18.820
pain and death young at the hands of a tyrant delivered by the mob betrayed by your friends
01:07:27.260
in the presence of your mother accompanied by the betrayal of your acolytes
01:07:34.400
well occupied by an imperial force despite doing nothing but working for the good
01:07:57.740
The transformation of the story of the brazen serpent
0.92
01:08:06.760
is the insistence that redemption is to be found
01:08:11.520
by confronting the sum total of all that's terrifying the story of christ is a meta tragedy
01:08:20.140
and it doesn't end with death because painful and undeserved death at the hands of a treacherous mob
01:08:29.440
is not the worst thing that can happen to you the worst thing that can happen to you is that
01:08:35.380
plus a full-fledged encounter with the forces of malevolence itself that happens to christ when he
01:08:42.760
encounters satan in the desert after the holy spirit descends upon him and it happens when he
01:08:48.280
harrows hell after his death and so the calling of christianity which is the crucifix at the center of
01:08:56.040
the community is the calling to the followers of the divine to confront not only everything that
01:09:03.400
terrifies them about life but the deepest and most abysmal spirit of evil itself in the belief
01:09:11.420
that that courageous confrontation will invigorate and defend and make the forthright and courageous
01:09:22.080
and open-eyed disciple immune from the poison of the serpent right and that's
01:09:32.680
the story and the principle upon which the free states of the West are
01:09:41.080
And that's the story of the last third of Exodus.
01:10:57.280
Yes, well, thank you all for listening to that.
01:11:11.080
it's a crazy story eh yeah god i think the reason that the meaning of those stories is
01:11:31.480
is so stark and clear now is because the patterns that the biblical stories refer to
01:11:40.580
have always been present, right? They're the patterns of life.
01:11:47.140
But things are happening so fast now that you can see it unfolding, right? As the rate of
01:11:54.460
transformation in our culture accelerates, the patterns are dancing. Patterns that might have
01:12:00.220
taken centuries to move are now dancing within weeks and you can see the realm of the spirits
01:12:05.700
re-emerge that's really the case and it's a terrifying thing
01:12:10.720
so hang on to your hats people and get your houses in order right
01:12:19.420
question number one dr peterson in what way does love expand consciousness
01:13:03.900
Because in the effort to align yourself with that highest goal,
01:13:11.000
you'll transform yourself into the carrier of that spirit.
01:13:20.900
The promise in Genesis 1 is that human beings are made in the image of God,
01:13:24.800
But we obscure that reflection with our presumption and pride.
01:13:37.220
The great commandment that underlies the Ten Commandments is that you are to love the God that is one with all your heart and all your soul.
01:13:59.840
A vertical orientation and a horizontal orientation.
01:14:07.660
and love is the desire that all things flourish.
01:14:16.440
and that's the goal of religious practice is to invite that spirit to possess you
01:14:21.420
now what does that mean well imagine that you decided to
01:14:26.200
practice devoutly the love that it that led you to your marriage
01:14:38.060
we know that people are enticed into partnership as a consequence of love we know that the
01:14:47.960
foundation of our relationship with our children and our parents is love we know that in the first
01:14:54.760
throes of a romantic relationship that love is offered as a gift but you might imagine that
01:15:01.340
it's incumbent upon you to make the fostering and nurturance of that love
01:15:07.100
religious duty and that if you practice that it would your ability to inhabit that realm would
01:15:15.860
expand now what would that mean it would mean that you would remember when you were interacting
01:15:22.700
with your wife or your children or your parents that you would remember that you loved them
01:15:28.480
and you would remember what that implied and what it would imply is that you would interact
01:15:33.900
with them in a manner that would be best for them insofar as you were capable of that
01:15:38.040
insofar as that was commensurate with your understanding but that that would be your aim
01:15:42.800
and if that was your aim you would see the world in accordance with that aim and your deviation
01:16:17.980
and action so that the spirit of love was ever more present and that would be a consequence
01:16:25.300
of you gathering information that is offered to you in consequence of your aim but that's
01:16:33.580
not all you become what you practice imagine that a challenge emerges and that there's
