The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Abraham: Father of Nations

Episode Date: August 31, 2017

Lecture 10 in the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series. The Abrahamic adventures continue with this, the tenth lecture in my 12-part initial Biblical lecture series. Abraham's life is presented as a series of encapsulated narratives, punctuated by sacrifice, and the rekindling of his covenant with God.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. Hello, everyone. It's been a very strange day, so I'm going to tell you about what happened, and then I'll start the lecture. So I got up this morning and started to put my day together, and then I tried to sign into my Gmail account. And it said that it had been disabled

because I violated the terms of service with Gmail. And I thought, well, I didn't violate any terms of service that I know of. Now I set up a new YouTube channel yesterday called Jordan B Peterson Clips, and so we made some technical changes, and so I thought maybe it had something to do with that, and I had been shot out of Google one other time years ago. So when you get a shot out like that, there's a little form you can fill out. And so I filled out the form and I said

that I had been shot out, and that I didn't know why, and I sent it off. And then I realized one of my staff members called me and said that she was locked out of the YouTube account. And I thought, oh yeah, the YouTube account is hooked to the Gmail account. So that meant that I couldn't get access to any of my YouTube videos. They were still up and online, but I couldn't get access to them. I couldn't post last week's biblical lecture for example. And so that was worrisome and made me suspicious. And then about two hours later,

something like that, I got an email from Google and they said that they had reviewed my request to be reinstated and that I had violated Google's terms of agreement or terms of service, and they weren't going to turn my account back on. And I thought, and they didn't say why. They didn't say anything. I got there was no warning whatsoever about any of this. They didn't tell me why. And they didn't say why in the email response.

And so I wrote them back and I said, because they said I could, I wrote them back and I said, this might not be a good idea, basically. And you might want to think about it. And then I tweeted what had happened, right? I took screenshots and I tweeted and I contacted a whole bunch of journalists because it turns out that I know a whole bunch of journalists. And so, and so then what happened then was that I got a call

from the daily caller in the United States. I had done an interview with them last week, which isn't posted yet. And they interviewed me, and within 20 minutes posted it online. And so they have a fairly big audience. And so that was good. And then somebody phoned me from Ottawa,

and I did a live radio show about that. And that was good. And then a number of other journalists contacted me, and I sent them the information. But another one of my staff, and actually my son, emailed me, and he said, look, you should hold off, because maybe there's still a mistake here. And I thought, yeah, there might be.

It might be just a mistake. But then why in the world did I email Google and they contacted me and they said they would not reinstate it and they didn't provide me with any information. So I contacted the other journalists and I said well you never know maybe this is just a mistake so let's hold off and then while I was about half an hour later while I was trying to get into my, I use this ad words account that's linked to Google. I don't run ads on my videos, but I need the ad words account

because it helps me add some little gadgets to the videos that I wouldn't otherwise be able to. And I was always playing with that. The system came back online, I thought. Well, that's interesting. And lots of people that emailed me and Twittered me and some people within Google and some people elsewhere. And they were doing whatever they were going to do

to help me get all this material back up and running. And so something worked. My suspicions are that what worked was the publicity. Now, but maybe not. It's very weird being in this situation because there has been a number of recent episodes where these larger companies, Facebook, Google, Patreon, not that it's a massive company,

but it's starting to become reasonably significant, have decided on rather arbitrary grounds to shut down their users. And this is very ominous to me partly because we've turned our communications over to very large systems or very large systems have emerged to mediate our communication, right? I mean, there's lots of benefit to it, so you don't want to get too cynical about it. But we're blind with regards to the policies that regulate the actions, the regulatory actions

of these large organizations. And that's really a bad thing. And something else is even more ominous, really ominous. It's highly probable that we're going to build political algorithms into our artificial intelligence. And this sort of thing will be regulated by machines that no one understands. And that's a really bad idea. And that's a really likely possibility. and that's a really likely possibility.

So anyways, I was all confused about this. I thought, Jesus, maybe I flew off the handle, you know, because I was sort of, was stressful, man, you know, because I have like 150,000 emails in that account. Like that's a lot of emails, and it's all my correspondence for the last 10 years, you know, so it's an archive as well as an ongoing email system. I have a commercially male system that I just set up three weeks ago with like six different email addresses now to try to organize my correspondence, so I wasn't completely unable to communicate, but my calendar was gone, and that's a bloody disaster because like I've got things scheduled out forever, and I don't remember what they are. I can't even remember what I'm doing in a day, so much less than a month. But I thought maybe I flew off the handle, and I was worried

that I contacted the journalist too soon, and, you know, but anyways, it all worked out. So then what happened? Well, just as I was coming to this lecture, I stepped outside, and there was a little package outside, and luckily it wasn't a bomb. There was a package outside, nice little package. When I looked, my wife and I looked inside it and there was a couple of bottles of wine in there. So that was nice and there was a little note. And so I'm going to review the little note because it's actually pretty interesting. So, so this person said that they had finally tackled the self-authoring suite, so they seemed to be happy about that, but that's not so interesting except peripherally.

A friend on Twitter has contact with Google engineers. She said, quote, I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered to help, and I did get contacted by quite a few people at Google who said that they had been, you know, watching my lectures and so on and were happy about what I was doing. Anyways, I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered to help, but they suggest he set up a backup plan. The teams are feeling significant pressure from advocacy groups. And quote, I have at least four Google engineers who offered to speak up on his behalf.

But they know the team dynamics. And unfortunately, especially YouTube, is an SJWCES pool. I hope this information is useful to you. It's like, yeah, it's kind of useful. All right. So that was part of what happened today. And so anyways, I still don't really understand it, right?

Because I don't know why it got shut down. And I don't know if anything I did got it turned back on. And I don't know the reasons for it. And that's also rather ominous. It seems to me that when I was thinking it through, and I know I have a fairly, what would you call it? Respectable YouTube following. I don't know if you necessarily call it respectable.

It's fairly large YouTube following. And it seems to me that it would have been appropriate for Google if they were going to shut down my account to tell me why, I would think, and also maybe look me up, maybe, especially after I emailed them. And then maybe not to have emailed me back and said, no, we're not going to reinstate you, but we're not going to tell you any reasons. They didn't say they wouldn't tell me any reasons. They just didn't tell me any reasons.

And then it also seems very strange to me that it just all of a sudden went back on after two hours. And so, well, so I don't know what to make of that. Maybe more information will come to light over the next few days. I hope that I didn't jump the gun, but it's very a very peculiar set of circumstances. I thought it was kind of amusing actually that the video that they stopped me from posting today

was the last biblical lecture. You wouldn't necessarily think that that would be the sort of thing that people would want to stop from being posted. But we're in very, very strange times. So that was my adventure for today. And so I didn't, you know, I hate speakers who apologize to the crowd before they talk to them because, you know, if you're speaking to people and they put all this effort into coming, then you shouldn't tell them what a sorry and useless creature you are before you talk to them.

And ask further forbearance and forgiveness. It's like, you're a little late for that, but I'm still going to do that a little bit today because I wanted to spend all day preparing this lecture. I mean, I've prepared it a lot beforehand, but that rattled me up a lot. And so I didn't prepare as much as I could have. Anyways, we'll stumble forward and see how it goes. I'm reasonably familiar with the stories now. And so, onward and upward.

So I'm gonna reiterate this, you know, I've learned something. I have this idea that it would be a good idea for young people and older people, citizens of the West, let's say, to learn more about their culture and their civilization, right? Because it's a great civilization and it's taken a lot of work to put together. But I don't think that we really know, I mean, I know a fair bit about it, although I wouldn't consider myself nearly as educated

as a person should be, but I'm not too badly educated. But I tell you, going through these biblical lectures, verse by verse, just makes me even more aware of how unbelievably ignorant I am. And partly for two reasons, like one is because I've been using this BibleHub.com place and I think I told you last week, but I wanted to reiterate it because it's important. It's so interesting the way that they've set it up because you can go through the biblical stories verse by verse and then for each, there's a whole small font page

of commentary from multiple sources. And so not only is the Bible hyperlinked in the way that I discussed in the first lecture with all the verses referring to not all the other verses, but lots of them. But it's got its tendrils out into literature, direct commentaries on the text, but also all the literature that's been influenced by it.

So it's an unbelievably central and core text. And it's so interesting to read a book where every sentence has been commented on what really in volumes. And then just to get a sense of that volume of material, you know, how much power, brain power there's been put into this. And to also understand how bloody ignorant,

like I'm so ignorant about this, there's all this work. And it seems that we've left it to decay in the dust. And it's a big mistake, man, it's a big mistake because the people who are writing these commentaries, like, you know, a lot of it's from the 14th and 15th and 16th century, it's kind of archaic. And it's, you know, a lot of it's from the 14th and 15th and 16th century. It's kind of archaic and it's and it's some of it's outdated and some of it you wouldn't agree with. But if you read all the commentaries side by side, you know, you get a pretty good blast

of wisdom coming at you. And like the thing about wisdom is it stops you from running face first into walls, you know. It's not just there to, so that you can talk to people at parties about what university you graduated from, you know? And it's there because the information is unbelievably useful. You know, one of the things that I've realized that I want to return to tonight, because I've been thinking a lot about this idea of the arc, you know, and I think I mentioned to you last week

that I'd figured out that there is this idea that Noah was perfect in his generations and not meant that he has set his family in order. It wasn't just him, but he had set his family in order. And because of that, when the catastrophe came, like it comes to everyone, he was able to withstand it because he had the support of the people who were near and dear to him. And that's really important when things come along to lay you low, like if you're alone and the flood comes, it's like, man, goodbye to you. If you've got 10 or 15 people supporting you

in a tight network, and your interrelationships with them are pristine and you can tell them the truth, and they can tell the truth back to you, it's possible that you might be able to find that thin way that will preserve you when the terrible things come knocking at your door. And so the idea of the arc is very, very concrete.

In Noah, it's actually a structure that he inhabits. It's a concretized, almost like a child story. And I'm not being cynical about that because there are some bloody brilliant child children's stories, but it's really concretized, but then Abraham comes along, and instead of an arc, there's a covenant, right? Now it says in this story of Noah that Noah walked with God, and then of course Abraham, it isn't clear exactly that he's walking with God or before God, which we'll get into later, but you see, I see this as part of the increasing psychologization of the sacred ideas that were acted out by archaic people. So, first of all, it's concretized in the form of a ship that actually sustains

you when the floods come, right? It's very concrete imagery, the sort of thing you might see in a movie. But then, with Abraham, it turns into a psychological covenant, in some sense. It's like a contractual agreement. Now, it's a contractual agreement between Abraham and God. But that doesn't really matter. That, I mean, obviously, it matters. But it's only half of what's important about that.

The other half is that it's a contract. And one of the things that you do with your ideal, let's say, is you establish a contract with it. And you also establish like a social contract with other people, right? That's what keeps society organized. And so there's this idea that emerges in the Abraham stories of a sacred contract

and that has the same function as the arc. And what it does, because what happens in Abraham, and we'll see more of this today, is that he, you know, God tells him to go forward into the world, and we talked about that last week, and he does that, and he encounters famine, and he encounters tyranny, and he encounters powerful people who want to take from him what is his. I mean, God sends him out in the world, but it's not like he has an easy right of it. It isn't easy at all. It's as hard as it can be. But there's this consistent emphasis in the text.

And I think it's something really worth attending to that if you maintain your contract, which and that has to do with honesty and trust and truth and all of those things, if you maintain your contract and you have a good possibility, the best possible possibility of making your way through the catastrophe in the chaos. And I don't want to be naive about this, you know, when I read Jung and I started to understand

the idea of the hero archetype, you know, the idea that the human being is a force, a logos force that can stand up against chaos and catastrophe and tragedy and evil and prevail. I never did think that that meant that if you did stand up and tell the truth that you would necessarily prevail, right? It's not a magic trick, it's your best bet, that's the thing, you don't have a better option. And that's what, that's what, you see the idea is emerging in the Abrahamic text.

It's like people are figuring this out, that would be progressive revelation, that's one way of thinking about it. And you can think about that religious terms, but you can also think about it as humanity consulting itself, right? Each individual talking to themselves, which is what we do when we think. And each individual communicating with every other individual

and gathering a body of wisdom that helps people or orient themselves in the toughest conditions. And it's an incremental process. And I think that I really do believe that that's speaking purely secularly. I do believe that that's what manifests itself in the biblical stories, right? It's the dawning enlightenment of mankind,

something like that, as we start to understand the principles by which we have to live in order to orient ourselves properly in the world. So, and I also do believe, and this is the thing that's the unspoken question, it's like, you don't have any idea how rich and fulfilling your life could be, despite its tragedy and limitation, if you stop doing the things that you know to be wrong, it's a really grand experiment. And you know, one of the things that God tells Abraham constantly as the story progresses,

especially every time Abraham makes a sacrifice, as God says, walk with me and be perfect. It's something like that. And so the injunction is, well, aim high, establish this relationship with the highest thing that you can conceive of, which you might as well do that, because what are you going to do? Establish a relationship with the most mediocre thing

you can conceive of, or you're going to establish a relationship with the lowest thing you can conceive of? People do that, and I wouldn't recommend it. It's a really bad thing. And there's a lot of pain associated with that. And maybe there's pain that can expand into a world destroying force down that route. And there's absolutely no doubt about that.

So what is there something superstitious and foolish about attempting to establish a contractual relationship with the source of all being. I mean, I just don't see that as an erroneous conception. And, you know, it's not necessary, perhaps, to get lost in the details. We can argue forever about what God might or might not be, but we could at least say that the concept of God is an embodiment of humanity's highest ideal, right? We could at least agree on that.

