The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 126. Biblical Series: Jacobs Ladder

Episode Date: July 5, 2020

We continue with another Jordan B. Peterson lecture on the Bible. Mikhaila Peterson also has a podcast with a very special guest this past week. Thanks to our sponsor: https://helixsleep.com/jordan

Welcome to season 3 episode 13 of the Jordan B Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I hope you enjoy this episode, it's called Jacob's Ladder. Last Tuesday, my dad came on my podcast and talked about what the last year has been like. He hasn't done something for YouTube in almost a year. If you haven't seen it, look up the Michaela Peterson podcast on YouTube and he's the most recent episode. Or if you want an audio version,

look up the Michaela Peterson podcast wherever you listen to your podcast. It was tough. It wasn't an easy conversation. The last year has been hell, but we finally got some help. I hope the podcast stops other people from experiencing the horrors that my dad has had to experience this year. Enjoy the episode. Sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our health. My family and I are in Serbia right now, and the time change has been absolutely brutal. I can't think very well if I don't get enough sleep. Neither can anyone really. Apparently a lack of sleep is equivalent in brain toxicity to alcohol. So I've made it a goal to increase my sleep quality while I'm here.

And I'm really missing my Helix sleep mattress. Helix has rated the number one mattress by GQ and Wired and CNN called it the most comfortable mattress they've ever slept on. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take their two-minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. Right now, helix is offering up to $200 off. Welcome to season 3 episode 13 of the Jordan V. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I hope you enjoy this episode. It's called Jacob's Ladder.

Last Tuesday, my dad came on my podcast and talked about what the last year has been like. He hasn't done something for YouTube in almost a year. If you haven't seen it, look up the Michaela Peterson podcast on YouTube and he's the most recent episode. Or if you want an audio version, look up the Michaela Peterson Podcast wherever you listen to your podcast. It was tough. It wasn't an easy conversation. The last year has been hell, but we finally have got some help.

I hope the podcast stops other people from experiencing the horrors that my dad has had to experience this year. Enjoy the episode. Sleep is one of the most important things we can do for our health. My family and I are in Serbia right now, and the time change has been absolutely brutal. I can't think very well if I don't get enough sleep. Neither can anyone really. Apparently a lack of sleep is equivalent in brain toxicity to alcohol.

So I've made it a goal to increase my sleep quality while I'm here. And I'm really missing my helix sleep mattress. Helix has rated the number one mattress by GQ and Wired and CNN called it the most comfortable mattress they've ever slept on. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan, take their two minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. Right now, Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders at helixleap.com slash Jordan. Get up to $200 off at helixleap.com slash Jordan. Helixleap.com slash Jordan.

Season three, episode 13, Jacob's Ladder, for Jordan B. Peterson Lecture. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for showing up again. That's a really good to see everybody here. So one of the things that I've been realizing as a consequence of going through these stories is that the degree to which they're about individuals is quite remarkable. And I think that's really telling. Now, one of the reasons I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy is because Tolstoy is more of a

sociologist. He's more interested in the relationship between groups of people. This is an oversimplification because obviously Tolstoy is a great author, but I like Dostoevsky better because he really delves into the souls of individuals. And I think it's remarkable the degree to which all of the stories that we've covered so far in Genesis are about individuals.

And they're quite realistic, which is quite remarkable too. They're not really romanticized to any great degree, because all of the people that are regarded, let's say, as patriarchal or matriarchal figures in Genesis, have no shortage of ethical flaws, no shortage of ethical flaws and also no shortage of difficulties in their life. And the difficulties are realistic. They're major league problems, like familial catastrophes and famine and war and revenge and hatred and all those things. It's not a pretty book and that's one of the things that makes it great. That's one of the things that characterizes great literature. It doesn't present

you with a whitewash view of humanity or of existence. That's really a relief, I think, because as you all know, because you're alive, there's no such thing as a whitewash existence. Like here, to be alive is to be in trouble, ethically and existentially. I've been reading this book recently. I'll talk about it a little bit later. It's called Better Never To Have A Bean. I've been reading this book recently. I'll talk about it a little bit later.

It's called Better Never to Have a Bean. And it was written by a philosopher in South Africa in Cape Town named Benatar, that's his last name. And he basically argues, I think it's a spacious argument and I think it's artificially constructed. But he basically argues that because life is so full of suffering, even good lives are very much full of suffering, that it's wrong to bring children into the world

because the suffering outweighs the good, even in good lives. And it's actually wrong, it would also be better not to exist for exactly the same reason. And my sense in reading the book is that he came to that conclusion and then wrote the book to justify it, which is actually the reverse of the way that you should write a book. What you should do when you're writing a book is you should have a question. And you should be a real question, right? It should be one you don't know the answer to. And then you should be studying and writing like mad and reading everything you can get your hands on to see if you can actually

grapple with the problem and come to some solution and you should walk the reader as well through your process of thinking so that they can come to the well not necessary to the same conclusion but at least track what you're doing. And I don't think that's what he did. I think he wrote it backwards. But then, and so I was thinking about it a lot, because that's actually a question that I've contended with in my writing, there are mephistophelian or satanic figures, for example, in Dirtas Faust. And also Ivan in the brother's Kramazov,

who basically make the same case, you know, that existence is so rife with trouble and suffering that it would be better if it didn't exist at all. And the problem I've had with that, there's a variety of them. But one of the problems I've had with that is what happens if you start to think that way. Because what I've observed is that people who begin to think that way, that isn't where they stop.

Like they get angry at existence, which is what happened to Kane as we saw in the Kane Enable story. And then the next step is to start taking revenge against existence. And that cascades until it's revenge against, well, I think the best way of thinking about it is revenge against God for the crime of being, which

is I think the deepest sort of hatred that you can entertain. And when you're in the grip of a really deep emotion, like a really profound emotion, right at the bottom of emotions, you're in something that's like a quasi-religious state. And that's more or less independent of your belief, say, in a transcendent deity. I mean, you can be in a profoundly emotional state that's as deep as it can be, and it can have religious significance without that necessarily signifying anything about a transcendent being. But then I was thinking, see, the problem with that argument

is you can gerrymander it endlessly, because first of all, how do you measure suffering and how do you measure happiness? It's like how do you assign weights to them? And there's just no way of doing that. You have to do it arbitrarily. And so you can make an argument that the suffering outweighs the happiness, you just wait the suffering more heavily than you wait the happiness, and that's the end of that. And so that's a

problem. But I think there's a deeper problem. And I was reading this other book, Wildback, as well, which was written by the guy who ran the human genome project. And I don't remember exactly what it was called, but it was something like a scientist's case for God, something like that. And one of the things he referred to, which didn't strike me as hard as it should have to begin with, was that he thought that one of the phenomena say that justified a belief in a transcendent being was something like the moral intuition of human beings. We have a sense of right and wrong.

And what happens in Genesis in the story of Adam and Eve is that that story announces the coming of the sense of right and wrong, the knowledge of and evil. And it isn't something we ascribe to animals. It's something that's unique to human beings. Animals can be predators, and they can be gentle, and you can have a relationship with them. But you never think of an evil cat or an evil wolf, even though they're predatory. But human beings, we have this capacity to judge between good and evil right and wrong. And it's really an integral part of our being.

And I think you can make an evolutionary case for that a biological case, for that as you can make a biological case for most of what is relevant about human beings because we're biological creatures. But we don't really understand the significance of that. Like, what happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that that realization, that coming to the knowledge of good and evil is actually represented as a shift

of cosmic significance, right? It puts a permanent fracture in the structure of being. And, you know, if you think of human beings as insignificant ants on a tiny dust moat in the middle of an infinite cosmos, a cosmos that cares less for us, then who cares fundamentally if human beings have the knowledge to distinguish between good and evil. But if you give consciousness a central role in being, and you can make a perfectly reasonable case for that because without consciousness there's no being as far as anyone can determine. So it may be much more central than we think. And I really don't think there's a counter argument to that.

Not a solid one. You can state that consciousness is epithenominal and that the world is fundamentally materialistic and it doesn't matter that there's consciousness. You can state that, but you can make an equally credible case the other way. And certainly our lived experience is that consciousness is crucial, obviously, and we treat each other as if most of the time we're valuable conscious beings.

And we wouldn't give up our consciousness, even though it's often consciousness of suffering. And so then I think another problem with the book is that it's sort of predicated on the idea that life is for happiness. And I don't think that's right. And I don't think that's how people experience life. And I might be wrong. But it seems to me that people experience life as something like a series of crucial ethical

decisions. It's something like that. I mean, I just can't imagine, and maybe I'm being naive about this, but I can't imagine that I can't imagine another being that's like me in most senses that isn't constantly wrestling in some sense with what the next proper thing to do is. It's not like it's obvious, it's not bloody obvious, and it doesn't mean you'll do the right thing, because you don't, lots of times, and you know that by your own judgment, right, because you're making mistakes all the time. Sometimes you don't know what you're doing,

and maybe it's a mistake, and maybe it isn't, and who's to say, that isn't what I'm talking about, I'm talking about when you know that what you're doing is wrong and you go ahead and do it anyways. People do that all the time. And that's also extremely peculiar. You bloody well think that if you knew it was wrong and you told yourself that it was wrong, that that would be sufficient so that you just wouldn't do it.

But that isn't what you're like at all. You can tell yourself something is wrong 50 times and you'll do it the 51st time and then you'll feel like you deserve to feel probably. But it doesn't stop you. And so then I think the other problem with the viewpoint, the idea that the suffering of life eradicates its utility is that it's predicated on the idea that happiness or lack of suffering even is the right criteria

by which to judge life. And I don't think that's how we actually experience life. I think what we do instead is put ourselves through a series of excruciating moral choices. You know, one of the things that's really significant about the biblical stories, and I think about the entire implicit philosophy that's embedded in the stories, is that that's how life is presented in the stories.

Is all of these individuals, first, their individuals, not groups, and second, they're agonizing over their moral choices all the time, all the time. And they have a relationship with God. And but it's not a directive relationship, exactly. Even the people to whom God speaks directly, which I suspect is not something you'd exactly wanna have happen, is,

they're still, even the fact that they have a direct relationship with God doesn't stop them from being tormented continually by their moral choices. And so the world is presented as a moral landscape, not as a place that justifies itself by happiness. It's presented as a moral landscape, and people are presented as creatures who traverse through the moral landscape, making ethical decisions that determine the course of the world. And that seems to me to be right, and that's not the same as happiness by any stretch of the imagination. It's a whole different category of being. And you know, and then I thought that through a lot.

I think, well, we do make choices. And what we do is contend with the future. And the future seems to appear to us as a realm of possibility. That's a more accurate way of thinking about it than that the future presents itself to us as a realm of determined things. It presents itself as a realm of possibility. and there's good choices in that realm, and

there's poor choices, or even evil choices in that realm. And we're negotiating continually deciding which of those choices we're going to bring into being. That seems to me to be phenomenologically indisputable, and we certainly treat each other as if that's what we're doing, because we hold each other responsible for our actions, you know, with some exceptions, and that we're deciding each moment whether to make things better or worse. And that seems to me to be correct. And I think that that's what these stories illustrate. They don't say that directly, you know,

although I think it gets more and more explicit as the narrative unfolds. But, and then part of the realism of this story is that the people aren't, the people that are being presented are by no means good. I mean, maybe with the exception of Noah, Noah seemed to be a pretty good guy. They did get drunk and, you know, and end up naked exposed to his sons and so forth.

But I mean, he isn't talked about a lot as a character. It's a pretty compressed story. But Abraham, I mean, Abraham had plenty of problems, not least of which was in his inability to leave home. And then his lying about his wife. And there's all sorts of mistakes. And then Jacob, who we're going to talk about tonight, is an even more morally ambivalent character.

He's, especially at the beginning of the story, he's, it's, he isn't the sort of person that you would pick out, especially if you were a hack writer. You wouldn't pick him out as the hero of the story. He does a lot of things that are really pretty reprehensible and takes him an awful long time to learn better. And yet, he's the person who's put forward as the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. It's from this flawed person that the people that,

maybe that whose story you might say is at the fundamental, constitutes the fundamental underpinning of our culture. It's from this deeply flawed individual that group emerges. And so you might think of it as a relief, too, because you're no knight in shining armor with a pure moral past. I mean, people make mistakes of catastrophic proportions non-stop. That also means that these stories put forward something approximating hope, because in their realism, in their moral realism, they present heroes, I suppose the heroes of renown, right? The patriarchs of old, let's say, who are realistic people, who have fits of anger and

rage, and who are murderous at times, and who are deeply, deeply embroiled with family dispute, and who have adulterous affairs, and like they do all the terrible things that people do. And the weird thing is is that God is still with them. And you know, it isn't obvious what that means or even if it means anything, but it's very, it's not disputable as far as I can tell that It's not disputable as far as I can tell that A, we're conscious, and that consciousness is a transcendent phenomena, which we do not understand, and that the landscape that we traverse through is moral. Like every story you ever watch, anything that grips your imagination on the screen or in the theater, like any story that grabs you, is a story of moral striving.

It's just not interesting otherwise. The person has to be confronted with complex moral choices and then you see the outcome. And the good guy does it right, and the bad guy does it badly, and things don't go so well for the bad guy generally. And if it's a bit more sophisticated, the good and the bad are in the same individual, and that's a more compelling story.

But so we could say, well, That's a more compelling story. But... So we could say, well, let's we could make the assumption that it might be worthwhile thinking of the world as a... as it has been thought of classically, as a theater upon which the forces of good and evil continually strive for dominance. And I, for the life of me, especially after I started reading deeply into 20th century history and all the terrible things that happened in the 20th century

and all the terrible, unbelievably incomprehensible things that people did to one another, I just couldn't see seeing things any other way as realistic. You know, because I don't think that you can immerse yourself in 20th century history without coming to the conclusion that evil is a reality. And if it's a reality, it depends on what you mean by reality. But it's fundamental enough reality for me.

