The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Call to Abraham

Episode Date: August 25, 2017

Lecture 9 in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series. In this lecture, I tell the story of Abraham, who heeds the call of God to leave what was familiar behind and to journey into unknown lands. The man portrayed in the Bible as the father of nations moves forward into the world. He encounters the worst of nature (famine), society (the tyranny of Egypt) and the envy of the powerful, who desire his wife.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com. So I've been thinking this week about doing this once a month on a continuing basis. So I think if I do that, I think it'll be here, although it's harder to rent this theater during the academic year, but if it isn't here, it'll be somewhere else. Because I'd like to continue doing this. I'm learning a lot from doing it. Once a month would really be good, because then I could really do the background work.

And I could probably do that for a couple of years because obviously this is going very quickly. But that's okay. You know, I mean, it shouldn't go any faster than it can go. And that's how it seems to me anyways. So this has been a very steep learning curve for me with regards to these stories because I didn't understand them very well. And I've got better at using the resources online to help me do my background investigation.

I have a lot of books and some of you may have noticed that online I posted a conversation I had with Jonathan Pazzo and his brother Matthew. I hope it's Matthew, I remember names escaped me so badly, but I believe that's right. He just finished a book on the Bible, and so I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories, trying to understand what they're about. And then there's all these commentaries. There's a great site, I think it's called Bible Hub, that has every single verse of the Bible is listed there.

And then with each verse, there are, like, they've aggregated 10 commentaries from, about 10 commentaries from over the last 400 years. And so there's like a dense page on every line. And that's one of the things that's really interesting about this book too, is that it's aggregated so much commentary, that it's much bigger than it looks, the book is much bigger than it looks.

And so it's been very interesting to become familiar with those too. And the fact that this site is set up with all the commentary split up by versus means you can rapidly compare the commentaries and get a sense of how people have interpreted this over, well, at least several hundred years, but of course much longer than that, because the people who wrote the commentaries and get a sense of how people have interpreted this over, well at least several hundred years, but of course much longer than that because the people who wrote the commentaries were, of course, reading things that were older than that. So that's been very, very interesting.

So last week we talked about a couple of things. We talked about how you might understand the idea of a divine encounter. And then we also paralleled that with the idea that God disappears in the Old Testament. He bows out as the stories progress, and that seems to be an emergent property of the sequencing of the stories, right? Because all the books were written by independent people, no different people, and then they were aggregated by other people. And so the narrative continuity is some kind of emergent property that's a consequence of this interaction between people, readers, and writers over centuries.

And it's strange that given that there are also multiple coherent narratives that unite it. It's really not that easy to understand that, but it does at least seem to be the case. And so, and the third thing we talked about was that as God bows out, so to speak, the individual personality of the characters that are involved, the human characters that are involved seems to become more and more developed.

And it isn't exactly clear what that, I mean, what it means is that God steps away and man steps forward. that's what it means, but why it's arranged like that, or they say ultimate significance of that is by no means clear. And so, so Abraham, who we're going to concentrate on today, is quite a well-developed character. And I would say there are two,

there are multiple endings and beginnings in the biblical stories. The most important ending, I suppose, is the ending of the garden of paradise and the disenchantment of the world and the sending forth of Adam and Eve into history, right, into the future, into a mode of being that has a future as part of it, and that has

history as part of it, and that has the necessity of sacrifice and toil as part of it. That's obviously crucial, and then that's, that is replayed with the story of Noah, because everything is destroyed, and then the world is created anew, and then sacrifice this have to be made in order for the world to begin. And then you see the same thing happen again after the Noah's story and the Tower of Babel, because history, as we really understand history, seems to start with Abraham, because the stories of Abraham sound like historical stories, and scholars debate about the historical accuracy of the Bible.

And I suppose there's no way of ever determining, once and for all, the degree to which you might regard the accounts as equivalent to modern empirical history. But this is a psychological interpretation of the biblical stories, not a historical interpretation. And it certainly does seem to be the case that from a psychological perspective, we enter something like the domain

of the modern conceptualization, relatively modern conceptualization of history with Abraham. Beyond the domain of the modern conceptualization, relatively modern conceptualization of history with Abraham. Beyond the accounts of divine commands that Abraham carries out, this is from Friedman, the man I mentioned in the last lecture, who wrote the disappearance of God in a variety of other books that are well worth reading. The narrative also includes a variety of stories

in which Abraham acts on his own initiative. He divides land with his nephew Lot, he battles kings, he takes concubines, he land with his nephew, Laught. He battles kings. He takes concubines. He argues with his wife, Sarah. On two occasions, he tells kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife. He arranges his son's marriage.

In the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness, there are, in the case of Abraham, the stories of a man's life. And one of the things I was really struck by reading this in depth and reading the commentary is how much like a story about a person, it is. Abraham isn't a divine figure in any archetypal sense precisely.

I mean, he has archetypal elements because he's also obviously the founder of a nation. But fundamentally, he's a human being. And he has the adventures. And he makes the mistakes of a nation, but fundamentally he's a human being and he makes, he has the adventures and he makes the mistakes of a human being and that's, it's the mistake part that really struck me, you know, because I was talking with a friend of mine this week, Norman Deutsch, who's a very remarkable person in many ways and he was taking me to task, he was reading my book, which I'm going to publish, which will be out in January. And in the book, in one section I contrasted the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament and made the case sort of based on North or

Fry's ideas that the God of the Old Testament was really harsh and judgmental, you know, and that the God of the New Testament was more merciful and at least to some degree more sweetness and light. And Norman took me to task about that, saying that that was an overly Christianized interpretation, which would make sense because I derived it in part from Northrop Fry. And I really have come to understand that more, that he's right, because he's right about that,

because the God in the Old Testament is actually far more merciful than he's generally made out to be. And you really see this with it. It's good news, fundamentally, if you regard the representation of God as somehow key to the description of being itself. I mean, Abraham makes a lot of mistakes, you know, serious mistakes, and yet he has a life, and he's blessed by God, despite the fact that he's pretty deeply flawed and engages in deceptive practice. I mean, he's a good man,

but he's not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination and things work out really well for him and he's the founder of a nation and all of that. And that's good news for everyone because perfect people are very, very hard to find and if the only pathway to having a rich and meaningful life was through perfection,

then we would all be in deep trouble. And so that's very satisfying to read that. And the other thing that I've been struck by is that Abraham, and I think this is actually absolutely key to the interpretation of this story, Abraham goes out and does things. That's the thing. And so one of the things that I've noticed in my life is that

nothing I've ever done was wasted. And by done, I mean put my heart and soul into, you know, like attempted with all of my effort, that always worked. Now, it didn't always work the way I expected it to work. That's a whole different issue. But the payoff from it was always positive. I always, something always, something of value always accrued to me when I made the sacrifices necessary to do something worthwhile.

And so I think part of the message in this story of Abrahamic stories is go do something. And I've thought about this in a variety of ways, outside of the interpretation of this story, because I have this in a variety of ways outside of the interpretation of this story because I have this program some of you might be familiar with which is called Future Authoring Program and it's it's designed to help people make a plan for three to five years into the future you know and we so what you do is you answer some questions it's a writing program you answer some

questions about how you would like your life to be and what you would like your character to be three to five years down the road. If you were taking care of yourself like you were taking care of someone that you actually cared about. So you kind of have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself like you, like someone you have respect for and that you want the best for. That's not easy because people don't necessarily have respect for themselves and they don't necessarily want what's the best for themselves because they have a lot of self-contempt and a lot of self-hatred and a lot of guilt and a lot of existential angst and a lot of self-consciousness

and all of that. And so people don't necessarily take care of themselves very well. And I think you have an obligation. It's one of the highest moral obligations to treat yourself as if you're a creature of value. And that is in some sense, it's in some sense that's independent of your actions. And you might think about that metaphorically as a recognition

of your divine worth in the biblical sense, regardless of your sins, so to speak. And I think that's powerful language, as far as I'm concerned, once you understand it. Anyways, with the self-authoring program, the future authoring program, you ask, you answer questions about how you would like your friendships to be conducted, because it's useful to surround yourself

with people who are trying to move forward. And more importantly, who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move backwards. Not when you fall, that isn't what I mean, but when you're doing self-destructive things, your friends shouldn't be there to cheer you on. Because then they're really not acting like friends, obviously. I know it's obvious, but it still happens all the time and people allow it to happen. It's not a good idea.

And how would you like to sort your family out? And I was thinking about this this week too because I was thinking about Noah's Ark and there was a phrase in that story that I didn't understand which was that Noah was perfect in his generations. I thought, I don't know what that means. And you know, when you're going through a book like the Bible, if you don't understand a phrase, that actually means you've missed something. It doesn't mean that that's just not, you know, that's not your main to the story. It means you're stupid. You didn't get it, man. You didn't get it. You didn't understand it. And so the idea that Noah was perfect in his generations, and

that's why he could build an ark that would sustain him and humanity itself through the flood. It meant that he, not only did he walk with God, which is something that we talked about in the context of the sermon on the mount, but that he established proper relationships with his family, with his children. And so what that meant was that his not only was he well integrated as a person, but his level of integration had reached the point where it stretched out beyond him and encompassed his family. And so it was Noah and the family that was in the ark, and I can tell you, and I really understood this this year, because I had a very tumultuous year. You could think about it from a personal perspective.

I could think about it as a year that had no shortage of floods, and part of the reason that I was able to get through it. I also had terrible health problems, and one of the reasons I was able to get through it was because my family really came together around me, my kids, my wife, my parents, and my friends as well. And particularly a certain group of friends. And that's partly all of that came together.

In my mind this week, and I thought, oh, that's what it means to be perfect in his generations, meant that he hadn't just straightened himself out. He'd also straightened out in his relationships with his family. And I can tell you that when crisis strikes you, which it will, it will, the flood will come, right? That's why the apocalypse is always upon us. The flood will definitely come in your life.

And to the degree that you've organized yourself psychologically and also healed the relationships between you and your family. That could be the critical element that determines whether you live or die when a crisis comes or whether someone in your family lives or dies. So the idea of the arc containing the man who walks with God and whose generations are perfect and that that's what sustains humanity through the crisis. It's like you couldn't be more psychologically accurate than that. You know, the other thing I was thinking about this week, I was thinking about another line in the New Testament. I think it's from the Sermon on the Mount, but I'm not absolutely sure. Christ compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed. And so I was thinking about a mustard seed as a very tiny seed and it grows into

quite a spectacular complex plant. And I was thinking about how you should operate in the world in order to make it a better place, assuming that that's what you should be doing. And that is what you should be doing. And there's lots in the world to fix. Everything that bothers you about the world and about yourself should be fixed. And you can do that. And my dawning realization, I have a friend.

He lives in Montreal. His name is James Simon. He's a great painter. And he's taught me a lot of things. He's helped me design my house and beautify it. And I bought some paintings from him a couple of years ago. And he did this series of paintings where he went around North America

and stood in different places. And then he painted the view from here down. And so it's his feet planted in different places, on roads, in the desert, on the ocean. I have one actually hanging over my toilet, which is him standing at a urinal. Well, you know, he was trying to make a point. And the point was that wherever you are, it's worth paying attention. And that's because, you know, so was trying to make a point, and the point was that wherever you are, it's worth paying attention. And that's because, you know, so all these places that he visited, he looked exactly where he was, I'm standing by the side of the road in the desert, it's sort of mundane in some

sense, but then maybe he put 40 hours into that painting, you know, and it's very, very realistic painting with really good light. And what he's telling you as a painter is, everything is worth paying attention to an infinite amount, but you don't have enough time. And so the artist does that for you, right? The artist looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and then gives you that vision. And so then you can look at the painting and it reminds you that right where you are is there's every everything that there is is right where you are. And that's a hard thing to realize, but it's actually true. And so I've been telling people online in various ways

in lectures that they should start fixing up the world by cleaning up the room. And I wanted to just elaborate on that a little bit before I get back to the lecture itself. So as it's become this internet, weird internet meme, you know. And it's a joke. And good. It's become this internet, weird internet meme, you know. And it's a joke, and good, it's a joke. I'm really happy about the fact that so much of this

has got the leave and of humor, and it's really important, because that's what stops things from degenerating into conflict, humor. And I was thinking about this idea of cleaning up your room in relationship to the mustard seed idea. And you see, the thing about cleaning up your room, this is also something I learned from Carl Jung and his studies on alchemy because for Jung, when the alchemist was attempting to make the philosopher's stone, he was not only engaged in the transformation of the material world,

but he was engaged in a process of self-transformation that occurred at the same time as the chemical transformation. So it was a psychological work in some sense. Let's say you want to sort out your room and beautify it because the beauty is also important. And let's say that all you have is just a little room like you're not rich, you're poor. And you don't have any power, that's another thing. But you've got your damn room and you've got this space right in front of you. You know, that's a part of the cosmos that you can come to grips with and You might think well, what's there in front of you right in front of you?

And the answer to that is it depends on how open your eyes are that that's the proper answer because you could say and William Blake said this for example and eldest Huxley made comments that were very similar that in a transcendent state You can see infinity in the finite and you might say well you can say you can see infinity in what you have within your grasp if you look and you could say maybe that's the case with your room and so you want to clean up your room well okay how do you do that exactly well a room is a room is a place to sleep and so if you say your room up properly then you figure out how to sleep and when you should sleep, and how you should sleep.

And then you figure out when you should wake up. And then you figure out, well, what clothes you should wear? Because they have to be arranged properly in your dresser. And then you have to have some place to put your clothes. And if you're going to have some clothes, you have to figure out what you're going to wear those clothes to do, right? And then that means you have to figure out

what you're going to do. And then your room has to serve that purpose, because otherwise it doesn't set up properly. And if it doesn't serve your purposes, you will be unhappy and not happy in the room because the way that we perceive the world is as a place to move from point A to point B in. And then if the place that we're in facilitates that movement, then we're happy to be there. And if the place that we're in serves as an obstacle to that movement, then we're unhappy to be there.