And then you might say, well, is that real? And the first thing I would say about that is, ah, there's a lot of things about the world we don't understand. And the second thing I would say is, it depends bloody well on what you mean by real. That's for sure. And that turns out to be a very complicated question. So. OK, so we left Abraham, remember, at the end,

last time he had just gone off to fight a bunch of kings and get his nephew back, which seemed to be a pretty courageous act. And so that brought a story to an end. And it's interesting. I think what happens in the narrative is that there's a story. So Abraham is somewhere, and he goes somewhere else. That's a story.

And he has adventures along the way. And those adventures are usually the typical kind of adventure, which is a rift in the structure of the story and exposure to a kind of chaos and novelty and then a reconstitution of the mode of being. So that's a classic story, right? You are somewhere, you're a certain way, you're moving forward, something happens

that you don't expect, it blows you into pieces, it introduces chaos, right? You face the drag and you get the gold or maybe the bloody thing eats you and the story is over. And then you get to where you're going, but then the question is, well, what happens when you get to where you're going? And that's a really important issue because one of the things that happens to people all the time in their life is that they get to where they're going. And then they don't know what to do, right? So, for example, you graduate

from university. It's like, okay, story over. Who are you now? Who are you the next day? And so what happens is when you succeed, then there's a success crisis. And the success crisis is, well, I've run this story to its end. Now what? And that's exactly what happens in the Abrahamic stories. And they're punctuated by a period of contemplation and sacrifice. So every time an Abrahamic story comes to its end, then Abraham makes another sacrifice and commutes with God, and then he figures out what to do next. And that seems right. It seems psychologically right,

because what you should do when your story comes to an end, when you've achieved what it is that you want to achieve, or perhaps when you're in terribly dire straits, but we won't talk about that at the moment. When you've achieved what you need to achieve, then the next question is, okay, well, now I'm that person, or I have that character. What do I need to do next? And some of that is always, well, what do I need to give up? Now, what do I need to let go of so I can move to the next plateau, right?

Assume that your life is hopefully a sequence of upward moving. What would you call them? It's like Cisophus, except you're actually, each time you climb up the mountain, you get a little higher on the mountain. It's something like that. So it's Cisophus with an optimistic bent. And and and maybe if you push the rock up the mountain properly and let it roll down, then and if you do that right, then it's okay. Every time you roll it back up, it's better in some sense. I don't

think that's unrealistic either. And so, Abraham goes and rescues his nephew from these tyrannical kings, that's very brave, and he doesn't take any reward for it because as far as he's concerned, it's just a manifestation of the right thing. And then he has another vision. After these things that's the battle, the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision saying, fear not, Abram, I'm thy shield and thy exceeding great reward. And Abram said, Lord God, what will I'll give me seeing I go childless in the steward of my house is this elisier of Damascus. And Abram said, Behold to me, that was given no seed, and low, no one born in my house is my heir. And behold the word of the Lord came to him saying,

This shall not be dine heir, but he that shall come forth out of their own, dine own bowels shall be dine heir. And he brought him forth abroad, and he said, Now look to heaven and tell the stars, if you're able to number them. And he said unto him, so shall thy seed be. And Abraham believed in the Lord,

and he counted it to him for righteousness. And he said unto him, I'm the Lord that brought thee out of her, the chaldees, to give this land to you to inherit it. And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? And then he does this sacrifice, take me an effort,

a heifer of three years old, and a she goat, and a rabid and a turtle of an young pigeon. And then God comes down, and well, Abraham goes into a trance, that's what it appears to be in the story, and has a great terror, and then God appears to him. And I'll just review this commentary again. This is from Joseph Benson. And when the sun was going down, that's about the time when you wash up for the evening. And he's praying and waiting towards the evening. A deep sleep fell upon Abraham, not a common

sleep through weariness or carelessness, but a divine ecstasy that being wholly taken off from things sensible, he might be wholly taken up with the contemplation of things spiritual, very strange, very, very strange, series of interpretations, because it does seem that what happens to Abraham, that he falls into some sort of revelatory trance. And so, as I've taken some pains to explain, we don't really understand such things, and we can't rule out their existence because there's too much evidence that they do in fact occur. Perhaps it's a technology that we no longer possess, that's one possibility. Perhaps we no longer know how to access these sorts of states of

consciousness. It's certainly possible. And loa horror of great darkness fell upon him. This was designed to strike off on the spirit of Abraham and to possess him with a holy reverence. Holy fear prepares the soul for holy joy. God humbles first and then lifts, lifts up. Yeah, well, I think that's right too. Like, you know, one of the experiences I've had in my life, fairly commonly, in a variety of different ways. This is especially true when I was paying a lot of attention to my dreams, which I did for about 15 years, I guess, something like that.

Now and then I would feel like I'd learned some things and had sort of consolidated them and then before I went to sleep, I'd think, okay, I'm ready to learn something else. It's like, and I didn't say that without trepidation. Because usually when you learn something, it's not that pleasant, because you usually learn something about why you're wrong. And the deeper the thing that you learn, the more you learn

about why you're wrong. And there's a death that's associated with that, because then you have to let that part of you that's wrong die. And that's the sacrifice, right? And so you have to make a sacrifice, you have to be willing to make a sacrifice before you're going to learn something. And perhaps your, what you'll learn is in proportion

to your willingness to make a sacrifice. And I really do believe that. I do believe that as well because I also think that if you commit to something, that means that you don't do a bunch of other things, right? So that's the sacrifice of all those other things. You commit to it and you set your sights on it. If you really commit to it

and you get the sacrifice right, so to speak, then the probability that that thing will be successful vastly increases. And I think that that's also not a naive or a naive way of thinking or a foolish way of thinking. My experience has been that that's the case. And so back to the dream. I mean, I do think that we learn intrepidation and that most of the time, if you have to be laid low before the new revelation can make itself manifest.

And I think that's also what happens to people often in psychedelic experiences when they have a bad trip is they don't get through the bad part of it. And maybe that's because there's so much mess in their lives. Now, I'm speculating, but it's informed speculation. There's so much mess in their lives that the altered state of consciousness makes manifest that it's like a little trip through hell.

And but the mess is so complete and comprehensive and all-pervading that there's no way they can get through it. Now if they could get through it and start to sort those things out then you know there would be perhaps what would you call it a compensatory positive revelation at the end, but the first thing is if you want to learn something is that you're going to encounter But the first thing is, if you want to learn something, is that you're going to encounter, well, you have to figure out what's wrong before you can figure out what wisdom you need next to guide yourself. And that's no laughing matter, right?

And so I think that that's what this refers to. I think that's the sort of psychological experience that that refers to. I also think we build this a little bit into this into the future authoring program, you know, I read this really cool paper once reviewed by this guy named Jeffrey Gray. Jeffrey Gray wrote a book called The Neural Psychology of Anxiety Man and that is a great book. It is impossible to read.

It took me really, it took me like six months to read it. And the reason for that is that he reviewed about 3,000 papers and they were all neurological papers and heavy psychological, slash biological papers. He actually read them all and he understood them and he synthesized them and then he wrote this book about the synthesis and so, and he's very, very careful with this terminology. And so to read the book, you have to understand brain anatomy,

and you have to understand neuropharmacology, and you have to understand animal behavior, the whole literature on animal behavior, not whole, whopping dose of human psychology and cybernatics is like it's a vicious book. But you really learn something when a vicious book, but you really learn something when you read it if you go through it by bit. It's had an overwhelming influence on psychology, even among people who haven't read it, which

is most of the people who cite it, by the way. But he said, he outlined this real cool study, maybe it was a sequence of studies, about how to motivate rats, rats are a lot like us in positive and negative ways. And biochemically and psychopharmacologically, they're very, very similar. And they have very complex social environments. And they have hierarchies and they play. And they laugh, jackpanks have, yuckpanks have found out that rats laugh. Jackpanks, that's that found out that Ratz laugh. If you tickle them, you can tickle them.

It's like the end of a pencil eraser. But you can't hear them laughing because they laugh ultrasonically like that. So you have to record it and then slow it down. Then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them. So, which is, you know, you think, oh, it has spent $50,000 on a study. They're demonstrating that Ratz laugh.

And you think, well, wait a second, wait a second. That's a major league study, you know, because he's outlined a ludic circuit. That's a play circuit, and Yacht Panks have discovered the play circuit in mammals. That's a bloody big deal, you know. If you get that by like rubbing rats with a pencil eraser, well good for you. So, anyways, so Gray talked a lot about how to motivate a rat. And you might have heard about BF Skinner, you know, he used food pellets to motivate his rats, but what you don't know about Skinner is that those rats were starved to three

quarters of their normal body weight. So they would work for food, man. So Skinner's rats were kind of oversimplified, but you can get rats to work for food. They don't have to be that hungry. You can get them to work for food. And they'll do all sorts of things. They'll press levers and they'll open doors and they'll solve problems. And you know, they'll do all sorts of things. And one of the things you can do to kind of measure how much the rat is motivated is, let's say you've run him through a maze and he knows there's some food at the end of the maze.

You can tie a little spring to his tail and see how hard he pulls when you open the door to the maze, so that's because that's how much work the rat is willing to do, so you can measure that, or you can see how fast he skitters down the maze and you can get an estimate about the rat's motivation. And so then you might say, well, how motivated is a hungry rat, and the answer would be, it depends on how hungry is, but there's another answer. It also depends on what's chasing him

when he's going after the food. So if you have a rat, and you have food over here, and you wafed in some cat odor, rats hate cat odor, and it's innate. They never have to see or smell a cat to be absolutely petrified by cat odor. And so if you wofed in some cat odor and then open the door, that rat will zoom to that food a lot faster than it will if it's just hungry.

So a rat running away from something that it doesn't want towards something that it does want is a very motivated rat. And so one of the things we did with the Future Authoring Program, that's germane to this idea of terror because there's a There's this idea and the Old Testament the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom And it's a pretty harsh idea But but there's something really useful about it because one of the things you see with people all the time is that They're maybe they're trying to stumble forward towards their ideal as

Poorly defined as it might be but then they're afraid right? They're afraid about what they might encounter. And that stops them because fear does stop people. It freezes you like a prey animal. And so people move ahead, but then they get afraid, and then they stop moving ahead. And so, and that's not so good because negative emotion is a really powerful motivator.

So we're more motivated by negative emotion than positive emotion, quantitatively speaking. Quantitatively speaking, you can measure that. And that's, I think, because we can only be so happy, but we can really be suffering and dead. So we have to pay more attention to the negative. And that's bad, because the negative can stop you. And then in my clinical practice, I often

talk to people who are trying to make a difficult life decision, and they are weighing out the costs and the benefits of making the life decision. And one of the things I always talk to them about is wait a second, that's an incomplete analysis. You have to weigh out the benefits and the costs of doing this. And you have to weigh out the costs and benefits of not doing that, not doing it. And that's not the same as the zero that you assume that you're starting with, right? Because to not make a decision also has a cost. And sometimes the cost of not making a decision

is far worse than the cost of making a decision, even if the decision is risky. And so one of the things you can derive from that, and this is very useful, I think, is that this is also, I think why it's so useful to contemplate your mortality, so to speak, is you're screwed no matter what you do. And that actually frees you, is that you have path A that has catastrophes, and you have path B that has catastrophes, and you don't get to have the no catastrophe path, but you

get to pick which one. And that's really something, because if you know that there's terrible risk associated with everything that you do and don't do, then you can afford to take some risks because you're not, you know, and this is all within the arc metaphor. I'm still making the case that, despite the fact that your life is essentially catastrophic, you can make a covenant with the highest ideal, and that will take you through it the best way possible. I'm still making that case. So then you think, okay, well, I'm trying to make this decision. I'm going to go try to do something difficult and isn't that terrifying.

And then you think, yeah, but wait a minute, what's really terrifying is not doing it. And then you think about the cost of not doing it. So in the future authoring program, we have people do this little meditative exercise, which is, okay, just think about urine sufficiencies. By your own definition, right, the way that you don't do what you know you should do, about the things that you do that you shouldn't do, that you know you shouldn't do,

beyond a shadow of a doubt, right? There's some things like that. And that's bad habits and poor aim and all of the resentment and hatred and aggression and unresolved conflicts and all those things that are demanding you and warping you and then think, okay, those things get the upper hand, man, they get the upper hand and they take you the worst possible place you could go

in the next three to five years. What exactly does that look like? And so you sketch all that out and you think, hey, I don't wanna go there. And so the next time that a temptation comes up, you think, well, it'd be a lot better for me if I didn't succumb to this temptation. It's like, that's kind of weak, okay? You'd look a little better if you didn't eat like a cheesecake a day or something like that. You know, that's something, but it's not the same as, I'm going to have diabetes and I'm going to lose my damn leg in five years

if I don't get my eating under control. That's motivating. And so then the temptation comes along and you think, oh, how about no? Seriously, how about no? Not just because a higher good would be obtained if I avoided it, but because a terrible catastrophe would be averted if I didn't. And so, well, so you want to get your fear behind you, right? You want to get it behind you where it's pushing you forward, instead of in front of you where it's stopping you, and you get your fear behind you pushing you forward by actually thinking through the consequences of not putting your life together.

And the least of those is that you waste it and suffer, right? Because you can suffer anyways, man is that you waste it and suffer, right? Because you can suffer anyways, man. So you waste it and suffer. That's a bad deal. Because maybe if you're going to suffer, you could at least do something noble and glorious and upright and powerful and honorable and admirable and helpful and difficult.

That's just so much better. And maybe that's good enough so that you think, hey, little suffering, it's basically worth it. At least it's a way forward, you know? At least it's a way forward. And he said unto Abram, no of a surety that Diceach shall be a stranger in the land that is not theirs, and she'll serve those people and they'll flick them for 400 years. God, he's hedging his bets here a lot, right? He says, Abraham, we'll go out into the world and then he confronts him with a famine

and he confronts him with the tyranny and with powerful people he wants to take his wife and then he loses his nephew and who he has a fight with. And then he has to go fight a war. And now, he's reconstituting this covenant. God says, yeah, you're going to have a nation is going to come from you. But there are going to be slaves to tyrants for like 400 years. It's like he's not the great salesman exactly. But the thing about it is that the thing that I like about it is that it's realistic.