And if it's a reality, then I don't see how you can escape from the conclusion that the cosmos, as we experience it, at least, is a place of moral striving. And well, that's one of the things that's really illustrated in the story of Jacob. And I found that quite striking. So, so the last time, last lecture, I ended with the Abrahamic stories with the death of Sarah,

and that was Abraham's wife. And so we're gonna continue from there. Remember Abraham had a son, Isaac, and he was asked by God to sacrifice his son, which we talked about in some depth. And I was attempting to make the case that the idea of sacrifice was one of human kinds, great discoveries, because it meant the discovery of the future, essentially, but it also meant the discovery that the future was something that you could make a bargain with, and that

you could give up something now, something impulsive, some pleasure, even a deep pleasure, in the moment, and you could strive, and hypothetically, you could make a covenant at bargain with the future, and if your sacrifices were acceptable, and that seemed to mean ethically acceptable, you had to sacrifice the right thing, that that vastly increased the probability

that not only you would be successful, let's say, but that your descendants would be too. And I don't think that that's an irrational proposition. I mean, you have to leave in it a bit with the realization that sometimes, you know, you get sliced off at the knees no matter what, right? Because life has an arbitrary element. And that can't be tossed out. But building in the arbitrary

element will say, you still want to think, well, what's your best bet given a certain amount of randomness? And it seems to me that conscious, self-aware, sacrifice, and proper ethical striving is your best bet. And, you know, there's another idea that I've always explained it, when I've explained it to people, I've always used the movie Pinocchio as an example. You know that when Jepetto was trying to make his puppet into a self-aware and autonomous moral agent, which is what he wants above all else,

he aims at the highest good that he can conceive, which is the star that he prays to essentially, and aims at the highest good that he can conceive, which is the star that he prays to essentially, and hopes for the transformation. And there's also something in that that's unoutherably profound, and maybe that is somewhat independent of the idea that you have to believe in God. I would also say that what it means to believe in God in the Old Testament is by no means clear. And that's something I also really want to talk about tonight.

It's not obvious what it means. And well, Jopetto, what he does, at least, is aim at the highest good of which he can conceive. And that's actually been a philosophical definition of God upon occasion, that God is the highest good of which you conceive. And that's different than the idea of a transcendent being precisely. But it's in line with certain interesting psychoanalytic speculations. This is one of the things I really liked about Carl Jung. Jung was so radical a thinker.

It's just Jung belief. I've read a lot of critics of Jung. And I've always got to kick out of them because the things they accuse Jung of are so trivial compared to the things that Jung actually did, that it's like accusing a murderer of J-walking. Like, because Jung was unbelievably radical. Like, here's one of his ideas.

You know, he thought that it was necessary. He believed that psychotherapy could be replaced by a supreme moral effort. And so the moral effort would be something like aiming out the good and then trying to integrate yourself around that. The good at which you aimed would be something approximating what you would be like if you manifested your full potential. And then you'd have a glimmering of what that full potential was. So that would be the potential future you. And he thought of that, he thought of people

as four dimensional entities, essentially, that were stretched across time. And that you as a totality across time, including your potential manifested yourself also in the here and now. And that part of what your potential manifested itself was something like the voice of conscience or intuition. It's an amazing idea.

It's an amazing idea, right? Because it's like what you could be in the future beckons to you in the present and helps you determine the difference between good and evil. It's a mind-boggling idea, and I think that it's an idea you have to contend with. And then he went further than that, and this is also a remarkable idea. He was interested in the symbolic representation of Christ, and I mean psychologically speaking,

and he thought of Christ as the representation of the ideal potential human. It's something like that. So it was a symbolic at minimum, that's what Christ was. It's a symbolic representation of the ideal potential of a human being. And so for Jung, there was no difference between, there was no psychological difference

between who you could be in the future, beckoning to you and the present and orienting yourself in relationship to Christ. Psychologically, those were the same thing. And then, so that's a pretty mind-boggling idea. Like, seriously, that's a mind-boggling idea. You know, especially when you add the psychological idea that one of the things that characterizes your ideal future self is the ability to make

sacrifices, right? And the deeper the sacrifice, the better, and then also to recover from the sacrifice, right? So that's the death and rebirth. So the part of you that's most essential to your full flowering as a being is your ability to let things go and then spring back from that, so to die in some sense and to be reborn in the service of a higher good. And then, well, then the next part of that is that the direction of the world depends on you doing that. So not only your own life, but your family's life. And because we're networks so intently together, the whole panoply of humankind and maybe the structure of the cosmos.

And you know, you might think, well, no, but, you know, it's not so simple, it's not so simple. First of all, one person can leak an awful lot of havoc. There's absolutely no doubt about that. And as we get more technologically powerful, that becomes even more relevant and important. And crucial, you know, one of the things that Jung said was that we had to wake up because we are too technologically powerful to be as morally asleep as we are. And that seems to me just to be self-evident. That's, yeah, for sure. We're half asleep with nuclear bombs.

It's not a good idea. It's seriously not a good idea. And so, well, and then you might ask yourself too, you know, well, like, what is the ultimate potential of a fully developed human being? And well, we certainly know that you have admiration for people who are more developed rather than less developed. That just happens automatically or resentment, but that's okay. It's the same thing.

It doesn't matter. But it's not like you can't identify them. You can identify them. And they're put forward to you in drama and fiction and all of that constantly. So that's another form of moral intuition. You can discern the wheat from the chaff, let's say. And so the other thing that I was thinking about

that's worth consideration too is that, you know, and maybe this is petty, but I don't think it is. Somebody asked me the other day if I believed in miracles, and I hate being asked questions like that, you know? And you know, it's also people ask me do I believe in God?

And I don't know what they mean when they say that. And so I don't know what to answer, because I don't think we're necessarily going to talk about the same thing. But in any case, I said, yes. And I have a variety of reasons for that. But one of them is that, you know, the consensus among physicists is that we can track the origin of the cosmos to something

like a hundred million of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. It's like it's so close to the Big Bang that the difference is literally infinitesimal. But the consensus is that before that, whatever that is, the laws of physics themselves break down. Well, what do you call an event that exists outside the laws of physics? By definition, that's a miracle. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a transcendent deity that caused the event. That's a separate issue. But it does imply a barrier of some sort, beyond which we can't go, where some other set

of rules apply. And so I find that interesting as well. So all right. So Sarah dies and Abraham makes a bargain with the hit-tites to purchase a burial place for her. They offer it as a gift, and he insists upon paying for it. It's a little story that basically indicates two things that Abraham was the kind of guy that you trust pretty much when you see him, and that even if something is offered to him as a gift,

he's going to do everything to be reciprocal about it. And so it's not a massively important part of the story, but it's in keeping with the same narrative flow. And so Efron, who's a head-out, offers a burial place as a gift. And Abraham says, no, you have to let me pay for it. And Efron says, he will. And that works out very well. And so he has a good burial place for his wife.

And then Abraham decides that Isaac needs a wife. And so he sends his eldest servant to Mesopotamia, to find a wife for Isaac. And there's a strange ritual that's performed. So it says in the story that the servant places his hand under Abraham's thigh to swear. But that isn't really what it means. It means that he places his hand.

I don't know exactly how to say this properly. Well, use your imagination. How about that? And the idea is that as far as I can tell, that he's swearing on the future. He's swearing on future people. It's something like that. So that's sort of what testify means, right?

Think about the root. Well, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. That is the derivation, right? It is the derivation. So anyways, this is a serious issue. So that servant has to go and find Isaac a good wife. And he wants him to find Isaac a wife who

is willing to accept the same fundamental belief system, which is something like the belief in a God that's a unity rather than a plurality. You know, the other thing that Jung was very insistent upon was that there was a relationship between polytheism and psychological confusion and monotheism and psychological unification. I really like that idea too,

that what you're trying to do, because you are a plurality, that's one of the things the psychoanalysts were really good at figuring out that the cognitive scientists haven't touched yet as far as I can tell. They're way behind the psychoanalysts in that element of thinking is that you are composed of subpersonalities, which all have their own desires and their own viewpoint,

their own thoughts and their own perceptions, and they're in a war with each other constantly. Maybe even a Darwinian war, it's been portrayed that way by certain neuroscientists. And that one of the goals of life is to integrate all of that plurality into a hierarchical ethical structure that has some canonical ethic at the pinnacle, right? We've talked a little bit about that, and it's not obvious what should be at the pinnacle, but we can guess at it. It's that which we admire.

That's one way of thinking about it. It's that that describes fair play across a sequence of games. That's another good way of thinking about it. It's the heroic ideal. That's another way of thinking about it, but's the heroic ideal. That's another way of thinking about it. But it's combined with generosity, you know, because the hero, the mythological hero, goes out into the unknown and slays the dragon

and gets the gold. But then comes back to the community and distributes what's found. And so it's courage plus generosity. And so all of that interior struggling that you're doing is an attempt to bang yourself against the world with challenge constantly to hit everything together, like you're beating on a piece of iron to cure it, let's say, so that you're not an internal contradiction, you're not a massive competing god, something like that,

because it's just too psychologically stressful and hard on everyone else and impossible for them to get along with you with your one thing, one moment, and another thing, another moment. So anyways, Abraham insists that Isaac find a wife from among people who are likely to carry up forward the monotheistic tradition. And I to carry up forward the monotheistic tradition. And I'm not sure that the monotheistic tradition

is actually indistinguishable, is actually distinguishable from the individualistic tradition. I think they might be the same thing at different levels of analysis, you know? So, because the individual means undivided in some sense, to be an individual means to be one thing. And the other thing that mitigates against the idea of life as happiness is it isn't obvious to me

that it's happiness that is what molds you and shapes you. You know, it's something more like optimal challenge, voluntarily undertaken, it's something like that, right? And I think that's echoed in the idea that everyone has a moral obligation to raise their cross, something like that, to accept the fact of their mortality voluntarily. I believe that that's the case. And I do actually think that that's a prerequisite to proper psychological development, because

if you're not willing to take your mortality on voluntarily, like if you're kicking and fighting about it constantly, and you have every reason to, don't get me wrong, then you can't act forthrightly in the world, right? You're going to be afraid, and when you're afraid, then you can't voluntarily take on a challenge, and then if you can't take voluntarily take on a challenge, then you can't develop, and so again, the life seems to be something like if it's a proper life, is the voluntarily taking on of great challenges. And maybe that's better than happiness. Like it's certainly more noble, you know?

It's not a word we use very much anymore, the idea of nobility, because we're so obsessed with happiness. But I think happiness is, like if it comes along, man, great, you know, wonderful, don't take it lightly or for granted because it's fleeting. But the idea that that's what you should be for in some sense, just seems to me, if that's what life is for, then maybe it shouldn't be. Maybe that's correct, because that isn't what life is. But it also doesn't, it isn't

obvious to me that that's what life should be. You know, I mean, if you really loved someone, like your son, let's say, would you say, well, I hope he has a happy life, or would you say, I hope he accomplishes great things. It seems to me that that's better, that the accomplishing of great things. And because that's admirable, you know?

It's like a happy person, it's a happy person, but a noble person, it that's admirable, you know? It's like a happy person is a happy person, but a noble person is an admirable person. And that's better, man. And so maybe there are better things than happiness. And so you can't judge being on the basis of the ratio of suffering to pleasure, something like that. It's, and I don't think we do that. I don't believe we do that.

I mean, comedians are happy, right? But everyone doesn't aspire to be a comedian. And you don't watch comedy all the time, even though you can laugh, nonstop, more or less, if the comedian's funny. You want to get your teeth into something. And it also seems to me that, and this is one of the reasons I like the existential philosophy was that, you know, the existentialist believed, it's sort of an original sin idea.

They believed that we came into the world with an ethical burden already laid in upon us, something like that, and that we had a felt sense that it was necessary for us to justify our being. And if we didn't do that, then we weren't authentic to ourselves. We weren't moving towards individuality. We weren't sustaining the community. We weren't living properly. And that idea was deeply embedded in people as part of their ordinary experience. And that also seems to me to be accurate.

And I've dealt with lots of people saying my clinical practice. They don't really cut, they will come and say, I wish I wasn't so unhappy, but they don't usually come and say, I wish I was happier. And those things aren't the same. And then when you talk to people who are having trouble, they want to straighten things out and figure out how to do them right. It's something like that.

And that's their primary goal. And so anyways, Abraham sends his eldest servant off to his place that God has granted him to find a wife. And interestingly, the borders of the Promised Land are quite similar to the current borders of Israel. And these are estimates, right, based on the biblical, and I mean, that's not a fluke, obviously. But it's interesting to see

the concordance between these ancient stories and the present-day world. So I thought that was very interesting, and it shows once again that the past, you think the past is the past, but it's not, it's still here, it's embedded in the present, you know, just like the future in some ways is folded up inside the present waiting to unfold. The past is all folded up inside the present, too. So anyways, the servant goes to the lamb that he's been charged to go to. And he's trying to figure out how in the world am I going to find a good wife for Isaac? I mean, I don't know any of these people. And so he has this little dialogue that's

presented in the form of a prayer, I suppose. And he thinks, well, I'm going to go to the place where people get water and water the animals. Because that's a place where everyone gathers. So that's a good place to find someone. And it's not a place of fun and lightness and relaxation and impulsivity It's a place of life-sustaining work and then he thinks something like well What would a decent girl do at a watering place and he thought well maybe she would offer a stranger some water and

also offer to Water the camels because that would be brave to approach the stranger and then generous and then indicative of the willingness to make an effort. And when you know that a camel, I think he took ten camels. It was quite a few camels anyways, not just one. And that a camel can drink 20 gallons of water and Rebecca who was drawing water from the wet turns out to be Rebecca who was drawing water from the well, which was hard, right, because water is heavy and you have to lift it up and it's

10 camels, and so that's like 200 gallons of water. So, you know, she has to put herself out of ferrobit in order to make this stranger happy. And so that's what happens. And then the servant has brought along gifts and that sort of thing. And anyways, to LeBecke Long story short, Rebecca agrees to come back to come back with the servant and Mary Isaac. And so then she has pregnant and she has twins. And this is an interesting thing. The twins fight inside her.

