The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Biblical Series: Introduction to the Idea of God

Episode Date: April 12, 2020

On this Easter Sunday, we bring you our first lecture from Jordan Peterson's Biblical Series. These lectures (previously only available on You Tube) will be released in full, and along with selections from his Q&A. We hope you enjoy this series at a time in our history when so many are turning to the Bible for faith, hope, and understanding.

Welcome to season 3, episode 1 of the Jordan B Peterson Podcast. Technically, this is episode 54 if anyone's still keeping track. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I hope you enjoy this episode. It's called Introduction to the Idea of God. I'm using this episode to start season 3 of the Jordan B Peterson Podcast. These lectures are taken from Dad's Biblical series, also available on YouTube, so some of you may have listened to these before.

I thought it would be a good way to start Easter Sunday. Happy Easter, everyone. Hope you're enjoying your turkey. I'll be having steak. Season three episode one introduction to the idea of God a Jordan B Peterson lecture Well, thank you all very much for coming. It's really shocking to me that you don't have anything better to do on a Tuesday day. No, seriously though, it is. I mean, you know, it's very strange in some sense that there's so many of you here to listen to a sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the biblical stories. It isn't something I've wanted to do for a long time, but it still does surprise me that there's a ready audience for it.

So that's good. So we'll see how it goes. And I'll start with this, because this is the right question. The right question is why bother doing this? And I don't mean why should I bother doing it. I have my own reasons for doing it, but you might think, well, why bother with this strange old book at all?

And that's a good question. It's a contradictory document that's been cobbled together over thousands of years. It's outlasted kingdoms, many, many kingdoms. It's really interesting that it turns out that a book is more durable than stone. It's more durable than a castle. It's more durable than an empire.

And that's really interesting, that it's something in some sense, so evanescent can be so long living. So there's that. That's kind of a mystery. I'm approaching this whole scenario. This, the biblical stories is if they're a mystery fundamentally, because they are.

There's a lot. We don't understand about them. We don't understand how they came about. We don't really understand how they were put together. We don't understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization. We don't understand how people could have believed them. We don't understand what it means

that we don't believe them now, or even what it would mean if we did believe them. And then on top of all that, there's the additional problem, which isn't specific to me, but it's certainly relevant to me that no matter how educated you are, you're not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the biblical stories. But I'm going to do my best. And partly because I want to learn more about them and one of the things I've learned is that

the best way to learn about something is to talk about it. And when I'm lecturing, I'm thinking, you know, I'm not trying to tell you what I know for sure to be the case because there's lots of things I don't know for sure to be the case. I'm trying to make sense out of this and I have been doing this for a long time. Now, you may know, you may not, that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a devastating critic of, I would say, dogmatic Christianity. Christianity, as it was instantiated in institutions. I suppose, although he's a very paradoxical thinker, because, for example, one of the things Nietzsche said

was that he didn't believe that the scientific revolution would have ever got off the ground if it hadn't been for Christianity and more specifically for Catholicism, because he believed that over the course of really 1,000 years, the European mind, so to speak, had to train itself to interpret everything that was known within a single coherent framework, coherent, if you accept the initial axioms, a single coherent framework.

So Nietzsche believed that that Catholicization of the phenomena of life and of history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of transcending that its dogmatic foundations and then concentrating on something else, which in this particular case happened to be the natural world. And so Nietzsche believed that in some sense Christianity died at its own hand. It had spent a very long period of time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth, absent the corruption and all of that that's always part of any human endeavor. And then the spirit of the truth that was developed

by Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity. And everyone woke up and said something like or thought something like well How is it that we came to believe any of this? It's like waking up one day and noting noting that you really don't know why you put a Christmas tree up But you've been doing it for a long time and that's what people do and you know, there are reasons that Christmas trees came about but The what would you say the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten? So, now Nietzsche, although he was a critic of Christianity

and also a champion of its disciplinary capacity because you see the other thing that Nietzsche believed was that it was not possible to be free in some sense unless you had been a slave. And by that, he meant that you don't go from childhood to full fledged adult individuality. You go from childhood to a state of discipline which you might think is akin to slavery

to self-imposed slavery. That would be the best scenario where you have to discipline yourself to become something specific before you might be able to re-attain the generality that you had as a child. And he believed that Christianity had played that role for Western civilization. But in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead,

and you often hear of that as something triumphant, but for Nietzsche, it wasn't because he was too nuanced to think or to be that simple-minded. See, Nietzsche understood that, and this is something I'm going to try to make clear is that, that, and this is something I'm going to try to make clear, is that there's a very large amount that we don't know about the structure of experience, that we don't know about reality, and we have our articulated representations of the world, and then you can think of outside

of that, there are things we know absolutely nothing about, and there's a buffer between them, and those are things we sort of know something about, and are things we know absolutely nothing about. And there's a buffer between them. And those are things we sort of know something about. And we don't know them in an articulated way. Here's an example, sometimes you're arguing with one of your, someone close to you, and they're in a bad mood, you know? And they're being touchy and unreasonable. And you keep the conversation up, and maybe all of a sudden they,

you know, they get angry, or maybe they cry. And then when they cry, they figure out what they're angry about. And it has nothing to do with you, even though you might have been what precipitated the argument. That's an interesting phenomenon as far as I'm concerned, because it means that people can know things at one level without being able to speak what they know at another. So in some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body. And they do that in moods and they do that from the body and they do that in moods

and they do that in images and they do that in actions. And we have all sorts of ways that we understand before we understand in a fully articulated manner. And so we have this articulated space that we can all discuss. And then outside of that we have something that's more akin to a dream that we're embedded in. And it's an emotional dream that we're embedded in. And that's based at least in part on our actions. I'll describe that later. And then outside of that is what we don't know anything about at all.

And in that dream, that's where the mystics live. And that's where the artists live. And they're the mediators between the absolute unknown and the things we know for sure. And you see, what that means in some sense is what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we don't really understand, and that if those two things are out of sync, so you might say, if our articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dream,

then we become dissociated internally. We think things we don't act out, and we act out things we don't dream, and that produces a kind of sickness of the spirit. And that sickness of the spirit, it, see, it's cure is something like an integrated system of belief and representation. And then people turn to things like ideologies, which I regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructure to try to organize their thinking, and then that's a catastrophe. And that's what Nietzsche foresaw.

You see, he knew that when we knocked the slats out of the base of Western civilization by destroying this representation, this god-ideal, let's say, that we would destabilize and move back and forth violently between nihilism, let's say, and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about radical left ideology, you know, and believed and predicted this in the late 1800s, which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of staggering magnitude predicted that in the 20th century, that hundreds of millions of people would die because of the replacement of these underlying dream-like structures with this rational,

rational but deeply incorrect representation of the world. And we've been oscillating back and forth between left and right in some sense ever since, and with some good sprinkling of nihilism in there in despair. In some sense, that's the situation of the modern Western person, and increasingly of people in general. I think part of the reason that Islam has its backup with regards to the West to such a degree. I mean, there's many reasons, and not all of them are valid. That's for sure. But one of the reasons is that being still grounded in a dream, let's say sure. But one of the reasons is that being still grounded in a dream, let's say, they can see

that the rootless questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity of their culture. Now, and it does. I mean, Westerners us, we undermine ourselves all the time with our searching intellect. And I'm not complaining about that. I mean, there isn't anything And I'm not complaining about that. You know what I mean? It, there isn't anything easy that can be done about it,

but it's still a sort of fruitful catastrophe. And you know, it has real effects on people's lives. It's not some abstract thing, you know. I mean, lots of times when I've been treating people for depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential issues. It's not just some psychiatric condition. It's not just that they're tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is faulty, although sometimes that happens to be the case. It's that they are overwhelmed by the suffering

and complexity of their life, and they're not sure why it's reasonable to continue with it. They can feel the terrible negative meanings of life, but are skeptical beyond belief about any of the positive meanings. I had one client who was a very brilliant artist, and as long as he didn't think he was fine, because he don't create, and he was really good at being an artist. He had that personality that was continually creative and quite brilliant, although he was self-dintegrating.

But as soon as he started to think about what he was doing, then it's like a drill or a saw or something like that. He'd saw the branch off that he was sitting on, because he'd start to criticize what he was doing, even the utility of it, even though it was sort of self-evidently useful, that it would be very, very hard for him to even motivate himself to create. And he always struck me as a good example of the consequences

of having your rational intellect divorced in some way from your being, divorced enough so that it actually questions the utility of your being. And it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing. And it's really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathology, but also in social psychopathology. And that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of as,

they're like crippled religions. That's the right way to think about them. They're like a religion that's missing an arm and a leg, but can still hobble along, and it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent, and it's a parasite on something underlying

that's rich and true, and that's how it looks to me anyways. So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem. I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done than that. I've thought that for a long, long time, probably since the early 80s. When I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health, because you can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems, it's like, why the hell do they care exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?

Like, people get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak. And it isn't, it is not by any stretch of the imagination, obvious why. But there's some, it's like, there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on. It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and you're starting to pull out the logs.

And they're afraid they're going to fall in and drown. It's like drowning in what? And what are the logs protecting themselves, protecting them from? And why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? And these are not obvious things. So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time

and I've done some lectures about that, that are on YouTube, most of you know that. And some of what I'm going to talk about in this series, you'll have heard if you've listened to the YouTube videos. But, you know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles. And so, okay, so Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially. Now, he understood that we had bodies and that we had motivations and emotions, like he was a romantic thinker in some sense, but way ahead of his time, because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul,

but was embedded in our physiology constrained by our emotions, shape, by our motivation, shape, by our body. He understood that, but he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values. That was that's and he thought that the person he talked about, the person who could create their own values as That was that's and he thought that the person he talked about the person who could create their own values as the over man or the Superman and that was one of the parts of Nietzsche and philosophy that the Nazis I would say took out of context and used to fuel their you know superior man ideology. So and we know what happened with, that didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.

And see, I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung, and it was through Jung, and also Jean Piaget, who's a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream, and that that dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act. So you know, we act out things we don't understand all the time.

And if that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that because we would be completely transparent to ourselves. And we're clearly not. So we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave and telling stories about it for thousands

and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity and trying to represent them partly through imitation, but also through drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that to represent what we're like so that we can understand what we're like. And that process of understanding is what I see unfolding at least in part in the biblical stories. And it's it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that which is one of the things that makes the book so complex. I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal, forebearers say, and to become

conscious of what it means to be human. That's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are, what we are, where we came from, or any of those things. And you know, the light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years. It's an absolutely unbelievable thing. Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years. It's absolutely unbelievable. We rose out of the dirt and the mock. And here we are conscious, but not knowing. And we're trying to figure out who we are. And a story that we've been telling, or a set of stories that we've been telling for 3,000 years seems to me to have something to offer.

And so when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say in some sense, with a beginner's mind, it's a mystery, this book, how the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for 2,000 years and to transform the world. Like, what's going on? How did that happen? It's by no means obvious.

And one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously. And it's a serious phenomena. I mean, not least because people have the capacity for religious experience, and no one knows why that is. And I mean, you can induce it reliably in all sorts of different ways. You can do it with brain stimulation.

You can certainly do it with drugs. There's especially the psychedelic variety. They produce intimations of the divine, extraordinarily, regularly, people have been using drugs like that for God only knows how long 50,000 years, maybe more than that, to produce some sort of intimate union with the divine. It's like, we don't understand any of that when we discovered the psychedelics in the late 60s. It shocked everybody so badly that they were instantly made illegal and abandoned in terms of research for like 50 years

And it's no wonder because who the hell expected that? nobody now Now Jung was a student of Nietzsche, you see and he was also I would say at a very astute critic of Nietzsche He was educated by Freud. And Freud, I suppose in some sense, started to collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream.

You know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind. And we take this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the idea was. What's happened with Freud is that we've taken all the marrow out of his bones so to speak and less the husk behind. And now when we think about Freud, we just think about the husk because that's everything

that's been discarded. But so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception now, including the idea that your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all, what would you say, informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control. And that's a very, very strange thing. It's one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories, because the psychoanalytic theories are something like, you're a loose collection of living subpersonalities, each with its own set of motivations and perceptions

and emotions and rationales, all of that. And you have limited control over that, so you're like a plurality of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity. You know that because you can't control yourself very well, which is one of Jung's objections to Nietzsche's idea that we could create our own values. So Jung didn't believe that, especially not after interacting with Freud

because he saw that human beings were affected by things that were deeply, deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. And no one really knows how to conceptualize those things. The cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines. And the ancient people, I think, thought of them as God. So though it's more complex than that,

like rage would be a God, Mars, the God of rage. That's the thing that possesses you when you're angry. It has a viewpoint. And it says what it wants to say. And that might have very little to do with what you want to say when you're being sensible. And it doesn't just inhabit you, it inhabits everyone, and it lives forever, and it even inhabits animals.

And so it's this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body, politic, like a thought inhabits the brain. That's one way of thinking about it. It's a very strange way of thinking, but it certainly has its merits. And so, and those things, well, in some sense, those are deities, although it's not that simple.