You've got to think to, as who knows why it is that the Bible exists or why people wrote it, but you know if they're gonna sell you something I don't know if this is the way to do it, you know, because unless you're a salesman who's sophisticated beyond belief because you'd think that if it was just a matter of controlling the masses Let's say which is one say Marxist interpretation of religion, or providing people with a primitive defense against death anxiety, which is essentially the Freudian interpretation, that you'd kind of make the deals that God cut with Abraham a little more on the positive and polished side instead of making them a realistic offer constantly like they are. And that's also that's part of the reason I think it is reasonable to treat the Bible as literature. It's more than literature.

It's something other than literature. But you can treat it as literature. And I think the reason that you can treat it as literature is because the characters are all complex, including the character of God himself, is complex and sophisticated. It's not one side. And it's paradoxical and incomprehensible at times, but I think good literature is like that, because you know true art, here's something about true art, this is something I learned from Jung, it's so smart, he's so smart. So you

imagine that you inhabit the land that you know conceptually and practically, and then imagine outside of that there's that massive space of things that you don't know, and even outside of that there's the space of things that no one knows, right? So it's the known territory surrounded by the unknown. That's the canonical archetypal landscape. And the unknown manifests itself to you, and that's where new knowledge comes from. But the question is, how is that knowledge generated? And it doesn't just leap from completely unknown to completely articulated in one move.

That isn't how it happens. It has to pass through stages of analysis before it becomes articular and the first stage of analysis as far as I can tell is that you acted out. So if something really surprises you, the first way that you react to it, your category is actually embodied. You'd like this. That's your first category. It's not conceptual at all, it's embodied.

And then maybe you start to, like you're at home at night and something startles the union freeze and then it's dark and then your imagination populates the darkness with whatever might be making the noise. And that's the sequence. It's like embodied response, imaginative representation, exploration, articulation.

That's how information moves from the unknown to the known. And artists are the people who stand on that imagistic frontier. And they put themselves out into the unknown, and they take a piece of it, and they transform it into some mythological image. And they don't know what they're doing exactly, because they're guided by their intuition,

if they're real artists, otherwise they're just propagandists. They have to be contending with something they don't understand. And what they do is they make it more understandable. And then people gaze at those artworks, or they listen to the stories, and then they start to become informed by them, but they don't know how or why. I was at the modern art museum, Museum of Art in New York. I'm afraid I don't remember which one, unfortunately. But I was in this amazing room.

You know, it had all these priceless paintings from the late Renaissance hanging in it. Each painting worth, who knows, a billion dollars, maybe the priceless painting. So the room was, it's a shrine, and it was full of people from all over the world who are looking at these paintings. You think, well, what the hell are these people doing coming to this room, looking at these paintings?

Look, what are they up to? One of them was a painting of the assumption of Mary, brilliantly composed. And there was all these people looking at it. And I thought, what are they doing? They don't know what that means. Like, why are they looking at that painting? Why is it in this room? Why does it Like, why are they looking at that painting?

Why is it in this room? Why does it cost a billion dollars? Why is that painting worth so much? And the answer to that is, well, we don't really know. Like, did it happen? Did there are sacred objects in some sense? And we gaze at them in ignorance and wonder. And the reason for that is that the unknown shines through the matis

and impartially articulated form. And so, well, that's the rule of art. And that's the rule of artists. I know. And real artists, real artists, are contending with unknown, right? And they're possessed by it. They have a personality trait, open this, that makes them do that. They can't even help it.

And I've had lots of creative people in my clinical practice, and I can tell you the worst thing for creative people is to not be creative because they just die. And it, because it's, it's, it's, it's, like maybe you're a tree with a few major branches. That's your personality. So if you're extroverted, man, you can't be cut off from people because you're just wither. And if you're agreeable, you have to be in an intimate relationship or you die.

And if you're conscientious, man, and you're unemployed, you're just going to eat yourself up because you have to have a duty and you have to carry a load. Because you just can't stand it otherwise. And open people have to be creative. They have to be because otherwise they die. They don't have any vitality. And so they're cursed with the necessity of putting a foot out into the unknown and making sense of it. And then they're also cursed with the necessity of trying to make a living while they're doing that, which they can't because you can't. It's almost impossible to monetize creative, creative action as many of you who are creative will

no doubt find out. It's very, very frustrating. It's not that creative action is without value, right? Because the creative people are entrepreneurs, and the creative people revitalize cities, and the creative people make things magnificent and beautiful. You think about what's happened in Europe over the last thousand years, say, two thousand years, this amazing, unbelievable collaboration to make things so beautiful that they're jaw dropping when you walk into them. You think about the economic value of that, right? I mean, I think it's either France or Spain that's the most visited country

in the world. It's one of those two. I think there's more tourists in France than there are people most of the time. And part of the reason for that is it's one of those two. I think there's more tourists in France than there are people most of the time. And part of the reason for that is it's just so damn beautiful. You just can't stand it. And you think, what's the economic value of that? It's absolutely incalculable. And what's interesting, too, is that you build that beauty in. And then the farther away you get from it in time,

the more valuable it becomes, right? Instead of decaying, it has exactly the opposite effect. It's value magnifies, and one of the things that I'm deeply ashamed of as a Canadian is that our sense of beauty is so underdeveloped or so primitive, it's not even primitive, that's the wrong word, because you know, I don't know what it is. It's second rate, it's second rate at least. It's terror too because people are afraid of beauty. But the idea that art is, the conservatives really have a problem with this in particular

because conservative people tend to be that creative. And it's a mystery, by temperament. It's a mystery to me because they should be concerned with economic development and beauty is so unbelievably crucial to economic development It just yells out at you, you know, so Anyway, so that's what artists are doing and so one of the things I would say is buy a damn piece of art You know find one that really speaks to you and and buy a piece of art because you invite that into your life And it's it's a lookout if you do it if it's a real piece of art, because you'll also get a little introduction to the artist,

and then that'll seep into your life, and that'll change things like mad. But it's really, it's unbelievably worth it, because it opens your eyes to the domain of the transcendent. That's the right way of thinking about it. A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent. That's what it is. And you need that in your life,

because you're finite and limited and bounded by your ignorance and your lack of knowing. And unless you can make a connection to the transcendent, then you don't have the strength to prevail. And that's part of the covenant with God. And you can see that because you look at these magnificent cathedrals that our civilization built over the centuries.

Some of those, they're still building this San Greedeth family in Barcelona, right? And it's an amazing building. I think it's going to take them like 300 years to build that. People in the Middle Ages, they'd start building a cathedral. And they think, well, we'll be done this in 300 years. Imagine the vision that it took to invest in something like that. We look at quarterly reports. We can't think 300 years into the future to build something of that kind of remarkable, remarkable, what, those cathedrals are so. They're perfect,

they're trees first, right? They're a forest, right? The Gothic cathedrals, they're, they're a forest. And the sun is shining through the branches. That's the stained glass. And they're, the perfect balance of light and structure because they're representing something about the proper structure of being, which is something like the proper balance between light and structure. And they represent like the sacred tragedy of mankind. That's why they're in the shape of a cross and they're open to the sky. That's why they have a dome, and they're full of gold,

so that it glitters, because that's like the city of God. And you can see that integral to our culture is the idea that beauty is one pathway towards God. And it's saying, if you can't find another pathway, then why don't you use beauty? Sure, most of you do that with music. Because music is the one thing that modern people can't be cynical about. Thank God for that.

And being fascinated by music because of that, it speaks meaning to people, right? Even nihilistic punk rockers are so damn engaged with their music that they can hardly stand it. And you can knock on them and say, look, you're having a transcendent religious experience and they'll just tell you to fuck off because that's what punk rockers have to do. But that's still what's happening. It's still what's happening, you know? I mean, it's still what's happening. So, okay, so I got into all that because I was talking about the Bible as literature,

you know, and trying to lay out, because we need in our culture to justify the arts. And I don't want to do that by talking about high culture, talking about something abstract and evidences. That's the wrong way to go about it. This is vital. One of the things that's really interesting about the University of Toronto is that the one side of the campus where we are is beautiful, medieval,

cathedral, and other side is God-awful factory. And, you know, and, and that, and the thing is, the attitude towards knowledge has paralleled that architectural transformation. You know, at one point, the humanities, let's say, we're a sacred endeavor, and so was the art of being educated in the university, and that's turned into like mass factory, and that's reflected

in the architecture. This isn't accidental. None of this happens by random chance. It's not like there's a conspiracy or anything because there isn't, but that doesn't mean that these things aren't tangled together, and the loss of beauty in the university is a catastrophe, because without that beauty, there's no call to higher being. You know, this is also why I've mentioned to people that they should clean up their rooms, that's become quite the internet meme, but I'm really serious about it

because it's really hard to do that. And I've been cleaning up my room, by the way, for about four months now, because my life was thrown into such a catastrophe and also we were renovating and so, but it isn't just that you clean it up, you also make it beautiful and beautiful. It's really hard to make something beautiful. And it's really worthwhile and what's really cool is if you learn to make something beautiful,

even one thing, if you can just make one thing in your life beautiful, then you've established a relationship with beauty and then you can start to expand that relationship with beauty out into into the world, like into other elements of your life. And that is so worthwhile. It's just incredibly, crazily worthwhile. And that's an invitation to the divine. You have to be daring to do that. People are terrified of it.

People are terrified of color. They paint their walls beige. They're terrified of art. They buy some mass-produced thing, because they don't want anybody laughing at them for their lack of taste. And they would get laughed at because they have no taste. But you have to, well, it's right.

Because what do you know, right? You have to develop it. And so you're going to stumble along and make mistakes to begin with. And you're going to show yourself. Because if you buy, oh, I think this is pretty. And you know, somebody comes over and goes, hey, what's up with you? It's kind of hard on yourself a steam, but it's a stumbling towards the right, you're stumbling towards the kingdom of God.

That's what you're stumbling towards when you try to make an aesthetic decision and to put something in your life that's beautiful and it's unbelievably worthwhile to do that. And you have to steer clear of the frauds and the con artists and all of that and art is full of that, of course, because it's difficult to distinguish between the real thing and the frauds and the con artists and all of that. And art is full of that, of course, because it's difficult to distinguish between the

real thing and the fraud, but it's unbelievably worthwhile. And so back to literature. I'm telling you this partly because I've been thinking a lot about the humanities and the arts. And practically speaking, because I know that artistic types are also entrepreneurial types, they're know that artistic types are also entrepreneurial types, they're the same personality types, and so it's very much worthwhile to make an economic and practical case for this sort of thing.

You study literature and the humanities so that you can familiarize yourself with the wisdom of our civilization. Man, you should do that, because people have been working on this thing for a long time, and it's rich beyond comparison, So why wouldn't you do that? And you teach yourself to read. And you teach yourself to speak. And you teach yourself to think. And you teach yourself to communicate.

And I can tell you, if you can read and think and communicate, you are absolutely 100% unstoppable. And that's another thing that's so interesting about humanity's education that's at the core of the university. It's like there's nothing more economically valuable than teaching people how to articulate themselves and communicate, because they can identify problems, they can formulate solutions, they can negotiate to consensus,

they can negotiate on their own behalf or on the behalf of others. It's like there's absolutely no downside to it, except that there's responsibility that goes along with it, but it doesn't matter, like there's absolutely no downside to it, except that there's responsibility that goes along with it, but it doesn't matter because there's no escape from responsibility. You can either take it voluntarily or you can take it involuntarily.

Those are your options, but there aren't any other options. And so we need to understand the role of art and literature and stop thinking about it as an option. It's not an option. It's not an option. What is it said? Man does not live by bread alone. That's exactly right. We live by beauty.

We live by literature. We live by art. And literally, not metaphorically, we cannot live without it, because life is too dismal and tragic in the absence of the sublime. So, and ourselves, we have to be sharp so that we can survive properly and orient the world properly and not destroy things including ourselves.

And so, and so back to the Bible which I do think is a reasonable, it's reasonably construed as a piece of literature because it's deep and because the people who wrote it had at least one foot in the unknowable. And they're trying to communicate what they experienced in the unknowable to make it known. And that's partly what we're trying to do in this series and what you're trying to do while you're listening and all of that. And so good for that. And also that nation whom they shall serve, I will judge, and afterward they'll come out

with great substance. They'll be a period of tyranny. There's a psychological truth to that too. One of the things I learned from reading Nietzsche, because you can learn a lot from reading Nietzsche. That's for sure. He talked about the Catholic Church. You know, Nietzsche is often construed

as a great critic of Christianity, and he certainly was. But he was no casual critic. In fact, I think he was the sort of critic that you'd like to have as a friend, because he was the sort of critic that said, well, here's the great things you've done, and that you could keep doing, but here's a bunch of really things that you did that you really should stop doing. And he talked about the Catholic church, and he said, what the Catholic church had done to the European mind in particular, was discipline it, So that over a period of 1,000 years, 1,300 years, 1,400 years,

there was this rule that there was a conceptual structure within which you had to interpret everything. And what that did was turn the European educated, European mind into a systematizing cognitive entity. And that once that systematizing cognitive entity had been established, then it could free itself from those underlying disciplinary structures and go off and do such things as produce the scientific revolution, for example, which required incredible systematic thinking. And so Nietzsche

had this really interesting idea about freedom, and he believed that slavery was an intermediary between the undeveloped individual and the free individual that you had to submit yourself to some intense disciplinary process for some period of time in your life before you could develop any true freedom. And so you think, maybe you want to learn to play the piano. It's like, that's not going to be any fun for a really long period of time, right?

