The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why Being Nice Is Destroying Your Family

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00:01:46.640 Hi, everybody. Welcome to the release of the ninth lecture from my extensive tour archives.

00:01:52.780 they've been received very well I've been happy to have the opportunity to offer everyone lectures

00:02:00.620 style of YouTube utilization that I began with you know more than 10 years ago now I think I

00:02:09.380 started really in about 2013 maybe even before that when YouTube was just cute cat videos

00:02:15.660 I've been writing a lot this week

00:02:18.020 trying to puzzle out

00:02:21.240 a conundrum

00:02:23.120 I guess it's the conundrum of monotheism

00:02:25.360 it's a topic I refer to in the lectures

00:02:27.560 fairly frequently

00:02:28.420 what unites a culture

00:02:31.680 what has to unite a culture

00:02:33.520 what hierarchy of values

00:02:36.360 because values are comparative

00:02:37.980 they have to be rank ordered

00:02:39.300 what hierarchy of values best serves a culture

00:02:42.280 and if it's a hierarchy

00:02:43.420 that implies it's a unity

00:02:45.520 and that there's something at the pinnacle

00:02:47.220 or reversed something at the foundation.

00:02:49.800 I'm trying to puzzle out what that has to be and why

00:02:53.120 and how that's related to our religious thinking.

00:02:56.260 While doing this writing, by the way,

00:02:58.960 several hours a day now, so I'm pretty happy about that.

00:03:02.060 I'm using a program, an app that my son and I developed

00:03:06.460 called Essay.app.

00:03:08.320 And it's turned into a really elegant word processor

00:03:11.780 that also teaches you how to write,

00:03:14.020 to teaches you how to organize sentences teaches you how to rewrite the sentences to organize the

00:03:19.200 paragraphs to rewrite the paragraphs to write your first draft to do the finessing and I'm finding it

00:03:27.660 very helpful it's a mature product now and it's uh it it flows seamlessly from computer to

00:03:36.680 telephone so if I'm traveling it's very easy in the car for example to keep writing and

00:03:41.240 so and i'm out a bit now so that's been very helpful anyways i thought i'd put in a good

00:03:47.640 word for sa.app because um it's quite an elegant program and i found it real useful in any case

00:03:53.920 welcome to the ninth lecture i hope you find it useful i hope you find it as useful as i found it

00:04:01.680 a privilege to be able to deliver it i loved being on tour and it was such a remarkable adventure and

00:04:08.420 such a remarkable opportunity to speak with so many thousands of people on a continuing basis.

00:04:15.060 So on with the show. Thank you.

00:04:23.020 I found out in 2017 when I was doing a lecture series on Genesis, Book of Genesis, which was

00:04:32.900 really the first fully public lecture series that i had done we rented a theater my family and i

00:04:39.240 rented a theater of about 500 people in toronto and it was something i this series was something

00:04:45.920 i had dreamed about doing for a long time i suppose this lecture tonight is an extension

00:04:51.040 of that dream i had a ambition to walk through the body of biblical stories publicly at some

00:05:01.220 And so that's where it started. And that was in fall of 2017. My YouTube channel was doing well. And there had been a lot of political, it was really philosophical scandal around me, I would say.

00:05:23.260 a lot of what is actually philosophical scandal in our culture is masquerading as political scandal

00:05:31.060 because we don't render unto Caesar what is Caesar and unto God what is God's

00:05:35.960 and so that means the sacred has collapsed into the political

00:05:39.760 and that's why nobody can talk to anyone anymore right

00:05:43.660 because you tread on sacred ground at your peril

00:05:46.800 and you'll have no doubt experienced exactly that phenomenon

00:05:51.060 in the inability that many of you now have

00:05:53.900 to even talk to close family members

00:05:55.800 or people who were once friends.

00:05:59.580 In any case,

00:06:01.560 I was interested in elaborating on these biblical stories,

00:06:07.400 not least because I had spent a lot of time

00:06:09.640 lecturing at Harvard and at the University of Toronto.

00:06:13.320 You know, I used to be able to say at Harvard

00:06:15.240 with a certain sense of...

00:06:19.060 What would you say?

00:06:21.060 incredulity that I was that I had the privilege to teach there and now I gotta tell you when I

00:06:27.460 utter that word there's some shame and that that's a that's a catastrophe that's what happened in DC

00:06:35.620 with Claudine Gay with the president of MIT with UPenn you want to pay attention to that

00:06:41.060 that was a catastrophe it's it's appalling and I have launched am launching this new

00:06:47.220 university endeavor with my daughter but i take no satisfaction whatsoever in the fact that these

00:06:52.300 truly these once truly great institutions harvard and mit perhaps foremost among them

00:07:00.700 have now become not only incapable of doing what they are required to do but actually doing the

00:07:10.560 reverse. Because no education is better than miseducation. So in any case, I decided to

00:07:21.780 embark on this series of biblical lectures. I really had no idea what was going to happen.

00:07:26.840 I had been lecturing about stories for a long time. And I'm a clinical psychologist. And

00:07:33.060 as a clinical psychologist, really what you do is have people tell you their stories and

00:07:38.340 and listen and see if you can help them see if you can provide them a forum so that they can

00:07:46.400 put themselves together by telling someone who they are and that's an extremely interesting

00:07:53.680 endeavor and one piece of information you might leave here with tonight is this observation which

00:08:04.580 i certainly found to be true in my clinical practice if the person you're talking to is dull

00:08:12.440 you're not doing a very good job of listening

00:08:15.920 and and if you're tired of your wife or your husband you're tired of your friends

00:08:22.160 you find people in general dull

00:08:24.500 it's probably not them and that's a really useful thing you know and i would say there's a certain

00:08:33.160 kind of cowardice in that there's a certain kind of ignorance but there's a certain kind of

00:08:36.640 cowardice because it's actually the case if you let people reveal themselves and they will if you

00:08:42.440 listen people will tell you everything everything if you listen and then they become unbearably

00:08:50.840 interesting and i think it's to shield we shield ourselves against that unbearable connection by

00:08:58.240 failing to listen and so whenever i was in a clinical session and i found my mind wandering

00:09:06.120 i realized that i wasn't listening intently enough i wasn't asking searching enough questions to keep

00:09:15.280 the conversation deep enough so that it was entirely and thoroughly engrossing and no i

00:09:23.020 used to my clinical practice was mostly not entirely but mostly limited to one day and I

00:09:29.200 you would see usually about 13 people which took about 14 hours it was a very long day

00:09:34.240 I used to go to the restaurant a little cheap restaurant with my my family afterwards and the

00:09:40.480 rule was don't say anything to dad that is more than one sentence long because I couldn't pay it

00:09:48.420 I was done by that point.

00:09:51.080 But it was fascinating.

00:09:52.460 It was fascinating to have the opportunity to walk through people's stories.

00:09:55.780 The courses I taught were story-predicated.

00:09:59.860 I learned, especially from the psychoanalytic thinkers,

00:10:03.300 that our personalities make themselves manifest across time as a story.

00:10:10.080 We're characters on the stage, as Shakespeare observed.

00:10:15.360 and in those courses I dealt with a an array of deep stories some from the Taoist tradition

00:10:25.420 some from ancient Mesopotamia some from ancient Egypt and then a variety of stories from the

00:10:31.900 Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition Hindu stories Greek Scandinavian all of them

00:10:39.860 with something profound to offer.

00:10:43.440 And I did a lot of analysis of pop culture,

00:10:47.480 movies like The Lion King,

00:10:49.320 rap videos,

00:10:51.340 like the one Ben Shapiro just released

00:10:54.340 in this most bizarre of all possible universes.

00:10:58.600 And the Genesis series

00:11:01.700 was a logical extension of that.

00:11:03.420 And I'd come to understand very deeply

00:11:06.040 by that point that those stories

00:11:09.700 They sit at the base of our culture

00:11:12.280 And they're not replaceable

00:11:15.060 Well

00:11:15.380 They're replaceable by idols

00:11:18.400 That's a good way of thinking about it

00:11:20.140 But this is true culturally

00:11:21.760 But it's also true psychologically

00:11:23.360 Although you don't know this

00:11:26.460 And this is a realization that I've really come to

00:11:28.660 Recently

00:11:29.900 The biblical

00:11:34.560 Corpus of stories is implicit

00:11:37.080 In the structure through which you see the world

00:11:39.680 now that's not much more than saying

00:11:42.540 that because you're the inheritors

00:11:44.640 of the Judeo-Christian tradition 0.62

00:11:46.420 that's shaped the way you view the world

00:11:49.440 but you have to think through

00:11:51.860 and understand what that means

00:11:53.320 it means that

00:11:54.100 within the confines of your imagination

00:11:57.360 the imagination that structures your vision

00:12:00.080 are nested

00:12:02.860 better or worse representations

00:12:06.240 of these fundamental stories

00:12:08.220 they're there they guide the way you understand the world insofar as you're enculturated in that

00:12:15.680 tradition they make it possible for you for example for you to understand a movie like

00:12:21.520 the dark knight with its antithesis between the hero batman the dark hero and the joker because

00:12:28.960 that's a retelling of cain and abel now i'm not saying if you never heard the story of cain and

00:12:34.580 you wouldn't be able to understand Batman, although there's some real truth in that.

00:12:39.000 I'm saying that the structure of comprehension that enables you to understand that story

00:12:46.420 is a consequence of your incorporation in part of the network of stories

00:12:54.840 that lies at the base of your culture.

00:12:57.080 Now, the people who founded your country knew this because they said strange things

00:13:02.860 when founding your culture, like

00:13:05.620 we hold these truths to be self-evident.

00:13:12.320 Now, a self-evident truth requires no further explanation

00:13:17.340 in some sense by definition, but a psychologist might ask,

00:13:22.740 well, what is it that makes a truth self-evident?

00:13:26.540 And the answer is something like,

00:13:28.400 it emerges out of the corpus of stories that you take for granted right and those are the stories

00:13:36.720 that organize they are the stories that organize our life and so one of the things that you might

00:13:43.280 realize in consequence of that is that if you're not fleshed out well on the cultural side so for

00:13:50.180 example if you don't know the biblical stories and there are other stories as well that you

00:13:55.800 could and should know but if you don't know the biblical stories there there are holes and the

00:14:03.500 the web of meaning through which you view the world is incomplete and tattered and torn and

00:14:11.100 other things will move in there to occupy you and that's that's a terrifying thing to understand

00:14:18.820 you know i started to understand this when i was studying the psychoanalysts deeply because

00:14:26.180 Jung, for example, Carl Jung, who was a compatriot of Sigmund Freud,

00:14:29.600 who was the founder of the psychoanalytic tradition.

00:14:32.800 Jung was a student of Friedrich Nietzsche.

00:14:35.900 And Friedrich Nietzsche is the German philosopher who so famously announced that God was dead.