And so Jung, Jung was, we've got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths, because he would see in his clients dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology. And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes,

the dream and the story and storytelling. And well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them. And some people remember dreams all the time. Like, two or three at night, I've had clients like that. And they often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures. I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable at the time. Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown

reality before you get a real grip on it. So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking. That's a good way of thinking about it. And so because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear, it's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message. That's not what Jung believed. He believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated, conscious comprehension.

It was, because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about, but what the hell does that mean? A thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about, but what the hell does that mean? A thought appears in your head. What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? It just doesn't help with anything. Where does it come from?

Well, nowhere, it just appears in my head. Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation as it turns out, you know? And so you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from? Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right? Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead. And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.

And your motivation speaks to, and your motion speaks to, and your body speaks to you, and it does all that, at least, in part through the dream. And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea. They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right? They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how they have a developmental origin and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, I am conscious. That's taken, chimpanzees don't say that. It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that from the common ancestor. They have no articulated knowledge at all. They have very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness. And that's not the case with us at all.

And we had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage. And I think some of that's represented and captured in some sense in these ancient stories, which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories in Genesis, which the stories we're gonna start with, that they were, that some of the archaic nature

of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell. I can give you just a quick example. You know, there's an idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament. And it's pretty barbaric. I mean, the story of Abraham and Isaac is a good example of that, because Abraham is called on to actually sacrifice his own son, which

doesn't really seem like something that a reasonable God would ask you to do, right? And the God in the Old Testament is frequently cruel and arbitrary and demanding and paradoxical, which is one of the things that really gives the book life, because it wasn't edited by a committee, a committee that was concerned with not offending anyone, that's for sure.

So... So Jung believed that the dream was the birthplace of thought, and I've been extending that idea because one of the things I wondered about deeply was, you know, you have a dream and then someone interprets it. You can argue about whether or not an interpretation is valid, just like you can argue about whether your interpretation of a novel or movie is valid, right? It's a very difficult thing to determine with any degree of accuracy, which counts in part for the postmodern critique. But my observation is being that people will present a dream and sometimes we can extract

out real useful information from it that the person didn't appear to know. And they get a flash of insight. And to me, that's a marker that we stumbled on something that unites part of that person that wasn't united before. It pulls things together, which is often what a good story will do or sometimes a good theory. You know, things snap together for you. There's a little light goes on.

That's one of the markers that I've used for accuracy and dreams, and I know in my own family, when I was first married, I'd have fights with my wife, arguments about this and that. And I'm fairly hotheaded. And so I'd get all puffed up and agitated about whatever we were arguing about. And she'd go to sleep, which was really annoying, you know, so annoying.

Because I couldn't sleep, right? I was like chewing off my fingernails and she'd be like sleeping peacefully beside me. It's like maddening. So but often she'd have a dream, you know. And then the next morning she'd discuss it with me and then we could unravel what was at the bottom of our argument and that was unbelievably useful, even though it was extraordinarily aggravating.

So, you know, I was convinced by Jung, it looked to me like his ideas about the relationship between dreams and mythology and drama and literature made sense to me and the relationship between that and art. I know this native carver, he's a quakwa-quakwa guy. He's carved a bunch of wooden sculptures, totem poles and masks that I have in my house. And he's a very interesting person, not literate,

not particularly literate, and really still steeped in this ancient 13,000-year-old tradition. He's an original language speaker. And the fact that he isn't literate has sort of left him with the mind of someone who's pre-literate. And pre-literate people aren't stupid. They're just not literate. So their brains are organized differently in many ways.

And I've asked him about his intuition for his carvings. And he's told me that he dreams, like you've seen the Heida masks. You know what they look like? Well, his people are closely related to the hide-a-so, it's the same kind of style. He said, he dreams in those animals and can remember his dreams.

And he also talks to his grandparents who taught him how to carve in his dreams quite often. If he runs into a problem with carving his grandparents will come and he'll talk to them. But he sees the creatures that he's going to carve living in an animated sense in his imagination. I mean, it's not that difficult. First of all, I have no reason to disbelieve him.

He's a very, very straightforward person. And he doesn't have the motivation or the guile, I would say, in some sense, to invent a story like that. There's just no reason he would possibly do it. I don't think he's told that many people about it. He thinks it's kind of crazy. You know, he said when he was a kid, he thought he was insane because he'd had those dreams all the time about these creatures and so forth.

And so it wasn't something he was trumpeting, but I found it fascinating because I can see in him part of the manifestation of this unbroken tradition. We have no idea how traditions like that are really passed along for thousands and thousands of years, right? Part of its oral and memory, part of its act it out and dramatized, and then part of it's going to be imaginative. And people who aren't literate, they store information quite differently than we do.

We don't remember anything. It's all written down in books, right? But if you're from an oral culture, especially if you're trained in that way, you have all of that information at hand, both so you can speak it, you can tell the stories, and you really know them, and modern people don't really know what that's like anymore, doubt if there's more than maybe two of you in the audience that could spout from memory like a 30-line poem. You know, and poetry was written so that people could do that. That's why we have that form is so that people could remember it

and have it with them. And we don't do any of that anymore. Anyways, back to Jung. Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I noted that dreams will tell you things that you don't know. And then I thought, well, how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know? How does that make any sense?

First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream? It's like you're not, there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right? The dream happens to you, just like life happens to you. I mean, there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's, you're laying there asleep and this crazy complicated world manifests itself inside you, and you don't know how, you can't do it when you're awake, and you don't know what it means. It's like, what the hell is going on?

And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because you get this both from Freud and Jung. You really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around. There's a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits,

so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life. And you don't control it. And what does? Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory, I think, is absolutely absurd absurd because there's nothing random about dreams. You know, they're very, very structured

and very, very complex. And they're not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio, like those things are complicated. And then also I've seen so often that people have very coherent dreams that have a perfect narrative structure. Now, they're fully developed in some sense. And so that just doesn't, I'd that theory just doesn't go anywhere with me. I just can't see that as useful at all.

And so I'm more likely to take the phenomena seriously, say, well, there's something to dreams. Well, you dream of the future, and then you try to make it into a reality. That seems to be an important thing. Or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality, because people do that too, if they're hell bent on revenge, for example, in full of hatred and resentment. That manifests itself in terrible fantasies. Those are dreams, then people go act them out. These things are powerful. And whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams. That's what happened to the Nazis. That's what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

It was absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle. And the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. The same thing happened in China. It's like, we have to take these things seriously. And try to understand what's going on. So you believe that the dream could contain more information than was yet articulated. You think artists do the same thing.

People go to museums and they look at paintings, Renaissance paintings or modern paintings. They don't exactly know why they're there. I was in this room in New York. I don't remember which museum, but it was a room full of Renaissance art, great painters, the greatest painters, and thought maybe that room was worth a billion dollars or something outrageous, because there was like 20 paintings in there. So priceless.

And the first thing is, well, why are those paintings worth so much? And why is there a museum in the biggest city in the world devoted to them? And why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What the hell are those people doing? One of them was of the assumption of Mary, beautifully painted,

absolutely glowing work of art. There's like 20 people standing in front of it, looking at it and you think, what are those people up to? They don't know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting? It's not like they know, why is it worth so much? I mean, I know there's a status element to it too,

but that begs the question, why do those items become such high status items? What is it about them that's so absolutely remarkable? Well, we're strange creatures. So I was trying to figure out in part, well, where did the information that's in the dream come from? It has to come from somewhere, and you can think about it as a revelation, you know, because

it's like it springs out of the void and it's new knowledge and it's a revelation. You didn't produce it, it just appears. But that's, see, one of the things I want to do with this series is like I am scientifically minded and I'm quite a rational person and I like to have an explanation for things that's rational and empirical before I look for any other kind of explanation. And I don't want to say that everything that's associated with divinity can be reduced in some manner to biology or to an evolutionary history or anything like that. But in so far as it's possible to do that reduction, I'm going to do that. And I'm going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air because they can't be pinned down

and in that category, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we don't understand at all. So artists observe one another. They observe people and they represent what they see and they transmit the message of what they see to us and they teach us to see. And we don't necessarily know what it is that we're learning from them.

But we're learning something or at least we're acting like we're learning something. We go to movies, we watch stories, we immerse ourselves in fiction constantly. That's an artistic production. And for many people, the world of the arts is a living world. And that's particularly true if you're a creative person. It's the creative artistic people that do move the knowledge of humanity forward, and they do that with their artistic productions first. They're on the edge, and the dancers do that, and the poets do that, and the visual artists do that, and the musicians do that, and we're not sure what they're doing. We're not sure what musicians are doing. What the hell are they doing?

Why do you like music? It gives you deep intamation of the significance of things. No one questions it. You go to a concert, you're thrilled. It's a quasi-religious experience, particularly if the people really get themselves together and get the crowd moving. There's something incredibly intense about it, but makes no sense whatsoever. It's not an easy thing to understand. Music is deeply patterned, and patterned in layers, and I think that has something to do

with it, because reality is patterned and deeply patterned in layers, and so I think music is representing reality in some fundamental way, and that we get into the sway of that and sort of participate in being, and that's part of what makes it such an uplifting experience. But we don't really know that's what we're doing, we just go do it. And it's nourishing for people, right? I mean, young people in particular, lots of them live for music. It's where they derive all their meaning, their cultural identity. Everything that's nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music as part of their cultural identity. So that's an amazing thing.

The question still remains, where does the information and dreams come from? And I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone We watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We've watched that forever and we've got some representations of those patterns. That's part of our cultural history. That's what's embedded in stories, in fictional accounts of the story between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy and the romance.

These are canonical patterns of being for people and they deeply affect us because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world. And then we flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. And so it's like there's waves of behavioral patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd across time, that great dramas are played on the crowd across time. The artists watch that,

and they get intimations of what that is, and they write it down, and they tell us, and then we're a little clearer about what we're up to. Like a great dramatist, like Shakespeare, let's say, he's, we know that what he wrote is fiction, and then we say, well, fiction isn't true, but then you think, well, wait a minute, maybe it's true like numbers are true. Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think numbers aren't true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, right?

Because the abstraction is so insanely powerful. Once you have mathematics, you're just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. And so it's not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. And you take a work of fiction like Hamlet and you think, well, is that it's not true because it's fiction. But then you think, wait a minute, what kind of explanation is that?

Like, maybe it's more true than nonfiction. Because it takes what the story that needs to be told about you and the story that needs to be told about you and you and you and you and abstracts that out and says, look, here's something that's a key part of the human experience as such. So it's an abstraction from this underlying noisy substrate. And people are affected by it because they see

that the thing that's represented is part of the pattern of their being. That's the right way to think about it. And then with these old stories, these ancient stories, it seems to me like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. It's like we watched ourselves and we extracted out some stories.

We imitated each other and we represented that in drama. And then we distilled the drama, and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again. And at the end of that process, God only knows how long. I think some of these stories, they've traced fairy tales back 10,000 years,

some fairy tales, in relatively unchanged form. And it certainly seems to me that the archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories, that the Bible begins with are at least that old and likely embedded in a prehistory that's far older than that. You might think, well, how can you be so sure? The answer to that in part is that cultures that don't change, like the ancient cultures, right? They didn't change as fast as this. They stayed the same. That's

the answer. So they keep their information moving generation to generation. That's how they stayed the same. And so we know, again, in the archaeological record, there are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years. It was discovered in caves in Japan that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time. We're watching each other act in the world. And then the question is, well, how long have we been watching each other? And the answer to that, in some senses, well, as long as there's been creatures with nervous systems, and that's a long time, you know, that's some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps

longer than that. We've been watching each other trying to figure out what we're up to across that entire span of time. And some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies, which is why we can dance with each other, for example, right? Because understanding isn't just something that you have as an abstraction. It's something that you act out. You know, that's what children are doing when they're learning to rough and tumble plays. They're learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way, learning to cooperate and compete, and that's all instantiated right into their body. It's not abstract knowledge. They don't know that they're doing that. They're just doing it. And so we can even use our body as a representational platform. So we've been studying each other for a long time

abstracting out what is it that we're up to? And that's that that's what is it we're up to? What should we be up to? That's even a more fundamental question. If you're going to live in the world and you're going to do it properly, what does properly mean? And how is it that you might go about that? Well, it's the right question, right? It's what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? Not what is the world made of? It's not the same question. How do you live in the world? It's the eternal question of human beings. And I guess we're the only species that has ever really asked that question because all the other animals, they just go and do whatever they do. Not us. It's a question for us. We've had to, we have to become aware of it. We have to be able to speak it. God only knows why.

But that seems to be the situation. So, we act, that acting is shaped by the world, that acting is shaped by society into something that we don't understand, but that we can model, that we can model, we model it in our stories, we model it with our bodies. And that's where the dream gets its information. The dream is part of the process that's watching everything and then trying to formulate it and trying to say, well, trying to get the signal out from the noise and to portrait in dramatic form,

because the dream is little drama. And then you get the chance to talk about what that dream is. And then you have something like articulated knowledge at that point. And so the Bible, I would say, is it sort of, it exists in that space that's half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge. It's something like that.