And so what it means to set up your room is that you have to have somewhere to go that's worthwhile or you can't set up your room. And then your room has to be set up to facilitate that. And then the next thing is, well, maybe you have to make it beautiful, but that's not easy, right? That means you have to have some taste. And that doesn't mean you have to have money. It doesn't, because you can be garish with money, and you can be tasteful with nothing.

All you need is taste, and taste beats money when it comes to beautifying things. You know, I mean, not that money is trivial because it's not, but taste is crucial. And people who are very artistically oriented can make beautiful things out of virtually nothing. And not only that, the literature suggests that if you're going to make beautiful things, putting real constraints on what you allow yourself to do, facilitates creativity instead of interfering with it. Because let's say you have to make something out of nothing,

right, which I suppose would be a godly act, right? You have to make something out of nothing. You have to be creative in order to do that. And so then to beautify your room means that you also have to develop your capacity to be creative. And so then you can make your room shine. But then what will happen is that if your family isn't together, they will interfere with that.

You'll interfere with that because you won't have the discipline to do it properly. But then when you start building this little microcosm of perfection with what you have at hand, then it'll evoke all the pathologies of everyone in your household. They'll wonder what the hell you're up to in there. And they won't necessarily be happy because if they're in a lowly place, let's say, and so are you, and you're trying to

move out of that, then the trying to move out of that, then the higher you move out of that, the more the place they're in looks bad. And you might say, well, what they should do is celebrate your victory over chaos and evil, but that isn't what will happen. What will happen instead is that they will attempt to pull you back down.

They'll attempt to, and I mean, obviously, all families don't do that, but all families do that to some degree, and some families don't do that, but all families do that to some degree, and some families do almost nothing but that. And so what that means is that if you're going to organize your room, then you're going to have to confront the devils in your house, and that's often a terrifying thing because some of those devils have lineages

that go back many, many, many generations. And God only knows what you have to struggle with in order to overcome that. And so to sort yourself out into fix up your room is a non-trivial matter. And you can do that, you'll learn by doing that. And then maybe you'll learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little bit. And then having done that, you'll have enough character so that when you try to operate in the world at your job or maybe in the broader social spheres

that you'll be a force for good instead of harm, because you'll have learned some humility by noting just how difficult it was to put your damn room together, well, and yourself for that matter. And so you'll proceed cautiously with your eyes open towards the good. And so, well, those are some of the things I've been thinking about this week. And they're germane.

They're germane to what we're going to discuss tonight, because what happens at the beginning of the Abrahamic stories is basically God comes to Abraham and just says, go. Get going, man. Do something. Do something. Get going.

And you might think, well, do something, do something, get going. And you might think, well, where should I go? And God is somewhat vague about that. And where He sends Abraham, it's a real fixer upper, man. It's like there's starvation there, and there's tyranny, and there's marital dissolution, and there's deceit. Like, it's just like where you live. It's exactly the same thing.

It's tyranny and catastrophe. So that's the tyrannical great father, because Abraham ends up having to sojourn in Egypt. And there's a famine, and so Mother Nature is on the rampage, and Abraham lies about his wife, has will see. So it's the world, it's the world, it's tyranny and vulnerability and deceit. And yet God says, go, because if you do go, then you'll become a father of nations.

And you think, well, again, that's pretty good news, although it's strange because you'd expect that if God chose Abraham, then he'd send him immediately to the land of honey, land of milk and honey. And that isn't what happens at all. It doesn't happen at all. And Abraham never gets there. But his mission is still regarded as divine. And thank God for that, because that's

what your mission will be, because that's what you will encounter in your life. Those are the archetypal things. Everyone encounters the tyranny of the social structure and the repatiousness of nature and the deceitful quality of the human psyche. It's like, that's the world. Now, it's a negative view in some sense,

but it's positive in the story because what it basically says is something that's akin to the sermon on the Mount, which is that if you're aligned with God and you pay attention to the divine injunction, then you can operate in the midst of chaos and tyranny and deception and flourish. And you could hardly hope to have a better piece of news than that given that that's exactly where you are. So, and I didn't see any of that in the Abrahamic stories to begin with, so it's been

very interesting to have that sort of reveal itself. The Abraham section thus develops the personality and character of a man to a new degree in biblical narrative. Well, picturing him in a new degree of responsibility, in him a new degree of responsibility. So here's the other thing that's really struck me. And I think this is absolutely crucial importance, and I don't know how much importance, but it's certainly important to me. One of the things that has just blown me away in the last year, because I've talked to lots of people, lots of people live, you know, but also lots of people online. But it's more obvious live, and it's obvious in this theater as well, is that I've gone around and spoken a large proportion of my audience has been young man, you know, under 30, something like that. And I've spoken

to them a lot about responsibility. And what's so odd about this is that of all the things that I've spoken about, because I can see the audience and I can feel how the audience is reacting, because I'm always paying attention to all of you, it's in so far as I can manage that. So I get some sense of how what I'm saying is landing, which you have to do if you're going to speak effectively to people. And what happens is if I talk about responsibilities, everyone is silent, just like they are now.

It's silent and not moving, focusing, attentive, say, pick up your responsibility, pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it, and the room goes quiet, and everybody's eyes open, and I think, that always makes me break up. I was... I don't know why I was speaking to an English journalist today who's going to write an article in Spectative Magazine, and I was talking about this, and at the same point in the discussion, the same, I had the same emotional reaction, I don't really understand it. I think it's something, there's something about it that's so crucial because, you know, we've been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms, and there's something about it that's so crucial because we've been fed this unending diet of

rights and freedoms. And there's something about that, especially, there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong. And people are starving for the antidote. And the antidote is truth and responsibility, right? And it isn't because that's what you should do. And some, I know better or someone knows better for you what you should do in some, you know, in some, I know better or someone knows better for you what you should do sense. It's that, it's that, it's that, that's the secret to a meaningful

life and without a meaningful life, then all you have is suffering and, and nihilism and despair and all of that and self-contempt and, and that's not good. And so the man hits necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility. And they all know that and are starving for that message. And the message is more that that's also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility. Because you're cursed so much now from when you're young with this notion that your active engagement with the world

is part of what is destroying and undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems. It's like, how about not so much of that? Because it's too soul-deadening. It's anti-human right to the core. And my sense instead is that, you know, if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world, that you would be an overwhelming force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works and that's the other thing that you see in the Abrahamic stories because Abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch

of the imagination. He's a real person and he makes mistakes but it doesn't matter the overarching narrative is you know maintain your covenant with God and despite your inadequacies then not only will you prevail but your descendants will prevail it's like great that's really good news you know so it's been really something to see that in the in the stories it's that. So that's responsibility. It's not just that Abraham is kind or gentle or more intrepid, ethical or a better debater than his ancestor Noah. Rather, both the Noah and Abraham stories

are pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the deity. Before the story is over, humans will become a good deal stronger and bolder than Abraham. Well, that's really something to say, because Abraham is pretty bold. So we'll, let's read the stories. The first one is about Abraham, Sarah, and Lot.

Now, these are the generations of Tara, Tara begot Abraham. So his name is Abraham, to begin with, and that actually turns out to be important. It's not Abraham, Neh or in Heron, and Heron begot Lot. So Heron is Abram's brother. And Heron died before his father, Tara, in the land of his nativity, in ur of the Cheldies.

And Abraham and Nehore took them wives. The name of Abram's wife was Sarah, and the name of Nehore's wife, Milka, the daughter of Heron, the father of Milka, and the father of Iska. But Sarah was barren, she had no child. And Tara took Abram, his son, and laught the son of Heron, his son's son, and Sarah, his daughter-in-law,

his son Abram's wife, and they went forth with them from the ear of the cellities, from the ear of the cellities, to go into the land of Canaan, that's exile, and they came unto Heron and dwelt there. And the days of Tara were 205 years, and Tara died in Heron. And there's a reason that Sarah is the day of terror, we're 205 years and terror died in here. There's a reason that Sarah is introduced as Baron. To set the stage, I think it was Anton Chekov, when he was talking about the stage setting

for a play, that if there was a rifle hanging on the wall, then it had better been used before I believed the second act, or it shouldn't be hanging there at all. This is stage setting. And part of the reason that the biblical writers are pointing out that Abram's wife is Baroness because it's a real catastrophe for Abraham and for Sarah as well that she's Baron. And so it's showing the trouble that Abram is in at the beginning of the story. And it's also, it's also, see what happens as the story progresses is that Abraham and Sarah are

eventually granted a son, but it's way late in the story and they're very, very old by the time it happens. And of course, you're not going to be a father of nations without having a child. And so the writers are attempting to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue, let's say, that all things are possible. That's the idea and the narrative. You might say that's naive. It's not.

You think it when you're naive, right? And then you dispense with that idea. And then when you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas, then you come to another place. And that's the place where you think, you have no idea what might be possible for you if you if you got things together and pursued what you should pursue. You don't know how much what's impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions. It's an unknown phenomena. And like I've watched people who put themselves together

across time incrementally and continually, and they become capable of things that are not only jaw-droppingly amazing, but also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand. And so we don't know the limits of human endeavor. We truly don't. And it's premature to put a cap on what it is that we are, what it is that we're capable of. And so you know, you're already something and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration. But you make wonder if you did nothing for the next 30 years except put yourself together

just exactly what would you be able to do? And you might think, well, that's worth finding out. But of course, that's the adoption of responsibility. And one thing I've also learned over the years, because I've been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism. You know, and I mean, I could see for a long while the rationale in nihilism and the power of the nihilistic argument, but it occurred to me across time that despite that the power of the nihilistic argument

is more powerful than naive optimism, but it's not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive, because the optimism that is not naive says, it's self-evident that the world is a place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that. And it's self-evident that the world is a place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that. And it's self-evident that people are flawed and that there's things to be done about that. And then the non-naive optimist says the suffering could be reduced and the insufficiency could

be overcome if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing. And I do not believe that that's deniable. I do, I think that human potential is virtually limitless and that there's nothing perhaps that's beyond our grasp if we're careful as individuals and as a society. And so I think that there's no reason for nihilism and there's no reason for hopelessness and there's no reason to bow down before evil because

we're capable of so much more. And I think that you can easily, you know that first because you're not happy with who you are and you're ashamed and embarrassed about it as you should be. And you know it because if you look out there, you see people who are capable of doing great things and you know that we're not giving it our all. And still we're not doing so badly, you know? And so you might wonder if we devoted 90% of our effort to putting things right instead of 55% of our effort or maybe even less than that, you might wonder just how well could things be put together.

And I think that you can figure that out by starting with your room, by the way. And the Lord said unto Abram, and this is the opening of the story, get the out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee. And this is one of those phrases where every clause is significant. Go somewhere you don't understand. That's the first thing.

Get the out of that country. Back in the 1920s, there was a whole slew of American writers who ended up as expatriates in Paris, Hemingway among them, and who wrote the great Gatsby Fitzgerald, yes, and a variety of others. It was very inexpensive in Paris at the time. And part of their transformation into great literary figures was the fact that they were out of their country. And now they can see what their country was because you can't see what your country is

until you leave it. So you have to go into the unknown. And that's God's first command. Go into the unknown because you already know what you know. And so, and that's not enough unless you think you're enough. And if you're not's not enough unless you think you're enough. And if you're not enough and you don't think you're enough, then you have to go where you haven't been. And so, that's the first commandment to Abraham. It's like, okay, that's a good one. That makes perfect sense. Go to where you don't know. Yes.

And from like Kindred, well, that what does that mean? It means grow up, right? That's what it means. It means get away from your family enough so that you can establish your independence. And that isn't because there's something wrong with your family, although perhaps there is, as there is perhaps wrong with you. But it means get away.

I talk to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection. And they know it themselves. And that means they're deprived of necessity. You know, one of the things that you see in the United States, for example, is that the children of first-generation immigrants often do better than their children. And the reason for that is that the children of first-generation

immigrants have necessity driving them. And you don't know how much you need necessity to drive you, because maybe you're not very Disciplined and if and a catastrophe doesn't immediately befall you if you don't act forthrightly today Then maybe you never act forthrightly, right? Because the gap between your foolishness and the punishment is Lengthened by your unernd wealth and so you never grow up and, and you have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow Necessity to drive you forward and that's to become independent and to become mature and I think part of what's happening in our cultures that

the the the force that's attacking the the Forth-right movement forward of young men in particular is afraid of the power of men, because it's confused about the distinction between power and authority and competence. Like a man who has authority and competence has power as a byproduct, but the authority and competence is everything.

And people who can't understand that fail to make the distinction between power and authority and competence, and they're afraid of power. And so they destroy authority and competence. And that's a terrible thing, because we need authority and competence. What else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run? And so you get away from your country,

and you get away from your kin and from your father's house, right? And you go out there and you establish yourself in the world. It's a call to adventure. That's what this, the first lines in Abrahamic story is a call to adventure. So, great, unto a land that I will show you. Well, you know, what does that mean? Well, you know, what does that mean? You know, one of the things that I've been struck very hard by a number of writers, Carl Jung, obviously among them. I mean, he wrote things like Nietzsche that if you understand them, they just break you into pieces, you know. And one of the things that Jung understood in the psychoanalysts understand is one of the most terrifying elements of psychoanalyst thinking. It's very tightly allied with religious thinking, which is that you are not the master of your own house.

