The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 135. Maps of Meaning 07: Images of Story & Metastory

Episode Date: September 6, 2020

In this lecture, Dr. Peterson discusses how the basic or archetypal categories we use to frame the world are represented in image, where they existed long before their nature could be articulated. These categories include the individual (hero/adversary), culture (wise king/tyrant), and nature (destruction/creation). The heroic individual (the knower) is typically masculine, as is culture (the known), while the unknown is feminine. These categories can be conceptualized, as well, as explorer, explored territory, and unexplored territory. The most abstract category is the dragon of chaos, the monster who guards what is most valuable. It is from this most primordial of categories that the other three emerge. Our existence as prey and predator is reflected in the ambivalent representation of the absolute unknown. Thanks to our sponsors:https://www.nhtsa.gov/https://allform.com/lp/jordan/podcastshttps://helixsleep.com/jordan Listen to The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mikhaila-peterson-podcast/id1514043751

Season 3 Episode 22, Maps of Meaning Part 7, Images of Story and MetaStory, a Jordan V. Peterson lecture. So I'm back in Toronto. I came back two weeks early to set up everything for Dad coming back. I'm a Kayla Peterson, by the way, his daughter, if you didn't know that. The Peterson's are coming back to Canada. Being home is such a relief. Living out of a suitcase in a foreign country really is

quite stressful, even if you pretend it's not. I could feel my body relax when I got home. So that's incredible news. We haven't been home since January 4th. Some other news. I've finagled a discount on dads understand myself personality test if you guys want to try it. With the code September 15, you save 15%, so I believe that means it's $8 for the test. It's incredibly accurate. I would highly recommend screening your roommates or future girlfriends or boyfriends with it. I scored 0%ile in politeness, but 89%ile in compassion, the two facets of the trait, agreeableness. Anyway, again, if you're interested, the code is September 15 uppercase, but believe it has to be uppercase. And the website is understandmyself.com.

I hope you guys are doing well. I hope you enjoy this episode where so happy to be home. I'm so excited for my dad to be back. Paid for by Nitsa. Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a crash. People could get hurt or killed. But let's take a moment to look at some surprising statistics.

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Get up to $200 off at helixsleep.com slash Jordan. All right, so I want to go through a lot of material today, and hopefully that'll work out. It should. So so far what we've been doing is laying out an argument that you inhabit what you might describe as a frame of reference or a story or that you're occupied by sequential subpersonalities. That's another reasonable way of thinking about it.

It might be the most reasonable way of thinking about it really, and that these frames of reference or subpersonalities have a point of view and associated thoughts and associated memories. And that most importantly, perhaps, as well as directing your behavior and emotions, they also structure your perceptions.

And I think that's the most critical, that's the most critically important realization about the frames that you bring to bear on the world, because it's through them that the world manifests itself. And what that means, to some degree, is that you have an indeterminate role to play as a consequence of your moral choices, because these are essentially value-based structures. As a consequence of your moral choices,

you determine to an indeterminate degree the manner in which the world manifests itself to you. So in that sense, you're a co-creator of your own being, and then you're also a co-creator through your action and your communication for the being of other people as well and for the external world, and so far as you act upon it. So it's an nontrivial realization to understand that to what degree your value structures filter

the world for you and shape it. And so we've been talking so far about the structure of that world. And I introduced some neurophysiological ideas last time, the idea being that you come into the world obviously embodied with a set of inbuilt, we'll call them subpersonalities. At hand, most of them, those are regulated

by very archaic, ancient brain systems that you share with many other creatures on the evolutionary chain, which is partly why you can communicate with and understand other creatures, because if you didn't share that underlying biological structure, they would be opaque to you in the same way that perhaps an octopus is relatively opaque to you. You can't understand it because you don't share an embodied platform, and its experience is therefore entirely foreign to you, but you share your embodied platform, certainly, very specifically with all mammals.

And of course, you can understand mammals quite well, but you can even really understand lizards to some degree, and especially the more social ones. And so there's this tremendous degree of inbuilt biological structure and biological commonality. And we talked about it most particularly in reference to the hypothalamus, which seems to be the built-in initial subpersonality generator, something like that.

And the hypothalamus is responsible for regulating what you might regard as the most fundamental biological elements of behavior, the systems that not only keep you alive, which is obviously very important, but also impel you to do such things as defend yourself, obviously part of survival, and also to reproduce and to explore. And the exploration element is quite interesting because you think of that as a very sophisticated form of behavior, and it is, but it's rooted in an unbelievably archaic neurophysiology. So the hypothalamus roughly sets you into motivated frames and then when those frames either fail or when they're all quiescent because they've been satiated, it pops you into an exploratory state of mind,

and you wander around exploring foraging for information, roughly speaking, so that you can update all the subpersonalities that you use to organize your perceptions and frame your emotions and so forth. Now, the hypothalamus throws up these frames, it makes you hungry, it makes you thirsty, it makes you defensively aggressive, it helps regulate your temperature through behavior and all of those things.

Now, the problem with that is that it's a set of impulsive unit-dimensional systems, each one operating in the moment and each one only concerned with the satiation of its particular aim, we'll say. And the problem with that is that while you live for more than the moment, you live across many moments, you stretch yourself across time. And we know human beings know that they stretch across time,

and so actually have to consider not only the organization of their behavior in the short term, but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, but also the organization of their behavior in the short term so that it also works across weeks and across months and across years, and maybe even for longer spans of time than that. And also, equally and similarly, it has to work across people. And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is there actually isn't much difference between establishing a value structure that

works for you now and next week and next month and into the future and establishing a value structure that works for you and other people simultaneously because you could say that whoever you are in a year is sort of like another person. And so in so far as you can organize yourself so that other people find what you're doing, let's say acceptable and valuable, you're also organizing yourself so that perhaps you're acting in the best interests

of your future self. And so then you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can organize your being such that you can can organize your being such that you can satiate, satisfy your most basic needs, why do you need the rest of the brain? And the answer to that is, well, it looks like it's to solve the problem of more complex forms of being. So these fundamental biological subsystems have to interact with each other in a productive way, it can't just cycle unit dimensionally from motivated state to motivated state. It's not a very effective solution.

And not only that, you have to learn to operate in a world with time and with other people. And so that makes the adaptation problem much, much more complex. And it's for that reason as far as I can tell. And no doubt for other reasons as well, that there's utility in the provision of extra sub-cortical and cortical resources.

And I think the right way to think about the cortex, in some ways, is actually has living space for the hypothalamus and the sub-cortical structures. So you know what happens when you develop as a young child, especially in the very early stages of development, the underlying sub-cortical systems, including the systems for the senses, more or less compete for dominion over the cortical territory.

So, for example, if you take a kitten and you close one of its eyes shortly after birth and you leave it covered for a number of months, what will happen is the remaining eye will invade both hemispheres' visual representation systems. So that eye becomes, this is hingle remaining eye, becomes much more acute and more cortically dominant, like an invader, really, like an invader, than the other one does.

And then if you uncover the other eye, the cat, after a critical period of development, that the cat will never learn to see out of that eye. And so, you know, you've got these underlying biological systems, motivational and sensory, and they're looking to expand themselves as the organism manifests itself in the world, and it does that by occupying cortical territory in a competitive process. So for example, if your deaf, your visual cortex will become occupied by auditory and tactile process, because why not? I mean, you can basically see with your hands.

And you can, well, I wouldn't say it's not so easy here with your eyes. That's harder. Although you can hear to some degree with touch, because you can feel vibration. All of your senses overlap to a substantial degree. And if one of them is missing, it's perfectly reasonable for the others to occupy the territory

that would otherwise be given over to that sense. And this actually has some practical implications, even. So silent reading is actually a relatively new ability, evolutionarily speaking, certainly literacy is a relatively new invention from an evolutionary perspective, but to silent read is to use your eyes as ears. So you know, when you read silently you can hear the words so to speak in your head ears. So, you know, when you read silently, you can hear the words, so to speak, in your head. And the reason for that, as it turns out, is that the part of the brain that you use

to read silently with is right between the visual and the auditory cortex, is right where they overlap. So, you are literally, literally, you are using your eyes as ears. And so, that's quite the thing, that you can figure out how to do that. So, anyways, so you can think about these hypothelamic systems being in place,

more or less ready to go at birth, and then having to organize themselves into a sophisticated and integrated single ego that acts across time and in the social environment. And, you know, when Piaget originally started talking about child development, he regarded the child as something that was born into the world with just a set of very primordial reflexes, mostly sucking reflexes and some primary motor reflexes. He was very much a constructionist, but I would say, you know, had he been alive now, his constructionism would have been modified, modified by the relevant neurophysiological data, showing that there's a lot more built into us right from the beginning

than PHA expected. You still might need experience to catalyze the development, but obviously children are born with the ability to hear and to see and to sense with touch, and they're hungry, and tired, and angry, and like they have the whole range of emotions at hand, and they also come into the world with their motivation already in place. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to form a relationship with them.

And that's modified by the development of the higher-cortical systems through play and through social negotiation. But the biology is there to begin with. And so that's a good way to think about it with regards to understanding how both, how the fundamental biological systems operate and how they manifest themselves in personality

and in story. Because you do that all the time. You tell a story about how you got angry. And it's basically a story about being dominated by a particular kind of subpersonality, which would be hypothalamic, and exactly how you manifested that in what the consequences were. And I was very mad at this person, but I

knew I couldn't get too upset because. And that's a good story that indicates both highly motivated nature of the original response tendency, and then your immediate proclivity to have to figure out how to negotiate that expression within a social space so that the medium to long-term consequences are positive rather than negative. And people are very interested in such bits of information, such units of information, because we need to know how to conduct ourselves in complex environments. And so if someone's willing to share their experience and they can narrate it in an interesting

story, we're absolutely more than happy to listen, because in some sense we're assembling our identities out of those stories. And then you can think that there are patterns across stories, which is really a useful thing to understand, because that gives you real insight into what constitutes an archetype, because an archetype is what's common across sets of stories. That might be one way of looking at it. So an archetype is like a meta-story. And so what part of what we're going to turn to now in this discussion is a description of certain meta-stories.

And there's a particular meta-story that I'm most interested in. And that's the story about how stories transform themselves. And so that I think is the most fundamental story that characterizes human beings. There's the story. I was here. I implemented some behaviors.

And I went there. There was better than here. That's the fundamental unit. I was here, I implemented some behaviors, and I went there. There was better than here. That's the fundamental unit. But the thing about structures like that is that they may work in one situation and not in another, or at one time and not in another. And thus, they have to be modified.

And it was partly for this reason that P.S.A. as his career as a developmental psychologist progressed, started to understand that it was more important not so much to understand the given structure of a knowledge structure, but to understand the manner in which knowledge structures transformed. And that was partly illustrated in his description of stage theory, because stages were really movement from one set of axiomatic presuppositions that through with which the child was structuring the world into a state where that system failed because it wasn't sufficiently comprehensive, and then into the development of a new stage

that could do everything the previous stage could plus account for all the things that the previous stage could plus account for all the things that the previous stage couldn't. So that's also why PHA believed that knowledge actually accumulated because each time there was a transformation, the new structure could had a wider range of application than the previous structure, even though it kept all the advantages

of the previous structure. And so that's a good way of conceptualizing progress because it's not that easy. If you're a relativist, fundamentally, you don't believe in difference between knowledge structures and you certainly don't believe in the idea of progress. But if you think about a more sophisticated structure as being able to do more things properly,

then you can certainly map out progress with no problem. And you know that because you see people operating the world who are less competent, generally speaking, and more competent, generally speaking, and there doesn't seem to be much debate about that. You can recognize people like that very, very easily. So, so that's the basic structure, and we've talked about that at length, and I suggested that while you're occupying a structure like that, the world manifests itself to you, not as objects, but as number one, things to ignore,

which is the major category. I was talking to some guy yesterday who was working, think he was in San Diego, on artificial intelligence and neural networks. And he was working with someone who's actually started to, so a neural network will learn how to wait certain stimulus features, let's say, in order to identify an image. So the thing will be trained up on a whole set of diverse images

and it learns through feedback to discriminate between them. But the problem with the neural network is that it's not easy to understand what's actually going on inside of them because it itself generated. So we could easily end up, for example, creating fully conscious machines and not understanding at all how they work. It's the most likely outcome in my estimation. But this guy was working with another guy who had figured out how to model the weights. And one of the things he told me was that a

tremendous amount of what the neural network is doing is learning what's not relevant, right? Which is exactly, and these, by the way, these neural network models, produce output that's analogous to the output that's produced by sections of cortical tissue. It's not identical, but partly they

make the same kind of mistakes, which is an indication that they're functioning in the same way. So what are the things that a neural net does when you're training it, is learn to figure out which things that can ignore. And that's mostly what you're doing is what can be ignored. And that's a tremendous realization, too, because it highlights, again, how important the structure within which you exist, how importantly the structure within which you exist determines what importantly the structure within which you exist determines what manifests itself to you as you move through the world.

Because you ignore almost everything. So you ignore almost everything, but then you concentrate on things that move you along your way or obstacles that get in your way. And those things have emotional significance. They're valanced. And the reason they're valanced

is because they're conceptualized in relationship to the journey. If you run across a tool or something positive, and have opportunity, we could say, which is like an abstract tool, then that moves you forward. And the fact that it's moving you forward is signaled by the incentive reward system, open, menurgically mediated incentive reward system,

that's grounded in the hypothalamus, the same system that you use when you explore, the same system that's activated by psychomotor stimulants like cocaine and heroin, and most of the drugs that people abuse, that system indicates to you that this entity is non-ignorable because it's positively functionally related to the transformation of the world that you're attempting to accomplish. So that makes you happy. That provides you with hope and incentive to move forward. If fundamental motivating force of life for human beings with the possible exception,

say of aggression and sexuality, which I would say operate much more sporadically, this is pretty much continual. And then, of course, the negative emotions are generated when you encounter something that gets in the way, which can require a small detour, let's say, or can blow apart the frame that you're inhabiting completely.

And part of what we're trying to do is understand how you compute how emotional to get about certain classes of events. And the reason that it's so complicated is because often when you run into a tool or an opportunity, generally speaking, it's not too hard to compute how useful it is. Although sometimes something can happen to you, like let's say you win a lottery where the possibility space is so great that it's of indefinite positive significance, you know, and you're going to be overwhelmed

by that sort of thing. It's pretty rare that something like that happens. It does happen, maybe it happens when someone that you're desperately chasing for amorous purposes agrees to go out with you. That's another place where that sort of excitement occurs. It seems to occur to football players, when they make a touchdown on TV, too, because they do their little touchdown and dance around like mad dogs. And scientists never do that when they get a paper published.