She can tell that they're not getting along. And this is an echo, right? It's an echo of Cain and Abel. And there's a mythological motif that the unions have called the hostile brothers, the hostile brothers. And you see them all the time, Batman and the Joker are hostile brothers, and Thor and Loki are hostile brothers. And it's an unbelievably common motif.

And the ultimate hostile brothers are Christ and Satan. So that's the archetypal representation of the hostile brothers, right? The ultimate good and the ultimate evil. And so it's an echo of the Can brothers, right? The ultimate good and the ultimate evil. And so, and so it's an echo of the cane-enabled story. Although it's a little more complex, I would say, from a literary point of view, because it isn't obvious which of these brothers is cane and which of them is able.

They have parts of both in each of them. So Esau, who turns out to be one of the brothers in Jacob, who turns out to be the other, both have their admirable qualities and their faults. Anyways, Esau comes, is born first, but Jacob hasn't by the heel. And so there was a fight within the womb to see who would emerge first. Now, that's relevant because the first born had a special status, well has a special status in many communities, especially agricultural communities.

And there's the reason all these people were more, herds people. But if you divide your property equally among all your children, then in like three generations, everybody has one goat, and everybody starves to death, or the same thing happens with land. So one of the ways that traditional communities solve that is they just give almost everything to the first born.

And then everyone else knows, well, you go out and do whatever you can. And it's kind of arbitrary and unfair. But at least it's predictably arbitrary and unfair instead of doom over four generations. So it actually mattered to be the first born. And God generally favors the first born. And then you might think, well, what is it about being born first that's so relevant, apart from the cultural practice of more generous inheritance?

And I would say, well, the first born is something like the model for the leader of the family, because the first born child should be, if there's a number of siblings, A, should take care of the siblings, at least to some degree, but also should be a role model for them. So it's like a natural position of leadership, but there's a psych...

There's a psychologization of the idea of the first born in these stories, because God often passes over the first born in favor of a later born child. He seems to do that on the basis of moral character, essentially. And so there's this idea that there's a natural proclivity towards leadership that's just a biological fact that would be associated with being a firstborn, but there's an element of characterological development that transcends that, and so that it's more important to be spiritually a first born, let's say, then to be biologically a first born.

And God recognizes that continually in these stories and inverts the natural order in favors a later born who's done more work with regards to characterological development. And that's also interesting too. You know, I've talked to lots of business people about leadership, and there's a literature on leadership, but it's not a good literature. It's pretty shallow.

Partly, because it's not that easy to define leadership, and partly because there are different, you know, people have different temperaments, and different temperaments can be leaders. They just do it in different ways. Now, there's something in common about being a leader though and I would say one is that if you're an actual leader you actually know where you're going, right? Because what are you going to do? Lead people in circles? It's like maybe they'll follow you but you're not a leader, you're just a charlatan. So you have to know where you're going and then you have to be able to communicate that and then people have to trust you so you actually have to be honest because people aren't that stupid, at least not for a long period of time.

And then where you're going has to have some value, because otherwise, why would anyone want to go along with you? So, and then you might say, well, what are the attributes, then that make you a leader, and I would say, well, they're characterological, fundamentally. And this is not naive optimism or casual moralizing. It has nothing to do with that. We know, for example, that conscientiousness that the personality trait is a good predictor of long-term success in most occupations, not all, but most, and that one of the things

that's associated with conscientiousness is that people keep their word, they're trustworthy. And that's certainly one element of a leader, especially across any reasonable amount of time. You have to be able to trust the person. They can even be harsh, right? It doesn't matter, because you can see harsh leaders and kind leaders.

But as long as they do what they say they will do, then you can follow them and you know that the future payoff is secure, something like that. So the idea that characterological development is more important to leadership than primogenitor, I think that's the right word. Primogenesis, anyways, being a first born, that's a very crucial psychological realization that it's characterological development that makes you favored of God. And I do think we've forgotten this in many ways because there isn't a lot of emphasis in our

education system on characterological development. And that's very, very surprising to me. I think maybe it's partly because in our fractured society, we can't agree on what constitutes a reasonable characterological goal. So we just throw up our hands and don't educate our kids to any degree at all, especially in schools, about what an admirable person is like, or even let them know that, well, maybe you should actually try to be one, you know, that that's actually the most important possible thing that you could learn, right? So, and I also think, and I think this is laid out very thoroughly in the biblical stories

as well, is that if there are enough people who are admirable, then things work. And if there aren't, then things are terrible. You get wiped out. You remember when Abraham is bargaining with God with regards to Sodom and Gomorrah, he asks God to save the city if there's like 40 admirable people, respectable. But let's say admirable, I don't want to say good because good is being corrupted in some sense by casual usage. I mean admirable, noble people.

I think Abraham bargains God down to like 10. If there's 10 of them in the city, the city won't be destroyed. And that's not very many in the city. So there's an interesting idea there, which is that there doesn't have to be that many people in a group who have their act together, but zero is the wrong number. And if it's zero, then then we're seriously in trouble. And I think that goes along with the idea of the Pareto principle in economics too, which is that it's a small minority of people who do most

of the productive work in any given domain. But so a small number of properly behaving people might have enough of an impact to keep everything moving. And that might actually be true. But it can't fall below some crucial level. And I do think that we're in some danger of allowing it to fall below some crucial level, because our society seems to be at war in some ways against the idea

of the individual and individual character per se. And I think that's absolutely catastrophic. And that's part of the reason that I'm doing these biblical lectures, you know, because I think that I've known for a long time that the moral presuppositions of a culture are instantiated in its stories. They're not instantiated in its explicit philosophy. There might be a layer of explicit philosophy, and of course, there is in the West, and a layer of explicit law, but underneath that, there are stories. And there isn't anything under the stories,

except maybe behavior. And that's so implicit, it doesn't even actually count. It's not a cognitive operation. And so this is the story. These are the stories that are underneath our culture. And so there better be something to them. That's what we hope. But more importantly, maybe we shouldn't toss them away without knowing what they mean.

Because if we toss them away, then we are throwing everything that we depend on away as far as I can tell. And we will pay for it. We'll pay for it individually because we'll be weak. You know, because if you're not firm in your convictions, then someone else who's firm in their convictions can, you're their puppet, like instantly. And then you're also the puppet of your own doubts, right? Because unless you have convictions, you're going to generate doubts like mad because

everyone does. And then the doubts will win. And you'll be paralyzed because there'll be, you know be 50% of you moving forward and 50% of you've frozen stiff and that'll be enough just to lodge you in place. And so, okay, so there's a psychologist of the idea of leadership which is very important and then it's associated with the idea of characterological development and it's associated with the idea of struggle, not happiness. And it's also associated with this Abrahamic idea, which I

really liked, which was something that's been very useful to me as a consequence of doing these lectures. Because remember, at the beginning of the Abrahamic stories, Abraham's like a stay-at-home guy. He's like the guy who's 40 years old living in his mother's basement. And God says, get the hell out of there. Get out in the world where you belong.

Go do something difficult, because what you're doing isn't acceptable. And the first thing he does is it goes somewhere there's a terrible famine, and then he goes somewhere there's a tyranny. So it's pretty funny. Follows God's call. And it's not like sweetness and light and paradise.

Immediately, it's nothing like that. It's instantaneous combat of the most difficult kind. But Abraham does in fact follow that impulse. It's interesting too. I mean, I don't know. Here's another thing that made me a really an advocate of psychoanalytic thinking. It was the sort of thing that started to terrify me

about what the human psyche was actually like. I started to understand that not only were we, like an amalgam of relatively autonomous subpersonalities, each of which had the possibility of gaining control, but that we were also victim, you might say, or beneficiary, of impulses that were beyond our conscious formulation or understanding or capacity to resist.

So here's a funny story. So I was talking to one of my patron people online this week and he said he was a committed atheist and that's fine. Lots of atheists are very honest people, and they're atheists because they don't know how to reconcile what they know with traditional claims, let's say, and they're not willing to just

mangle them together. And there might be synuses in all that associated with it as well. But he said he was entranced by these biblical lectures, which is pretty weird. And he said, if someone would have told him a year ago that he was going to be obsessed with the sequence of biblical lectures,

he would have told them that they were mad. And so we had a bit of a discussion about that because this is an interesting thing. And he mentioned this. He said, it was something like, you don't choose your interests, they choose you. And that's really worth thinking about too, man, because it's really hard to get interested

in something you're not interested in. Even if you know there's a good reason for it. You're studying for an exam, you find the material boring. Anything will be more interesting than the studying. Even though you know that that's what you need to do, you can't voluntarily grab yourself by the scruff of the neck, let's say, and shake yourself and say, sit down and concentrate.

Your mind will just go everywhere. But then if you're interested in something, and even if it's something you shouldn't be interested in, because that happens all the time, then it's like you're a laser-focused man. You can pay attention forever. You can work until you're exhausted. You won't even notice it. And you remember everything.

It's like, okay, if you can't control your interest, what does? And now I tell you, you can think about that for a very long time. So Jung talked about the spirit mercurious, mercurious the winged messenger of the gods. And here's how he conceptualized it psychologically. He thought this is what the ancient people

who thought about Mercury as the wing messenger of the gods were trying to state psychologically, you know, your interest flits around. It's like there's something that captures it and that moves your interest from place to place. You know, like if you walk into a bookstore, you'll get interested in a particular book. And it's as if the book grips you because you don't know why you're interested in that, you might, but often you don't know why you're interested in that, you might, but often you don't know why you're interested in that book. And, you know, your interest is flitting around. And so that's mercury. The thing that makes your interest flicker around is mercury, the winged messenger of the gods. And mercury is the messenger of the gods because it's the things behind the

scene psychologically that are manipulating your attention. And for Jung, those were equivalent in some sense to the lost gods. And so for Jung, your interest was being manipulated behind the scenes by unseen forces that were associated with your characterological development across time. That was the manifestation of the self. So the self is this, the potential you, let's say. And the way it operates in the present is by gripping your interest and directing it somewhere. And that's part of the instinct of self-realization. It's a

mind-boggling idea, man, really. I think it's correct. I can't see how it can't be correct. It doesn't mean I understand it completely, but it certainly seems phenomenologically correct. And I mean, the potential that you are has to manifest itself somehow in the here and now, it has to. And what better way than by directing your attention? You know, it's like it seems like this might be useful for you. Or maybe you get attracted to this person. Maybe you admire this person. That happens with kids a lot.

They'll admire someone and then copy them. And you can see that that's obviously part of their developmental progression. It's a form of hero worship, but kids are very imitative, and they hero worship at the drop of a hat. And so they're entranced by the next stage of development. And if they see someone who embodies that, especially if it's in the zone of proximal development, it's something they could achieve, stretching a bit,

they find someone who embodies that next stage of development, and then they start to imitate them and act like them. Well, adults are no different. We're no different. We do it at a perhaps more abstract and sophisticated level. So Jacob and Esau are hostile brothers. They're like Canaan able, except the mixture of Canaan able. And they're very different. Esau was read and covered with hair. He was a hunter and a man of the field.

So he's like your basic jock, right? He's extroverted. He's outgoing. He's really tough. He's like extraordinarily masculine. He hunts, and he's a real favorite of his father. And so, and Jacob isn't. He's a dweller in tents. And yeah, right, exactly, exactly, exactly, right. And it says Isaac Lovede so, but Rebecca loved Jacob. Now that's a problem, right? That's a big problem. And there's a Freudian element to this. It's like, this family is now divided

because one child is the favorite of the mother. And that's Jacob. And one child is the favorite of the father. And so Jacob is kind of a mother's boy, I guess, to use a rather archaic phrase. And certainly not as admirable from his father's perspective as Iso, who's a tough guy who goes out with the bone arrow and wanders around on the plains and brings animals home. And he's a tough guy. But there's this discord in the family because one parent prefers one child and the other parent prefers the other.

And it's obvious from the story that the parents do not communicate about this because they really take sides and so there's a split in the family. And that's I think very realistic because one of the things that you do learn if you have a family and of course most of you do, but if you also think about families is that there's deep divisions within families very, very frequently that no one will ever talk about. And or even think about often because it's too painful to think about, you know, and Freud himself said, Freud was clearly his mother's favorite, and the family sacrificed a lot, including some of the potential ambitions

of the other children in order to kind of put Sigmund Freud up on a pedestal, and advance his education, and it worked. I mean, he turned into a great man, but there was a cost to his siblings, and Freud himself said that there was something about being the favorite of the mother that gave a person additional confidence throughout their life.

And, you know, there's something to be said about that. Even if someone like Eric Erickson, you know, he noted that very interested in child development, that that first bonding with the mother was the place where trust was established, maybe trust even in the goodness of existence was established. And so anyways, Jacob is Rachel's favorite. And Esau is Isaac's favorite. Now Esau being extroverted, let's say, is also a bit impulsive. And maybe he's a man of action.

He's not a forward thinker. But he's also doing hard work. And so he goes out and he's hunting and he's worn out. And he comes home and he's faint with hunger. And Jacob is at home cooking. He's boiling up lentils, red lentils. And Esau comes in from the hunt and he's half starved to death.