There are spirits that dwell within you, meaning you have a will and you can exercise a certain amount of conscious control over your being. But there are all sorts of things that occur within you that seem to be beyond your capacity to control. Your dreams, for example, that's a really good example, or your impulses, for example, you might think of those as so foreign from you that they're not even, you don't even want them to be part of you, but more subtly even, how about what you're interested in,

what compels you? Like where does that come from? Exactly. Because you can't conjure it up of your own accord, you know? So if you're a student and you're taking a difficult course, you might say to yourself, well, I need to sit down and study for three hours. But then you sit down and that isn't what happens.

Your attention goes everywhere. And you might say, well, whose attention is it then if it goes everywhere? Because you say it's your attention. It's like, well, whose attention is it then if it goes everywhere? Because you say it's your attention. It's like, well, if it's your attention, maybe you would be able to control it, but you can't. And so then you might think, well, Jen, just exactly what the hell is controlling it. And you might say, well, it's random. It's better not be random. I can tell you that. That happens to some degree in schizophrenia. There's an element of randomness in that. It's not random.

It's driven by the action of phenomena that I think are best considered as something like subpersonalities, although even that's only a partial description. You can't make yourself interested in something. Interest manifests itself and grips you. That's a whole different thing. And so what is it that's gripping you? And how do you conceptualize that? Is that a divine power? Well, it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it. And so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by

and what you're interested in, and sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not. But you're compelled forward and what you're interested in, and sometimes that might be very dark, and sometimes not, but you're compelled forward by your interest. And so the idea that what moves you away from your country and your father's house and the comforts of your childhood home is something that's beyond you and that you listen to and harken to,

that's exactly right. And you can say, well, I don't wanna call that God. It's like, it doesn't matter what you call it exactly. It doesn't matter to what it is, what it's called. It still is. And if you don't listen to it, that's the other thing. If you don't listen to it, and I've been a clinician and talked to enough people now, as old as I am,

to know this absolutely. If you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward, you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine. You'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good. And worse, you'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had. So this is not only a calling fourth, but a warning onto a land that I will show thee. And that's it, that I will show thee. And you don't want to be too concrete about this.

There's all sorts of new territories that you can inhabit. There's abstract and conceptual territories of go to university and you study biology or you study physics or any discipline. You're in a territory, right? You're in the territory that all the scholars have established. And then as you master the discipline, you move out beyond the established territory into the unknown. And that's a new land, right? Maybe it's even a land of your enemies for that matter.

But it's a new land. The frontier is always in front of you. And so, you know, when the earth was less inhabited than it is now, the frontier was the psychological frontier and the geographical frontier was the same thing. And now they've separated to some degree because there's not so much geographical frontier. But the frontier is a place that never disappears. And the land that's beyond the land that you know

is always there, and it's always where you should go. And all of that's packed into these, what, four phrases. So when I've been thinking about narrative, you look at the world through a story. You can't help it. And the story is what gives value to the world, or the story is what you extract from the value of the world. You can look at it either way.

You're somewhere, and it's not good enough. That's the eternal human predicament. Wherever you are isn't good enough. And to some degree, that's actually a good thing because if it was good enough, well, there's nothing for you to do. So it's actually maybe a good thing that it's insufficient. And that might be why sometimes having less

is better than having more. And I don't want to be a polyanna about that. I mean, I know that there's deprivation that can reach to the point where it's completely counterproductive. But it isn't always the case that starting with little is, if you start with little, you start with more possibility. It's something like that. So you move from always from what's unbearable

about the present to some better future, right? And if you don't have that, then you have no, you have nothing but threat and a negative emotion. You have no positive emotion because the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the better future and then the evidence that you generate yourself that you're moving towards it. That's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes. So you want to set up this structure properly. It's very, very important. And so what it means is that you want to be going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is worth the while. And you can ask yourself that. And that's partly what we tried to build into the future authoring program, which is, well, we know

what's wrong with life. It's right with suffering and insufficiency and deception and evil. It's all of that. Obviously, okay, what would make the journey worthwhile? Or you can ask yourself that. It's like, all right, in order to bear up under this load, what is it that I would need to be striving to attain? And if you ask yourself that, that's to knock and the door will open. That's what that means.

If you ask yourself that, then you will find an answer and you'll think, you'll shrink away from it, you'll think, well, there's no way I could do that. It's like, well, you don't know what you could do. You don't know what's possible. And you're not as much as you could be. And so God only knows what you could do and have and give if you sacrificed everything to it.

And that's the reason Abraham is constantly making sacrifices. And it's archaic, right? He's burning up like baby lambs, but like, well, they're alive. You know, that's something. And they're valuable, and that's something. It's, you have to admit, even if you think about it as a modern person, that the act of sacrificing something might have some dramatic compulsion to it,

to go out into a flock and to take something that's newborn and to cut its throat and to bleed it and to burn it, might be a way of indicating to yourself that you're actually serious about something. And it isn't so obvious that we have rituals of seriousness like that now. And so it's not so obvious that we're actually

serious about anything. And so maybe that's not such a good thing. And so it's not so obvious that we're actually serious about anything. And so maybe that's not such a good thing. And so maybe we shouldn't be thinking that these people were so archaic and primitive and superstitious. It's possible that they knew something that we don't. And certainly in the Abrahamic stories, one of the things that maintains Abraham's covenant with God is his continual willingness to sacrifice.

And it's so that sacrificial issue is so important because you are not committed to something unless you're willing to sacrifice for it. Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing. And I think it borders on miraculous that those concepts are embedded into this narrative at the level of dramatic action, you know, instead of abstract explanation.

People are acting this out. And the fundamental conception is so profound that it's really quite awe-inspiring, it's breathtaking, really, when you understand what message is trying to be conveyed. You have to make sacrifices, and what do you have to sacrifice? You have to sacrifice that which is most valuable to you currently that's stopping you. And God only knows what that is. It's certainly the worst of you.

It's certainly that. And God only knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of you. So, well, so you move from the unbearable present to the ideal future. And you can't help that. You have to live in a structure like that. That's your house. That's another way of thinking about it. If you want to get your house in order and if you want it to be a place that you can live properly, then you have to plan the future that is perfect. And then I think, well, what does that mean? And it means it's good for

you. One of the things that I do all the time with my clinical and consulting clients is try to figure out what would be good for them. But we do more than that. We try to think, okay, well, how can we set this up? So it's really good for you. And that all the side consequences of that are things that are good for other people.

And so because people are often also timid about trying to get something that's good for themselves, because they feel that it's selfish or that they don't deserve it. So we set it up so that, well, look, we're gonna set it up so that it's plainly obvious that this will not harm the structure of the universe. For you to have what you need and to do it in a way

that's of benefit to other people, there's no downside to that. And so it's okay, it's people. There's no downside to that. And so it's okay, it's okay if you reach out and take that. And one of the things that's interesting about the biblical stories, the Abrahamic stories as well, is that God doesn't really seem to be opposed to this success of the people that he's chosen.

You know, what happens to them is, as they progress through their journey, is they get larger flocks and they get more authority and they get more they get life more abundant. That's what happens. God doesn't seem to be a miser in the Old Testament. It's like if you put in the effort and you accept the covenant and you make the sacrifice, then you get to be successful and maybe successful beyond your wildest dreams and that that actually seems to be okay with God. And that's pretty cool given that, you know,

that general notion of Old Testament God is that all he's doing is casting out curses and death, you know, wherever he happens to wander. And I mean, there's certainly no shortage of that. But, but again, it seems to me that that's very good news and that you also don't have to be perfect in order to have that happen. And then the other thing, this is the issue about going into the unknown.

It's like, well, if you leave your country and your kin and your father's house, and you go out into a land that your intuition guides you to, you're going to undergo these radical transformations. This is a sacrificial transformation too, because you're moving forth rightly and voluntarily into chaos, right? And that's the same as the dragon fight. That's the hero's story. And what will happen there is that you will transform yourself. And so the call to an ideal is also the call to a sequence of deaths and rebirths that move you closer and closer to the ideal. And that's what God is calling Abraham to do in the first sentence of this story. You see these things echoed

in the strangest places. And so these are stills that I took from Pinocchio and this little cricket, so it's the still small voice, right? That's the thing that calls to you. It's your conscience in part, it's your intuition in part. And it's the thing that opens up the great book of the world, the great sacred book of the world, and that's what happens here, right? And the animators are at pains to show you that. It's a leather bound book with guilt lettering. It's a valuable book. And it's something that's quiet that's showing it to you, right?

You have to meditate, let's say. You have to be somewhere where the world isn't drowning you out in order to understand how to open this, to listen to that voice that tells you where you should go, what you should do next. And then what happens is that something beckons to you. In the night, it's a star, right? It's something that transcends the horizon. It's glitters, it's brilliant, it's not day-to-day.

It's something that's beyond you. It's something that represents a transcendent ideal. And that makes it manifest to you if you're quiet enough to listen. And that's what you wish upon so strangely, right? And people do that, they wish upon a star, they teach their children that, and they don't know why? Well, what do you mean you wish upon a star? What in the world does that mean?

It means you lift your eyes to the heavens and make a pact with the transcendent. And then what your heart's desire will come to you. That's what it means. And you think, well, that's not naive. It's the most sophisticated thing that you can know. And it's the birth of the hero, right? Because that's the nativity star, obviously. And this is where it takes place.

It's just anywhere. And the person that is just a carpenter and a toy maker. But that's pretty good. A carpenter, if you're a deceitful carpenter, then your house falls down. And if you're a toy maker, then you love children. That's a good start. So, so, Jepetto, who lives in this little,

it's not a grand house. It's just an everyday house, but everything that's happening and it is good. And so that means it's a palace because everything that's happening is good. There's a saying, and I don't remember where it comes from, that it's better to have bread and water in peace than a feast and conflict.

And that's not a saying, that's just the starkest possible description of the truth, because there's nothing worse than eating a grand meal with people you hate and despise that are at each other's throats. It's much better to have bread and water in peace. It's not, it's just clear-headed analysis of the structure of the world to say things like that. And so, the magical transformation can happen in the most mundane of places.

And the reason for that is that the mundane nature of places is in illusion because every place is the potential birthplace of the kingdom of God. That's the case. And so Jebetto, he's a good guy. He has a kitten, you know, the kitten likes him. He makes puppets, and he's humble person. And he knows that compared to the ideal that he's attempting to subscribe to, that he's not a baste before it, or anything like that. He's not despicable in relationship to it.

But the reason he's on his knees is because the thing he's pointing at is above him. No, it wouldn't be the right aim if it wasn't above him. And so the fact that he's on his knees, so to speak, is only an indication that his aim is proper because you should be on your knees to something that you actually admire. And if you don't feel like being on your knees in front of it, then perhaps you don't actually admire it. And then that means you haven't got the stage set properly.

It should be something that fills you with awe. Your aim should be at something that fills you with awe. Because why do something else? Well, perhaps because it's easy and perhaps because it's malevolent and all of those things. But those are no answer to the problems that be set. They just make things worse worse and that's clear. And so then, Jopetto, having made his pact, his covenant, just like Abraham,

he falls into a dream, right? He falls into a dream and the rest of the movie actually takes place in a dream. And it's a dream. It's the dream within which transformation takes place. And that's laid out at least in part. Time stops in the Pinocchio story. And everything happens to Pinocchio in some sense in a land that's outside of normal time. And that's the infinite archetypal space.

And that's a real place. That's a real place. The infinite and the finite coexist. And most of the time we're in the place of the finite. But that doesn't mean that the place of the infinite doesn't exist. It just means that we can't get access to it. We just get intimations of it from time to time.

You know, when things are going perfectly well for you, on those rare occasions, where everything comes together, for the brief moment you inhabit that divine place, and you have some sense of what your life could be like if you organized it from the smallest element to the largest element and that's a place that you can inhabit, if not forever, in a manner that at least felt like forever. Well because of Jepetto's decision, the transcendent manifests itself and takes the form of the blue fairy here. That's the positive element of nature, right?

So we could say, well, nature, it's not so clear that she's on your side, right? She's the red queen in Ellison Wonderland who runs around screaming when you go down the rabbit hole. She runs around screaming off with her heads and who says, in my kingdom, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. That's Mother Nature, but then we might say, well, how do we know that Mother Nature's attitude towards you isn't negative because your attitude towards things isn't proper? And that's what this film attempts to indicate. The idea is that if you aim properly, then nature aligns itself behind you.

Now it also arrays itself in front of you, perhaps even as an antagonist, but the power that it provides you with from within might be sufficient to overcome it from without. And I think that the clinical evidence is clear about that because one of the things that we do know is that if you take people who are confronting terrible things and shrinking from them and you teach them how to structure their behavior so that they can advance with courage, everything works better for them. Their fears decrease and their character grows. And so, there might be enough of nature within us to help us withstand the nature that's outside of us. And it depends at least to some degree on how it is that we orient ourselves in the world,

to some unknowable degree. to some unknowable degree. Now, Jepetta wants an autonomous individual as a son. And that's also something that makes him a great person because autonomous individuals have their own will. And if you're a tyrant, it's the last thing that you're going to want. And if you're the tyrant whose jealous of his son, it's even more so the last thing you you're going to want. And if you're the tyrant whose jealous of his son, it's even more so the last thing you're ever going to want.

And so to aim high and to want the development of the autonomous individual are the same thing. And I would say that's the core story in some sense of Western culture, is that to aim high and to develop the autonomous individual are the same thing. And that's what happens in Pinocchio. That's what happens in the story of Abraham. And the transformation takes place, the magical transformation.

And in the Pinocchio story, one of the things that's so interesting about it, and this is part of its mythological substructure from the scientific perspective. There's only two determining forces with regards to the destiny of the individual. There's nature, deterministic, and culture, deterministic. And then scholars wrangle about which of those is the greater force.