00:14:41.520 He could see the deterioration of our explicit belief in the deity of our ancestors

00:14:49.480 within the confines of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

00:14:52.620 He could see that falling apart under the onslaught of the materialistic, atheistic rationalists of the Enlightenment.

00:15:02.020 And that's why he made that prophetic pronouncement.

00:15:07.140 And Nietzsche knew that there would be dreadful trouble in the aftermath of the death of God.

00:15:13.020 And he knew, for example, that that would produce the rise of totalitarian super states like the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

00:15:21.420 and that millions of people would die in consequence.

00:15:24.760 So when Nietzsche announced that God was dead,

00:15:26.980 it wasn't like he was doing it in triumph.

00:15:29.320 He called us the murderer of all murderers.

00:15:33.240 And so Nietzsche tried to come up with a solution to that.

00:15:37.820 And his solution was that human beings could take it upon themselves

00:15:41.580 to establish their own values,

00:15:44.200 that we would have to become the creatures

00:15:46.060 who determined the rules by which things were valued,

00:15:50.740 who determined the moral order and you know that sounds attractive it sounds like

00:15:58.820 captain of your own ship but even if you're captain of your own ship you're not master of

00:16:05.820 the waves and even if you're captain of your own ship you still have to navigate towards some

00:16:13.360 undesirable destination and as a consequence of that you're locked in this wrestling you might say

00:16:22.380 with the fundamental structure of existence itself i learned in the 2017 series that

00:16:29.560 the word israel the chosen people of god means we who wrestle with god and then you might say well

00:16:39.320 who are those people and the answer is well do you ever feel like shaking your fist at the sky

00:16:47.480 in despair and rage do you ever lose hope are you ever inspired are you ever in a moral quandary

00:16:53.940 when you're caught between two terrible possibilities both good and you're you're you're

00:17:02.000 You're attempting to wrangle an estimate of your fate.

00:17:11.880 That's life.

00:17:14.560 Life is wrestling with the domain of value.

00:17:20.300 Even with the central essence of value itself.

00:17:24.240 And there's no escape from that.

00:17:26.940 And there are worse and better solutions to that problem.

00:17:30.920 And part of what I'm trying to understand is, what is the best possible solution to that problem?

00:17:38.780 Is there a best solution to that problem?

00:17:42.120 And if so, what is the best solution?

00:17:45.400 And so that's what this lecture tonight will be part and parcel of.

00:17:51.000 Imagine your favorite lecture.

00:17:53.740 Dial that up on Macs, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it.

00:17:58.920 That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture.

00:18:04.400 I went to college because I had to.

00:18:06.380 I go to Peterson Academy because I want to.

00:18:08.300 I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago,

00:18:10.440 and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college.

00:18:13.720 In traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry.

00:18:17.140 They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

00:18:21.240 It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody

00:18:23.860 who actually wants to teach you.

00:18:25.460 If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time.

00:18:29.200 That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself.

00:18:33.680 You have the opportunity to investigate that calling.

00:18:43.500 Now, Nietzsche said we should create our own values,

00:18:47.020 but Jung in particular, Freud first, noted that, well, we can't.

00:18:55.460 And you might say, well, what did they mean by that?

00:18:58.280 They said, well, if you contend with people, if you wrestle with people,

00:19:02.740 what you find is that they're like demon-filled warehouses.

00:19:07.040 There's all sorts of things going on in the background

00:19:10.580 that aren't exactly under people's control.

00:19:16.300 They're possessed by strange ideas, or if not ideas, strange impulses,

00:19:21.360 and impulses that act contrary to their own will.

00:19:24.500 And you know this, you know this, because you'll have been in the situation where you've told yourself to do something.

00:19:32.480 And maybe you've told yourself to do something over and over.

00:19:35.000 And not only that, you've told yourself to do something that you know would be good for you.

00:19:40.420 And not only do you not do that, you do exactly the opposite and repeatedly,

00:19:46.820 as if there was something inside you that was trying to do its worst.

00:19:51.860 well so then you might say well how could a creature as perplexing and paradoxical as that

00:19:58.280 possibly hope to in the span of a single lifetime revalue all values and create his or her own

00:20:06.900 destiny it's like maybe what you do is you search for the implicit moral order and you

00:20:15.100 align yourself with that there's a reason I open these lectures with music I spent a lot of time

00:20:22.380 thinking about music 40 years ago I was obsessed with music from a psychological perspective for

00:20:31.840 about a year I made a piece of art which is on the cover of my books it's a it's a Mandela

00:20:41.440 essentially a kind of a fiery geometric explosion of chaos and order and I made that over about

00:20:50.240 four months when I was trying to understand the ineffable significance of music and the reason I

00:20:58.060 was so interested in music was because I was interested in nihilism I was interested in

00:21:01.700 meaninglessness and music seemed to me to be the inarguable counterpart to nihilism in that

00:21:09.580 even the most nihilistic of people find deep meaning in music and at about that time it wasn't

00:21:16.600 much long the punk rock movement was still flourishing at about that time in the early 80s

00:21:22.740 and I went to a Ramones concert and it was in a theater just a movie theater with sat about 1200

00:21:29.780 people and I was up on the balcony with my wife right on the first row and those bloody musicians

00:21:35.380 the Ramones they brought their stadium gear into that theater and I tell you I listened to the

00:21:40.380 whole concert with my ears plugged and it was I was still ringing my ears were still ringing three

00:21:44.720 days later even though it was tremendous fun and beneath us where we could peer over the balcony

00:21:51.140 beneath us was a kind of an empty space in front of the stage and all these crazy nihilistic punk

00:21:58.660 rockers were out there while the concert was going on slam dancing into each other they looked like 0.70

00:22:04.760 ants on a frying pan and it was ridiculously comical because they're all nihilistic and they 0.89

00:22:10.260 hate life and they have their middle finger up to the sky and it's screw this and to hell with that 0.54

00:22:15.160 and there's no meaning in life and yet they're all out there like dancing away now pretty violently

00:22:19.700 and all that but the thing is the music gripped them nonetheless and that was a great mystery to

00:22:27.080 me you know and i started to think about music and there is this conceit that music is a non-representational

00:22:36.860 art form because especially a music without a piece of music without lyrics it's hard to say

00:22:41.700 what it's about you know like it can have a sad tone perhaps if it's in a minor key in it it can

00:22:47.660 be cataclysmic and thunderous or it can be um puerile like like music in an elevator which 0.98

00:22:53.800 really isn't music it's it's music filtered through stupidity and um but but but i i started 0.90

00:23:04.520 to try to understand what what is music exactly well music what is music exactly well it's it's 0.94

00:23:10.980 a pattern pattern is something that repeats it's a pattern with variations now it's a layered

00:23:18.020 pattern with variations it's layers stacked on top of one another and the more sophisticated

00:23:23.860 the music the more layers there are stacked on top of one another and the more the layers

00:23:28.620 interplay with one another maybe one instrument per layer or something like that

00:23:33.500 but it's layers of harmonious patterns and then i thought that's what the world is because we think

00:23:41.760 the world is a world of objects because we're implicitly atheistic materialist rationalists

00:23:48.880 and so we think the world is made out of self-evident objects and by the way it's not

00:23:55.260 it's made out of patterns and it's made out of patterns that when opt optimally arranged

00:24:03.920 operate together in a hierarchy of harmony.

00:24:08.700 And that's what music tells you.

00:24:11.400 And it tells you so directly that it compels you to move to it.

00:24:16.040 And what the music is doing to you is inviting you to align yourselves

00:24:23.720 with the central pattern of harmonious being.

00:24:28.580 And everyone loves that.

00:24:30.540 And the reason they love that is because it's right.

00:24:33.920 that's what you're called upon to do

00:24:37.020 and that's why

00:24:39.880 and you know that

00:24:40.680 even though you might not be able to say it

00:24:42.600 you know it

00:24:43.320 and you can tell you know it

00:24:44.880 because when a great musician comes to town

00:24:46.700 you'll pay

00:24:48.200 and take time

00:24:49.660 to go sit

00:24:51.020 with thousands of people

00:24:52.500 and all do that together

00:24:54.080 and you'll enjoy it

00:24:56.680 and you won't regard it as work

00:24:58.740 and if the place gets jumping

00:25:00.840 you're pretty damn thrilled to be there

00:25:02.800 and you think 0.79

00:25:03.740 well that was damn near a religious experience

00:25:06.600 it's like yeah 0.62

00:25:08.180 not damn near

00:25:10.400 like definitely

00:25:12.520 it was just the kind of religious experience

00:25:14.800 that the prideful

00:25:16.580 linguistic intellect can't

00:25:18.540 criticize out of existence

00:25:19.860 that doesn't make it any less real

00:25:22.360 quite the contrary

00:25:23.220 it speaks of something tremendously deep

00:25:26.240 it speaks of

00:25:27.900 the spirit of the

00:25:30.640 redeeming story

00:25:32.160 that's a good way to think about it

00:25:34.160 and that's the spirit that

00:25:36.200 makes itself manifest in the biblical

00:25:37.980 corpus and

00:25:39.580 well we'll

00:25:42.000 wander through some of that tonight

00:25:43.780 and I'll do what I can

00:25:46.140 to explain some of the

00:25:48.160 opening parts of that story

00:25:49.880 in a way that I hope

00:25:51.540 makes sense

00:26:02.160 In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

00:26:09.800 Now, this is an interesting image.

00:26:12.040 They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

00:26:14.660 We'll see how many words we can get out of this image.

00:26:18.560 So that's an image of God as a father.

00:26:22.060 Now, what does it mean?

00:26:24.280 What does it mean for there to be a father first?

00:26:29.060 This is a father who brings light.

00:26:32.160 And maybe you were fortunate enough to have a father that brought light.

00:26:36.660 Not everybody is. Tammy was. I was.

00:26:40.260 I know the people that I've interviewed who've thrived.

00:26:44.480 Almost all of them had a father that brought them light.

00:26:47.580 Who encouraged them and who stood behind them.

00:26:50.120 Who was dedicated to developing and encouraging the best in them.

00:26:55.540 Okay, so what is that exactly?

00:26:57.700 Well, you might say that's your father, but you have to observe that father is actually a generic term, right?

00:27:05.400 You don't call your father his name, unless you're Bart Simpson.

00:27:10.220 You call your father a generic name.

00:27:14.480 And that means, in some sense, that you're referring in your relationship with him to, you could say, a role he's playing.

00:27:23.100 That's one way of looking at it, a part he's playing.