01:16:43.340
two ways you can respond to it. One is resentfully and with the mien of a victim, as if the challenge
01:16:50.960
has been arbitrarily imposed on you by an unjust tyrant. Alternatively, you could face
01:16:57.360
that challenge with faith and hope, like Caleb and Joshua, and you could construe it as the
01:17:04.680
dragon that guards it as of yet unrevealed treasure and you could embody the spirit of
01:17:13.560
saint george and move forward in strength to grapple with the challenge what happens if you
01:17:23.320
do that everything changes psychophysiological analysis of stress response indicates that
01:17:34.680
The difference in those two patterns of response
01:18:04.680
when you approach a new situation in a given spirit
01:18:10.740
the spirit in which you approach the situation manifests itself as a physiological pattern
01:18:19.640
and that transforms the way genes themselves code for proteins if you practice love you
01:18:29.340
change yourself physiologically all the way down to the molecular level and you free
01:18:37.780
you release from the domain of implicit physiological potential
01:18:45.980
the you that would be what it could be if it was the purest possible manifestation of love
01:18:57.240
you and you know that you see the people around you and you you die for this you see the people
01:19:11.120
around you clearly at their best clearly at their best when they're motivated by love and if you're
01:19:18.480
spiteful and resentful and bitter and miserable and you're shaking your fist at god the sight of
01:19:24.120
that love might burn you to the core and further embitter you but you know in your deepest heart
01:19:29.600
of hearts that if you could live anywhere that's where you would live and so the religious call is
01:19:36.040
a call to live like that and it isn't a call to believe in that it's a call to do that because
01:19:42.400
that's the deepest form of belief and to practice it what's the purpose what's the purpose of prayer
01:19:51.620
god grant me the wisdom to have the humility to transform myself into the man who could
01:20:01.540
properly love his wife and children that's a prayer that will be answered
01:20:25.020
but I am unconvinced by organized religions
0.99
01:20:29.280
well i'll say something rude to begin with if you're capable of finding the path to god by
01:20:46.580
yourself why don't you go to church and help the lost church i mean because because that's the
01:20:57.580
claim, that's the, that's the claim you're making. You're saying you, you are sufficient unto
01:21:03.980
yourself to find the divine pathway forward. If that's true, then why not revitalize the
01:21:10.060
institutions while you're at it? And if you can't do that, then maybe your first presumption was
01:21:14.720
wrong. And maybe you should go to, maybe you could go to the church that's composed of people no
01:21:21.380
worse than you, and you could participate with them in aiming up, and you could
01:21:26.220
rectify the errors of the community and your own errors in relationship to what's
01:21:35.740
I would also say that the end point of the presumption that you alone can find the divine
01:21:53.780
path is no difference from the insistence of the postmodernists that what they feel
01:22:01.180
is the final definition of reality those are the same thing right
01:22:06.200
i i don't want to get too like high and mighty about that you know because
01:22:14.320
it's certainly the same thing i thought when i left the church when i was
01:22:19.260
a teenager and it's the same thing that so many people who've left the organized stream of religion
01:22:25.700
think it's understandable and it's built into our rebellious enlightenment demented protestant
01:22:36.700
luciferian culture and so the fact and i'm not singling out the protestants it's a it's a deviant
01:22:44.740
stream of what would heretical protestantism that's a way of thinking about it right the
01:22:51.300
notion that we can define ourselves we have to step forward communally so it's incumbent upon
01:22:58.880
you to participate in the process of communal organization because that's part of the manner
01:23:04.380
in which you approach the divine it's not a solitary pursuit you can't buddha knew that
01:23:10.620
buddha was offered the opportunity to enter the realm of the gods and to remain in nirvana and he
01:23:18.460
abandoned that offer which was genuine and hard-earned because he determined that he would
01:23:25.400
not step into paradise unless he could take everyone with him right and maybe that's because
01:23:32.980
there is no paradise for you alone right how could that be paradise an eternity of you alone
01:23:41.720
What has been your biggest hurdle in bridging the theology-science-cultural gap?