But in mythological stories, there's always a third element. And that third element is something like autonomous consciousness. And there's no place for autonomous consciousness in the deterministic story of nature and culture. But we all act as if autonomous consciousness is the primary reality, and the biblical stories are predicated on the idea that autonomous consciousness is what gives rise to the world.

And I don't think that we're in a position to presume that that is necessarily an error. And so what that means is to aim high and to develop the autonomous individual is simultaneously the decision to formulate an allegiance with the conscious power that brings being into existence. And that all takes place inside this little puppet. And then he has his adventures, right? He's still half jackass and half deceptive, but he's still despite all the errors, he has the capacity to move forward and to transform

him into something, to transform himself into something that can be properly considered, described as a true son of God. And that's the right aim. And it works like this as far as I can tell, you know. When I talk to people about doing the future authoring program, they often put it off. And it's not surprising because it's hard. And be it, but it's more than that. They think, well, I don't know how to write. I'm going to do a bad job.

I don't really like assignments. I'm going to have to do it perfectly. I need to wait till I have enough time. And like one of those is enough to stop you cold and all five of them you're just done. And so I tell people, do it haphazardly, a tiny bit at a time and badly because you can do that. I tell my students when they're doing their thesis, master's thesis,

write a really bad first draft. And then we have a little conversation about that because they don't think I mean that. Because it sounds like a cliche in some sense. It's not a cliche. It's not a cliche at all. It means you're a terrible writer. But if someone put a gun to your head and said, you have to have your 100 page thesis done by next Monday, or I'll shoot you,

but I don't care how terrible it is, you would sit down and write it. And the thing is, then you have it, right? Then you have something, and then you can fix it. You can iterate and fix it, that bad first draft, that's the most valuable thing. And so that's what you need. You need a bad first draft of yourself. And there's an idea that Jung developed

about the trickster and the gesture, the comedian, that the trickster is the precursor to the savior. That's one of the things I learned from Jung that was just, it's so unlikely. You'd never think that. It's so amazing that that might be the case, but the satirical and the eronic and the troublemaker, the comedian, the fool, the fool is the precursor to the Savior. Why? Because you're a fool when you start something new. And so if you're not willing to be a fool, then you'll never start

anything new. And if you never start anything new, then you won't develop. And so if you're not willing to be a fool then you'll never start anything new and if you never start anything new then you won't develop. And so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation and that's the same as humility. And so if you're gonna write your destiny you can do a bad first job. You're gonna get smarter as you move forward. That's the thing is that so something beckons to you. That's what happens here. Maybe the star that you pet a wish on was the wrong damn star, but at least it was a star, right? At least it was in the sky, at least it moved him forward.

And so you say in your life, well, something grips you and fills you with interest. And you think, well, should I do that? And the answer is, if not that, then something, what if it's a mistake? It's a mistake, rest assured, what do you know? You're going to stumble around, right? And what's going to happen is this, you're going to move, you're going to not stay in stasis, you're not going to wander around in circles. And I see people like that. They said,

well, I never knew what to do. And now I'm 40. It's like, that's not so good. That's not so good. And you might say, well, and there is a literature too that suggests that people are a lot more unhappy when they look back on their lives about the things they didn't do, then they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things. And so that's really worth thinking about too, because there's redemptive mistakes. And a redemptive mistake would be a mistake that you make when you go out and try to do something. You know, you actually, you think, okay, I'm going to try to do this. And you're not good at it. You make a bunch of mistakes.

It's like, what's the consequence? If you pay attention, you're not quite so stupid anymore. That's the thing is you've been informed by the results of your errors. And so what happens is, you follow the beacon, you follow the light. And you're blind. So you don't know where the light is. It's dimly apprehended only.

And you're afraid to follow it. But you decide to take some stumbling steps towards it. And as you take stumbling steps towards it, you become illuminated and enlightened and informed because of the nature of your experience, because you're pushing yourself beyond where you are, and you're going into the country that you have not yet been in, and you learn something, and so what happens then is the star moves.

You move ten feet towards it, and you think, no, that's not right, I didn't get it right. It isn't there, it's actually there. And so then you see it somewhere else, and you shift yourself slightly, and you move move forward and that's what happens is that You continue as you change the thing that guides you forward moves Right, it's like God in the in the desert in Egypt the pillar of light that you're following it's moving It's not a permanent thing you move towards it, it moves away,

it guides you forward. And so you say, well, is what I'm aiming at, paradise itself, and the answer to that is no, because what do you know? You couldn't see paradise if it was right in front of you, but you might get a glimmer of it. And so you move towards it, and you grow. And then the next time you open your eyes, you see a little bit more clearly. And that's what happens is that just happens over and over. It keeps moving. And so you move like this. But the thing that's so cool is that all those Zigs and Zags,

you say, and each of those Zags, and Zigs, is a catastrophe. I hit a wall, my God. And then I had to die a little bit. And I barely got back up. It's a phoenix transformation at each turn. And it's painful. But the thing is, is that even though you've traveled 20 miles, let's say, on that road, and you've only moved three miles

forward, you've moved three miles forward instead of falling backwards. Because that's the thing, too, because that's the thing too, is that if you stand still, you fall backwards. You cannot stand still, because the world moves away from you if you stand still. And there's no stasis, there's only backwards. And so if you're not moving backwards,

backwards, forwards, then you're moving backwards. And that's more of the underlying truth of the Matthew principle, to those who have everything more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken. It's a warning. Do not stay in one place. Well, as you zig and zag, maybe the cataclysm of each transformation starts to lessen. There's not so much of you that has to die with every mistake. And maybe you end up oriented at least reasonably properly. And if you were sensible, that would have been your trip.

But it wasn't, right? It's that. And perhaps it's a lot worse than that. Perhaps there's no shortage of backtracking, but it doesn't matter because as you stumble forward, you illuminate and inform yourself. And perhaps that's partly because the world is made of information. And if you encounter it and tangle with it, then it informs you, and then you become informed and then you're in formation and then you're ready. And so God says to Abraham,

I will make of the great nation. And I will bless thee and make thy name great. And thou shalt be a blessing. That's a good offer, fundamentally. I mean, it means... What does it mean to be made a great nation of? Well, perhaps it has something to do directly with your descendants, but I don't think it's just that, you know,

is if you're a force for good in the world, then that radiates out from you And if you're good enough, it's difficult to say how much of an impact on things you could have You know Dostoevsky who is a very crazy person partly because of his epilepsy He said a man is not only responsible for everything he does, but for everything that everyone else does and you think Well, no, no, no. And yes, sometimes no. Sometimes that's what you think if your cataclysmically depressed, right, is that your sins are so egregious that they're unforgivable and that in some manner,

you're at fault for everything that's terrible with the world. But there's actually truth in that, and there's actually redemptive truth in that, is that things wouldn't be so bad if you weren't so far from what you could be. And that's terribly pessimistic because it's all on you, man. But it's terribly optimistic because God, there's a lot of things that you could do.

And if you're crying out for something to do, then that's the best news you could possibly have. It's like, things aren't so good, but neither are you. So, if you stop doing the things that you knew to be destructive, which is the right place to start, you know, if you're going to clean up your room, what do you do first? Well, you just get rid of the mess. You know, and you know what, no one has to come and tell you, hopefully, what's the worst mess?

It's just it announces itself to you, and you can certainly know yourself, and this is a very easy meditative exercise to sit down and think, okay, I'm doing one thing really stupidly that I should stop doing. It's like, how long is it going to take you to figure out what that is?

It's about two seconds, right? You've known it forever. And you could even make it less demanding, you could say, there are some stupid things that I'm doing that I know are stupid and wrong, that I could stop doing, that I would stop doing. And then you can just start with that. And you can just do that, and maybe it's just a little thing,

although it's not because it's a step forward on the proper voyage. It's not a small thing, and you think, well, what would happen? You could say, let's do this for a year, even a month. Just try not to do things you know to be stupid and wrong for a month. And that means not to say things you know to be stupid and wrong as well. Maybe that's the most important thing. Just do it as an experiment.

See what happens. And it's so fun because I have people writing to me from all over the world who are saying they're doing that. They're saying, well, you know, I cleaned up my room and then I stopped saying stupid things. And my God, it's like things are way better. It's like who would have guessed it? And so it's lowanging fruit, man.

Because that's the other thing. If there's a lot of things wrong with you, then it's really easy to start fixing it. You've got so much territory that you can inhabit. I will make of the great nation. I will bless thee. That's good. I mean, the whole nation thing, that's positive, but to have God on your side, that's, you know, you might want that when things get rough, that would be good and make that name great.

And that would help be a blessing. Wonderful. That's a good deal. And I will bless them that bless thee. That's a good deal. And I will bless them that bless thee. That's good too. And curse him that curse thee. And in thee, shall all families of the earth be blessed. That's something.

That's something. It wouldn't be something if you could wake up. And your day was composed in part of people thanking you for all the good things you've done in the world. Would that be good? It's not impossible for that to happen. So Abraham departed. Yes, as the Lord had spoken unto him and Lord went with him. And Abraham was 70 and five years when he departed out of Iran. That's old. Now Abraham lives a long time, but this is also part of this story.

So he has a wife who can't have children. He has nothing. Obviously, he's been hanging around dad's shack for a little too long, given that he's 75, right? It's time to get on the fire, lit underneath him a bit. And so he's not got much going for him, but he still decides to move forward. And I've seen this too. You know, like if you don't have your destiny in hand by your

time, your 30, it's rough. You start hurting. And if you don't have your destiny in hand by the time you're 40, then you really start hurting. And 40 is a real fork in the road. The fork in the road, that's always where you meet the devil, by the way. And that's because every time you have to make a decision, the possibility of evil backings, that's why that is.

I had a friend, I've told you a little about him, and he killed himself just after 40. He had a book published, with a very small press, he was quite a good writer, but he could not get himself together, and it hit him too hard at 40. And I'm not saying that it's hopeless at 40. I'm not saying that. And I'm not saying that partly because of these verses, but also partly because of what I've seen in my clinical practice. I've had people come to me who have had very chaotic

and ill spent lives, let's say, who were in that neighborhood of age, and it's true for people who are older as well, who then decided to make a real effort and to try to make where they were better, instead of being better about where they weren't, because that's the bitterness that really does you in. It's really not good.

It's the opposite of gratitude. It's the manifestation of resentment. It makes you malevolent. It's very, very bad to be better. It's not, of resentment. It makes you malevolent. It's very, very bad to be better. It's not, it's not, it's hell to be better. And if you're 40 and you're not successful, then you have to accept your lot and you have to start to improve what's right in front of you. And if you do that, it doesn't take very long. It's quite interesting to watch people. Things can be a lot better in six months and they can be way better in two years.

Like, it's a struggle up, hell struggle, but it's by no means impossible. And I don't know again what the limit of that is, I suppose it depends to degree to some degree on the degree of your commitment. But anyway, so Aber, it's another indication of the real validity of this story. God isn't setting this up to be easy, right? Abraham's old and his wife is old too, and more than that she's barren, how is he going to be the father of nations? How is he going to be successful? Well, the initial departure point is insufficient,

radically insufficient, and that's very inspiring because it means that you can start from where you are. So Abraham departed as the Lord had spoken unto him and lawt went with him. And Abraham was 75 years old when he departed out of her hand. And Abraham took Sarai's wife and lawt his brother's son and all their substance that they had gathered. And you know, he has a relationship with law, right? And he doesn't have his own son, but he has brother died. And so he takes his nephew as his son. That's grateful.

You know, he could be very angry and have nothing to do with him because he didn't get his own son, but that isn't what happens is he's offered a substitute, let's say, and he accepts it. And so good for him, you know, and that's also something that I've seen that characterizes people who can make the best of a bad lot. He's, they don't get exactly what they want, but something comes along that offers possibilities that are sufficient, perhaps, if exploited properly.

And they open their heart and welcomed them in instead of rejecting them in bitterness. And so that's a good thing, and that's part of Abraham's character. And Abraham took Sarai's wife and laught his brother's son, and all their substance that they had gathered, and all the souls that they had gotten in her hand, and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan into exile, let's say, and into the land of Canaan they came. exile, let's say, and into the land of Cain and they came. And that's another repetition of the transformation story, right? You have to go to a land where you're not welcome. An Abram passed through the land onto the place of Cicem, onto the plain of Mora, and the Cain and I was then in the land. And the Lord appeared unto Abram and said, unto thy

seed, I will give you this land, and there he built an altar to the Lord who appeared unto him. And he removed from then some to a mountain on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent having Bethel on the west and high on the east, and there he built an altar unto the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. Now, we don't understand these rituals precisely. You know, I don't know if the people who did this engaged in a meditative ritual was not the idea that you take something of value, you do this, you undertake this dramatic transformation, a life and death transformation, and is that an aid to meditation? And what do you do? Do you sit

down and think, do you pray, pray being to ask, you know, to what do I do next? How do I orient myself in the world? It's a useful exercise to do that too. I think it's something that people could do every morning. I think it's useful to sit down and think, okay, what's the most important thing I should do today? What, I have an array of things that call to me to be done, some of which I will do with joy

and some of which I will bear as responsibilities, but they array themselves in front of me. What should I attend to first? Well, do you ask or do you decide? And it seems to me, when I do it, because I do it all the time, I do it every morning, I try to sit down and think, okay, I've got things that I would like to do and things that call to me out of necessity. What do I do first?

