The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 144. Carl Jung (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

In this lecture, Dr. Peterson uses Disney's Lion King to further illustrate the basic principles of the personality and clinical theories of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, student of Nietzsche and Freud, originator of analytical psychology, and great interpreter of mythology and archetype.--Go to https://Surfshark.deals/peterson and use code PETERSON to get 83% off a 2-year plan and 3 extra months for free!--For Advertising Inquiries, visit https://www.advertisecast.com/TheJordanBPetersonPodcast

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So you can browse securely on all your devices. That's surfshark.deals slash Peterson. So I think the best way to continue to walk you through the thinkers that we're planning to cover is to do that with examples. They stick better and they're more interesting. And it's very difficult to understand Jung outside of a narrative context. And so I'm going to walk you through the Lion King today. How many of you have seen the Lion King?

Yes. So how many of you haven't? Right. Okay, so so you obviously were raised in a box somewhere out in the middle of a field. So anyways, you know, it's it's an amazingly popular animated movie. I think it was the most high-scroasing animated movie ever made until Frozen, which I actually absolutely detested. But the Lion King is actually consciously influenced by archetypes as well as unconsciously influenced by them. So it's a bit of a cheat, I would say, in some sense, but it doesn't. I don't, for the purposes that we're using it for, I think it's just fine. And so partly what you might think about is that it's relationship to archetypal themes that made it so overwhelmingly popular, same being the

case with, say, books and movies like Harry Potter or the entire Marvel series. Marvel series is quite interesting. I know somebody who wrote for Batman and for Wolverine, I know Batman isn't a Marvel comic, but one of the things that he told me that was quite interesting was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their own, they have a backstory, which becomes part of the mythology that's collectively held by the readers. And if you can invent an alternative universe

where you can muck about with the backstory, but otherwise you better stick with it or the readers are gonna write you and tell you that you've got the story wrong. And so there's a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the readers after these things take on a life of their own. And so, and of course, they tend to,

the comic books in particular, tend to, tend towards mythological themes very, very rapidly. And so anyways, Carl Young was a fascinating person, I think, you can read his biography his autobiography, slash biography, which is called Memory, Streams, and Reflections, which in many ways I think is an unfortunate book, because it's usually the only book that people read that is more or less

by Jung. And it is more popularly accessible, which is probably a good thing. But it's also, it's not as rigorous as his other books. And so the problem with someone like Jung is you kind of have to read him as much as you can in the original, because interpreting him is not a very straightforward matter.

He was a very visionary person, by which I mean, he had an incredible visual imagination. And he used that a lot. He used it in his therapy practice. I believe that most of his therapy clients were high in trait openness. I have a lot of clients who are high in trait openness. They kind of seek me out because I'm high in trait openness and you know they watch my videos and that sort of thing and they're interested in what I'm doing.

Many of them are astute dreamers and prolific dreamers. And many open people in my experience have archetypal dreams. Whereas people who are lower in openness, they either don't dream at all or they don't remember their dreams as much or they're not interested in them and they're not interested in the mythological underpinnings of them.

So I've taught psychology, roughly speaking, to many different types of people, including lawyers and lawyers and physicians. And they tend to be higher in trait conscientiousness than in openness. And they're much more interested in the practical applications of psychology and maybe the big five theories than they are in the narrative underpinnings. And you know, people say that when they went to Jung, they had Jungian dreams, but I don't, and then when they went

to Freud, they had Freudian dreams. And I don't really believe that's exactly true. I think it was a matter of selection bias, a priori selection bias on the part of the people who were likely to go see either of those two. And so, but I've been struck by some clients in particular how unbelievably continually they can generate deep archetypal dreams with a really coherent narrative structure. It's really phenomenal and how revealing those dreams are. Problem with archetypal dreams is that they're not really personal, right?

So if you're looking for a personal way out of a situation, an archetypal dream doesn't help you that much because it gives you the general pattern rather than a specific solution to your problem. But a good dream will do both at once. Anyways, Jung was a student of Freud's. We'll cover Freud next, although generally in personality courses, the order is reversed. Freud first and then Jung, because of their temporal order of their thought.

But I think it's better to start with Jung, because it's as if Freud excavated into the basement and then Jung excavated into many, many floors underneath the basement of the mind. And so if you're transitioning from an archaic, understanding of archaic modes of thinking towards Freud, it's better to go through Jung because Jung is, I think Freudian theory is a subset of Jungian theory, fundamentally, just like Newtonian physics

is a subset of Einsteinian physics. And I think that Freud knew that even to some degree, although he was very much opposed to any sort of religious thinking, mythological religious thinking, I would say. He was a real 19th century materialist and he didn't like the fact that Jung's work started to delve into religious themes in a manner that actually in some sense validated those themes. And so that's actually why they split. They split when Jung published a book called Symbols of Transformation.

Jung was also a deep student of Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote a book called Thus Spakes Aerothustra, which is kind of an old testament revelation poetry kind of book. It's a strange one, and I wouldn't recommend if you want to read Nietzsche that you start with that one, but most people do. But Jung did a seminar on the Thus-Bake's Aerothoustra, which is about, I've got this wrong, it's somewhere between 700 and 1,100 pages long and it only covers the first third of the book. And Thus-Bake's Aerothoustra is actually quite a short book. And so, well, so you can imagine how much Jung had to know about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words.

And Nietzsche was a, well, an absolute genius. And Jung was actually trying to answer the question that Nietzsche posed fundamentally, which is why, part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a Freudian. He was, so Nietzsche basically stated, let's say explicitly, that scientific empiricism slash rationalism had resulted in the death of the mythological tradition of the West, roughly speaking. That's Nietzsche's comment on the death of God. And in that comment, he also said that the fact that God was dead was going to produce tremendous ideational

and social, historical upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people. That he didn't say all that in one place. It's spread between part of its will to power. And I can't remember the source of the other one. Some of its reference to us speaks to the earth's true. But Nietzsche believed that in order to overcome the collapse of traditional values with the idea of God as its cornerstone, people would have to become creatures that could produce their own values as a replacement that we would have to become

capable of generating autonomous values. And Jung, but that's easier said than done because trying to impose a set of values on yourself is very difficult because you're not very cooperative. And you know that if you try to get yourself to do something that you don't want to do or that's hard, you just won't do it. And so it's not like you can just invent your own values and then go along with that. That just doesn't work. And so what Jung and the Freudians did, Freud first, I would say, was to start looking into people's fantasies, autonomous fantasies, unconscious fantasies, to see if they could, and discovered that values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies. And you can imagine, for example, if you've

become enamored of someone that you might start fantasizing about them. And if you read off the fantasy, then you can tell what you're after and what you're up to. And so the motivational force composes the fantasy. And Freud was more interested in that in a personal sense. So in so far as your fantasies might reveal your personal history. So for example, if you have a burst of negative emotion in a clinical session, there'll be a fantasy that goes along with that. And then association of ideas that kind of manifest themselves of their own accord, and they're not necessarily coherent and logical, they're linked by emotion. That's the free association technique in Freudian psychology, and they also might manifest

themselves in dreams and fantasies, and so Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous, let's call them fantasies, and Jung linked that more, Freud did this first with the Edipel-edipel complex, but then Jung linked up spontaneous fantasies, and Jung linked that more, Freud did this first with the Edipold complex, but then Jung linked up spontaneous fantasies and dreams with myth, mythology, and fantasy across history. And of course, Piaje did the same thing from a completely different standpoint. And then a lot of that's embedded in this movie, so we might as well just walk through it. So the first question

might be, well, why is a lion a king? Right? And because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king. And of course, a lion is an apex predator, and so which means it's at the top of the food chain, roughly speaking. And it's sort of golden like the sun, so that's also useful. And you know, it has that mane that makes it look majestic. And of course, it's very physically powerful. And it's intimidating. And so it's something that you run away from as well, right?

Or you're awestruck by. So the fact that, you know, it's like snail king just doesn't make any sense, right? But lion king, that works. And you've got to think about those things because it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king, but a snail wouldn't. But it fits in with your metaphorical understanding

of the way the world works much better. And so the Lion King makes sense. And, well, and when things like that that aren't rationally self-evident, make sense, you have to ask yourself in what metaphorical contexts do they make sense. So you have the Lion King. Now, the movie opens with a sunrise, and the sunrise is equivalent to the dawn of consciousness, so that in many archaic stories the sun was a hero like Horace, if I remember correctly, was a solar king, but Apollo in particular, but Apollo Greek myth. The idea was that the sun was The idea was that the sun was the hero, the hero, who illuminated the sky in the day. And so heroism and illumination and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically. And then at night, what would happen would be that the sun would fight with the dragon of darkness,

basically, or with evil all night, and then rise again victorious in the morning. And so it's a death and rebirth theme, and it's very, very, very, very common mythological theme. And the reason the sun is associated with consciousness as far as I can tell is that we're not nocturnal creatures, we're awake during the day, and we're very, very visual. Half our brain is devoted to visual processing, and to be enlightened and illuminated means to move towards

a higher state of consciousness, and we naturally use light symbolism to represent that, like the light bulb on the top of someone's head. You don't say, I was in darkened when you learned something new. And so again, that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that's, I think, deeply biologically grounded, but also socially grounded. So it's a new day. It's the start of a new day,

and a day-day actually means like French, it's your name, it means day, the day-track in some sense, and how to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question. The day is the canonical unit of time, and so you have to know how to comport yourself during the day, and part of that is a journey from consciousness into unconsciousness and that return.