00:27:25.460 Or you could say that you're referring to something deep

00:27:28.840 That he's embodying insofar as he's a good father

00:27:32.440 That's a better way of thinking about it

00:27:34.640 Now, here's a way of understanding that

00:27:36.620 Imagine you were, you're three years old

00:27:39.740 And your eyes are open, man

00:27:42.920 And everything's coming in at you 0.99

00:27:44.380 You know how imitative three-year-olds are 0.99

00:27:46.500 You send a three or four-year-old off 0.55

00:27:49.240 Well-behaved three or four-year-old off to daycare

00:27:52.020 And they come back completely infested with demons

00:27:54.640 and they'll i saw this in my son all the time he'd come back from daycare this kid who was

00:28:00.700 reasonably civilized he'd only have to be there for an hour he'd pick up some pathological pattern 1.00

00:28:06.780 of miserable misbehavior from some wretched little brat with parents who were foolish 0.99

00:28:12.020 and he'd come home and play that out it was like what the hell do you think you're doing you know 1.00

00:28:18.200 perfectly well that's not going to go very well it's like nope he's absorbed that sucker and he

00:28:23.320 was going to see if that was a trick that would work at home it's like kids are very good at this

00:28:28.480 they absorb spirits that's a good way of thinking about now we're very imitative human beings we're

00:28:35.740 unbelievably imitative like if you're socially skilled you don't even know this if you're

00:28:39.960 socially skilled when you're sitting and talking to someone you're dancing with them and if you

00:28:45.420 recorded your interactions and you sped it up you'd see that two people who are really engrossed

00:28:50.240 in a conversation they're just dancing that's been done with mothers and babies depressed mothers

00:28:55.840 don't dance with their babies right and it's because they're too they've they've they've

00:29:02.640 withdrawn within and they're not attending to the relationship and the babies suffer as a consequence

00:29:10.300 um and so you and so you dance with someone and you absorb their spirit or you create a spirit

00:29:20.120 between you when you're conversing and if you're both pursuing the truth when you're conversing

00:29:25.560 then you jointly construct the spirit that pursues the truth and that inhabits you and that fills you

00:29:31.700 with enthusiasm and that's the logos that tammy made reference to earlier that christ described

00:29:37.980 as present if two or more were gathered in his name that's what that means now children are very

00:29:44.960 imitative and it's really the basis of their knowledge and so when you first start to adapt

00:29:50.640 to the world you learn how to move in it right but you learn how to you learn how to imitate

00:29:56.080 movements in the world in a complex way if a child does something interesting you'll have seen this

00:30:01.620 with nine months old you know you would try to feed them say 13 months they're in their high

00:30:07.820 chair you're trying to feed them and then they knock something off the the high chair table and

00:30:13.640 top and it falls on the ground and that's pretty interesting and so then you put it back on they

00:30:19.120 knock it off again and that's pretty interesting and so you put it on they knock it off again

00:30:23.260 and what they're doing actually is imitating themselves right because they did something

00:30:27.280 kind of random and it produced an interesting consequence and so they duplicate the interesting

00:30:32.540 consequence and so kids copy themselves now you know that because that's how you learn to play

00:30:37.160 peekaboo with them right you can get them into an imitative game very quickly even if they're very

00:30:41.660 young my my granddaughter when she was nine months night four months old i had her on my lap and she

00:30:49.920 was standing up and i she's very alert this girl and extremely extroverted she was really like

00:30:54.960 zeroed in on me and i thought i wonder if i can play a game with this kid so i i went one two three 1.00

00:31:01.480 little pause and bonked her head on mine like very lightly hey and then she kind of looked and then

00:31:08.520 i was slow and careful with her because babies are slow you know which is a good thing and 0.63

00:31:14.620 and then i did it again and i kept repeating it and she got she caught on and she she got the

00:31:22.240 pattern right she was starting to align herself with it and then i did it like six times let's

00:31:28.100 say to establish the pattern and then the seventh time i counted and i didn't bop i moved her forward

00:31:33.080 but I didn't bop heads with her and she laughed and I thought perfect she got that that theme and

00:31:41.160 variation right that's part of a game that's what you do when you play peekaboo too and there's

00:31:45.300 mimicry in that you you set up a pattern then you repeat it then you repeat it then you repeat it

00:31:50.540 then you vary it like interestingly and that's a game and that's a social interaction and that's

00:31:56.080 the structure on which all of our social interactions are predicated right a certain

00:32:00.800 predictability of interaction with the leaven of novelty there's something

00:32:05.480 deeply musical about that now children will imitate themselves but they'll also

00:32:09.860 imitate their father so now let's imagine we have kids who are four years

00:32:15.800 old and it's a boy and a girl and they're trying to get to know each other

00:32:20.240 and so what they are going to try to figure out is could they play a game

00:32:24.020 together which is by the way what you're doing when you get to know someone at

00:32:27.740 at least under optimal circumstances.

00:32:30.000 And so maybe the boy says to the girl, or vice versa,

00:32:33.280 would you like to play house?

00:32:35.420 Which means, would you like to dramatically re-represent

00:32:39.180 a domestic environment spontaneously in your behavior?

00:32:43.220 But generally, that isn't what four-year-olds say.

00:32:45.720 They just compress that.

00:32:47.760 Would you like to play house?

00:32:49.060 And the girl who's invited has to say yes,

00:32:53.600 because if she doesn't do it voluntarily,

00:32:55.980 then it's not a game

00:32:58.380 and that's something

00:32:59.560 you should bloody well learn

00:33:00.840 when you're four

00:33:01.660 so you never forget it

00:33:03.200 for the rest of your life

00:33:04.400 and so maybe she says yes

00:33:06.580 and then you say

00:33:07.860 well he says

00:33:09.400 the little boy says

00:33:10.200 well I'll be the daddy 0.93

00:33:11.440 and you can be the mummy

00:33:12.400 and hypothetically

00:33:13.960 although God only knows

00:33:15.460 both of them agree

00:33:17.520 that that's appropriate

00:33:18.540 and

00:33:19.560 and then the boy starts

00:33:23.040 to act out father

00:33:25.220 But then you might ask, this is so cool.

00:33:27.780 It's so amazing.

00:33:29.140 It's such a miracle.

00:33:30.900 You might say, well, now he's going to imitate his father.

00:33:34.300 But that's not what he does.

00:33:36.200 Because kids are way smarter than that.

00:33:38.120 Like, if I was going to imitate someone,

00:33:40.700 I'll imitate this gentleman right here in the front row.

00:33:43.660 So this is what I would do.

00:33:47.380 And so what I'm doing, and you know,

00:33:48.920 it's kind of annoying when someone imitates you directly,

00:33:52.220 even if it's a little kid.

00:33:53.520 And you can do that as a joke, but what imitation means directly is that I do exactly what you do, either when you do it or a little later.

00:34:04.620 But that isn't what kids do, not at all.

00:34:07.660 They're so much smarter than that, and it really is a miracle.

00:34:10.360 What they do is they watch their father act across repeated instances and situations, right?

00:34:19.320 Thousands of them, because they're watching you like a hawk.

00:34:22.280 And they're building a model of you that helps them understand you.

00:34:29.760 But it is also the scaffold on which they build their masculinity.

00:34:35.660 That's a good way of thinking about it.

00:34:37.320 And so they're watching you like mad.

00:34:39.240 And they're testing you out too.

00:34:40.640 They're going to pull out every trick they can possibly manage to poke you with.

00:34:44.880 Just to see how the pattern that constitutes you will react to all these different experiments.

00:34:51.640 That's, you might ask, why do your children misbehave?

00:34:54.380 And the answer is, well, it's an exploratory tool. 0.83

00:34:57.020 I mean, that's why you provoke your wife. 1.00

00:34:58.700 And that's why she provokes you. 0.98

00:35:00.140 It's like, who the hell are you anyways?

00:35:03.020 Like, you could ask someone, but like, what do you know about who you are? 0.99

00:35:06.940 It's like, you're mysterious, just like everyone else.

00:35:09.780 And so if you want to learn, get to know someone, you have to sneak up on them.

00:35:15.340 And do something a little out of the ordinary.

00:35:17.700 And see how they respond.

00:35:19.540 And so children are doing that all the time.

00:35:21.040 And while they're doing that, they're mapping you like mad.

00:35:24.240 And they're learning to imitate you.

00:35:25.340 And then they're not just doing that by watching you.

00:35:27.460 They're doing that by watching other fathers.

00:35:29.460 They're doing that by watching TV shows about fathers.

00:35:32.820 They're doing that by watching movies about fathers.

00:35:35.280 They're doing that by being read books about fathers.

00:35:38.020 And what they're doing is they're extracting out a representation of the father as such.

00:35:45.000 And then when they play, they embody that spirit.

00:35:49.360 it, and they experiment with it in real time. And if they're good at it, they can do it in a way

00:35:56.180 that invites the girl to play, so that she'll keep playing. And that's what you're doing if

00:36:02.140 you're married. Really, really. And if you're doing it properly, then you're playing. And if

00:36:11.520 you say, well, my marriage isn't much of a game, it's like, maybe you're not that good at playing.

00:36:16.020 That's a good secret

00:36:19.960 It's a good secret to know

00:36:21.820 Because one of the things

00:36:22.880 That you can extract from that piece of knowledge

00:36:25.960 Is the following

00:36:26.640 If you notice

00:36:28.040 The manner in which you and your wife

00:36:30.920 Interact let's say 0.85

00:36:31.900 Or you and your husband

00:36:32.660 You'll see that sometimes you're playing

00:36:35.600 And then you may see also

00:36:38.860 That when you're playing

00:36:39.760 You remember at least briefly

00:36:41.620 That this is a person you love

00:36:45.040 and that you wanted to be with.

00:36:47.360 And then you get a little glimpse

00:36:48.860 into what your life could be like

00:36:50.820 if you got it right all the time.

00:36:54.020 And then you could be humble enough to think,

00:36:57.040 for whatever reason,

00:36:59.960 I just did something right there

00:37:01.640 that's unlike what I often do

00:37:04.240 that leads to whatever misery

00:37:05.780 characterizes our relationship.

00:37:08.140 Maybe if I was careful,

00:37:09.480 I could figure out what that game was

00:37:12.220 and I could get better at it.

00:37:15.040 And that's something to understand and focus on.

00:37:20.340 And that is what children are practicing when they're young.

00:37:23.300 Because if the little boy likes the little girl or the reverse,

00:37:28.200 what they want to do is establish a pattern of iterative play.

00:37:33.900 So play that repeats across many circumstances,

00:37:37.080 that moves upward, that they both want to participate in.

00:37:41.320 That's a friendship.