01:24:11.720
the pride pride in relationship to the first question let's say because i thought
01:24:22.020
when i was 13 and perplexed about the apparent paradoxical relationship between evolutionary
01:24:29.940
theories and biblical accounts of creation that i knew enough to dispense with the entire religious
01:24:37.320
tradition of the western world well what's that pride obviously what kind of pride the pride of
01:24:46.440
the luciferian intellect like 100 that and i i escaped from that to the degree that i have escaped
01:24:59.640
Because I came to understand, first, that I knew nothing.
01:25:05.060
And second, that I truly knew nothing about evil itself.
01:25:10.480
Even though I became unshakably convinced of its existence.
01:25:17.020
And it was my investigation into the structure of hell
01:25:23.560
that eradicated my luciferian pride i came to understand when i was about 23 that
01:25:37.740
virtually everything i said was a performance and a lie 95 of it and i understood that
01:25:53.560
as a consequence of my developing understanding of the misapprehensions that led to
01:25:59.560
the development of totalitarian states i was very curious about the relationship between
01:26:06.160
individual misconduct of the sort that enabled people to remain silent when atrocities were being
01:26:13.360
committed of the sort that allowed people to luxuriate in the opportunity to exact their
01:26:35.860
the dawning of my understanding that I was an actor
01:26:47.900
instrumentally manipulate, to be the smartest person in the room, to ensure that my intellect
01:26:54.800
was celebrated, and to delight in the victory I obtained over others. And I learned that
01:27:05.540
speaking words oriented by that aim made me weak, contemptible, desperate, and dangerous.
01:27:16.280
And that on those few occasions when I strived instead to say instead only what I believed to be true,
01:27:25.740
that the ground under my feet came back together and that I was thereby climbing uphill.
01:27:50.660
Right, so that was the obstacle, you might say.
01:28:00.340
look when god throws adam and eve out of paradise for the sin of pride and presumption
01:28:09.620
he bars the gates with a sword that is on fire that turns every which way
01:28:17.680
a sword that turns every which way is one that you cannot avoid
01:28:22.500
it burns and it cuts and what does it burn away and cut everything that isn't fit to be in paradise
01:28:29.860
it's highly probable that that's a lot of you and so you might say that
01:28:41.160
equivalent to a trial by fire the trial by fire of hell in direct proportion
01:28:51.160
to the magnitude of your sins yeah well there's an impediment for you
01:28:57.340
when abraham proceeds on his voyage uphill animated by the spirit of adventure
01:29:12.800
he's called upon to make sacrifices in sequence commensurate with the expanding field of
01:29:20.800
opportunity that reveals itself in front of him until he transforms himself so completely
01:29:28.800
by his willingness to undertake even the ultimate sacrifice that he's awarded a new name
01:29:36.000
right that's equivalent to a death and rebirth and to movement toward the
01:29:44.720
establishment of an earthly paradise but it requires a
01:29:49.680
a secession of sacrifice that culminates in the sacrifice of everything
01:29:55.860
and the transformation of identity that's so complete that it's as if
01:30:00.480
you become born anew which is what happens to abraham and jacob right and christ when baptized
01:30:09.620
yeah and all those who are visited and then abide by the call of the holy spirit
01:30:15.940
terrible right that's the terrible swift sword yeah that's why when christ comes back at the
01:30:25.440
end of time or why the spirit that makes itself manifest when the end times reveal themselves
01:30:33.020
christ comes back with a sword in his mouth and he separates the sheep from the goats
01:30:39.060
and there's a lot more goats than sheep and that's a psychological warning and a sociological warning
01:30:48.760
and it's a terrifying vision into the under structure of reality itself
01:30:54.780
cain is doomed because he doesn't offer his best that means that insofar as you haven't offered your
01:31:04.140
best. All that is within you that has not been the offering of the best is dood. That's a terrible
01:31:17.000
thing to know. But it's the sort of thing that can scare you straight. And it's wisdom that says
01:31:24.380
the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. So aim up because there's no better place to aim.
01:31:46.160
And on those happy notes, thank you very much, everybody.
01:32:22.660
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