Because you're really bad at it. And there's a million things you have to memorize, and you have to stumble around like an amateur. And the same thing happens when kids learn how to read. And some of them never get past that point, and they never get to the point where they can enjoy reading. But in order to put yourself together, you have to put yourself in a vice

and allow yourself to be constricted and mangled even by the thing that enslaves you. But the goal should be that, as a consequence of submitting to the thing that enslaves you, but the goal should be that as a consequence of submitting to the discipline that you become disciplined, and then once you become disciplined, you can emerge from the disciplinary structure as someone who's free, and that's something that's very much

worth thinking about as well. So that's illustrated conceptually in this, in this piece of literature, let's say, because what the psychological meaning of what God tells Abraham is that all people are subject, and I mean not equally, obviously all people are subject to the tyranny that precedes freedom. And that idea is repeated over and over in the Old Testament, and it comes out most particularly in the story of Moses, right? Because of course, that's the story of movement from tyranny.

Where do you go from a tyranny? It's an absolute catastrophe. You go from a tyranny into the desert, where you starve. It's harsh. That's what happens in the story of Exodus. And so that's so interesting, too, because what it means is that sometimes if you're going to move uphill, the first thing that happens is you move downhill a lot. And so if you want to escape

from the straits that bind you now, you're not going to move forward and go up. You're going to move forward and go down. And that's another reason this is also something that Jung talked about a lot is that on the road to enlightenment, you encounter all the things that you don't want to encounter first, like all the weaknesses of yourself, all the realizations of the tyranny of the world, and the catastrophe of nature, and all of that. And so you step out of your encapsulation, your ignorant encapsulation, and its immediate plummet into something that's a desert, let's say, where everything is chaotic and where you're wandering around without direction. A real catastrophe, so it's, you know, because one of the things you might ask yourself is that if enlightenment is possible, then why aren't people enlightened?

Because if it was just a matter of going from a good place to a better place, it's like, well, man, let's just get at it. It's no problem, right? Why would we ever stop doing that? But it seems not to be that. It's that you're here and that's not good and it's unstable and you step out of it. It's like down, down to where you don't want to be.

And you have to contend with that. And then maybe you can start your struggle upward. And so, God is telling Abraham this and he's also telling him that it's okay. It's rough though. And now, and now she'll go to thy fathers in peace. Now she'll be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation, they shall come hither again.

That's the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham. For the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. God is going to leave the tyrants alone until they've manifested their fold here any for reasons that we don't fully understand. And it came to pass that when the sun went down, it was dark behold, a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between the pieces.

All Albert Barnes said, the oven of smoke and lamp of flame symbolized the smoke of destruction, which we've already talked about, this catastrophe of the initial stages and the light of salvation. They're passing through the pieces of the victims and probably consuming them as an acceptance sacrifice. Are the ratification of the covenant on the part of God as the dividing and presenting of them were on the part of Abram? In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram

saying unto thy seed, I've given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river Euphrates. given this land from the river of Egypt under the great river Euphrates. Now, Sarai Abram's wife, Baram no children. And she had a handmade and Egyptian, whose name was Heger. So this is a big catastrophe for Abraham, especially in those times, and perhaps now, as much, although perhaps people aren't as conscious

of it as they once were. I mean, for Abraham without a biological son, there was no vision forward into the future. We don't really know what sort of time span over which these archaic people fought, but the medieval people who already said could think 300 years into the future without batting an eye. And these people who were concerned about their descendants were obviously thinking about existence in a way that wasn't just focused on their immediate existence. They were thinking about while their children

and their grandchildren, maybe their great grandchildren, maybe the whole society that stemmed out from them. And that's smart. One of the things I learned from Piaget, at least in part, was that his idea of the equilibrated state, which he thought about as part of the things I learned from Piaget, at least in part, was that his idea of the equilibrated state, which he thought about as partly part of the biological basis of the idea of moral progress. It's something like that.

He was a very, very smart Piaget. And we said that the proper equilibrated state is one where, imagine you have a family, you've got five people in it, and you're doing what you want in your family, what's good for you. But you're doing it in such a way so that the other four members of your family agree with what you do and that it also facilitates them doing what they want and what they should be doing.

And so it's a really tricky arrangement because it isn't just for you, it's for you in a way that's for them and you could also see that that would be something that would be a multiplier, right? Because if you have everyone working voluntarily towards the same common goal, then you get a multiplying effect of that. And then you might think, well, it's not just you and your family. It's you and your family today and next week and next month, next year and 10 years for now. So you have to take the time span into account. And then it should

be you and your family in a way that works well in society, and then it should work well now and next week and next year and into the future. It should be iteratable, right? That's like sustainability. It's something like the idea of sustainability. And that's, I would say that's a reasonable way of conceptualizing the Holy City. It's something like that. If you're trying to make it concrete, it's like, how should you live your life? Well, let's say you live your life in a manner that justifies its limitation and tragedy. That's a good start. But then let's say that it does that in a way that also reduces the limitations and suffering of the people that you interact with and now and into the future. Well, maybe there's a way to do that. I mean, a good negotiation does that, right? Because

if you're negotiating with someone like your wife, for example, what you want is for her to agree with the negotiation. And one of the things that Piaget said, which I think was brilliant, brilliant, he said, if you take an equilibrated system, a family, let's say, and a disequilibrated system. So that would be one where, let's say, the father is a tyrant and everyone is operating under his whip. And you put them in a head-to-head competition. The equilibrated system will outcompete the disequilibrated system because the enforcement cost is such that it will slow the system down. You know, because you'll get resistances from the people inside the system. The system will be working at counter purposes to itself, plus there's enforcement costs.

And so a tyranny cannot be the nil-quilibrated system. And I was really excited to encounter that idea because when I encountered it, I was also trying to figure out if there was some quantitative difference between the systems say of the Soviet Union and Maoist China and the systems of the West, apart from just, you know, arbitrary world interpretation as the postmodern islets might have it. If there was something fundamental at stake in the terrible Cold War that we fought,

or if it was just a matter of opinion, when the Piagetian take was that, well, roughly speaking, is that the West was an equilibrated system, not perfectly equilibrated, but reasonably equilibrated, in that people were essentially, even if they were slaves to some degree, they were at least voluntary slaves instead of involuntary slaves, and that that was better. The system was actually technically better and not just as a matter of interpretation. So that's a lovely thing to know, and I think it's a really, really solid, really, really

solid idea. I haven't been able to put crow bars under that idea and lift it up. I think it's a good one. So, now, Sarai, Abrams, wife, barum, no children. So, okay, back to children. So, one of the things that's worth thinking about with regards to reading these old stories, because we're very arrogant modern people, we look at these old stories and we think, we've transcended all that superstition. It's like, don't be so bloody sure about that. These people weren't stupid. And so there are ways that they viewed the world that we don't have anymore.

And one of them seems to be this concern for descendants because that just isn't part of our way of thinking. We have very short term way of thinking. Maybe it's not even one lifetime long. It's certainly not multiple lifetimes long. And it isn't clear to me at all that that's for the best. And the constant complaint that the environmentalists generate, some of which is justified

and some of which is just anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal nonsense that should be cleared out of that entire conversation, is that we need to take a longer view and consider more things in our purview when we act and like that's fair enough, like do we really want an ocean that has nothing in it but jellyfish because that's really what we're doing and we're doing it very, very rapidly and the data on that are very clear. And so, you know, when you lift up your eyes and you make a connection with something that's

transcendent, then that should bring more of the world within your purview, and maybe that's concerned for the endless number of descendants that you might have. You might think too, well, you know, if you're a successful person, if you have a successful family, God only knows how many people you will be the father of, right? It's completely, because you're a nexus, right? All sorts of things have come together in the cosmos to produce you, and then all sorts of things manifest themselves from you. You have no idea what your potential, the potential consequences of your actions might be as they cascade across time, right?

You have no idea. And so Abraham, at least, is concerned with these sorts of things, and God seems to be concerned too, because he promises Abraham that if he maintains the covenant that the most important things that he needs will come to him. And they're pretty serious about this. So, Sir I talk to Abram. She's not very happy about the fact that she can't have children. She says, behold now the Lord hath restrained me from bearing, I pray thee, go in unto my maid. It may be that I obtain children by her, and Abram Harkin to the voice of Sarai. Well, that's not a very trivial thing. I wouldn't

think. I don't imagine that Sarai was very happy about turning her maid over to her husband, and potentially being usurped in the whole childbearing process, not in the least. But, you know, so it's also a major sacrifice on Sirized Part. There's no doubt about that. And, of course, it's very difficult for us to talk about the ethics of the fact that Hager was a more less involuntary participant in this, but that was the times, absolutely the case. And, of course, slavery and indentured servitude is the way

of mankind except in very, very, very limited circumstances. Carl Jung had something to say about that too, which I really liked. He said that part of the reason that modern people have, it's not the only reason, there's the Industrial Revolution, obviously. But part of the reason that modern people have been able to escape from the catastrophe of tyranny and slavery is because we've agreed to make ourselves our own slaves. So instead of owning a slave, you own yourself in a sense, and so you trot yourself off

to work and exploit yourself so that you can stay alive, and maybe it's not something that you want to do, but you've taken on the role of slave in some sense, in relationship to your own survival, instead of forcing someone else to do it. Which is also something I think that's very noble about the West, is that we're willing to enslave ourselves as individuals and we're not doing that to other people. Now, we're doing it to some degree, obviously, because the society is imperfect, but that's something that's very much worth thinking about.

So an Abram Harkin to the voice of Sarai. And Sarai, Abram's wife took Hager, her maid, the Egyptian, after Abram had dwelt 10 years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her husband, Abram, to be his wife. That's the other thing that's been so interesting about doing this, one of the other things about doing this biblical series.

And it's one of the things that's so cool about Google, despite the fact that they cut off my account. You can find any piece of art that ever existed on Google. And so that's great. So when I'm trying to illustrate these lectures, I type in Abraham Renaissance. And then I get 200 Renaissance paintings. It's so great. And then I can look at them.

And one of the other things that's so remarkable is that all of these, the major themes of these stories have been illustrated by people of spectacular mind, mind-expanding talent. There's just this endless array of, well, look at that. I mean, that's an amazing painting. And so there's dozens of paintings on this theme, and it's just another indication of how obsessed people, you know, this was the only book that existed for years,

and people were absolutely obsessed by it, and produced all these amazing things from it, and were in danger of losing that, and that's a big mistake, because it's magnificent. A little humility would go a long way towards restoring it. And he went into Hegar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes. So, Hegar was successful, and that was a hallmark of feminine success now, and certainly then. And so she started to lord it over Sarai, which seemed a little bit on the ungrateful side, I would say, because Sarai made a big sacrifice to allow Heygart to become Abram's wife, and so a little bit of gratitude would have been in order, I suppose.

At least that's how the story goes. And Sarai said unto Abraham, my wrong be upon thee, I have given my maid into thibosom, and when she saw that she had conceived, I was despised in her eyes, the Lord judged between you and I. And Abraham said unto Sarah, behold, I made, is in thine hand, due to her as it pleases you.

And when Sarah dealt hardly with her, Hagar fled from her face, and the angel of the Lord found her by a fountain of water and the wilderness by the fountain in the way to shore. And he said, hey, Ghar, Sirai's made, whence came as thou, and wither wilt thou go. And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress, Sirai, and the angel of the Lord said,

return to thy mistress and submit under her hands. And the angel said, I will multiply your seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude. And the angel said, behold, thou art with child and thou shalt bear a son and shall call his name Ishmael. And Ishmael means God hears, by the way,

because the Lord has heard thy affliction. And he'll be a wild man, his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him. And he should dwell in the presence of all his brothers. And she called the name of the Lord that spake under her, thou God seized me, for she said, have I also here looked after him that seized me,

wherefore the well was called beer la heroe. And that means the well who sees me and lives. It's an interesting interlude because, you know, Abraham, God has established this covenant with Abraham, and obviously things are going wrong in the household in a really serious way, like a really serious way, because, well, he's now had a child by another woman, and the two women are not getting along,

and one is beating the other because of her in subordination and contempt. And so she's so desperate, she runs out into the desert where she's probably going to die and God comes along and says anyways to Hagar that her son she'll as well be the father of nations. And so that's partly a reflection back on the power of Abraham's covenant, right? Even though things are going terribly wrong, locally, let's say, the fact that Abraham has made this overarching agreement with God means that all of these catastrophes

are taking place within a bounded space, within the ark, we could say. That's one way of looking at it. And I do think that that's right, because it seems to me that, you know, the gnarc we could say, that's one way of looking at it. And I do think, I do think that that's right because it seems to me that, you know, if everything falls apart around you, there's a couple of things you're gonna want.

You're gonna want someone standing beside you. That's for sure, that you can trust. You're gonna want your family around you and you want them to have your back. And you're gonna wanna know that you didn't do some goddamn stupid thing to bring all hell down on yourself. And if you're locking any of those, when that crisis comes, there's a high probability

it will flatten you and you won't be able to get up. It does seem to me, you can ask yourself this question. When things collapse around you, how much utility is knowledge of your own moral virtue? It's bad enough to be laid, it's bad to be laid low, but to be laid low and to know that you were the fault, you were at fault for it. And worse, the things that you did, that you knew you did, that were wrong, brought you there, then I think you have nothing to stand on in that situation.