And going into it to find out what the stories are about, can aid our self understanding. And then the other issue is that if Nietzsche was correct, and if Dostoevsky or Jung was correct, and Dostoevsky as well, without the cornerstone that that understanding provides, were lost. And that's not good, because then we're susceptible to psychopathology.

That's psychological pathology. You know, the people who are adamant, anti-religious thinkers seem to believe that if we abandoned our emersment in the underlying dream that we'd all instantly become rationalists like Descartes or Bacon or intelligent, clear thinking, rational, scientific people, I don't believe that for a moment because I don't think there's any evidence for it. I think we would become so irrational,

so rapidly that the weirdest mysteries of Catholicism would see positively rational by contrast. And I think that's already happening. So this is the idea essentially, you know, that you have the unknown world. That's just what you don't know at all. That's the outside, that's the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit, something like that. It's chaos itself.

And then you act in that world, and you act in ways you don't understand. There's more to your actions than you can understand. One of the things Jung said, I love this when I first understood it, he said, everybody acts out of myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don't want it to be. And that's really worth thinking because thinking about because you because you have a pattern of behavior that characterizes you, and God only knows where you got it. Partly, it's biological, partly, it's from your parents. It's your unconscious assumptions.

It's the way the philosophy of your society has shaped you. And it's aiming you somewhere. Well, is it aiming you somewhere you want to go? That's a good question. That's part of self-realization, you know? We know we don't understand our actions. That's almost every argument you have with someone is about that. It's like, why did you do that? You come up with some half-baked reasons why you did it. You're flailing around in the darkness, you know, you try to give an account for yourself,

but you can only do it partially. It's very, very difficult because you're a complicated animal with the beginnings of an articulated mind, something like that, and you're just way more than you can handle. And all right, so you act things out, right? You act things out, and that's a kind of competence. And then you imagine what you act out, and you imagine what everyone else acts out. And so there's a tremendous amount of information in your action. And then that information is translated up into the dream, into art, into mythology, and literature, and there's a tremendous amount of information in that.

And then some of that is translated into articulated thought. And I'll give you a quick example of something like that. I think this is partly what happens in Exodus when Moses comes up with the law. He's wandering around with the Israelites forever in the desert, and they're going left and going right and worshiping idols and having a hell of a time. And we'll get in rebellious. And Moses goes up in the mountain,

and he has this tremendous revelation sort of in the sight of God. And it illuminates him, and he goes up in the mountain and he has this tremendous revelation sort of in the sight of God and it illuminates him and he comes down with the law. You think, well, Moses acted as a judge. I know this is a mythological story. Moses acted as a judge in the desert. He was continually mediating between people

who are having problems, constantly trying to keep peace. And so what are you doing when you're trying to keep peace? Is you're trying to understand what peace is, right? You have to apply the principles. Well, what are the principles? Well, you don't know. The principles are whatever satisfies people enough to make peace. And maybe you do that 10,000 times. And then you get some sense of, oh, here's the principles that bring peace. And then one day it blasts into your consciousness like a revelation. Here's the rules that we're already acting out. Well, that's the 10 commandments. It's there to begin with.

And Moses comes forward and says, look, this is already basically what we're doing. But now it's codified, right? And that's all a historical process that's condensed into a single story. But obviously that happened because we have written law, and that emerged in good legal systems that emerges from the bottom up. That's English common law is exactly like that. It's single decisions that are predicated on principles that are then articulated and made into the body of law.

The body of law is something you act out. That's why it's a body of law. If you're a good citizen, you act out the body of law is something you act out. That's why it's a body of law. If you're a good citizen, you act out the body of law. The body of law has principles. Okay, so the question is, there's principles that guide our behavior. What are those principles? Well, I think when you,

if you want the initial answer of what the archaic is relight meant by God, that's something like what they meant. Now, it's not a good enough explanation, but imagine that you have a chimpanzee and you have a powerful, dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society. That represents power.

Now more than that, because it's not sheer physical prowess that keeps a chimp at the top of the hierarchy. It's much more complicated than that. But you could say, well, there's a principle that the dominant person manifests. And then you might say, well, that principle shines forth even more brightly if you know 10 people who are dominant,

powerful. And then you can extract out what dominance means from that. you can extract out what dominance means from that, you can extract out what power means from that, and then you can divorce the concept from the people. And we had to do that at some point because we can say power in a human context, and we can imagine what that means, but it's divorced from any specific manifestation of power.

Well, how the hell did we do that? Like, that's so complicated. When we, if you're a chimp, the power is in another chimp. It's not some damn abstraction. Well, so the question is, think about it. We're in these hierarchies, many of them across centuries. We're trying to figure out what the guiding principle is.

We're trying to extract out the core of the guiding principle. And we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being. Well, it's something like that. That's God. It's an abstracted ideal. And it's put in personified form. It manifests itself in personified form,

but that's OK, because what we're trying to get at is in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning and properly functioning, properly social and properly competent individual. We're trying to figure out what that means. You need an embodiment, you need an ideal that's abstracted that you could act out that would enable you to understand what that means.

And that's what we've been driving at. So that's the first hypothesis in some sense. I'm going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we formalized as God. But that's the first sort of hypothesis, is that a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself first as a concrete pattern of behavior that's characteristic of a single individual. And then it's a set of individuals. And then it's an abstraction from that set. And then you have the abstraction. It's so important. So here's a political implication, for example.

One of the debates, we might say, between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire, was whether or not an emperor could be God, literally, right, to be deified, to be put in a temple. And you can see why that might happen, because that's someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy, who has a tremendous amount of power and influence. But the Christian response to that was never confused the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself. It's brilliant. And see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that. So that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to something else.

Subordinate to, let's call it a divine principle for lack of a better word. So that even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. And we still believe that because we believe that our president, our prime minister, is subordinate to the damn law, whatever the body of law. There's a principle inside that that even the leader is subordinate to.

And without that, you could argue, we can't even have a civilized society, because your leader immediately turns into something that's transcendent and all-powerful. And I mean, that's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in Maoist China and what happened in Nazi Germany, because there was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to. You're supposed to be subordinate to God. So what does that mean? Well, we're going to tear that idea apart, but partly what You're supposed to be subordinate to God. So what does that mean?

Well, we're gonna tear that idea apart, but partly what it means is that you're subordinate, even if you're sovereign to the principle of sovereignty itself. And then the question is, what the hell is the principle of sovereignty? And I could say, we have been working that out for a very long period of time. And so that's one of the things that we'll talk about

because the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting dramatic ideas about that. So, as for example, very briefly, there was a deity known as Mardek. And Mardek, he was a Mesopotamian deity, and imagine this is sort of what happened is that as an empire grew out of the post-ice age, say 15,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, all these tribes came together and these tribes each had their own daddy, their own image of the ideal. But then they started to occupy the same territory, right?

And so then one tribe had God A and one tribe had God B and one could wipe the other went out, and then it would just be God, A, who wins, but that's not so good because, well, maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you don't want to lose half your population in a war, something like that. So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priority, which ideal is going to take priority, and what seems to happen is, that's represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in sort of celestial space. But from a practical perspective, it's more like an ongoing dialogue. You believe this, I believe this. You believe that, I believe this. How are you going to meld that together? So you take

God, A, and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God's C from them. And you say, well, God's C now has the attributes of A and B. And then some other tribes come in, and then C takes them over too. And so you get, like with Marduk, for example, he has a multitude of names, 50 different names, while those are names, at least in part, of the subordinate gods that represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization. That's part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstractive. You think this is important and it works because your tribes alive and you think this is important and it works because your tribe is alive. And so we'll take the best of both

if we can manage it and extract out something that's even more abstract that covers both of us if we can do it. And one of the things that's really interesting about Marduk, I'll just give you a couple of his features, but he has eyes all the way around his head. He's elected by all the other gods to be King God. So that's the first thing, that's quite cool. And they elect him because they're facing a terrible threat,

sort of like a flood and a monster combined, something like that. And Marduk basically says that if they elect him, They're facing a terrible threat, sort of like a flood and a monster combined, something like that. And Marwick basically says that if they elect him, top god, then he'll go out and stop the flood monster and they won't all get wiped out. It's a serious threat. It's chaos itself, making its comeback.

And so all the gods agree. And Marwick has a new manifestation. He's got eyes all the way around his head. And he speaks magic words. And then he also goes out, and when he fights, he fights this day, and he called, Tiamat. And we need to know that, because the word Tiamat is associated with the word Tehom, T-E-H-O-M, and Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of that, the beginning of time, in Genesis. So it's linked very tightly to this story.

And Mardek with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words goes out to confront Tyomat, who's like a watery sea dragon, something like that. It's a classic, it's a classic, say, George story, to go out and wreak havoc on the dragon. He cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world out of her pieces. And that's the world out of her pieces. And that's the world that human beings live in. And the Mesopotamian emperor acted out

Marduk. He was allowed to be emperor in so far as he was a good Marduk. And so that meant that he had eyes all the way around his head. And he could speak magic. He could speak properly. And so that we're starting to understand there at that point, the essence of leadership, right? Because what's leadership? It's the capacity to see what the hell is in front of your face and maybe in every direction. And then the capacity to use your language properly in a transformative manner and to transform chaos

into order. And God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out. And the best they could do is dramatize it, but it's staggeringly brilliant. You know, it's by no means obvious, and this chaos, this chaos is a very strange thing, and this is the chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time. Chaos is what, it's half psychological and half real.

There's no other way to really describe it. The chaos is what you encounter when you're thrown into deep confusion, right? When your world falls apart, when you encounter something that blows you into pieces, when your dreams die, when you're betrayed, it's the chaos that emerges, and the chaos is everything at once, and it's too much for you, and that's for sure, and it pulls you down into the underworld, and that's where the dragons are, And all you've got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open and to speak as carefully and clearly as you can. And maybe if you're lucky, you'll get through it that way and come out the other side. And it's taken people a very long time to figure that out. And it looks to me like the idea is

erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago, because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply using the same system that we use to represent like serpentile, serpentile, or other carnivorous predators. And you know, we're biological creatures, right? So when we've formulated our capacity to abstract our strange capacity to abstract and use language, we still have all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals and we have to use those systems there. They're part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking. Part of the reason we can demonize our enemies who upset our

axioms is because we perceive them as if they're carnivorous predators. We do it with the same system. And that's chaos itself, the thing that always threatens us, right? The snakes that came to the trees when we lived in them like 60 million years ago. It's the same damn systems. So the Marlux story is partly the story of using attention and language to confront those things that most threaten us. And some of those things are real, real world threats, but some of them are psychological threats, which are just as profound, but far more abstract. But we use the same systems to represent them. It's why you freeze if you're frightened, right? You're a prey animal. You're like a rabbit. You've seen something that's going to eat you. You freeze.

And that way, you're paralyzed. You're turned to stone, which is what you do when you see a Medusa with a head full of snakes, right? You're turned to stone. You're paralyzed. And the reason you do that is because you're using the predator detection system to protect yourself. Your heart rate goes way up. and you get ready to move.

Things that upset us rely on that system. And then the story, the Martik story, for example, is the idea that if there are things that upset you, chaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous, underworld things that threaten you, the best thing to do is to open your eyes and get your speech organized and go out and confront the thing and make the world out of it.

And it's staggering. When I read that story and started to understand it, just blew me away, that it's such a profound idea. And we know it's true, too, because we know in psychotherapy, for example, that you're much better off to confront your fears head on than you are to wait and let them find you And so partly what you do if you're a psychotherapist is you help people Break their fears into little pieces the things that upset them and then to encounter them one by one and master them

And so you're teaching this process of eternal mastery over the strange and chaotic world and that all of that makes up some of the background We haven't even got to makes up some of the background. We haven't even got to the first sentence of the biblical stories yet. I'm putting it in. I'm putting it in. I'm putting it in. I'm putting it in.

I'm putting it in. I'm putting it in. I'm putting it in. But all of that makes up the background. So you have to think that we've extracted this story, this sort of this strange collection of stories with all its errors and its repetitions and its peculiarities out of the entire history that we've been able to collect ideas.

It's the best we've been able to do. I know there are other religious traditions, not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an example, but it's the best we've been able to do. What I'm hoping is that we can return to the stories in some sense with an open mind and see if there's something there that we actually need. And I hope that that will be the case. And as I said, all approach it as rationally as I possibly can. So, well, this is the idea to begin with, you know, is we have the unknown as such.

And then we act in it like animals act. They act first, they don't think, they don't imagine, they act and that's where we started. We started by acting and then we started to be able to represent how we acted and then we started to talk about how we represented how we acted and that enabled us to tell stories because that is what a story is. It's to tell about how you represent how you act. And so you know that because if you read a book, what happens?