And he's sitting there in the aroma of these red lentils reaches him. And he's exhausted and he tells Jacob that he wants some of this stew. And Jacob, who's being a pain in the neck, fundamentally, basically says, no, there's a teasing thing going on here and won't give him any. And you have to imagine this because it's not laid

out explicitly in the story, but there's some dispute about whether Esau gets to have lunch and Jacob finally says, well, I'll give you some, but you have to give me your birthright. And Esau, you think he must say something like, well, to hell with it, take it. You son of a bitch, take it. Just give me some damn stew. It's something like that. So that's what happens. But with these archaic people, once you made a statement like that, that was you were done.

That was it. And so, Esau sells his birthright. And this turns out to be incredibly significant. Benson, who wrote biblical commentary, said, oh, there's a bit of a twist to it. So He saw He eats the red lentils, and then from then on, his name is red. And you've got to use your imagination a bit. I mean, people are making fun of him, right? That's why they're calling him red.

I mean, he's already red because we established that, but no one was calling him red before this. And so, for the rest of his life, you know, every time he goes out amongst his friends and family, they call him red and sort of sneaker because he's the, you know, half-famished idiot who sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils. And so, it's not that funny, actually. And so, Esau is not happy about this. And it actually turns out that this... So what does it mean? It means don't sell the future for the desires of the present

and don't be casual about what you have. And then there's an archetypal element to this too. And Benson says, various have been the opinions what this birthright was, which Esau sold. But the most probable is that, together with the right of sacrificing, so determining what should be sacrificed in win and being the priest of the family, it included the peculiar blessing promised to the seed of Abraham, that of being the progenitor of the Messiah and the error of the special promises of

God respecting Christ's kingdom. It was at least typical of spiritual privileges, those of the first born that are written in heaven. Well, that's a lot harsher than meets the eye to begin with. And so there's a very interesting, deep moral story there, which is, it sort of, Esau does the opposite of a sacrifice. It's the reverse, right? He, Esau does the opposite of a sacrifice, it's the reverse, right? He sacrifices the future for the present. And so the story basically says,

the way it's laid out across stories is that if you're the sort of person that sacrifices the future to the present, then that eradicates the possibility that you will bring the most noble being into existence. That's what it means. And you can, again, this is the psychological significance of the biblical story. So that's a bad thing to do if you want to realize your potential, let's say. You don't do reverse sacrifices. That's a very bad idea. And so Esau really did himself in by

That's a very bad idea. And so Esau really did himself in by being too attached to the present without a vision of the future. So he's too in the moment, you know? And he pays a heavy price for it. I mean, he's the, first of all, he loses his birth, right? And his double inheritance. So there's a practical consequence. And then there's a spiritual consequence.

And then he's, well, he's been made a fool of by his brother. Jacob means supplantor, by the way. That's what the name means. And Jacob is always trying to usurp Esau, as we see it. And so Jacob gets one over on him, and you know, that's not, doesn't make an older brother happy when a younger brother gets something over on him. That's for sure. And then he loses the opportunity to be the progenitor of the Messiah, which is like, he probably didn't realize

that precisely, but it seems to be, you know, it's kind of rough that. So, and then there's a statement in Matthew 1626, for what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? It's an echo of the same idea. You know, and you think, well, what does this idea of soul mean?

And it's not intellect. And it's something like consciousness allied with character, I think. And I think the reason that it's valued so much is that because you got to ask yourself, well, what do you really have when it comes down to it? So life is suffering, let's say. And you can pile up worldly goods.

And the God in the Old Testament doesn't seem to have anything against that, really, right? The people who he favors seem to prosper quite nicely in the world. But they also have to make a choice between whether they're going to fundamentally sustain their character or whether they're going to prosper in the world when push comes to shove.

And the idea constantly is that really what you have in the world when push comes to shove. And the idea constantly is that really what you have in the world that allows you the best possible defense against the suffering that's intrinsic to being is your character. That's what you have, period. And I don't think there is anything that's more psychologically true than that. Because everything else, well, first of all, your relationships with others depend on your character.

And certainly, this is part of the story of Noah's Ark, because his generations were perfect. So he had a very tight familial arrangement. Everyone trusted each other. That's a big deal if you hit a rocky patch in your life, right? And it's character that determines that. If you're generous and honest and all of those things, people know they can rely on you. Assuming they're not resentful, that's a whole different story.

Then they're going to come to your aid when it's necessary. They're going to pull together with you. And when people are really after you for one reason or another, and they're accusing you of all sorts of things, and you're guilty because you have a past that's laden with character logical errors,

then it's very easy for people to take you down because they'll poke until they hit a place where you're guilty and then you're done because you'll do yourself in with your own judgment. And so, well, so Esau makes a very big mistake. And there's a sacrificial idea here too, which is now and then you're going to be faced with a situation where it's something you really want or your character. Maybe you'll have to lie about something. You'll think, ah, what difference does it make?

I'll lie about it. Jacob does this. But there's a bunch of problems with that. One is that, well, now you know that you're the sort of person that will, in fact, deceive yourself about the nature of reality if something shiny is dangled in front of you. And that's not good because it undermines your faith in yourself. And when you're really in trouble, they call that the dark night of the soul, when you're really in trouble, that's what you've got. You've got whether or not you can trust yourself, and that's it. You know,

when things are really harsh. And so if you've betrayed yourself in that manner, then you weaken yourself under the worst possible circumstances, and that's just, that's really not a good thing. So this is very practical advice. It's not casual moralizing. There's very little casual moralizing in these stories. In the next part of the story,

there's some parallels with Abraham, and that's built into the story, there's some parallels with Abraham, and that's built into the narrative, I think, because Isaac is Abraham's descendant, and so we have to keep the narrative echoing forward, otherwise it loses its continuity, and there's a famine in the land that Isaac's in, and God tells him to stay the course. Anyways, repeating the promise he gave to Abraham, although Isaac goes to Abimelec, also telling the king and people that Rebecca was his sister, which is exactly what Abraham did when he went to Egypt. And so there's another echo there of the same, of the same, it's as if the story is being

told for a second time, essentially, and's supposed to remind you of the previous story. But they're careless. The king sees that Rebecca and Isaac are intimate together. And luckily, he doesn't have them put it out. He just tells everybody in the kingdom that they're to be left hell alone. And then Isaac prospers in that land, just like Abraham did in Egypt until the Philistines asked him to leave. He's just getting too rich and powerful.

Things are going too well for him, so he's asked to leave. Now in the meantime, Esau gets married. And this is a funny little story. He says, he marries two women who give grief to Isaac and Rebecca. So whoever Esau marries, they're not popular with their in-laws, not in the least. That actually becomes relevant a little later because they drive Rebecca quite mad. So I get a kick out of that because that's very common. It's not easy to integrate new people into your family and hope that that will go smoothly. It's actually one of

the real catastrophes in life, right? You have a kid, maybe you get along with them, and maybe you don't. But let's have Zoom you do, but then they marry someone that you just don't like. And or maybe you think is wrong for them. I mean, that's really rough. That's, what are you going to do about that? Because you're basically screwed both ways. If you have the person you love around, then you have to put up with this horrendous creature

that they allied themselves with. And if you get rid of them completely, well, then you don't have your child anymore. So it's a very, very difficult position. And so that's another example of the realism, I think, of the stories. Now Isaac, who's hypothetically on his deathbed, asks Esau to hunt for venison,

because he likes venison, and he's happy that his son is a hunter. And Rebecca overhears this, so she conspires with Jacob to slaughter two small goats and make his father some stew because he wants Esau to make him stew out of venison. But Rebecca, who's being, I would say, let's say slightly deceitful or horribly lying, that would be more accurate. She conspires with Jacob, so Jacob kills two little goats, kids, and boils up a stew, and then he puts on some goat skins, because Eastow is a hairy character, and Rebecca dresses Isaac in ESAW's clothing, because Isaac can't see very well at this point. And so then Jacob goes into his father with the stew and he's trying to disguise his voice,

but it doesn't work very well. And so Isaac asks him to come close and Jacob puts out his arm with the gold skin on it and Isaac smells them too. And he smells like ESAW, and Isaac smells them too, and he smells like Esau, which maybe wasn't the best thing. But, and feels like him. And so, because Isaac thinks he's on his deathbed,

he decides to deliver a blessing to hypothetically to Esau. And so, but it's Jacob. And so that's a big deal too, because the blessing is actually, as I said before, with these ancient people, it appeared as though once you said something, you didn't get to take it back. You couldn't say, well, look, you deceived me. So it doesn't count. It was like, they weren't maybe as, well, weak might be one way of thinking about it, but another way is they weren't quite as attentive to context, you know, because if I make you a deal and then it turns out that you've betrayed me, I may feel that the deal is no longer valid

because the assumption was you were being honest to be given it and that violates the whole spirit, but that isn't how these people thought. They said, once you promised man, you promised and that was that. So Isaac blesses Jacob. He says, let God give you the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of corn and wine. Let people serve you and nations bow down to you. Be Lord over thy brethren.

That's going to be rough on Esau. Let thy mother's sons bow down to the cursed be everyone that cursed thee and blessed be he the blessed thee And so there's a quite a remarkable painting of that So there's Rebecca she's looking pretty old and Isaac's looking pretty blind and Jacob's taking directions from his mother and we might say he's perhaps a little old to be taking moral Lessons from his mother especially given how she's acting and so it's a pretty ugly scene altogether, especially that we also know that Jacob already tricked Esau out of his birthright. And so now he's like taken the birthright and he's taken the blessing. And so as I said, that Jacob, he turns out to be the father of Israel. It's like

he's a reprehensible character. These are major league betrayals that he's engaging in. It's not trivial. He really, really pulls the rug out from under his brother. And you know, you could say, well, Eseau is not as awake as he might be. He's kind of a wild man and fair enough. But it certainly seems to me that the predominant moral error falls on Jacob's shoulders.

It's very treacherous behavior what he's doing. So then he saw a shows up and he's got a nice stag for his dad and it's like little late for that. And he states that his brother was rightly named Jacob, which means supplanter because he's been deceived twice. Isaac says, Isaac answered, he's asking, he's asking fundamentally if there's anything at all left over for him.

And Isaac can't give him the same blessing because that's already been given. So he has to think of something else. And Isaac says, behold, I've made him thy Lord. And all his brothers, I've given to him for servants, which includes you. And with corn and wine, if I sustained him, and what shall I now do unto thee, my son, and Esau said unto his father, have you even one blessing for me, my father, and bless

me also, and Esau lifted up his voice and wept. You know, we already know that Esau is a pretty tough guy by all appearances, and you know, he's out there hunting on his own and camping, And it's like he's no pushover in the fact that this reduces him to tears is an indication of the magnitude of the betrayal. And Isaac says, behold, I dwelling shall be the fountains of the earth and of the dew of heaven from above.

And by thy sword thou shall live and thou shall serve your brother. And it shall come to pass when you will have the dominion and you'll break his yoke off from Dynek. And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing where with his father blessed him. And Esau said in his heart, the days of mourning for my father are at hand, then I will slay my brother Jacob.

So fundamentally, if Isaac dies or when he dies, then we'll mourn for him and then Jacob better look the hell out because it's like it's serious death coming his way. And he's got a point. He's in Dante's Inferno, I think I mentioned this at one point, so Dante's Inferno, it's a very interesting story. It's a descent into hell, and it's actually one of the places that we sort of derive the popular conception of hell

was partly based on Dante's imagination, on his work. And what Dante was trying to do was to discover the hierarchical structure of evil. And you might think there's a hierarchical structure of good. Some things are better than other things, but there's also a hierarchical structure of evil. Some evils are greater than other evils. And he put betrayal in the lowest part of hell.

So if you were betraying people, you were right beside Satan himself. And so, and I think that's good. That's very smart, while Dante was a genius after all. And I think the reason for that is that, you see, if someone trusts you, they're laying their vulnerability open to you. Now, they might just be naive, let's say.

And we won't think about that, because you're just a child if you're naive. You can still be betrayed. But if you're an adult and you trust, it's often because you, if you're an actual adult, it's you willingly open yourself up, knowing that you could be hurt, right? Because you're not naive anymore.

So you decide to trust and you say, I'll open myself up. And I know that I'm laying myself open to you if you choose to use that power. And then that's a good thing to know. You know, if you've been hurt as a child, or hurt as a naive person, you might say, well, why should I ever trust again?

Which is a really good question. And the answer is the reason you trust again, once you're an adult, is because you're courageous. You're courageous. It's an act of courage to trust. And the reason it's useful is because if you trust someone, you open the door to reciprocity and negotiation and cooperation, and you entice the best part of the person forward. And so it's a courageous act. But then if you betray someone, then what you've done is you've taken the best part of them, which is the part that will courageously trust, you know, with open eyes, right?

And you stuck a dagger in that. And so you've purposefully damaged the best part of them. And so that's why it's such a egregious fault. And it's often people don't recover from that sort of blanket. If you betray someone badly, and now you can damage them, like you can give them post-traumatic stress disorder, if you really put your mind to it. And that's not just a psychological disorder.

If you have post-traumatic stress disorder, it produces permanent neurological alterations that make you more neurotic, more sensitive to negative emotion, really, for the rest of your life. Like you can recover from it to some degree, but stress will tend to re-instantiate the PTSD. So you hurt someone,

and it's not merely psychological, not that psychological is merely, but it's not merely psychological, right? It's fundamental physiological damage. So, anyways, Jacob's smart enough to get out of there. And which is also not really a testament to his integrity, right? I mean, he's done these terrible things at the behest of his mother because he wants power, and he wants to get it without deserving it.

And then he finally goes too far and he high-tales it out of there to another family member, to his mother's brother. And so it's not exactly the world's most heroic story. That's for sure. And so now there's an interlude here and this is a really interesting interlude. It's the story of Jacob's latter.

So he's off to visit Leban or Laban, whose mother's brother. And on the way, he has a sleep. And he lighted upon a certain place and carried there all night, because the sun was set. And he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows, which seems to indicate very bad planning on his part, and lay down in that place to sleep, and he dreamed, and beheld a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven, and beheld the angels of God ascending and descending on it, and behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac, the land were on thou liest, to thee I will give it and to thy seed."