And that's also the circumstances under which I think you're more likely, at least to be abandoned by people around you. So given that you know that the catastrophe is coming, right, that the tragedy of life will strike you, the question is, well, how do you fortify yourself against that? And obviously, to some degree, you do that by being materially sensible and these old people, in the test, in the Old Testament, these ancient people, they weren't blind to the utility of having a good crop and some animals, you know, that's an integral part of their life to take care of themselves physically. But they're also wise enough to know that there's an element of moral, what would you call it, there's a necessity for moral integration that defends you against the catastrophe of existence

even more effectively than anything material. And even more that the stability of the material things is more dependent on the integrity of your spirit than the integrity of your spirit is dependent on the material things. And I think the evidence for that is actually quite clear. I read a very interesting book a while back called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

that was written by a Harvard Emeritus Professor of History. And one of the things that he claimed, I liked it. I thought it was very smart, was that the only true natural resources interpersonal trust. If you can set up a society where people trust each other, then it will instantly become rich. And you use the example of Japan, which is a very conscientious society,

and very rich society. But the Japanese have no natural resources, right? None to speak of. And yet they're rich. And then you have countries like the Soviet Russia and much of South America, where there's just natural resources that, you know, they're just like Venezuela. Just more natural resources than you know what to do with. And the places are absolute catastrophes, absolute catastrophes of cynicism and corruption.

And so he attempted to document the relationship between default interpersonal trust among citizens within countries and their productivity and their GDP and their standard of living and found a very, very tight relationship. And I like that a lot and I've got a story about that quickly that I think is very interesting. I'll tell you two stories. One sort of generic. I'll tell you one personal first. So one day I lent my card to one of my graduate students and he took it to Montreal. It was this old cowl-ack and it was a really bad rainstorm in Montreal and he was in one of the highways that are like set into the ground and there was like six inches of water

and he was turning a corner, hit the brakes and skidded on the water and smacked it into the wall on the corner of the bumper. And so then he brought it back and he was very apologetic about it and his name name was Matt Shade, I'll tell you that, because Matt might hear this, and I can shame him a bit for doing this, 20 years ago. And he's a professor at the Ontario Institute of Technology, I think now, and quite a successful one. But anyways, he brought the car back, and I went and got it evaluated for damages. It was like $1,700 or something to repair it, and or maybe more, but it was almost as much as the car was worth.

I thought, well, I'm not going to do that. So I went online and I typed in the part. And if you do that, you can get people to bid on sending you a used part from all over North America. So that's kind of cool. So there's all these junk dealers I've got together, and they have this network of communications. So you put in the car part, and then they send you a used part from all over North America. So that's kind of cool. So there's all these junk dealers have got together and they have this network of communications. So you put in the car part and then they send you a bid.

And so this guy said, well, I'll send you the bumper assembly, which is the whole bumper and the lights for like, it's $250. And I thought, yeah, okay, you could do that, that'd be good. So then I said yes. And then he called me up about half an hour later. This guy from Waydown South had a really deep sort of Mississippi accent. He said, wait a sec, was that for the bumper or the bumper assembly?

And I said, well, it was for the bumper assembly. He said, oh, I thought it was for the bumper. And then he said, but that's OK. I'll send it to you anyways. I thought, whoa, that's pretty good. So I said, well, thank you. And then I hung up. And then half an hour later, he called me up again. And he and he said look I just went out and looked at that bumper assembly and there's a plastic trim piece on the side

And it has a scratch in it and I thought I better tell you that just in case you didn't want it And I thought wow that's so amazing. It's like there's a miracle man It's like this guy. He's somewhere in Mississippi. I'm never gonna see him again ever I'm never gonna have any contact with him. He made a bad deal, because the part was worth more than he decided to sell it to me for. But he stuck with his deal. And then he went over and above the call of duty.

He said, well, this part that I'm selling to you for way less than it's worth is damaged. So I thought I'd better tell you. It's like, man, you've got to recognize a miracle when you see one. That was a miracle. So I said, hey, look. It's like, man, you got to recognize a miracle when you see one. That was a miracle. So I said, hey, look, thanks for calling, man. It's OK.

I can handle the scratch and the part needed. And I got the car fixed and forgave Matt. And you know, it had a happy ending. So that's trust, right? Because I didn't know him from Adam. And he's a primate full of snakes just like the rest of us. And yet, he was willing to simplify himself to the point where I could just take him absolutely at his word,

and that meant we could trade even though we were strangers. It's like, man, do not underestimate the utility of that. And then there's eBay. So when eBay first started, the idea was, it's not going to work, because you'll send me junk and I'll send you a check that bounces, and that'll be the end of eBay, right? And so these escrow agents popped up so you could ensure your transaction with them, it moves for like 10% of the transaction, they would get the check and the goods and make

sure that they were okay, and then send them on or ensure the transaction. But what happened was the escrow agents didn't make any money, and the reason for that was no one cheated Now you think about how amazing that is right you bring these people together across a whole continent They've never seen each other before they're never going to interact with each other again And this was before there were any reputation ratings on eBay and yet the default transaction was you describe your goods Honestly including their flaws you set a reasonable price I decide to pay you you ship the goods and I pay you and it works and You describe your goods honestly, including their flaws. You set a reasonable price.

I decide to pay you, you ship the goods, and I pay you. And it works. And what happened was that eBay produced a tremendous amount of capital that was previously frozen. So frozen capital is when you've invested money in something, but the thing is no longer useful to you. So the money is just sitting there frozen, right? So to speak.

And you can't get it loose because, well, you've got an attic full of junk. How are you going to get rid of that? Oh, eBay. And so all of a sudden, all these things that were just junk became valuable. And everybody got richer. And none of that would have happened

without the covenant that we established between each other that's predicated on trust. And so you might say that trust is the currency. And currency is trust because it's a promissary note, right? And if people lie, then the currency gets debased very, very rapidly. And so the economy runs on trust. And so that's part of the overarching covenant. So Abraham makes this covenant with God and he decides that he's gonna aim high

and live a good life and tell the truth and that puts this boundary around him. It's like a walled garden. It's like a walled garden. And inside there, there's all sorts of things that are happening that are complex and difficult, but outside there's a boundary and the boundary is, well, maybe things won't, it's like God says after the flood, He says, I'll never send a flood again, that's part of the story.

And so there's an intimation there that no matter how bad things get, they won't get so bad that they'll be catastrophic, but there's a coded to that, which is that you have to maintain the covenant. And we don't know what that means, you know? Because you know, you think it's pretty obvious that if you treat people well, if you really think about it, and you're not being naively optimistic and like, you know, a nice good person with all the weakness that that that that that that intimates. If you're being hard-nosed and sensible,

you understand that if you treat people, if you trust people, that's an act of courage. If you're not naive, right? If you're naive, it's an act of stupidity because you might get bit and you probably will. And if you're naive and you get bit and you probably will. And if you're naive and you get bit, you will suffer for it. It'll traumatize you. But if you're not naive and you know you can get bit, then you might ask, well, what should you do with people?

And the answer is you should trust them. And not because you're naive and not because they couldn't betray you and not because you don't know that they could betray you. But because if you hold out your hand in trust, then you're inviting the best part of that person to step forward. And that won't happen unless you take that initial step. And that's courage, not naivety. And so to trust someone once your eyes are open, that's an act of courage. And that opens up the world.

You know, and you might say, OK. You mean? APPLAUSE And so there's this idea in this story that you can withstand it a fair bit of the catastrophe of life by establishing the proper covenant and by acting in a trustworthy manner and extending your hand to people properly. And you might say, well, okay, that's sensible. I can understand how that would work. And I can certainly see how the opposite wouldn't work

because if I have to be absolutely terrified that you're gonna be training it every possible moment and we're in a negotiation, we're not gonna get any work done, man, because I'm gonna be figuring out what you're up to all the time and you're gonna be figuring out what I'm up to all the time and we're just not gonna get anywhere.

You'll come and say you're gonna do something and I can just simplify you. I can say you're gonna do what you said you do. I don't have to worry about you. And then the same applies to me. And then we can go do something. And that's how we generate wealth. So then you might say, well, what's the ultimate limit of that?

Like we know that there's corruption in our society, and that people betray each other, and that there's deceit and all of that. And it causes things like the periodic collapse in 2008, which was complicated, but was partly engendered by corruption. What would be the upside if we really determined to act honestly? What do you think it is that people would be able to do with the world if we stopped acting in a corrupt manner? I mean, what is the upside? Do you think we could, could, could, how far back

could we push aging, do you think? If we hit it hard for 50 years, could we triple our lifespan? It wouldn't surprise me. You know, all these terrible diseases that be set the planet, we could get rid of them. There's no reason for hunger and starvation. We make enough food.

It's like, what would happen if we stopped acting badly? How much better could things get? Well, you start locally, I think. You start with yourself and you start with your family. But there's intimations of the divine. There's intimations of the kingdom of God and the covenant with God in the Old Testament. It's like, you think, well, we speak secularly.

You think, well, that's an unprovable assumption. It's like, well, we well, we speak secularly. You think, well, that's an unprovable assumption. It's like, well, we'll just hold on a sec. What's the assumption here exactly? What is the upper end for humanity? I mean, who's gonna say, right? Who's gonna say, especially in this day and age, man? There's so many things happening that you can't even comprehend them.

What can we do if we put all of our effort into it? Well, you can experiment with that because you can start in your own household, you can start in your own room. And you can make miracles happen in the confines of your own space. There's no doubt about that. All you have to do is try. You'll see that that happens. And people are writing to me and telling me that they're trying this and that that's exactly what's happening. And so we don't want to be too cynical about where we might be headed. And Hager bore Abraham a son. Abraham called his son's name, which Hager bore Ishmael, who is by tradition the forefather of several Arab nations and of Muhammad himself. And Abraham

was four of Scorra and six years old when Hager bear Ischmailed Abram. So that's the end of another story. And then, so that section ends, and then again we have an encounter between Abraham and God, when Abram was 90 years old and 9, 99 years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, Walk before me and be thou perfect." Alexander McLaren, who was a biblical commentator who lived in the early 19th century, said, this phrase walking before God is not precisely walking with God, because that's what Noah did, right? He says, it's rather that of an active life spent in continual consciousness of being naked and opened before the eyes of him to whom we have to give account. I was pretty happy to stumble

across that because I mean I might have picked and chosen of course you never know that whether you do that, but it does seem in keeping with the narrative strain of the chapter, right? Because what we've hypothesized so far is that God is called Abraham and said, you know, get out there in the world. Go to where it's unknown. Go to where you're a stranger. And get away from the familiar. Go out to the unknown.

Establish yourself. And great things will come of it. Regardless of the proximal evidence, great things will come of it. And so I think that's what the walking before God refers to. It's not like Abraham is acting in certainty. There's no certainty here. That's the act of the leap of faith, even, because it does require a leap of faith for you to move into the world, because the world is a catastrophe. Self-evidently, the world is a catastrophe. And so there's every reason for you to assume that And so there's every reason for you to assume that you should sit in your basement and hide from it, but that's not it doesn't help. It doesn't make things better. And the thing is perhaps you're not built for that. You're not taking the lead. He's the person that's going out there into the unknown.

God says, well, the great things are going to happen, but he's a little short on details, that's for sure. So the weight is still on Abraham, and that's a good thing because it also, that in noble Abraham, right? That's the other thing that's so cool is that if God had just laid out the whole story and brushed the branches from Abraham's path while he was walking forward.

Well, then there'd be nothing for Abraham to do. There'd be no nobility in his own pursuit. And this is another thing that we don't understand very well. It's a really tough thing to understand. It's like, how much trouble would you want there not to be? It's a weird question, right? Because you want to have something to contend with. You want to have something that forces from you the best

that you have. And so you have to have real problems. It's something like that. Would you dispense with all your real, but you could just lay down on a bed and have problem infused into your mouth, you know? If all your problems were solved. And so maybe you want difficult problems that you can solve

something like that. Because there's some, I don't know what it is about it, there's the overcoming and the growth that comes along with that. There's something about the nobility of the enterprise. You certainly see that when you go about having children, for example, which is, you know, the psychological literature is quite clear. If you do moment-to-moment comparisons of people who have kids and people who don't have kids, the people who don't have kids are happier. And so, psychologists who tend to get things wrong even when they make intelligent discoveries, like that one, immediately some of them jump to the conclusion that because happiness is the goal

that, well, there's something about children that make you unhappy and that's not good. It's like, well, wait a second, maybe that's the wrong metric. It's like, of course, you're less happy once you have children because you have to worry about them. You know, my neighbor down the street, who's very smart, woman said to me once, you can only be as happy as your unhappy as child, which I thought was really good. You know, that's really smart. But then it isn't, well, if having children doesn't make you happy, the answer isn't don't have children.

It's like, don't be so stupid about being happy. That's the answer. It's because there's a nobility in the pursuit, right? And of course, now you're responsible. You have a new baby, you think, especially if you're a new parent, you think, what the hell is this? And what am I going to do with it? And then you're done for the rest of your life.

You never sleep properly again, because you're going to be worried about this creature that you have to take care of. But what the hell good are you if you're not doing that or something else equally difficult? Because you just haven't been called out yet, unless you take on a responsibility like that. The idea that happiness is the purpose of life.

It's like great for happiness. Man, if it comes along, you should be thrilled that it's visiting you. But the notion that that's what you should pursue, that's the weakest possible notion. First of all, as soon as something terrible happens to you, you're done. It's like, life is to be happy. It's like, well, now you have cancer. So how's that?

How's the happiness thing work it out for you now? Or maybe it's not you you know, maybe it's your father that has Alzheimer's disease or some damn thing and you know It's like it's a rare person that doesn't have some catastrophe one One person away from them is like life is to be happy. It's that's not right and And we can at least derive that from these stories. That isn't what they say at all. God's perfectly happy in the stories to grant the people with whom he forms a covenant, happiness,

and prosperity. But there's never a word that that's the purpose. The rule is aim high and get your bloody act together. That's the rule. And establish this contractual covenant with the ultimate ideal. And that will see you through the catastrophes. And that's a much more mature way of looking at life as far as I'm concerned, because all you have to do is have your eyes half open,

and you see that the fundamental reality of life is tragedy and suffering. That's inescapable. The question, that doesn't mean that it makes life unbearable, or that it makes being something that shouldn't have existed. That isn't what it means, but it means that you have to contend with it and you have to get ready. And the willingness to adopt responsibility for yourself and for others is the precondition for that. And then maybe if you do that properly, then now and then you get some happiness.