You read the book and images come to mind of the people in the book behaving, right? It's one step from acting it out. You don't act it out because you can abstract. You can represent action without having to act it out. It's an amazing thing. And that's part of the development of the prefrontal cortex. It's part of the capacity for human abstract thought, is that you can pull the behavior, the representation of the behavior away from the behavior, and manipulate the representation

before you enact it. That's why you think, is so that you can generate a pattern of action and test it out in a fictional world before you embody it and die because you're foolish, right? You let the representation die, not you, and that's why you think. And so that's partly what we're trying to do with these stories. What do I hope to accomplish? I hope to end this 12 lecture series knowing more than I did when I started.

That's my goal, because I said that, I'm not telling you what I know. I'm trying to figure things out. And this is part of the process by which I'm doing that. And so I'm doing my best to think on my feet. I mean, I come prepared, but I'm trying to stay on the I'm doing my best to think on my feet. I'm going to come prepared, but I'm trying to stay on the edge of my capacity to generate knowledge and to make this continually clearer and to get to the bottom of things. And so I'm hoping that that's what I want to

accomplish. And it seems like people are interested in that. So then we're going to try to accomplish that together. And so that's the plan. And the idea is to see if there's something at the bottom of this amazing civilization that we've managed to construct that I think is imperil for a variety of reasons. And maybe if we understand it a little bit better, we won't be so prone just to throw the damn thing away, which I think would be a big mistake. And to throw it away because of resentment and hatred and bitterness and historical ignorance and jealousy and the desire for destruction and all of that. It's like, I don't want to go there.

It's a bad idea to go there. We need to be grounded better. And so hopefully, we'll see how this works. All right. So how do I approach this? Well, first of all, I think in evolutionary terms, you know, as far as I'm concerned, the cosmos is 15 billion years old, and the world is 4.5 billion years old, and there's been life for 3.5 billion years. And there were creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems 300 to 600 million years ago. And we were living in trees as small mammals,

60 million years ago. And we were down on the plains between 60 million and 7 million years ago. And that's about when we split from chimpanzees and modern human beings seem to emerge about 150,000 years ago. And civilization, pretty much after the last ice age, something after 15,000 years ago, not very long ago at all, you know.

And that's the span across which I want to understand. That's the span across which I want to understand. I want to understand why we are the way we are looking at life and it's continual complexity, right complexity from the beginning of life itself. And there's some real utility in that because we share attributes with other animals, even animal animals as simple as crustaceans, for example, have nervous system properties that are very much like ours.

And it's very much worth knowing that. And so I think in an evolutionary way, I think it's a grand and remarkable way to think because it has this incredible time span. It's this amazing, I mean, people at the end of the 19th century, middle of the 19th century, say, thought the world, really thought the world was about 6,000 years old. I mean, 15 billion years old, that's a lot more, right?

It's a lot grander, it's a lot bigger, but it's also a lot more frightening and alienating in some sense, because the cosmos has become so vast, it's either easy for human beings to think of themselves as trivial specs, on a trivial spec, out some miss begotten hellhole end of the galaxy among hundreds of millions of galaxies, right?

It's very easy to see yourself as nothing in that span of time. And that's a real challenge for people. And I think it's a mistake to think that way, because I think consciousness is far more than we think it is, but it's still something we have to grapple with. I'm a psychoanalytic thinker. And what that means is that I believe that people are collections of subpersonalities and that those subpersonalities are alive. They're not machines. They have their viewpoint. They have their

wants. They have their perceptions. They have their arguments. They have their emotions. They're like low-resolution representations of you. You know, when you get angry, it's like it's a very low-resolution representation of you. It only wants rage or it only wants something to eat or it only wants water, it only wants sex. It's you, but shrunk and focused in a specific direction. And those, all those motivational systems are very, very ancient, very archaic and very, very powerful. And they play a determining role in the manner in which we

manifest ourselves as Freud pointed out with the id. We have to figure out how to take all those underlying animalistic motivations and emotions and civilize them in some way so that we can all live in the same general territory without tearing each other to shreds, which is maybe the default position of both chimpanzee and humanity. So, I take that seriously, the idea that we're a loose collection of spirits. And that, that, you know, it says in the Old Testament somewhere that the fear of God is

the beginning of wisdom. And I think this is akin to that. If you know that you're not in control of yourself thoroughly and that there are other factors behind the scenes like the Greeks thought that human beings were the play things of the gods. That's the way they conceptualized the world. They sort of meant the same thing. They meant that there are these great forces that move us, that we don't create, that we're subordinate to in some sense,

not entirely, but we can be subordinate to them, and they move our destinies. That was the Greek view, and there's something, it teaches you humility to understand that, that there's a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes, and you're the driver of a very complex vehicle, but you don't understand the vehicle very well. And it's got its own motivations and methods.

And sometimes you think it's doing something and it's doing something completely different. You see that in psychotherapy all the time because you help someone unwind a pattern of behavior that they've manifested forever. First of all, they describe it, then they become aware of it. Then maybe they start to see what the cause is. They had no idea why they were acting like that.

You know, they have to have the memory that produced the behavioral pattern to begin with. It has to be brought back to mind, and then it has to be analyzed and assessed, and then they have to think about a different way of acting. And it's extraordinarily complex. So psychoanalytic, literary, well, there's this new, there's this postmodern idea about literature and about the world for that matter that if you take a complex piece of literature like a Shakespeare play, there's no end to the number of interpretations that you can make of it. You can interpret each word, you can interpret each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph,

you can interpret the entire play. The way you interpret it depends on how many other books you've read depends on your orientation in the world. It depends on a very, very large number of things, how cultured you are, or how much culture you lack, all of those things. It opens up a huge, a huge vista for potential interpretation. And so the postmodern sort of stubbed their toe on that and thought, well, if there's this vast number of interpretations of any particular literary work, how can you be sure that any

interpretation is more valid than any other interpretation? And if you can't be sure, then how do you even know those are great works? How do you know they can't? Maybe they're just works that the people in power have used to facilitate their continual accession of power, which is really a post-modern idea, a very, very cynical one, but it has its point. But the thing is, it's grounded in something real, right? It's like, yes, you can interpret things forever. I want to show you something here just briefly. We'll go back to it later. Look at this. This is the one of the coolest things I've ever seen. So at the

bottom here, every single one of those lines is a biblical verse, okay? Now, the length of the line is proportionate to how many times that verse is referred to in some way by some other verse. So you say, well, this is the first hyperlinked book, right? I'm getting serious about that. You can't click and get the hyperlink, so obviously, but it's a thoroughly hyperlinked book. And it's because, well, the people who worked on these stories that are hypothetically at the end, which is the end can't affect the beginning. That's the rule of time, right? What happens now can't affect what happened to you

10 years ago, even though it actually can, but whatever. Well, you reinterpret things, right? And then they're not the same. But, well, whatever, we won't get into that. But technically speaking, the present cannot affect the past. But if you were looking at a piece of literature, that's not right. Because when you write the end, you know what it was at the beginning.

And when you write the beginning or edit it, you know what's at the end. And so you can weave the whole thing together. And there's 65,000 cross references. And that's what this map shows. And so that's a great visual representation of the book. And then you can see, well, why is it deep? Why is the book deep?

Well, just imagine how many pathways you could take through that. Right? I mean, you just journey through, you just journey through that forever. You never ever get to the end of it. There's permutations and combinations. And every phrase is dependent on every other phrase. And every verse is dependent on every other phrase and every verse is dependent on every other, not entirely, but 65,000 is not a bad start. And so, okay, well, so that's another issue in some sense

that seems to make the postmodernist critique even more correct. How in the world are you gonna extract out a canonical interpretation of something like that? It's like it's not possible. But here's the issue as far as I can tell. So in the postmodernist's extended that critique to the world, they said, look, while a text is complicated enough, you can't extract out a canonical interpretation. What about the world? The world's way more complicated than a text, and so there's an infinite number of ways that you can look at the world, and so how do we know that any one way is better

than any other way? That's a good question. Now, the postmodern answer was, we can't, and that's not a good answer, because you drown in chaos under those circumstances, right? You can't make sense of anything, and that's not good because it's not neutral to not make sense of things. It's very anxiety-provoking. It's very depressing because if things are so chaotic that you can't get a handle on them, your body defaults into emergency preparation mode, and your heart rate goes up and your immune system stops working, and you burn yourself out, you age rapidly

because you're surrounded by nothing you can control. It's varying, that's an existential crisis, right? It's anxiety-provoking and depressing, very hard on people. And even more than that, it turns out that the way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim. And we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim. It isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy. As you all know, if you've ever attained anything, because, as soon as you attain it,

then the whole little game ends, then you have to come up with another game. So it's sysophous, and that's okay. But it does show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives you because it collapses the game. That's what happens when you graduate from university. It's like you're king of the mountain for one day and then you're like surf at at Starbucks for the next five years. So yeah. So what happens is that that human beings are weird creatures because we're much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment.

And what that means is you have to have an aim. And that means you have to have an interpretation. And it also means that the nobler the aim, that's one way of thinking about it, the better your life. And that's a really interesting thing to know because you've heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person, and you shouldn't lie, for example. And you might think, well, why the hell should I act like a good person, and why not lie? Even a three-year-old can ask that question, because smart kids learned

to lie earlier, by the way. And they think, well, why not twist the fabric of reality, so that it serves your specific short term needs? I mean, that's a great question. Why not do that? Why act morally? If you can get away with something and it brings you closer to something you want, well, why not do it?

These are good questions. It's not self-evident. Well, it seems to me tied in with what I just mentioned. It's like you destabilize yourself and things become chaotic, that's not good. And if you don't have a noble aim, then you have nothing but shallow, trivial pleasures and they don't sustain you.

And that's not good because because life is so difficult, so much suffering, it's so complex, it ends, and everyone dies and it's painful. It's like, without a noble aim, how can you withstand any of that? You can't. You become desperate, and once you become desperate, things go from bad to worse very rapidly when you become desperate. And so there's the idea of the noble aim, and it's not something, it's something that's

necessary. It's the bread that people cannot live without, right? It's not physical bread. It's the noble aim. And what is that? Well, it was encapsulated in part in the story of Marduk. That's to pay attention. It's to speak properly.

It's to confront chaos. It's to make a better world. It's something like that. And that's enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that you can do something that's worthwhile to justify your wretched position on the planet. So now there's a literary issue is that, so look,

you take a text, you can interpret it in a variety of ways, but that's not right. This is where the postmodernist went wrong, because what you're looking for in a text, you can interpret it in a variety of ways, but that's not right. This is where the postmodernists went wrong because what you're looking for in a text and in the world, without matter, is sufficient order and direction. So then we have to think, well, what is sufficient order and direction means? Well, you don't want to suffer so much that your life is unbearable, right? That just seems self-evident. Pain argues for itself.

I think of pain as the fundamental reality, because no one disputes it. I mean, even if you say that you don't believe in pain, it doesn't help when you're in pain. You still believe in it. You can't pry it up with logic and rationality. It just stands forth as what the fundamental existence. And that's actually quite useful to know.

Say, well, you don't want any more of that than is absolutely necessary. And I think that's self-evident. And then you say, wait a minute, it's more complicated than that. You don't want any more of that that's necessary today, but also not tomorrow and not next week and not next month and not next year. So however you act now, better not compromise how you're going to be in a year,

because that just be counterproductive. That's part of the problem with short-term pleasures, right? It's like active haste, repented leisure, everyone knows exactly what that means. So you have to act in a way that works now and tomorrow and next week and next month and so forth. So you have to take your future self into account. And human beings can do that. And taking your future self into account isn't much different than taking other people into account. Right, because I remember there's this Simpson episode.

And Homer Downs a quart of mayonnaise and vodka. He says, someone, Marge says, you know, you shouldn't really do that. And Homer says, that's a problem for future Homer. I'm sure glad I'm not that guy. And so ridiculous, the comical, you know. But, okay, but you see we have to grapple with that and so the you that's out there in the future is sort of like another person and so figuring out how to conduct yourself properly in relationship to your future self isn't much different than figuring out how to conduct yourself in relationship to other

people, but then we could expand the constraints. Not only does the interpretation that you extract have to protect you from suffering and give you an aim, but it has to do it in a way that's iterable. So it works across time, and then it has to work in the presence of other people so that you can cooperate with them and compete with them in a way that doesn't make you suffer more.

And people are not that tolerant. You know, I mean, they have choices, they don't have to hang around with you, they can hang around tolerant. You know what I mean? They have choices. They don't have to hang around with you. They can hang around with any one of these other primates. And so if you don't act properly, at least within certain boundaries, it's like, you're just cast aside.

And so people are broadcasting information at you all the time about how you need to interpret the world so they can tolerate being around you. And you need that because socially isolated, you're insane and then you're dead. No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time. We can't maintain our own sanity with a continual feedback from other people

because it's too damn complicated. So you're constrained by your own existence and then you're constrained by the existence of other people. And then you're also constrained by the world. If I read Hamlet and what I extract out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge, it's like it puts my interpretation to an end rather quickly.

It doesn't seem to be optimally functional, let's say. And so an interpretation is constrained by the reality of the world. It's constrained by the reality of other people. It's constrained by the reality of other people. And it's constrained by your reality across time. And there's only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space. And so that's part of the reason that the postmodernists are wrong.