So there's something about scoring a goal that's really got that incentive reward blast. So anyhow, the positive emotion systems are operating, roughly speaking, because you have encountered something that moves you forward on your path, and we could say that given, as we've discussed, that your value structure is a nested entity, right, with small goals nested inside larger goals,

or small personalities nested inside of larger personalities, a positive thing that's really positive has implications for what you're doing right now that are positive, but also has positive implications higher up the abstraction chain. You know, so for example, let's say you study really hard for an exam and you get a really good grade on it and you're surprised, you think, well that's extraordinarily

useful, I passed the grade, you think, well, that's extraordinarily useful. I passed the grade, I passed the exam. I did well in the course, but that means that maybe I'm a better student than I thought and given what I'm aiming for in the future, maybe I'm a more competent person that I had believed. And so you can see that the positive emotion would echo through those levels of analysis

because it has implications on each level. Now, you're also trying when you encounter something negative to constrain its propagation across those levels, because let's say you study really hard and you fail adismally. And so then you think, well, I messed up this course. I messed up this exam. I messed up this course.

I'm not as good a student as I think I am. Maybe I'm a failure as a person. And that can take you out completely, right? And of course, there are more, there are certainly more traumatic events that can be fall you than that. A typical one that really will wipe someone out. Imagine someone who's naive and dependent and over sheltered.

And so they're off into the world, although they're not prepared for it. And their axiomatic presuppositions aren't sophisticated enough to allow for the existence of radical uncertainty or malevolence. And then one day they're attacked. When they're out, they get mugged or maybe they get raped or something worse.

And they develop post-traumatic stress disorder from that. And the reason for that is that the event is so anomalous, especially combined with its malevolence, that it demolishes the interpretation frames from the local level all the way out to the superordinate level. And then the person is cast into this chaotic state, and they're terrified and angry and vengeful and paralyzed and depressed,

and all of those things simultaneously, and maybe they never put the pieces back together, right? They descend into chaos, and that's that. And if you're in a situation like that long enough, you know, the cortisol that's produced can produce permanent neurophysiological changes, shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that moves information from short-term attention to long-term storage, shrinkage of the hippocampus, and growth of the amygdala, which is something that seems to tag stimuli, roughly speaking,

with emotional significance more or less permanently, because if you really encounter something traumatic, the hippocampus restricts information with regards to its application in a certain time and place. So it's sort of situation specific. But if you encounter something truly dangerous, your brain is set up so that you will be afraid of it regardless of context.

So it's the amygdala that can produce context, independent fears. And those are basically, well, they can be part of post-traumatic stress disorder, they can be part of a very, very serious phobia. And so you can't contextualize them. What you really do with someone who has a problem like that is you try to walk them through a recontextualization process.

So maybe if they're afraid of snakes, so afraid of them, they can't even really think of snakes. You have them, well, first maybe you have them sit for one second and think of a cartoon snake. And what happens is their brain notices that they can hold that image and nothing negative happens. And so then in some sense, it's built an inhibitory structure that partially inhibits,

which is what inhibitory structures do, that partially inhibits the otherwise context independent fear that would constitute the phobia. And so you basically build up contexts of safety around the phobia until the context signifies lack of danger and the person can progress forward. If they're really damaged, it's really hard to do that, especially if the trauma was really severe. So, okay, so you see, you don't see irrelevant things, that's most things. You do see things that move you forward and you do see things that get in your way. And in the class of things that get in your way are indeterminate occurrences, novel or anomalous occurrences. And almost everything that gets in your way

is in some sense a novel occurrence, because you usually structure your behavior so that you don't go anywhere where something wildly anomalous is likely to occur. So if you encounter an obstacle, two things happen at the same time. And one is that your movement forward to your specific goal or sets of goals is blocked.

But the second thing that happens is you're faced with a mystery. And the mystery is, this thing wasn't supposed to exist, but it does exist. So what implication does that have for everything I think? And that's very, very hard on people. They do not like that at all. And no wonder because it's the constrained chaos that's underneath everything inhibited by your contextual knowledge

that suddenly popped its head up into your world. It's like the shark in the movie Jaws, which is of course a mythological story. It's exactly that. And it's exactly what that movie signified, a safe vacation, paradise, all of a sudden threatened by some subterranean thing that can pull you down and that destroys the peace and the harmony

of that particular community. It's a dragon story, it's a hero myth. It's the story that people have been telling forever. So what you can think, you can think of that thing that re-emerges, that shark that rises up from the depths or that whale or that dragon or that predator or the foreign invader for that matter or the barbarian, they all fit into the same category. That's what had been deemed irrelevant, suddenly manifesting itself.

And when you think about how much is deemed irrelevant, the fact that it suddenly manifests itself, that's exactly the purpose for the reason for the trauma. It's like, well, I've eradicated from my conceptualizations, 99.99% of everything. It's zeroed out. And all of a sudden, I've made a mistake, bang, I don't know where I am.

Well, what's relevant when you don't know where you are, and the answer to that is, since you don't know, everything is relevant. And you can imagine the sort of terror that people who experience paranoid schizophrenia are living in perennially, because what happens to them is precisely that. They undergo neurophysiological transformations

that makes everything that they once depended on disappear and everything comes back as relevant. And that puts them in the early stages of schizophrenia. That's extraordinarily stressful, neurophysiologically. So they're overwhelmed with cortisol and their brain's deteriorate as a consequence of that. It's just too much. So unsurprisingly, right?

Because you can't deal with, you can hardly deal with anything, let alone with everything. Now, often what you see, and it's rarely conceptualized this way in the training of clinical therapists, but often what you see, when you are dealing with people who are in crisis, isn't people who have a mental illness. In fact, in my experience, that's actually quite rare. What's far more common is that the person that you're talking to has become overwhelmed by catastrophe. So their life has fallen apart in some way

that makes what they're doing actually impossible. So maybe someone very close to them in their family that they were depending on has developed a very serious illness and that's thrown their entire financial state into utter chaos. Or maybe they've developed a condition that makes it impossible for them to work, or you can imagine the potential range of catastrophes. And they're coming to see you because they're anxious

and depressed, but the reason they're anxious and depressed is because everything they have ignored has popped its head back up and is hell bent on their destruction. And often you see people who are being attacked by five or six of these monsters at the same time. And it isn't their mental illness that stops them from being able to deal with it, although that, you know, whatever weaknesses you have are going to interfere. It's the fact that what they're facing is no damn joke.

And if you were facing it, you'd feel exactly the same way. So then you're trying to come up with practical solutions to these tremendously complex problems. And that's a very, well, it's extraordinarily difficult, generally speaking. People often don't come to a therapist until they've exhausted their entire range of resources. They cannot figure out what to do. And so, you know, in a situation like that, you can administer antidepressants, and maybe

that'll help the person increase their stress resistance. But as a, and it may be that because they're depressed and have been brought down, that they are in fact exaggerating the danger of some of the smaller monsters that are after them. But making the person more stressed resilient doesn't give them, for example, a new job. And it certainly doesn't bring back the person they've been living with for two years

who has a degenerating neurological disease or some form of cancer. Like these things are major, you know, I often see people who, well, they're in a relationship, maybe they're rather isolated, older people. One of the partners is dying in their entire financial situation has become catastrophic. It's like, that's not a mental illness, man.

I mean, they may have got into that situation because of... Season three, episode 22, maps of meaning part seven, images of story and metastory, a Jordan V. Peterson lecture. So I'm back in Toronto. I came back two weeks early to set up everything for Dad coming back. I'm Michaela Peterson, by the way, his daughter, if you didn't know that. The Peterson's are coming back to Canada. Being home is such a relief. Living out of a suitcase in a foreign country really is quite stressful, even if you pretend it's not. I could feel my body relax when I got home. So that's incredible news.

We haven't been home since January 4th. Some other news. I've finagled a discount on dads understand myself personality test if you guys want to try it. With the code September 15, you save 15%. So I believe that means it's $8 for the test. It's incredibly accurate. I would highly recommend screening your roommates or future girlfriends or boyfriends with it. I scored 0%ile in politeness, but 89%ile in compassion, the two facets of the

trade agreeableness. Anyway, again, if you're interested, the code is September 15, uppercase, but believe it has to be uppercase, but believe it has to be uppercase. And the website is understandmyself.com. I hope you guys are doing well. I hope you enjoy this episode. We're so happy to be home. I'm so excited for my dad to be back.

Paid for by Nitsa. Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a crash. People could get hurt or killed. But let's take a moment to look at some surprising statistics. Almost 29 people in the United States die every day in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes. That's one person every 50 minutes. Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year. Drunk driving can have a big impact on your wallet too.

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All right, so I want to go through a lot of material today, and hopefully that'll work out. It should. So, so far what we've been doing is laying out an argument that you inhabit what you might describe as a frame of reference or a story, or that you're occupied by sequential subpersonalities. That's another reasonable way of thinking about it. It might be the most reasonable way of thinking about it really, and that these frames of reference or subpersonalities have a point of view and associated thoughts and associated memories, and that most importantly, perhaps, as well

as directing your behavior and emotions, they also structure your perceptions. And I think that's the most critical, that's the most critically important realization about the frames that you bring to bear on the world, because they, it's through them that the world manifests itself. And what that means, to some degree, is that you have an indeterminate role to play as a consequence of your moral choices, because these are essentially value-based structures. As a consequence of your moral choices, because these are essentially value-based structures.

As a consequence of your moral choices, you determine to an indeterminate degree the manner in which the world manifests itself to you. So in that sense, you're a co-creator of your own being, and then you're also a co-creator through your action and your communication for the being of other people as well and for the external world, and so far as you act upon it. So it's an entrepreneurial realization to understand that,

to what degree your value structures filter the world for you and shape it. And so we've been talking so far about the structure of that world. And I introduced some neurophysiological ideas last time, the idea being that you come into the world obviously embodied with a set of inbuilt, we'll call them subpersonalities, at hand, most of them, those are regulated by very archaic,

ancient brain systems that you share with many other creatures on the evolutionary chain, which is partly why you can communicate with and understand other creatures. Because if you didn't share that underlying biological structure, they would be opaque to you in the same way that perhaps an octopus is relatively opaque to you. You can't understand it because you don't share an embodied platform.

And its experience is therefore entirely foreign to you. You can't understand it because you don't share an embodied platform, and its experience is therefore entirely foreign to you. But you share your embodied platform certainly very specifically with all mammals. And of course, you can understand mammals quite well. But you can even really understand lizards to some degree, and especially the more social ones. And so there's this tremendous degree of inbuilt biological structure and biological

commonality. And we talked about it most particularly in reference to the hypothalamus, which seems to be the built-in initial subpersonality generator, something like that. And the hypothalamus is responsible for regulating what you might regard as the most fundamental biological elements of behavior, that things, the systems that not only keep you alive, which is obviously very important, but also impel you to do such things as defend yourself, obviously part of survival, and also to reproduce and to explore. And the exploration elements, quite interesting, because you think of that as a very sophisticated form

of behavior, and it is, but it's rooted in an unbelievably archaic neurophysiology. So the hypothalamus roughly sets you into motivated frames. And then when those frames either fail or when they're all quiescent because they've been satiated, it pops you into an exploratory state of mind, and you wander around exploring foraging for information,

roughly speaking, so that you can update all the subpersonalities that you use to organize your perceptions and frame your emotions and so forth. Now, the hypothalamus throws up these frames, it makes you hungry, it makes you thirsty, it makes you defensively It makes you thirsty. It makes you defensively aggressive. It helps regulate your temperature through behavior and all of those things. Now, the problem with that is that it's

a set of impulsive unidimensional systems. Each one operating in the moment and each one only concerned with the satiation of its particular aim, we'll say. And the problem with that is that while you live for more than the moment, you live across many moments, you stretch yourself across time. And we know human beings know that they stretch across time, and so actually have to consider not only the organization of their behavior

in the short term, but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, but also the organization of their behavior in the short term, so that it also works across weeks and across months and across years, and maybe even for longer spans of time than that. And also, equally and similarly, it has to work across people. And one of the things that's kind of interesting about that is, there actually isn't much difference between establishing a value structure that works for you now and next week and next month and into the future

and establishing a value structure that works for you and other people simultaneously, because you could say that whoever you are in a year is sort of like another person. And so in so far as you can organize yourself so that other people find what you're doing, let's say, acceptable and valuable, you're also organizing yourself so that perhaps you're

acting in the best interests of your future self. And so then you might say, well, if the hypothalamus can organize your being such that you can satiate, satisfy your most basic needs, why do you need the rest of the brain? And the answer to that is, well, it looks like it's to solve the problem of more complex forms of being. So these fundamental biological subsystems have to interact with each other in a productive way, it can't just cycle unit-dimensionally from motivated state to motivated state. It's not a very effective solution.

And not only that, you have to learn to operate in a world with time and with other people. And so that makes the adaptation problem much, much more complex. And it's for that reason as far as I can tell. And no doubt for other reasons as well, that there's utility in the provision of extra sub-cortical and cortical resources. And I think the right way to think about the cortex in some ways is actually has living space for the hypothalamus and the sub-cortical structure. So, you know, what happens when you develop as a young child, especially in the very early

stages of development, the underlying sub-cortical systems, including the systems for the senses, more or less compete for dominion over the cortical territory. So, for example, if you take a kitten and you close one of its eyes shortly after birth, and you leave it covered for a number of months, what will happen is the remaining eye

will invade both hemispheres' visual representation systems. So that eye becomes, this is Hengel remaining eye, becomes much more acute and more cordically dominant, like an invader, really, like an invader, than the other one does. And then if you uncover the other eye, the cat, after a critical period of development,

the cat will never learn to see out of that eye. And so, you know, you've got these underlying biological systems, motivational and sensory, and they're looking to expand themselves as the organism manifests itself in the world. And it does that by occupying cortical territory in a competitive process. So, for example, if you're deaf, your visual cortex will become occupied by auditory and tactile

process, because why not? You can basically see with your hands, you know, and you can, well, I wouldn't say it's not so easy to hear with your eyes, that's harder. Although you can hear to some degree with touch, because you can feel vibration. All of your senses overlap to a substantial degree. And if one of them is missing, it's perfectly reasonable for the others to occupy the territory that

would otherwise be given over to that sense. And this actually has some practical implications, even. So silent reading is actually a relatively new ability, evolutionarily speaking, certainly literacy is a relatively new invention from an evolutionary perspective. But to silent read is to use your eyes as ears. So, you know, when you read silently, you can hear the word so to speak in your head. And the reason for that, as it turns out, is that the part of the brain that you use to read silently with is right between the visual and the auditory cortexis, right where they overlap. So you are literally, literally, you are using your eyes as ears. And so that's quite the thing, that you can

you can figure out how to do that. So, anyways, so you can think about these hypothalamic systems being in place, more or less ready to go at birth, and then having to organize themselves into a sophisticated and integrated, single ego that acts across time and in the social environment. And, you know, when Piaget originally started talking

about child development, he regarded the child as something that was born into the world with just a set of very primordial reflexes, mostly sucking reflexes and some primary motor reflexes. He was very much a constructionist, but I would say, you know, had he been alive now, his constructionism would have been modified, modified by the relevant neurophysiological data, showing that there's a lot more built into us right from the beginning than PHA expected. You still might need experience to catalyze the development, but obviously children are

born with the ability to hear and to see and to sense with touch and their hungry, tired, and angry, and like they have the whole range of emotions at hand, and they also come into the world with their motivation already in place. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to form a relationship with them. And that's modified by the development of the higher-cortical systems through play and through social negotiation. But the biology is there to begin with. And so that's a good way to think about it

with regards to understanding how both, how the fundamental biological systems operate and how they manifest themselves in personality and in story. Because you do that all the time. You tell a story about how you got angry. And it's basically a story about being dominated by a particular kind of subpersonality,

which would be hypothalamic, and exactly how you manifested that in what the consequences were. And, you know, I was very mad at this person, but I knew I couldn't get too upset because, and that's a good story that indicates both the highly motivated nature of the original response tendency,

and then your immediate proclivity to have to figure out how to negotiate that expression within a social space so that the medium to long-term consequences are positive rather than negative. And people are very interested in such bits of information, such units of information, because we need to know how to conduct ourselves in complex environments. And so if someone's willing to share their experience, and they can narrate it in an interesting story, we're absolutely more than happy to listen.