You can sit at the end of a day and you have half an hour where your conscience is clear and there's nothing that you need to be doing and you can relax and think, you know, that's all right, things are okay and thank God for that. And that's maybe where you get your happiness. So that's something, that's growing up, man, obviously. And to not know that, and to not be taught that, like everyone should be taught that. It's so obvious, we should be taught that. Well, and that's partly what these biblical stories do. And I'll make my covenant between me and thee, and we'll multiply thee exceedingly.

And Abram fell on his face. Yeah. And God talked with them saying, as for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shall be a father of many nations. God says this a lot, as for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations. God says this a lot, Abram, right? It's almost like he has to remind him now and then, and it's not surprising, because he keeps going through these unbelievable adventures

that are really psychologically and socially shattering. So it's a good thing that this reminder pops up and fairly frequently, but of course, Abraham is also open to it. And I think, what does it mean? You know, I'll talk personally for a moment, I guess. So I've asked myself a lot of questions in the last eight months, man. I can tell you that.

And I'm still asking myself a lot of questions. And I've been conferring with a lot of people, because I had lots of people who were helping me negotiate whatever the hell this is that's happening. And I could ask them how it was doing, and they would tell me a bunch of things I was doing wrong, and some things I was doing right, and I could listen to them. I was asking questions all the time about how the hell I should manage this properly.

And what I was trying to do and what seemed to serve me properly was to figure out how to do it correctly. That was the issue. It's like, I didn't really care what happened. And I guess I really don't care what happens. But I do care if I do it correctly because I don't want to screw it up. I don't want to screw things up. And that seems to be a reasonable goal for people. I mean, wouldn't you like that as a goal that you don't screw things up?

Because you can't control too. You know, your life isn't fully under your control by any stretch of the imagination, but it might be nice to not have your conscience eating at you saying, look, you know, you had a big opportunity there and you mocked it up because your weak and blind and you didn't listen. That's no good. The catastrophe is bad enough, as I said, without you being the bloody source of it. And so, well, that's Abraham falling on his face, I guess, and also communing with God. He wants to get it right. And there's these things that back in and promise, but it's bloody easy to make a catastrophic mistake. And you'll do that in your life. And maybe humility is one of the things that can prevent that,

because you can look and you can think, okay, what am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? What can I do better? How can I do this properly? And then maybe you get the intimation of the proper way to move forward. And maybe that's what protects you when things are chaotic and in strife. And who knows what that's worth? Neither shall I name any more be called Abraham, which means high king, if I remember

correctly. But thy name shall be Abraham, for a father of many nations, have I made the... Oh yes, Abraham for high father, look at that. Abraham means father of a multitude, and I will make the exceedingly fruitful, and I will make nations of the productive, right? Productive, and that seems to be something that's good to be. I mean, like one of the things that I've thought about deeply, I thought deeply about death and the death of my family members and about funerals. And I thought about it partly because I had this weird experience once that I think I

told you about where I took one of my clients to see an emombing, which was very strange experience. I had a chance to talk to the funeral directors, you know, because they have weird jobs, you know. And there's this idea, well, the Freudian idea that people suffer from this terrible death anxiety. And there's a whole line of social psychological theory theorizing called tear management theory that's

predicated on the idea that we defend ourselves against death anxiety with our belief systems. And like it's a Puppet's Ernest Becker's idea, he wrote the denial of death, which is a great book. But there's a weakness in it because you see some people who aren't like that. You know, like emergency room nurses aren't like that. And palliative care nurses aren't like that. My sister-in-law is a palliative care nurse.

That's a hard job, right? Because you go in there, you're caring for people. You have, and they're in pain, and they're in the last legs, you're trying to make them comfortable, and you have a relationship with them because how the hell are you going to make them comfortable? If you don't, then they go and die on you and that just happens, that's what happens every day, right? And what's weird is that people can be palliative care nurses, it's like how do you

figure that out? Because people can actually thrive in the face of death strangely enough and like these funeral parlor directors, they were interesting to talk to because that's all they do, right? They just deal with, they deal with death and grief all the time. And it was very interesting talking to them because I talked to them. They found their job extremely meaningful. And I asked them, well, you know, what is that do to your life? You know, you're saturated with death and suffering. And this is the same answer that I got from the palliative care nurse is that it doesn't undermine your life. It enriches it. Now, who would guess that, right? I mean, what the hell? That just doesn't make any sense at all. But what it does is speak to human possibility because

God only knows how tough you are. You know, I mean, if you read history and you read about what people have done, you think, wow, we're pretty tough. People are, I read, there is a shipwreck in the Antarctica. 100 years ago was so, and I read the story. It was not a biography if I remember correctly of the captain. I might be wrong about that, but I've got the basic story, right? Well, they had a shipwreck and the Antarctica. And then they were there for a whole year in the Antarctica, you know? And none of them died. Not one.

He didn't lose a single man. Not one. He kept them around high. And then they took this boat that was on the ship. And they crossed like 400 miles of the roughest ocean, the roughest frigid ocean in the world, right? You don't go in that ocean. And then they went to an island. And they ocean in the world, right? You don't go in that ocean, and then they went to an island,

and they walked across the island, across these mountains that no one else has ever climbed since, and they went to the city on the other side of the island, and they got a boat, and they went and rescued their compatriots, and everyone survived. It's like endurance is the name of the book. You read that book, man, you think,

wow, people are really tough. And it's ridiculous. So who knows how tough you are? And maybe you find out by going out to find out how tough you are, right? So you take on a challenge. One that you think you can master. Just it's just a bit beyond your grasp.

And you master it. And then you're a little tougher. And you think, hey, that worked out pretty well. And so then you're more of a monster. And then you go out and you find another challenge that's even bigger and you think, well, maybe I can do that too. And all of a sudden you can and you get a little bit bigger and God only knows what the limit is of view.

And you find out by pushing yourself against the world. And of course, that's what Abraham is doing. And so, see, we're very pessimistic, us modern people. You know, we're pessimistic about humanity. That's for sure, dismal, wretched, planet destroying, cancer on the planet, right? As the Club of Rome described us. So pleasantly back in the 1960s, you know?

And I don't know, maybe we're ashamed of the Cold War. Maybe we're ashamed of all the destruction in the 20th century and the hydrogen bomb and the, you know, the continuing catastrophes of our societies, and we're deeply ashamed of that and ashamed of ourselves personally, but it's a hell of a thing to, you know, call us a cancer on the planet. There's just no excuse for that, because what you do with cancer is eradicate it, and I don't think that that's a very noble mode of personally. And I think it says a lot about the people who would use such phrasology that they would dare to conceptualize humanity in that manner. But you know, it would be nice if we could be optimistic. And I think, began the problem with being optimistic

is that it's naive. So then the question is, is there an optimism that's not naive? And I think there is. And the optimism that's not naive is just a visualization of how strong people can be. So one of the things that I tell people, I told my students in my class in maps of meaning. Here is a goal.

You want to be the person at the funeral of your father that everyone can rely on. How would that be? You want to be the person who's broken and useless and adding to the misery in the corner. And look, I'm not making light of people's grief. You know, I understand grief. But who do you want to be when there's a crisis? Right? You want to be the person that a crisis? Right? Do you want to be the person that everyone can turn to for strength? It's like why the hell not? Why

not that is a goal? That'd be a good goal because then if there's a crisis and there will be, it won't be such a bloody crisis because there'll be someone there that can deal with it. You know, so when I went and talked to these people at the funeral home, I envisioned that. I thought, okay, well this is something you have to contend with if you're going to be alive and adult. You have to contend with death and suffering and you have to be ready for it. And you have to be there for the person because that's all they're going to have. And so there's a goal, man. And in this time of nihilism, you know, it's what's the point of life people ask.

And they're taught that at universities. What's the point of life? Everything's interpretation. Humanities of cancer on the planet, you know? Well, how about no? How about not that? How about that there's something to us? And I will establish my covenant between me and the end I seed after the end their generations for an everlasting covenant to be a God unto the end to the seed after the end to the end to the seed after

the end. The land wherein thou art a stranger, all of the land of Canaan, because of course Abraham went out into the land of strangers, right? But it says that he'll master if he keeps his covenant. He'll master the land of strangers. That's a wonderful thing to know. And I think a true thing. Because if you're dealing with strangers, I've dealt with lots of strange people in my life.

I'm a clinical psychologist. And that isn't to say that everyone that I've dealt with was strange because that's not the case. But I have encountered some very strange people and you know The way to deal with strange people is to you never lie to a strange person That's the thing Especially if they're paranoid You never lie to someone who's paranoid it will come back to bite you and if you're in an extreme situation with someone who's very

unpredictable the only thing you have that works is the truth. That works. I'll tell you a little story. This is in my book. So I had this landlord in Montreal. He lived next door to me. He was an ex-Helz Angels biker. He'd spent a lot of time in prison.

And his wife had borderline personality disorder and she committed suicide when I lived there. And he was a rough guy, and he was a Kebacquah. He spoke Jouel, which I could hardly understand. And he didn't really know what to make of me, and I didn't really know what to make of him. But we got along. I was very careful talking to him, as you might imagine.

But I was, I was very, and we went over as you might imagine. But I was. And we went over, my wife and I went over there, and we had spaghetti dinner one night, and we sort of communicated. And I bought a poster from him, because he made these wooden posters that had neon on them. And that's how we made a living. He kind of trained himself to be a bit of an electronic

sky. So we made these things. And he was trying to quit drinking. And we talked about that. He was a lot older than me. He was like 20 years older than me. I was about 25 at this point. And we got along pretty well.

But every now and then, he'd go out and get and drink. And he could really drink. Well, like he was one of these guys who could drink like 60 beer, and you think, well, no one can drink that much. And you're wrong. I studied alcohol for like 10 years. Some of my subjects, fathers drank 40 ounces of vodka a day and had been doing it for 20 years.

So you can drink a lot and he could drink a lot. And what would happen? He was trying to not drink, but he'd go out and go on a binge and then he'd be going for like three days. And he'd drink up all his money. And then we'd hear him out in the backyard, howling at the moon with this little ugly dog he had, you know? And he'd howled in the dog with howled and he'd howled in the dog with howled.

And it was rather unsettling and made my wife nervous. And what worse, you know, now and then he'd come to the door, like three in the morning, eh? And he'd knock on the door and he'd be standing there. And I don't know how much experience you've had with rough guys who are alcoholic and who are drunk, but they can be upright and unconscious at the same time. And so that was the state that he was in. He'd be just swaying, and he'd ask me if I would like to buy his toaster or his microwave because he needed some money to keep drinking and you know I didn't really want to buy his toaster or his microwave but when the ex-Helsey Angel, as you all speaking,

60 beer drunk, K-Bakwa, Biker shows up at your door at three in the morning and it offers you to sell, offers to sell you his microwave. The easiest thing is to say, I really need a microwave. So you know, I bought the microwave and toaster and some other things. But then my wife talked to me and she liked my landlord, you know, even though she was afraid of him, she liked him. And she said, you can't buy any more appliances because it's not good for him. And I thought, huh, that's an interesting problem, you know. So what the hell am I going to do about this?

Because no, I don't want to buy your microwave. It just doesn't seem to be the right answer at three in the morning. So at one time, he took me out on his 750 Honda. And he put me on the back of it. He wanted to show me his layer, I guess, his hangouts. And I got his wife's helmet on, but it didn't fit. It just sit on the top of my head. And he said, I got on the bike and he said,

if the cops chase us, we're not stopping. And then away we went. And we went to these bars downtown on San Laurent. They were very rough places. And he got into like four fights that night. Because he was a rough guy. And these kind of punk guys would come up to him and sort of challenge him and act stupidly around him and he was very skeptical and if you were acting stupidly around him for any length of time, he just hid you because he felt that that's what you deserved and perhaps he was right, you know, so, so I had first-hand

opportunity to observe him. So anyways, he sure enough about a week or two after we had this conversation, he showed up at the door, knock, knock, knock, you know, open the door and they were standing there, you know, with his eyes kind of half closed and he was swaying and he had, I don't remember what the appliance was this time, but he wanted to sell it to me. And I said, I'm not all I can buy this, I'm not going to buy this because I know not all I can buy this. I'm not gonna buy this because I know you're trying to quit drinking. And if I give you this money, then you're gonna go and drink it up.

And it's not going to be good for you. And what else did I tell him? I think I told him as well that this whole thing of him coming to my house at like two in the morning was scaring my wife who he liked and that it had to stop. And believe me, man, I was thinking about what I was saying, because he was watching me like a rough guy watches you.

And a rough guy watches you like this. He thinks, if you say one thing that indicates contempt, you're going to bloody well pay for it. And so I was finding my words like, you know, to bloody well pay for it. And so I was finding my words like, you know, I was crossing a swamp and trying to look for the rocks underneath the surface. And I said what I had to say very, very carefully, and he looked at me for about 15 seconds. And that's a long time to be looked at, at in the morning and he left and he never came back to sell me anything again and we got along fine but that's a good illustration of this issue with regards to truth and success in the strange

land because I was in the strange land when I was talking to my neighbor, my landlord, and I managed to say what was true carefully enough, so despite the fact that he was a very violent person, and that he was a very intoxicated person, and that he had every reason to be suspicious of me, and we couldn't communicate very well. And I didn't do what he wanted, that he took it, and he left, and there was no problem, and life went on just fine after that. And so we don't want to underestimate the utility of establishing this bounded relationship with the ideal and attempting to live with some nobility in truth while aiming at the highest ideal.