It's also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who've been trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in a body is it turns out that you just can't make something intelligent in some sense without it being embodied and it's partly for the reasons that I just described as you need constraints on the system before you need constraints on the system so that the system doesn't drown in an infinite sea of interpretation. It's something like that. So that's the literary end of it. Moral, well, morality for me is about action. And I'm an existentialist in some sense.

And what that means is that I believe that what people believe to be true is what they act out, not what they say. And so there's lots of definitions of truth. I mean, truth is a very expansive word. And you can think of objective truth, but behavioral truth isn't the same as objective truth. What you should do isn't the same as what is. As far as I can tell, people debate that,

but I think the reason that that has to be the case is because think about it this way. You're standing in front of a field, and you can see the field, but the field doesn't tell you how to walk through it. There's an infinite number of ways you could walk through it. And so you can't extract out an inviolable guide to how you should act from the array of facts that are in front of you. Because there's just too many facts. And they don't have directionality. But you need to know, you need to know how not to suffer,

and you need to know what your aim is. And so you have to overlay that objective reality with some interpretive structure. And it's the nature of that interpretive structure that we're going to be aiming at hard. Given you some hints about it already, we've extracted it in part for observations of our own behavior and other people's behavior. And we've extracted it in part by the nature of our embodiment that's been shaped over hundreds of millions of years. But we see the infinite plane of facts and we impose a moral interpretation on it.

And the moral interpretation is what to do about what is. And that's associated both with security, because you just don't need too much complexity, and also with aim. And so we're mobile creatures, right? We need to know where we're going, because all we're ever concerned about, roughly speaking, is where we're going. That's what we need to know.

Where are we going? What are we doing and why? And that's not the same question as what is the world made of objectively. It's a different question, requires different answers. And so that's the domain of the moral, as far as I'm concerned, which is what are you aiming at? And that's the question of the ultimate ideal, in some sense.

Even if you have trivial, little fragmentary ideals, there's something trying to emerge out of that that's more coherent and more integrated and more applicable and more practical. And that's the other thing is that, you know, you think about literature and you think about art and you think those aren't very tightly tied to the earth. They're imperial in the airy and spiritual and they don't seem practical, but I'm a practical person. And part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary and aesthetic and evolutionary perspective is to extract out something of value, something of real value, that's practical. Or something, because one of the rules that I have

when I'm lecturing is that I don't want to tell anybody anything that they can't use. Because I think of knowledge as a tool. It's something to implement in the world. We're tool using creatures and our knowledge is tools. And we need tools to work in the world. We need tools to regulate our emotions and to make things better, and to put an end to suffering, to the degree that we can, and to live with ourselves properly, and to stand up properly. And you need the tools to do that. And so I don't wanna do anything in this lecture series

that isn't practical. You know, I want you to come away, having things put together in a way that you can immediately imply, not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Rational, well, it's got to make sense, you know, because the more restrictions on your theory, the better. And so I wanted all laid out causally

so that A and A follow, or B follows A, and B precedes C, and in a way that's understandable and doesn't require a leap, any unnecessary leap of faith. Because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like The Bible is that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe. And that's no good, because that's a form of lie

as far as I can tell. And then, well, then you have to scrap the whole thing, because in principle, the whole thing's about truth. And if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that? And so I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this or I don't want any more than I can then I have to leave in it because I can't get any farther than that. And so it's going to make sense rationally. I don't want it to be pushing up against what we know

to be scientifically untrue, even those sciences in flux. And that's somewhat of a dangerous parameter. I don't want. If it isn't working with evolutionary theory, for example, then I think that it's not a good enough solution. So. And then finally, it's phenomenological. Modern people, we think of reality as objective,

and that's very powerful, but that isn't how we experience reality. We have our domain of experience, you know, and this is a hard thing to get a grip on on even though it should be the most obvious thing. For the phenomenologists, everything that you experience is real. And so they're interested in the structure of your subjective experience. I can say, well, you have subjective experience, and you have subjective experience. So do you.

And there's commonalities across all of those, like for example, you're likely to experience the same set of emotions. You know, we've been able to identify canonical emotions and canonical motivations. And without that, we couldn't even communicate because you wouldn't know what the other person was like. You'd have to explain infinitely. There's nothing you could take for granted, but you can. You know, and phenomenology is the fact that in the center of my vision, my hands are very clear. And then out in the periphery, they disappear. And phenomenology is the way things smell,

and the way things taste, and the fact that they matter. And so you could say in some sense that phenomenology is the study of what matters rather than matter. And it's a given from the phenomenological perspective that things have meaning. And even if you're a rationalist, say, a cynic and a nihilist, and you say, well, nothing has any meaning, you still run into the problem of pain

because pain undercuts your arguments and has a meaning. So there's no escaping from the meaning. You can pretty much demolish all the positive parts of it, but trying to think your way out of the negative parts, man. Good luck with that, because that just doesn't work. So phenomenology is, and the Bible stories, and I think this is true of a fiction in general, is phenomenological.

And it concentrates on trying to elucidate the nature of human experience, and that is not the same as the objective world, but it's also a form of truth, because it is truth that you have a field of experience and that it has qualities. The question is, what are the qualities? Now, ancient representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomena,

things that we would consider objective facts, and subjective truth, the projection of subjective truth, and I'll show you, for example, I'll show you how they've mess up a Damien's, viewed the world, they had a model, basically the world was a disc. You know, if you go out in a field at night, what does the world look like? What's a disc? It's got a dome on top of it. Well, that was basically the Mesopotamian view

of the world, and the view of the world that the people who wrote the first stories in the Bible believed to. And on top of the dome, there was water. Well, obviously, it's like it rains, right? Where does the water come from? Well, there's water around the dome. And then there's land, that's the disc, and then underneath that, there's like it rains, right? Where does the water come from? Well, there's water around the dome. And then there's land, that's the disc,

and then underneath that, there's water. How do you know that? Well, drill. You'll hit water? What's under the earth? Obviously, because otherwise, how would you hit the water? And then what's under that?

There's fresh water. And then what's under that? Well, if you go to the edge of the disc, you hit the ocean, it's salt water. So it's a dome with water outside of it, and then it's a disk that the dome sits on, and then underneath that there's fresh water, and then underneath that there's salt water. And that was roughly the massive Potemian world. And you see, you see that's a mix of observation and imagination, right? Because

that isn't the world, but it is the way the world appears. It's a perfectly believable cosmology from, and the sun rises in the sun's sets on that dome. It's not like the thing is bloody well spinning. Who would ever think that out? It's obviously the sun comes up, it goes down, and then travels underneath the world, and comes back up again. There's nothing more self-evident than that. Well, that's that strange intermingling of subjective fantasy, let's say, right at the level of perception and actual observable phenomena.

And a lot of the cosmology that's associated with the biblical stories is exactly like that. It's half psychology and half reality, although the psychological is real as well. So to know that the biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing because the poor fund the mentalists, they're trying to cling to their moral structure.

And I understand why, because it does organize their societies and it organizes their psyche, so they've got something to cling to, but they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth, and they try to gerrymander the biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory, promoting creationism, for example, has an alternative

scientific theory. It's like, that just isn't going to go anywhere, you know? Because the people who wrote these damn stories weren't scientists to begin with. There weren't any scientists back then. There's hardly any scientists now. You know, it's really, it's hard to think scientifically, man. It's like, it takes a lot of training. And even scientists don't think scientifically once you get the bow to the lab.

And hardly even when they're in the lab, you've got to get peer reviewed and criticized. And it's hard to think scientifically. So, and however, the people who wrote these stories thought was more like dramatists think, more like Shakespeare thought. But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it. It just means that you have to be a little bit more

sophisticated about your ideas of truth. And that's okay, you know. There are truths to live by. Okay, well, fine. Then we want to figure out what those are because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much. So, and so if you know that what the Bible stories and stories in general are trying to represent is the lived experience of conscious

individuals, like the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals, then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding and eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and let's say the claims of religious stories. So, okay. Okay, so let's take a look at the structure of the book itself. So the first thing about the Bible is that it's a comedy. And a comedy has a happy ending, right? So that's a strange thing because the Greek God's stories,

we're almost always tragic. Now, the Bible is a comedy. It has a happy ending. Everyone lives. There's a heaven. So, now, what you think about that is a completely different issue. I'm just telling you the structure of the story. It's something like there is paradise at the beginning of time. And then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history and history is limitation and mortality and suffering and self-consciousness. But there's a mode of being or potentially

the establishment of a state that will transcend that and that's what time is aiming at. So that's the idea of the story. Now, it's a funny thing that the Bible has a story because it wasn't written as a book, right? It was assembled from a whole bunch of different books, and the fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable. And what the question is, then, well, what is that story about? And how did it come up as a story? And then I suppose as well, is there anything to it? It constitutes a dramatic record of self-realization

or abstraction. I already mentioned that. It's like the idea, for example, of the formulation of, let's say the image of God is an abstraction, that's how we're going to handle it to begin with. I want to say, though, because I said I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary, I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience

is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable. And so I don't wanna explain it away. I wanna just leave it as a fact. And then I wanna pull back from that and say, okay, well, we'll leave that as a fact in the mystery. And, but we'll look at this, we're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God

was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. So, and that's good enough, that's an amazing thing if it's true, but I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say. It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors, so what does that mean? Many people wrote it. There's many different books, even and they're interwoven together, especially in the first five books.

By people who, I suspect, took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization and tried to make their accounts coherent. And so they took a little of this and they took a little of that and they took a little of this. And they tried not to lose anything because it seemed valuable.

It was certainly valuable to the people who had collected the stories. They weren't gonna tolerate too much editing, but they also wanted it to make sense to some degree. So it wasn't completely logically contradictory and completely absurd. And so many people wrote it, and many people edited, and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time.

And we have very few documents like that, and so just because we have a document like that is a sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomenon and try to understand what it is that it's trying to communicate, let's say. And then I said it's also the world's first hyperlinked text, which is that again, and very much we're thinking about for quite a long time. All right, there's four sources in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, four stories that we know came together.

One was called the priest, there's a source called the priestly, and it used the name Elohim or El Shaddai for God. I believe Al is the root word for Alah as well. That's usually translated as God or the gods, because Elohim is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible. And it's newer than the Yahweh's version. Now, the reason I'm telling you that is because Genesis 1, which is the first story,

isn't as old as Genesis 2. Genesis 2 contains the Yahweh's version, contains the story, for example, of Adam and Eve. And that's older than the very first book in the Bible. But they decided to put the newer version first. And I think it's because it deals with more fundamental abstractions, something like that. It's like it deals with the most basic of abstractions, how the universe was created, and then segues into what the human environment is like.

And so that seems to be the logic behind it. The Awest version uses the name YHWH, which apparently people didn't say, but we believe was pronounced something like Yawa. And it has a strongly anthropomorphic god, so one that takes human form. It begins with Genesis 2.4. This is the account of the heavens and the earth, wind, and it contains the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Noah and the Tower of Babel

and Exodus and numbers, along with the priestly version. It also contains the law in the form, just the form of the Ten Commandments, which is like a truncated form of the law. There's the elohist source. It contains the stories of Abraham and Isaac. It's concerned with a heavenly hierarchy that includes angels.

It talks about the departure from Egypt. And it presents the covenant code, which is this idea of the society is predicated. This was Israeli society. It was predicated on a covenant with God, and that's laid out in a sequence of rules, some of which are the 10 commandments, but many of which are much more extensive than that.

And then the final one is the deuteronomist code, and it contains the bulk of the law and what's called the deuteronomic history, and it's independent of genesis X of this Leviticus and numbers. of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. And so we know that at least for now there's debate about this, like there is about everything, so I'm brushing over a very large area of scholarship. People generally assume that there were multiple authors over multiple periods of time. And the way they've concluded that is by looking at textual analysis, you know, trying to see where there

are chunks of the stories that have the same kind of style or the same reference. And people argue about that because, you know, obviously it's difficult to recreate something ancient, but that's the basic idea. So it is an amalgam of viewpoints about these initial issues, and that's important to know. So it's like a collective story. And, okay, now, to understand the first part of Genesis, I'm going to turn strangely enough to something that's actually part of the New Testament, and this is a central element of Christianity. And it's a very strange idea,

and it's gonna take a very long time to unpack, but the idea, this is what John said about Christ, he said, in the beginning was the word, and so that relates back to Genesis one, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Well, three sentences like that take a lot of unpacking because none of that seems to make any sense whatsoever,

really, right? In the beginning was the word, and the word was both with God, and the word was God. So the first question might be, what in the world does that mean? In the beginning was the word. That's the logo, actually, and the logos is what in the world does that mean? In the beginning was the word. That's the logos actually. And the logos is embodied in the figure of Christ.

So there's this idea and John that whatever Christ is, the son of God, is not only instantiated in history, say at a particular time and place, as a carpenter and some backwards part of the world, but also something eternal that exists outside of time and space that was there right at the beginning. And as far as I can tell, what that logos represents is something like modern people.