So, like Apollo, you descend into unconsciousness and then re-emerge. And of course, that's not metaphorical at all. That's exactly what you do. You descend into the underworld of darkness and dreams. And strange things happen down there. And then you awake, if you're fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your state of mind, you awake in the morning and it's a new day, right? And so the dream world seems to help you sort out your thoughts, by the way, if you keep people awake for an extended period of time, then they lose their minds, essentially. The unconsciousness in the dream state seem absolutely

critical in the maintenance of mental health, although people don't exactly understand why. It looks like dreams might help you forget, because forgetting is really important. You just can't remember everything that happens. You get so damn cluttered that you'd fall apart. And so you reduce things to the gist, and when you're doing that, you pack them in, it's like you compress them in some sense. You pack them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that, you pack them in, it's like you compress them in some sense. You pack them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant.

And the dream seems to be part of that. It also seems to be a place where you deeply encode learning that might have been done that day, which is something that Freud actually noted in his interpretation of dreams, which is a great book. If you're ever going to read a book that Freud wrote, the interpretation of dreams is the proper one to read in my estimation, it's a brilliant book, and it laid the groundwork

for a lot of what Jung did. And so anyways, that's how the movie starts, and the animals come out into the light, and that's a metaphor for the dawning of consciousness to come out into the light, where you can see. And so this is a baby giraffe, and baby's emerging to the light, roughly speaking, and that's, like I said, that's a representation

of the emergence or expansion of consciousness. So this is how the movie starts. It starts with very expansive music as well, celebratory music, and that's to indicate to you, to set the tone for the movie, but also to indicate to you that you're about to watch something of import. And the opening scene is actually a real scene of genius in my estimation. The animators did a great job, and it goes along very nicely with the music. And so you see this lit place, and then you see this rock, pride rock, I believe it's called, in the

middle of it. And it's the center. It's the center. It's like the spot that's marked by a cathedral, which is an X or a cross, and you're right in the middle of that. And so it's the center of the light. That's another way of thinking about it. Or it's the center of the territory, or it's the home, or it's the fire in the wilderness, or it's the tree in the center where you live. It's all of those things at once. It's inhabited territory with you at the center. And the rock represents tradition, because people tend to inscribe their traditions on rock, right? Or to build them into rock like the pyramid. So you could think about that as a pyramid, as an Egyptian pyramid, and it's the right way to think about it.

You could also think about it as a dominance hierarchy with the apex predator at the top, and that's the lion. So it makes sense that the lion would be in the light on the rock, that's a pyramid in the middle of the territory, right? That makes sense to people psychologically. So because that's what the state is, the state is a hierarchy with something at the top

that occupies a space that has been illuminated and made safe by consciousness. That's what the state is. And that's all represented right away in this movie. And all the animals come to observe what's happening in the pyramid and at the top because they need to know what happens at the top, partly to organize their world, that's the pyramid,

but also to see how the organizational principle works, and that's why they're all gathering. And so they're gathering in the light in the morning to observe something new that's going to be born, that's of significant importance, and that's the birth of the hero. And this little bird here, Zezou, right? Zezou is like Horus, the Egyptian god,

who was a falcon and an eye at the same time. And he is the king's eye in this, king's eyes, in this movie, right? He flies up above outside of the pyramid so he can see everything that goes on and reports to the king. And so partly what that indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be an eye. And that's partly why you see an eye on the top

of the pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill. It's exactly the same idea. Or if you look at the Washington Monument, which is a pyramid at the top, you see that it's capped with aluminum. And you think, well, why aluminum? And the answer to that was it was the most expensive metal at that time. And so, the notion is that at the top of the pyramid, there's something that actually at the top of the pyramid, there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid. It's something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything. And so you could think about it this way,

is that you're going to be in a lot of pyramids in your life, dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that. And they'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy, and they'll be something at the top. And the top is the thing that can do well across hierarchies. So it's not stuck in any one pyramid, and it's partly associated with vision, and the ability to see a long, long distance.

Also to see what you don't want to see, and to report that back to the king. And so the king, fundamentally, as far as you guys are concerned, from a psychological perspective, that's your super-egoed, that's the Freudian perspective, or it might be the moral system by which you comport yourself, but your eyes are the thing that updates that, right? You need it to orient yourself in the world, you need it to orient yourself among other people, but your eye and your capacity to pay attention, especially to what you don't want to pay attention to, is the thing that continually updates that model,

exactly as PHA laid out with children. So, and all of that's packed into the imagery in the first, you know, a few minutes of this movie, and that's actually why it relies on imagery, why this isn't just a lecture by a psychologist, you know, when you go to see the movie. It's because the images, they say a picture is worth a thousand words,

but, and there's thousands of pictures in this movie, obviously, but maybe a picture is worth more words than you can actually use to describe it, if the picture is profound enough. And we have many, many pictures like that. Any deeply symbolic picture is virtually inexhaustible in terms of its semantically with regards to its explanation.

Images are very, very dense. So anyways, the animals all gathered. Now, the animals are also id representations from the Freudian perspective. And the id is the part of your psyche from the Freudian perspective that's animalistic and full of implicit drives, sexual and aggressive, in particular, as far as Freud was concerned. And that's because those two drives, say and aggressive in particular, as far as Freud was concerned,

and that's because those two drives, say unlike thirst or hunger, are much more difficult to integrate into proper social being and tend to be excluded and left unconscious. And so a lot of Freudian psychology, and I would say psychology in general, is focused on the integration of sexual impulses

and aggressive impulses into the psyche. I would also add to that anxiety because anxiety is also a major problem, anxiety and negative emotion. That's pain-like is also a major problem for people. And so the animals represent those in-like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically before you can become an integrated being in precisely the Piagetti in manner, right? Because Piagetti would say, well, the child comes into the world with reflexes, and maybe a more modern psychologist would also concentrate on the implicit motivations, and those have to be organized inside the child into some kind of hierarchy of unity

before the child can organize him or herself into the broader unity of the state. And that's basically what's being represented here. And so, so Zazoo, the eyes of the king, comes to check out the king, and that's what's his name. What's the king's name? Mufasa, yeah, and he's either a very regal looking person, lion, and he stands up straight and tall. And that means that he's high in serotonin,

because serotonin governs postural flexion, and if so, you're dominant, and near the top straight and tall, and that means that he's high in serotonin because serotonin governs posture or flexion, and if so, if you're dominant and near the top of hierarchies, you tend to expand so that you look bigger than you could if you shrunk down, and so if you're low dominant person, you wander around like this so that you look small and weak, and you don't pose a threat to anybody,

but if you're at the top, you expand yourself so that you can command the space, and that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture. And if you look at the top, you expand yourself so that you can command the space. And that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture. And if you look at his facial expression, you see that it's quite severe. Like he's capable of kindness, but he's also harsh and judgmental. And that's what society is like.

That's what the super ego is like. And what that means is that he's integrated his aggression. And I've seen this happen in my clinical clients when they come in and they're too agreeable. They look like Simba looks later in the movie when he's an adolescent and he's sort of like a deer in the headlights, everything is coming in and nothing is coming out.

But when the person integrates their shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality, their face is hardened. And if you look at people, you can tell because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and innocent and the people who are hyper aggressive person will look mean and cruel. But I've seen people's face change, face change in the course of therapy.

Man and women, and what happens is they start to look more mature and it's more like they're judging the world as well as interacting with it properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them. It's very, very necessary. And that's part of the incorporation of the union shadow or the incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective. But old Musa-Fa there, he's already got that covered.

So, and he's capable, like obviously he can smile. And he's capable of the full range of expressions, but he's capable, like obviously he can smile and he's capable of the full range of expressions, but he's a tough looking character. And now, this, the baboon here who's supposed to be basically just a fool when the story was first written, he turned into what's essentially a shaman across time. And so, he represents the self from the union perspective. Now, the self is everything you could be across time. So you imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you, whatever that is. And potential is an interesting idea

because it's represents something that isn't yet real yet we act like it's real because people will say to you, you should live up to your potential. And that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information, right? Because you build yourself out of the information in the Piagetian sense,

but it's deeper than that, too, because we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment, new genes turn on in your nervous system. They encode for new proteins. And so you're full of biological potential that won't be realized unless you move yourself around in the world into different challenging circumstances and that'll turn on different circuits. So it's not merely that you're incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense. It's that by exposing yourself to different environments, you put different physiological demands on yourself all the way down to the genetic level and that manifests new elements of you.

And so one of the things that happens to people and this is a very common cultural notion is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central and that would be, say, like the rock in the Pride rock in the Lion King because you take yourself out of your dopey little village and that's just a little bounded U that everyone knows and that isn't very expanded and then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place.

And while you do that, you have adventures, and they toughen you, and pull more out of you, like partly because you're becoming informed, which means information. It means you're becoming more organized at every level of analysis, but there's also more of you too. And so that's a very classic idea. And then in cathedrals in Europe, especially at Charter, there's a big maze on the floor, a circular maze, which is a symbolic representation of the pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it. And so it's a huge circle divided into quadrants,

which is a union Mandela. And you enter the maze at one point, and then you have to walk through the entire maze, northeast, west, and south, before you get to the center. And the center is symbolized by a flower that's carved in stone. It looks like this. It's big, this maze, eh? It's large, so that you can walk it. And that's a symbolic pilgrimage. It takes you to the center. That's the center of the cross, because it's in a cathedral,

and that's the point of acceptance of voluntary suffering. That's what that means. And so you walk through, you don't call that a circumambulation. You go to all the quarters of the world to find yourself. And so, well, this self is the baboon in this particular, in this, I think he's a mandrel actually, in this particular representation. And he lives in the tree.