00:37:42.320 a friendship is a chain of games that are increasing in complexity

00:37:47.000 and that's what a marriage should be

00:37:48.880 that's what a marriage should be

00:37:50.880 if it was conducted properly

00:37:53.020 now I understand that life gets in the way of play

00:37:57.160 but that doesn't mean that life properly mastered wouldn't be play

00:38:02.400 right

00:38:03.460 maybe you just have to be sophisticated enough to play the most difficult of games

00:38:07.960 and maybe even under the most difficult of circumstances

00:38:12.260 Now, that's what Tammy was trying to do, for example,

00:38:14.380 when she was attempting to set her head straight 0.90

00:38:16.820 in the aftermath of the death of her father,

00:38:19.860 which is truly a catastrophic loss,

00:38:22.580 and in the face of the resentment that she was liable to feel,

00:38:27.020 not merely because of that loss,

00:38:28.540 but maybe because the circumstances surrounding his death

00:38:32.800 could be deemed suboptimal, as they so often are.

00:38:39.720 realization

00:38:43.840 was that even under those circumstances

00:38:45.940 your best bet is to aim up

00:38:48.000 is to aim up

00:38:49.640 in whatever manner

00:38:51.880 up means to you

00:38:53.080 in the knowledge as well

00:38:55.760 that if you aim up, even if your aim

00:38:57.840 is off to begin with, if you

00:38:59.960 learn along the way

00:39:01.880 how you err in your aim

00:39:05.620 when you're aiming up, all that

00:39:07.720 will happen is that you learn to aim up better and better and better and better indefinitely

00:39:13.560 without end because you might say if you're a cynic well what's better anyways and the proper

00:39:23.480 answer that is that's up to you to figure out not because you make your own values that's up to you

00:39:29.280 to discover

00:39:30.000 our aim is often

00:39:34.340 off that's what

00:39:36.880 to sin means to sin means to miss

00:39:39.300 the target by the way

00:39:40.820 it's derived both in Greek

00:39:43.440 Hebrew and

00:39:45.080 Latin

00:39:47.240 the equivalent word

00:39:51.300 for sin is always derived from an

00:39:53.080 archery term to miss the

00:39:55.180 target well the more you practice

00:39:57.280 aiming at a target, the better

00:39:59.300 you get at hitting it, the farther away

00:40:01.240 you can be from it, and still have your

00:40:03.320 aim be unerring. To begin with, you

00:40:05.340 might be so

00:40:06.200 without skill that

00:40:09.060 you can hardly even make out the target.

00:40:11.980 But that doesn't mean that

00:40:13.240 practice won't make perfect.

00:40:16.420 Back to the

00:40:17.380 child playing with

00:40:19.260 his would-be

00:40:21.100 girlfriend. He's

00:40:23.180 embodying the spirit of the father.

00:40:24.740 he's embodying the spirit of the benevolent father insofar as he's entertaining to play with

00:40:33.160 he's learning to allow that spirit which is the essence of what is repeatable across

00:40:41.300 instances of proper fatherhood to take residence within him

00:40:47.520 when the insistence

00:40:53.960 is made in the opening of chapters

00:40:55.740 of Genesis

00:40:57.640 that God

00:40:59.800 is the spirit that

00:41:01.160 creates

00:41:02.460 in the beginning

00:41:04.480 there's a

00:41:08.140 there's an insistence that

00:41:13.860 that's the same thing that makes itself manifest

00:41:18.760 in the form of the most benevolent father

00:41:21.720 and that's something very much worth thinking about

00:41:26.280 there's a lot of ways of bringing light

00:41:29.640 and the order that is good into the world

00:41:32.220 a family is a realm of potential

00:41:36.060 a family is a realm of unformed potential

00:41:40.240 the spirit of the benevolent father transforms that into the order that is good or very good

00:41:49.340 and it does that by making itself let's ask how does it do that

00:41:58.580 someone says my father was great he loved me and i loved him a great gift for a child to receive

00:42:07.160 What does that mean?

00:42:08.240 To love someone.

00:42:11.680 To offer the best in them, the best in you.

00:42:16.300 How's that?

00:42:19.860 See, my father gave me a gift that many of my friends didn't have.

00:42:25.140 My father was a very harsh taskmaster.

00:42:27.840 And it was very difficult for me to do anything that was good enough.

00:42:31.260 and there's some you could argue that there was something about that that's cutting

00:42:36.520 and and that's certainly the case it's the cutting that cuts away everything that isn't worthy that's

00:42:42.520 what sort of cutting that is but at the same time he in his deepest relationship with me

00:42:48.980 he communicated to me that if i set my spirit to it there was nothing i couldn't figure out

00:42:58.200 and that faith took hold within me

00:43:04.060 as an unshakable conviction

00:43:05.900 and that's a revelation

00:43:10.940 mediated by my father

00:43:14.540 insofar as he was a carrier of the spirit

00:43:18.100 of the benevolent father

00:43:19.900 of the fact that human beings are made in the image of God

00:43:24.000 and there's no greater gift than that

00:43:27.520 not least because it's the truth

00:43:30.180 why is it true

00:43:34.740 well you might ask yourself

00:43:38.680 what do you see

00:43:41.560 when you look at the world

00:43:44.080 and the earth was without form and void

00:43:47.120 and darkness was on the face of the deep

00:43:49.000 and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

00:43:51.860 there's a proposition here

00:43:54.200 the proposition is that

00:43:57.060 The proposition is a characterization of the unformed nature of what exists before reality makes itself manifest.

00:44:08.640 Okay, what does that mean?

00:44:10.420 What do you see when you look at someone?

00:44:13.260 Well, you think you see the person you know.

00:44:19.860 And I would say, what makes you think you know them?

00:44:23.260 and secondly i would say no you see a concretized starting point for a range of potential adventures

00:44:33.440 and you might say well what do you mean by that and i might say do you remember when you fell in

00:44:40.660 love what did you see and you might say what do you mean by see and i mean the all-encompassing

00:44:50.260 encompassing seeing you saw someone that for some reason you could envision spending time with for

00:45:02.780 the rest of your life and you saw that as deeply as you could see anything insofar as you had

00:45:12.120 a sophisticated and well-developed capacity for love and that love that makes itself manifest

00:45:19.700 when you fall in love

00:45:21.720 is a vision of the highest possibility

00:45:24.960 that you could attain

00:45:26.120 if you conducted yourself properly

00:45:28.540 in the presence of that person.

00:45:31.740 And that's a gift from God,

00:45:34.280 that vision.

00:45:35.880 And you can do with it what you will.

00:45:41.940 You can minimize it

00:45:45.120 as a chemically induced delusion you can become bitter about it because it vanishes because you

00:45:54.900 mistreated it you can reduce it in any manner you choose to see fit but all that means is that

00:46:02.260 you've squandered it or you could accept the invitation which is in some sense what you do

00:46:09.900 when you get married and say,

00:46:12.080 I'll stake my life on what I see.

00:46:17.860 What are you doing if you do that?

00:46:21.640 You're encountering the ground of possibility itself

00:46:26.740 and making the determination guided by love

00:46:31.760 to bring order, the order that is good

00:46:35.020 or the order that is very good

00:46:36.820 to the part of the world that you have under your influence.

00:46:43.100 And you're doing that, according to this story,

00:46:47.440 because you are literally an embodiment of the process that does that everywhere,

00:46:55.460 that engenders reality itself out of the underlying chaotic possibility.

00:47:03.960 and there's nothing about that that's mere superstition there's nothing about that that's

00:47:13.420 archaic or outdated there's everything about that that's as advanced a view of the structure of

00:47:21.040 reality is that we could that we could possibly imagine that offers to us an infinitely expanding

00:47:29.960 adventure that unites us psychologically and with other people in a peaceful, productive

00:47:39.140 and generous union, and that moves us all eternally up Jacob's ladder to the highest

00:47:45.820 possible heights.

00:47:47.740 And why would that not be not only the most accurate description of reality possible,

00:47:54.240 but simultaneously the most desirable.

00:48:01.260 Well, the price you pay for that,

00:48:04.020 you might say, is that

00:48:05.660 you're called upon to live in accordance with that spirit.

00:48:10.600 And you're called upon to take the responsibility to do so.

00:48:14.760 You're called upon to act in love, to aim up,

00:48:17.760 and to step forward with all due care

00:48:21.880 in action and word.

00:48:24.240 here's a proposition

00:48:31.060 the spirit of God that descends in Genesis

00:48:36.300 has been identified in the Christian tradition as the word

00:48:39.820 and the word is

00:48:42.160 symbolically associated with the person of Jesus Christ

00:48:47.080 this is a very strange

00:48:49.600 Set of meaningful associations

00:48:55.620 There's nothing about that that's obvious

00:48:58.180 But I'll give you a hint

00:49:00.040 Carl Jung described the story of Christ as archetypal

00:49:06.660 And he meant something very specific by that

00:49:10.000 He meant something like this

00:49:11.600 Imagine you took

00:49:14.060 A selection of interesting stories

00:49:17.200 A large selection of interesting stories

00:49:19.500 stories that were compelling and moving and memorable and then by some mechanism you were

00:49:27.000 able to distill out of those stories the story the meta story that was most compelling and moving

00:49:34.360 and interesting you look you see a row a range of superhero movies and you think some of one of

00:49:41.640 those movies was better than all the others now you know they all of them make a set they make a

00:49:48.060 set of superhero movies. You know, they have similar themes and similar characterizations.

00:49:52.280 You have a sense that there's a qualitative distinction between the movies and that one

00:49:56.400 of them hit the mark better than any other. And that's the one you're most happy to go see. That's

00:50:01.400 the one you're most likely to remember. It's the one you'll recommend to friends. It's the one

00:50:05.020 that'll get the best reviews. Well, imagine you took 10,000 superhero movies and you distilled

00:50:12.260 them to their essence.

00:50:14.260 You have a myth.

00:50:16.480 That's what a myth is.

00:50:18.480 It's a distillation. It's an abstraction.

00:50:21.160 The reason that

00:50:22.120 Jung said that

00:50:23.360 the story of Christ was archetypal was because

00:50:26.340 you can't tell a more tragic

00:50:28.320 story.

00:50:30.240 It's a limit case.

00:50:32.660 Why?

00:50:33.840 Well,

00:50:35.020 imagine all the terrible things that could

00:50:38.180 happen to you.

00:50:41.020 Let's walk through them.

00:50:42.260 Death

00:50:44.260 You might think there's nothing worse

00:50:48.060 If you think there's nothing worse than death

00:50:51.180 You've had a very sheltered life

00:50:54.140 People aren't generally traumatized by death

00:51:01.400 Even their own

00:51:03.220 They're often traumatized by malevolence

00:51:06.420 If you want to develop post-traumatic stress disorder

00:51:10.920 one of the best ways to do it is to watch yourself doing something

00:51:13.820 you couldn't imagine you were capable of doing.

00:51:17.140 That often happens to soldiers, naive soldiers in particular,

00:51:21.120 who are placed in a battlefield for the first time

00:51:23.380 and find themselves doing things they couldn't possibly imagine

00:51:26.660 they were capable of doing.

00:51:28.500 And maybe even discovering that the darkest part of them

00:51:32.380 that was still unrevealed enjoys that in a way

00:51:35.960 they couldn't have possibly imagined.