It's something like what modern people refer to when they talk about consciousness. It's something like that. It's more than that. It's like consciousness and its capacity to be aware and its capacity to communicate. It's something like that, and there's an idea underneath that, which is that being, especially from a phenomenological perspective, so the being that is experienced cannot exist without consciousness. It's like consciousness shines a light on things to bring it into being,

because without consciousness, what is there? No one experiences anything. It's like, is there anything? No one experiences anything. It's like, is there anything with no one experiences anything? That's the question. And the answer that this book is presenting is that no, you have to think about consciousness as a constituent element of reality. It's something that's necessary for reality itself to exist.

Now, of course, it depends on what you mean by reality. But the reality that's being referred to here, I told you already, is this strange amalgam of the subjective experience in the world. But the question is deeper than that too, because it is by no means obvious what there is if there's no one to experience it. I mean, the whole notion of time itself

seems to collapse, at least in terms of something like felt duration. And then the notion of size disappears essentially because there's nothing to scale it, and the causality seems to vanish. And so, and we don't understand consciousness, not in the least. We don't understand what it is that is in us that gives illumination to being. And what happens in the Old Testament, at least in part, is that that consciousness is associated with the divine. Now you think, well, is that a reasonable proposition?

And that's a very complicated question. But at least we might note that there's something to the claim, because there is a miracle of experience and existence that's dependent on consciousness. I mean, people try to explain it away constantly, but it doesn't seem to work very well. And here's something else to think about. I think that's really worth thinking about. People do not like it when you treat them like they're not conscious, right?

They react very badly to that. And then you don't like it if someone assumes that you're not conscious, and you don't like it if someone assumes that you don't have free will, that you're just absolutely determined in your actions. There's nothing that's going to repair you, and that you don't need to have any responsibility for your actions. It's like our culture, the laws of our culture are predicated on the idea, something like people are conscious, people have experience,

people make decisions and can be held responsible for them, that there's a free will element to it, and you can debate all that philosophically and find. But the point is that that is how we act, and that is the idea that our legal system is predicated on. And there's something deep about it, because you're a subject to the law. But the law is also limited by you, which

is to say that in a well-functioning, properly grounded democratic system, you have intrinsic value. That's the source of your rights. Even if you're a murderer, we have to say, the law can only go so far because there's something about you that's divine. Well, what does that mean? Well, partly it means that there's something about you

that's conscious and capable of communicating. Like you're a whole world, and unto yourself. And you have that to contribute to everyone else, and that's valuable. I mean, that you can learn new things, you can transform the structure of society, you can invent a new way of dealing with the world. You're capable of all that.

It's an intrinsic part of you, and that's associated with this. It's associated with that's the idea there, is that there's something about the logos that is necessary for the absolute chaos of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality. It's an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos. And you can debate that, but you know, it's not.

You can't just bloody well brush it off. Because first of all, we are the most complicated things there are that we know of by a massive amount. We're so complicated that it's unbelievable. And so, you know, there's a lot of cosmos out there, but there's a lot of cosmos in here too. And which one is greater is by no means obvious unless you use something trivial like relative size, which really isn't a very sophisticated approach. And whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it, which is very strange thing. You can conceptualize a future in your imagination, and then you can work and make that manifest.

You participate in the process of creation. That's one way of thinking about it. And so that's why I think in Genesis 1, it relates the idea that human beings are made in the image of the divine. Men and women, which is interesting too, because the feminists are always criticizing Christianity, for example, as being what inexorably patriarchal. Or as they criticize everything like that. for example, as being what inexorably patriarchal. Or as they criticize everything like that,

so it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance. But I think it's an absolute miracle that right at the beginning of the document, it says straight forwardly, like with no hesitation whatsoever, that the divine spark, which we're associating with the word that brings forth being,

is manifest in men and women equally. That's a very cool thing. And you've got to think, well, like I said, you actually take that seriously. Well, what you've got to ask is, what happens if you don't take it seriously? Right? That's read Dosti Eski's crime and punishment. That's the best, the best investigation of that tactic that's ever been produced, because what happens in Dostoevsky's crime and punishment is that the main character whose name is Ryskolnikov decides that there's no intrinsic value to other people, and that as a consequence he can do whatever he wants.

It's only cowardice that stops him from acting, right? Because why would it be anything else if the value of other people is just an arbitrary superstition? Then why can't I do exactly what I want, when I want, which is the psychopath's viewpoint? Well, so resculling the cove does. He kills someone who's a very horrible person, and he has very good reasons for killing her,

and he's half starved and a little bit insane and possessed by this ideology. It's brilliant, killing her. And he's half starved and a little bit insane and possessed by this ideology. It's brilliant, brilliant layout. And he finds out something after he kills her, which is that the post killing was skulled in the coffin, the pre killing was skulled in the coffin are not the same person even a little bit. Because he's broken a rule, like he's broken a serious rule,

and there's no going back. And crime and punishment is the best investigation I know of. Of what happens if you take the notion that there's nothing divine about the individual seriously. Most of the people I know who are deeply atheistic, and I understand why they're deeply atheistic, they haven't contended with people like Dostiewski, not as far as I can tell. Because I don't see logical flaws in crime and punishment. I think he got the psychology exactly right. And he, and Dostiewski's amazing for this,

because in one of his books, The Devils, for example, he describes a political scenario that's not much different than the one we find yourself in now. And there are these people who are possessed by rationalistic, utopian, atheistic ideas. And they're very powerful, they give rise to the Communist Revolution, right? I mean utopian atheistic ideas. And they're very powerful. They give rise to the Communist Revolution, right? I mean, they're powerful ideas.

And his character, Stavrigan, also acts out the presupposition that human beings have no intrinsic nature and no intrinsic value. And it's another brilliant investigation in Dostoyevsky prophesized, that's what I would say, what will happen to a society if it goes down that road? And he was dead exactly accurate. It's uncanny to read Dostoevsky's The Possessed

or The Devil's, depending on the translation. And then to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Guli Garcopaligo, because one is fiction and prophecy. And the second is, hey, look, it turned out exactly the way that Dostyewski said it would for exactly the same reasons. So it's quite remarkable. So, well, so the question is,

do you contend seriously with the idea that A, there's something, cosmically constitutive about consciousness, and B, that that might well be considered divine and C, that that is instant be considered divine and see that that is instantiated in every person and then ask yourself if you're not a criminal if you don't act it out and Then ask yourself what that means is that reflective of a reality? It is a metaphor like maybe it's a metaphor a complex metaphor that we have to use to organize her societies could well be but

even as a metaphor it's it's true enough so that we have to use to organize her societies. Could well be, but even as a metaphor, it's true enough so that we mess with it at our peril. And it also took people a very long time to figure out. This is Genesis 1. You know, and I'm probably gonna stop there because I believe it's 9.30. And so we didn't even get to the first line. that we'll use as a pro-drama for the next lecture, because I'll just bounce through a collection of ideas that's associated with the notion of divinity, okay?

And then we'll turn back to the first lines when we start the next lecture. I have no idea how far I'm going to get through the biblical stories, by the way, because I'm trying to figure this out as I go along. Okay, so, you know, there's an idea in Christianity that the image of God is a trinity, right? There's the Father, there's the element of the Father, there's the element of the Son,

and there's the element of the Holy Spirit. It's something like tradition, the spirit of tradition. It's something like the human being as the newest incarnation of that tradition, like the living incarnation of that tradition. And then it's something like the spirit in people that makes relationship with this and this possible, the spirit in individuals. And so I'm going to bounce my way quickly

through some of the classical metaphorical attributes of God so that we kind of have a cloud of notions about what we're talking about when we return to Genesis 1 and talk about the God who spoke chaos into B8. So there's a fatherly aspect. So here's what God has a father is like. You can enter into a covenant with it. So you can make a bargain with it. Now you think about that. Money is like that because money is a bargain you make with the future. So we've structured our world so that you can negotiate with the future.

And I don't think that we would have got to the point where we could do that without having this idea to begin with. You can act as if the future is a reality. There's a spirit of tradition that enables you to act as if the future is something that can be bargain with. That's why you make sacrifices, right? And the sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time, and now they're psychological. We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present,

and expect that you're negotiating with something that represents the transcendent future. And that's a amazing human discovery. Like, no other creature can do that to act as if the future is real. To note that you can bargain with reality itself and that you can do it successfully. It's unbelievable. It responds to sacrifice. It answers prayers.

I'm not saying that any of this is true, by the way. I'm just saying what the cloud of ideas represents. It punishes end rewards. it judges and forgives. It's not nature. You see, the thing about, the thing that's one of the things that's weird about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God and nature are not the same thing at all. Whatever God is, partially manifest in this logos

is something that stands outside of nature. And I think that's something like consciousness as abstracted from the natural world. So it built Eden for mankind and then banished us for disobedience. It's too powerful to be touched. It granted free will. Distance from it is hell.

Distance from it is death. It reveals itself in dogma and in mystical experience, and it's the law. So that's sort of like the fatherly aspect. And then the sun-like aspect, it speaks chaos into order, it slays dragons, and feeds people with the remains. It finds gold, it rescues virgins, it's the body and blood of Christ, it's a tragic victim and scapegoat, and eternally triumphant redeemer simultaneously. It cares for the outcast. It dies and is reborn.

It's the king of kings and hero of heroes. It's not the state, but is both the fulfillment and critic of the state. It dwells in the perfect house. It is aiming at paradise or heaven. It can rescue from hell. It cares for the outcast. It's the foundation stone and the cornerstone

that was rejected, and it's the spirit of the law. And then it's spirit-like. It's akin to the human soul. It's the prophetic voice. It's the still small voice of conscience. It's the spoken truth. It's called forth by music. It is the enemy of deceit, arrogance, and resentment. It's the spoken truth. It's called fourth by music. It is the enemy of deceit, arrogance, and resentment.

It's the water of life. It burns without consuming and it's a blinding light. Okay, so that's a very well developed poetic set of poetic metaphors essentially, right? So these are all what would you say? Glimpses of the transcendent ideal. That's the right way of thinking about. They're glimpses of the transcendent ideal. And all of them have a specific meaning. And well, in part, what we're going to do is go over that meaning as we continue with this series.

And so what we've got now is a brief description, at least, of what this is. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We know it's associated with the logos in this sequence of stories. We know it's associated with the word and with consciousness. And we know that it's associated with whatever God is. And then I laid out the metaphorical landscape

that at least in part describes God. And so now we have some sense of the being that does this. Creates the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void. That's that chaotic state of intermingled confusion. And darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light.

And so we'll stop with that. And because now we're ready to take a tentative step into the very first part of this book. And it's important to have your conceptual framework properly organized so that you can appreciate where it's going and what it might possibly mean. And so, well, I've done what I can today to what would you say elaborate on this single word I suppose and

But it's a big word, you know, so It's not so unreasonable that it takes a long time to get to the point where you have any sense of what it means at all All right That is nowhere near that is not I thought I would get a lot farther All right, so thank you very much. Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! So we do have time for some questions.

We have to be out of here at 10.30. It's 9.30. So maybe we'll have questions until someone crazy grubs the microphone. Or maybe we'll have questions for half an hour, something like that. So if anybody has any questions, then there's a microphone there and there's a microphone there. And I'll try to answer them to the best that I can missed my ability. So let's start.

OK, so you talked about the idea of when you're confronting something that you fear, you face it head on and you destroy it. But then you said that the idea is when you're confronting something, you make the world out of it. And I was wondering if you could just, I mean, you make your marriage out of the arguments. You have arguments with your wife, You have arguments with your children.

That's that chaotic state, because no one's been able to formulate a habitable order from that domain of controversy and confusion. And then, through dialogue, you erect a structure that's a house that you can both live in. And so that's the idea of making the world out of that chaos. And it's frightening, because if you're really, and this is why people often avoid having disputes with people they love,

because it's frightening, right? You find out what the person's like, and you find out what you're like, it's like, God, who wants to do that? Nobody. And so, you know, your heart rate goes up, and it's confrontation and conflict. And that's because you're encountering that domain

that hasn't been properly mapped or configured. And so, and you're doing that with your predator detection systems essentially. And so that chaos that the threat and the stability say of the marriage is equivalent to, well, it's equivalent to the serpent in the tree, that's one form of equivalence. And then by dialogue, through dialogue and negotiation,

you formulate the problem. What exactly is going on here? Where exactly are we? What exactly is the problem? And so you keep talking until you reach a consensus about that, one that you can live with, one that you can act out. And then maybe you come up with a solution

to the problem and you've established peace again. And peace, that's the house that you can both live in. And that's the chaos. That's the chaos that people can fall into all the time and often do. And it's the chaos that makes a marriage wash up on the shores and transform into like you know, 15-year divorce court, very horrible thing. So that's the idea.

OK, thank you. OK. Hi, Dr. Peterson. Thank you so much for the talk. And thanks for your teachings. It's really helped me a lot. I had an experience in grad school, two English degrees. And the way you described the humanities in my experience, how may understand my experience

back then. So thank you. That's too bad. That's too bad that it happens to be the case. Really, like that, you know, it's really not good. But you don't have to tell me that. Yeah. But you know, I survived and I learned a lot.