And so this story of Jacob's ladder has really possessed the imagination of the West. And then there's a reason for that. It's because it's an archetypal story, because the idea of a ladder that reaches to heaven is one of the oldest ideas of mankind. So you find it widely distributed among the shamanic cultures, for example. And it's a hallmark of psychedelic experience. That's another way of thinking about it, which is a very peculiar thing. So there's one representation of the ladder.

You see God up at the top there, peaking out from the clouds. Now, you know, that's sort of where we get the idea that God is in heaven and then heaven's up in the sky. And that's an easy story to make fun of because, you know, we've gone up to the moon and there's no God there. But this is not a reasonable way of conceptualizing what these experiences are about. These experiences, what this is, the opening up there, that's more like an opening into an alternate dimension. That's a better way of thinking about it. It's beyond, like, from the Judeo-Christian perspective,

one of the things you have to understand is that God is beyond space and time. He's not in the universe. He's outside the universe in some manner. And so the idea that you have an experience of God and it's up isn't the best that the human imagination can do with what's essentially a form of extra-dimensional experience, or that's the best way to conceptualize it.

And these experiences aren't rare. They make up the core of the shamanic tradition. And so there's an intrusion of the ancient shamanic tradition, which is tens of thousands of years old, into the biblical stories at this point. Now, why Jacob had essentially shamanic experience is very difficult to tell, because we don't know what these old people were up to, right? And we don't know how much of the archaic tradition, archaic religious tradition, was still extant at that point in time. But we certainly do know that our ancient forebears,

were using psychedelic substances constantly, like aminita mascaria mushrooms, for example, which were widely used in India, before they became extinct. That's the theory anyways. That seemed to be the basis of the chemical soma, which much has been written about. And so, we hear of this as a dream, or as a vision,

and perhaps that's what it was, but perhaps that wasn't what it was either, and perhaps it was an experience that was induced by the same processes that shamanic people have always induced these experiences. And so, we're gonna go through this a little bit. So anyways, there's a connection between heaven and earth that opens up. That's the vision. And there's messengers moving up and down.

Now, one way you can conceptualize that is psychologically, as we already discussed, that there are forces within you that are active and alive, and you can think of them in some sense as messengers of the higher self, and so you can think about this as an image of a psychological reality. And so we can stick with that, but here's some of the representations that have been made. I really like the one on the right. That's William Blake. I like the Helix idea and I don't think that that's That's fluke. There are helixes and double helixes and all sorts of imagery

Very ancient and very modern that are associated with both healing and with this kind of vision So and you see it in the Blake Representation God is associated with well really with the sun and with light and you see it in the Blake representation, God is associated with, well, really with the sun and with light. And you see that on the left as well, that wherever God is is where light is. And so that's a very interesting idea, as far as I'm concerned as well. There's some other representations, one by Shagel. So now there's this idea that there's the possibility of opening up a line of communication between the human psyche and the transcendent divine. And there's a great image of Christ as Pantuckr, there's a creator of the world. It is one of the first mosaics if I remember

correctly, and I wish I knew remember where it was, but I don't. But it's a very interesting image. I remember correctly, and I wish I knew remember where it was, but I don't. But it's a very interesting image. I'm having a carving of it made at the moment by a friend of mine, but you see Christ's face and portrayed in a medieval manner, and he's holding a book. So it symbolizes the importance of the book,

as a means of transmitting wisdom. And his face is very asymmetrical. And the eyes are different one side and the other, and one half of the face represents the human part, and the other side of the face represents the divine part. And, you know, I also think about that psychologically, because I do think that that's the right way to conceptualize human beings is that there's an aspect of us that's mortal and human and limited, but there's an aspect of us that's mortal and human and limited, but there's an aspect of us that's transcendent and divine as well. And it's latent in some sense,

but there are times when it manifests itself. And this is not speculation. Right? This is like the oldest experience of human beings. Now, it's not necessarily an easy experience to have, but it's reported everywhere. And it can be reliably induced, as we've discussed before, by chemical means, which, and I don't know what that means exactly. We've talked a little bit about psilocybin mushrooms, for example, and you could say that the mystical experiences that have been invoked in the newest experiments down at

Johns Hopkins are derangements or forms of psychosis, because they have some similarity to psychotic experiences, although psychotic people were given LSD in the 60s, and they always said that that was something different than what they were having. And if you give psychotic people amphetamines, you can make them worse. So they're biochemically separate, and we know that.

But also the thing that's so interesting about the psilocybin experiences is that they reliably produce mystical experiences, that the people rate as among the most important experiences of their life, and among those who have the psychedelic experience, positive things happen to them. And so that kind of messes with the whole psychosis theory, right? Because what are you going to do?

You're going to claim that you give someone a pill and they have a psychotic break and then they're healthier. It's like, no, that isn't how psychotic breaks work. You're not healthier after having one. You're like, you're a broken egg and it's not easy to put you back together. So, and we know that people all over the world have discovered every manner of psychedelic substance that you could possibly, while you imagine there's lots of hungry people wandering the earth for a long time,

and they ate every damn thing they could get their hands on. And now and then something very peculiar happened as a consequence. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about the shamanic tradition, because it's associated with Jacob's latter. So according to Eliot, it, mercy of Iliata, it was a great historian of religion,

a compatriot of Jung's and they influenced each other quite substantially. Iliata believed that shamanism that used psychedelics was a degeneration from the original, more pure shamanism, but I think later scholarship has demonstrated that that's incorrect, that the shamanism, but I think later scholarship has demonstrated that that's incorrect, that the shamanic ritual per se was a direct consequence of the use, discovery of and ritualistic use of psychedelic substances. But anyways, Elietta identified three pathways to shamanism.

And the shaman in it in a tribe was more educated than the typical person with a larger vocabulary and was the repository of the oral tradition. And so learned all the stories that had been passed down, word to mouth, and people, by the way, are very, very, can very, very accurately tell the same story across generations. That's been quite well documented.

So, and people who can't read really can remember, because what else are they going to do? Their memories are far greater than modern people's memories, because we can forget everything because we can just look it up. But they remembered things because they had no choice. My father knew someone who was illiterate and couldn't use numbers either when he grew up in Saskatchewan, you know, 60 years ago.

And he was, he had sheep, if I remember correctly. And although he couldn't count, he knew if one of his sheep was missing. Because he knew all the sheep. And so he could tell just by looking if one of the sheep was missing, but he couldn't count. And so, well, so people who don't have our particular set of skills, first of all, they're not stupid, and second,

they have other skills that we don't understand to fill in the gaps. So, Eliada identified spontaneous vocation. So, you were just, you had the spirit of a shaman, let's say. So, you're probably extremely high in openness, let's say, from a modern perspective. Hereditary transmission, so, you know, your father was a shaman, so your father was a shaman and your grandfather was a shaman and so forth

and you got initiated into that process or a personal quest. In Siberia, this is from Elietta. In Siberia, the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior. For example, he seeks solitude, becomes absent-minded, loves to roam in the woods or unfriendqueted places, has visions and sings in his sleep. You know, if you put someone in a place that's deprived, that's where you're deprived from a sensory perspective, it normal people will hallucinate quite quickly.

So it seems what happens is that if you dampen down the sensory input, then you start to become aware of the background processes of your mind. It's something like that. It's like the signal-to-noise ratio. I got to get this right. As the noise decreases, some of the noise becomes signal. The background noise becomes signal. And you start to become aware of your own internal psychological process. This is something like that.

He has visions and sings in his sleep. In some instances, this period of incubation is marked by quite serious symptoms among the Yakut. The young man sometimes has fits of fury and easily loses consciousness, hides in the forest, feeds on the bark of trees, throws himself into water and fire and cuts themselves with knives. We went to a potlatch in Northern Vancouver,

island about a year ago, and they had this one dance. It was the Quakua Native. And they had this interesting dance that was the dance of the wild man. And so the person who invited us was the wild man. And he was dressed up in tree branches and so forth. And so he was the person who'd been in the bush too long. And he came in as a cannibal, and there was genuine cannibalistic rights among these people

not so long ago. He came in as a cannibal, and everybody had to wear this like cedar headdress, because if you had a cedar headdress on, then the cannibal wouldn't take a bite out of you. They actually took this rather seriously, so you should have your cedar headdress on. And so he's looking around the crowd, and there's like 400 people in this place, and he could really act, too. And so he's doing this wild man dance, and then all the women stood up

and started to kind of dance in place and sing, and they were taming him. So that was really cool. You know, it was really interesting to see that, because those people are about, they've had an unbroken culture for about 13,000 years, say, that's how long they've been out on the island there. And it was very interesting to see that dramatization of the domestication of man by women laid out in that dance in that way.

But it was also interesting in relationship to the Shamanic tradition because he came in as a wild man, right, and he had to be re-civilized in some sense and brought back down to earth. So, but by whatever method he may have been designated, as Shaman is recognized as such, only after having received two methods of instruction. The first is ecstatic, dreams, transes, visions. The other thing that this guy told me, and I have no reason to doubt him, he's also not a literate person person and so has a great memory. He does carving, traditional carving and he's very good at it. He carved a 53-foot totem pole that's now in front of the museum of art in downtown Montreal. So if you ever go there,

you can go see it. I won't be there forever, but it's there right now. And he was taught to carve by his grandparents, and he said that he dreamed in, you know, what the Heida images look like. So the Quakauok's are kind of like the Heida, same sort of imagery. He told me that he dreamed in those images. So when he dreams, that's the form that the things he dreams about takes.

And he also said that he would talk to his grandparents in his dreams. So if he was working on a piece of wood and trying to figure out how to carve it, and he ran into a particularly difficult problem, he'd dream and he'd have a conversation with his grandparents and they'd help him figure out how to solve the problem, and then he'd wake up and he could go carve the.

And the thing is, he told me these things sort of matter effectively, right? Like, you know what I mean? It wasn't like he was telling me these weird things that happened to him, although he was doing that to some degree, I asked him a lot of questions about what he carved and what it all meant. And, you know, that was just part of his explanation

of how he did it. And he carved me a couple of doors that I have in my house. And one of them was quite interesting, he knew how the two make a panel. a couple of doors that I have in my house. And one of them is quite interesting. The two make a panel. And they're an underwater scene, and under the water there's a bunch of, you know, mythical monsters. Some of them are killer whales, and I think there's an octopus down there, and carved in this particular style. And he said that the other thing that happens to him when he dreams is he goes down to the bottom of the water where these

mythical creatures are, and he gets inspiration from them. So I thought that was extremely interesting too. We don't know what a mind that isn't hyper-civilized, let's say, hyper-literate, like our minds are because we're so bombarded by external stimuli. We have no idea what the natural mind is like, really. So it was quite interesting to listen to that. And also to see the consequences, because he's quite a great, he's quite a great carver. So the first is ecstatic, dreams, trans-is visions, the second is traditional. Shamanic

techniques, names, and functions of the spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan, a secret language. This twofold teaching imparted by the spirits in the Old Master Shaman's constitutes initiation. Well, so modern people have a problem with that because we don't really get initiated, but I would say that, you know, let's say that we're each on a quest of some sort. You wouldn't be here, I don't think if a quest of some sort. You wouldn't be here.

I don't think if you weren't, because why else would you be here? And so you're on a quest of some sort to figure out, to struggle with the meaning of life, let's say. And you don't want to do that alone because you only last like 70 years and good luck figuring it out on your own. It's just not going to happen. It's too complicated. And you'll be too isolated, right? If it's just you, that's insanity. That's no one can stand that.

And so you hope that other people have things to tell you and that your culture has something to tell you. You know, so you're on a quest, maybe not with the same intensity as a shamanic initiate, but you know, let's give you some credit. And then you're also trying to understand the wisdom of the past. And that's the second part of this. It's like, OK, well, you're a human being and human beings have been telling stories for a long period of time, trying to figure out what's going on, trying to figure out how to orient themselves in the world.

And so, you know, partly what you're doing here is exactly what the shamanic initiate does in the second part of the process, which is to expose yourself to the degree that you can to names and part of the process, which is to expose yourself to the degree that you can to names and functions of the spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan and the secret language. This twofold teaching imparted by the spirits in the Old Master Shaman's constitutes initiation.

So that's the rebirth, right? That's what initiation is. It's being born again. And that's a birth of the spirit rather than an initiation is. It's being born again. And that's a birth of the spirit rather than of the body. It's something like that. And so it's the rebirth of an integrated psyche. That's one way of thinking about it. And a psyche that's individual, but also grounded in common humanity, in the wisdom of common

humanity. And that makes you strong, or at least it makes you stronger. Because there's a limit to your strength, but God only knows to some degree what that of common humanity, and that makes you strong, or at least it makes you stronger, because there's a limit to your strength, but God only knows to some degree what that limit is. People can be unbelievably tough, unbelievably tough, and I think it's even the more admirable for human beings to be tough, because we're so conscious of how we can be hurt, and we're so conscious of what that hurt can lead to. You can have your family taken away from you, and you can be destroyed.

And the fact that you can be courageous in the face of that at all is something that is absolutely unbelievable. And people deserve a lot more credit, I think, than people give themselves. Because the fact that we can be honorable under conditions of life and death, of suffering, that's a testament to the human spirit. And there's a profound anti-human ethos, I think, that pervades our culture. You know, that considers human beings, cancers on the planet, something like that.