He lives in the tree of life. It's a bail-bab actually in this particular representation. And he lives in the tree. He lives in the tree of life. It's a bail-babb tree in this particular. So he's the spirit that inhabits the tree of life. And he's the eternal wise man, that's a way of thinking. So is the king. But he's sort of a superordinate king or an outside king, in some sense. He's the repository of ancient wisdom.

And the king is the manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the world. And so they're friends. And that means that the king is the manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the world. And so they're friends, and that means that the king is a good king, because if the king was a bad king, he would be alienated from himself, and that would make him shallow and one-dimensional, and that would make him a bad ruler. No union with the traditions of the past. To be a good ruler, you have to rescue your father from the underworld and integrate that. And of course, that's a main theme in this entire movie. So, okay, so the hero is born and that's what the rising sun represents and everybody goes,

oh, isn't that cute? And the reason for that is because you're biologically wired, especially if you're agreeable to respond with caretaking activity to cuteness. And cuteness is button-nosed, big eyes, small mouth, round head, symmetry, and helpless movements. And you'll respond to that across the entire class of mammalian creatures, even maybe down to lizards. Isn't that cute? No, it's a lizard.

But you know. So that's an archetype as well. That's the archetype of the vulnerable hero at the vulnerable hero newly born and that should invoke a desire mostly on the part of males to encourage and mostly on the part of females to nurture but males and females are quite cross-wired among human beings and so there's encouragement from the women and there's also nurturing from the man, and there's also nurturing from the men. And of course, those curves, in some sense, overlap. So there's more nurturing males and more encouraging females, but that's roughly the archetype. And so he looks cute and everybody goes, ah, and that's because the animators nailed that. They caught the

essential features of cuteness. And he's also in the light, right? And so then the Shaman mandrel basically baptizes him, and that's essentially what he's doing. And so then the shaman, mandrel, basically baptizes him, that's essentially what he's doing. And he uses something that's symbolic of the sun, which is this ripe fruit. And fruits are symbolic of the sun because, of course, they need the sun to ripen and they're round like the sun. And so, and people know that they need light. But, and so anyways, the animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to break and the sun. And so he's also being baptized into the sun, and that means that he's being baptized into the light or that he's

being transformed into a hero. And so then everyone's happy, and that's basically the divine father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self who's taking care of that. And there's a union between the baby and the wise old man because the baby is all the potential that's realized in the self. And there's an old idea that the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain it. It's a brilliant idea and that echoes through myths all over the world. And that means you have to regain your capacity once you're disciplined,

and you know how to do something, you have to regain your capacity for play and sort of for wide-eyed wonder. And that's maybe the childlike part of your spirit, and the reintegration of that childlike part with the adult grown-up part revivifies the adult grown-up part and allows the child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world. And so that's all being hinted at there. And then they show the shaman shows the baby, the newborn hero to the crowd.

And it's very cool what happens in the movie, all the animals spontaneously kneel. And I can give you an example of that kind of spontaneous action in a crowd. So imagine you're watching gymnastics performance, right? And it's like at a high level world-class performance. And someone comes out there and they do this routine. It's just dead, letter perfect, you know? And they stop and everybody claps like mad, right? And it's perfect.

And so then the next contestant comes out and they're basically in real trouble. Because you know, this person just got 9.7 out of 10 and it was perfect. So how do you beat perfect? And so they come out there and then you watch them and you're right on the edge of your seat because what you see them do is something extraordinarily disciplined just like the last person did, but they push themselves into that zone that's just beyond their discipline capacity and you can tell every second you're watching it that they're that close to disaster.

And so you're right on the edge of your seat, and you know that they're doing a high wire act without a net. And so when they finally land triumphantly, you'll all stand up and collapse spontaneously. And it's because you've just witnessed someone who's a master at playing a game, who's also a master at improving how to play that game at the same time.

And people love that more than anything to see that. It's just absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to the human spirit. And you'll respond automatically and unconsciously to that. That's why that's an analogy to why the animals all spontaneously bow when now what happens is he shows the line and the sun breaks and shines on the hero at the same time. So there's this concordance between an earthly event and a so-called heavenly event, and Jung would call that synchronous. That's his idea of synchronicity, where something important, subjectively,

is also signified by something that appears in narrative keeping with that in the outside world. It's one of the most controversial elements of his theory, but I've experienced a variety of synchronous events, and they often happen in therapy, especially around dreams, but they're very hard to communicate because they're so specific to the context in which it occurs, they're very difficult to explain. So anyways, it's the synchronous event

that makes drops all the animals to their knees. So there's the sun coming out and there's shining on them. And although primates go mad for that, and that's, of course, exactly what we do when we applaud. And then we switch to scar. Now scar is Mufasa's brother, evil brother. The king always has an evil brother. And so does the hero. The hero always has an adversary. And the reason for that is the king always has an evil brother. And so does the hero. The hero always has an adversary. And the reason for that is the king always has an evil brother. And that means that the state always has a tyrannical element. And the tyrannical element exists for two reasons. One is the state deteriorates of its own accord. And that's an entropy observation. What that means is that the state is a construction of the past, right? But the present isn't the same as the past, and to the degree that the past is

mismatched with the demands of the present, then it's then it's then it's tyrannical, it's malfunctioning, and so it's a continual problem with the state. It's always two steps behind the environment, and so then that means that the awareness of living people has to update the state. And so Eliad and Merchia Eliad, who's a great historian of religions, looked at flood stories from all over the world because there are flood stories from all over the world, partly because there are floods all over the world. But that's, there's a psychological reason too.

So you imagine that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane, right? A flood. And you say, well, that was an act of God. But then you think, wait a second. Wait a second. They knew those damn dicks weren't going to hold. They knew they weren't built strong enough. They took the money that was allocated to the dicks and spent it badly.

And that was willful blindness. And so you could say that it was God who caused the flood, so to speak, metaphorically. But you could also say that it was the degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of the politicians that caused the flood. In Holland, they built the dikes to withstand the worst storm in 10,000 years.

In the Southern US, they built them to withstand the worst storm in 100 years. And they knew that that was insufficient. And so the flood, if there's a flood, well, you can say, well, that's an act of nature, but you can also say, just wait a sec. Maybe there was a flood because we looked the other way and because our systems were out of date.

And that's why in flood stories, there's a continual theme, which is the people get wiped out by the flood because God judges them harshly for their sinility and their willful blindness. And it's a story that's very much, you'll have a flood in your life, right? It'll be a flood of chaos, and you'll find of one form or another, and you'll find when you investigate the causes of the flood that some of it will be, and sometimes this is the case,

it's just random. You just got singled out, you got a terrible disease, and that's the end of you or something like that. But there'll be other situations where the flood comes and you're surrounded by chaos and you'll look into it and you'll think, I knew this was coming. I knew I wasn't paying attention. I knew I hadn't sorted things out. And the consequences of that will have cascaded and wiped you out.

And then you're in real trouble because not only did you get wiped out, but you also know what's your fault. And that is not a good thing. That makes you bitter and resentful and murderous when that happens. So anyway, scar is scarred, right? So what that implies is he's had a pretty rough life and he's kind of skinny and he said he was born in the low end of the gene pool. And so he has reasons to be resentful. He's also hyper-intelligent and rational. And it's one of the things you see very commonly about the evil adversary of the state or of the individuals, often intelligent and hyper-rational. And the best commentator on that was probably John Milton in Paradise Lost because that's how he represents Lucifer

or Satan, who's the spirit of rationality and enlightenment, strangely enough, hence Lucifer, the bringer of light. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, and this is something that Milton figured out, when he compiled all these ancient stories about evil and tried to make them coherent, was that the problem with irrationality, with rationality, is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions. And so then it comes up with a theory that makes out a totality, and then it won't let go. So the rational mind has a totalitarian element.

And we know that to some degree, because that kind of rationality seems more left hemisphere focused, and the left hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world and be updated by the right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere generally updates it with negative information and with fantasy. And so the left hemisphere will impose a coherent structure on the world, which is really necessary for you to live in it. But the problem is there's a tension between coherence and completeness.

And that's partly why you need two hemispheres. You need one to represent the world. And you need one to keep track of the exceptions and to feed those slowly into the representational system so that it can stay updated without collapsing into complete chaos. So anyways, scar, and he's got this droopy mouth and this whiny, arrogant voice, and he feels hard done by, and he's resentful. And in classic hero stories, stories of the state as well,

so this is an Egyptian take on it, Osiris was the god of the state and set who later became Satan, that name became Satan as it transformed through cop to Christianity. Osiris had a brother named Seth and set, he didn't pay attention to Seth, enough attention. And Seth was always scheming to overthrow the kingdom, just like Scar is.

And the Egyptian said straight forwardly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by Set, he got chopped into pieces and his pieces distributed throughout the state in the mythological representation. And those pieces were actually the provinces of Egypt, technically speaking. And that's what the Egyptians thought.