00:51:38.200 And that's enough to shatter them

00:51:39.840 because they've had an encounter with malevolence itself.

00:51:43.280 And so we could add that to the list.

00:51:45.160 Death and malevolence.

00:51:47.420 The ultimate symbolic representation of the encounter with malevolence

00:51:53.060 is a descent into hell.

00:51:55.460 And that's what happens in principle in the story of Christ after the crucifixion.

00:52:00.820 Three days down, right?

00:52:03.440 The harrowing of hell.

00:52:04.960 It happens in the desert with the encounter with Satan.

00:52:07.900 And what does that mean for each of us?

00:52:10.040 It means you're going to have to contend in your life with the reality of death and the reality of evil.

00:52:15.680 One way or another.

00:52:17.080 Kicking and screaming or voluntarily.

00:52:19.700 Those are your options.

00:52:21.200 Or I suppose with head firmly buried in sand.

00:52:25.740 Which is probably the worst of those three options.

00:52:29.180 But that's not enough.

00:52:30.960 That's not bad enough.

00:52:32.420 Bad as it is.

00:52:33.980 How about betrayal?

00:52:35.840 How about betrayal at the hands of someone you've done nothing but be good to and who is your best friend?

00:52:43.020 How about justice delivered by the mob?

00:52:47.920 How about justice delivered by the mob in alliance with a tyrant who oppresses your people?

00:52:55.580 Et cetera, et cetera.

00:52:56.840 the Christian story is 0.98

00:53:00.260 the panoply of catastrophe 0.62

00:53:03.060 with a redemption at the end

00:53:06.180 it's the pattern of human adaptation

00:53:09.340 as such

00:53:11.020 why?

00:53:17.080 because to live properly

00:53:18.680 you have to hoist all that on your shoulders

00:53:20.640 and so what does that have to do

00:53:25.360 with the word of God that makes itself manifest at the beginning of time.

00:53:30.300 If you confronted the realm of possibility

00:53:34.120 in the manner that would generate the order that was good or very good,

00:53:41.300 you would do that by confronting voluntarily

00:53:45.020 everything that comes your way in your life.

00:53:49.280 And that's the explanation, at least in part,

00:53:52.260 for the Trinitarian vision of Christianity.

00:53:56.760 That capacity to face whatever comes at you,

00:54:03.300 no matter its form,

00:54:06.080 with head held high and eyes gazing upward,

00:54:10.540 speaking the truth,

00:54:13.180 that's equivalent to the embodiment of the Spirit

00:54:16.240 that generates reality itself,

00:54:18.380 not only at the beginning of time,

00:54:20.400 but continually and forever in eternity.

00:54:26.740 And to understand that and to live it out

00:54:30.260 is to take your proper role as a son of God.

00:54:35.800 And that's equivalent to re-entry into the paradise

00:54:40.320 that was barred to Adam and Eve.

00:54:43.420 And so that's what all that means.

00:54:46.640 and i would say further and you can think about this for yourself

00:54:52.560 one of the pieces of one of the suggestions that i've made online is that young men could strive

00:55:01.680 to develop their characters so that they could be the strongest person at the funeral of their

00:55:06.100 father and many young men have come to me and said that that was a very helpful piece of orienting

00:55:12.820 advice because one of the things you don't know what to do one of the situations where you might

00:55:20.260 not know how to act is in the face of death itself especially in the face of the death of someone you

00:55:25.360 love because in some ways there's not much that can be said about it right because everyone at

00:55:31.020 a funeral confronts the abyss simultaneously and so then you might ask yourself well how best to

00:55:38.860 confront the abyss and that's no different in the deepest possible sense than how to confront the

00:55:44.540 deepest problems in your life and you might say could you under those circumstances be of great

00:55:51.920 service to others could you be the staff upon which they lean and if you were capable of doing that

00:55:59.120 despite or even incorporating your own grief into the effort

00:56:04.480 Is it possible that that would be the best possible way through that particular valley of the shadow of death?

00:56:15.420 Well, think about this.

00:56:20.740 I interviewed this monstrous character, Jocko Willink, multiple times.

00:56:26.880 And Jocko, he's about four feet wide and about three feet thick.

00:56:34.480 He eats tough guys for breakfast.

00:56:37.900 And Jocko knows perfectly well that had he made a few inconvenient decisions

00:56:44.800 when he was a young man, that he could have been one criminal monster.

00:56:50.320 And he went to the military instead.

00:56:54.420 A civilized form of possibility for mayhem.

00:56:57.820 and he learned there that

00:56:59.840 he

00:57:02.820 because he had the opportunity

00:57:04.320 to foster the development of young men

00:57:06.340 as an emerging leader

00:57:07.460 he was a special forces guy

00:57:10.040 not an easy thing to manage

00:57:11.780 and

00:57:12.840 he was mentoring young men

00:57:15.480 and he found that

00:57:16.880 more interesting than causing trouble

00:57:20.760 which is a good definition of a deep interest

00:57:24.380 because

00:57:25.160 causing trouble is extremely interesting

00:57:27.540 And so if you find something better than that, you're pretty damn fortunate.

00:57:31.860 He found that if he conducted himself as someone that younger men looked up to,

00:57:38.600 who could serve as a model and who could pull them forward,

00:57:40.800 who could encourage and help to develop,

00:57:47.840 that there was nothing that spoke more directly, even to his savage soul.

00:57:51.960 there's no difference between that and being the staff that people rely on at a funeral

00:57:57.800 and you know we know that the more you focus on yourself the more miserable you are

00:58:04.260 we know as psychologists that there's no difference between being miserable and being

00:58:08.920 self-conscious and you might say well what's the antidote to miserable self-consciousness

00:58:13.620 it's all about me and all of my pain and my terrible suffering and what i want right now

00:58:19.880 and that's a pathway to misery.

00:58:22.140 And the antithesis of that isn't to stop doing that.

00:58:26.760 The antithesis of that is to do everything you can

00:58:30.140 to be of utility, productive, generous utility to others,

00:58:34.780 particularly when they're in need.

00:58:36.840 And that is something that you could do at a funeral.

00:58:39.040 And if you were a master at that,

00:58:41.540 maybe the funeral would be a celebration.

00:58:44.120 And I'm not trying to be naive about that.

00:58:47.280 I know there's a loss in it.

00:58:50.880 But there is, in that grief, there is also an element of the celebration of the fact that the person that you love existed.

00:58:59.420 And perhaps that sentiment could take predominance even in those dismal times.

00:59:03.860 And perhaps the most appropriate manner, perhaps the surest pathway to that possibility, realizing itself,

00:59:10.720 is to take time even in the midst of your own grief to make sure everyone else is welcome and comfortable.

00:59:19.880 to make sure that you're grateful for their presence,

00:59:23.440 to make sure that you attend to their grief

00:59:26.580 and to find the meaning,

00:59:32.480 the deep meaning that's available to you

00:59:35.200 in the deepest of all possible service

00:59:38.060 at the most inopportune possible moment.

00:59:41.180 And then you might also ask yourself,

00:59:42.840 you tell me, you tell me

00:59:44.560 if you would not admire someone who could do that.

00:59:47.400 right and then you might think well imagine that you could do that would you not imagine as well

00:59:53.760 that you were then allied with something that you found deeply admirable and i mean from the core

00:59:59.140 right i don't mean as a rational interpretation you'd walk away from a situation like thinking

01:00:05.820 that was really something that's really something to think about that was really inspiring

01:00:10.700 that was really something to aim for and that's something that's calling that's a manifestation

01:00:17.040 of something that calls to something inside you

01:00:20.020 that's looking for that pathway forward.

01:00:23.640 That's what admiration is.

01:00:26.600 Admiration is the instinct to imitate.

01:00:29.780 It's more than that.

01:00:31.020 It's an instinct to imitate the central animating spirit

01:00:34.120 of the benevolent father.

01:00:36.380 That's a very good way of thinking about it.

01:00:39.400 And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

01:00:42.180 you can feel that

01:00:43.880 when you're inspired

01:00:47.120 when something occurs to you

01:00:48.920 when you have a flash of insight

01:00:50.200 when you find your way

01:00:51.640 when you see where to put your foot down next

01:00:54.780 on firm ground

01:00:55.960 when you're sure of your step

01:00:58.340 when you're precise with your words

01:01:00.720 when every syllable lands

01:01:03.660 when you're saying exactly what's right

01:01:06.380 in the right time and the right place

01:01:08.860 if you do that

01:01:16.220 if you have the grace to do that

01:01:18.260 it's because you've

01:01:20.020 you've had the good fortune

01:01:25.760 and possibly the humility

01:01:27.080 to allow

01:01:27.820 what's best

01:01:30.500 about the human tradition

01:01:32.620 to take residence within you

01:01:35.740 and speak

01:01:36.520 your conscience will tell you how to do that or at least when you aren't that's a messenger of god

01:01:47.360 that's hermes that's the winged messenger of the gods it's one of them your conscience is one of

01:01:53.800 those autonomous spirits that makes mockery of the notion that you can create your own values

01:01:58.800 because your conscience

01:02:00.720 your conscience is the voice of suffering itself

01:02:04.100 it tells you that you're on the wrong path

01:02:08.860 it tells you that you've slipped off the golden path upward

01:02:13.260 and that you've moved on to the path of perdition

01:02:16.100 and you can do what you can to ignore that

01:02:19.840 and to rationalize it away

01:02:21.600 and all that will do is make things worse

01:02:24.680 And every single person who's ever been born knows that.

01:02:33.080 When else do you feel that moving?

01:02:35.820 When something grips your attention.

01:02:37.780 When something calls to you and compels you forward.

01:02:40.860 When something elicits your interest.

01:02:42.860 When some gateway to something new makes itself manifest.

01:02:46.660 When you have a plan that's inspiring.

01:02:49.000 When you have a vision that's inviting.

01:02:54.680 that dichotomy of forces,

01:02:57.320 conscience and calling,

01:02:59.500 that's the voices within

01:03:01.500 the two pillars of God,

01:03:03.340 you might say,

01:03:04.060 that guide you through the desert.

01:03:08.680 And modern people,

01:03:11.320 Carl Jung said,

01:03:12.500 modern people don't see God

01:03:13.900 because they don't look low enough.

01:03:16.560 They're not humble enough.

01:03:18.020 That's a good way of thinking.

01:03:19.080 But they're waiting for the miraculous manifestation.

01:03:21.980 They're waiting for God to break the rules of time and space.

01:03:24.680 So that their doubt can be alleviated.

01:03:27.760 Well that's a lot to ask for.

01:03:30.280 It's a lot to ask for the laws of reality themselves to be suspended for any moment.

01:03:37.500 Just to eliminate your faithless doubt.