And that there should be less of us. It's the same spirit that motivated the guy who wrote the book about it better to have never been. And it's like, I's the same spirit that motivated the guy who wrote the book about it better to have never been. And it's like, I don't see it that way. I mean, I think people do pretty well for having their leg caught in a bear trap and their head caught in a vice, they're actually doing pretty well because life is really hard. And the fact that we're not absolutely brutal and murderous all the time is really something

remarkable, given what we actually have to contend with that we can go out of our way to be honest and generous and altruistic and to care for each other. Under unbelievably dire circumstances and to act nobly sometimes under the most trying conditions, you know, in Soljohnitsen's Guglegaard Kepeligl, he tells story after story of people who acted abysmally, but also people who, under the worst threats imaginable, never sacrificed their character. And when reading about that is really, while it really makes you wonder, that's what it does. The future shamans among the tongueists as they approach maturity go through

a hysterical or a historic crisis, but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age. The boy runs away into the mountains and remains there for a week or more, feeding on animals which he terraced to pieces with his teeth. He returns to the village, filthy, bloodstained, and it's only after ten or more days that have passed that he begins to babble incoherent words. The strange behavior of future shaman's has not failed to attract the attention of scholars, and from the middle of the past century, several attempts have been made to explain the phenomena

as a mental disorder, but the problem was wrongly put. From the one hand, it is not true that shamans always are, or always have to be neuropathic, mentally deranged. On the other hand, and this is the critical issue, those among them who had been ill become shamans precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cured. So it was, it's not the dissent into this strange subterranean psychological state that constitutes the transformation that makes the shaman, but it's the emergence back out of that. And that's a journey to the underworld in a

rebirth, right? And so, and there's this great book, this is a great book. My guy named Henry Ellen Berge, and he was an existential psychoanalyst in philosopher, and he wrote a book called The Discovery of the Unconscious, which I would highly recommend. It's on my list of recommended readings. It is a great book. If you want to know about the psychoanalyst tradition, it's the best introduction there is. And he discusses Adler and Young and Freud, and does a very credible job of all three,

but also takes the history of psychoanalytic thought back three, four hundred years before Freud. And so it's very engaging reading and very interesting. And one of the things Alan Berger points out quite clearly and he associates this to some degree with the Schumannic tradition that both Freud and Jung, Jung in particular, underwent very intense periods of psychological disturbance, let's say.

And I would say what was happening is that because they were questioning their axioms at the most fundamental level, they were deranging their cognitive and perceptual structures. And Jung was also experimenting with imaginative techniques, with visionary techniques, which he did a lot. And there is a period of his life where he was having a constant stream of visions, which

he wrote down in a book called the Red Book. But at the same time, he was still functioning as a psychiatrist and operating normally in the world. And so people have suggested that what he had was a psychotic break, but that's ridiculous because you don't know. That's not how it works, man. If you're having a psychotic break,

you're not being an effective psychiatrist. Those things do not go together, especially not for a long period of time. And so there's the possibility of extreme experience without psychoso, psychopathology. And so, and Ellen Berger, he says much the same thing about Freud and about Charles Darwin as well, who underwent a terrible period of mental confusion,

I would say, as a consequence of formulating his theory of evolution, which was really hard on him, because he was a diehard Christian, and he knew what the implications of his theory were. He didn't know what to do about that, you know, so it was very, very hard on him. So it's quite common for people of genius to go through an intense crisis, psychological crisis, but then resolve it, and the geniuses in the resolution, right? The precondition for the geniuses is the disillusion in some sense, because you have to be obsessed with a problem, it has to grip you completely before you're going to concentrate on it,

so obsessively that you might come up with a solution. But it's the people who come up with a solution that are the prophets in the shaman and so forth and so on. And so that's not, this isn't something that only characterizes our cultures. We just don't recognize it in our own culture properly. And that's a problem. Well, sometimes we do. Right, you remember that?

And in the Lion King, right, that Prifiki shows up. He's the shaman. He brings, he brings, uh, Simba down that tunnel, dark tunnel, that's the dark night of the soul. He hasn't reflect upon himself in a pool. When he reflects upon himself deeply, he sees the reflection of his father, then that becomes a thing of cosmic significance.

And his father appears in the sky, just like God appears to Jacob, and basically tells him that it's time for him to grow the hell up and to return to the devastated kingdom and to set it right. And so, and that's right, that's exactly right. I mean, we live in the devastated kingdom, that's an eternal truth, and it's the responsibility of the individual to grow the hell up and to set it right, because when it's devastated and when things are not in place, then everyone suffers too much, and that's not good.

And there's no excuse for not doing something about it, because you don't have anything better to do. So, and even like children's movies tell you this. So, this is a fun one. This is from the Edwine Salter, 9th to 12th century. And that's Adam and Eve, but the, there is speculation that the fruit that they're eating there, you see, these psilocybin mushrooms, right, because they're the only kind of mushroom that grow like that. So that's pretty wild, you might say. And then this

is the, I think it's called Bannisteri of Vine, if I remember correctly, and it's what Ayahuasca is made out of, and it has this double helix form, which is very, very interesting. And the people, the natives, nobody could figure out how the hell they made this Ayahuasca, which transports people spiritually in a very intense manner. And there's a whole religion based on it, like a modern religion, as well as the archaic religion. To make this stuff, they had to take two plants that don't grow anywhere near each other, and there's like a million plants in the Amazon, so how do you figure that out?

Nobody knows. Then you have to cook them in this very particular way for a particular amount of time before you produce this stuff. So one of the plants has DMT in it, which is a very intense psychedelic, but it's very short-acting. And the other has a MAO inhibitor. So if you take the DMT and you take the MAO inhibitor, then the DMT trip lasts for much

longer. And so that's what these Amazonian natives figured out. And no one has any idea how they managed it. And if you ask them, they tell you that the plants told them how to do it, which isn't much of an explanation as far as modern people are concerned. But then when modern people take the ayahuasca and the plant, so to speak, starts to talk to them,

there are a little less leery of the whole theory that the plants had something to do with this. So you know, and these things that I'm loath to talk about this because I'm not an advocate for drug use. But by the same token, you can't ignore empirical data. It's not reasonable. And the empirical data that psychedelic substances

can produce mystical experiences and that those often have a transformative effect. I mean, one of the latest studies showed that if you took people who are dying of cancer, and you gave them psilocybin in a sufficient dose to produce a mystical experience, that you radically decreased their fear of death. It's like, you go out and think about that, man, that's tough. That's a tough experiment. You just wouldn't expect that. You think you take someone, you do range them intensely.

And then when they come back, they're not, even though they're dying, they're not nearly as afraid of dying. You know, you got to kind of wake up and smell the roses when you see something like that. And the people who are doing this research are very reliable people. So there's the aminita mascara. You know, there's this old idea, it's quite a funny idea, a Toadstool. So flies like Aminita Muscaria. And there's some, this is ridiculous.

There's some evidence that they actually like getting stoned. So because animals will eat these, like reindeer will eat these things too. And they get pretty tripped out by them. And so I have this book on psychedelic use among animals, which is a small book. But. And so there's this book on psychedelic use among animals, which is a small book. But, and so there's this idea that Toads

used to sit around the, they haven't eaten a miscarriage, and wait for the stone flies to like buzz badly around them and then snap them up. So that's pretty funny, I think. And so, and you know, there are mushrooms in the US that are the oldest, the oldest organisms on the planet. There's one mushroom I can't remember where it is, but it covers something like, oh God,

I don't know, like hundreds of square miles. It's like this huge thing because it's all underground, right? And they have these very complex networks of mycelia, they're called. And they think the thing is like 150,000 years old, something like that. So there's plenty of things about the world that we don't know, that's for sure. There's the chemical makeup of the classic psychedelics.

You see, they all have the same fundamental structure. This is serotonin, that's one of the major brain neurotransmitters. And so what happens with the psychedelics is that they alter the brain function by altering the neurochemical utilization of serotonin. They change the manner in which the serotonin energy systems work. And that is, the serotonin system is very basic system, because when you're an embryo and your brain is developing, it's the serotonin projections that basically orchestrate the development of your brain. So they're, and they're very archaic circuits, very, very archaic circuits. So, and this is the paper, I think I stole this from Silasibon Griffiths, who's been

doing a lot of this research. Silasibon can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. So why? That's a good question, right? So here's a question for you. It is beyond dispute that human beings are capable of religious experience. Why?

Why is that exactly? And you can associate with psychosis, but that doesn't work. The theory doesn't hold water. It's not the same thing. So why is it there exactly? And it's not an easy thing to figure out. I've always tried to figure out a biological explanation for everything. If you want to find something to stand on, you want to make sure that it can resist a challenge. And so if I can find an explanation for something

that's reductionistic and materialistic and biological, then I'm going for that. But that's a tough one. Consciousness is a tough one. The moral sense is a tough one. They're not easy things to crack. The big bang is a tough one. So you know, I mean, a cynic might say that maybe sometimes when people are close to suicide,

they'll have a mystical experience, you know. And you maybe you say, well, it's a last-ditch attempt of your brain to dilute you into thinking that your life has some significance, you know. And that's a plausible theory. But I don't think it accounts for the generality of the phenomena. So I don't buy it. What happens in the shamanic experience is that the shaman has the experience of being reduced to a skeleton first. So death, a death experience, a very realistic death experience. And then the next thing that happens is that he finds

himself in a place where he's communing with his ancestral, the ancestral spirits. And then after that there's the climbing of something like the ladder, Jacob's ladder, say, and encounter with God for all intents and purposes. And it's very widespread phenomena. It's the world tree. And I thought about this a lot trying to figure out what this represents. According to a Yakut informant that's in Siberia, the spirits carry the future shaman to hell

and shut him in a house for three years. Harry Undergoze's initiation, the spirits cut off his head, which they set off to one side for the novice must watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes, disillusion to the primary elements in some sense, and hack his body to bits, which are later distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses. It's only on this condition that the future shaman

will obtain the power of healing. His bones are then covered with new flesh, and in some case, he is also given new blood. So there's a death and resurrection experience that's associated with the shamanic ritual. We're here in the presence of a very ancient religious idea which belongs to the hunter culture. Bone symbolizes the final root of animal life,

the mold from which the flesh continually rises. It is from the bone that men and animals are reborn for a time they maintain themselves and in existence of the flesh, then they die. And their life is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton from which they will be born again. That's a good graphic representation of the experience. That's an old painting by, I think it's Heronymous Bosch, if I remember correctly.

I really like that because it's reminiscent of the near-death experiences that you hear people describe, and they're quite common as well. And I had that very weird experience once. I don't think I've told you this story. I was assessing someone who had gone through a car windshield and he was very depressed. And that happened a long time before, but he was very depressed. And the insurance company was basically accusing him of lingering, because'd been depressed for so long and you know he'd sort of healed up and everything but if your left hemisphere is damaged especially the

frontal part of your left hemisphere then you can be an chronic state of depression because the left hemisphere generally speaking is responsible for positive emotion and so if it isn't there then it's like negative emotion for you and so I went and assessed him, and I was giving him this. I think it was called the MMPI, the Minnesota Multifasic Personality Inventory, which is kind of a standard half personality test, half psychopathology test. And he was feeling it out.

He was a very serious guy, middle aged guy. Nothing about him was new agey in the least. He was like an accountant, I think, in fact, he was an accountant, if I remember correctly. And there was one question, and it said, my spirit has left my body. I think that's right, it's very close. And he stopped and he asked me, well, he said, I'm not sure how to answer this. And so I said, well, why? And he said, well, after said, I'm not sure how to answer this. So I said, well, why? And he said, well, after I went through the car windshield, I was in a coma for three weeks,

something like that. And I died. I think he said he died three times. And he said that he could remember, he couldn't remember anything during that period of time. And he couldn't remember the car accident. That's retrograde adnesia. It's quite common with head injuries. And he said that during one of those experiences, and this is all he remembered from the hospital, was that he came out of his body and went down the long tunnel of light. You've heard these near-death experiences, and then saw his family members there, and saw the heavenly light, and then realized that it wasn't his time and came back to his body.

Now what was interesting about this guy was that, well first of all, I didn't ask him about this, right, he basically volunteered this story and it was instigated by this question and and he didn't know that anybody else at any ever had an experience like that because I asked him if he'd ever heard anything about like that. He said, no, that was interesting. But what really was interesting is how the hell did he remember that? Right? Because he had amnesia during that entire period of time. He was in a bloody coma.

It's like he didn't remember anything, but he remembered that. And so, well, those experiences are more common than you think. And then there's a painting of one, which is quite interesting. And that's like a tunnel to heaven. It's the same basic idea. It's a little bit more suffering going on in this one, I think. But that's pretty much typical of a Hironymous Bosch. I mean, I don't know what was up with that guy, but he was one strange character.

Now, the Scandinavians have this idea that the world is a tree. with that guy, but he was one strange character. Now, the Scandinavians have this idea that the world is a tree. And I've been thinking about that a lot. I think that the tree idea, a tree is something that is grounded in matter, let's say, and that reaches up to heaven. In the Scandinavian tree at the bottom,

there's quite a cool idea at the bottom of that. See, this tree is constantly being nod by snakes. You can sort of see the snakes at the bottom. And at the same time, it's being watered. And the water makes the tree grow at the same rate that the snakes nod its roots. So it's like a Yin-Yang idea, you know, that there's continual chaotic destruction and replacement

at the basis of whatever this process is. But the tree seems to me to be a representation, not so much of, it's like a different dimensional space. That's what's trying to be represented. So imagine that you're structured. If you take powers of 10 magnifications, say human beings are about in the middle of the tiniest thing and the largest thing, if you do it by powers of 10.

And so you have a subatomic level, and an atomic level, and a molecular level, and then maybe a level of organs, and then there's you, and then there's your family, and so on, all the way up the tree, fundamentally. And so I think that what this tree represents, and this is the thing that the shaman moves up and down, I think that's what it represents. It's this different view of, of, it's dimensionality, it's something like that.

And I think that what happens in the psychedelic experience is that consciousness can travel up and down that structure. It's something like that, and maybe not only up and down it, but maybe right through it. I know that's a radical claim. It's a really radical claim. And it might be wrong, but it's probably wrong even because most radical claims are wrong, but. But. But I'm not so sure it's wrong. And here's something cool.