I'm not, you know, ungrateful for my experience. I've learned a lot. But you said something, you described the Bible, the collection of stories in the Bible, an interesting way, and I wonder if it was on purpose. You described it as, created by an assembly of stories, created by many people over time that's hyperlinked into itself. And it sounds a lot like how a description of the internet

and how that works. Yeah, well, it's not accidental. I mean, because the internet's also a collective, it's a collective endeavor. God only knows what personality it's going to manifest. But it's going to manifest some personality because it's learning to understand us very, very rapidly. So I think there's no reason not to think about it

as a precursor. I mean, the distance between the Bible and the Internet is a lot less than the distance between a chimpanzee and a human being. So, you know, it's a, and the difference between a book and the Internet is, it's also, it's in some sense, it's a matter of degree rather than kind so I can't speculate you know because God only knows what's going to happen in the

next 20 years I certainly don't and so I don't know what the preconditions are for consciousness I have no idea and I don't think anybody knows so I guess we're going to find out. So yeah. Yeah. Hey Dr. Peterson. I'm curious about the connection between aesthetic beauty and religious experience. I think you've hinted at it once or twice over the course of this lecture. Is it possible for something that's incredibly beautiful to evoke a religious or mystical experience or something kind of in the same ballpark as that? I think that's what they're for, like in some sense.

You know, I mean, if you look at the structure of like a Renaissance Cathedral, you know, it's just just gonna- Right, right. That's my tag on to, I apologize, and then to drop. My tag on to that question, the next part was, is that why we have cathedrals built like a spectacular building, as opposed to a whole box or something?

Yeah, well, it's a whole box or something. Right, well, it's if you're gonna house the ultimate ideal, you build something beautiful, right, to represent its dwelling place, and it should be beautiful. And this is something that people do not take seriously. And this is especially something we don't take seriously in Canada. I mean, one of the, you think about,

you think about all the hundreds of millions of dollars that were invested into beauty in Europe. I mean, spectacular, excessive investment in beauty that's paid back, God only knows how many multiples of times. People make pilgrimages to Europe constantly because it's so beautiful that it just, it staggers you. Beauty is so valuable and we're so afraid of it.

And I think we're afraid of it because it's a pathway, it's not the only pathway to the divine. I mean, there's pathways to the divine. Love is one of them, I suppose. But beauty, especially for people who have an affinity for beauty, it's like music. It's one of those things that you can't argue against, right?

You can't even understand, it just hits you. And it shows you the ideal. That's one way of thinking about it. But it also shows you, I think, it's like a vision of the potential future. It's something like that as well, that if we just got our act together and beautified things, that that's the place that we can inhabit and that would in noblest. And that's why the Jerusalem, the heavily city, is paved with gemstones, you know, they're crystalline, they emit light. And yeah, it's the proper dwelling place

for an enlightened consciousness. Beauty is the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness. Beauty is the proper dwelling place for an enlightened consciousness. And we ignore it at our spiritual and economic peril. It's obvious that beauty, there's almost nothing more valuable than beauty, economically, practically. So yeah, why that is.

I mean, I don't, it's very, who knows? I mean, why we experience gemstones, for example, is beautiful, it's very mysterious, but there are deep reasons for it. So, yep. I have a bit of a similar question actually. I know what one of the ways in which the Bible is appreciated even by some of its harshest critics and deeply atheistic people is as a work of literature and is something, at least the King James with authorized translation of the Bible is something very aesthetically beautiful and a great work of literature and a great work of poetry.

And I'm wondering, just from your study of it and from your personal perspective, if there's any particular passages or parts of it that you find particularly have struck you in that way or that you cherish more than any others that you be able to share. Well the ones that have really opened up to me, I think, are the stories in Genesis right up to the Tower of Babel, because I think, well, hopefully I'll be able to talk to all of you about that. But I think I've got some sense of what they mean and why.

I mean, I know it's not exhaustive and obviously. And the story in Exodus as well, I also feel that I've got a handle on that. And so those have hit me really, really hard. And just trying to understand this first part of Genesis to try to understand what these concepts mean, is especially when I started to understand that the concept that human beings are made in God's image,

that God has all those attributes that we just described, that human beings are made in God's image, that that's actually the cornerstone of our legal system. That really rattled me because I didn't understand that clearly. That our body of laws has that metaphysical presupposition without which the laws fall apart. And that's starting to happen. It really is. You know, like the postmodern critique of law. The law schools are, I would say, they're overrun by postmodernists who are undermining the structure of Western law as fast as they possibly can, because they don't buy any of this. And so they're much more likely to just think of the law as something

like a casual pragmatic tool to be manipulated for the purposes of bringing forth the utopia. It's a really, really, really bad idea. So it's very strange to me that we go off track when that metaphysical foundation starts to get rattled. So... So do you think you're, you're appreciating the aesthetic beauty of it comes from a belief in like the truth of its underlying propositions? I mean, that's because even the atheistic critics, I'm thinking of like even Dawkins or But you seem to see it. Yeah, well, I don't think that you can see it as beautiful and poetic with and reject the underlying premises.

Because if you see it as beautiful and poetic, you're accepting the underlying premises with your experience of the beauty and the poetics, even though you may be fighting it with your articulated rationality. So I think all that indicates is a disintegrated perspective on the book. And it's not surprising that that's the case.

I mean, it's the perspective that everyone has on the book, except with them it's more well-developed and well thought through. But I think it's fundamentally, they're not approaching the thing with enough respect. That's my sense, is they, and who knows, right? Because I don't, I don't know, but what I've tried to do is to think there's probably more to this than I know. And then try to understand it from that perspective, rather than to think, for example,

well, it's a collection of superstitions that we've somehow outgrown. It's like, no, it's just, sorry, that's not a deep enough analysis, because it's got some truth, but it doesn't take into account the fact that the proposition still stand at the foundation of our culture. It doesn't address niche's central concern, which is that if you blow out the notion of God, the entire structure crumbles.

You can debate that, fine, but I'd just assume that you debated it with Nietzsche because he's a pretty tough customer to tangle with. I don't think the atheist types in so far as there's a type. I don't think they've wrestled with the real problems. So I appreciate you setting up some ground rules, keep things rational, and I think that's going to help us. What I'm wondering is, for instance, you had said elsewhere the new testament from what you can see, it's psychologically correct, and that's quite astounding, I would say. There's a lot of truth.

And in your depictions of these stories elsewhere, you've pointed out like deep truths, you know, that are real powerful. So what my question would be is, if we can say Nietzsche took an order of magnitude of intelligence and depth to be able to predict what would happen in the next century, rationally, if the Bible is not the inherent word of God, what's going on?

That's a good question. That's a really good question. I'm going to try to answer that rationally. But as we move forward, but as I said, I don't want to leave people with the notion. Because you know, some ways, this is something I've thought about what I've been thinking about for a long time, is I can't tell if I'm like an advocate of the religious viewpoint

or it's worst possible critic. Because I am doing my best to make it rational. And there's a reductionistic element to that. But I think that I'm doing that while also leaving the door open to things that I don't understand because I know that there's more to this story than I understand or can understand. And I'm laying out what I can understand and I'm making it rational, but I do not believe for an instant that that exhausts the realm.

It's like there are ways of interpreting these stories that work in the conceptual universe we inhabit right now. But there's a lot of things that we don't understand. And what I'm the thing I've found about digging into these stories is that the deeper you dig, the more you find. And that's pretty damn, that's one of the things that convinced me that there was more to them that I had originally suspected because things would click. And I think, wow, that's really something. And then I would take it apart further and I'd think, oh, well, I thought that was something, but this is even more remarkable. It just keeps opening and opening.

And so I'm going to make it rational. I'm going to try to provide an answer to, and it is, I think you're right about speaking about Nietzsche and his capacity for prophecy and Dostoevsky's in the same category. It's like there are prophetic elements to the old and new testament that seem to stretch over much faster spans of time. And I'm going to try to produce a rational account of that. But I mean, one of the reasons that I think the New Testament is psychologically true,

let's say, is because, and this is one of the things that's deeply embedded in the structure of the Bible. In the Old Testament, there's this idea, and I'm skipping ahead, that, through a succession of states, the people who behave properly will eventually establish the proper state. And so the state is viewed, in in some sense as the entity of salvation. But what happens in the New Testament is that idea gets, you could say, deconstructed. And instead of a state being the place of redemption, a state of being becomes the state of redemption. And so the idea that human beings will be redeemed moves from the utopian state vision to the responsibility of the individual.

And I think that's correct. I believe that that's the right answer. And I think that the West in particular is predicated on that idea because it makes the state subservient to the individual. I mean, there's a, there's a what? A dialogue, a continual dialogue, but in the final analysis, the locus of the divine is the individual, not the state. And I believe that that's so true

that if we don't act it out and believe it, then we all die painfully. And that's true enough for me. So. Thank you. Yeah. Applause. Thank you for the nominating talk. I'm going to keep you on the creation story, and if you

don't mind, because we know this editing that was done, there was the purpose for the editing. Can you give us your thoughts about the difference in the story of creation, especially pertaining to men from the first chapter, which is very God-like, by a word, and to the second one, which is more like a fatherly type of creation, is it the selling point, what was the reason for this type

of editing to put the two together, one after the other? Well, I think, you know, the more cynical, would you call, criticism of the Bible and the religious tradition. Criticisms like Marx's or Freud's even, for that matter, make the case that it's a manifestation of power and politics, and that there's always a political or economic motivation behind the construction of the stories.

And I think that that's true to some degree. But I don't think that it's true enough so that you can take that particular interpretive tack and be done with it. And I would say that to the degree that there are political and economic motivations that have shaped the stories, the fact that multiple stories have come together, they're sort of corrective in some sense. And so, even if at the level of detail,

there's political intrigue and politics, say, with regards to the ascendancy of Israel, when you step away from it, it becomes something that's more universal and escapes from that. And how that happened, I don't know. I mean, I think it's safe to say, it's reasonably safe to say that the people who put this document together,

they did two things. I think they were guided by their aesthetic taste and their conscience. I truly believe that. And the reason I believe that is because I think anything that was propagandistic would have been forgotten. Because you can't remember propaganda. No one likes it. It's like it's dead 10 years after you're right, it's 20 years. And it isn't only that these books were assembled and written.

It was that they were preserved and remembered. And to me that means they have an affinity with the structure of memory. I mean, you think about it. How does this story last 10,000 years, unless it's the kind of story you can remember? It doesn't, because you forget all the forgettable stuff, and all you remember is the memorable stuff. And so there's this interplay between the document itself and its audience that shapes the document. And so now I don't know how specifically I answered your question.

We're going to hit this different stories as they come up in sequence. And I think I'll shed some more light on the relationship between them doing that. And we'll start with that next week. OK? APPLAUSE Right. So I've been really interested in a lot of the stuff that you've been saying about

dreams because I've been lucid dreaming a lot for many years, but always in a sort of atheistic way as sort of like a game or something like that. But because of seeing your talks and everything, I'm starting to think of it from a different perspective like you're now interfacing with something beyond the narrow scope of your conscious awareness that or something like that maybe mythological or maybe something like God and so What I've been thinking about and what I maybe wondered what you think about it is that In some ways when you're lucid dreaming you're kind of trend you're getting beyond

In some ways when you're lucid dreaming you're kind of, you're getting beyond limitations of an ordinary dream, you're sort of transcending limitations, which maybe is like it's not the purpose of people, right? Because as a person you're supposed to be limited in some way, as opposed to like God who's like not limited. And how, but on the other hand, it's a good opportunity to kind of have control over your interactions with this like very special and like interesting thing. So I guess the conundrum is that on one hand, you can control your interactions, but on the other hand, you are controlling them.

So I guess I'm wondering what do you think about that and also just in general, what do you think about lucid dreaming as a thing? Like, should you do it? I had a client who could really lucid dream, you know? And one of the things, she used them now and then to solve problems, even though she didn't always pay attention to the answer. Sometimes she did.

She, in one of her dreams, one of the characters told her that she would have to learn to live in a slaughterhouse. She was very afraid of life. And one of the consequences of that was that we went and watched an embalming so So the dreams were but one of the things she did she'd ask the characters what they were up to you know She was she was instead of controlling she would inquire and so but I don't know what to say about Lucid dreaming beyond that

Like I know it's a well-documented phenomena and many people do it, and women seem to be able to do it better than men. That's what the research indicates. But I think that what we don't know about Lucid Dreaming could fill a lot of books. So I think you do. There is some danger in controlling it, I think, because you lose the spontaneous revelation, although not completely, because you can't control it completely. But I, like, you see, you might be interested in reading Jung's works on active imagination because he kind of learned to dream when he was awake. And he spent a lot of time in the world of imagination when he was

awake. The red books, for example, the red book is a document of his experiences with awake dreaming. But he was very interactive with the dream, instead of trying to bend it to his whim or his will. He was exploring it in some sense like you'd explore a video game, which are forms of dreams in and of themselves. So yeah, I would say do it with an exploratory purpose in mind.

And you could always ask yourself what you could learn, too, which is a very dangerous question to ask a dream. Because sometimes you'll find out what you have to learn. That's not so pleasant, but it's really worthwhile. OK. OK. Yep. OK.