Because in some sense, we're assembling our identities out of those stories. And then you can think that there are patterns across stories, which is really a useful thing to understand. Because that gives you real insight into what constitutes an archetype, because an archetype is what's common across sets of stories. That might be one way of looking at it. So an archetype is like a meta story.

And so part of what we're going to turn to now in this discussion is a description of certain meta stories. And there's a particular meta story that I'm most interested in, and that's the story about how stories transform themselves. And so that, I think, is the most fundamental story that characterizes human beings. There's the story. I was here. I implemented some behaviors, and I went there.

There was better than here. That's the fundamental unit, but the thing about structures like that is that they may work in one situation and not in another or at one time and not in another. And thus they have to be modified. And it was partly for this reason that Piaget as his career as a developmental psychologist progressed, started to understand that it was more important,

not so much to understand the given structure of a knowledge structure, but to understand the manner in which knowledge structures transformed. And that was partly illustrated in his description of stage theory, because stages were really movement from one set of axiomatic presuppositions that through with which the child was structuring the world into a state where that system failed because it wasn't sufficiently comprehensive and then into the development of a new stage that could do everything the previous stage could plus account for all the things that the previous stage couldn't. So, that's also why PHA believed that knowledge actually accumulated because each time there was

a transformation, the new structure could have a wider range of application than the previous structure, even though it kept all the advantages of the previous structure. And so, that's a good way of conceptualizing progress because it's not that easy. If you're a relativist, fundamentally, you don't believe in difference between knowledge structures saying you certainly don't believe in the idea of progress. But if you think about a more sophisticated structure as being able to do more things properly,

then you can certainly map out progress with no problem. And you know that because you see people operating the world who are less competent, generally speaking, and more competent, generally speaking, and there doesn't seem to be much debate about that. You can recognize people like that very, very easily. So that's the basic structure. And we've talked about that at length.

And I suggested that while you're occupying a structure like that, the world manifests itself to you, not as objects, but as number one, things to ignore, which is the major category. I was talking to some guy yesterday who is working, I think he was in San Diego, on artificial intelligence and neural networks. And he was working with someone who's actually started to,

so a neural network will learn how to wait certain stimulus features, let's say, in order to identify an image. So the thing will be trained up on a whole set of diverse images, and it learns through feedback to discriminate between them. But the problem with the neural network is that it's not easy to understand what's actually going on inside of them because it itself generated. So we could easily end up, for example, creating fully conscious machines and not understanding at all how they work. It's the most likely outcome in my estimation. But this guy was working with another guy who had figured out how to model the weights. And one of

the things he told me was that a tremendous amount of what the neural network is doing is learning what's not relevant, right, which is exactly, and these, by the way, these neural network models, produce output that's analogous to the output that's produced by sections of cortical tissue. It's not identical, but partly they make the same kind of mistakes, which is an indication that they're functioning in the same way. So what are the things that a neural net does when you're training it? Is learn to figure out which things that can ignore, and that's mostly what you're doing is what can be ignored.

And that's a tremendous realization, too, because it highlights, again, how important the structure within which you exist, how importantly the structure within which you exist, determines what manifests itself to you as you move through the world within which you exist determines what manifests itself to you as you move through the world. Because you ignore almost everything. So you ignore almost everything, but then you concentrate on things that move you along your way or obstacles that get in your way.

And those things have emotional significance. They're valanced, and the reason they're valanced is because they're conceptualized in relationship to the journey. You know, if you run across a tool or something positive, an opportunity, we could say, which is like an abstract tool, then that moves you forward. And the fact that it's moving you forward is signaled by the incentive reward system, open, menurgically mediated incentive reward system, that's grounded in the hypothalamus, the same system that you use when you explore, the same system that's activated by psychomotor stimulants like cocaine and heroin, and most

of the drugs that people abuse, that system indicates to you that this entity is non-ignorable because it's positively, functionally related to the transformation of the world that you're attempting to accomplish. So that makes you happy. That provides you with hope and incentive to move forward. A fundamental motivating force of life for human beings with the possible exception, say, of aggression and sexuality, which I would say operate much more sporadically.

This is pretty much continual. And then, of course, the negative emotions are generated when you encounter something that gets in the way, which can require a small detour, let's say, or can blow apart the frame that you're inhabiting completely. And part of what we're trying to do is understand how you compute how emotional to get about about certain classes of events. And the reason that it's so complicated is because often

when you run into a tool or an opportunity, generally speaking, it's not too hard to compute how useful it is. Although sometimes something can happen to you, like let's say you win a lottery, where the possibility space is so great that it's of indefinite positive significance, and you're gonna be overwhelmed by that sort of thing.

It's pretty rare that something like that happens. It does happen. Maybe it happens when someone that you're desperately chasing for amorous purposes agrees to go out with you. That's another place where that sort of excitement occurs. It seems to occur to football players, when they make a touchdown on TV too, because they do their little touchdown

and dance around like mad dogs. And scientists never do that when they get a paper published. So there's something about scoring a goal that's really got that incentive reward blast. So anyhow, the positive emotion systems are operating roughly speaking, because you have encountered something that moves you forward on your path. And we could say that, given, as we've discussed, that your value structure is a nested entity,

with small goals nested inside larger goals, or small personalities nested inside of larger personalities, a positive thing that's really positive has implications for what you're doing right now that are positive, but also has positive implications higher up the abstraction chain. So for example, let's say you study really hard for an exam and you get a really good grade on it and you're surprised, you think, well, that's extraordinarily useful. I passed the grade, I passed the exam, I did well in the course, but that means maybe I'm a better student than I thought, and given what I'm aiming for in the future,

maybe I'm a more competent person that I had believed. And so you can see that the positive emotion would echo through those levels of analysis because it has implications on each level. Now, you're also trying, when you encounter something negative, to constrain its propagation across those levels. Because let's say you study really hard, and you fail, a dismaly.

And so then you think, well, I messed up this course, I messed up this exam, I messed up this course, I'm not as good a student as I think I am, maybe I'm a failure as a person. And that can take you out completely, right? And of course, there are certainly more traumatic events that can be fall you than that. A typical one that really will wipe someone out,

imagine someone who's naive and dependent and over sheltered. No, and they, and so they're off into the world, although they're not prepared for it. And, you know, their axiomatic presuppositions aren't sophisticated enough to allow for the existence of radical uncertainty or malevolence. And then one day they're attacked when they're

maybe they're out, they get mugged, or maybe they get raped, or something worse. And they develop post-traumatic stress disorder from that. And the reason for that is that the event is so anomalous, especially combined with its malevolence, that it demolishes the interpretation frames from the local level all the way out to the superordinate level. And then the person is cast into this chaotic state, and they're terrified and angry and vengeful and paralyzed and depressed and all of those

things simultaneously and maybe they never put the pieces back together, right? They descend into chaos and that's that. And if you're in a situation like that long enough, you know, the cortisol that's produced can produce permanent neurophysiological changes, shrinkage of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that moves information from short-term attention to long-term storage, shrinkage of the hippocampus and growth of the amygdala, which is something that seems to tag stimuli, roughly speaking,

with emotional significance more or less permanently, because if you really encounter something traumatic, the hippocampus restricts information with regards to its application in a certain time and place. So it's sort of situation specific. But if you encounter something truly dangerous, your brain is set up so that you will be afraid of it regardless of context. So it's the amygdala that can produce context independent fears. And those are basically, well, they can be part of post-traumatic stress disorder, they can be part of a very, very serious phobia. And so you can't contextualize them. What you really do with someone who

has a problem like that is you try to walk them through a recontextualization process. So, you know, maybe if they're afraid of snakes, so afraid of them, they can't even really think of snakes. You have them, well, first, maybe you have them sit for one second and think of a cartoon snake. And what happens is their brain notices that they can hold that image in nothing negative happens. And so then in some sense, it's built an inhibitory structure that partially inhibits, which is what inhibitory structures do,

that partially inhibits the otherwise context independent fear that would constitute the phobia. And so you basically build up contexts of safety around the phobia until the context signifies lack of danger and the person can progress forward. If they're really damaged, it's really hard to do that, especially if the trauma was really severe. So, okay, so you see, you don't see irrelevant things, that's most things. You do see things that move you forward, and you do see things that get in your way.

And in the class of things that get in your way are indeterminate occurrences, novel or anomalous occurrences. And almost everything that gets in your way is in some sense a novel occurrence, because you usually structure your behavior so that you don't go anywhere where something wildly anomalous is likely to occur. So if you encounter an obstacle, two things happen at the same time, and one is that your movement forward to your specific goal or sets of goals is blocked, but the second thing that happens is you're faced with a mystery. And the mystery is, this thing wasn't supposed to exist, but it does exist. So what implication does that have for everything I think?

And that's very, very hard on people. They do not like that at all. And no wonder, because it's the constrained chaos that's underneath everything, inhibited by your contextual knowledge that suddenly popped its head up into your world. It's like the shark in the movie, Jaws, which is of course a mythological story.

It's exactly that. And it's exactly what that movie signified, a safe vacation, paradise, all of a sudden threatened by some subterranean thing that can pull you down and that destroys the peace and the harmony of that particular community. It's a dragon story, it's a hero myth. It's the story that people have been telling forever.

So what you can think, you can think of that thing that re-emerges, that shark that rises up from the depths or that whale or that dragon or that predator or the foreign invader for that matter or the barbarian, they all fit into the same category. That's what had been deemed irrelevant, suddenly manifesting itself. And when you think about how much is deemed irrelevant, the fact that it suddenly manifests itself, that's exactly the purpose for the reason for the trauma. It's like, well, I've eradicated from my conceptualizations, 99.99% of everything. It's zeroed out. And all of a sudden, I've made a mistake, bang, I don't know where I am. Well, what's relevant when you don't know where you are? And the answer to that is, since you don't know, everything is relevant.

And you can imagine the sort of terror that people who experience paranoid schizophrenia are living in perennially, because what happens to them is precisely that. They undergo neurophysiological transformations that makes everything that they once depended on disappear and everything comes back as relevant. And that puts them in the early stages of schizophrenia. That's extraordinarily stressful, neurophysiologically.

So they're overwhelmed with cortisol and their brain's deteriorate as a consequence of that. It's just too much. So unsurprisingly, right? Because you can't deal with, you can hardly deal with anything, let alone with everything. Now, often what you see, and it's rarely conceptualized this way in the training of clinical therapists, but often what you see when you are dealing with people who are in crisis isn't people who have a mental illness. In fact, in my experience, that's actually quite rare. What's far more common is that the person that you're talking to has become overwhelmed by catastrophe.

So their life has fallen apart in some way that makes what they're doing actually impossible. So maybe someone very close to them in their family that they were depending on has developed a very serious illness and that's thrown their entire financial state into utter chaos. Or maybe they've developed a condition that makes it impossible for them to work, or you can imagine the potential range of catastrophes. And they're coming to see you because they're anxious and depressed,

but the reason they're anxious and depressed is because everything they have ignored has popped its head back up and is hell-bent on their destruction. And often you see people who are being attacked by five or six of these monsters at the same time. And it isn't their mental illness that stops them from being able to deal with it, although that, you know, whatever weaknesses you have are going to interfere. It's the fact that what they're facing is no damn joke.

And if you were facing it, you'd feel exactly the same way. So then you're trying to come up with practical solutions to these tremendously complex problems. And that's a very, well, it's extraordinarily difficult, generally speaking. People often don't come to a therapist until they've exhausted their entire range of resources. They cannot figure out what to do. And so, you know, in a situation like that, you can administer antidepressants, and maybe that'll help the person

increase their stress resistance. But as a, and it may be that because they're depressed and have been brought down, that they are in fact exaggerating the danger of some of the smaller monsters that are after them. But making the person more stress resilient doesn't give them, for example, a new job, and it certainly doesn't bring back the person they've been living with for two years who has a degenerating neurological disease or some form of cancer.

Like these things are major, you know, I often see people who, well, they're in a relationship, maybe they're rather isolated, older, older people. One of the partners is dying in their entire financial situation has become catastrophic. It's like, that's not a mental illness, man. I mean, they may have got into that situation because of one inadequacy or another. But you don't even want to push that too far

because that sort of thing can happen to anyone. And will, in fact, happen to most people in one form or another, at least at some point in their lives. So you want to be damn prepared for that. You want to be prepared for that because it's bitter and harsh and anxiety-provoking and painful. But if you're not ready, then it's also hell.

And often you can stop things from becoming hell, even though you can't stop them from being bitter and painful and anxiety-provoking and all of that. You can at least delimit the catastrophe enough so that it doesn't permanently bring you and the people around you down. And that's not so bad, right? That's a hell or at least it's a lot better than the alternative. So this is the problem. You know, things object, things are obstacles. Well, how big is the obstacle? It's the same, it's the same question as how big is the predator that's lurking outside the door of our cave?