01:03:42.020 And it's especially a lot to ask for when it's crystal clear that even if that happened a week later you wouldn't believe it anyways.

01:03:54.680 this is a Greek representation of the same kind of idea.

01:04:00.780 You know what it's like in life when everything gets out of control?

01:04:07.000 That's too much possibility and not enough actuality.

01:04:10.640 That's too much chaos and not enough order.

01:04:13.600 It's too much potential even.

01:04:15.760 Because too much potential makes itself manifest as nothing but potential for trouble.

01:04:21.560 you know the story of the hydra it's a terrible serpent if you cut off one head

01:04:28.040 seven more grow right and it's very straightforward and likely that you it's very likely that you'll

01:04:35.760 be in a situation like that in your life and fairly often well there are echoes of this imagery

01:04:43.160 in the opening sections of the genesis narrative there's the insistence as god describes much later

01:04:51.300 to Job that it was

01:04:52.620 the spirit that

01:04:54.600 made order out

01:04:57.300 of chaos that

01:04:58.360 defeated the primordial

01:05:03.640 leviathan

01:05:04.300 that's an

01:05:07.420 echo of the old hero story

01:05:09.100 of the hero against the dragon

01:05:11.100 the hero who cuts the dragon

01:05:13.280 into parts and makes the world

01:05:14.800 that's a

01:05:15.620 hunting myth you might say

01:05:19.060 and that's part of the

01:05:21.180 spirit that inhabits us that capability of human beings to go out into the vast wastelands and

01:05:27.900 encounter that which is most terrifying and transform it and by taking up arms let's say

01:05:37.560 eradicate the predator and bring home the beast and that's part of the same collection of ideas

01:05:46.120 that speaks to the courageous human capacity

01:05:50.340 to confront potential and create the order that is good.

01:05:54.240 That's the origin of the dragon myth, right?

01:05:57.600 That's the Harry Potter story.

01:05:59.480 That's the story of the Lord of the Rings.

01:06:02.520 That's the story of the movie Jaws,

01:06:05.660 the hero who encounters the terrible beast

01:06:08.380 and discovers the treasure that's buried deep within its lair

01:06:12.580 and brings that back to the community and distributes it.

01:06:16.720 That's equivalent in the symbolic realm, in the narrative realm,

01:06:19.860 to the spirit that uses the word that confronts mortality itself

01:06:25.040 with spirit held high to generate the order that is good.

01:06:29.400 All of that fits in a piece.

01:06:32.100 None of that's accidental.

01:06:34.200 And the reason for that is that it is a direct reflection

01:06:38.780 of what's been captured in imagination

01:06:40.700 about the deepest structure of reality itself.

01:06:44.300 And we're at a point in the development of our culture

01:06:46.960 where we have to begin to understand these things

01:06:50.240 explicitly and consciously

01:06:52.080 so that we can rediscover what they mean.

01:07:10.700 And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

01:07:37.620 And God saw the light, that it was good.

01:07:39.200 and God divided the light from the darkness.

01:07:41.180 That's a representation of what you might say,

01:07:46.980 it's the most primordial form of moral discrimination.

01:07:50.660 That's a good way of thinking about it.

01:07:54.460 These lines contain references to many things.

01:07:58.360 The Bible, technically speaking, is a deeply hyperlinked text.

01:08:02.080 Virtually every verse refers to multiple other verses.

01:08:05.840 And so every poetic line is next to an associated web of connotative meanings that amplify the text.

01:08:23.500 What does this mean pragmatically speaking?

01:08:27.580 Look, think about what you do when you make a decision.

01:08:31.040 if you have any sense at all at least partly what you're trying to do is to

01:08:36.000 move towards the light or to bring light to the circumstance to illuminate your circumstance

01:08:41.260 and more than that you're actually trying to divide the light from the darkness what does

01:08:45.720 that mean well don't you think when you're making a decision that you try to figure out what's right

01:08:50.120 now you might fail and you might think how can i get what i need right now out of this situation

01:08:58.100 Now, I wouldn't recommend that as a standard pattern of approach.

01:09:03.260 Because it betrays the you that you will become, because it's about right now.

01:09:11.160 And it makes everyone else subordinate to your immediate whim, which is what a two-year-old does.

01:09:17.580 And two-year-olds can't live by themselves, because you can't live with that orientation.

01:09:23.920 And so what do you do when you make a decision?

01:09:26.320 you divide the light from the darkness

01:09:28.380 you try to see the pathway forward

01:09:31.360 that glistens and gleams

01:09:33.020 and you may be wary of that

01:09:35.300 because of the responsibility

01:09:36.600 to take up your cross

01:09:38.660 so to speak

01:09:39.980 that accompanies walking down that pathway

01:09:42.880 but to the degree that you're wise

01:09:45.320 in the smallest of guises

01:09:46.960 you will attempt to separate the light

01:09:50.160 from the darkness

01:09:50.980 and to dwell within the light

01:09:53.560 And the moral of this remarkable, so far, four-line story is that in discriminating the light from the darkness and in walking that path, you replicate the process that generates reality itself, the reality that is good, out of the chaos of possibility that presents itself.

01:10:23.560 So here's something fun to know.

01:10:28.480 How do you know if you're doing that right?

01:10:32.440 It's meaningful.

01:10:35.320 What is meaning?

01:10:37.800 It's the deepest of orienting instincts.

01:10:43.580 People say life has no meaning.

01:10:47.860 This is what they mean.

01:10:50.000 In my intellectual pride and presumption, I have allowed the critical faculty that I'm far too identified with to criticize what's most valuable in me out of existence.

01:11:09.180 That is not a claim to virtue.

01:11:12.980 It's a declaration of alliance with the darkest possible spirit.

01:11:18.360 what's lucifer

01:11:22.600 the presumptuous spirit of prideful intellect

01:11:28.160 the adversary of the spirit of being itself

01:11:32.600 the spirit that if you allow

01:11:36.900 its residence to be made within you

01:11:41.360 will demolish your capacity

01:11:44.400 to discriminate light from darkness

01:11:47.300 or entice you to seek out and pursue the darkness.

01:11:54.360 And there's no difference between that and the pathway to hell.

01:12:01.700 And I don't mean that in some faraway transcendent space,

01:12:06.900 although perhaps that's also true.

01:12:10.200 I mean that as the most pragmatic and accurate possible advice

01:12:15.940 that could ever be given to anyone.

01:12:20.320 Hence its position in the opening lines

01:12:24.280 of the book upon which our culture is predicated.

01:12:31.280 And God called the light day

01:12:33.140 and the darkness he called night

01:12:34.520 and the evening and the morning were the first day.

01:12:36.720 More differentiation.

01:12:38.740 Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water

01:12:41.200 and let it divide the waters from the waters.

01:12:44.520 this is the building up of what is concrete and foundational from possibility that's what you do

01:12:55.520 when you get to know someone because when you don't know them they're nothing but who they

01:13:01.760 could be and that's an infinite realm of possible possibilities and permutations and as you

01:13:08.720 investigate and discriminate and pursue either the light or the darkness in relationship to them

01:13:14.820 you differentiate them into solid understanding and you do that with everything you encounter

01:13:23.300 in the world and you might say well that has nothing to do with the creation of being itself

01:13:28.300 and i would say how could you possibly construe the existence of being itself in the absence of

01:13:35.260 conscious observer. You certainly act as if your experience is real. Your pain, for example,

01:13:44.820 is real. That reality itself is constituted in consequence of your conscious experience.

01:13:52.420 Maybe that's true. You act like it's true.

01:13:57.340 in your interactions with other people

01:14:04.760 when you treat them with the respect

01:14:07.820 that someone made in the image of God

01:14:11.300 is due

01:14:12.460 they like being around you

01:14:15.160 if you treat your children that way

01:14:17.440 they thrive 0.99

01:14:18.460 if you treat your wife that way 0.62

01:14:20.420 she develops

01:14:21.580 if you treat your friends that way

01:14:23.380 you have friends and not just henchmen

01:14:26.220 or people to get drunk with.

01:14:30.520 When I say you act this out,

01:14:32.580 I suppose I mean that

01:14:33.840 insofar as your life is successful

01:14:36.620 and flourishing,

01:14:38.400 you act it out.

01:14:41.060 Insofar as you listen to the messages

01:14:43.300 that other people send you

01:14:44.740 about how they want to be treated,

01:14:47.380 you act it out.

01:14:51.140 Insofar as you act it out,

01:14:54.340 The world of possibilities opens itself up to you in ever-increasing plenitude.

01:15:01.340 That's why in the Gospels, Christ is presented as the man who performs the miracle of feeding from nothing.

01:15:15.900 The loaves and the fishes.

01:15:18.880 The pattern that can provide in the midst of absence.

01:15:25.060 What is that pattern?

01:15:27.900 How about your reputation for generous productivity?

01:15:35.520 How about that?

01:15:36.700 How about if you aimed at nothing but that?

01:15:40.040 The generous productivity that you could offer to others.

01:15:44.480 If you were a master at that, do you think you would ever go hungry?

01:15:47.740 Do you think the people that you love would ever go hungry?

01:15:50.900 Don't you think instead that people would be lining up in your hour of need

01:15:54.160 to serve you in the same way that you serve them?

01:15:58.020 That's, by the way, the treasure that you store up in heaven

01:16:01.700 that is to be preferred to all earthly treasure.

01:16:05.380 That's the pearl of great price

01:16:07.240 that the wise man sells everything he owns to gather.

01:16:12.200 And that's all a representation of the pattern of existence

01:16:15.440 that's embedded in the first eight lines of this story.

01:16:24.680 And God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place

01:16:28.940 to bring everything into a unity that's concretized

01:16:32.120 and let the dry land upon which life can emerge occur.

01:16:36.660 The solidity, the foundation, the foundation upon which the wise man builds his house.

01:16:44.540 And God called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters he called the seas.

01:16:50.280 And that's another re-representation of the separation of order that is habitable from chaos,

01:16:58.400 the watery chaos that prevailed at the beginning of time.

01:17:02.360 The realm of possibility and potential symbolized by the oceanic depths

01:17:07.200 from which much nourishment can be drawn.

01:17:11.160 And God saw that it was good.

01:17:13.860 Now that's a hint.

01:17:15.800 That line is repeated multiple times in this text.

01:17:20.280 What is the order that is good?

01:17:23.220 Well, I suppose that's the foundation for the kingdom of heaven.

01:17:26.440 That's one way of thinking about it.

01:17:28.260 How do you participate in the process that brings about the order that is good?

01:17:34.700 How about by aiming at the good?

01:17:38.620 Well, here's a thought for you.

01:17:40.320 Here's a definition for those of you harboring atheistic pretensions.

01:17:46.400 Imagine ten good things.

01:17:50.280 What do they share?

01:17:52.700 Well, they share that which is, in essence, good.