So that's quite cool. But the Egyptians said explicitly that the reason that Oseerus got overthrown by Set was because he was willfully blind, old senile and willfully blind, same idea as the flood myth. You don't see that quite here because Mufasa is sort of on to Set or to Scar, but Scar is more treacherous than Mufasa believes, and he gets at Mufasa is sort of on to set or to scar, but scar is more treacherous than Mufasa believes,

and he gets at Mufasa by going through his son by playing on the impulsivity and juvenile qualities of his son. So obviously there's some antagonism between these two as you can see by their facial expressions there. And there's the good example of scar. You know, he's got that droopy, kind of whiny, malevolent face and that malevolent voice that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly well.

And he's always skulking. He's a creature of the night. He always skulks around. He's not a creature of the day in any sense of the word. And obviously, Mufasa is golden like the sun and scar is dark like the night. That's, Mufasa is golden like the sun and scars dark like the night. That's another clue, another hint. Okay, there's the tree. That's the tree of life. We already talked about that. I think that represents the multiple

levels at which you exist simultaneously all the way from the subatomic, all the way up to the cosmic, so to speak. And that's a different kind of dimension. And that's the place that the self inhabits, and it can kind of move up and down those dimensions. But anyways, the shaman lives inside that tree, and that's our first introduction to him, basically, but he's the spirit of the ancient tree. That's another way of thinking about it. It's a very, very common element in stories, right? The spirit of the ancient tree. And so, all right, so now, Mufasa has taken Simba up to the top of the pyramid, right? So that's the aluminum place, let's say,

or the place of the eye, where you can really see a long ways, and he's explaining to him what his kingdom is going to be. And you see the sun, of course, appears at that to begin with, and that's another hint about being at the top. That's the illuminated part of the pyramid. And so they're up there talking. And what Mufasa Tel Simba is that his kingdom is every place the light has touched. And that's so brilliant. So one of the things you'll notice, if you move into a new apartment, you're like a cat. Cats don't like changing houses. And they have to zoom around in every

corner to see exactly what the hell is going on there before they calm down. They need to know where they can hide and where the potential dangers are. And what you'll find if you move into a new place that you will not be comfortable there until you've investigated, potentially cleaned and repaired every single square inch of it. The more attention you pay to it, the more it'll become yours. And that's far more than mirror, like material ownership, which is also relevant. But in order to feel comfortable somewhere

and to dominate that place, to be enmeshed in that place, you have to attend to it. You have to shine light on every corner. And you have to do that with yourself and with your relationships as well. And so anyways, Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything that the light shines on. And that's exactly right.

And then there's a metaphor there too, which is that what you've shown light on, which is what you've come to understand and master, is surrounded by an other world of all the things that you don't understand. And some of those would be natural things, and some of them would be tyrannicalical things and some of those would be things you don't want to know about yourself. But they're outside of where you've managed to shine the light. And so that's exactly what Mufasa Tel Simba says. We live in this pyramid. We're at the top. There's a domain of light around it that's explored territory. Outside of that, there's unexplored territory, and that's partly the unconscious, because you fill it with fantasy, and it's partly what you just don't know.

And then Mufasa tells Simba, and it's sort of like God telling Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden not to eat the apple. Mufasa tells Simba, there's this outside place that's dark, that's not part of your kingdom, and you should not go there. And that's really interesting, because Simba doesn't even know about that place yet.

And so Mufasa is doing something very contradictory there. It's like telling him that it exists and heightening his curiosity, but also saying that he should go there, almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do. You see this in the Pinocchio movie, too, where Pinocchio is planning to jump into the ocean to go get a jappetto from the underworld, and he's following his conscience as along with him, Jiminy Cricket. And the Cricket is warning him about all the dangers that he'll face down there,

and telling him that he will be fish food personally. And while he's doing that, Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail, around a rock, so he can sink and the little cricket helps him tie the knot. So while he's warning him about the adventure he's going to undertake at the same time he's encouraging him to do it. And there's that paradoxical thing, which is that if you go outside what you know, it will cause a fall, because it'll damage your knowledge structures, and you'll go down into chaos. And that can really destroy you, so you shouldn't do it. But by the same token, if you do do it and you do it successfully, then the new you that

are realises can be stronger and more complete than the previous you. So you should do it and you shouldn't do it. And that's anyone sensible says, look, don't bother. But sensible isn't enough. That's the thing. You have to also be not sensible in order to live. And your typical hero, and Harry Potter's a really good example, is always a rule breaker, always.

But he, you know, the rules he breaks are like, there's judiciousness behind the rule breaking. The hero breaks a rule in the service of a higher good, but he's still breaking the rules. And that's what puts him outside the boundary of the social establishment. So, now, at this point, Simba also gets introduced to Scar, and that has two meanings. One is that Scar is the tyrannical element of the state, and so, as a child, when you're being socialized,

you encounter the tyranny of the state, and one of the best, there's no way around it. One of the best examples of that is that children are always running around having fun, and they're really bubbly and impulsive and joyous and playful. And that causes a lot of trouble, because positive emotion is very disruptive. They'll run around and break things,

they'll hurt themselves, and they'll get into trouble. And so you're always saying, calm down, sit down, behave. Don't do that. And it's not because they're get into trouble. And so you're always saying calm down, sit down, behave. Don't do that. And it's not because they're crying or angry. It's because they're so damn happy and impulsive that no one can stand them. And so that's a tyranny. It's like the state puts pressure on you

to regulate your emotions, positive, negative, and positive. And it crushes you. It crushes the life out of you, a lot of it. And so you end up your age and you're all mopey because the whole, especially because you've been forced to sit down in school for like 17 years, you're all mopey and it's no wonder, you know, you've had the spirit taken out of you by the process of discipline. But without that, you'd be completely useless. So it's another one of those paradoxical, you know, gifts and catastrophes that you encounter as you move through life. So anyways, Simba, look at how happy he is. He doesn't know a damn thing. He's so naive, you can tell by, oh look, it's some my Uncle Skar. It's like, you know, and this is not a guy you smile at clearly, but he's all positive emotion and joy and enthusiasm, and that's not good because

that means this character can take serious advantage of it, and that's not good because that means this character can take serious advantage of it and that's exactly what he does. And so Scar pretends to be on his side which is what a good pedophile always does by the way. And so you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and openness in order to exploit them and that's what horrible people do that all the time including the parents of children and other children themselves. So, you know, there's this false, I mean, look at the animators are so damn brilliant, hey? Look at that expression. Really, like, you know, you just look at that and you think,

well, that's just a facial expression, but of course, it's not. Some damn animators worked a really hard to get that. They're really observant, and they distilled the facial, look how big the face is, right? It covers the whole head. And they've got the eyebrow lifts proper and they've got this horrible sanctimonious smile and the tilt of the head. And you know, and he's sort of crushing him while he's hugging him at the same time. And really, really. And you know, it took a lot of

thought for every single one of these frames to be put together, right? There's a tremendous amount of cognitive effort that went into that. So none of this is accidental. Yeah, well that pretty much says everything. It's like, I hate that kid. I can hardly wait till he's gone and didn't I pull one over on him. You know, it's real testament to an adult's genius when he can fool a kid. So then Simba encounters the anima. That's the anima, the Jungian anima, and the anima is the feminine counterpart in the soul. And she, well, yeah, you could tell what she does to him, right? Because she's got this super-cilious and what would you say, judgmental and teasy look on her face?

And she's really trying to put him down, and it's work at like bad. He's not very happy about that at all. And she's the thing, this is what the anima does, the soul. She's the thing that teaches the exploratory hero that it's not everything it could be. And that's part of, this can be read multiple ways, but it's part of the eternal tendency of women to make men self-conscious by their sexual selectivity.

That's part of it, because that makes men self-conscious like nothing else. And it's also perhaps been one of the phenomena that's produced the evolutionary arms race in this sex as among human beings that's caused our rapid cortical expansion and our quick movement away from chimpanzees who aren't selective maters by the way. So look at him, Jesus, you just want to slap him, right? He's the son of a kid. I'd love to introduce one of our new podcast sponsors, Surfshark. Surfshark is a VPN.

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to cover is to do that with examples. They stick better and they're more interesting. And it's very difficult to understand Jung outside of a narrative context And so I'm going to walk you through the Lion King today. How many of you have seen the Lion King? Yes, so how many of you haven't Right, okay, so so you obviously were raised in a box somewhere out in the middle of the field So anyways, you know, it's it's an amazingly popular animated movie. I think it was the most high-scroasing animated movie ever made, made until frozen, which I actually absolutely detested.

But the Lion King, the Lion King is actually consciously influenced by archetypes as well as unconsciously influenced by them. So it's a bit of a cheat, I would say, in some sense, but it doesn't. I don't, for the purposes that we're using it for, I think it's just fine. And so partly, what you might think about is that it's relationship to archetypal themes that made it so overwhelmingly popular, same being the case with, say, books and movies like Harry Potter or the entire Marvel series. Marvel series is quite interesting. I know somebody who wrote for Batman and for Wolverine. I know Batman isn't a Marvel comic. But one of the things that he told me that was quite interesting

was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their own, they have a backstory, and which becomes part of the mythology that's collectively held by the readers. And if you can invent an alternative universe where you can muck about with the backstory, but otherwise you better stick with it, or the readers are going to write you and tell you

that you've got the story wrong. And so there's a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the readers after these things take on a life of their own. And so, and of course, they tend to, the comic books in particular, tend to, tend towards mythological themes very, very rapidly.