It's exactly the same problem except conceptualized abstractly. And I would say exactly the same systems that your distant ancestors used to conceptualize the lurking predator are the systems that are activated now when you encounter the re-emergence of all the monsters that you've ignored. It's the same neurological platform. You think, well, how could it be otherwise?

Because evolution is a conservative process. Everything about you is built on ancient foundations, right? Very little new, certainly very little radically new, comes into existence. It's mostly tinkering with structures that have been around forever, like your body plan, for example. That's unbelievably old. I mean, you share that with, you share that with lizards,

roughly speaking. So it's incredibly ancient. So, you know, when you share bilateral symmetry, even with most invertebrates. So those things are extraordinarily old. And so for our ancestors, what was down out of the tree, let's say, down in the grass, that was the thing that lurked in the unknown. Well, for us, the idea of the unknown has become much more abstractly conceptualized,

like we can think of the unknown as such things we don't know. And so then we can think of the abstract predator. And the abstract predator is the thing that lurks in the unknown that always confronts us. Now, because people are strange and complex creatures, and because we're partly predators and partly prey animals, we don't only conceptualize the thing that lurks in the unknown as a devouring predator. We also conceptualize it as something that offers possibility, because we've learned that if we go into the unknown, we can find things that we need for now and for the medium and for the long term.

It can be beneficial for us to confront the things that we don't know. And that's human beings in a nutshell. That's what we do. And so that's the basis. That's why I believe that's the most archetypal story. Because it fundamentally characterizes our mode of being in the world. We're information foragers.

We go out into the unknown, the terrifying unknown, and we gather things of value. It's not much different than squirrels foraging for knots, really. And we use exactly the same biological systems to go out and forage for information that squirrels use when they go out and forage for knots. So I guess the system developed in part because we were fruit eaters as well. And so we found trees that had ripe fruit in them and learned where they were and how to gather them. And then you see a tight relationship there between information and food, right?

There's almost no difference between eating and knowing where the food is. And as soon as this so our systems of knowing where things are grew massively. And so that turned us into the kind of abstract creatures that we are. So we're always looking for ways of producing more of what we need. That's a good way of thinking about it. And we do that abstractly. So all right, so when you encounter something that's anomalous, something unexpected.

So, oh, you're in a relationship that you're not that happy about. It's a good example. And the person that you're with is suddenly much colder to you than usual. Okay, now the question is, that good news or bad news? And the answer is, well, it's good news in so far as you're not that happy with the relationship. And it's bad news in so far as you want the relationship to continue. And so very frequently, it's the case that you're somewhat ambivalent about the frame that you inhabit. And so anomalous information has a two-fold meaning. It's like, well, now I can finally get out of this. That's one way of thinking about it. And if the person

is particularly cold and distant to you and maybe even insulting, then half of you is going to be very upset because this is happening. And the other half is roughly speaking, is going to be saying, oh, this is just the opportunity I wanted. And what that means is you're in your frame that constitutes the relationship, let's say, in the story you've laid out about it, the novel event occurs,

and it produces activation in two computing systems. One is the positive system that explores for new opportunities, and the other is the threat system that paralyzes you because your current mode of conceptualization is no longer valid. And so, anomaly has this deeply ambivalent nature. And one of the things that I've tried to understand for a long time is how you compute that. And it seems to me that you need to consider it in relationship to this hierarchical value structure that we've talked about before. So you might say that imagine your nervous system is tuned. So that if anomalous things happen at high resolution levels,

you produce a very small amount of negative emotion and a comparatively large amount of curiosity. Because the thing that's being threatened by the anomalous event isn't that big, and so the possibility that information lurks there that might be useful as high compared to the threat. Whereas, generally speaking, if you encounter something, maybe you, I don't know, maybe you go into a store one day and on a whim, you shoplift something in a, you know, a fit of stupid impulsivity and you get caught. That happened to a, there was an NDP member of parliament 20 years ago who did exactly that. He, you know, he had a pretty good reputation. He went into a department store, swiped something,

some gloves or something. I don't even remember what it was. And got caught. It's like, well, you know, that's sufficiently anomalous behavior to, or currents to make you question whether or not you're actually a good person. And so it's almost as if at the higher resolution levels of the value structure, if something anomalous occurs, then it's either neutral or tilted slightly towards positive, and at the higher levels, and the more abstract and comprehensive levels, if something anomalous happens, then it's more likely to blow out large portions of the systems you used to organize the world, and it's going to be experienced as negative. And partly what you're trying to do when something anomalous occurs

is to do a search up and down this value structure. You have an argument with someone that you love. Well, what does that mean? Maybe you're arguing about how you interact with each other when one of you comes home. You'd like a kiss and a hug at the door. And they'd just as soon sit there and watch TV. So you have an argument about that. Okay, what does the argument mean?

Does it mean that some little thing has to be adjusted at the level of micro detail? Or does it mean, you know, the person that you've tangled up your life with really doesn't care for you at all and is a complete jerk and you should leave? While a big part of the argument is going to be how do we construe the occurrence? How do we construe the occurrence? Is it a major event or a minor event? And my advice would be, unless there's strong reason, presumably it's a minor event, and start operating in that level, because otherwise every argument becomes a catastrophe. And if that's the case, you actually can't solve any problems, you won't be able to discuss anything, right? Because as soon as you bring up

an anomaly, something unpleasant, the other person will assume that everything's over and get so shorted out that you won't be able to talk with them. So those are the sort of people who will cry if you bring up anything negative, right? And so they're threatened by their value might say, their value structure. So fragilely constructed? And so they're threatened by their value might say their value structure, so fragilely constructed and maybe they're not standing on enough pillars so that anything you toss at them, that's a question is enough to shake the entire structure to its foundations, or maybe they're acting that out just to manipulate you, that's another option. So anyways, partly what you seem to be doing when you're thinking about something is to

shift your frames of reference up and down your value hierarchy to constrain the occurrence and to determine the degree to which it's positive and the degree to which it's negative. It's also complicated too because whether something is positive or negative depends on the frame of reference that you bring to bear on it, right? And so that's why I was saying earlier about the relationship. is positive or negative depends on the frame of reference that you bring to bear on it, right? And so that's why I was saying earlier about the relationship. If you're ambivalent about the relationship and something negative happens, you know, something disruptive, it's certainly possible to adopt a frame of reference almost immediately

that makes that into something positive. You say, well, I was done with this anyways. I'm glad you said that because it gives me the excuse I needed to terminate this. And so it's such a very strange thing that you can shift the emotional valence of almost anything, almost anything, by shifting your frame of reference. There are boundaries. You can teach animals pleasure to electric shocks, painful electric shocks. If you pair them reliably with the provision of something intensely rewarding, cocaine, for example, or hypothelamic stimulation, they can learn to associate pain with something good and respond positively to it, to work for it.

So when you see this in you even a little bit, some of you have no doubt learned to eat foods that aren't really edible, like all of us are a good example of that, or coffee, they're bitter. And generally speaking, poisonous things tend to be better. And people don't really like bitter things. But if you train yourself, you can get to the point where I taught my daughter how to eat olives when she was very young. And like, I bet her, I think she was only three. I bet her that she couldn't eat 20 olives over the next week or something.

She'd always respond to a challenge. And so, you know, the first three olives, it was not a fun experience for her, because kids have a lot of taste, but her face would get all crinkled up and she just wasn't enjoying it now. But I paid for that desperately later in my life because I used to go to this specialty shop

and buy these particularly good, spicy olives, you know, by the court. And if they were in the Fred Sheikam home and just devour the entire court, like a, like a, like a, like a mad bulimic, I mean, on olives for God's sake. And so then I never got any of them. So it served me right exactly. But the point is, you can rewire yourself quite completely by placing negative things in a positive context. And the degree to which you can do that is quite remarkable. You can't, there seems to be limits beyond which your ability to turn pain into pleasure, for example, is compromised.

I don't think anybody's ever going to learn how to associate being seriously burnt by something hot with something pleasurable, right? There's, and I don't know how the systems exactly adjust themselves so that there are limits to, you know, how you can transform an emotional stimulus because you can transform them quite remarkably. But obviously there's some boundaries that we don't understand very well. So, all right. So, no, so roughly speaking, we could say that the degree to which something

is experienced as utter chaos is proportionate to the level of the value hierarchy that that anomalous event is construed or experienced to disrupt. And you really see this happening in people who are depressed because you might think, here's another way of thinking about it, you might think, well, am I a good cook? You're asking yourself, you fail at cooking something, so you think, well, am I capable of completing a meal? And you might say, well, if all you've done is set the table badly, probably the right thing to do is to learn how to

set the table and not to question your ability to complete a meal. So then you might say, OK, well, when should you move up one level of abstraction? We might say, well, imagine there's five things that you need to do at this level in order to successfully complete that level. So you have to cut vegetables. You have to set the table. You have to do the dishes in order to complete a meal. And so you break six dishes, you burn the soup, and I don't know.

But you set the table properly. You got two out of three wrong. Well, maybe at that point, it's time to start wondering if you're actually capable of completing a meal. But you don't want to jump from a single mistake at the higher level, mistake at the higher level to the, or at the, sorry, at the higher resolution level. You don't want to jump from a single mistake at that level to the next level. And the reason for that is that you'll get a cascade.

Oh, I set the table badly. Error. That means I can't complete a meal. Error. That means I can't take care of my family. Error. That means I'm not a good parent. Error. That means I'm't complete a meal, error. That means I can't take care of my family, error. That means I'm not a good parent, error. That means I'm not a good person. That's what happens to depressed people.

And I think what happens is there's serotonin levels fall, right? They fall like serotonin levels fall if you're brought down a dominance hierarchy. Now we already know that if you live at the bottom of a dominance hierarchy, you live where it's dangerous. And the reason for that is everything around you is already not good. And you don't have a lot of social support. So you're sort of clinging desperately to the underside of life. And what that means is you probably can't even afford a single mistake. Your serotonin levels fall, and that allows error signals to propagate up the value system so that every little

thing becomes a catastrophe. Now that in itself is a catastrophe, because if you're living at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy, and you're already super stressed, the additional stress that you're likely to experience as a consequence of an additional error is going to be, maybe, push you over the limits. But the thing is, is that it is dangerous there. Now what seems to happen to people who are, is that it is dangerous there. Now, what seems to happen to people who are depressed is that their serotonin levels fall, roughly

speaking, as if they plummeted down a dominance hierarchy without having actually plummeted down it. So, they're still competent, capable, and scorned in their relatively productive environment, but they're reacting as if every little thing has become a catastrophe. And so partly, what happens is if you provide people with serotonin reuptake inhibitors, is that the propagation of negative emotion across these levels of value hierarchy seems to be reduced.

So maybe then it takes, if it takes two errors at this level to trigger off an error message at that level, while you're in a lot better shape, right? That's, it's like a definition of resilience. So now you can also do that with people cognitively to some degree, you know, because maybe somebody will come to you in therapy and say, I had a bad day at work, my boss hates me, I'm going to lose my job and then my marriage is going to dissolve. And so he walked them through it at a micro level. Okay, what exactly happened to you at work?

And then they lay out the specific story. You say, well, what are the multiple ways that might be interpreted? And is there some possibility that it's not the catastrophe that you're envisioning, right? You get them to contextualize it and help them build out up micro-defences. That might be one way of thinking about it. A lot of people who are prone to depression are not good at defending themselves, right? They don't have at hand the mechanisms to forgive themselves

or even ready to understand their own failure. Or even more importantly, sometimes, they radically underestimate, they radically overest underestimate their own incompetence and radically overestimate the competence of everyone else. And so that's also another reason why it's sometimes useful for people to seek therapy, because they'll come in and say, well, I'm anxious and nervous.

And I have this amount of negative emotion, and I make these sorts of mistakes. And you listen and you think, yeah, so does everybody else. That's par for the course. But they're so isolated, and so afraid of the things that have been happening to them, and so unwilling to expose themselves to social evaluation, that they never really communicate with anyone else, and find out that the level of misery that characterizes their existence is pretty much normal and average. And so just helping people learn that

can often be of tremendous advantage to them, because the real issue isn't precisely whether or not you're a good person. That's an absolute idea, right? You could say, well, are you a good person compared to the absolute ideal? And the answer to that is no. But it's also absolute idea, right? You could say, well, are you a good person compared to the absolute ideal? And the answer to that is no. But it's also not exactly, it's not a useful comparison

across most situations. What you really want to know is, well, how do you stack up against other people? If you're at your job, the issue isn't whether or not you're competent. The issue is whether you're competent compared to the other people around you who are supposed to be doing the same thing.

Because in an absolute sense, you're completely incompetent. But in a relative sense, you might be at the top of the pack or even in the middle, and that's generally okay. So, and if you don't know what the relative status is, that's not good at all. So, all right. Now, if, so here's a way of thinking about it. Let's say, you're in a class, it's near the beginning of the semester, you write an exam or you hand in an essay and you don't get the mark that you desired. Okay, so what are your options? Well, one option would be, so you've hidden anomaly.

Things didn't happen the way you wanted them to happen. And so maybe you say, geez, that was a boring and stupid class. Anyways, this gives me an excuse to get out. And so that's not such a negative thing. Or you think, oh, well, I really better buckle down and study and you just died to stay in the class. So basically, what you've done is maintained your framework.

I'm going to work through this class, but you've decided to modify some of the subroutines that make up that frame. You say, well, I should study more next time, or I have to prioritize this class compared to other classes. So it's a micro alteration within the overarching framework. But another thing you can do is say, to hell with the class, I just won't, I'll just drop it.

And so, the advantage to that is problem gone. The disadvantage is, well, now you have a different problem, which is, okay, fine, you drop the class, do you have another class that you can replace it with? Is that a good way of dealing with a micro failure, to move up a level of analysis and throw out the whole frame? Because you could also say, well, maybe I should just

drop out of university and maybe I should go hang myself. That's, well, it's the same line of logic. It's just taken up to a higher degree of abstraction. And so generally speaking, you don't want to solve a problem by moving up a level and wiping out the frame within which the problem was experienced. You want to do that carefully because in principle, the frame that you were working within had already, you'd already assigned value to it and worked at it. You've already invested in it. It's a big sacrifice to blow out the whole frame. Now sometimes you can do it. So anyways, what happens is, well, you get the bad grade

and you're upset about it. And so you've been plunged from your happy satiated state, let's say, into a state of relative chaos. And the chaos is, oh, I had an obstacle, I didn't expect it, and now I don't know what to do. And so what does it mean to not know what to do? Well, it can mean I need to study harder. It can mean I should drop this course. It can mean I should major in a different subject. It can mean maybe I shouldn't be in university. It could mean maybe my future plans have been formulated badly.