There's nothing about that that's anything but strengthening and positive. And it's exactly what you need to set against the catastrophe and uncertainty of life. And as far as I can tell, that's what these Abrahamic stories are attempting to communicate. So we'll stop there. Thank you. I have to make an announcement. I'm going to do a talk August 22nd, I think. I'm not sure of the date, but I'll find out with Gadsad from Concordia. And so, I'm with a, with an ex-social worker named Serena Singh.

And with Faith Goldie, I think Faith is going to be there as well. So the tickets for that will go on sale. I'm not hosting this. Someone else is dealing with it. But the tickets for that will go on sale within approximately a week. And I'll post that on my, I'll probably make an announcement on YouTube. But I'll Twitter it, Twitter it, and all of that. So, and I think I mentioned to you guys last week

that I would like to continue this series, but I think I'll do it once a month, and I'll try to do it in this theater, but I haven't got word from the people who run the theater, that's the university, whether or not it'll be accessible, but I'll figure something out. And so, oh, hi, Serena. Serena is the person who's going to be hosting this. It's August 22nd. Seven to ten PM at Ryerson. Okay, tickets go on sale Monday. All right. And then, and then, oh,

there's a special freedom of speech edition of the Hemingway's Restaurant, Jordan Peterson discussion group tonight. So that's at 10 p.m. So you're all welcome to attend that. So that's 142 Cumberland Street. OK, so that's it for announcements, I guess. And then let's say for questions,

yes, I was going to let you ask the first question last time wasn't I? OK, so I will do that. And so let's say for questions, yes, I was gonna let you ask the first question last time, wasn't I? Okay, so I will do that. And so let's make sure again, everybody to speak into the mic clearly so that the YouTube people can hear and the ghostly YouTube people. And so go ahead. My question, I was quite impressed with your presentation

last week and I wasn't quite sure where it was going at one point in what neither neither was I And that's okay because at one point I listen and I thought what you basically were talking about This is what I saw you were embodying mind body and spirit and bringing it all together as one and you touch on it a bit tonight When you talk about truth. This is where we need to go right and I know you see be positive and all that and yeah That's right, I agree. It's scary what's going on right now.

However, we have the power to stay in the positive. What you talked about last week, you talked about using our intuition, which I consider our higher self, using consciousness. And you made reference, I can't remember exactly what you said, but you held your hand and you talked about emotions and bringing intellect on top.

And when you said emotions, everything just lit up for me because I'm thinking that's our heart chakra, that's what combines our lower self, our physical being, the material stuff, all the stuff that doesn't really motivate us with our higher self. And when you just talked about emotion, I wanted to talk about the emotion of love. And I find so many people are terrified. It's a four-letter word I know, but it doesn't have to be bad. OK, so I remember why, when I talked to you last week, why I wanted you to ask this question.

So, OK, so I've talked a lot in this lecture series about truth. And, no, I think there's a battle in the biblical stories all the way through between love and truth in terms of their primacy. And I've concentrated a lot on truth in my own thinking. And it's hard to talk about love because it's a word that people have mouted to death. As soon as you start talking about love, then people should just go into a different room and not listen to you.

It can get sappy and new age, you just like that. And I don't like that at all, but it still has something that has to be contended with. And I think, so I've been trying to conceptualize, let's say, what this covenant might, might constitute. And I think the love part, so here's this, so, you know, there's this book by Gert the called Faust and it's in two volumes Faust one and Faust two logically enough. One was written much later than the other and Faust basically sells the soul to the devil for knowledge and the devil in Faust is Mephistopheles. And Mephistopheles is quite a well-developed character, and Gertlis has Mephistopheles say what he's about, which is really quite cool.

So it's like the adversary of the world, evil itself, gets a chance to speak and make its case. And Gertlis thought this was so important that he actually had Mephistopheles announce himself once in Faust I, and then using the same words, phrase differently, again in part two. It really struck me, it really struck me. So what Mephistoffley says is that the world is such a

charter house of suffering and destruction that it would be better if it never existed. And so that what he's working to is to bring existence to an end because it is not justified by its suffering. It's like that's... It's an argument very similar to the argument that is made by Ivan... Camer... Cameratzov... Thank you, thank you.

Russian, say, you can't pronounce them or live with them, you can. But he's basically... He's an atheist and does a very good job of detailing out the atheist argument, or maybe an anti-theist argument. And he's arguing with his brother, Aliyosha, who's a monastic novitiate, who's a very good guy, but not an intellect. Ivan's an intellect and a very powerful one.

And he basically tells Aliyosha that all of the cosmos isn't worth the suffering of one child. He tells this story about this, and this Dostoevsky took this from a newspaper about this parents that locked their four-year-old daughter in an outhouse overnight, and she screamed about it until she froze to death. And so Dostoevsky used that argument. He tied that into Ivan's anti-theist argument against Heliosha, very, very powerful argument. The brother's Kremlin outso of his an absolutely mind-boggling, amazing book. I would highly recommend it.

And so that's a mefist awfully in perspective. Mr. Phelian perspective is that being itself is so corrupt that it shouldn't exist. So then you think, okay, well, that, fair enough, that's a decent argument, it's understandable, but the problem comes when you try to implement that and what happens when you implement it as far as I can tell, you adopt that

messed epistophilia and attitude of bitterness and resentment and destruction is that you make all the suffering that you're complaining about far worse. And I think that's what happened at the base of things in the 20th century, is that there was a powerful movement among humanity to bring being itself to a halt, you know, what culminated in the development

of the hydrogen bomb. And the high probability, for many periods of time, that we were going to do something permanent and fatal. Which seems like a bad idea. Which seems like a bad idea. It seems like a bad idea. So what's the opposite of the myth, the Stofelean attitude? And I think the opposite of that is what's presented in the biblical stories in the guise of love.

And that is the wish that things would be good. It's something like that. That's what love is, I think, is that it's the attempt to orient yourself towards making things better. And it's predicated on something like a deep appreciation for being despite its suffering and deficiencies. And maybe a decision that you're going to act to bring about things, to move things towards the good. And I think that's the thing that sets the parameters of the aim. It's the opposite of the thing that sets the parameters of the aim. It's the opposite of the mefistophilia and attitude. It's like to work towards the betterment of being because you've decided that you're

going to open your heart to existence, something like that. And it's within that framework that truth takes place. I think because truth has to serve something. It can serve truth, but it has to be bounded inside something. And I think that that's what it's bounded inside. So what I was going to refer to with that was David Hawkins wrote Power versus Force, and he put it on a quantifiable scale, all different emotions. He called it consciousness, and he put love at 528 Hertz.

He put shame at 20. I'm not sure if I've got these 100% right. Guilt I think at 30, fear at 50. And it shows you how far people who are really knocked down have to get to love. And I'm thinking if we could quantify love on a term, it means different things to everybody and rightly so. But come and get to that frequency.

And if you look at the Sulfedrian notes, you know the musical notes. Have you heard? I'm afraid I'm going to ask you to stop if you would, because I should go to another question if you, thank you very much. Okay, let's. So you've been an educator through the rise of the smartphone, and my question basically relates to procrastination and tasterlay delay specifically and given the unprecedented level of

distraction that we have in today's world I just want to get your perspective from a psychological standpoint on other than cleaning your damn room what would you suggest to a student who's looking to overcome these things? Well, I think with any, let's call it, addictive process. I mean, emails powerfully addictive, right? Partly, it's a slot machine, and I mean that technically. So when you pull, that's a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, if I remember correctly, and it's very addictive because if you pull on the slot machine arm enough, you will win. And you never know which pole will reward you. And so not only is that addictive, it's very hard to

extinguish that. And so, emails like that, because there's always something beckoning and now, and then it's a jackpot. And social media is like that because there's always something back in and now and then it's a jackpot. And social media is like that because, you know, people are posting interesting things. And so, well, how do you overcome an addictive process? And partly, you do it by replacing it with something better. Right? So, when people study drug and alcohol use, they often make an elementary mistake,

which is to try to figure out why people use drugs in alcohol, that's not a smart thing to wonder. We know why people use cocaine. Cocaine directly stimulates the systems that produce positive emotion. It's like, so there's no mystery there. The mystery with cocaine is very, very simple. Why don't people take cocaine all the time until they die? That's the mystery, really, because

you can get isolated rats to do that. And for some people, alcohol has the same kind of effect, except it's mediated by opiates. But often what people have to do to get themselves out of an addictive process is to find something better to do to replace it. And so I would say, the problem with the gadgets, and I mean, there are amazing things, is that they interfere with, they proximately interfere with medium to long-term goals, I would say. And so I think the first thing you have to do to bring them under control is figure out what it is that their use is interfering with. It has to be something important, right? So you think, well, I want to do something important. What is that? Well, could be personal. Maybe you want to have a relationship. You

want to get married. You want to have kids. You want to have a career that's meaningful. You want to have a life. You want to have an Abrahamic adventure and be the father of nations, let's say. Well, you can't be ranting away on your cell phone and doing that. And so I think part of it is to set your sights high and make a plan and figure out who you could be and see if obsessive utilization of smartphone fits into that vision of nobility. And it will partly because they're unbelievably powerful communication devices. But so often it's for lack of something better to do

and it also interferes. So that's about the best I can do with that. Applause. Hello, Dr. Pieson. So you've been talking with some of the conservative candidates for leadership this year. Yani, you talked with most all of them, right? Not all of them, but a number of them. Yes.

You talked with Andrew, though, right? Yes, I did. Yes. So something very interesting popped up in my Facebook feed. So it was an ad for the Conservative Party. And it was suggesting that we cut funding to public universities that don't support free speech. Yeah, that was probably my fault. Yeah.

See, precisely, because this is something you say in some of your wilder moments, you suggest that we should cut the universities funding by 25% and let them battle it out for the remains. And he's taken that to, you know, his platform. But now what you're doing is, well, one of the things you're doing is you've created this website that identifies the postmodern lexicon and helps people distinguish between postmodern courses and not, so people don't take them.

Or take them if they want. Yeah, so that's... It'd be interesting to know what sort of malevolent postmodernist just study you meticulously and try to use all your knowledge of it. Anyway, but what you've said though, you said that what we need to do is starve it out try to use all your knowledge of it anyway. But what you've said though, you said that what we need to do is starve it out from the source. Yeah, okay, so I do, I know where you're going.

So about two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I went up to Northern Saskatchewan. My parents have a cottage up there. It's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. And there's no cell phone, although we do have internet now, which is probably bad and good. But anyways, I got to take a bit of a break, which was good, because I haven't really been able to think. Because more broadly, about say what I'm doing, because I don't know what the hell I'm doing exactly. This is all very strange. But one thing I thought about, I was out on the lake, I was canoeing around, and I thought about war,

because I was very irritated, I'm very irritated about what's happened to the universities. And there's a hint of malevolence about it, and I'm not a fan of ideological possession. And I've been set back up on my heels a lot over the last eight months by the onslaught of what emerged when I said that there was words I wouldn't say. And so it's put me into a defensive posture, let's say. And I had been thinking in terms of war metaphors, you know? Like this is a battleground,

and that there's a war going on an ideological war. And I do believe that that's true. But then I was reading, and I did this partly for this course, I was reading the sermon on the Mount, and one of the things that says is, resist not evil. And I don't know what it'd make of that line. And so I was talking to a bunch of people about it and reading about it a lot and trying to figure out

what it meant. And partly what it means is don't waste time, right? Because when you're fighting against something, then there's something else you're not doing. And then I thought, also, when I was out there on the lake, I thought, well, do I really want to be in a war because war, that's not, that's not, uh, that's not heaven. That's for sure. It's really stressful. And people get hurt. And so I thought, well, maybe that's just the wrong way of thinking about it,

even though there's a battleground issue here. And I thought, well, wait a second, maybe the right thing to do in a situation like this, and this is maybe something that those on the alt-right might consider, is that the right thing to do, maybe, is to outline a better way rather than go out directly on the attack. Now, that might be, seem somewhat, at odds with my idea on the attack. Now that might be seen somewhat at odds with my idea of the website and perhaps it is somewhat at odds without. I'm not sure about that, but what I'm trying to do instead of conducting this like a war, let's say,

is to conduct it like a movement towards something better and that would be better. Now with regards to cutting the university's funding, I thought about that too, and I thought, wait a second, that's not going to work out, because it's inviting political interference into higher education. Now, the political interference might be of the counterbalancing kind, because the evidence that the humanities in particular

have tilted almost 100% to the left is overwhelming. And so maybe some counterbalance from the right would set things more towards the middle. But the problem is, is when you open up the door to political interference with higher education content, you can't close the door again. And so on reflection, I thought that it probably was a suboptimal idea.

And that would be better instead, and what this and what are, this is what I wanna do when I launched the website. I wanna ask students, the students who will be using it, it's like, what do you want from university? Because here's your options, you can come out ideologically possessed, right? You can buy this doctrine, this pathological doctrine, and you can become better and resentful,

and you won't learn to communicate properly and you won't read the great works of civilization and you won't learn to think and write, you won't become noble in body and spirit. Is that what you want or do you want the opposite? You want a real education and then I want to explain what that means like I did tonight to some degree, you know, that there's absolute value in learning how to put yourself together and to communicate and to familiarize yourself with the classic works of civilization. And I want to offer that.

I want to do what I can to offer that as the proper alternative, instead of staying in sconce in this notion of a battle, which is just, I just don't think it's the right metaphor. So. Either in Dr. Peterson, I just want to say that I think what you're doing is absolutely miraculous. It's helped change my life, and I'm sure at least raise your hand if Dr. Peterson has helped change your life. So for the better or for the worse.