And it's not so much a decision as it is a question. And I don't know what I'm calling on. I'm calling on my capacity to think, I suppose, but that's not my capacity, exactly. I can commune with whatever provides answers, and I can think that that's me thinking. But, and that I believe that I can't think. I do believe that I can consciously think, but that's not the same as calling for inspiration. It's not the same process,

just like a dream is not conscious thinking. It's something that happens to you, and that kind of inspiration is also something that happens to you, because I ask myself, well, what's the most important thing I could do next? And then I have an answer to that, but it isn't because I decided exactly, I've decided that I'll do it whatever it is and that I want to know what it is. Those are the decisions. But there's an involuntary aspect to the sorting that occurs. And that's the psychological equivalent, I suppose, to this. And I guess the sacrifice is, when I feel

that I will do whatever it is that calls to be done, then I don't do the other things that I might want to do. And that's the sacrifice. To me, it's the proper sacrifice, because my sense is that things don't go properly unless you do what's most important. And if I want things to go properly, and I do, because I've had my taste of things not going properly, I want things to go properly.

And so then, it's not so difficult to do what's necessary to do what makes things go properly under those circumstances. It's partly, see, this is partly why the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is embedded in the Abrahamic stories, I think, because that's an apocalyptic story, right? If things go badly enough, the whole city is destroyed. And the reason it goes badly is because the people in the city do not behave properly. And the people in the city might be you.

And so if you're not behaving properly, then you go and so does the city. And maybe you don't want, maybe you do want that. But maybe you don't want that. And if you don't want that, then maybe, and you know that if you don't want, maybe you do want that. But maybe you don't want that. And if you don't want that, then maybe, and you know that if you don't do things properly, then it's you and the city. If you actually know that, then maybe that terrifies you badly

enough so that you're willing to make the sacrifice to do the right things instead of the impulsive things that you might otherwise want to do. You know, I learned from Victor Frankl and from Carl Jung and from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and from many of the people whose works on the Holocaust that I read, and on the catastrophes in the Soviet Union,

and the people who'd studied it most deeply always came to the same conclusion. The state became corrupted because each individual allowed themselves to be corrupted, or perhaps participated joyfully in the process of being corrupted. And the consequence of that was the end of the world. And so what that means is that if you don't behave properly, then you bring about the end of the world. And maybe you think, well, that's only the end of your world, fair enough, or maybe

it's the only the end of your family's world, which I suppose might give you some pause. But there's more to it than that, because you're connected to everyone else. And what you do that isn't good distributes itself, and all the things you don't do that could be good, take away from the whole. And so if you know that, and I do think you know that, if you take it seriously, because if you look at the historical events, the cataclysmic events of the 20th century seriously. I do not think that you can fail to come to that conclusion. And Abraham journeyed going on still towards the south. That's interesting because to go south means to go downhill. It's not good to go south.

It's cloak-wheel for going to where you shouldn't go. And so this is what happens to Abraham. His ascent is preceded by a descent. And that's very common in life, I would say. And so the redemptive element of this narrative is that if the covenant is constructed properly, so it's an ark Which is your decision to align yourself with God for all intents and purposes then even the journey south can be part of a broader journey upward

And there was a famine in the land That's Mother Nature, failing to cooperate. I mean, that's going to be pretty disheartening for Abraham, don't you think? Because he finally gets it together when he's 75 to leave. And then, because God says, well, it's, you know, get going. And so the first place he goes, everyone starving to death. It's like, you know, you might think about that

as a test of faith, wouldn't you say? But he keeps going. And then what happens? Well, he has to go to Egypt. So great. He goes where he's starving, where everyone's starving. And then to get away from where everyone's starving, he goes to a tyranny. So the whole beginning of the story is not particularly auspicious.

An apron went down into Egypt to Sojourn there for the famine was grievous in the land. It's a repetition of the same idea again. There's downhill voyage out into chaos, right? It's repeated over and over that the beginning of Abraham's journey is basically a sequence of experiences of exile, chaos, tyranny, and catastrophe. Well, you should be able to relate to that. You know how hard it is to get things together.

You go out to do what you're supposed to do, say, and there's your beset by the intransigence of the world and failure. Well, so what are you supposed to do about that? Well, maintain your faith in the good and continue to move forward. That's the idea. And part of that, even if you don't buy the metaphor, it's like, what are you going to

do instead? That won't make it worth. So even if it isn't an op that you're pursuing, you're at least for stalling the transformation of the chaos of your life into sheer hell. And that can certainly happen. You see people who are having a terrible time. And then you see people who are having a terrible time who are also in hell. And it's a lot better to just have a terrible time than to have a terrible time and be in hell at the same time. And it came to pass when he was come to neared enter into Egypt that he

said unto Sarah his wife, behold now I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon. Therefore it shall come to pass when the Egyptians shall see that they shall say this is his wife and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive. So look, I mean, Abraham is really having a rough time. He's a failure, right? I mean, he's wandering around through the land of starvation. Now he's going to go be a quasi-slave in Egypt. He has this incredibly attractive wife, and all he can look forward to is the fact that the most successful man in Egypt, the Pharaoh,

will take her from him. So he's got the whole embitterment thing pretty much nailed down as far as I can tell. And this is when he makes one of his errors, let's say. And one of the errors that humanizes him say, I pray the that thou art my sister, that it may be well for me for thy sake, and my soul shall live because of the. And it came to pass that when Abram was come into Egypt, the Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair. The princes also of Pharaoh saw her and commended her before Pharaoh, and the woman was taken

into Pharaoh's house. And he entreated Abram well for her sake, and he had sheep and oxen and he-assas and men servants and made servants and she-assas and camels. So actually things work out pretty well for for Abraham, despite his deceit, which is quite interesting. And I guess it's because if the overarching structure is solid, something like that, it's something like that, then errors can still be forgiven to speak about it from a metaphorical perspective.

And the Lord plagued Pharaoh in his house with great plagues because of Sirai Abram's wife. Well, it doesn't seem very fair, but because the Pharaoh didn't know, but it's not the right way to look at it. The right way to look at it. See, there's a story later in the Bible about David. And David, David could be a pretty bad guy, you know? So one of the things he does is when he becomes king, he's in his castle and he's looking over the city and he sees a woman, nude bathing nude, sunbathing nude on a roof out on the city and he's smitten by her, floored by her and he has inquiries made about who she is, her name is Bathsheba, and he finds out who her husband is, and her husband actually happens to be a general in his army.

And he arranges for that general to be put at the thick of the battle and killed, the battle and killed, and then he takes Bathsheba. So, and the Lord is not pleased by that. Let's put it that way. And that's interesting. It's an interesting story because you might say, well, why can't the king do whatever the hell he wants? Like, seriously, he's the king. He's not just, and he's not like the prime minister, the president, right? He's the king. And so you might say, well, why is the king subject to any rules whatsoever? What's the rationale for the king being subject to rules? Well, the rationale emerges in these stories is there are social strictures that are such that even if the ruler of the land transgresses against them, there will be hell to pay.

And that's continually presented over and over in the biblical stories. And it's a natural law sort of idea. It's that there are intrinsic rules to the game of social human being. And maybe intrinsic rules to the natural state of human being. You break those rules consciously or unconsciously at your absolute peril, and not only at your peril, but at the peril of the state, and it doesn't matter who you are. And so I would

say this is actually an indication of God being fair rather than being unfair, because the rule here is, fairo or not. You don't get to take someone else's wife and ignorance is no excuse. Now you might say that's a little bit harsh and perhaps it is a little bit harsh, but it's not without merit. The idea is not without merit. And of course Abram is complicit in this, despite that he is successful. And Pharaoh called Abram and said, what is this that thou hast done unto me?

Why did so now tell me that she was thy wife? Why said so? She is my sister. I might have taken her to me to wife. Now therefore behold thy wife, take her and go thy way. And Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him, and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that he had. And Abraham went out of Egypt, he and his wife, and all that he had, and locked with him into the south. And Abraham was very rich in cattle, and silver, and in gold.

And it's so interesting, you know, Abraham, he goes to the place of famine and then he goes to the place of tyranny and then he lies and then he almost loses his wife, but because he goes, things work out for him. And so, he ran for that and he went on his journeys from the south, even to Bethel, and to the place where his tent had been at the beginning between Bethel and High, and to the place of the altar, so he makes another sacrifice, which he had made there at the first, and their Abram called on the name of the Lord. Well, so he's had an adventure, right? He's finished his journey. And so there's a culminating point in this narrative, and now he doesn't know what to do. He's left the place, he's at, he doesn't know what to do.

So it's time to build an altar, make a sacrifice, and figure out, and to ask for divine guidance once again, to figure out, okay, well, I'm done that, being there, done that, what's next? And the question is asked seriously, and this is something to consider. If you want to know what to do, ask seriously, and say, I know what to do, ask seriously and say,

I'm willing to see Abraham sacrifices a life to his vow. So what do you do? Well, you don't sacrifice an animal. You don't make a blood sacrifice. You do it psychologically. You say, I'm going to sacrifice my life to this aim. That's what you do if you're serious. What do I do next? Well, I'm going to sacrifice my life to the same. What is it that I should do that's worth sacrificing my life to? That's a serious question. Well, maybe that's the sort of question that people don't ask because they're afraid of the seriousness of the question.

And the magnitude of the potential answer, do you really want to know what you should do that would be worth sacrificing your life to? Well, the answer is yes, because it's worth it, but the answer is also no, because really, it's your life, you know, what if you're wrong? And you're probably wrong. But maybe that doesn't matter, maybe it doesn't matter, because maybe the rightness is in the process and not in the decision, right? Because it's the beginning of a sequence of decisions, as we've already pointed out, to the place of the altar which he had made there at the first and their Abram called on the name of the Lord.

And Lord also, and Lord also, which went with Abraham, Abraham had flocks and herds intense, and the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together, for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together. And there was a strife between the herdsmen of Abrams' cattle, the cowboys, and the herdsmen of Lodz' cattle, and the Canaanite and the Parasite dwell then in the land. Well, and that's interesting, too, because Abrams having a pretty good time of it now, right?

He's out of starvation. Hey, that's good. He's out of starvation. Hey, that's good. He's out of the tyranny. Now he's kind of wealthy. And then the story flips on him. He's wealthy. And now a bad thing happens to him. It's that he's got all this wealth.

And so does his nephew. Now they can't get along because they have too much stuff. So that's quite comical as well. I think that's a comic interlude here. Now they handle it properly. And Abrams said unto Lord, let there be no strife. I pray thee between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen,

because we're brothers. Is not the whole land before thee, separate thyself. I pray thee from me. If you'll take the left, then I'll take the right, or if you depart to the right, then I'll go to the left. So basically they sit down and say, well, one of us has got to get out of town, and it can be one or the other. It doesn't really matter.

We can flip a coin or, but we have to separate. And so they do it amicably. And Lot lifted up his eyes and looked out, all of the plane of Jordan, that it was well-watered everywhere. So that's an intimation of Eden, right? Because you remember, Eden means well-watered place. Before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the Garden of the Lord, like the land of Eden, right? Because you remember, Eden means well-watered place. Before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the Garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, as thou

commest unto Zor. So interesting, you get foreshadowed here again, right? So Lawton, Abram, are making the decision about where to go, and Lawton looks out and sees a reasonable place, but then this warning comes up that there's a city out there. There's a place out there where things are not going to go well. Things are being done badly, and things are not going to go well. Then Lot shows them all the plane of Jordan and Lot journeyed east, and they separated themselves, the one from the other. Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan and Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain and pitched his tent toward Sodom. But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly.

Now the word sin, I've mentioned this to you before I think, it's an interesting word. It's the derivation of a archery term in my understanding of its derivation. The Greek word was hamartia and hamartia is archery term, which means to miss the bullseye. And you think, we're thinking about that metaphorically, because you've got to think about all the ways that you could miss the bullseye, right? You could close your eyes. That's very common.

You could just not lift up the damn bow and arrow to begin with. You could face the wrong way. You could be unskilled in your aim. But I also like the archery metaphor, because human beings are built on a hunting platform, right? And we always aim at things. We're things that were ballistic creatures on a trajectory always.

And we're always aiming at something. We're always aiming at the mark, which is, of course, what you do when you hunt, right? Because you have to hit the mark precisely. And that's what we're like. And so, what we're like that psychologically, we have to aim at something and then move towards it. And so to sin is to miss the mark, is to miss the bullseye, to fail to take aim,

to aim badly, aim carelessly, or to not aim at all. And that says, well, that's like a sin of omission. That's to not do. And then to be wicked is to aim at what you know you shouldn't aim at. And again, I don't think of that as an external morality precisely. I think that you can read the entire biblical narrative, again, from a psychological perspective and say, we're not talking about external codes of conduct here, although we could.

We're not. The wickedness that's being described is the act of you doing something that you know to be wrong, period. You know, and you may do something, you don't know if it's wrong or not. That isn't the sort of thing that we're talking about. And we're not talking about the things that you do that are right, that other people think are wrong. We're not talking about those either.

We're talking about those things that you consciously do, although you know them to be wrong yourself. And that's the things that seem to get people into the most trouble in these stories. And I believe that to be the case. I think that's very accurate psychologically. It's amazing because I see this all the time.

If you do something wrong and it's because you're ignorant, you don't know better. It doesn't go well for you. That's the case. But if you do something wrong and you know it's wrong, the punishment is is manifold. And I think the reason for that, I think the reason for that is because that makes you cane. It means you betray your own ideal, right? If you just don't know, well, you haven't betrayed your ideal, you're just not together, maybe you're even willfully blind. But if you do something you know to be wrong, then you've betrayed your own ideal. And that lands you. Cain says to God, one once Cain destroys Abel, he says, I cannot bear my punishment. And the Lord said unto Abram, after that Lord was separated from, lift up now thine eyes.

Look upward, and look from the place where there are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land which thou seeest to thee, I will give it, and to thy seed forever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall all thy seed be numbered. Arise, walk through the land in the length of it, and the breadth of it earth, then she'll all die seed be numbered.

Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee. In the cathedral at Shart, I can't say that properly, because Puy French is non-existent. So a cathedral is a cross, and the transformation takes place at the crux of the cross, which is exactly right, because the transformation takes place at the point of maximal suffering,

and the cathedral is designed to indicate that, right, symbolically. Now, what happens in a religious ceremony is also a journey. And it's a journey, in some sense, to the holy city. And then that's also played out in the idea of pilgrimage, right? Because you go to the holy city. Actually, you go to Jerusalem or wherever it is that you think the holy city is. You go there and that takes you out of your country and away from your kin

and away from your family into the strange land. as you make the journey you transform and when you come back you're not the same. That's the Hobbit, right? That's the story of the Hobbit. But let's say you can't afford to go on a pilgrimage. So you go to the Cathedral at Shard and there's a huge maze on the ground and it's the world, northwest, south and east, just as God describes here. So it's laid out. And you enter the maze at one side. And in the middle is a stone pattern that looks like a flower.

And it's the place where being wealth forth and it's at the center of the cathedral. And what that means is that if you accept your suffering, then you move to the place where the spirit of being wells forth. That's what that means. And so you enter the maze and you walk, and it's divided into quadrants, and you walk one quadrant completely,

and then the maze pathway takes you into the next quadrant, and you walk that completely, and then it takes you to the third one and the fourth one. And then when you walk the maze completely everywhere, when you've gone everywhere in the world, north, south, east, and west, where you, when you traverse the territory completely, then you come to the center and then it's yours. And that's what this is. So I've noticed when I've been renovating houses, I like to do that.

I paid a lot of attention to the psychological process of a house renovation. Because I learned from Jung that Jung said this. This is something, man. He said, because he was talking about the stages of integration, psychological integration. And he looked beyond Piaget, I would say. Although Piaget looked very far, he said, here's a conjunction. You have to get your rationality and your

emotion together. That's a male-female conjunction symbolically speaking, male rationality, female emotionality. You want to bring those together so that they're oriented in the same direction. Your emotions and your rationality serve the same purpose. So then you're unified in mind and spirit, let's say. But that's not good enough. Once you've got that together, then there's a, you have a body, and then that's a male female conjunction. Again, a divine conjunction, the recreation of Adam before his division into female and male. And the reconstruction of the Androgynous Christ, that all those ideas are linked together. So now you have your emotion and your rationality

moving in the same direction, but you're not acting it out. So now you have to unite that abstract part of you with your body and start acting out what you think and feel. And that's the next conjunction, but it's not the last one. The last conjunction is when you realize that there is no distinction between you and your experience. They're the same thing. And so then when you put together your house, you're putting together yourself.

So I've noticed, when I've lived in places, rented or owned, didn't matter. If there were part of the place, if there was a part of the place that I hadn't attended to, whatever that might mean, it might have been cleaned, it might have meant fixed, but it certainly meant at least thoroughly investigated. Then that was chaos. It was like the desert that part. That's a way of thinking about it.

It wasn't mine, even if I owned it. It wasn't mine. I had to interact with it before it became mine. And I had to interact with it, and I had to put it in order, and then it became mine. And then, and then to the degree that it became mine and was in order, then I was also put in order. Now, you know that because you go into places that make you uncomfortable, and maybe it's your own house, it's highly probable, it's highly probable. You know, I walk into, well, Chinese doctors do this. Traditional Chinese doctors, they go into places, people's place and they they diagnose their

health conditions on the on the balance of Yin and Yang. Chaos in order. They walk into a house. This is easy to do. You walk into a house. There's too much chaos. Hey, you can detect that in no time flat. Everything is out of order and chaotic. You don't even want to be there. You certainly don't want to open the refrigerator. That's for sure. And there are things that should have been done years ago everywhere. And every one of those things is a fight that hasn't happened and something that's been avoided. And you can't even walk in there and maintain your health. As soon as you walk in there, you're sicker than you were when you were outside. And that's one sort of place. And

then another sort of place is you go in and you look at the living room and the person has vacuumed the living room, rug, and the lines that were vacuumed are parallel to one another. And the furniture is covered with plastic and you get a glass of water and then just as you're going to set it down on the coffee table, the person rushes over and puts a coaster underneath it. And everything in that house says to you that it would be a lot more perfect in that house if you were either not there or dead. And that's the message that the whole house is blasting at you. And if you happen to live there, then you're going to be sick. And what you're going to be sick from is too much order.

And in the other house, you're going to be sick from too much chaos. And so when you interact with the house, the unexplored parts are the chaos that parts that you have not yet contended with are the chaos that has not yet been transformed by your embodied logos action into habitable territory and it does not belong to you. Arise, walk through the land, in the length of it, and the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee. The neighbor and removed his tent and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamra, which is in Hebrew and built there in Ulter unto the Lord. And it came toelt in the plain of Mamra, which is in Hebron, and built there in Altar on to the Lord. And it came to pass in the days of Amrifil,

King of Shinar, Ariak, King of Alasar, Chirta Lomar, there's a lot of kings. We won't talk about them. These made war with Barra, King of Sodom, and with Bershia, King of Gomorrah, Shinab, King of Adma, and the King of Bala, which is Zor, and these were joined together in the veil of Siddham, which is the salt sea. Now, this is actually very much relevant, hey, because you see, the veil of Siddham, which

is the salt sea, is the farthest south you can go if south is down, because it's the Dead Sea, and the Dead Sea is the lowest place that there is. So what's happened is that there's chaos in the lowest place that there is. That's what this story says. And what happens to Laud is he gets tangled up in the chaos of the lowest place that there is. And in the 14th year came Chador Le Mora and the kings that were with him and smote the

ref-fames and asterooth, Coneim, and the Zuzums and Ham and the Emons and Shava-Kuryathame and the Horites and their Mountsire and to Elparen which is by the wilderness. And they returned and came to En-Mishpat which is Kadesh and smote all the country their mellicites, amelicites and the amurites that dwelt in, has a, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,. So this is absolute chaos and mayhem in the lowest place. It's hell, essentially. With Chetelomor, the King of Alam and with tidal King of nations and Amrifal, King of Shinar and area King of Elazar, four Kings with five, and the Vale of Sidim was full of slime pits. Low in hell like with war isn't enough. They had to throw the slime pits in there. Apparently, around the Dead Sea, there are pits of bitumen, like the tar pits in the RLA.

This seems to actually be historically accurate. The kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell there, and they that remained fled to the mountain. They took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their rituals and went their way. And they took law at Abram's brother's son who dwelt in Sodom and his goods in departed. So Abram has a family member who falls into the lowest place. And there came one that had escaped and told Abram the Hebrew for he dwelt in the plane of Mammar of the Amorite, brother of his skull and brother of anor.

And these were Confederate with Abram. And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, 318, and pursued the month of Dan. Well, so now we also know that Abram's a pretty brave guy, right? He gets word that this horrible war has broken out, in the worst of all possible places, and that his nephew is involved. And the first thing he does is, you know, mount up his posse

and get the hell in there and rescue his nephew. So Abraham's no, whatever goodness is from the Old Testament perspective, it isn't harmlessness, it isn't emasculation and castration. It's not that, it's not weakness, it's not the inability to fight. None of that is associated with virtue. It's a sort of strength that enables someone to mount an arm, team of 300 people when he finds out that his nephew is being kidnapped in a terrible war and to get the hell out there and

take him back. And so that's a that's a that's a call to it's a call to power that not not a kind of peaceful meekness. That's funny too because you know there's a line in the New Testament, the meek shall inherit the earth. I got to look at my phone for a sec here. Because I don't know what time it is. There's a line in the New Testament that says, and sin the sermon on the Mount, says the meek shall inherit the earth. And that line always bothered me. I thought, no way, that's not right. Meek can't be the right word. So when I was doing this story of Noah and talking about the sermon on the Mount, I spent a bunch of time looking at commentaries

on that line, looking at the roots, the Greek roots and the Hebrew roots and trying to figure out what that meant. And it meek does not mean meek. That's wrong. Here's what it means. Those who have weapons and know how to use them, but still keep them sheathed will inherit the earth.

Jesus. That's a lot different, man. It's a lot better, right? Because the way it's normally interpreted is, if you're so weak that you're harmless, then things will go well for you. It's like, no, that's not right. That can't be right. It doesn't fit with the narrative.

It certainly doesn't fit with this narrative. And he divided himself against them. He and his servants by night and smote them and pursued them unto Hobo, which is on the left side of Damascus. And he brought back all the goods and his brother-lawed and his goods and the women also and the people. Good work, Abraham. And the kings of Sodom went out to meet him after his return at the slaughter of

Chert-Alomar, and of the kings that there were there with him at the Valley of Shival, which is the King's Tale, and Melch is a decked king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine. And he was the priest of the most high God, and he blessed him and said, Blessed be Abraham of the most high God. And he blessed him and said, blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth. And blessed be the most high God, which has delivered the enemies into thine hand. And it gave him tithes of all. And the king of Sodom said to Abram,

give me the persons and take thy goods to thyself. That were the goods that Abram rescued, of the kings. And Abram said to the king of Sodom, I have lift up my hand unto the Lord. What does that mean? It means I've made a vow, that's what it means. That's what that phrase means.

I've made a vow to God, the possessor of heaven and earth, that I will not take anything from a thread, even to a shoelace. I won't take anything that's yours. Lest you should say, I've made Abram rich. I'll take only that, which my young men have eaten, and the portion of men that went with me, and Ainer, Echcolon, and Mamart, let them take their portion. And so Abraham decides here, he's made this immense sacrifice, and done this incredibly

brave act, and rescued his nephew, and rescued the kings king's goods and they offer him a reward. And he says, I'm not going to take the reward. And the reason for that is that he doesn't want to contaminate the ethical purity of his actions. He doesn't want to be paid, he doesn't want to benefit from doing, he doesn't want to, what is it exactly, he doesn't want to what is it exactly doesn't want to benefit inappropriately from doing the right thing It's something like that and so it's another testament to his character in a very complex testament right because he's not a He's not a good man in any simple sense. I mean look what's just happened. He's he's mounted an armed he's mounted an armed He's he's led an army into battle an army into battle and participated in a slaughter.

Refuses to benefit from it, except to get back what was his, that's it. He refuses to benefit from it, except to get back what was rightfully his. And in that way, he maintains his covenant with God. Even to a shoe latch, anything though never so small or mean, less dowsheds claim a share with God in the honor due to him. This is from Matthew Poole, who was an English non-conformist theological commenting on that line. Even to a shoe latchet, IE anything, though never so mean or small, less dowsheds claim

a share with God in the honor due to him. To whose blessing alone I do and I will owe my riches. Or, lest thou shalt say, Abraham is enriched with my spoils. And however he pretended kindness and charity, yet indeed it was his covetousness that put him upon this work. After these things, the word of the Lord came unto Abraham in the vision, saying, fear not, Abraham, I'm nice shield, and thy exceedingly,

and thy exceeding great reward. The vision issue again. Well, we went through that last week. Fear not, Abraham, I'm nice shield and I exceeding great reward. And Abraham said, Lord God, what can you give me? Seeing as I'm childish, childless, and that's the only thing that matters,

Tabernum at this point, and the steward of my house is this elisier of Damascus, no kin. And Abraham said, Abraham said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed, and lo, one born in my house is my heir, and behold, the word of the Lord came unto him,

saying, this shall not be thine heir, but he that shall come forth out of thy known boll will be thine heir. So he gets promised the impossible once again. And he brought him forth abroad and said, now look towards the heaven and tell the stars if thou be able to number them. And he said unto him, so shall thy seed be,

and he believed in the Lord and counted to him for righteousness. See in that this is the covenant idea, this belief, because here's the belief. It's the willingness to act as if the world is constructed. So that if you do the right thing, the best possible outcome will occur. It's a decision, that's the covenant. It's a decision about how to live in the world because the evidence can't be there before you make the decision.

Right, and so you might hedge your bets. You know, when Christ comes back in the book of Revelation to judge people, because he comes back as a judge and virtually everyone gets cast out with the chaff and not saved with the wheat. He says something very interesting. He appears in the vision with a sword coming out of his mouth. It's a horrifying vision. And he divides humanity into the damned and the saved, or the damned, yes, the damned and the saved.

He says something very interesting. He says, to those who are neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth. And it's a disgust metaphor, right? And what it says is that the worst punishment isn't waiting for those who committed to something and did wrong. The worst punishment is reserved for those who committed to nothing and stayed on the fence. And that's really something too. That's really something to think about. And it's also something I believe to be true, because I see that stasis is utterly destructive, because there's no progress,

all there is is movement backwards, there's aging and suffering and no progress. And so to not commit to anything is the worst of all transgressions. To commit means to put your body and soul into something, to offer your life as a sacrifice means that you're willing to make a bargain with fate. And the bargain is, I'm going to act as if I give it my all, then the best possible thing will happen because of that. And to not see the analogy between that and the active faith in God is to misunderstand the story completely.

And it has to be an active faith because how are you going to know? You can look at other people, but that isn't going to do it. At Kierkegaard was very clear about this sort of thing. There's certain sorts of truths that you can only learn for yourself through experience. And that's, of course, why Abraham also has to go out alone, right? He has to leave this, Kenneth. It's an individual, it's the individuation process, like dying. It's something that you do alone. There's no way you can tell what is within your grasp, let's say, unless you make the

ultimate sacrifice. And there's no way of finding out without actually making it. And so that's the sacrificial act, right? That's that's re-emphasized in the act of Abram being called upon to sacrifice Isaac. Think about that. His Abram, he's been doing, he's been like breaking himself into pieces, trying to progress forward through starvation and tyranny and war and deceit and the potential loss of his wife and childlessness and like everything that can really befall you in some sense. And finally, God grants him Isaac when he's old.

It's impossible. He gets Isaac his son. And then what does God do next? To say, well, you know that son that you've been waiting for so long. It's like, I'd like to see just exactly what you're made of. So I think you should offer him up as a sacrifice. And I mean, it's a very barbaric story in a sense, and maybe in more than just a sense, but Abraham does maintain his covenant.