So that's the Scandinavian world tree. And that was drawn by an anthropologist who visited the tribes in the Amazon who used Ayahuasca. Now, you see, it's a snake. It's a tree with snakes. Well, you know, that's reminiscent snake. It's a tree with snakes. Well, you know, that's reminiscent of the story in Adam and Eve, obviously, but it's also reminiscent of our primate dwelling place, right? Because that was basically our ancestral home, a tree surrounded by snakes, and the snakes

like to eat us. And this is a long time ago. This is like 50 billion years ago. It's really a long time ago, this is like 50 billion years ago, it's really a long time ago. And so we don't know where these images come from precisely. But I do have the suspicion that we use the circuitry that we develop to detect snakes to represent the unknown as such, because a snake is something that comes out of the unknown. And we evolved, right? We evolved out of an animal substructure.

And so we had to get our biological cognitive structure from somewhere. And we have this capacity of thinking about the absolute unknown and the terrors that are involved in that, that horrors that can emerge from what we don't understand. And it stands perfectly to reason that we would use circuits that were already pre-developed for that, and that this is a reasonable representation of the existential structure of the world. So, and I think I might have showed you this before,

but it never ceases to amaze me this picture. So, my son drew this when he was nine, eight. And so on the right, you see mushroom houses. And they have the names of all his friends on them. And so that's order, right? And then on the left side, you see chaos there. And the little orange thing is a bug. And then there's a river that runs right down the middle.

And so that's like the, you know, the Yin Yang symbol with the divide in the middle. So that's quite cool. And then there's, there it is. There's Jacob's louder. It's like Jack and the Beanstalk, which is, by the way, another variant of the same shamanic story. And there are bugs going up and down it.

And then they're taking messages from heaven. And then up there in heaven, it's got the sun, and there's St. Peter, and I don't know where in the world he got this. It's not like he had a lot of religious education, I mean, despite me. And then there's the perlite gates up there, and that was the world as far as his, he had a very well-ordered psyche, I would say,

and still does, but when he drew that, it just absolutely blew me away. And so I had it laminated and it's in my office because, well, I don't know, because like what the hell do you make of that? That's why. So while you sort of get the picture there, the cathedrals, the great cathedrals of Europe are there like the forest in stone, right? And they try to represent the light coming through the leaves. And so it's sort of our ancestral

forest home, but it's it's transformed into these great sculptures of stone. And you know, they produce awe because of the combination of light and darkness and color, but also I think for the same reason that huge trees produce awe and people, you know, and we don't want them to cut down. They seem sacred in some sense and perhaps they are. But you know, it also seemed to me, this is an intuition that the architects of these great cathedrals were trying to get, they're trying to express something that's deep and structural. They're trying, trying to express the idea that if being was constituted properly,

then it would be organized from the subatomic level, all the way up to the highest cosmic level perfectly. So every layer stacked on top of each other without any contradictions. And that would be an ideal mode of being. And everything would come together under those circumstances. And that's what's being expressed in these cathedrals. It's not all that's being expressed because they're also shaped like a cross.

And, you know, the idea is that the center of the cross, which is the center of suffering, is also the place of the individual. The place where the transformation takes place, that's all built into the architecture as well. And so... That's all built into the architecture as well. And so, then there's the tree-like structures that make us up.

It's stretched down to the tiniest realities, the microcosm. microcosm. And there's this idea, it's all represented in the same way. Again, it's this idea, especially the Mandela up and the top right, it's the idea of it's perfection of crystalline structure. And that's what the yogis are trying to attain when they organize their bodies, they're trying to get every single layer of their being aligned properly. And it's something like, and you can kind of see an echo of that in the, I think that's a Tibetan sand painting,

if I remember correctly, on the bottom left. The idea is that if you get yourself aligned properly, then information can flow along that tree that's you without impediment, something like that. And that would be like a state of optimal health. And that both physical and spiritual exercises can put you in that state. And that's, while those are all clouds of ideas that surround this idea of a ladder to heaven.

So Jacob is talking to God and God says, behold, I am with thee. And I will keep thee in all places where you go and bring you again into this land for I won't leave you until I have done that, which I have spoken to you of. And Jacob awakened out of his sleep. And he said, surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not. And he was afraid and said, how dreadful is this place? This is not other but the house of God. And this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put for his pillows

and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on top of it. That's a sacrifice. And he called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of the city was called Luz at the first. And Jacob vowed a vow saying, if God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me bread to eat and Raymond to put on. So that I come again to my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God.

And this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house. And of all of that that is given to me, I will surely give the 10th unto thee. And that's a pretty good place to stop. is given to me, I will surely give the 10th unto thee. And that's a pretty good place to stop. So now I'll just conclude. So you have this very morally ambivalent character, right? Who's so far, pretty much everything he's done

that we're familiar with is not good. So he's betrayed his brother horribly twice, badly enough so that his brother wants to kill him, and everyone can kind of sympathize with his brother. So, and then he runs away essentially because his mother tells him to, which is not exactly a testament to his character, and despite that, strangely enough, he has this experience. And that's heartening, I guess, and that's the point, is that people are predisposed

to terrible error. There's no doubt about that. And yet, when I was writing my latest book, I had a friend of mine, Norman Doige, wrote the forward. And Norman's written a couple of great books, and he's Jewish. And he read some of what I'd written, and he took me to task for making the god of the old testament, you know, from a Christian perspective, too harsh and unforgiving. And I rewrote a fair bit of it because of his criticism and because of what I've learned

doing these lectures. It's like, it's not exactly right. You know, I mean, what happens in the Old Testament is if you screw up, especially if you know you do and you decide that you're not going to do anything about it. So it's conscious and deliberate, then like, look the hell out. You are in serious trouble. And I actually think that's also psychologically accurate. One of the things Jung pointed out,

and this always struck me, was that if you don't know what you're doing, this is actually in the Gospel of Thomas as well, interestingly enough, is one of the gos... Nostocospels, Christ tells his followers something like, if you make a mistake and you don't know what you're doing, then you'll be forgiven for it. But if you make a mistake knowing what you're doing

and you do it anyways, then like, good luck to you. And I think that's psychologically accurate. I mean, one of the things that's very interesting about the judgmental God in the Old Testament, however, is that he can be bargained with, and even if you make mistakes, especially if you're unconscious of them, if you haven't learned yet, let's say, then you always have the opportunity to return to the proper path. And that's, people get cynical about that because there's, you know, this mostly Christian idea that you could live a terribly sinful life, but if you repent it on your deathbed,

it's like heaven for you, and it's like, oh, that sounds like a great deal, right? It's like, you can do whatever the hell you want until just before you die, of course you might not know when that is, so that's a problem. Then you can just say, well, I'm sorry, and everything's forgiven,

but the problem with being cynical about that sort of thing is that it's no trivial matter to repent. Because to repent means a, figure out what you actually did, and the worst things that you did, the more horrible it is to figure it out. It's no joke, right? And there's no genuine repentance without understanding of the depth of your depravity. And so, if you lived a particularly reprehensible life and you come to understand it, I think that in and of itself could kill

you. You know, it's a terrible thing to wake up and see what you've done, if what you've done is truly terrible. So, there's no easy out, it's not an easy out, it's just pure cynicism to associate that idea with an easy out, it's not an easy out, it's just pure cynicism to associate that idea with an easy out, it's not. But there is that positive idea that's continually represented is that the individual's the source of moral choice, and the individual is prone to genuine error and temptation in a believable and realistic way, but that that

doesn't sever the relationship between the individual and the divine and the possibility of further growth. And then I would say, well thank God for that because without that, like who would have a chance, right, who would have a chance. And so the idea that the deity has presented the infinite, let's say, as presented in the Old Testament, is merely judgmental, is definitely wrong. And is in fact something that you can contend with and bargain with. Oh, I'll close with one thing. One of the things that I learned while I was going through this was the meaning of the name Israel, because Jacob eventually gets named Israel.

I'm jumping ahead a little bit to the next lecture, but Israel, and so he's also the father of Israel, and the father of the 12 sons who make up the 12 tribes of Israel, but what Israel means is he who struggles with God. And that's such an interesting idea, because it's again a psychological idea. And that's why I said earlier that it isn't obvious in the Old Testament what it means to believe in God because what Jacob does is struggle with God. And I think that that's a really good characterization of an ethical life because if you're trying to lead an ethical life, that's what you're doing is you're struggling. Like blind belief isn't helpful because you don't know what you're believing in. Like it's just not that helpful. But if you're possessed by the desire to orient yourself properly, but also confused by the existential structure

of the world, which we all are, then what you're doing when you're trying to orient yourself properly in life is struggling ethically. And Jacob actually gets quite hurt. He wrestles with God literally and God dislocates his thigh. And so the idea there is watch the hell out, right? The thing that you're contending with is powerful, although you can contend with it.

That's the thing that's so interesting. But you do it at some genuine peril, which I think is exactly right. But the idea that Israel, so there's Israel, the state, let's say, in Israel, the Promised Land and all of that. But there's this more important idea, which is again a psychological idea, which is the state of Israel, which is the Promised Land, is the state that everyone who wrestles with God exists in. And that's not happy, naive belief and, you know, an eternally blessed afterlife. It's not that. It's not a wish fulfillment.

It's to be actively engaged in life and in the difficulties of life, right? And trying to find the path because that's what wrestling with God is, is trying to find the path. And that seems to me what belief means fundamentally in the Old Testament, and perhaps in the New Testament as well, is that belief is expressed in trying to find the path. And that's an ethical struggle, and it's a real struggle. It's the struggle of life. So as long as you're willing to engage in that struggle, then hypothetically, you have the divine behind you.

And so I believe that. I think that's true. Because the other thing I see is that the people who set things right, so that the horrible forces of cosmic destruction don't do us in. The people who are trying to set things right are the ones that are struggling ethically. And so, and that, there is a redemptive element to that. And I don't think there's any way of being cynical about that. So, well, so thank you, So remember to speak right into the mic because there are all these other people watching that will hear it will hear us So okay Hi, Dr. Peterson

So with the story of Jacob today There was a theme of betrayal and you can see that from the beginning because he was very angry and jealous at his brother And I was thinking are there new stories or what you can say about betrayal that does come from a loved one, right? Where it's not from a place of so black and white of anger, resentment, and bitter, and how do the parties kind of recover from that, or is there any way to be named out? Or is it as black and white as if you betray someone then there, it's like Jacob where he was better, he was hatred. No, and in fact, in this story, it's not black and white because we know we're only halfway through it and One of the things I've noticed as a clinician, let's say is that and as an observer of people in general is that I've never ever seen anyone get away with anything and

Jacob doesn't get away with any of this and so You know, he's humbled by his eventual experiences and he learns that he did it wrong and there's reconciliation that happens throughout the story of Jacob. So and there's minor betrayals and major betrayals, you know, that some of them have tremendously serious consequences and some of them have lesser consequences. But there is an underlying idea that things can still be set right, even though it's, well, I think it takes Jacob some 20 years, something like that,

to set things right. And even then, it's like touch and go. So did I answer your question? OK. Yeah. Hey. You speak frequently in your lectures about, I guess, the war between good and evil

or the struggle of life really is a struggle between good and evil being at the core of a conscious, lived existence. And I guess on that note, if you were 100% certain that there was no afterlife, would you still be able to preach that there's a positive meaning in life? If you were 100% certain, some atheists seem to be 100% certain, and yet they still preach that there's some positive meaning to life. Would you be one of those, or would you turn into cane? You know, so cynical. I think that, well, as far as I'm concerned, one of the things I learned from studying 20th century history

is that, like, even if the idea that, even if you take the most cynical of ideas, let's say, that life is irredeemable suffering and perhaps isn't even justified because of that, it still seems to me that you have an ethical duty, let's say, to live in a manner that reduces that to the degree that that's possible. And so, and I think that that can be experienced as meaningful in some sense, independently of the transcendent context.

Now, I don't exactly know how to strip off the transcendent context because one of the things I would say that's happened to me is because I've spent so much time looking at the horrible things that people have done is that it's, like Jung said, that he, when this is one of his famous quotes, he said, no tree can reach up to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. And so, as I've dug deeper into the depravity of human beings,

my sense of the possibility of human beings has also grown, what would you say, in proportion? And until I've become convinced, actually, that good is a more powerful force than evil, even though evil is an unbelievably powerful force. And so I can't really strip the transcendent way now. What bearing that has on eternity, say on an afterlife, I mean I can't say anything about that. The only thing I guess I can say is that there are many things about being that we

don't understand in the least, and we don't understand the nature of consciousness or the nature of time. So I wouldn't despair about that. But yes, I think that life can still be meaningful without there being a necessity of an afterlife. So. Did you get into one lecture that you

were going to work with at the time? No, no, no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No, no. No. Hi, Dr. Peterson. So since studying your work,

one of the things that I found most fascinating is your analysis of the story of Kane and Abel. And my question is, if Kane got to the point that he did right before killing his brother, murdering his ideal, and decided that that was something he didn't want to do, what advice or guidance would you give a person that got to that point? Well, there's a story I read called the cocktail party.

I've mentioned this before by T.S. Eliot and in the cocktail party there's a scene to play where this woman approaches a psychiatrist and starts talking to him about her problems. And she says something that surprises him. She says, I hope that I'm the problem. And he says, well, why would you hope that? And she says, well, I thought about it a lot. And if the world's the problem, then I'm done because I can't change the world. But if I'm the problem, then maybe there's something about myself I can change and I can undo this terrible situation that I'm in. And so I would say, that's repentance fundamentally.