It can mean my future plans have been formulated badly because I don't understand myself very well. And I've been telling lies about my past, right? The thing can really expand on you. And that's what the chaotic domain is. That's the remanifestation of those things that you had considered irrelevant, right? Because when you go to pick up the exam,

you've got your identity as a competent student intact. You're not questioning whether you should be in the course or whether you should be in that major or whether you should be in university. None of that. That's all in the implicitly accepted category. And as soon as the anomalous event emerges, all of those things that you had rendered axiomatic start to become questionable. And that's like the shark coming up,

coming up from the depths to pull you down. And that's the classic way of representing that, and of symbolizing it. That's Jonah in the whale, for example. So it's something that manifests itself from the deep unknown and pulls you under, like an alligator at a waterhole, which is I'm sure one of the sources from which we derived

that particular kind of mythological representation, because you could imagine that when we were on the vet after living on trees, we had to go down to the dam water holes, and you've watched enough nature programs to know what a nile crocodile can do to a water buffalo. It's not pretty. And so, to go down to the water, the chaotic water and the source of all life as well, right, is to risk and encounter with the terrible thing that lurks in the depths. And so we use that as a central metaphor for mapping the sorts of things that happen to us in a much more abstract space. And you know that because one of the things you're going to do, let's say that One of the things you're going to do, let's say that the professor,

there's a professor obviously who gave you the bad grade. Okay, so one logical presupposition is that you're in some sense insufficient in relationship to the course. But another logical and instantaneous categorization is to throw that person into the category of malevolent predator. And you'll do that by becoming upset and cursing the person in your imagination.

Curcing is exactly right, and I can tell you why. So, I don't know if I told you this or not, but primates of various sorts, like vervet monkeys, have predator alarm cries. They have one, if you look across a vast array of predators or primates, they have one for things that attack from the sky. And so those would be predatory birds. They have one for cats that climb into the trees to get you.

And that means hit the little branches because the cat can't be out there. And they have one for things that rustle through the grass, snakes, for example. And so each of those produces a distinctive alarm cry. And so that's the same alarm, that alarm cry system is the same system that we use to swear with.

We use short, guttural words. So there are chaotic words, because short words tend to be very, very old. And so that's, and we have a separate system that utters those sorts of vocalizations, and that's the system that's disinhibited in Tourette's, which is why people with Tourette swear. And so when you curse the professor for giving you the bad grade, you are using the same bloody linguistic system that your ancestors used to categorize snakes in the grass or predators that sweep down from the sky. That's very, very interesting. So, and people regard

that as quite rude, right? If you swear at someone, then they'll be taken aback by that. They considered insulting to be thrown into the arbitrary predator category. And so, that also turns the world into a good versus evil story very rapidly with the oppressive person who's judging you, playing the role of malevolent predator and you playing the role of innocent, innocent prey, essentially. Very, very easy for that to happen. So, okay's my little clicker?

So if the anomaly, if you can't, you might say, okay, so, you're thinking through the fact that you didn't get a good mark on the exam. And you think, I don't know what I can do about that, because I've already got six classes, say, or seven. Maybe you're overloaded. You're working part-time. You're studying as hard as you can. And so you try to do a micro-fix rearranging your priorities, concentrating more on your studies,

but maybe you're already operating at top capacity. And it's not easy. It's not straightforward for you to calculate how you might reconstruct your micro-priority so the problem goes away. So it's under those circumstances that it's reasonable to pop up one level of obstruction and to say, okay, I have to give something up. That's a sacrificial motif. I have to sacrifice something. What's it going to be? Well, maybe you can't afford to have the part-time job, even though that's going to put you under financial stress.

Or maybe you have to hire a tutor, even though that's going to put you under financial stress. Or maybe you have to drop out of the course and only take six, even though that's going to, say, delay your graduation for one semester. There's going to be costs. But so what's happening when you're thrown into the chaotic state by the anomaly is that the problem space magnifies itself.

And you have to do a microanalysis, which is the best place to start. Let's look at fixing things that are subordinate to this frame. But you may have to leap up a level or two and fix something that's superordinate. So it may be the case that you fail to classes. And your parent, one of your parents

develops a very fatal disease. And so you have to go home and take care of them. It's like, OK, fine, too much chaos, bang, you're done with your university career for now. You have to go up a number of levels, blow apart that frame, and that'll alleviate the problem. Even though it, by letting all the snakes out of the basket, it causes all sorts of other problems.

You're going to have to think, OK, well, what am I going to do? Instead, what does this mean for my future and so forth? So there's a cost, there's definite cost to moving up the abstraction hierarchy. But the reason that a sufficient anomaly places you in chaos is because it makes all sorts of things that you've already considered alive again. And that can be extraordinarily chaotic.

And so, the anomaly knocks you flat, you can't sustain the frame anymore, you plunge into a chaotic state. And you know, your life, your whole life is a sequence of those things at a micro level and at a macro level. You know, every time you encounter something you don't understand, you have to retool the framework of interpretation that you were using prior to encountering that. Now sometimes it's just a small modification, like at least in principle when you're in

a class and you're learning things, you're undoing what you already knew and re-sowing it back together constantly, but it's at a small enough level so that maybe it only feels exhilarating. Right? You're releasing just enough novelty to activate your exploratory systems, because there's value in the information, but not enough to knock you flat. And one of the things that's interesting about the whole safe space phenomena is that people differ in the threshold that they have with regards to the receipt of anomalous information. And if you're especially if you're a naive person

and a sheltered person to be exposed to anything that has a hint of real malevolence in it, might be enough to destabilize you quite badly. And that's a real problem if you're pursuing well education in history or literature because history and literature is nothing but a sequence of absolute, you know, moral catastrophes thrown at you one after the other. So you have to be pretty solid into an unstable state, and that's where everything comes up to haunt you. Now, it can really be bad in a chaotic state,

because this often also happens to people who are depressed, but it can happen to people under normal circumstances too. It's like, well, let's say you've been happily married or you think you were happily married, and then one day you come home and your partner is gone. Well, then what do you think? Well, you think malevolent predator, that's one thing. You think useless you, that's another thing.

You think the past is unstable, the present is unstable, and the future is unstable. That's another thing. But then things can really get out of hand. So then you're just in chaos, let's say. But then you start thinking at three o'clock in the morning about all the stupid things you've done in your life that led you to this point. And that can just take you completely apart. Because, you know, if you go back over your past experiences,

it's easy for you to remember, because people do remember these things, where you made errors, right? And maybe you're not torturing yourself to begin with about the specific errors that you made in that relationship, although you probably will. You know, you'll think, oh, well, you know, I kind of knew this was coming. And then your mind will say, well, you kind of knew when it started, and then it'll tell you, well, maybe you should have done this back then and you actually knew it. You'll think, yeah, I actually did know it and I didn't do it. And then that'll trigger off a whole host of other memories about just exactly what you knew and didn't act on.

And that'll trigger off a bunch of other memories about stupid things that you've made and mistakes that you've hidden and make you question just exactly what sort of creature you are and why all your how all your moral insufficiencies defined by yourself have led you to this dismal state and there's very little difference between that and hell. And so there's a mythology of the underworld, right? The underworld is partly a place of chaos and and that's a place where people go when things fall apart, but part of that is there's a subdivision in chaos that's hell, and that subdivision is the place that you go when you take yourself apart

because of your recognition of your own moral failings. Now that can be useful, because maybe you have some things to learn and likely you do, but it can also be something that's so devastating that you just can't recover from it. So because you may conclude, well, the reason my relationship collapsed precipitously

is because I'm so blind and malevolent that there's absolutely no hope for my recovery. And you know, sometimes that's actually true. So distinguishing, you never know, right, is when things happen to you that aren't what you want or expect, it's an open question how much you're responsible for it. Now a conscientious person under those circumstances will just take themselves apart because the conscientious

person is liable to presume that if something bad happens to them it's because they did something wrong. And you can see that's useful if something bad happened to you because you did something wrong and you can learn what you did wrong and fix it. Then the bad thing won't happen to you again. So, hooray, it's a wonderful way of thinking. But it's very tricky because there is a random element to life, and sometimes you get knocked flat by circumstances that are really beyond any reasonable person's control. And this happens to conscientious people, for example,

when they get laid off on mass at work. You know, their company starts to fail. A thousand people are laid off sort of arbitrarily. Some of those people are truly industrious and conscientious. Even though there is very little relationship between their work habits and the consequences for their job continuity, they'll go home and brood about it and take themselves apart. And those are the people who end up catastrophically depressed because they can't stand not being in a situation where they're functional and productive.

So nasty. So it's a cognitive response that can be very useful, but it's actually only useful when it is what you did that resulted in that end, and not merely the blind, random forces of nature happening to focus on you. And that's also a problematic issue, too, because there's actually some relief in concluding that it's your fault, because the alternative is that it just happened, right? And that means that there are whole swathes of terrible things that might happen to you

that are completely beyond your control. So it's not like deciding that you weren't at fault leaves you sitting pretty. It just says, well, you weren't brought to your knees because of your own stupidity and malevolence. Instead, you were brought to your knees by the absolute uncaring forces of society and nature. It's like, well, that's not much of a consolation,

I wouldn't say. Although sometimes it's exactly the right thing to conclude. And it is part of, I think, being mature to understand that you are prey to random forces. And you need to be able to distinguish between when you're at fault from something and when something just happened to you. And I would also say that the right rule of thumb is to start with the assumption that something just happened to you.

And only then start to investigate the degree to which you had something to do with it. Situational analysis first, personal analysis second, it's safer, because if you start with the first one, you'll take yourself apart morally, continually, and that's very, very, very, very stressful. You should leave that for emergencies. So, okay, so, down you are in chaos, right? And so that's part of the classic human story. The classic human story is I was going from point A to point B and I wanted to get to point B and here's how I did it,

but then along the way, something popped up unexpectedly and stopped me and it threw me for a loop. Everything fell apart. That's another metaphorical way of a loop. Everything fell apart. That's another metaphorical way of representing it. Everything fell apart. And I didn't know up from down, right? I lost myself. It was like I was wandering in a desert.

And then it lasted for years. And that's the situation where people are also likely to turn to such things as alcohol and other drugs. Alcohol, particularly being a good one, because it suppresses anxiety and increases incentive reward. And so down there in a chaotic state, you can medicate yourself and you'll be inclined to too. You'll think, well, there's no hope for the future, for example, I can't see any way out of this. Well, under those circumstances, what else do you have to turn to? So, that's to be in the belly of the whale.

That's another way of thinking about it. You remember in the Pinocchio story, that's where Jepetto ended up. And that was because he had severed his relationship with the exploratory hero. That was Pinocchio, or lost the relationship, you could call that an involuntary encounter with the dragon of chaos. That's really what it is, is that, and that's, it's your home happy and the predator invades your lair. That's the story of the Garden of Eden. That's the story of the Garden of Eden. There's no place that's so safe that there isn't a snake in it, right? It's the fundamental story of mankind.

Even God himself can't define a space so tightly and absolutely that a predator can't, the predator of the unknown can't make itself manifest within. Now, I read a book here a while back on Dragons. It was only a week or two ago. I just found this book. It was published in 2002. It's an interesting book. It's flawed, but it's an interesting book.

I'll find the name of it for you. But the person who wrote this book was very interested in the fact that representations of dragons can be found worldwide. Really, like no matter where you go, that representation seems to exist. It's the winged, it's the winged, lagid serpent. And he was very interested in trying to puzzle out why, and he had an interesting hypothesis, and I do believe there's some truth to it. He said, like in the case of the vervet monkeys, that there were three class of predators on tree dwelling primates, winged, bodied like a cat, because cats in particular like to eat tree dwelling primates and snakes. So you might

think, well, cats, birds of prey, and predatory and snakes are all different. But then you might think, well, what do you mean by different exactly? Because categories are constructed in relationship to their functional significance. They're all the same if the category is things that eat you if you're not careful. And so there's absolutely no reason for human beings not to have produced a category that's an exemplar of things that eat you if you're not careful. And so it's an amalgam snake, predatory cat, predatory bird, winged serpent with lakes. And often it has claws, you see the claws on it,

on this one are like talons. And they're often like that in dragon representations or sometimes they're more like the claws of predators, but the talon representation is quite common. Often like this one, the thing has two legs, like a bird. Not always, because sometimes dragons don't have any legs at all. They're mostly snakes with wings, and sometimes they have four legs. But they often also have two legs.

And so you think you need a representation of predator. You don't need a differentiated representation, precisely, of type of predator. That would come second. You know, it's like the kid who points at the cat, little kid points at the cat walking on the street says doggy. It's like, that's not a dog.

It's like, no, no, that's not right. The child's use of dog isn't representation of dog. It's representation of four-legged petable entity. And cat is an exemplar of that category, and so is dog, and so is bunny rabbit for that matter. And you might say, well, so that's the category of pet. And it's a perfectly reasonable category. You could say you should differentiate it into bunny rabbit, dog, and cat,

because there's important information lost in the low representation, representation of pet. But there's a bloody useful information conserved. Now, so that's the wall garden and the dragon of chaos. I'm going to tell you something interesting about Genesis, about the story in Genesis. This took me like 30 years to figure out. I could not figure it out for the longest period of time. It's a segue, but it'll give you an idea of how these things operate across vast spans of time. So in the garden of Eden, there's Adam and Eve, the primordial human beings. And there's a walled garden, that's paradise.

Paradise means walled garden, and Eden means well-watered place. And so there's this idea that the proper habitat of human beings is in the mellum of social structure and nature. And that's exactly right, because that's what we live in. We never live in nature. And we never live in society. We live in the melcom of society and nature. That's the human environment. So it's a walled garden. And so it's a productive, well-watered place

where we could thrive. It's safe, and it's ruled over by a father figure in this particular story. And that's like the, you could think about that as the spirit of civilization. That's at least one way of considering it. So, well, there's a snake in the garden and it's there unbeknownst to God, roughly speaking, although he knows everything, so I guess he probably knows about the snake too. And he tells Adam and Eve not to interact with it, fine, and they do, and the snake wakes

them up, right? Because when they interact with the snake, they're given a fruit that opens their eyes and makes them aware that they're naked and vulnerable, and then dooms them to work. Well, I'll tell you the whole story much later in the course, but I want to give you an overview of it now. But then there's this really strange idea that developed over the course of the development of not only Christianity, but Judaism

and a number of other religions that fed into the mainstream of Christian ideas, including Zoroastrianism. There's an idea that emerged across a very long period of time, that the snake in the garden was the same as Satan, the source of all evil. And I've been trying to figure out for the longest period of time why in the world the manifestation of what's essentially a representation of a predator. So that's this snake.