And so anyways, Carl Jung was a fascinating person, I think you can read his biography, autobiography slash biography, which is called Memory, Streams and Reflections, which in many ways I think is an unfortunate book because it's usually the only book that people read that is more or less by Jung, but and it is more popularly accessible,

which is probably a good thing, but it's also, it's not as rigorous as his other books. And so, the problem with someone like Jung is you kind of have to read him as much as you can in the original, because interpreting him is not a very straightforward matter. He was a very visionary person, by which I mean, he had an incredible visual

imagination and he used that a lot, he used it in his therapy practice. I believe that most of his therapy clients were high in trait openness. I have a lot of clients who are high in trait openness. They kind of seek me out because I'm high in trait openness and you know they watch my videos and that sort of thing, and they're interested in what I'm doing. And many of them are astute dreamers and prolific dreamers. And many open people in my experience have archetypal dreams. Whereas people who are lower in openness, they either don't dream at all, or they don't remember their dreams as much,

or they're not interested in them, and they're not interested in the mythological underpinnings of them. So I've taught psychology, roughly speaking, to many different types of people, including lawyers and lawyers and physicians, and they tend to be higher in trait conscientiousness than in openness. And they're much more interested

in the practical applications of psychology and maybe the big five theories than they are in the narrative underpinnings. And people say that when they went to Jung, they had Jungian dreams, but I don And people say that when they went to Jung, they had Jungian dreams. But I don't, and then when they went to Freud, they had Freudian dreams. And I don't really believe that's exactly true.

I think it was a matter of selection bias, a priori selection bias on the part of the people who were likely to go see either of those two. And so, but I've been struck by some clients in particular, how unbelievably continually they can generate deep archetypal dreams with a really coherent narrative structure. It's really phenomenal and how revealing those dreams are. Problem with archetypal dreams is that they're not really personal, right?

So if you're looking for a personal way out of a situation, an archetypal dream doesn't help you that much because it gives you the general pattern rather than a specific solution to your problem, but a good dream will do both at once. Anyways, Jung was an astute student of Freud's. We'll cover Freud next, although generally in personality courses, the order is reversed. Freud first and then Jung because of their temporal order of their thought. But I think it's better to start with Jung because it's as if Freud excavated into the basement

and then Jung excavated into many, many floors underneath the basement of the mind. And so if you're transitioning from an archaic, understanding of archaic modes of thinking towards Freud, it's better to go through Jung because Jung is, I think Freudian theory is a subset of Jungian theory, fundamentally, just like Newtonian physics is a subset of Einsteinian physics. And I think that Freud knew that even to some degree, although he was very much opposed

to any sort of religious thinking, or mythological religious thinking, I would say. He was a real 19th century materialist, and he didn't like the fact that Jung's work started to delve into religious themes in a manner that actually, in some sense, validated those themes. And so that's actually why they split. They split when Jung published a book called Symbols of Transformation. Jung was also a deep student of Nietzsche, Nietzsche wrote a book called Thus Spakes Aerothustra, which is kind of an old testament revelation poetry kind of book. It's a strange one, and I wouldn't recommend if you want to read Nietzsche that you start with that one, but most people do. But Jung did a seminar on Thus Spakes Ayrathustra, which is about, I've got this wrong, it's somewhere between 700 and 1,100 pages long,

and it only covers the first third of the book. And thus, Bakes Aerothouster is actually quite a short book. And so, well, so you can imagine how much Jung had to know about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words. And Nietzsche was a, well, an absolute genius. And Jung was actually trying to answer the question that Nietzsche posed fundamentally, which is why part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a Freudian. He was, so Nietzsche, basically stated, let's say explicitly, that scientific empiricism, slash rationalism had resulted in the death of the mythological tradition of the West, roughly speaking. That's Nietzsche's comment on the death of God. And in that comment, he also said that the fact that God was dead was going to

produce tremendous, ideational and social, historical upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people. He didn't say all that in one place. It's spread between part of its in will to power. And I can't remember the source of the other one. Some of its's in will to power, and I can't remember the source of the other one. Some of it's referenced in thus speaks to Earth's true story. But Nietzsche believed that in order to overcome the collapse of traditional values with the idea of God as its cornerstone, people would have to become creatures that could produce their own values as a replacement, that we would have to become capable of generating autonomous values.

And Jung, but that's easier said than done because trying to impose a set of values on yourself is very difficult because you're not very cooperative. And you know that if you try to get yourself to do something that you don't want to do or that's hard, you just won't do it. And so it's not like you can just invent your own values and then go along with that. That just doesn't work. And so what Jung and the Freudians did, Freud first, I would say, was to start looking into people's fantasies, autonomous fantasies, unconscious fantasies, to see if they could and discovered that values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies. And you can imagine, for example, if you've become enamored of someone that you might start fantasizing about them.

And if you read off the fantasy, then you can tell what you're after and what you're up to. And so the motivational force composes the fantasy. And Freud was more interested in that in a personal sense. So in so far as your fantasies might reveal your personal history. So for example, if you have a burst of negative emotion in a clinical session, there'll be a fantasy

that goes along with that and an association of ideas that kind of manifest themselves of their own accord. And they're not necessarily coherent and logical. They're linked by emotion. That's the free association technique in Freudian psychology. And they also might manifest themselves in dreams and fantasies.

And so Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous, let's call them fantasies. and so Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous, let's call them fantasies, and Jung linked that more, Freud did this first with the Edible complex, but then Jung linked up spontaneous fantasies and dreams with mythology and fantasy across history, and of course Piaje did the same thing from a completely different standpoint. And then a lot of that's embedded in this movie, so we might as well just walk through it. So the first question might be,

well why is a lion a king, right? And because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king, and of course a lion is an apex predator, and so which means it's at the top of the food chain, roughly speaking, and it's sort of golden like the sun, so that's also useful. And you know, it has that mane that makes it look majestic, and of course it's very physically powerful.

And it's intimidating. And so it's something that you run away from as well, right, or you're awestruck by. So the fact that, you know, it's like snail king just doesn't make any sense, right? But lion king, that works. And you've got to think about those things because it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king, but a snail wouldn't. But it fits in with your metaphorical understanding of the way the world works much better. And so the Lion King makes sense. And well, and when things like that that aren't rationally self-evident, make sense, you have to ask

yourself in what metaphorical contexts do they make sense. So you have the Lion King. Now the movie opens with a sunrise, and the sunrise is equivalent to the dawn of consciousness. So that in many archaic stories, the sun was a hero like a chorus, if I remember correctly, was a solar king, but Apollo in particular, but Apollo, Greek myth, the idea was that the sun was the hero, the hero, who illuminated the sky in the day. And so heroism and illumination and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically. And then at night, what would happen would be

that sun would fight with the dragon of darkness, basically, or with evil all night, and then rise again victorious in the morning. And so it's a death and rebirth theme, and it's very, very, very common mythological theme. And the reason the sun is associated with consciousness, as far as I can tell, is that we're not nocturnal creatures, right? We're awake during the day, and we're very, very visual. Half our brain is devoted to visual processing and to be enlightened and illuminated means to move towards

a higher state of consciousness. And we naturally use light symbolism to represent that, you know, like the light bulb on the top of someone's head. You know, you don't say, I was in darkened when you learned something new. And so again, that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that's, I think, deeply biologically grounded, but also socially grounded.

So it's a new day. It's the start of a new day. And a day-day actually means, like French, Journet, it means the day-track in some sense. And how to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question. The day is the canonical unit of time. And so you have to know how to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question. The day is the canonical unit of time. And so you have to know how to comport yourself during the day. And part of that is a journey from consciousness into unconsciousness and that's and that return. So like Apollo, you you you you you descend into unconsciousness and then reemerge. And of course that's not metaphorical at all. That's

exactly what you do. You descend into the underworld of darkness and dreams and strange things happen down there. And so, and then you awake if you're fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your state of mind, you awake in the morning and it's a new day, right? And so the dream world seems to help you sort out your thoughts, by the way, if you keep people awake for an extended period of time, then they lose their minds, essentially. The unconsciousness and the dream state seem absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health, although people don't exactly understand why. It looks like dreams might help you forget, because forgetting is really important. You just can't remember everything that happens.

You get so damn cluttered that you'd fall apart. And so you reduce things to the gist, and when you're doing that, you pack them in, ited that you'd fall apart. And so you reduce things to the gist. And when you're doing that, you pack them in, it's like you compress them in some sense. You pack them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant. And the dream seems to be part of that. It also seems to be a place where you deeply encode learning that might have been done that day, which is something that Freud actually noted in his interpretation of dreams, which is a great book. If you're ever going to read a book that Freud wrote, the interpretation of dreams is the proper one to read.

In my estimation, it's a brilliant book. And it laid the groundwork for a lot of what Jung did. And so anyways, that's how the movie starts. And the animals come out into the light. And that's a metaphor for the dawning of consciousness to come out into the light, where you can see. And so this is a baby giraffe, and's emergent to the light, roughly speaking. And that's, like I said, that's a representation of the emergence or expansion of consciousness.

So this is how the movie starts. It starts with very expansive music as well, celebratory music. And that's to indicate to you, to set the tone for the movie, but also to indicate to you that you're about to watch something of import. And the opening scene is actually a real scene of genius in my estimation. The animators did a great job, and it goes along very nicely with the music. And so you see this lit place, and then you see this rock, a pride rock, I believe it's called, in the middle of it. And it's the center. It's the center.