01:17:57.260 That's what unites them.

01:17:59.440 The essence of good is what unites good things.

01:18:04.460 God is the essence of good.

01:18:08.220 Do you believe in good?

01:18:10.780 Do you believe in the shared commonality of good things?

01:18:14.900 Well, then, at minimum, you have an implicit God beckoning to you.

01:18:18.920 And if you had any wisdom, you would make that explicit and open yourself up to its invitation.

01:18:29.620 Unless you don't want what's good.

01:18:32.120 Well, that's what we'll discover.

01:18:36.280 That's what you would discover if you continued in the text to the story of Cain and Abel.

01:18:42.000 Because Abel decides to pursue the order that is good.

01:18:48.740 And God rewards him with that benefit.

01:18:51.940 And Cain, in his bitterness and resentment and his unwillingness to commit,

01:18:57.860 pursues the order that's convenient.

01:19:02.880 And the consequence of that is that his suffering is multiplied to the point

01:19:07.900 where he's depressed and anxious and bitter and resentful and hostile and nihilistic

01:19:14.820 and downcast and murderous and genocidal.

01:19:21.520 And those are the paths that diverge in front of you

01:19:25.120 with every glance you take and every decision that you make.

01:19:31.920 Up Jacob's ladder to the highest possible place

01:19:36.140 or down inside Dante's inferno to the depths of hell

01:19:41.780 where the ultimate betrayer forever resides.

01:19:48.640 Thank you very much.

01:20:03.080 Thank you.

01:20:11.780 All right, my dear.

01:20:17.940 Thank you for putting up with that.

01:20:30.500 How you doing, bucko?

01:20:34.900 Well, that was, you know, a very strange form of entertainment,

01:20:38.020 but a form of entertainment nonetheless.

01:20:41.780 I liked your talk.

01:20:43.240 Thank you.

01:20:44.320 Yeah, it was good.

01:20:45.400 Good work.

01:20:46.280 Thank you, sir.

01:20:47.000 Yeah.

01:20:48.160 Okay.

01:20:51.120 Cervantes wrote,

01:20:53.340 the road is always better than the inn.

01:20:56.200 You're on the road again.

01:20:58.180 Do you agree with Cervantes

01:20:59.480 and what you have learned giving these talks?

01:21:02.960 Boy, that's a good question.

01:21:04.800 I wish I could give a gold star

01:21:06.200 to the person who asked that question.

01:21:09.480 The road is always better than the inn.

01:21:11.780 oh man that's such a great that's such a great line

01:21:15.200 okay so dostoevsky wrote a very famous book called notes from underground and

01:21:25.260 in dostoevsky was an absolute prophet like nietzsche he could see way down into the structure

01:21:31.780 of things and he knew what was about to happen he predicted the catastrophe of the communist

01:21:38.780 revolution like 60 years before it happened which is just a it's absolutely unimaginable feat he did

01:21:45.980 that in a book called the devils or the possessed and in many of his other books as well not least

01:21:51.200 in notes from underground he he he was commenting on this building that that was erected in london

01:21:58.660 at the world's, at the, at the, at the, I think it was 18, 18, late 1800s World Exhibition.

01:22:09.700 They built the first modern glass and steel building.

01:22:15.120 It was called something like the Palace of Crystal.

01:22:17.940 And it was a vision of a kind of technological material utopia.

01:22:22.760 and Dostoevsky got wind of this

01:22:25.680 and the utopian schemes that lay underneath it

01:22:29.140 that turned our cities into modern-day wastelands

01:22:32.400 by the way

01:22:33.380 the modern-day wastelands of uniform glass and steel

01:22:37.660 and he started to think deeply about the utopian offering

01:22:42.560 so imagine that you just had whatever you need

01:22:49.080 that's the Marxist dream I suppose

01:22:52.000 what do you need well doskidevsky thought well what what are our basic requirements fundamentally

01:22:58.680 he said well imagine that you set up a situation and i think he was speaking of california where

01:23:04.240 all you had to do was sit in pools of bubbling hot water and eat sweet cakes and busy yourself with

01:23:15.460 the propagation of the species, and that does sound a lot like Hollywood, and would that

01:23:26.500 suffice?

01:23:27.500 Now, you'd think, well, in some way, that is everything I need, or maybe in some sense

01:23:36.840 even everything I desire.

01:23:40.340 So what's the problem with that?

01:23:41.460 Well, Dostoevsky said, well, one of the problems is that people are basically insane and in a very curious way.

01:23:49.080 And they'll break things into bits, even if they're good, just because they want something interesting to happen.

01:23:55.940 And so if you provided a group of people with this garden of hedonistic delights,

01:24:02.900 it would take no time at all until they smashed it into pieces,

01:24:06.300 just so they could squabble interestingly among the runes and curse.

01:24:11.460 And that's very funny and very accurate, and that was Dostoevsky's observation.

01:24:16.740 And that was a devastating critique of the presumptions of materialist utopians.

01:24:21.700 And the reason for that is that's not what we want.

01:24:24.040 And the reason for that is we're not overgrown infants.

01:24:28.000 And that's an infantile vision of paradise.

01:24:30.920 You can just lay there.

01:24:32.140 Someone will change your diapers because you don't want to have all of the inconvenience of actually having to move

01:24:38.080 when an intravenous flow into your veins

01:24:41.040 could provide you with everything you need.

01:24:43.200 Maybe you don't even have to be conscious.

01:24:46.460 Well, is that what you want?

01:24:53.900 Well, if that isn't what you want,

01:24:55.500 what do you want?

01:24:57.040 How about the great adventure of your life?

01:25:01.900 How about that?

01:25:03.100 In the story of Abraham,

01:25:05.420 Abraham is an overgrown infant.

01:25:07.840 He's a failure to launch.

01:25:09.220 He's like 70-something years old.

01:25:12.480 He lives in his dad's tent or his mother's basement.

01:25:17.300 And, you know, he's got food.

01:25:20.340 He's got grapes. 0.99

01:25:21.380 He's got slave girls or pornography. 0.99

01:25:24.420 He's got everything he needs at hand. 0.99

01:25:26.800 Needs at hand.

01:25:28.640 He's got privilege.

01:25:31.100 And it's undeserved.

01:25:32.820 But there's no need for him to do anything.

01:25:35.500 So what does he lack?

01:25:37.440 How about the need to do something?

01:25:40.500 How about that?

01:25:41.300 How about that that's the need that becomes paramount in the land of material plenty?

01:25:47.940 The call to adventure.

01:25:50.020 Well, that's what comes to Abraham.

01:25:51.480 That's what comes to Abraham.

01:25:53.040 That's how God is defined in the story of Abraham.

01:25:59.600 The biblical corpus is a sequence of stories that contain within them a definition of God.

01:26:04.920 And so you might say, one manner that you could conceptualize God is the,

01:26:11.540 God is the manifestation of the spirit within that calls you to broaden yourself in the struggle with life.

01:26:20.860 It's a definition, do you understand?

01:26:23.940 It's not a proclamation of faith.

01:26:26.840 It's a definition of the highest possible aspiration.

01:26:30.980 Well, now then you ask yourself this.

01:26:34.920 Do you believe in the existence of a spirit that calls you to adventure?

01:26:40.260 Well, if you pursue adventure, then yes.

01:26:45.380 Ask yourself this, then.

01:26:47.900 If you devoted yourself to nothing but that pursuit,

01:26:53.120 wholeheartedly and with full faith, how great an adventure could you have?

01:26:58.920 That's what God offers Abraham.

01:27:00.360 And Abraham says, I'm in no matter what.

01:27:05.320 And God says, okay then, how about if I call upon you to sacrifice your son?

01:27:12.300 And Abraham says, I'm all in no matter what.

01:27:21.020 And that's the ultimate statement of faith.

01:27:23.140 And it's a necessary statement because whether you like it or not, you are all in no matter what.

01:27:30.900 And you can either do that in the most noble possible manner.

01:27:39.340 Or you can do it as a second-grader.

01:27:43.620 And those are your options.

01:27:45.740 And if you do it as a second-grader, all that means is that you have faith in being second-rate.

01:27:52.500 And good luck with that.

01:27:56.060 And I would say that too.

01:27:57.700 Good luck with that.

01:27:58.500 And why?

01:27:59.000 Because life is far too brutal, far too overwhelming, far too magnificent, far too demanding for you to master it without committing, sacrificing the very best within you.

01:28:23.220 And then you might ask yourself too, life is a veil of suffering.

01:28:29.000 maybe it's because you don't make the right sacrifices.

01:28:33.460 Now, let's think that through for a minute.

01:28:36.540 When you look back in your life and you're happy with yourself,

01:28:40.860 I don't mean prideful, I don't mean puffed out.

01:28:43.900 Maybe you don't even discuss this with anybody.

01:28:45.560 I mean, when you're having a colloquy with your conscience

01:28:48.380 and you're trying to decide if there's anything within you of redeeming value whatsoever,

01:28:52.800 what might you point to?

01:28:54.980 how about a time in your past

01:28:57.580 where you encountered something remarkably difficult

01:29:00.020 and managed it with dignity, grace

01:29:02.260 and productive generosity

01:29:05.620 even once or twice

01:29:07.460 when you stepped out of your way

01:29:09.120 to do something for someone else

01:29:10.740 not to gain the credit

01:29:12.740 the public credit

01:29:14.280 in relationship to your reputation for doing so

01:29:17.140 but because you were moved by the spirit

01:29:19.320 that pushed you to

01:29:22.020 extend yourself beyond your limits

01:29:24.860 that contemplation of those acts

01:29:28.220 can get you through a very dark time

01:29:30.120 what if your life was made of nothing but those acts

01:29:33.040 maybe there would be no truly dark times

01:29:37.380 maybe you would be able to construe

01:29:39.740 whatever came your way

01:29:43.120 no matter how horrific

01:29:47.220 as an immense dragon with a commensurate potential reward

01:29:54.360 that's what happens in the story of job job is tortured almost to the same degree as christ and

01:30:01.440 job's insistence during his torment is no matter what happens to me i will not lose faith and

01:30:08.860 that's a decision it's a proclamation right it's an orientation and the orientation is

01:30:15.940 be set by catastrophe though i may be i will maintain faith in the fundamental goodness of

01:30:23.340 being and myself, and I will act in accordance with that proposition, and I will take whatever

01:30:29.440 comes my way in consequence of that faith. In dire straits, one faith or another will

01:30:37.580 move you forward. The traditional injunction is to maintain your faith in the ultimate