The snake is associated with trees. Well yes, the reason for that in all likelihood is that we dwell in trees, right? And snakes like trees and they're around trees and they can climb trees. And the snake was a typical predator on our ancient relatives. But, and so that's fine. So you can see that representation makes perfect sense.

There's predators that lurk in the garden, yes, obviously. If you interact with them, they wake you garden, yes, obviously. If you interact with them, they wake you up. Well, they better wake you up because if they don't wake you up when you interact with them, then you get eaten. So it's probably just as well to wake up, even though there's painful consequences associated with becoming conscious. And that manifests itself immediately in the story of Adam and Eve. But then there's this weird association. It's very undeveloped in the biblical stories that are part and parcel of this line of thinking. It was more like a consequence of a cloud of mythological stories that surrounded it. But the reason for that, I think, is that

imagine that what human beings were trying to puzzle out was the nature of the predator. Okay, so on one level of analysis, the predator is the thing that slinks along the ground and the threatens you. And also, it's the thing that's your mortal enemy and that wakes you up. But then that's one conceptualization of predator. And fair enough, you can identify it and you can take precautionary measures. But a better conceptualization of predator might be where does it come from? Let's say it's a snake. Well, there's a layer of snake somewhere. And so if we want to get rid of

the snake, we shouldn't be conceptualizing it as a snake. We should be conceptualizing it as one manifestation of a layer of snakes. And what we should do is go down, follow the damn snake wherever it goes and find its layer and wipe out all of the snakes. And that's a more abstract representation, right? It's not predator anymore. It's the source of predation. And so if you want to solve the predator problem permanently, you don't kill the snake.

You get rid of all the snakes. Okay, so fine. And people are pretty damn good at that. And that's why you have stories of people like St. Patrick who chased all the snakes out Okay, so fine. And people are pretty damn good at that. And that's why you have stories of people like St. Patrick who chased all the snakes out of Ireland. And all sorts of saints were snake eradication saints. And well, there's a variety of reasons for that. But then you might think, okay, well, the worst predator is the layer of snakes, right? But then you might think, well, wait a minute, the worst predator isn't the layer of snakes. Maybe the worst predator is the enemies that come to attack us. And those

are human enemies. And so what we do is we defend ourselves against the human enemies. We put walls around our cities. We fortify our land. And we defend ourselves against the evil that's lurking in other people's hearts. And so that's like a higher order snake. And then we build these walls around us, and what's inside gets larger and larger and larger. And then what happens is the snakes start popping up inside the cities, because we've pushed all the, we've protected ourselves

from all the evil that lurks outside, but we've now created a space where that evil can manifest itself inside. So there's criminals inside the city. And there's people who want to bring you down, but we've now created a space where that evil can manifest itself inside. So there's criminals inside the city, and there's people who want to bring you down, and there's malevolence within the city, not only outside. So then there's the problem of the snake that's closer to you. And then there's the ultimate problem, which is the snake that lives in your heart.

Right? And that's each individual's capacity for evil. And then that was conceptualized as a transcendent spirit. So that's the spirit of Satan, who's the adversary of the hero, the adversary of the hero. And that's why there's an association between the snake and the garden and this great series of mythologies about the existence of evil itself. It's a consequence of our continued capacity to abstract. We started using the Predator Detection System

to detect snakes and maybe no predatory cats and maybe birds of prey and all that, but that didn't solve the bloody problem. Because just because you hid from the predatory bird today didn't mean the bloody thing wasn't going to be back tomorrow. And tomorrow starts to matter as you get smarter. And then once you're on that pathway, and you're starting to think abstractly about the predator,

the nature of what constitutes the predator starts to become, because you're trying to solve it across all situations simultaneously, it starts to become very much more abstract, and it ends up being something like a personality, like an eternal personality, and an eternal personality that has its effect on everyone all the time. So, and it's so interesting to see those ideas because they basically evolved. People did not understand those ideas as they produced them, right? It was all put forward in a massive

mythological context and in a rich storied. And the stories were as conscious as the information got. It was never articulated past the level of story. So remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. OK, so let's take a break for 15 minutes. Now we're going to make things complicated. So I showed you this map before. And I wanted to, I produced this map

because I was trying to understand the fundamental substructure of the mythological world. I think that's the right way of thinking about it. And I'm not claiming that this is the only way it can be represented, because I know it will full well that it can be represented other ways. But it's a pretty good schema. And so the idea, it maps onto, yeah, it maps onto this idea.

So you can imagine that when you're here, you're an explored territory. Okay, so explored territory, you can explore territory in an archaic way is the fires at the center, the campfire, and the tribal boundary surrounds that space, and that's safe space. Okay, so it's a place in nature, obviously, within which there's a pyramid, and there's a fire at the center of the pyramid. And the pyramid is the dominant hierarchy, the social dominance hierarchy.

And that's where people live. That's the world. And so you could say, well, that circumscribed space, where you understand, see, it's explored territory, not only because you understand the natural world that prevails there. And the cumulative effort of all of your compatriots keeps all the terrible animals at bay. So it's actually safe from a natural perspective.

And you understand it. So it's explored when you're there, you're safe. And good things happen to you, mostly. And then not up, but it isn't just the natural space construed as the environment. It's the natural space construed of the relationship between you and all the other primates that inhabit that space, which is also, it's so-so, it's society, obviously, but it's also part of nature. And so, that explored territory is your understanding of the natural world and the social world,

but more importantly, the concordance of your understanding with what's happening in that space. So like take this place for example right now, everyone of you has expectations about what's going to happen in this classroom, and you bring those, and their desires actually, they're not merely expectations because it's gold erected, and you bring those with you into the classroom, and as long as what's happening is in concordance with those desires, then you're safe and calm, and maybe at least mildly interested, which would be the point, right? So it's explored territory because what you understand matches what's happening. And that's a place. And it's a place that

you strive to be. And you strive to maintain. And maybe you even strive to expand, which is a slightly different thing. But you certainly strive to maintain it. That's this. That's one place. Then there's another place, which is where you end up when that doesn't work. And you can think about that as, well, you know, in the Lion King, for example, when Mufasa brings Simba up to the top of Pride Rock, just when the sun is either rising or setting. And so they're on top of the rock, and the top of the rock is lit, and they're sitting at the top in the light, and Mufasa tells Simba that his territory is everything that the light touches, and everything that the light touches is everything that you've understood. It's everything that your capacity for illumination and enlightenment has turned into habitable space,

and so you're the king of that domain, right, especially in so far as you're guided by the light. That's what that little scene meant. And Mufasa tells Simba not to go out beyond where the light has touched into the dark territories. And that's where the elephant graveyard is in that story, right? And Mufasa Simba and Nella go out there, because of course, as soon as

you tell a human being not to do something, those little lions being human beings, after all, they immediately run off and do it. And that's an echo of the story, say, in Genesis, where God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the apple and this first thing they immediately do. Because if you want someone not to do something, you first specify it what it is that they shouldn't do, and then give them some sort of incomprehensible reason for why they shouldn't do it, and they'll just do it instantly, because that's what we're like. Right? That's why the Catholics are convinced that people suffer from original sin, and it's a very

intelligent way of looking at things, although it also has its problems. So anyways, there's the known territory. And then outside of that, there's unknown territory. And those are the most fundamental elements of existence. There's the place you are when you know what's going on. And there's the place you are when you don't know what's going on. And that can be mapped onto geographic territory.

If you go beyond the borders of your society, then you're in unknown territory. But it can also be mapped conceptually, so that, for example, we're all sitting in this room and someone leaps in with a weapon. It's like this was known territory a second ago, and now it's not known territory at all, even though you'd say, well, many things have remained the same. It's like, yeah, but all the relevant things have suddenly changed, right? And so part of the way of conceptualizing that is that you can manifest a geographic transformation

by moving from, you know, genuine geographic explored territory into genuine geographic unexplored territory. But you can do that in time as well, because we exist in time as well as space. And so a space that's stable and unchanging can be transformed into something completely other than it is by the movement forward of time. So why am I telling you that? It's because we've mapped the idea of the difference in space

between the known and the unknown to the difference in time between a place that works now and a place that no longer works, even though it's the same place. It's the same thing. It's just extended across time. All right, and so that's order versus chaos, and that's the chaos that can manifest itself within the order, the thing that's represented in the in and yang symbol, right? Because you see the black paisley with the white dot in it, and the white paisley with the black dot in it, order can turn into chaos at a moment's notice. And in the same way, chaos can turn to order in a moment's notice, and in the same way chaos can turn to order in a moment's notice,

at a moment's notice. And so we're trying to map the geography onto the app onto something that's more abstract and comprehensive. And we do that using conceptual schemes that we evolved over vast spans of time and have just moved up one level of obstruction. Known territory or what's explored, unknown territory or what's not explored, the transformation or the dissolution of one into the other and then the reconstitution of that. That's what an election does, right?

It's like, okay, we have our leader who's the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy and defines the nature of this particular structure, there's an election. It's regulated chaos. No one knows what's going to happen. It's the death of the old king, bang! We go into a chaotic state. Everyone argues for a while.

And then out of that argument, they produce a consensus and poof, we're in a new state. Right, that's the meta-story, order, chaos, order. But it's partial order, chaos reconstituted and revivified order. That's the thing is that this order is better than that order. So there's progress. And that's partly why I think the idea of moral relativism

is wrong. There's progress in moral order. And it was defined properly by Piaget. The new moral order does everything the old moral order did and some additional things. That's what constitutes progress. Now, here's a strange idea. And we'll talk about this more as we progress through the class.

What's the ultimate in order? Well, it's not this, obviously, because it can collapse. And it's not this, because it can collapse. And so then you think, well, there's no ultimate order, even though there's progression. But then you have to move it up one level of abstraction. What's the ultimate order? Doing this.

Willingness to do that. That's the ultimate order. Right? It's order at a different level of analysis, and you can see that's what's represented in that idea. That's what that idea means. That's the phoenix, right? The phoenix is something that lives ages and then allows itself to be consumed by fire and then reemerges, and the old phoenix gets old and burns, and the new phoenix reemerges. And so the real phoenix is the thing that's constant across those transformations.

That's the union's self. That's what he meant. The self is the element of the psyche that remains intact across transformations. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bloody amazing idea. That's for sure. And you can think about that. That's why Jung claimed, for example, in Ion, primarily, that Christ was a symbol of the self. That was his consequence of decades of meditation on the structure of Christianity, because it's the dying and resurrecting part of the psyche that remains constant across the transformation.

So the ultimate order isn't to identify with this. That's your current state of being. And it isn't to identify with that because, well, you can't by definition. And it isn't even to identify with that. It's to let these things go as they need to go. That's a sacrifice and to allow this continual process of transformation to occur.

And part of that is the admission that you're wrong. And so partly what you're doing is at micro levels and at macro levels, where are you not what you could be? And when you realize that, it'll take you apart a little bit and burn you down to your core a little bit and then allow you to regenerate. And if you do that continually, the everything that you don't need burns away, right?

And that's what this means. You remember in Harry Potter, you may remember, that Harry goes down. So in the second volume and in the second movie, Harry's at Hogwarts. So it's the school where you learn how to be magic, because that's what you really are. And there's something that threatens the school.

Well, part of what threatens the school, evil, right? Voldemort, that's one thing. But at the same time, it's also the snake that lurks underneath. It's the basilisk that threatens the school. And so the basilisk is the dragon. And when the basilisk looks at you, then you're paralyzed because you're a prey animal. And if a predator captures you in its gaze, you freeze.

And the reason you freeze is because your body reacts to the predator as something that should turn you to stone. Sorry about that. So what do you do about the baseless? Well, one thing you do is you run and hide. But the other thing you do is go confronted in its layer and that's what Harry Potter does. Now, and what's interesting about him is he's also touched by evil, right?

And that means that he's an embodiment of what Jung would regard as someone who's integrated the shadow. And without that capacity, he isn't able to communicate, say, with snakes. And that's not so good because since there are snakes, it's not such a bad idea to know how to communicate with them. And he goes down into the underground, into the chaotic domain that's underneath the school in order to find the snake and its lair. Now, if I remember correctly, you tell me if I'm wrong. Doesn't he go down through a bathroom, through a toilet?

Right. Well, so that's an indication of the Jungian dictum that what you, what you most, what you need most is to be found where you least want to look. I had a client once who actually had a dream like that. He dreamt that he had to go into the underground world through an outhouse.

Right, it was very, very interesting, and it was an elaboration of precisely this theme. It's what you've thrown away as of little value to you. And maybe what you hate and hold in contempt and fear is exactly what you have to face if you want to go down to the place where the transformations occur. So what happens in Harry Potter? Well, this Basilix is wandering around,

paralyzing everyone who isn't able to communicate with snakes. And he doesn't fight the Basilis precisely. He goes down into its layers, the underground world, and that what down there is that snake has got genevra, right? His girlfriend, that's her name, right? It's a variant of Virginia, that's a variant of virgin, and the snake always has a virgin. That's one of its characteristics, right?

Like gold, he goes down there to rescue her. What happens to him? He gets bit and he's gonna die. So what happens? The Phoenix comes along and cries tears into his wounds and cures him and that's So the idea is that what saves you in the encounter with the snake is your capacity to let things go and die and come back to life, right?

It's so interesting, eh, that that story is told in that way, in that series of volumes, because the plot structure is perfect in a mythological sense. It's exactly right. And the Phoenix actually happens to be the pet of the main wizard, which is also perfect. It's exactly right.

So what's his name? The Dumbledore. Yeah, he's basically for all intents and purposes, God the Father and his pet, his close ally, is the thing that can die and that transforms. Well, you can see that echoes of Christian thought in that, but that isn't exactly right. It's that Christian thought and the mythological substructure upon which the Harry Potter volume is based are drawing from the same underlying pool of ideas and symbols.

And they're universally accessible. And you can tell that because if they weren't, that book wouldn't have sold. How many million copies? How many million copies did it sell? And the movies, it's unbelievably, overwhelmingly powerful. She got kids to read 600-page books, like multiple volumes lining up for them.

You got to ask yourself, why? Silly stories about magical orphans. It's like, well, maybe not. Maybe people aren't so stupid. And certainly, if they happen to be reading relatively complex books, attributing that to stupidity seems to be rather counterproductive. All right, so that's the chaotic domain. Now, we got to think about the chaotic domain for a minute.