It's like the spot that's marked by a cathedral, which is an X or a cross, and you're right in the middle of that. And so it's the center of the light, that's another way of thinking about it, or it's the center of the territory, or it's the home, or it's the fire in the wilderness, or it's the tree in the center where you live. It's all of those things at once. It's inhabited territory with you at the center. And the rock represents tradition, because people tend to inscribe their traditions on rock, right, or to build them into rock like the pyramid.

So you could think about that as a pyramid, as an Egyptian pyramid, and it's the right way to think about it. You could also think about it as a dominance hierarchy with the apex predator at the top, and that's the lion. So it makes sense that the lion would be in the light on the rock, that's a pyramid in the middle of the territory, right? That makes sense to people psychologically. So because that's what the state is.

The state is a hierarchy with something at the top that occupies a space that has been illuminated and made safe by consciousness. That's what the state is. And that's all represented right away in this movie. And all the animals come to observe what's happening in the pyramid and at the top, because they need to know what happens at the top, partly to organize their world. That's the pyramid, but also to see how the organizational

principle works. And that's why they're all gathering. And so they're gathering in the light in the morning to observe something new that's going to be born. That's of significant importance, and that's the birth of the hero. And this little bird here, Zezou, right? Zezou is like Horus, the Egyptian god who was a falcon and an eye at the same time. He is the king's eye in this, king's eyes in this movie, right? He flies up above outside of the pyramid so he can see everything that goes on and

reports to the king. And so, partly what that indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be an eye. And that's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill. It's exactly the same idea. Or if you look at the Washington Monument, which is a pyramid at the top, you see that it's capped with aluminum. And you think, well, why aluminum? And the answer to that was it was the most expensive metal at that time. And so the notion is that at the top of the pyramid, there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid. It's something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything. And so you could think about it this way, is that you're going to be in a lot of pyramids in your life, dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that.

And they'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy, and they'll be something at the top. And the top is the thing that can do well across hierarchies. So it's not stuck in any one pyramid, and it's partly associated with vision and the ability to see a long, long distance. Also to see what you don't want to see and to report that back to the king.

And so the king, fundamentally, as far as you guys are concerned from a psychological perspective, that's your super ego that's the Freudian perspective or it might be the moral system by which you comport yourself, but your eyes are the thing that updates that, right? You need it to orient yourself in the world, you need it to orient yourself among other people. But your eye and your capacity to pay attention, especially to what you don't want to pay attention to, is the thing that continually updates that model, exactly as PHA laid out with children. And all of that's packed into the imagery in the first few minutes of this movie. That's actually why it relies on imagery.

Why this isn't just a lecture by a psychologist. You know, when you go to see the movie, it's because the images, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and there's thousands of pictures in this movie, obviously. But maybe a picture is worth more words than you can actually use to describe it, if the picture is profound enough. And we have many, many pictures like that. Any deeply symbolic picture is virtually inexhaustible

in terms of its semantically with regards to its explanation. Images are very, very dense. So anyways, the animals all gathered. Now, the animals are also id representations from the Freudian perspective, and the id is the part of your psyche, from the Freudian perspective that's animalistic and full of implicit drives, sexual and aggressive in particular, as far as Freud was concerned.

And that's because those two drives, say, unlike thirst or hunger, are much more difficult to integrate into proper social being and tend to be excluded and left unconscious. And so a lot of Freudian psychology, and I would say psychology in general, is focused on the integration of sexual impulses and aggressive impulses into the psyche. I would also add to that anxiety, because anxiety is also a major problem, anxiety and negative emotion that's pain-like

is also a major problem for people. And so the animals represent those in-like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically before you can become an integrated being in precisely the Piagetti in manner, right? Because Piagetti would say, well, the child comes into the world with reflexes, and maybe a more modern psychologist would also concentrate on the implicit motivations, and those have to be organized inside the child into some kind of hierarchy of unity before the child can organize him or herself

into the broader unity of the state. And that's basically what's being represented here. And so Zazoo, the eyes of the king, comes to check out the king and that's what's his name. What's the king's name? Mufasa, yeah, and he's a very regalal looking person lying, and he stands up straight and tall, and that means that he's high in serotonin because serotonin governs posterior flexion,

and if so, if you're dominant and near the top of hierarchies, you tend to expand so that you look bigger than you could if you shrunk down, and so if you're low dominant person, you wander around like this so that you look small and weak, and you don't pose a threat to anybody, But if you're at the top, you expand yourself so that you can command the space and that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture. And if you look at his facial expression, you see that it's quite severe. He's capable of kindness, but he's also harsh and judgmental. And that's what society is like. That's what the

super ego is like. And what that means is that he's integrated his aggression. And I've seen this happen in my clinical clients when they come in and they're too agreeable. They look like Simba looks later in the movie when he's an adolescent and he's sort of like a deer in the headlights, everything is coming in and nothing is coming out. But when the person integrates their shadow

and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality, Their face is hardened. And if you look at people, you can tell because the people who are too agreeable look child like an innocent and the people who are hyper aggressive person will look mean and cruel. But I've seen people's face change, face change in the course of therapy. Men and women, and what happens is they start to look more mature, and it's more like they're judging the world as well as interacting with it properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them.

It's very, very necessary. And that's part of the incorporation of the union shadow or the incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective. But old Musa-Fa there, he's already got that covered. And he's capable, obviously, he can smile, and he's capable of the full range of expressions, but he's a tough looking character. And now, this, the baboon here, who's supposed to be basically just a fool when the story was first written, he turned into what's essentially a shaman across time. And so he represents the self from the union perspective. Now, the self is everything you could be across time.

So you imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you, whatever that is, you know. And potential is an interesting idea because it's represents something that isn't yet real, yet we act like it's real. Because people will say to you, you should live up to your potential. And that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information, right?

Because you build yourself out of the information in the Piagetian sense, but it's deeper than that, too, because we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment, new genes turn on in your nervous system. They encode for new proteins. And so you're full of biological potential that won't be realized unless you move yourself

around in the world into different challenging circumstances and that'll turn on different circuits. So it's not merely that you're incorporating information from outside world in the constructivist sense. It's that by exposing yourself to different environments, you put different physiological demands on yourself all the way down to the genetic level, and that manifests new elements of you.

And so one of the things that happens to people, and this is a very common cultural notion, is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central, and that would be, say, like the rock, in the pride rock, in the Lion King, because you take yourself out of your dopey little village, and that's just a little bounded U that everyone knows, and that isn't very expanded, and then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place, and while you do that, you have adventures, and they toughen you, and pull more out of you, like, partly

because you're becoming informed, which means information formation, it means you're becoming more organized at every level of analysis, but there's also more of you, too. And so that's a very classic idea, and then in cathedrals in Europe, especially at Charter, there's a big maze on the floor, a circular maze, which is a symbolic representation of the pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it. And so it's a huge circle divided into quadrants, which is a union Mandela. And you enter the maze at one point,

and then you have to walk through the entire maze, North, East, West, and South, before you get to the center. And the center is symbolized by a flower that's carved in stone. It looks like this. It's big this maze. It's large, so that you can walk it. And that's a symbolic pilgrimage. It takes you to the center. That's the center of the cross, because it's large so that you can walk it. And that's a symbolic pilgrimage. It takes you to the center.

That's the center of the cross because it's in a cathedral and that's the point of acceptance of voluntary suffering. That's what that means. And so you walk through, you don't call that a circumambulation. You go to all the quarters of the world to find yourself. And so, well, this self is the baboon in this particular, I think he's a mand the baboon in this particular, I think he's a mandrel actually, in this particular representation.

And he lives in the tree, he lives in the tree of life. It's a bail-bab tree in this particular. So he's the spirit that inhabits the tree of life. And he's the eternal wise man, that's a way of thinking. So is the king, but he's sort of a superordinate king or an outside king in some sense. He's the repository of ancient wisdom, and the king is the manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the world. And so they're friends, and that means that the king is a good king, because if the king

was a bad king, he would be alienated from himself, and that would make him shallow and one dimensional, and that would make him a bad ruler. No union with the traditions of the past. To be a good ruler, you have to rescue your father from the underworld and integrate that. And of course, that's a main theme in this entire movie. So, okay, so the hero is born, and that's what the rising sun represents, and everybody goes, oh, isn't that cute?

And the reason for that is because you're biologically wired, especially if you're agreeable to respond with caretaking activity to cuteness. And cuteness is button-nosed, big eyes, small mouth, round head, symmetry, and helpless movements. And you'll respond to that across the entire class of mammalian creatures, even maybe down to lizards. Isn't that cute? No, it's a lizard.

But you know. So that's an archetype as well. That's the archetype of the vulnerable hero at the vulnerable hero newly born. And that should invoke a desire mostly on the part of males to encourage and mostly on the part of females to nurture. But males and females are quite cross-wired among human beings, and so there's encouragement from the women, and there's also nurturing from the men. And of course, those curves, in some sense, overlap. So there's more nurturing males and more encouraging females, but that's roughly the archetype.

And so he looks cute, and everybody goes, aw, and that's because the animators nailed that. They caught the essential features of cuteness. And he's also in the light, right? And so then the Charmin mandrel basically baptizes him, that's essentially what he's doing. And he uses something that's symbolic of the sun, which is this ripe fruit.

And fruits are symbolic of the sun because, of course, they need the sun to ripen and they're round like the sun. And so, and people know that they need light. But, and so anyways, the animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to break and the sun. And so he's also being baptized into the sun. And that means that he's being baptized into the light or that he's being transformed into a hero.