Ask him to look at it. Well it's about 40 people maybe, and that's that's miraculous You know and I think and and your thinking is gonna be it's gonna be it's gonna be all over the place in the Canadian election in two years And I think that God that's a horrible thing to call the plane You you better watch out for it buddy and you need and and and there's there's gonna be a lot of talk about how how how Andrew Sheer's political message is going to stem from yours. And I think it's really important that he doesn't censor himself like other conservative politicians are doing.

And because, I don't know, we need to unite under a valid, thoughtful, articulate, conservative voice. And what do we have now? We have Trump. That's what's, you know, we don't have any strong, articulate male voices in our political discourse right now. That's what it feels like. Well, it's definitely time for you to develop one. So it looks like you're on the right path.

Hello. Hello, Dr. Peterson. Thank you for everything you've done this past year, and I do mean everything. Well, I'd go stuff this lecture series. Going to get you to move just to, yes, great, belt it out, man. Okay, so I'll try to be succinct. I have two comments on one question Okay, first comment as you mentioned how you were prevented from uploading your YouTube video from last week Yeah, I actually turned that lecture and I make pretty detailed notes So if you want to make an email you it's okay. I've got it. It's my accounts reinstalled reinstored reinstored

Restored, yeah, and so it's okay. It's okay. It's straightened out. And I'm going to upload all the videos to a bunch of other sites. And so this isn't going to happen again. So but I appreciate that. Because I actually miss some lectures and I do want to look at them online. My second comment is about sort of kind of going into the commentaries of Christian theology

just over the centuries, like you've done yourself. I just would like To encourage everybody to also look at not just Western Christianity, but also Eastern Christianity like the Orthodox writings There's a big difference between the two in that the Western Sort of theology comes out of the Roman Roman law Roman justice so there's a lot more of an emphasis on kind of justice and Christ came, he died on the cross for our sin.

So there's that kind of like legal payback. You know what I mean? Right. Whereas the Eastern theology is a lot more, it focuses a lot more on love and on sort of the positive aspects. And if you do read like the first four centers of Christianity, where there was no schism, there's very little mention of like a sort of legalistic framework.

It's a lot more, I don't know, a per se or more heartfelt, I guess. So I think it's important that we also, in the West, look at the Eastern counterpart. Especially more so now because I do perceive a lot of fake love as being at the center of this malevolence that you mentioned. So this whole thing about demonizing the opposition, saying that they're hardless to have no love this and that. I perceive that as a lot of fake love. And I think that we have to keep in mind what true love is.

Sometimes it looks ugly, like in dealing with psychiatric patients, maybe like other countries are not as liberal as Canada, but the data results a lot more often. You know, as many psychiatric patients on the road, for example, in Greece, where I'm from. So yeah, that was kind of my comment that we need to focus a lot more on what real love is, I think, and not just the kind of love that you can put on a scale. Because I don't think that you can put love on a scale. So I've been talking, as some of you know,

to this guy, Jonathan Pazzo, who's an Orthodox carver, and he started a YouTube channel, and he's talking a lot about Orthodox issues. And I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to Orthodox Christianity. But from what I understand of it so far, there's plenty to be learned. So, yeah. I'm Orthodox myself.

I just recently came back to my faith two years ago. Basically, that was the original Christianity. Then there was the schism of 1054 between East and West because of the conflicts that these Christian Christians have with the Pope. And then after that, you also had the schism internally within the West between Catholicism and the Protestants. So that's kind of like the big difference.

The Christianity actually came from the East. So I think that's why it's important that we look at the most ancient types because those were the ones that were closest to the original message. So not to my question. It's about atheism. You might hear a lot of times people criticizing anybody that has any sort of relief in an adiore god that you're just somebody that has an imaginary friend. You know, like the heavenly fall that you have to adhere to, that you have no will of your own. So then there's also, like, what would the contrary argument be that, okay, so if I have a good relationship with my father,

and that's why I'm more likely to accept a higher deity, then it could be that you as an atheist, maybe you have conflict with your father, and that's why you're at first to kind of submit into a higher being that the kind of dig things of your life. Well, you're you're you're attempting a psychoanalysis of atheism, you know, and there's many factors that go into atheism. I would say that you could make that case in some situations, but not in all. I do think, though, and I think this is perhaps

where your question is stemming from, is that it's no fluke that at the same time that one of the consequences of the death of God that Nietzsche announced back in the late 1800s is the all-out assault on masculinity that's occurring in our culture now. And those things are associated. And I do think that does have to do with a lack of faith

in the masculine spirit. And that's a very bad thing because what's a bad thing for everyone, obviously, because women have a partially masculine spirit and they have to put up with men. And so to demolish that or to fail to nurture it, which is certainly what's occurring, is just a pathway to absolute disaster. So, yep. So this is the type of question that you hate because it's in the category of why you believe what you believe. And it's a type of question that makes you say, if I have it right from the last time,

quote, what the hell makes you think it's any of your business? So I'm going to try to, try to frame it properly. And I'm asking this at lecture 10 of 12 and after having listened to quite a few hours of you year and else where. And so in your second interview with Transliminal Media, you lay out a few things. I have some quotes here. I'll skip them for brevity.

You get to the point where you're discussing the embodiment of the logos by Christ as a historical figure. And then you say, quote, is this resurrection real? Did his body resurrect? I don't know. In today's lecture, you alluded to the fact that there are states of consciousness that perhaps we

don't know how to access anymore. And let's say that I'm with you. Let's say I'm with the idea that there are unknown ways to get intimations of the divine, that the embodiment of the logos is associated with physiological transformations, the upper limits of which are unknown, and that we might currently classify as paranormal. But to dumb it right back down to my level, I'm asking about the guy commonly depicted with long hair, nail to a cross, until dead is a doorknob.

And all of this goes to the heart of the question of literalism and religious interpretation. It goes to the heart of kind of, you know, what we're doing here at this lecture series. Are we examining the psychological significance of these stories? Are we entertaining the possibility of these fantastical events? I might be struggling with the concept, but I haven't been able to square away and reconcile those statements by you. So the question is on the question of the resurrection of Christ, why is your answer to your own question I don't know instead of at the very least, probably not.

Well, you're definitely right about me hating that question. Well, I called this series the psychological significance of the biblical stories for a reason, you know, and the reason was that I'm partially qualified to talk about such things. When I step outside of that, then I'm not where I should be. I don't think that... See, I don't think that this is... I'm not gonna get this right, I can't get the words exactly right. This isn't about what I believe personally. It's partly because I don't know what I believe. I don't know what I believe.

The world's a very strange place. I've had some very strange experiences in it. I don't think it's helpful for me to step outside my jurisdiction and speculate precisely. The easiest thing would be to say, I think I said, but I had to say today, I don't think that we know what the upper limits of human possibility are. I don't know what that means metaphysically. What I do understand from the Gospels is that even the accounts of Christ's resurrection

are complex and difficult to understand. I think from reading you in large part that you can make a very strong case for the symbolic meaning of the death and resurrection. I think it does stand for the capacity of the human logos to die and resurrect continually as it strives upward. I'm not willing to say that that's all it means because I don't know what everything means and I don't know what everything means. And I don't know about the fundamental metaphysics of being.

Like, I do believe that it's accurate to construe being as a battleground between good and evil. I believe that. I believe that is the most accurate way of representing being. It's not that most accurate way of representing the objective world, but that's not the same thing. Being is that set of experiences which we inhabit, and that's only partly objective, and it's not obviously reducible to the material, not in any straightforward way, because we don't understand the material substrate of being at all.

And when we do attempt to understand it, say at the quantum level, we run into mysteries that baffle the most intelligent of us and aware. So I'm going to have to leave the question hanging, but partly because I don't know what I think. But partly because there has to be a line between what I believe and what I can communicate. What you believe is beyond your capacity to articulate, if you, at the deepest levels of belief, and I can only share with you what I have actually come to understand, and there's things that I don't understand, and that's definitely one of them. I don't know how to draw a line

between the symbolic significance of the biblical events, say the symbolic and psychological significance of the biblical events and the metaphysics that's underneath them. And I think you see the same thing in Jung because when Jung writes technically and formally, he never talks about God. He always talks about the image of God, which is not the same thing. The image of God would be your subjective experience of God. It says nothing about the objective reality of God because your subjective experience can't say much about objective reality. But even in Jung, you get this mix. Sometimes it's psychological, but then he makes a metaphysical move. I think that reflected also the limits of his knowledge, because

the young had profound revelatory experiences. It was a very strange person. I think what's best for me is to stay on the ground that I'm competent on, and to say what I can say about the psychology and to reach beyond that briefly when it's necessary, but other than that to leave it to hell alone till I understand it better assuming that I ever do. So. Thank you.

So because of these lectures, I've been reading the Bible and obviously not finished, but I'm fairly familiar with how it goes. And I've been thinking about two parts of it in specific, which is the story of Isaac and the crucifixion of Christ, and particularly one of the things that Christ says on the cross, which is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And I've been trying to understand that because that's one hell of a thing for the Son of God to say. And you think that would have been edited out?

Yeah, no, seriously, it's like, why isn't that gone? It's very inconvenient. Yeah, and in... Well, you haven't touched on the story of Isaac yet, but there's this thing, the cult typology, which I'm sure you're aware of, but basically the idea that what's going on in the Old Testament is sort of the laying out of types for Christ, and that Isaac is essentially a type of Christ because they have all these similarities.

And so I've been thinking about it in that context and thinking about the parallels between them, between Isaac and Christ. One of the things that also struck me was mostly the differences between Isaac and Christ. And the main difference, it seems to me, is sort of a difference in direction of sacrifice. So the sacrifices of Abraham is Abraham sacrificing his son to God. And then the sacrifice of Jesus is God sacrificing his son to mankind. And I've been trying to understand basically how that works and in relation to the... You and Western civilization for 2000 years. Yeah. Well, there is these transformations of sacrifice

right that can... So the next thing that happens in these stories is that the circumcision, circumcision starts to come in as a sacrifice. And it seems to be something like the beginnings of replacement for sacrifice of animals. It's, you know, there's this, this psychologization of sacrifice. So first it's pure external enacted out and then it becomes something that's more conceptual. Like it becomes embodied in the form of the circumcision and then it becomes more conceptual. And that conceptual transformation keeps occurring. And it seems to, well, it culminates to some degree

in this idea of the sacrifice of Christ, whose God sacrificing his son to mankind, but the sacrifice is much more complex than that, right? It's also Christ sacrificing himself to God. And I think the issue there is something like, well, let's say you're supposed to offer up the best that you have to God. That's the sacrifice, that's what happens

with the high quality animals that able sacrifice is okay, but there's something better than the best that you own. Well, what's that? Well, part of it might be, well, the relationships you have with people, are you willing to sacrifice them to pursue the highest good? Well, then are you willing to sacrifice yourself or your son? Like, your son might be... that's a tough one. I can understand the idea of sacrificing yourself better, but I'm still wrestling with this story of Isaac,

obviously, because that's such a complicated story. And I do think it's reasonable to think about it as a form of foreshadowing, at least the way the Bible is set up. Of course, people who aren't Christian would agree with that, but that's fine. The idea that you would offer yourself as a sacrifice to God, that seems to me to follow quite logically

because, well, obviously you have nothing greater to give than the best of yourself, right? So you sacrifice yourself to the highest good, and that's part of the way in which humanity is redeemed. That makes sense to me. That just seems like, for me, that's a pretty straightforward psychological truth. The sun issue, that's a lot tougher thing to wrestle with. One of the things I was thinking with what Jesus says on the cross is that one of the interpretations of that is basically that Jesus in that moment is human basically.

It's not just Jesus, the human, but that always kind of felt a little bit like avoiding the question to me because you can't just posit something like the Trinity and then say Oh, but in this moment that doesn't go right that doesn't count so but if we think about it in that way of like The difference in the direction of sacrifice and it seems to me that in the sacrifice Whoever is making the sacrifice sort of aims toward something. So Abraham is sort of reaching for the divine when he sacrifices, when he's going to sacrifice

his son. And so that would mean maybe God is reaching toward the human. And so that would make some sense of that interpretation that Christ is only human in that moment, right? That it's the sacrifice is accomplished, then the reaching down is accomplished. But I still have to a question, what do I make of that? Because that's one interesting thing.

Well, I mean, it's useful to have a problem like that, because it gives you something to think about, right? And something to study further. And it's a major problem. I mean, the whole issue of, well, we could say, well, what's the relationship between the divine and the human, which is obviously brought to the forefront in the idea of Christ, right?

But it's a personal issue because part of the issue is what's the relationship between you as a finite entity and the transcendent infinity that surrounds you? Well, there's some relationship because here you are and the transcendent infinity that surrounds you. Well, there's some relationship because here you are and the transcendent infinity around you exists. So there's a relationship. The question is, what is the relationship?

And we don't know that. And it's dramatized in that story. And so I mean partly, the reason that there's so much conflict and confusion in that story is because it's trying to bring opposing things together. How can something be God and man at the same time? It's just like the genie, which is the root word of genius, by the way. The genie is this incredibly powerful force that can grant wishes, right? But it's constrained in this tiny little space. There's an intimation there that, for something to be real, it has to straddle the divide between the finite

and the infinite. And that's what human beings do, I think, to some degree. And that's dramatized in that story, but it doesn't mean that we understand it. I mean, you know that sometimes you're going to feel that way when you're called upon to make a sacrifice. You're going to feel that you've been betrayed by everything. I mean, the story set up that way, right? Christ is betrayed by tyranny.

He's betrayed by his best friends. He's betrayed by his mortality. Like, that's an archetypal story because, and he's innocent. So the story can't be any worse. That's why it's archetypal. And I mean, the story says to some degree that under such conditions, even God himself would have doubt. It's something like that. And that's a real, that's a powerful idea. It's a very powerful idea.

So that's the best I can make out of that for now. We have to stop, so we'll convene again in a week. Thank you very much. music you