The chaotic domain is where you don't know what's going to happen. And anything could happen, positive or negative. Anything can happen. And so you can think about the chaotic domain as the birthplace of order. It's the place from which order emerges. Well, it's akin in some sense. Remember what happens in Pinocchio? So Pinocchio goes down into the depths and then into the whale to rescue his father. He goes to the most frightening place possible. And he tests himself against it, and he rescues his father and he brings him up to the surface. But the consequence of that is that he dies, but what dies is the stupid puppet.

And so the question is, well, to the degree that you're a stupid puppet, are you willing to let that die? And the answer to that is, it depends on the degree to which you're actually a stupid puppet. Because the more that's true, the more of you has to die. And it's not something trivial. That's why these myths insist upon the horror of the thing that lurks, so to speak, is that that death might be enough to actually kill you if you're not properly prepared for it.

And that's what happens to people who are extraordinarily traumatized, for example, it's like huge parts of them are killed, and they often don't recover. So it's no joke. Well, and then, of course, this is often acted out in the real world, too, if, you know, this can happen on a psychological basis. And so your own psychological experiences can be enough to radically disrupt and hurt you, but it can be worked out in the real world too, because if you're wandering around naively with your eyes closed and you run into someone who's really psychopathic, they'll take you apart,

and you'll have no defense against it whatsoever because you're too blind and naïve. And if you encounter someone like that and they leave you in the ashes, which they might, it's certainly possible that you'll never recover from it. You just will not be able to handle the aftermath, but also you won't be able to handle the fact that something like that could actually happen. And that's really the nature of trauma. You cannot believe that that could actually happen.

And that's an encounter, it's almost always. And this has been the case, certainly be my clinical experience. What traumatizes people is malevolence. It's not tragedy, although tragedy can traumatize people if it's severe enough. But generally, no, people can withstand tragedy. They are done in by real malevolence. And so sometimes it's the realization of their own malevolence that does them in. But when that isn't the case, they encounter someone who's out there in the world

who's actually operating to hurt them. And so, and if the person is psychopathic enough, and this is actually goes beyond pure psychopathy, because at least the psychopath has the sense to be self-interested, you can go far farther than that, where you're perfectly willing to hurt yourself as long as you hurt the other person at the same time. And that's where you go when you're doing something like conjuring up the idea that you might shoot up a school. Because those people always kill themselves at the end. And you might think,

well, why don't they just save everyone a lot of trouble and kill themselves at the beginning? Well, that wouldn't exactly be the point, would it? What they want to say is, life means nothing to me, nothing. But I'm perfectly willing to make as many people as I possibly can suffer before I demonstrate that. And so that's a step past psychopathy. And if you encounter that in someone, it's or in yourself, that's going to be a deeply unsettling experience. And the idea behind many of these stories is that you cannot figure out what to do about that before you have an encounter like that.

And if you think about that properly, that's as horrifying an experience as you can imagine, right? It's precisely that. It's as horrifying an experience as you can imagine. So all right, so back, this chaos, this is the birthplace of things. That's why often it's represented as feminine, because feminine things are the birthplace of things. Now again, you know, people are stuck with the necessity of interpreting

their experience through the biological platform of interpretation that they evolved. And so we could say, well, we recognize feminine, we recognize masculine, we recognize parent, we recognize child, and that's ancient, right? That's as ancient as mammals. And so those are fundamental social cognitive categories. And we had to exploit those categories to represent the world beyond that when we started to be able to represent the world beyond that, just as a primate, like a chimpanzee or a tree-dwelling primate, a complex primate, almost all of their categories are social cognitive. Right? Why? Because they live in complex social environments. And there's a relationship between the size of

the social environment that a primate inhabits and its brain size. The bigger the brain, the larger the environment. And you could think there's a loop there, right? If your brain's too small, you can't handle the larger environment. So the environment grows and it selects for people, for creatures that are complex enough to compute the environment, and then that gives a selective advantage to creatures that are to compute the environment, and then that gives us selective advantage to creatures that are acute or are sharp enough to compute the environment, and so there's more of them, and it loops, and the brain grows. I mean, it's not the only thing driving the evolution of the brain among primates, but it's a primary source.

So, we have those categories to begin with, and then we have to view the world as it manifests itself outside those primary categories through the lens of those categories. And so what happens is we use the symbolism of sex differentiation and the symbolism of parent-child relationships to begin to account for the manner in which the world manifests itself. Masculine. Why? Well, that's the patriarchy. Chaos.

Feminine. Why? Well, partly it's conceived of in opposition to the patriarchy, but more importantly, it's the thing from which order rises. So it's perfectly reasonable to consider it feminine, and then order again. And then the question is, well, you have order, father, chaos, mother. And then you have this, this transformational process. Well, that's the mythological hero. And those are the three fundamental characters of mythology, individual, culture, nature,

right? It's the universal world. And then that's differentiated further, positive individual, negative individual, hero and adversary, tyrant and wise king, the destructive element of nature and the creative element of nature. And those are perfectly reasonable categories. They do a lovely job of actually representing how the world does manifest itself to us in the domains

that are permanent. There's always a conscious observer who's ambivalent about the nature of the world. There's always a social structure that's half tyrannical and half order-producing. And there's always the nature that gives rise to everything and that destroys it at the same time. Always, it's permanent. And so that's another reason.

It's so interesting. That's another reason why the mythological representations are hyperreal, because they think what makes something real? Let's say protons are real. Why? Because at one level of the analysis, every single thing is made out of protons. So you can use it as an explanatory tool, the concept. You can use it as an explanatory tool, the concept. You can use it as an explanatory tool for every possible situation, and it's true across all possible spans of time,

although protons do decay, but it takes billions and billions of years. So real means works now, works forever, applies now, and applies everywhere. Well, that's exactly what this map means. It's that there's always an observer. There's always a framework of interpretation, and there's always that which is being observed. There's always the individual. There's always the social environment, the dominant hierarchy. And there's always the nature that exists outside of that. There's always the nowhere, the known, and the and unknown always.

So then the question is, well, how do those things interrelate? Well, you differentiate them into their positive and negative elements, because there's always the positive and negative element, and then you tell stories about how the different categories interact, and that's what the stories do. And the more mythological the story, the more that underlying schema is self-evident in the plot. And you especially see that, I think, in stories for children. And maybe that's because children can't

understand stories unless they're archetypal, like blatantly archetypal. And that would make sense, right? Because the stories have to appeal to the instinctive knowledge of the child, or the child wouldn't be able to comprehend them. And so, you know, I saw this quite dramatically with my own kids watching them watch Disney movies,

for example, my son was absolutely obsessed with Pinocchio. And particularly obsessed with the scene where Pinocchio and his father are escaping from the whale, and the whale turns into this sort of smoke belching locomotive thing that's chasing them through the water. He would rewind that and watch it and rewind it and watch it and rewind it and watch it like over and over and over. And you think, what the hell is that kid up to?

Well, you know, it took us what, six hours to do a brief run through Pinocchio still by still. There's a lot of information in that movie, a tremendous amount of information. And then what the kids trying to do is to incorporate it, to understand it, to embody it. And that's all happening in some sense, I would say unconsciously. It's like it's unconscious in that he couldn't articulate

what he was doing, and neither could anyone else. But that doesn't mean he wasn't doing something. He was definitely doing something. He was doing the same thing that enabled my nephew to put on the night suit when he did that, the little night hat and the sword, and figure out how to go after the great dragon of chaos. And so I want to tell you a little bit more about this idea of chaos. So

here's the schema. We have the archetypal sun and we'll get to why it's masculine and not feminine. And that's also taken me a long time to crack because the women in this class have always asked me, well the hero in mythological stories is male, where does that leave women? And I never knew what to say about that exactly. You can look at Sleeping Beauty, for example, that story. And Sleeping Beauty is raised, rescued by a prince. And you can think of that prince at two levels of analysis simultaneously.

You can think about it as an actual male who plays that role. But you can also think about it as the exploratory and exploratory assertive and courageous part of the feminine psyche that's necessary to bring unconsciousness up into consciousness. And the story works perfectly across both those levels of analysis. So, and that is the classic way, I would say,

of explaining this particular mode of representation, but it came to my attention. This was so interesting. This is what triggered this for me. Finally, I was reading this book called Abillion Wicked Thoughts that was written by a bunch of engineers at Google, and they were looking at billions of search,

billions of Google searches. And you know, there's no shortage of pornography on the internet. And there's much less by proportion than there was when the internet was first invented. And it's so interesting because it actually turned out that one of the things that drove the development of the internet and the technology was the proclivity of young men to search out sexually provocative images. That was what was at the forefront of the development of the nets, extraordinarily interesting.

They were motivated to use it for that purpose, and that provided the platform from which it emerged. Amazing. Anyways, the Google engineers looked at pornographic search processes, and then segregated male searches from female searches, and what they found was that the male searched out images, surprise, surprise, no one considers that, particularly interesting, but the female searched out literary representations of pornography was written. And so I can give you an example of that. If you know about Harlequin romances,

does everybody still know about those? Anybody not know about those? Okay, well, they're mass market romances and of a very stereotypical type. And the original ones were pretty harmless in terms of no violence and no real sexual content. But that was 40 years ago and they've differentiated tremendously and now there's hardcore

harlequin romances and with particularly garish covers, and then there's the old, you know, more tame, basic, sexless, and aggressionless romances, where everything is implied and not explicit, but the explicit ones exist. So they did a plot analysis of the typical pornographic female fantasy. Well, and it was so comical because engineers did this and social scientists would never do this because they'd be probably too concerned about the ethics of it or some damn thing. But engineers, you know, they'll just plow ahead with no concern whatsoever for such things

and they actually discovered things that way. And so they discovered the basic plot of the female pornographic literary product. And they identified, so basically what happened was that a innocent, well-meaning and attractive young woman encounters a male who's a bit of a monster. And the monster is five types of classic male monster. For all you males who want to know,

this is what you can become. Vampire, that's a good one. World Wolf, billionaire, pirate, and surgeon. Okay, so that's very interesting, because well, first of all, there's a dominance thing. There's a, now you're actually blushing, you know, you're actually blushing about that. That's very, very funny.

So, sorry to point it out, but it's so comical, you know. I know, I know, it's so funny. I was reading this. I was reading this. It was just cracking me up. I thought, oh my God, really? Pirate vampire? Oh, that explains it.

What about all these damn vampire shows? Right, they're so popular online, they're so popular on Netflix. Oh, yes. And then there's the war wolf. There's nothing sexier than a war wolf, apparently. But I mean, so there's predatory dominance that's implicit in that, right? With the billionaire, it's more abstract, but clearly that's an indication of very high success in the male dominance hierarchy. So, but there's this desire for aggression that's in that, a real aggression, right?

And it's not surprising to me at all, it makes perfect sense. But the basic plot is that the woman encounters this mysterious and aggressive male and tame them. That's the female hero myth as far as I can tell. It's beauty in the beast. And so it's because, well, there's no fun in taming someone who's already tame. And what makes you think you really want someone who's tame? Anyways, there's no interest in that. Plus, when chaos manifests itself,

what makes you think that someone tame is gonna be good for anything? And it's a real question, and so that aggression is absolutely vital, it's absolutely necessary. But because it's incredibly dangerous, which of course it is, it has to be civilized. And so what happens is that the archetypal female

in these pornographic romances seduces and tames the aggressive male. And that's her encounter with chaos. Now, it's more complex. Of course, females, they're more complicated. And that's exactly how it is. And it's no wonder because their lives are more complicated. But OK, so back to this.

So this map isn't predicated on the Beauty and Beast story, and I don't know what to do about that at the moment. But whatever, we're going to go with this map for the time being, because it's been the dominant one, you have the archetypal son who's hero and adversary. That's Cain versus Abel, for example. That's Abel versus Cain, hero versus adversary. And then that diad, that hostile brothers,

that's the motif, mythological motif, that that lays out, it's a very common mythological motif. That's nested inside the social order of order versus tyranny, and that's nested inside the destruction and creation of nature. And then all of that is nested inside the dragon of chaos. And so it's interesting because you say, this is, you have the entity that knows, and that's the hero,

and then you have the structure within which that entity is operating, and then you have the unknown. It's the sun, it's the father, it's the mother, the mother stands for chaos, but outside of that, there's this additional chaos that's paradoxical. And you might say, well, why do you need to have two kinds of chaos? And that's where things get ridiculously complicated. The little or chaos is what's defined in relationship to what you already know.

So it's manageable in some sense. It's that which combined with what you already know can bring something forth. There's a sexual metaphor in that. You take what you know, you take what something you don't know, you put them together. This isn't enough to overwhelm this, and this isn't enough to suppress this. The two come together in a creative union, and something new is born from it. So that's the holy father, the holy mother, bang and the hero that emerges out of that.

Okay, but then there's the chaos that's so overwhelming that it just demolishes everything. And it's the ultimate source of what's known and what's unknown in relationship to what's known and the nor itself. And that's symbolized by this dragon of chaos. And I'm going to show you another way of thinking about it. It's the most primordial of symbols. Here's the P. S. Eddie an idea. Child occupies a circumscribed domain of knowledge.

The child applies that domain of knowledge to the world. Generally that works. Sometimes it doesn't. Something unexpected happens. OK. And that unexpected thing can be of different cataclysmic significance, let's say. If it's too overwhelming, the child will just cry.

And then the parent comes in and fixes up the anomalous thing. But the child's investigating and playing, you know, pushes his food off the table, or pushes his spoon off the table and watches it fall, and is playing, and he's playing at the edge of order in chaos trying to expand his knowledge domains at the rate that is most palatable to him, we'll say. So what's happening precisely? Well, you can say that the child is in a specific place and is doing a specific thing

with a specific outcome, or you can generalize from that, and you can say, well, the child is occupying a structured, is occupying a structure, a cognitive structure. And there's that which is outside the cognitive structure. And then you might say, well, how do you conceptualize that which is outside the cognitive structure? And the answer to that is, you can't because it's outside the cognitive structure, but it still exists. And so here's a way of conceptualizing it. What's outside the cognitive structure is latent information.

It's a domain of latent information. An information means information. And so what you're trying to do when you go beyond your knowledge structure is to look for new regularities in the environment that you can map and incorporate them into your structure. But that domain of latent information, that's K. for new regularities in the environment that you can map and incorporate them into your structure. But that domain of latent information, that's chaos itself. And that's what symbolized by the dragon of chaos. That's why it's predator, multi-dimensional predator, plus thing that holds

treasure at the same time. Because in order for us to guard ourselves, here's a way of thinking about it, in order for us to guard ourselves, here's a way of thinking about it, in order for us to guard ourselves properly against the eternal existence of the absolute unknown. We had to conceptualize it first. I can say absolute unknown. It's like, well, God, we think that's such a strange category. It's the category of all things that have not yet been categorized. It's like zero. It's like the antithesis of zero. It took people a long time to come up with the idea of zero. It's the category that contains nothing. Well, what do you need a category like that for?