And so then everyone's happy, and that's basically, you know, the divine father and the divine mother and the divine son and the self who's taking care of that. And there's a union between the baby and the wise old man because the baby is all the potential that's realized in the self. And there's an old idea that the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain it. It's a brilliant idea and that that echoes through myths all over the world. And that means you have to regain your capacity once you're disciplined. And you know how to do something, you have to regain your capacity for play and sort of for wide eyed wonder. And that's maybe the childlike part of your spirit.

And the reintegration of that childlike part with the adult grown-up part revivifies the adult grown-up part and allows the child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world. And so that's all being hinted at there. And then the shaman shows the baby, the newborn hero, to the crowd. And it's very cool what happens in the movie, all the animals spontaneously kneel. And I can give you an example of that kind of spontaneous action in a crowd.

So imagine you're watching gymnastics performance, right? And it's like at a high level world class performance. And someone comes out there and they do this routine. It's just dead, letter perfect, you know? And they stop and everybody claps like Matt, right? And it's perfect. And so then the next contestant comes out and they're basically in real trouble because you know This person just got 9.7 out of 10 and it was perfect. So how do you beat perfect? And so they come out there and then you watch them and you're right on the edge of your seat because what you see them do is

Something extraordinarily disciplined just like the last person did But they push themselves into that zone that's just beyond their discipline capacity, and you can tell every second you're watching it that they're that close to disaster. And so you're right on the edge of your seat, and you know that they're doing a high-wire act without a net. And so when they finally land triumphantly, you'll all stand up and collapse spontaneously. And it's because you've just witnessed someone who's a master at playing a game,

who's also a master at improving how to play that game at the same time. And people love that more than anything to see that. It's just absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to the human spirit. And you'll respond automatically and unconsciously to that. And that's why that's an analogy to why the animals all spontaneously bow when now what happens is

he shows the lion king and the sun breaks and shines on the hero at the same time. So there's this concordance between an earthly event and a so-called heavenly event and Jung would call that synchronous. That's his idea of synchronicity where something important, subjectively, is also signified by something that appears in narrative keeping with that in the outside world. It's one of the most controversial elements of his theory, but I've experienced a variety of synchronicity events, and they often happen in therapy, especially around dreams, but they're very hard to communicate because they're so specific to the context in which it

occurs, they're very difficult to explain. So anyways, it's the sin-crowness event that makes drops all the animals to their knees. So there's the sun coming out and there's shining on them, and all the primates go mad for that, and that's, of course, exactly what we do when we applaud. And then we switch to scar. Now scar is Mufasa's brother, evil brother. The king always has an evil brother. And so does the hero. The hero always has an adversary. And the reason for that is the king always has an evil brother. And that means that the state always has a tyrannical element. And the tyrannical element exists for two reasons. One is the state deteriorates of its own accord.

And that's an entropy observation. What that means is that the state is a construction of the past, right? But the present isn't the same as the past. And to the degree that the past is mismatched with the demands of the present, then it's tyrannical, it's malfunctioning. And so it's a continual problem with the state.

It's always two steps behind the environment. And so then that means that the awareness of living people has to update the state. And so Elia, a Merchia Elia, who's a great historian of religions, looked at flood stories from all over the world, because there are flood stories from all over the world, partly because there are floods all over the world. But there's a psychological reason too. So you imagine that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane, a flood. And you say,

well, that was an act of God. But then you think, wait a second, wait a second. They knew those damn dicks weren't going to hold. They knew they weren't built strong enough. They took the money that was allocated to the dicks and spent it badly. And that was willful blindness. And so you could say that it was God who caused the flood, so to speak, metaphorically, but you could also say that it was the degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of the politicians that caused the flood.

In Holland, they built the dicks to withstand the worst storm in 10,000 years. In the southern US, they built them to withstand the worst storm in a hundred years, and they knew that that was insufficient. And so the flood, if there's a flood, well you can say, well, that's an act of nature, but you can also say just wait a sec. Maybe there was a flood because we looked the other way, and because our systems were out of date, and that's why in flood stories, there's a continual theme, which is the people get wiped out by the flood

because God judges them harshly for their sinility and their willful blindness. And it's a story that's very much, you'll have a flood in your life, right? It'll be a flood of chaos, and you'll find of one form or another, and you'll find when you investigate the causes of the flood, that some of it will be, and sometimes this is the case, it's just random. You just got singled out, you got a terrible disease, and that's the end of you, or something like that. But there'll be other situations where the flood comes and you're surrounded by chaos, and you'll look into it, you'll think, I knew this was coming, I knew I wasn't paying

attention, I knew I hadn't sorted things out, and the consequences of that will have cascaded and wiped you out. And then you're in real trouble because not only did you get wiped out, but you also know it's your fault. And that is not a good thing. That makes you bitter and resentful and murderous when that happens. So anyway, scar is scarred, right? So what that implies is he's had a pretty rough life and he's kind of skinny and he said he was born in the low end of the gene pool And so he has reasons to be resentful. He's also hyper intelligent and rational and it's one of the things you see very commonly about the evil adversary of the state or of the individuals often intelligent and hyper rational and The best commentator on that was probably John Milton in Paradise Lost, because that's

how he represents Lucifer or Satan, who's the spirit of rationality and enlightenment, strangely enough, hence Lucifer, the bringer of light. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, and this is something that Milton figured out when he compiled all these ancient stories about evil and tried to make them coherent, was that the problem with irrationality, with rationality, is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions, right? And so then it comes up with a theory and it makes out a totality, and then it won't let go. So the rational mind has a totalitarian element. And we know that to some degree because that kind of rationality seems

more left hemisphere focused, and the left hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world and be updated by the right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere generally updates it with negative information and with fantasy. And so the left hemisphere will impose a coherent structure on the world, which is really necessary for you to live in it. But the problem is there's a tension between coherence and completeness. And that's partly why you need two hemispheres. You need one to represent the world,

and you need one to keep track of the exceptions, and to feed those slowly into the representational system so that it can stay updated without collapsing into complete chaos. So anyways, scar, and he's got this droopy mouth and this whiny, arrogant voice, and he feels hard done by, and he's got this like droopy mouth and this whiny, arrogant voice, and he feels hard done by, and he's resentful.

And in classic hero stories, stories of the state, as well, so this is an Egyptian take on it, Osiris was the god of the state and set who later became Satan, that name became Satan as it transformed through cop to Christianity. Osiris had a brother named Set and Set, he didn't pay attention to Set, enough attention. And Set was always scheming to overthrow the kingdom, just like Scaris. And the Egyptian said straightforwardly that the reason that Osiris got overthrown by Set, he got chopped into pieces and his pieces distributed throughout the state in the

mythological representation. Those pieces were actually the provinces of Egypt, technically speaking, and that's what the Egyptians thought. So that's quite cool. But the Egyptians said explicitly that the reason that Oseerus got overthrown by SET was because he was willfully blind, old senile and willfully blind. Same idea as the flood myth.

You don't see that quite here here because Mufasa is sort of on to set or to scar, but scar is more treacherous than Mufasa believes. And he gets at Mufasa by going through his son by playing on the impulsivity and juvenile qualities of his son. And so obviously there's some antagonism between these two as you can see by their facial expressions there. And there's the good example of scar. You know, he's got that droopy, kind of whiny, malevolent face and that malevolent voice

that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly well. And he's always skulking. He's a creature of the night. He always skulks around. He's not a creature of the day in any sense of the word. And obviously, Mufasa is golden like the sun and scars dark like the night. That's another clue, another hint.

OK, there's the tree. That's the tree of life. We already talked about that. I think that represents the multiple levels at which you exist simultaneously, all the way from the subatomic, all the way up to the cosmic, so to speak. And that's a different kind of dimension. And that's the place that the self inhabits.

And it can kind of move up and down those dimensions. But anyways, the shaman lives inside that tree. And that's our first introduction to him, basically. But he's the spirit of the ancient tree. That's another way of thinking about it. It's a very, very common element in stories, right? The spirit of the ancient tree. And so, all right.

So now, Mufasa has taken Simba up to the top of the pyramid, right? So that's the aluminum place, let's say, or the place of the eye, where you can really see a long ways, and he's explaining to him what his kingdom is going to be. And you see the sun, of course, appears at that to begin with, and that's another hint about being at the top. That's the illuminated part of the pyramid. And so they're up there talking, and what Mufasa Tel Simba is that his kingdom is every place the light has touched.

And that's so brilliant. So one of the things you'll notice if you move into a new apartment, you're like a cat. Cats don't like changing houses, and they have to zoom around in every corner to see exactly what the hell is going on there before they calm down. They need to know where they can hide and where the potential dangers are. And what you'll find if you move into a new place that you will not be comfortable there until you've investigated, potentially cleaned and repaired every single square inch of it. The more attention you pay to it, the more it'll become yours.

And that's far more than mirror, like, material ownership, which is also relevant. But in order to feel comfortable somewhere, and to dominate that place, to be in meshed in that place, you have to attend to it. You have to shine light on every corner, and you have to do that with yourself and with your relationships as well.

And so anyways, Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything that the light shines on, and that's exactly right. And then there's a metaphor there too, which is that what you've shown light on, which is what you've come to understand and master, is surrounded by an other world of all the things that you don't understand. And some of those would be natural things, and some of them would be tyrannical things, and some of those would be things you don't want to know about yourself. But they're outside of where you've managed to shine the light.