It's like, if, and I say this carefully, because I understand that people are susceptible to bad fortune, sin and ignorance can make that worse, but independently of that, like good people suffer, make no mistake about it. But if things aren't right for you, if you're resentful about being, because that's the right way of, because that's the deepest way of thinking. But if you read the writings of the people who do the mass killings, for example, that's what you see over and over. It's can. It's like they're angry beyond comprehension at the intolerability of being and they're angry at God. Even if they don't say it exactly like that, they come so close to saying it like that, that it's

no difference. You know what God says to can is look to yourself first before you criticize being. And that strikes me as right. It's because to not do that is arrogant beyond belief. That's satanic arrogance, literally, if something like that can be literal. It's like, don't make yourself the judge of being before you clean up your room, let's say. And the other thing too, this is something I learned in some part from Solzhenitsyn when he was in the prison camps and trying to understand how these heroic people he saw could possibly manage it. One of the exercises he undertook and he really viewed this

within a Christian Orthodox context of repentance and redemption. Is he said he went over his life with a fine tooth comb and tried to imagine all of the ethical mistakes he made in his entire life, that he knew were mistakes, right? It was a soul search, it wasn't relying on external standards of morality, except in so far as were inevitably influenced by those. And then his idea was, is there something I could do right now to put that right?

And that's the right question. Like if things aren't going your way, and I think that means that you're resentful and arrogant and deceitful, those are the three things that clump together, I think, that constitute the core of evil, it's something like that. And so if you're possessed by that, which is a hell, then it's repentance that's the right answer.

And what that means is you have to figure out what you did wrong, and you have to pay for it. And then at least you could think, well, look, I can try that with all of my soul, let's say, and see what happens. Right? It can at least be an experiment. And then I would also say that that's an active faith. It's an active faith to conduct that experiment. Because you put yourself on the line,

and that's what an active faith is. You don't know the outcome, but you don't know the outcome of your life. So live in some senses and active faith. You're putting faith in something. That's why you're moving forward. You couldn't move forward without an active faith. And people say, well, I only move forward on the basis of the facts.

It's like, yeah, but you select the facts. And there's an infinity of facts. And they don't just tell you what to do. So it's not a credible answer. So if you're in that situation, it's like, look to yourself. And one of the things about Solzhenetsin that that's so bloody amazing, is that's what he did. And then he wrote the Goulaigar Capelago. And he took an axe to the intellectual and moral

substructure of the totalitarian communist states. So while he was redeeming himself, let's say, he was simultaneously redeeming the world. And you see something like that. You got to wake up, man, that's, that was really something. So, yeah. Applause. So Dr. Peterson, I have a lot of questions

that arise from your comments at the Belfort 100 event, your M103 video, your recent discussion with Ion Hershey Ali, and your comments on Islam in the West in general. And in your comments, there's this comment theme that one of these things is not like the other. You put the Judeo-Christian tradition on the one side and Islam on the other, specifically the quote, complex problem of Islam in the quote,

as a quote totalizing system. And before I go further, let me state that if hypothetically a final analysis of Islam resulted in as totaled denunciation, as your analysis of postmodernism or neomarchism, I wouldn't be personally offended at all. This isn't a personal question. In your recent interview with Ion Herschiali, she said, Western values are superior

to Islamic law and Islamic values. I agree with that, basically, certainly in the context of, let's say, current global affairs. I'll skip the quotes from a reason magazine interview, but you should read them because versus a worldview which is very much the West versus Islam, not radical Islam, but Islam, including necessarily the military option. So my question is that the level of psychological significance of these stories, at the level of mythology and archetype, how is Islam so different from the Jai of Christian tradition? Because Adam, Adam, Eve, Ava, Satan, Shaitaan, so on and so forth, everything from the

fall to the flood. A lot of what you've discussed in this lecture series is necessarily part of Islam as well. And in fact, I think one of the strongest criticism of Islam is that it's perhaps pretty unoriginal. You know, tonight you said that the moral presuppositions of a culture are instantiated in its stories. I see a lot of the same stories. So current global affairs aside, I'm asking

at the deepest level, how different are these stories in the moral presuppositions? OK, well, that's a killer question. Well, OK, so the first thing I would say is fundamentally I don't know. And so part of the reason that I'm one of the things I'm planning to do is to have a series of discussions and plenty of people have contacted me about discussing with Ion Hershey-Elli, as you know, she has powerful and serious foes and they're not happy with her black and white distinction. And so, now I read Infidel, and I really liked that book.

Like, my sense was that she was a heroine. Now, what that means in relationship to Islam, that's a different story because she came out of a, like a totalitarian, let's say, family structure in a relatively totalitarian society. And you could make the case that there's a correspondence between that and Islam, and you could make the case that there isn't. And of course, that's the critical issue. And so there's a couple of things that I can't wrap my head around with, wrap my head around easily in relationship to Islam.

And so one is what I see as the failure to separate church from state. And that's a problem. Now, it may not be a problem as such, but it's certainly a problem in relationship to the relation between Islam and the West because we separate church from state. Now, there's fundamentalists in the United States, Christian fundamentals, who think that that separation is a mistake. So, it's not only an idea that's rooted in Islam, that those should be united, but it's definitely a problem with regards to our coexistence because that's rooted in Islam, that those should be united. But it's definitely a problem with regards to our coexistence, because that's a fundamentally different presumption. Okay, so that's problem number one.

Problem number two for me, and again, this may be a consequence of my ignorance, which I am trying to rectify. Muhammad was a warlord, and I don't know what to do about that fact. Like one thing you can say about Christ hypothetically, let's say, I'm not talking about a historical reality necessarily, although I'm not denying it either, is that of all the things he was, war Lord was definitely not one of them. And I don't know what to do about that. And so I don't know how to reconcile that. And I don't know how to reconcile, like not only was Muhammad a warlord, which I don't think is an unreasonable thing to proclaim, the expansion that he initiated was unbelievably successful. I mean, within 600 years, it was the biggest empire the world had ever seen,

and it demolished Byzantine Christianity, which is something that Western people don't even know. You know, I've read thinkers who said that the West was so traumatized, culturally, let's say, by the demolition of Byzantine Christianity, that we can't even study it now. And so I don't know if that's true, but I don't know that it's not true either. And the Buddhists were wiped out of Afghanistan, and we saw that echoed in the Taliban's destruction of those great Buddhist monuments. And so what I'm hoping is that there's a bridge, there better be a bridge. And that's why I want to have these discussions because I'd like to understand if there's

a bridge. And so lots of people have sent me people who I should talk to, who they think represent Islam far better than I am, herzeally, and perhaps they're correct, and hopefully I'll get an opportunity to talk to them, because I would like to know what, I would like to know if what I think is wrong,

because if it's wrong, it's important that I know it's wrong. But at the moment, I don't, A, I don't know it's wrong, and B, I don't see, I'm not sure what it signifies. So, and I don't think anyone is sure, right? Because we have this entangling of the civilizations. You know, when there's other things too, like, I'm not very happy with the Saudi Arabs and the Wahhabis.

I don't think there are allies. I don't see how any Western woman can possibly think that there are allies. And I'm not happy with the fact that the petri-dollars that we send them are transformed in substantial part into the kind of propaganda that's definitely a threat to the West. And I'm not very happy with the fact

that our politicians appear stupidly blind to that. Now, that may again be a consequence of my ignorance. It's certainly possible. But those are the sorts of things that I can't reconcile. And so, you know, I've seen, I've also seen parallels between the ideas that I'm presenting here and other religious traditions, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism. It's harder for me to bridge the gap with Islam, and I'm not sure why that is. I think it has something to do with the things that I just laid out. Now what I don't know about Islam would fill very many volumes, many of which I have

sitting on my shelves at home right now, because I want to do the reading, you know, as I progress through this, but yeah. Good evening, Dr. Pearson. Thanks for continuing this series. Even us atheists appreciate the doing this series, even us atheists appreciate the interaction and the conversation. I wanted to ask you something that is both emotional and analytical because oftentimes you're basically picked as seeing things very analytically. So you were talking earlier about, you were talking about the juxtaposition between happiness and honor, even though I don't think they're mutually exclusive personally, but if there's a situation, let's say, where someone is truly in love with someone else and they love them for many years and decades They have a whole history together and then someone and then one of the people in this grouping Start falling in love with someone else

so it's not that there's less love for the original partner how analytically and emotionally do you take care of a situation like that when you feel that you want to stay honorable and be happy? Okay, so the first thing I would say is the devil is always in the details, right? So one of the things that I'm not happy about with much modern moral theorizing is that it takes a story like that and then tries to extract out a general moral principle. And often that's impossible because the particulars of this situation are very important. But having said that, all right, so let me think about that for a minute.

I'm not sure that it's possible to be honorable in a situation like that because I think that you've acted out the violation already. And having acted out the violation to confess it might be the right thing to do, although perhaps not. You know, because if you, it isn't obvious to me that if you betray someone, then you get to have the right to tell them about it. My observation has been that if there's a tight relationship and if one party is betrayed by the other in that manner, that it's almost always irreconcilable, it breaks it.

And you know, I've helped people try to struggle through that, but on both sides of it, the person who was betrayed and the person who did the betrayal. I've seen people grow up and not do it again, and this was in situations where their partner didn't know. And in a couple of those situations, it seemed to me that it might have even been a necessary learning experience for the person who did it. You know, it helped them develop.

That doesn't mean I'm justifying it, but life is complicated. But I think that society works better, all things considered when you make a promise and you stick to it. And one of the things I learned from reading Jung, which I really liked was, you know, he believed that, and he had his affairs too, so you might think about it as somewhat hypocritical,

but I think that people can make mistakes without having what they think necessarily be wrong. You know, he said that there were things in a marriage that you can't have unless you're all in. And I believe that, I believe that. And so if there's a back door open, or to begin with, or a back door opens, then I think that there's something about the relationship

that is lacking at least. And I think you pay a big price for that. So, I mean, it depends on whether you regard a marriage as a practical arrangement or a spiritual arrangement. Now, really, it's both, you know, and both are important. But if it's a spiritual arrangement or a psychological arrangement above all, then I do think that you don't get the transformation without being all-in if you violate it then even if you can work it out with your partner there's something that you will never get

as a consequence. So. Thank you. Yep. Applause. Last question. OK, I hope we'll make this good. Thanks also for continuing the lecture series.

I haven't listened to all of the lectures, but it seems like you focus very much on the appeal of the Biblical stories to the individual psychology. There are many thoughts on the relative importance of crowd psychology to the appeal and staying power of the Bible, and also the reason why the Bible or the biblical stories took precedence over other ideologies which could have taken its place. Okay, well let's go to the second one first. I think it's the same thing that happens when someone both creates and edits a great movie.

It's no one knows, like imagine how many choices are there in a great movie. Let's say it's an animated movie because absolutely everything in an animated movie is constructed, everything. There's God only knows how many choices, like maybe there's millions of choices, you know, and each choice is guided by some intuition

of narrative suitability or beauty or there's some higher ideal motivating it, right? The desire to produce a masterpiece, maybe that's it, that was certainly the case with the Disney movies, for example. And so that aspiration then makes the decisions. And so I would say, well, something like that guided the writing and the selection of the stories in the biblical canon. Now, could there be other stories included? Well, the Catholics and the Protestants don't have the same biblical tradition and neither do the Jews and the Christians.

And so it isn't exactly clear what to make of that. I mean, that's a kin in some sense to the discussion we just had about Islam and Christianity. In some sense, I've left that aside, that specific question, except in so far as I've just answered, because I'm trying to take what we have, which I know is at the root of our culture, and to figure out what it is that we have. Why it is that we have it, well, I've made some attempt to explain that in the manner that I just described, but I don't have a final answer.

I could have been different. It could have been different at some levels, but the same at others. You know, I mean, one of the things that scholars of comparative religion who haven't been infected fatally with postmodernism have definitely realized, so young, for example, in Elia de and people who are interested in grand narratives. One of the things they pointed out quite clearly is that there's a set of common mythological themes across many cultures, and I tried to outline that in maps of meaning, and that worked out quite nicely for me, at least, as far as I was concerned,

because once I had the basic archetypal structure mapped out, it opened up all sorts of stories to me from all sorts of different cultures. And that's been unbelievably useful, like the Mesopotamian story of the Anumailish, when I figured out what that meant, as far as I was concerned. Like, I've never forgotten that. It just seared itself into my memory in the same with the Egyptian stories. And, you know, some Buddhist writings that I've read and some, the Dow T. Cheng is also very powerful. So I think that things can be different on one level and the same at another,

but that humanity kind of coalesces on what's the same over a reasonable period of time, because there isn't that many ways that human beings can live properly as individuals and as groups together. And so there's this constant force that makes our ethical presuppositions converge. And then that's automatically expressed in the stories. It's something like that. Now, it's an imperfect process and it's full of error. So, yep.

Applause. So, just one announcement, well, two announcements. The next lecture, I believe believe is November 14th, so I hopefully finish off the story of Jacob. It looks like it. And then I'm also appearing on a panel with Gad Sade and or an Amate on November 11th. And there's still quite a few tickets available for that.

So if you're interested, you could go to my website and pick up those tickets. It should be. Well, hopefully it'll be interesting. I think It should be, well hopefully it'll be interesting. I think it will be and it might be too interesting. That's one possibility. So we'll see. But I'm going to do two more of these this year.

And I hope I get through the story of Joseph, and then I can start in the new year with Exodus. And that's a story that I know quite well. And Exodus and Leviticus and what's the one after that. Yes, thank you. So I'm very much looking forward to that because that is one killer story man. And I've got some surprises for that as well. So anyways, thank you very much for coming and hopefully we'll see you November 14th.

If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast. See JordanB Peterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanB Peterson.com's last personality for information on his new course,

which is now 50% off. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review. Next week's episode is a continuation of the Biblical series and is titled A Restling with God. Talk to you soon. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.B. Peterson. Details on this show,

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