Well, to do mathematics, as it turns out, this category is the category of all things that have not yet been mastered. And your job is to be a master of the category of all things that have not yet been mastered. And you're not going to do that till you can conceptualize it, you conceptualize it with the gold hoarding meta predator. Because that's your opponent. And your job is not to, your job is to know how to confront that continually and to extract out from it what it holds as value.

And that's the permanent solution to the problem because it's never going to go away, right? It's an eternal thing. All you can do is master it the same way that a surfer master is a way. You master it in the process of mastering it. There's no solution to the problem except the solution of continual mastery. And so that's what you are. You're a shape transforming wizard that's doing its best to keep up with the continual transformation of that which you do not yet understand.

And I think there's absolutely no difference between that, by the way. And this thing that women chase in their pornographic fantasies, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. The war will so good example of that and the vampire. Right? There's this capacity for what's normal to transform into something that's extraordinarily aggressive

and to manifest mastery as a consequence of that. So it's the transforming spirit, and it can transform itself in, without bound and certainly in directions that aren't socially acceptable, let's say. There's a line you want to be able to push, and that's again why in the Harry Potter stories, Harry, first of all, is touched by evil and second is always breaking rules, constantly, right? And he's the most favored, so interesting, because he's the most favored of Dumbledore precisely because he knows when to break rules. And so it's so interesting, because he's the most favored of Dumbledore, precisely because he knows

when to break rules. And so it's so interesting, because Dumbledore, of course, is the spirit of, let's call it, the patriarchy, for all intents and purposes. And his favorite is that child that refuses to abide by the rules of the patriarchy, but only under the proper circumstances, right? You don't sacrifice the old rule, unless you have a reason for doing so. The thing you're doing has to be better

than the thing that you would be compelled to do by the old rule, and then you have to dare to do it. And you'd say, well, you're not gonna do that, unless you're already touched to some degree by the spirit of the snake, and that's exactly right. the snake and that's exactly right. Let's see. OK, here's another way of thinking about it. The winged reptile is a thing of the earth and a thing of the sky.

So you could think about it as a thing of matter and the thing of spirit. OK, so then the question is, well, what exactly does that mean? It's a symbol of the union of spirit and matter. Okay, so what's matter? Well, the world, but it isn't just the world. It's also what matters. And what's spirit? Well, it's the thing that flies free of the material world that's above the ground, that's in the ethereal space that's up in heaven, but it's also whatever it is in us that's psyche or spirit. Okay, so then you might say, well, what's the origin of that? Chaos. And we can actually, I don't want to put that out as a metaphysical proposition. I want to put it out as an extension of what we've been saying. So the child,

the child bootstraps itself up from nothing, roughly speaking, right, through its developmental process, as the emergence has a fully fledged nervous system. And it produces cognitive structures within which it exists and views the world. But there's something outside of the cognitive structures. And that's this latent information, we'll say. Well, then we could say that latent information

is properly conceptualized as matter and spirit. Why? Because when you investigate it, when you interact with it, you parse it into the world and into you. That's what it means to be informed by your contact with unknown. It informs you. It makes you more than you are.

So it's like you're extract, that's the resource you're extracting from the absolute unknown. It's the information that allows you to reconstitute your being. At the same time, you differentiate your knowledge of the world. So matter emerges from the latent information and what matters. And you emerge from the latent information in this this dialogical process that involves your continual exploration. You build yourself and you build the world.

And so the dragon of chaos, the winged dragon of chaos that guards the gold is the latent information that when you explore enables you to build yourself and to differentiate the world. I'll tell you a story, Dan, this. This is one of the great stories of mankind, and it's not. This isn't the only variant of this story. There's many variants of it, but this variant is useful for our purposes. That's a story I stumbled across a long time ago. I'm going to tell you the second

story first because I don't have the energy to tell you the first story. So this is a story that the ancient Egyptians predicated their society on. And to understand this story, the first thing you have to know is what the characters were. And these characters were gods. There's four of them. Although the Egyptians had far more than four gods, you might think of these as the central gods. And you might think, what is the central god? And then you might think, well, imagine that the gods compete for dominance across time

in people's imaginations and some gods win. And they occupy the primary position of dominance in the hierarchy, in the dominance hierarchy of gods. And those are ideals, and ideals compete across time for dominance, and they're embodied. And so when diverse tribal people come together, they throw all their gods into the ring, and they fight across time, and something emerges as a victor. And that's the emergence of monotheism, out of polytheism.

And it parallels the development of a unified morality within each of us as we develop across time. And the God that emerges as dominant across time bears a substantial represent, a substantial resemblance. Imagine you have a set of gods in this locale that are competing across time and something emerges as dominant. And then over here you have another set of gods that compete across time for dominance and something emerges. You'll see major commonalities across the two things that emerge. And the reason for that is because the emergent, the process of emergence that gives rise to both

of them is similar in both situations. And that's part of what accounts for the cross cultural similarity of high order religious ideas. All right, anyways, you need to know the characters. Osiris, Osiris is the old king. He's dumbledore for all intents and purposes. He's the old king. He's the spirit that established the Egyptian state when he was young. He was a great hero, but now he's old. And he's archaic and he's willfully blind. That's Osiris. He has a brother, Seth. Seth is set and set is Satan

because the word Satan comes from the word Seth and set via the Coptic Christians. So he's a precursor to the Western idea of Satan. You have ISIS, ISIS is queen of the underworld and ISIS was the goddess of a religious structure that prevailed across thousands and thousands of years. ISIS, and you have Horace. Horace is a falcon.

And the Egyptian eye, everyone knows that eye, right? The eye with the open pupil. That's Horace. And Horace is a falcon because falcons can see way better. They can see better than us. They can see better than anything else except for perhaps eagles. And they fly above everything.

Zazu in the Lion King is Horace, right? And Mufasa is Osiris. And Scar is Seth. And there's no specific representation of ISIS, but the closest there is in that story is probably the Queen of the Hyenas that's played by, who's the actress? Yes, Wuffy Goldborg, that's right, that's right, because they inhabit, she's like the Queen of the underworld, right?

She's the queen of the hyena's that live out among the death. But okay, anyways, Seth, Osiris, Seth, Isis and Horus, here's how the story goes. Osiris is a great king, he established the Egyptian state. You can think about him as the embodiment of the Egyptian custom and tradition. You could think about him as the thing that the pyramid represents, all right? But he was great when he was young,

but he's not young anymore. He's old and he's willfully blind. And what that means is that he doesn't see what he could see. He refuses to see what he could see. Why is Osiris old and willfully blind? Because that's what culture is. It's a pater is Osiris old and willfully blind? Because that's what culture is. It's a paternal spirit that's old and willfully blind, and it's always that way, always that way.

And the reason for that is because it's a construction of the dead. The dead aren't alive. They can't, so they're out of date, and they can't update themselves anymore. And you inhabit their corpse, and that's actually what happens in an earlier story that I'll tell you next week. The early Mesopotamian gods inhabited the corpse of their father, roughly speaking.

Anyway, so Osiris was great and when he was young, but he isn't young anymore, he's old and he's willfully blind. He won't look where he knows he should look. He doesn't have the energy or maybe he doesn't have the spirit. His brother Seth is not a good guy. And Osiris knows it, but he underestimates his malevolence and power. And so Seth wants to rule the kingdom. So what does that mean? It's easy. Every stable society is threatened by willful blindness and malevolence.

Always. Every bureaucracy has that proclivity to stagnate and to become blind. That's why corporations die all the time. That's why a Fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years. It's why we have to have elections. It's to stop the dead from staying in control for too long. Seth Osiris turns a blind eye to Seth. Seth is happy about that same thing happens in the Lion King,

roughly speaking. Seth, one day waits for Osiris turns a blind eye to Seth. Seth is happy about that same thing happens in the Lion King, roughly speaking. Seth, one day waits for Osiris to make a mistake and to be weak, and he attacks him, and he chops him up into pieces. And he distributes the pieces across the entire Egyptian state. In fact, the Egyptians regarded their provinces as pieces of Osiris' body. Okay, so... Now, you can't kill Osiris because because he's a God and why is he God? A God because he represents the spirit of structure and there's always structure. It can't be destroyed. It always reconstitutes itself. It can be hurt and broken into pieces, which is exactly what happens

to a Cyrus. Things fall apart. Why? Because they get old and because malevolence undermines them. That's what the Egyptians were trying to sort out. Okay, so Seth, distributes his OSIRIS all over Egypt, so we can't get himself back together, right? Things fall apart and they can't be brought back together. But the spirit of Osiris still lives in the pieces. So what happens? Order is demolished. What would you expect? Chaos emerges. That's ISIS. ISIS is queen of the underworld.

She's Osiris' wife. Order and chaos, just like the Yen in the Yang. Order collapses, up comes the queen of the underworld. She's looking for order. Chaos cries out for order. She's looking for order. She goes all around Egypt, trying to put us so Cyrus back together.

It's a state of chaos. She finds his fellace. She makes herself pregnant with it. And what does that mean? Well, it means it's like, it's like, jepetto in the belly of the whale. That thing has the potential to re-emerge. The thing that collapses into its pieces is still alive.

It can unite with the chaos and produce something new. That's the story of the disillusion of structure into chaos and then its revivocation. Jesus makes herself pregnant. She goes back down to the underworld. She gives birth to Horus. Horus is the Egyptian Ishe. He's the son of the great father and the great mother. He's a messianic figure. And in fact, much of the mythology that described Horus was extracted without much modification and then attributed to Christ, very much, and you can read about the parallels. You can read about it online if you want. There's any number of parallels.

And of course, there is the mythology that the Jews came out of Egypt, and of course, the Christians emerged from the Jews, and so there was a tremendous influence of Egyptian thinking on the development of these later ideas. And you see pictures of ISIS with Horus on her lap that are virtually identical in content and form to the later pictures of Mary with the infant Christ. But that's the holy mother of God in the hero. It's not a Christian motif. It's far deeper than a Christian motif.

It's a human motif. So ISIS, queen of the underworld, gives birth to Horace, and Horace grows up outside the kingdom. Why in the underworld? Because that's what human beings do. You're alienated from your culture. Always, why? It's old and dead and corrupt.

And so that leaves you growing up in chaos. What would you call alienated from your fundamental culture? That's the story of adolescence. Horus grows up. He can see. That's what differentiates him from Osiris. That's why he's a falcon. He goes and has a fight with Seth. And now the difference between Osiris and Horus is that

Horus does not underestimate Seth. He knows exactly what he's up against. He goes and has a terrible battle with him trying to get his kingdom back, something else that's echoed in the Lion King's story. And well, Horus and Osiris or Seth are fighting. Seth tears out one of his eyes. Now why? Because Seth is the embodiment of destruction and malevolence. And no matter how conscious you are, if you encounter that, even voluntarily, the probability that it's going to damage your consciousness

is extraordinarily high. That's why people don't do it. So the eyes torn out, but Seth is defeated, and Horace banishes him to the nether regions of the kingdom. You can't kill him. Why? Because the malevolent destructive force, the threatened states, never dies. It's always there.

You can only remove it temporarily. Now Horace is king, Pharaoh, king, God. He's God as I, and so you think, well, he's going to just pop that back in his head, and then he's going to be able to lead, he's going to be able to take his place at the uppermost pantheon of God's properly. But that isn't what he does. He takes his eye, and he goes back to the underworld, just like Pinocchio going into the depths to rescue Jepetto. And down there is the spirit of Osiris, whose extant as a kind of half-dad ghost. And he gives Osiris's eye. Now Osiris can see.

So what does that mean? You go down into the chaotic wind threatened by malevolence, Now, Osiris can see. So what does that mean? You go down into the chaotic wind threatened by malevolence, even to the point of damage to your consciousness. You go down into the chaos, and you find the dead spirit of your tradition, and you give it vision. And so provided with vision, Osiris regenerates, and then Osiris and Horus go back up to the

world, linked together and ruled jointly. And the Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh, who had an immortal spirit, was the embodiment of the conjunction of Horus and Osiris. And that's what gave him sovereignty. And so you think about how brilliant that is. The Egyptians are trying to puzzle out who should lead, who should be Pharaoh and what do you have to be? If you're going to be Pharaoh in order for things to work,

you have to be awake to malevolence and chaos, and you have to embody your tradition. And that puts you at the highest pinnacle of the dominant structure. And that's the same as it's the same thing. It's the same thing as the battle between the gods across centuries or eons and the emergence of the highest possible moral virtue as a consequence of that competition. It's the eye on the top of the pyramid, right? It's, you know, in the Washington Monument, there's a cap on the Washington Monument, the top of the Washington Monument is a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is a cap. It's made

out of aluminum. And the reason it's made out of aluminum is because when they made the Washington Monument, it was the most valuable metal-known. And so what does it mean? It means there's a pyramid and there's something at the top of it, but the thing that's at the top of the pyramid isn't the same as the rest of the pyramid. That's the thing. The pyramid exists, there's a dominant shark, he something climbs up to the top, but it's not just at the top of one pyramid, it's at the top of all of them. The thing that rises to the top of any given pyramid is the same thing that can dominate all pyramids. It isn't good enough to be the best at a dominance hierarchy.

What you want to be is the best at the set of all possible dominance hierarchies. Right, and that's the thing that's gold at the top of the pyramid. And that's the eye. That's what the Egyptians figured out. And what does that mean? It means the thing that puts you at the top is attention. Pay attention. Keep your eyes open. It's not the same as thinking. It's not the same thing. It's like watching. And the thing about human beings is we can see. We can see better than any other creature except birds of prey.

And so our capacity to see is, in fact, what we use in the world. Our brains are actually organized around vision, unlike most animals. Their brains are organized around smell, not us. We can see, we stand upright, so we can see a long distance. And in our ability to see is what saves us and what saves our communities.

And that's what these stories are trying to portray. And you might say, well, why didn't people just say so? And the answer to that is because they didn't know. It took a long time to figure it out. Forever. It's taken forever to figure it out. It's it's part of what I hoped when I wrote this book and and part of the reason that I'm teaching it is because it seems to me that it would be useful for everyone to actually understand this. Instead of just having it told as a story

It's like that's great man. Yes, you need the story, but why not also just having it told as a story, it's like, that's great, man. Yes, you need the story. But why not also just understand it? So... Well, so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to understand this. So... That's good enough for today. for today. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up dad's books, maps

of meaning the architecture of belief, or as 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 JordanBeePeterson.com for audio, ebook, and text links or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanB Peterson.com slash personality for information on his personality course. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review. Talk to you next week.