And so that's exactly what Mufasa Tel Simba says, we live in this pyramid, we're at the top, there's a domain of light around it that's explored territory, outside of that, there's unexplored territory, and that's partly the unconscious because you fill it with fantasy, and it's partly what you just don't know. And then Mufasa Tel Simba, and it's sort of like God telling Adam and Eve

in the Garden of Eden, not to eat the apple. Mufasa Tel Simba, there's this outside place that's dark, that's not part of your kingdom, and you should not go there. And that's really interesting, because Simba doesn't even know about that place yet. And so Mufasa is doing something very contradictory there. It's like telling him that it exists

and heightening his curiosity, but also saying that he shouldn't go there. Almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do. You see this in the Pinocchio movie, too, where Pinocchio is planning to jump into the ocean to go get Jepetto from the underworld, and he's following his conscience as along with him, Jiminy Cricket. And the Cricket is warning him about all the dangers that he'll face down there, and telling

him that he will be fish food personally. And while he's doing that, Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail, around a rock, so he can sink and the little cricket helps him tie the knot. So while he's warning him about the adventure, he's gonna undertake at the same time he's encouraging him to do it. And there's that paradoxical thing, which is that

if you go outside what you know, it will cause a fall because it'll damage your knowledge structures and you'll go down into chaos. And that can really destroy you, so you shouldn't do it. But by the same token, if you do do it, and you do it successfully, then the new you that re-arises can be stronger and more complete than the previous you. So you should do it, and you shouldn't do it. And that's anyone sensible says, look, don't bother. But sensible isn't enough. That's the thing. You have to also be not sensible in order to live. And your typical hero and Harry Potter's a really good example

is always a rule breaker, always. But the rules he breaks are like there's judiciousness behind the rule breaking. The hero breaks a rule in the service of a higher good, but he's still breaking the rules, and that's what puts him outside the boundary of the social establishment. So, now, at this point, Simba also gets introduced to Scar,

and that has two meanings. One is that Scar is the tyrannical element of the state, and so, as a child, when you're being socialized, you encounter the tyranny of the state and one of the best, there's no way around it. One of the best examples of that is that children are always running around having fun and they're really bubbly and impulsive and joyous and playful. And that causes a lot of trouble because positive emotion is very disruptive.

They'll run around and break things, they'll hurt themselves, and they'll get into trouble. And so you're always saying calm down, sit down, behave, don't do that. And it's not because they're crying or angry. It's because they're so damn happy and impulsive that no one can stand them. And so that's a tyranny. It's like the state puts pressure on you to regulate your emotions, positive, negative, and positive. And it crushes you. It crushes the life out of you, a lot of it.

And so you end up, you know, your age, and you're all mopey because the whole, especially, because you've been forced to sit down in school for like 17 years, you're all mopey. And it's no wonder, you know, you've had the spirit taken out of you by the process of discipline. But without that, you'd be completely useless.

So it's another one of those paradoxical gifts and catastrophes that you encounter as you move through life. So anyways, Simba, look at how happy he is. He doesn't know a damn thing. He's so naive, you can tell by, oh look, it's semi-eugal scar. This is not a guy you smile at clearly, but he's all positive emotion and joy and enthusiasm and that's not good because that means this character can take serious advantage of it and that's exactly what he does.

And so scar pretends to be on his side, which is what a good pedophile always does, by the way. And so, you know, you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and openness in order to exploit them, and that's what horrible people do that all the time, including the parents of children and other children themselves. So, there's this false, I mean, look at the animators, they're so damn brilliant, hey? Look at that expression.

Really, like, you just look at that and you think, well, that's just a facial expression, but of course, it's not. Some damn animators worked a really hard to get that. They're really observant. And they distilled the facial expression. Look how big the face is. Right? It covers the whole head.

And they've got the eyebrow lifts proper. And they've got this horrible sanctimonious smile and the tilt of the head. And he's sort of crushing him while he's hugging him at the same time. And really, really. And it took a lot of thought for every single one of these frames to be put together, right? There's a tremendous amount of cognitive effort that went into that. So none of this is accidental.

Yeah, well, that pretty much says everything. It's like, I hate that kid and can hardly wait till he's gone and didn't I pull one over on him, you know. It's real testament to an adult's genius when he can fool a kid. So then, Simba encounters the anima. That's the anima, the Jungian anima, and the anima is the feminine counterpart in the soul. And she, well, yeah, you can tell what she does to him, right? Because she's got this super-cilious and what would you say, judgmental and teasy look

on her face? And she's really trying to put him down, and it's work it like bad. He's not very happy about that at all. And she's the thing, this is what the anima does, the soul. She's the thing that teaches the exploratory hero that it's not everything it could be, right? And that's part of, this can be read multiple ways,

but it's part of the eternal tendency of women to make men self-conscious by their sexual selectivity. That's part eternal tendency of women to make men self-conscious by their sexual selectivity. That's part of it, because that makes men self-conscious, like nothing else. And it's also perhaps been one of the phenomena that's produced the evolutionary arms race in this sex as among human beings that's caused our rapid, cortical expansion and our quick movement away from chimpanzees who aren't selective maitors by the way. So look at him, Jesus, you just want to slap him, right? He's

the son of a king, so he's very, very privileged, and he confuses his privilege with competence, which of course all of you do because you're all sons of the king, which is why you can sit here in the university, and you confuse your privilege with competence as well because it's not, has nothing to do with any of you that the lights are on and this place is so peaceful, right? But you take that for granted and it can make you false and arrogant like, like, Jesus, that's just so sad. You look at that kid, you think, he's in for real trouble, man.

He thinks he knows everything. And of course, then he has a wrestling match with what's her name? What's it? Was it? Nala. Nala. Yeah, he has a wrestling match with Nala and she just pins him every time, right? Gachi again, pinye again. And that's basically right. One of the things that happens with men when they meet a woman who they really desire and admire is they project an ideal onto her immediately. That's an anima projection. And then that anima projection judges them, and they act all inferior and stupid. And it's part because they are, that's why. And so then they go down and defeat constantly

to this thing that they're projecting, which at least has some concordance with the actual woman, but not that much. So, okay, they keep wrestling, and then they're on the fringe of the kingdom, this wrestling match between this pairs of opposites, takes them to the edge of the kingdom and they end up in the elephant's graveyard, right? And there's bones everywhere.

And so now they're out into the kingdom of death. And what that means is that these two kids, as they've grown up, encounter death, right? They go outside the light and it's very, very shocking for them. They're very curious about it, obviously. They go to explore the skeletons and all of that, even though they were told not to, but their curiosity, they can't stay away from death. They're too curious about it.

And so they develop knowledge of death. And that, and then, of course, out there in the dead lands is where the hyenas are. And that's exactly right, because hyenas are scavengers, right? And they can break bones with their teeth. They're really, really quite the animal. And you know, you kind of have a shutter of repugnance when you see those things.

And I think it's partly, I mean, we shared an evolutionary landscape with the ancestors of hyenas for a very, very long time. And like vultures, too, you know. You couldn't imagine something that would be more well designed to look like it was a horrible thing than a vulture, right? And there's this weird concordance and crows and ravens are like that too, carry an eaters,

you know? Eagles are kind of an exception, but they look just as creepy as they are, which is really quite interesting. And of course, Hyenas fall into that category and they laugh too, which is, you know, really, you also have to laugh really with all these other things you have going for you. And anyways, the hyenas, and hyenas are enemies of lions, and they can take lions out. They're tough things, and you know, they're not one hyena, obviously, but a bunch of hyenas

can give a lion a pretty damn rough time. And so, and these little lions are really no match for the hyenas, and so they get threatened very, very rapidly. And one of the hyenas, and so they get threatened very, very rapidly. And one of the hyenas, of course, is just completely out of its mind. And one of the things that's really interesting, and you see this with the Muppets, too, there was often a puppet that was like a crazy puppet, and its eyes would move in different directions. You know, and one of the things that happens with people who are schizophrenic is they

show involuntary eye movements, and it's because you have a brain center that controls your eyes voluntarily, and you have another one that controls them involuntarily. So you can see that, look ahead and try to move your eyes smoothly back and forth. You can't do it. You'll see that they jerk, hey, but if you watch put a finger in front of your face and then do this, they'll move perfectly smoothly. And that's because you're using different eye control centers, one voluntary and one more involuntary, and the involuntary one is actually more sophisticated. And so in schizophrenia, the involuntary eye control centers

tend to disrupt the voluntary eye control centers and that's likely part of the hallucinatory process, you know, because you have the ego in this schizophrenic that's being disrupted by processes underneath fantasies and that sort of thing. And that looks like it's reflected in involuntary eye movements, like dream movements. So anyway, so much for the crazy hyena. And they're in real trouble.

Now the king's eye, who's supposed to be keeping an eye on this and was supposed to be watching Simba, is trying to intervene. But I mean, look at him. He's a delicious little bird. And so that's not working out very well. Anyways, and then you see this immediate juxtaposition of the domain of death and the hyenas with hell, right? And everyone looks at that, and they think, well, they know exactly what that means. It's no surprise to anyone that that happens. And I suppose that's partly because on the vellt, where we evolved in large part, but not by no means all part,

fire was an ever-present danger in the grasslands, right? And so that's a good example of hell. So, ha, well, I guess that's it. We'll do some more of this when we meet on Tuesday. Bye. meet on Tuesday. Bye! [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in