01:30:47.260 goodness of

01:30:48.160 being becoming and the human soul

01:30:51.120 and that's

01:30:53.300 why the road is better than the end

01:30:55.060 because we're not built for comfort

01:30:57.280 we're built

01:30:59.200 for adventure

01:30:59.840 we're built

01:31:03.440 for the adventure of the truth

01:31:04.960 to be more precise

01:31:07.300 so that's that

01:31:10.260 that's a good one

01:31:15.840 this year

01:31:25.260 this year

01:31:27.020 my teenage brother has come out as a woman

01:31:29.620 I'm the only one in the family

01:31:32.560 that doesn't call him by his new name

01:31:34.560 what should I do

01:31:36.320 well I would say

01:31:46.140 don't fall prey to the machinations

01:31:48.440 of toxic compassion

01:31:49.820 leave here

01:31:54.080 imagine 10 years from now

01:32:03.980 and

01:32:04.860 your brother and you have the best relationship you can imagine and things have worked out for him

01:32:13.160 act in act towards him in accordance with that spirit

01:32:18.920 that doesn't mean do what he wants you to do in the moment

01:32:23.840 establishing a proper relationship never means

01:32:29.180 doing for someone what they only want in the moment that is the worst thing you can do to

01:32:34.620 your children you act in accordance with what's good for them across the widest possible range

01:32:42.000 of circumstances and times and that's how you entice them into maturity and so you need a

01:32:46.720 vision you need a vision of the relationship you could have with your brother you could tell a

01:32:52.220 story a bit about your decision and determination to establish an appropriate relationship with your

01:33:02.760 father and your siblings just tell that briefly what you did and what happened uh well my sister

01:33:08.700 and I both my sisters and I they're much older than I they're five and seven years older than me

01:33:14.880 and we've always uh since I've been grown we never seem to get along much and as my mom

01:33:22.180 was diagnosed with dementia Jordan tested us and we found out that my oldest sister at 49 was

01:33:29.440 showing signs of dementia. And I said to Jordan, what do you think I could do to improve my

01:33:35.460 relationship with my sister? And he said, you could just listen, just listen. And so I stopped

01:33:40.880 talking to her. I'd stopped telling her any of my opinions, anything that I thought about.

01:33:46.920 I just listened. And that weekend went a lot better. I got in a lot less trouble.

01:33:52.380 surprise surprise and at the end of the weekend we were sitting having dinner with her and she

01:34:00.740 started to tell me what she thought of me and she started to say things like you never did anything

01:34:06.460 on your own mom and dad you were spoiled they did everything for you your life was easy

01:34:13.220 and I didn't say anything because that was what I decided and at the end of that she said but

01:34:18.920 you're a good mother. And I thought that was very strange. And over the years, that was in 2002,

01:34:26.020 over the years, we've gotten along much, much better because I continued to listen.

01:34:32.440 And we, and she didn't bring that up again, except for once. Other than that, we got along

01:34:37.760 fine. And so I would recommend trying that with anyone that you have a difficulty with

01:34:46.820 their relationship with you is just listen because you're not talking to who you think you are and

01:34:52.640 she had an old memory you know that she had never updated and she was talking to me about something

01:34:58.260 from the past but once she said it she realized that oh actually I was grown and I was a good

01:35:05.060 mother and none of that was really true so I think that's a yeah well so what happened in that

01:35:11.780 situation is you stop trying to impose your will on your sisters in all ways she stopped looking

01:35:18.240 for respect she stopped looking for love she stopped looking for attention she flipped the

01:35:24.540 game she decided that she was going to aim at reconciling with her sisters that was the aim

01:35:32.260 and then then she was going to watch and listen to see how the pathway to that

01:35:36.980 would make itself manifest now this is so cool here's something that's really worth understanding

01:35:42.080 that's how your perceptions work you're an aiming mechanism and so once you establish an aim

01:35:53.580 you lay an interpretive filter on the world that only lets through those things that will

01:36:04.840 move you towards that aim and those things that will stop you and that hides everything else

01:36:11.040 and so the way the world makes itself manifest to you perceptually is literally dependent on your

01:36:19.880 aim and so if you aim at reconciliation let's say in in the case of the questioner you want what's

01:36:27.240 best for your brother and for your relationship, and then you wait and watch, the pathway forward

01:36:36.240 to that will make itself available. Now, how do I know that? Well, don't you ever get where you're

01:36:42.980 going? Well, how? Well, the way you get where you're going is you decide what your destination

01:36:51.740 is. And then you see the pathway and the facilitators and the obstacles. And so

01:37:01.660 this is such a powerful approach that other people will fall under its spell. So if we meet

01:37:14.980 and I want to understand who you are

01:37:18.880 and I have that goal uppermost in mind

01:37:22.160 and I attend to you carefully,

01:37:24.800 you will tell me who you are,

01:37:27.360 one way or another.

01:37:30.560 And that's why it says in the Gospels, for example,

01:37:33.400 that if you knock, the door will open

01:37:36.300 and if you ask, you'll receive

01:37:38.200 and if you seek, you'll find.

01:37:39.940 And you think, well, there's no way

01:37:41.500 the world can be constituted like that.

01:37:43.700 It's like, if it wasn't constituted like that, you'd never receive if you asked,

01:37:48.920 and you'd never find if you sought.

01:37:51.100 And that isn't how it works.

01:37:53.660 And so if your aim is pure, and your heart is in the right place,

01:38:01.280 you'll find your way with your brother.

01:38:04.500 And you can wait.

01:38:07.240 You can wait until that way makes itself manifest.

01:38:10.560 You don't have to push it.

01:38:11.840 you can't push it

01:38:13.960 it's not up to you anyways

01:38:16.540 the best you can do is

01:38:18.880 hope you can help him find his way

01:38:23.660 and

01:38:25.160 the best way that you can help anyone find their way

01:38:28.520 is by

01:38:29.060 aiming at what's highest in relationship

01:38:32.460 to the two of you

01:38:33.760 and then

01:38:34.960 allowing that process to

01:38:39.140 unfold in so far as you're able to facilitate it and there's a kind of grace and dance with that

01:38:46.340 and one of the advantages of that too is you won't be crushed by an excess of responsibility

01:38:52.060 because you might be tearing out your hair thinking oh my god you know what should i do

01:38:56.260 with my brother and the answer is well if you don't know recalibrate your aim and wait and wait

01:39:04.240 the right time will make itself

01:39:07.560 the right time will make its appearance

01:39:10.260 the right words will come to mind

01:39:12.380 you can feel them as you move along

01:39:14.220 something you learn to do as a clinical therapist

01:39:16.640 you know if you're listening to people constantly

01:39:18.520 you want to find the right question

01:39:20.340 to draw them out further

01:39:22.220 you want to ask them the right question

01:39:24.480 to clarify what they've told you

01:39:26.480 to seek further understanding

01:39:28.220 and you can feel those

01:39:29.780 questions bubbling up inside you

01:39:32.060 those are the tools that are making themselves manifest to you

01:39:36.040 to attain your aim

01:39:37.440 the aim I told my clients

01:39:39.580 the aim I told my clients when they came to see me

01:39:42.500 well what's my aim here with you

01:39:44.420 my aim is to have the best in me serve the best in you

01:39:47.760 and that doesn't mean I'm always going to be on your side

01:39:51.340 right because sometimes the part of you that will be speaking

01:39:55.040 will be your worst enemy

01:39:56.800 and I'm not a fan of that

01:39:59.500 and that's not what you want from someone who's a friend

01:40:03.040 and certainly not from someone who's a counselor or a brother

01:40:06.140 now you're in the terrible circumstance of trying to weave your way forward

01:40:10.620 in an incredibly complicated moral landscape

01:40:13.000 but

01:40:13.400 get your aim straight and don't lie

01:40:18.820 and act in love and that's a good start

01:40:22.600 and you'll

01:40:23.100 even if you're the guy who's wrong for five years in everyone's minds

01:40:28.680 that doesn't mean you'll be the guy

01:40:30.560 that was wrong 15 years from now

01:40:32.680 what's the most important thing

01:40:54.320 I can do to take care of my wife

01:40:56.720 I didn't make that

01:41:06.720 try to remember that you love her

01:41:08.580 but I really mean that

01:41:12.120 by remember I mean

01:41:13.540 bring that to mind

01:41:16.820 like imagine that

01:41:20.000 rekindle it

01:41:21.640 you know like

01:41:23.680 people wonder

01:41:25.340 what it means to experience the grace of God.

01:41:30.060 And you could imagine

01:41:33.740 that that's the same question as

01:41:35.800 what does it mean to receive inspiration from within?

01:41:40.680 That's a good analog.

01:41:43.980 Well, love is a form of grace.

01:41:46.580 You fall in love.

01:41:48.500 Right?

01:41:49.100 You don't...

01:41:50.460 It's not something you do to yourself.

01:41:52.640 It's something that comes over you.

01:41:55.340 And I said, it's associated with a vision of heaven itself, essentially.

01:42:03.620 That's really what it is.

01:42:05.100 It's a portal to heaven itself.

01:42:07.180 And it's an offering.

01:42:09.760 But it's a spirit that descends that has to be made welcome.

01:42:17.820 Else it depart.

01:42:20.220 You have to practice it.

01:42:23.300 Like love is a practice.

01:42:26.220 It's not in its first stages because it's grace.

01:42:29.040 It's offered to you with no effort on your part or little effort

01:42:31.800 or maybe even despite yourself to some degree.

01:42:34.900 But the maintenance of love is a practice.

01:42:37.780 And it's best if it's a conscious practice.

01:42:39.860 And you can practice it.

01:42:41.260 You could do this.

01:42:42.200 Your husbands do this like 10 minutes a day.

01:42:45.560 Practice loving your wife. 0.89

01:42:47.060 Just pretend that you love her. 0.53

01:42:49.720 You know?

01:42:50.020 And in that game, you'll rediscover that spark.

01:42:55.160 and then it'll be there

01:42:56.280 and then maybe you'll only be able to practice that

01:42:58.900 15 minutes once a week to begin with

01:43:01.420 but maybe then it'll be like 20 minutes a day

01:43:03.540 and then maybe it'll be an hour a day

01:43:05.660 and then maybe it'll be 90 minutes a day

01:43:07.440 and you know maybe you could spend the rest of your life

01:43:10.740 trying to make it 12 hours a day

01:43:12.620 and maybe you could do that you know

01:43:14.860 and then every day would be the perfect date

01:43:18.040 every day would be the date you imagined you might have once

01:43:23.940 And if you aim at that, there's a reasonable probability that you'll make your wife happy.

01:43:37.700 Thank you very much, everyone.

01:43:43.580 Thank you, my dear.

01:43:45.000 You're welcome.

01:43:46.760 Thank you.

01:43:47.640 We'll see you next time.

01:44:17.640 I'll link up someone close to you.

01:44:18.460 Please go to connexontario.ca, TNC Supply.

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01:44:23.100 could change the direction of your entire day?

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01:44:30.260 with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories,

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01:44:43.140 Pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 16, 2026

Why Being Nice Is Destroying Your Family

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