He's willing to make the sacrifice. He's willing to make, this is the thing. He's willing to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to keep his covenant with God intact, and that's that, and that's the decision. Well, maybe it's no surprise that people don't do that. And he believed in the Lord and he counted it to him for righteousness. And he said unto him,

I am the Lord that brought the out of ear of the cellities to give this land to you to inherit it. And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it? And he said to him, this is a sacrificial story, again, taken a heifer of three years and a goat of three years and a ram of three years and a turtle dove and a young pigeon. It's fairly specific, actually. And he took all these and divided them and laid each piece one against another,

but the birds divided he not. Now there's a reason for that, and I don't know the reason for it. And when the foils came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away. And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram and low, a horror of great darkness fell upon him. That didn't mean he was afraid of the dark, which is what I thought it meant when I first read it. It isn't what it means. It means that he fell into a trance or something like that. And then he was enveloped by absolute horror. So that's how this story begins. And here's the commentary from Joseph Benson,

who was an English Methodist minister who lived in 1749, who was born in 1749. And when the sun was going down, about the time of the evening oblation, the washing, for he abode by them, praying and waiting till toward evening. A deep sleep fell upon Abraham. This was not a common sleep through weariness or carelessness, I don't know what a sleep is, that's supposed to be sleep. Not a common sleep through weariness or carelessness, but a divine ecstasy that being wholly taken off from things

sensible, he might be wholly taken up with the contemplation of things spiritual. Well, it really makes you wonder what Abraham was up to in his campsite. So he was participating in something that enabled this experience. And Loa, or a horror of great darkness fell upon him. This was designed to strike awe upon the spirit of Abram and to possess him with the Holy Revolence. Holy fear prepares the soul for holy joy. God humbles first and then lifts up.

Echoes of psychedelic experience. And he said unto Abram, no of assurity that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them, and they shall afflict them 400 years, and also that nation whom they shall serve, I will judge. And afterwards shall they come out with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace, thou shalt be buried in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. Commentaries of Joseph Benson once again, they shall come hither again, hither to the

land of Canaan wherein Thou not art, now art. The reason why they must not have the land of promise and possession until the fourth generation is because the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full. The righteous God has determined that the amurites shall not be cut off until they arrived at such a pitch of wickedness, and therefore till it come to that, the seed of Abraham must be kept out of possession. So the interpretation of the story essentially is that Abraham's descendants will end up enslaved in Egypt for a lengthy period of time and eventually come back to the land of Canaan.

And it's interesting, too, because this is part of Abrams, bargain with God, and in this divine vision. I mean, he's been promised everything, but it's a pretty tough bargain, because, you know, when God is pushed or reveals himself, let's say, he says, look, you're going to get your damn descendants, you know? But it's not going to be, it's going to be a tough journey. They're going to be slain, slaved for a very long time and eventually come back and you won't see it. You'll be dead long before then. And so it's a realistic promise in a sense and you might say,

well, Abraham is so desperate to keep the faith that he's willing to read good into what isn't good. But I think, I don't think that's the right way to look at it. I think the right way to look at it is that the people who wrote these stories were very realistic. And they knew that even if things turned out well for you, and we're still going to be real, you know, it wasn't going to be some fantasy. It's like, let's say you have a family that flourishes, is people are still going to die. They're still going to get sick.

They're still going to have, they're still going to be alive, you know, with all of its suffering. But it'll be, but it'll be a life that's rich enough and complete enough so that it'll justify its, its nature essentially. And so, and it came to pass that when the sun went down and it was dark, be hold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between the pieces. Albert Barnes, American Theologian commented on this, the oven of smoke and lamp of flame symbolize the smoke of destruction in the light of salvation. They're passing through the pieces of the sacrificial victims

and probably consuming them as an accepted sacrifice or the ratification of the covenant on the part of God as the dividing and presenting of them covenant on the part of God as the dividing and presenting of them were on the part of Abram. In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying unto thy seed I have given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river the river Euphrates, the key nights and the kinisites and the cadmenites, etc. Now Sarai Abram's wife bear him children, and she had a hand made.

Wait a second. I think we'll stop there. I'm tiring out, and it's just at its 29. So that's a very good place to stop. So, yes. So, so I should, I should close properly and just sum up. So what happens here is that Abram enters into a covenant with God to act in the world. And the action is an adventure story, essentially. And the adventures repeat and they're punctuated by success and sacrifice and recontemplation, right? And so it's this journey, it's the hero's journey uphill.

I'm here, there's a crisis, I collapse, I reconstruct myself to a higher place, and life is like that, continually, and that's the story of Abraham, and that's all contained though, it's all contained, and this is the thing that's so cool, because that is what your life is going that, continually, and that's the story of Abraham, and that's all contained though, it's all contained, and this is the thing that's so cool, because that is what your life is going to be like, whether you plan out your life or not,

it's going to be punctuated like that. Maybe it won't go up, maybe it'll go down. The question is, what sort of container do you need to be in in order to tolerate the movement up and down? And that's what the story of Abraham provides. It provides a description of the covenant, that's like the ark. The covenant and the ark are the same thing, except the covenant is the psychological equivalent of the ark. And the covenant is have faith in the structure of

existence and go forth. That's the covenant. And the story is, that's the best possible solution that you have at hand. All right, so I'm going to make a request with regards to the questions, which may mean you have to reorient yourself in the line. I would like the first two questions on each side, if possible, to relate specifically to tonight's lecture, and then I can address more general issues, if that's OK. So, and again, I would like you to carefully speak

into the mic so that the people who are watching can hear. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can. The story about Abraham saying his wife was his sister. You referred to that as him making a mistake. I'm not quite sure I understand how you're reading that as a mistake, seeing as it was a very deliberate decision and it had a pretty good outcome for him. And he does the same thing

a few chapters later. Yes, this is true. You see, I don't feel that I have cracked that part of that story properly. Now the reason I said it was a mistake is because it's clearly an active deceit and it does put the Pharaoh in a very awkward position, not to mention Sirai by the way or Sirai. How do you say that? I don't know how to say that. Sirai? Sirai, it's Sirai to begin with, yes, is that right? Sirai? Yes, okay, and then it's Sarah. So Abram means high king, something like that. And Abraham means father of the people, and Sirai means princess, and Sarah

means mother of the people. I have it exactly, right? I'll tell you next week, but that's part of the name transformation. It seems to me that at least in part, it's an indication of Abraham's willingness to use a suboptimal solution when driven to it by necessity. I don't think it's a heroic act to pretend that your wife is your sister. Now, and maybe you might say, well, under the circumstances,

there was nothing else he could have done, but it does seem, I can't see how you can interpret it other than as a departure from the truth. But I know that that's not all there is to it, and it does seem to work out well for him. And my interpretation is that, well, if you're oriented properly in the world, the grace of God allows you a few necessary mistakes,

something like that. Do you have an alternative idea? I just don't think I ever do it as a mistake. Well, why not? What is it about that? Because it's Abraham, and it isn't reasonable to attribute mistakes to him, or what is it about that? Because it's Abraham and it isn't reasonable to attribute mistakes to him or what is it? It's because at least I think it says in the text that he's looking to get out of a bad situation and he does whatever is the best thing that's available to him

and not to mention as I said, he does the same trick a few chapters later. Yeah, well maybe it is the case that, you know, it's like a white lie issue, you know, you say, well, as a white lie acceptable, I would say, well, the best that you can come up with is acceptable. That doesn't mean it's optimal though, right? Like, I'll give you a foolish example, because it's the best that I can do at the moment. But if you have a loved one who says, does this dress make me look fat? The answer to that question is,

I don't answer questions like that. That's the answer, right? Because the other answer is the white lie, I mean, at least in this context. And that means that on the one hand, you're maintaining the positive contract between you and the person who's asking the question, but then you're still sacrificing the truth within that.

So you're maintaining your relationship with the higher order truth, but sacrificing a lower order truth. And that would be better than the reverse, but it's not as good as not sacrificing the truth at all. And I would say that if you're maybe fortunate, because sometimes it's a matter, because you can be in a situation where all your choices are bad. I've seen people in situations like that, I've probably been in situations like that, and maybe that is what's happening in that story. Every choice Abraham is in front of him is bad, but I can't help but think that it's more like that. And maybe that is what's happening in that story. It's every choice Abraham is in front of him is bad.

But I can't help but think that it's more than that. It means that if you're doing the best you can and it's not perfect, it can still be good enough. That's how it looks to me. Thank you. Thank you. APPLAUSE Hello, Dr. Peterson.

You mentioned earlier that there's been a pervasive problem of nihilism and moral relativism and that that can kind of be cured with a nuss-naive optimism that's grounded in fact and what can actually be done to improve situations. Is there a way to communicate that message to a younger audience, say teenagers in a high school environment, which is nowadays a hotbed for this kind of nihilistic, morally well to this thinking? Great, I'm glad you asked that. So, I'm going to tell you, I was thinking about saying this at the beginning, but I decided not to, but now I get to say it, because I got this question. So that's so cool. I have plans. And so plan number one, I have worked with some people to design a website that will enable high university students to enter their course descriptions, their professor's name, the subdiscipline and the university, and an artificial intelligence agent will tell them if the course is post-modern

neo-Marxist indoctrination. Not only, and I have made tentative arrangements with someone to finance an advertising campaign for that site. And so the goal is, well, to inform the consumer. Do you want to be educated or do you want to be indoctrinated? And happily, you'll be able to use the site equally for both purposes, right? Because if you want to take the courses that I would regard as indoctrination, then this will give you a way of ensuring that nothing that you get exposed to won't be of that sort. So, and then I'm going to make a video to introduce that to university students and their parents,

and I'm going to outline what I think the universities are doing wrong. There's about 20 things they're doing wrong. And they're seriously wrong things. And I'm going to start by describing the utility of the university education. Humanity's education, because humanity's education makes you into the kind of autonomous individual that can go away from, that can be independent and can communicate and think. And that has immense economic value,

right? Not just spiritual value and cultural value, but economic value. And so there's, I don't want to tell people not to go to university, I want to tell them to go to university and grow the hell up and learn to communicate and think. And I want them to avoid the people who will take the spirit away from them. And so that's what that website is going to do, I hope. And the goal is to drop the enrollment in the indoctrination courses across the English-speaking world

by 75% within five years. That's the goal. So, and then you ask, that you ask more specifically about high school students. Well, we have this future authoring program that has been used for university students, and it produces about a 30% improvement in retention. And we've tested several thousand university students. Anyone can use it, by the way. It's not four university students,

but it was easy for us to test its beneficial impact. Even if people only spend under 90 minutes on it, it still has approximately that effect, especially on young men, especially if they're ethnic minorities, especially if they're not oriented towards a career and didn't do very well in school. And so that's really cool because it's really hard to design a psychological intervention that helps the people who are doing the worst. Most psychological interventions, so imagine there are people who are doing not so well and people who are doing well and you produce a psychological intervention. What usually happens is the people who are doing well benefit

even more, right? But this seems to work for the disenfranchised. So we're thrilled about that, really. And so we've a very version for high school students. Yes, and so, but we don't have them look three to five years out into the future because they can't. And they don't know enough, you know. It's hard for fully mature adults to look that far into the future. High school kids can probably manage three to six months. And so we're going to have them concentrate on character development and what they want

from their friendships and how they would like to orient themselves in school and to start thinking about the sorts of person that they would like to be. And that never happens in schools, weirdly enough. There's a guy named John Gatto, who won the Teacher of the Year Award in New York, City, and then in New York State, and then in New York State,

and then stopped being a teacher, by the way. He wrote a series of books about the education system that explain why students in pre-University Education aren't taught to be autonomous individuals. It's very interesting what he's discovered historically. But anyways, we're going to market that, probably to parents and to university students themselves rather than to the schools.

Because our experience has been that producing this sort of material directly for individuals works much better. It's much more efficient. And so then students will be able to, or their parents will be able to purchase the program and the students will be able to use it to design

their own personality in a manner that would make them thrilled to be alive, let's say. That would be the goal, right? I love you amazing that you see me. Yes. I'm going to get you to turn it to put it down a little more, even. Excellent, perfect. I think the literature and developmental psychology, I think, bears this out, but I think a huge part of learning is interaction and discourse. And that seems very difficult in an online setting, even if it's through text, I don't quite see it as the same thing. And additionally, I think there's a huge motivational factor that's difficult to keep motivated

when you're isolated and nobody else around you is pursuing the same goal. So, how would you address that? You're absolutely right on both counts. I would say that the idea of an online humanities university is grandiose and it may not be possible. And the reason for that is that, and as you're alluding to, we actually don't understand what the university is. We think it's lectures and exams, but it's probably not. It's certainly being together with people of your own age as you start your life.

It's moving away from your household. It's establishing yourself as a credible intellect, right? It's picking a new group of peers. It's all of those things and it isn't clear how that can be replicated online. Now the people that I'm talking to are sophisticated enough to understand Marshall McCluen's dictum that the medium is the message. And so I think it would be a mistake to attempt to duplicate the university online because you can't.

But so what we're concentrating on right now is not so much content but infrastructure. The question is we want to set up to set up a system of education online that will be autonomously self-governing and self-improving. And the content, in some sense, we're not so much interested in the content as we are interested in the process by which people who generate good content might be optimally rewarded. And that's what we want to get right. And that's probably a discussion that'll take a year or two years to flesh out. We started to conceptualize what the system might look like.