So I think I'm going to take four more questions only, because I'm running out of brain. And I don't want to say stupid things. So or stupider things that I've already said. So. So. Yeah, thank you for the talk. In the beginning of your lecture,

you talked about how society needed this kind of dream-like religious base. So we don't go between left and right violently, and we can kind of have this base. And then you also said you admired Nietzsche for kind of chopping down these ideological and kind of dogmatic weeds coming up from the base of Christianity. I was wondering how what your thoughts are and how society can have this kind of religious base without having these kind of dangerous ideologies that can spring up once in a while.

That's what I'm trying to figure out. Not really, I mean, that's the serious answer to that question. You know, I mean, the reason that I'm an admirer of Nietzsche is because he was the spirit of his time. So that's a good way of thinking about it. It's not like Nietzsche killed God. It's that Nietzsche gathered what was in the air and articulated it, right?

Incredibly, profoundly. And so he put his finger on the spot. And in doing so, he announced the problem. And once you announce the problem, then maybe you can come up with a solution because you can't solve a problem unless you know what it is. And the fact that he made it so stark and so clear is horrifying in some sense.

But at least we know where we stand. And so since then, I would say particularly with, in many ways, particularly with the work of Jung and everything that's come out of that, which is a deeper study of mythology and its meanings. And we've been trying to address that, the issue that Nietzsche brought up and trying to solve the problem. The problem is something like the reunification of the spirit of mankind.

It's something like that. Well, we're slogging through it, man. That's why you're all here, at least in part. So we'll see how far we can get. By this rate, we'll get to like the 12th verse in the first. But that's the aim, you know? Okay. I'll talk about that more next time.

I mean, I think that the best answer to that is I'll talk more about that next time. I mean, I think of them as overlapping metaphorical domains. You know, in the descriptions I put of the fatherly aspect, the sun aspect, and the spirit aspect, you could swap a lot of those. You know, it's kind of arbitrary, but I think the trinitarian idea is trying to get forward the notion that the locus of the divine is, it's the same thing in its essence, but it exists in a multiplicity. It exists as the spirit of tradition.

It exists as the living individual in time and space, and then it exists as the spirit and is conscious to something like that that we all share. Which, you know, Jung would have thought about that as something like the capacity for the individual to realize that tragedy and redemption of Christ in their individual life. And that's something like your capacity to voluntarily accept the tragic conditions of your existence and to move forward to something resembling paradise

regardless of that. You know, as something that's intrinsic to you, and I think that's associated with the idea of the Pentecost and the Holy Spirit, all of that. It's so, that's as good as I can do in a short period of time. So, yeah. So my question to you is, like it's a social contract or a legal system replaced the legitimate as a moral framework, and how do we want to act? I think it's because of the gap between what we articulate and what we don't know.

Something has to fill that gap. Like I think the law could be, could replace it if the law was total, but it isn't. It's bounded and incorrect. And there's something, it rests, it has to rest on something inside that's like this mediateer between what we articulate

and what we don't understand. It's something like custom, it's something like expectation. It's something like the intrinsic sense of justice, you know, that the law itself is aiming at. And those aren't fully articulated, but without them there'd be no grounding. Like without the body, the law would be a dictionary. You know, and if you don't know what a word means,

using the dictionary is helpful, but not that helpful because, like unless you don't know what a word means, using the dictionary is helpful, but not that helpful, because unless you've had the experience of anger, the dictionary can't tell you what anger means. It's just refers to other words, but the words themselves refer to something else, and the law refers to something else. And without that, it has to be in tune with that

something else and has to be in accordance with it. And so I don't think we can ever delineate that proper body of laws and that's also why you, like ideological utopias, see the ideological utopias dispensed with the transcendent. They say this is what we need to do. It's like no, you don't know. That's not good. You have to leave space for what you kind of know and for what you don't know. And I mean, you know, in the story of the Tower of Babel, human beings make this massive

building that's supposed to reach up to the heavens so that it'll take the place of God. Well, that's the earliest warning we have of the danger of making things so big that you confuse them with God. And God gets irritated and comes down and makes everybody speak different languages and scatters them. It's like, well, that's what happens when you try to make something a totality, is that it starts to fragment inside and disintegrate into catastrophe. And so it's almost as we have to maintain this articulated space inside the dream, inside the custom, something like that, because otherwise it doesn't work. And I think that's the same as having respect for the fact that we have bodies.

You know, we're not just abstract creatures that follow rules. We're not that at all. We only follow certain rules. We won't follow the other ones, and our societies will crumble. And so, and we just don't know enough to articulate the entire landscape of behavior with articulated rules. Not at all. We can't do it. It's beyond us. Yep. Yep.

All right. Thanks for the talk. My question is also about dreams. You spoke about dreams as a representation of truths and universal truths that can be interpreted into myths and religion. And as you say, it's very beneficial for the individual. And it sounds like also for the society as well, because not everyone can as easily remember their dreams or interpret their dreams like that. And also it's broadcasted to all of society

for their benefits. So I guess I'm wondering what the evolutionary advantage of dreams are. And my question would be, do you think that dreams suggest some sort of evolutionary group selection, such that groups that don't have these dreams that are represented in submits and religion, do you think they didn't survive as well? OK, so I'm not going to answer the second part of that question because I'd have to go far too far off

and it's tangent for me to manage right now, but I can answer the first part. I mean, what happens when you're dreaming? There's a little switch, so to speak, in your brain that shuts off when you're dreaming and it stops you from moving, right? It shuts everything off except your eyes because if you're moving your eyes back and forth, you're not going to get run around and get eaten by a lion. It's OK to move your eyes. But the rest of you is standing exactly where it is.

Then you can run these simulations. And so what's happening at night, and this is a fairly well accepted theory of dreaming. We know that dreams update memories and help consolidate memories. They also help you forget. But what seems to be happening at night is that you're You're running the underlying architecture of your cognitive ability in different simulations

And it's cost-free because you're you're paralyzed. You're not running around there out in the world Investigating so it's part of the manner in which your brain Experiments with the way the world can be represented. And so, and it seems absolutely necessary. And I mean, if you deprive people of REM sleep, they don't stay sane very long. There's something necessary about the dreaming process to maintenance of articulated sanity. So, you're doing some kind of organization at night when you descend into that chaos.

And partly what seems to happen is that your categorical, you know, your categories have boundaries, right? But sometimes you don't have the categories correct. And so the boundaries have to loosen and other things need to be put in the categories or some things shunted away. And in the dream, the category structure loosens, which is why dreams are so peculiar,

but they're experimenting. It's your mind is experimenting with the underlying categorical structure of imagination, and trying to update your mode of being in the world. Dreams often concentrate on things that provoke anxiety. So if you wake people up when they're dreaming, the most commonly reported emotion is anxiety. And so the dream is like the first stages of the attempt

to contend with the unknown. And so the dream is half unknown and half known, which is also why it's so peculiar, because you kind of understand it, but you don't really. And it partakes of the unknown and of the known. And it's the bridge between the two something like that so Okay, so my question is kind of two parts the first one is just like a general question and then just the application of the question So my first question is do you think that consciousness and beinghood are inextricably

linked? And then secondly, so if there was something like a super computer that one could house theoretically a perfect brain of a person in it, does that thing then become the same person as the person who is before? So is there a transcendency to beinghood, but not to conscious? OK, so the first question is, well, I would say that the kind of being that these stories are concerned with

is absolutely dependent on consciousness. Now, whether or not that means that being as such is dependent on consciousness actually depends on how you define being. So it's always tricky when you ask, and if is an example of B, those are tricky questions because it depends on how you define the two. But for our purposes, the being that we're discussing

that's represented in these stories is intrinsically associated with conscious experience. And consciousness is given this constitutive role. It says that the experience that we're talking about would not exist if consciousness did not exist. So you can think about it as a kind of game in a way, and then you have to decide for yourself whether that's a game that can be generalized. And I won't answer the second part, okay, if you don't mind.

Alright. So two more questions. First one's very quick, almost admin. If we want to read the biblical stories that kind of you are referring to as a particular version of edition source publisher, we should refer to it. Oh, I'll bring the thing I like next week, which is, I think the readers digest published it of all things,

but it lays out the narratives in a different format. It's easy. I find it much easier to read. So I'll show it to you. And I'll bring it next time and show it to you. One of the main reasons why I'm interested in so much of your work, and I think many people are there as well, is that you kind of leave literalism at the door,

and you open up another door to a much more deeper meaning. In your interview with Transliminal Media, you mentioned Liz Eibel's book, The Surpent, The Tree, The Surfer, and Vision. And you note that we as a species are very good at recognizing camouflage patterns of snakes, particularly in the lower field of vision. And you further note that visual acule is correlated with that

and that it co-evolved. And you summarize thusly by saying the following, the paraphrasing you, you say, what gives you vision, snakes do. That's what it says in Genesis. What else gives you vision fruit? That's also right. That's why we have color vision. What makes yourself conscious vision fruit? That's also right. That's why we have color vision

What makes you so conscious if you are a man woman? That's Eve and so I understand at the elementary level some of the concepts that you have about Representations dreams abstractions, etc. But kind of raises the question for me You know, I'm not accusing you of any creationism or literalism. Yeah, you know, what's your point? Why did you make that connection? What's the meaning of the story of Genesis vis-a-vis point, why did you make that connection? What's the meaning of the story of Genesis vis-a-vis Lysaibos book? No problem. We're gonna, as soon as I get past this first Genesis 1, we're gonna hit that hard. So, so, well, partly, and are you at all suggesting that one foreshadow, you know, the discovery of the site that people started? Yes, I'm suggesting that it foreshadowed it.

And I think they're the same thing. I mean, is Belton her book plays with that idea metaphorically, but she never really takes it seriously, which is no problem. I mean, there's only so much you can take seriously, and she did a fine job of what she did. But I'll talk about that a lot, because it's a very complicated issue. I mean, I would say to begin with that the systems that you use to deal with radical uncertainty

are the same systems that your primate ancestors evolved to deal with snakes. That's a good start. So, okay? One more and then we're done. I'm going. I'm an aerospace science engineer and an expert computer programmer and I have three rapid-fire questions so I need to get through them quick. Based on your opinion of where the universities now stand in terms of humanities and social sciences, is mathematics more powerful than articulated speech? I'm not sure. I'm not exactly sure how the first

is it to make you more powerful to study mathematics and a part of science in your version of the study? Well, it depends on what you mean by power, I guess. I mean, obviously studying mathematics and computer science makes you insanely powerful. The question is to what end? And I don't think that you can extract an answer to that

from the study of mathematics. The humanities are there to ground people in proper citizenhood. That's a way of thinking about it. And so yes, it makes you powerful. But then the question is, who has the power? Because it might not be you. It might be the mathematics, so to speak.

Because you never know what you're an agent of precisely. So, yeah, well look, I've got nothing against computer programmers. I mean, more power to you guys and mathematicians as well. But the math can match to be a tool, not those. Yes, and it has to be a tool. Right, it has to be a tool of something. And what the humanities were for was to tell people what the tools should be used for. And so the tools themselves are crazily powerful, but that's not necessarily an untrammeled good.

So I have to stop because- Okay, quick. Okay. Okay. You want to answer this question? Okay. Okay. You were in this, I guess, one room in a museum in New York, we've seen some original I know you love it. You want to answer this question now. Okay. Okay.

You were in this, I guess, one room in a museum in New York, we've seen some original Renaissance artwork masterpieces. Yeah. These are generally accepted as amazing artifacts. Does an original work of art, as opposed to a high fidelity reproduction, contain the spirit of the artist who created it, and does this account for the disparity and how much you'd have to pay for an original. It does in part. I know a good portrait artiste, and one of the things he pointed out about a great portrait is that it actually contains time.

So, you know, because a photograph is one instant, but a portrait is you layered on you, layered on you, layered on you. So it's got a thickness. And I think you can see that thickness in the original. But it's also a direct manifestation of that creative act of perception. And I don't think you get that. You just can't get the fidelity of the original

with the reproduction. But there's more to it than that, too, because the painting doesn't end with the frame. We tend to think of the painting itself as the object, but most objects are densely innervated with historical context. And you can say, well, the historical context isn't the object, but it depends on what you mean by the object. And often people, when they buy a piece of a painting, are buying the historical context. And you just don't get that with the reproduction.

It's a kind of magic. It's like, do you want to have Elvis Presley's guitar or another guitar just like it? Well, you want to have Elvis's guitar. It's why you can't tell it's Elvis's guitar by looking at it. Yeah, but why would you want it? That's when was there any rational reason?

I mean, it's exactly the same. It's a perfect fidelity reproduction. You can do such a thing. Well, it is at the level of detail, but not at the level of context. That's how it looks to me. Okay, we've got to go. Thank you. If you found this conversation meaningful,

you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief. Or is newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast. See JordanBPeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanB Peterson.com slash personality

for information on his new course, which is now 50% off. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review. Next week's episode is a continuation of the Biblical series and delves into Genesis, so stay tuned for that. Talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson,

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