But to your point, we're not taking lectures and putting them online, although obviously that's what I'm doing. That isn't going to make an online humanities university. And we know that. I think everything you said is very accurate. And also indicative of the high probability that something like this would fail. But we're going to try to be aware of the pitfalls. We're also going to, I read this great book. I would recommend this book. It's a very funny book by a guy named John Gaul, it's called Systemantics, and it's a cult classic system antics, and it's about how systems really work

and how they fail, and it's a work of ironic comedy, but it's quite brilliant. And one of the things, one line, it's made of a bunch of axioms, and here's one axiom, I just love this, the system does not do what its name says it does. And so I worked in the Alberta Social Services when I was a kid about 18 or so, and I worked as a consultant. And I got involved in projects that were above my pay grade, I would say. And I learned a lot about how large bureaucracy's function.

And I was asked at one point to update a report that it'd be made the year before about what percentage of the spending of the social services department actually went to the recipients of welfare and social aid in general. And the answer was, the system did not know and could not find out. And they had hired a very expensive consulting firm

to answer that question the year before, and I was asked to update it, which was quite odd to begin with. But then I did. I went and looked at the consulting report, and I went into the data. And what I found was that none of it was real. But even more importantly, there was no way of knowing whether it was true or false, because the system had never

been set up to calculate what percentage of its total spending actually went to the recipients of social aid. It just blew me away and then I thought, and I was reading this book at the same time, and I thought, oh, the purpose of the social services department is to employ people in the social services department. And I mean, I wasn't being cynical about that. It's like charity, most charities, you know, it's like 90% overhead. So what does the charity do? It runs itself.

Now you don't want to be cynical about that because big businesses are the same. And even if they're running at a profit, the profit is like 5%. So the business spends 95% of its time maintaining itself, you know, and it makes a bit of product and it makes a bit of profit. But most of what it does is maintain itself. So anyways, one of the axioms in that book, that was one of them, is the system does not do what it says it does. So that's because then you can face the system with a clear head and say, okay, well, this thing isn't doing what it says it's doing, but it's probably doing something and the thing it's doing might be useful, but we should figure out what that thing is.

So that's been really useful to me as a guide to thinking. The other thing he said was, if you want to build a big system that works, start with by building a small system that works and scale it. And we've done that, for example, with the self-authoring programs. You know, it's built small scale systems that are very robust with the hope that they'll scale. And that's the same, we'll do the same thing here, start with a small amount of content, see if we can reward, see what I would like to have happen is, you know, there's a lot of people out there who are

pretty intensely educated and some of them are really creative. And so imagine that there's a timeline, imagine you could do a humanities issue, imagine there's a timeline, say of a thousand years, that's scalable. Then imagine that there would be lectures associated with the timeline at different levels of resolution. So we might call for a lecture on the third century AD. What happened in the third century AD?

You've got half an hour to explain it. You can explain it any way you want. You can use animation. You can use lecture. You can use text. You can explain it any way you want. You can use animation, you can use lecture, you can use text, you can make a movie. We don't care. What you have to do is that's the topic, that's the time span, that's the amount of time.

And then you can post it. And so we can generate content that way and let people experiment. And then we can have people review the content as part of their education. Generate questions about the content as part of their education. Generate questions about the content as part of their assignments. Rate the questions as part of their assignments,

and rate the content. And then if we charge people, imagine you had to pay $50 a month to enroll, something like that. Maybe we would allow you, when you first enroll, maybe you get to use $ dollars of it as disposable income. You can reward that to any creator you want. But as you progress through the courses, you're right to determine where your money goes would increase as you became more and more educated.

Hopefully that way we would get some quality control built into it. So those are some of the ideas that we're starting to play around with. So the only one I'm concerned about is the motivation issue for individuals. Well, I'm not going to go into that because it would take too long, but rest assured that we are thinking about that very hard as well. We're going to build competition into it.

We're going to build cooperation into it. We hope to build peer interrelationships into it. I think all that's possible, but complex, right? Because we don't know how to build an online education system, really. But it would be fun to experiment and see if we can figure out how to do it. So thank you.

Thank you. Hi. So, I couldn't really zero in on any particular question, so it's more of a family questions that I have about the nature and cultivation of conscience, which was in a sense what the story exemplified about Abraham. Why do you say that? Why do you think that the story exemplified the development of conscience specifically? Well, going back to the zigzag, right, and the star, how you have to keep. Okay, so that's what you were referring to.

Okay. Orienting yourself completely autonomously on your own terms, right? Yeah. Okay, so you, you, we hit on some great there, I think, you know, and this is something weirdly enough that I learned most particularly from the Pinocchio movie, which I spent a lot of time studying is because in the Pinocchio movie,

Jiminy Cricket is an avatar of Christ, essentially. But it's very strange, because he's a bug. That's the first thing, that's kind of weird. And because Jiminy Cricket is Southern US slang for Jesus Christ, among other things. And these things get aggregated in great mythic dramas like that. And that's a great mythic drama. But one of the things that really makes Jiminy Cricket different from Christ apart from the fact that Christ wasn't a Cricket

is that Cricket learns as he progresses, right? Even though he's the conscience, and so you'd think that he would be the infallible guide. That isn't how the movie makers set it up, and that's so cool, is that he's just as muddleheaded as Pinocchio at the beginning, and he's a bit arrogant and puffed up too. And so it took me a long time to think that through, and then I realized that, well, you have the voice of culture in you, you have the voice of culture within you. But it's old and dead and out of date and it's not fully articulated and updated. And then what happens is that if you enter into a dialogue with it and you hammer yourself against the world, then you get hammered

into shape and so does your conscience. And so you both become elevated. And so, well, so anyways, I think that's ridiculously cool, because it means that you're conscience, you don't have an infelible guide, but you have something within you that you could build into an infelible guide if you cooperate with it and fed it. So, well, so I think that's very interesting. So that being said, yeah, the picture that I have in my mind

of the cultivation of virtue in general, it's kind of like taking a block of wood and trying to carve out a sphere out of it. It'll never be perfectly round, but the more you carve, right, the rounder and rounder. Right, that's successive approximation. Yeah, well, it's also like, what do you call that? Compound interest. This is one of the things that's also, and I you call that compound interest.

This is one of the things that's also, and I think this puts you on the two those who more shall be given part of the curve. It's like, you don't have to improve yourself very much each week to really improve yourself on a ridiculous amount in a year. So you could make, you could vow to make your day one 100th of a percent better than the day before.

And that would do the trick. If you were, if you were constant about that, that would do the trick. So that's this successive approximation. It's, you don't want to underestimate the utility of incremental progress, man. It's really, it's deadly powerful. So let's say you get to the, you know, the higher ends of the curve, right?

You're like a pretty virtuous person. Let's say you even become a sage or something of the sort. And I mean, one should you doubt your conscience. Like what are the things that we should watch out for, even when we- That's great. Well, that's, yeah, okay. Just to get it out of the way, right?

Yeah. I don't know how much this relates, well, it does relate, but psychopaths, for example, the entire idea that they lack a conscience and that's why, right, that's what psychopathy is. Whether or not you agree with that definition, right, but there's an issue of conscience, again, at play with psychopathy. How can we, the first question, doubt ourselves in a way that's warranted, right, regardless of how virtuous we've become. Yes. And can you treat a psychopath? Could they cultivate a conscience?

OK, so we'll start with the first one. Part of the reason that I believe that freedom of speech is the canonical right that's end obligation, more importantly, even obligation, is that that's how you figure out if you're wrong. You know, because so I sit home and I think, and I think, and I think, let's say, but I'm like, who am I to think? There's so many things I don't know that it's just,

there's the what I know compared to what I don't know is so minuscule, that it's a preposterous act just to say something. Okay, so no matter how much I sit at home and think, I'm not going to fix that. I'm going to be full, and then I have biases, but my temperament and I have biases because of my malevolence. And I have biases because of my gender, my sex, let's say, since we're not so fond of that word. So, either, no matter how much I said,

home and think, I'm still gonna be wrong and malevolent. So then, what I have to do is I have to talk to some other people and I have to say, this is what I think. And it's gonna be ugly, you know, because what the hell do I know? But then if I listen, people will tell me why I'm wrong. And lots of people have been telling me why I'm wrong. Like a lot, and it's hard, you know?

It's hard, but I've learned something from it. Like I had this revelation, let's say, about being yelled at by your father. Now I know that you can be yelled at too much by your father, but it's like you're wrong, man. And so someone's yelling at you, and maybe they're only 10% right. But if you shut the hell up and listen,

then you can figure out where you're wrong. And then maybe you can be thankful for that. And then maybe if you shut up and listened, your father would quit yelling at you. Because he's wrong, too. What the hell does he know? He knows how to yell at you and tell you how you're wrong. And he's throwing things out at you

that are probably not true. But some of it's true. And if someone can tell you why you're wrong, they've given you a great gift. Because then you don't have to be wrong anymore. And you might think, well, who cares if you're wrong? But, you know, there's a line in the new testament too, is if the blind lead, the blind won't they fall into a ditch? The answer to that question, by the way, is yes, they will. And so the reason that you want to think is because thinking is how you, like when you think you create a fictional world that's an analog of the world and then you make an avatar of

yourself to act in that world. And then if the avatar dies, you don't act out those actions, right? Well, so if you think properly, then you don't have to suffer and die. And so if you can say what you think and people people can tell you why you're wrong, and you know, to say what you think under extreme circumstances means that you're going to say things that no one wants to hear. Because those are the things you don't know about. Those are the things that are conflictual and difficult.

And those are going to be hard conversations, man. And you're going to be wrong about them a lot. If you don't get to stumble forward with your stupidity, then you can't be corrected. And so, so there's no distinction between free speech and thinking, and there's no distinction between thinking and thriving. And so those who want to inhibit free speech do not wish for people to thrive. And I believe that. So, thinking does not happen inside your head. That's only the beginnings of thinking. And it's this that we're doing here that's thinking, you know.

So we have to protect that. Psychopaths. I don't, I say this, I hope non-naively, also having dealt with psychopaths in my clinical practice, and I would say now and then in my life. I don't believe in psychopaths. I don't believe that we know enough to say there are people born without conscience. I don't think the psychometric measurement of psychopathy

is everything that it should be. I've been trying to model it in the big five domain. I think, now it's complicated because, so I would say a psychopath, a classic psychopath, is likely extroverted, especially assertive, disagreeable, and unconscious, and maybe extremely low in neuroticism, so you can't frighten them. But, so that's a rare combination, because it's extreme on many traits, right? But I don't believe that that means that someone

with that personality configuration is doomed from birth to a pathological existence, because there's things about psychopathy that the classifiers, those who claim, like, correctly, that the psychopath is born in some sense, can't explain. It's like, well, what about the cruelty? There seems to be a motive there,

with their passionless and they lack emotion. Well, why are they cruel then for entertainment? Well, but then you have to explain the entertainment motivation. Like, there's a failure in some sense with the classic psychopathy theorist to come to grips with the problem of malevolence. It's skirted over, and you can't do that if you're talking about psychopathy. It's like malevolence is the bloody issue here. And so, the other issue with the psychopath is that he's irredeemable, right?

That's the idea. I don't think we know enough to make such claims. Now, and that doesn't, I know the psychopathy literature quite well, and I have great respect for the primary researches in the field. I want to make that perfectly clear. But we're talking at a different, we're talking, we're approaching the problem from a different level of analysis here, something like a spiritual level of analysis. And I don't think that there's an easy translation from the descriptive psychometric, psychiatric approach to the spiritual level.

They don't match. And I'm more likely to say, let's not assume the soul is doomed from birth, right? And I'm, I'm loath to think that there are people born irredeemable, although I do think there are irredeemable people. You know, the death penalty issue is interesting in that regard, you know, because I've read a lot about really terrible people, and I've also read a lot about what really terrible people said about themselves and many of them wished for the death penalty. And so it's absolutely clear that there are things that you can do that deserve the death penalty. But that doesn't mean that the state should have the right to impose it. That's a different question.

So yeah. Yeah. In the previous lecture, you mentioned the 2008 economic crisis. And one of the very interesting themes that emerged at many levels, universities or economic policies, this perceived culture war, specifically the idea of Marx versus Mil. And you've criticized postmodern and neo-Marx's thought very frequently. One interesting critic of the policies of the EU, specifically the ECB and IMF during the Greek debt crisis, was Janis Varifakis, the former Greek finance minister. And his criticism of Mill was Mill's alleged contempt for the population, and Varifakis comments on the type of capitalism that results in too big to fail.

He describes himself as an erratic Marxist. To me personally, he's an example of someone who's positioned on the philosophical mooring of policy is interesting to compare and contrast with yours. He's certainly not your typical Marxist or postmodernist, even though I'm not really sure what that means, but if you look at his work during the Greek debt crisis and his current work with DM25,

he seems to be well-reasoned, well-positioned, and articulate. Now, I wanted to know if you had an opinion on that type of criticism of mill, or his taking of a position as an erratic Marxist. Okay. I would say no to the specifics of the question. I don't think that I have that detailed expertise in order to answer the question at the level of analysis that you, where you formulated it. But I have something to say that's more general

about the set of phenomena that you described. There's no doubt that distribution is a major problem, that capitalism contends with imperfectly at best. And the distribution problem is the pre-dodistribution problem, right? And something that Mark's commented on, which mostly in the monetary sphere, is that money tends to accumulate in the hands of very few people. It's like, there's no doubt about that. Now, as we've discussed before, the people in whom hands the money accumulates do turn

over more than people think, especially in countries that are functioning reasonably well. And it's really important that that happens. Yes, yes, yes. But that doesn't solve the problem of the fact that produced goods gravitate towards an extreme minority. Now, they're also produced often by extreme minority, which is also a problem. I would say then that the idea that capitalism is

more prone to that distribution problem than any other system, I don't believe that to have been demonstrated at all. And I think that capitalism is actually pretty good at self-destruction, except when that's interfered with. And I think that's particularly the case in the United States, where generally the policy has been, if you're an idol with feet of clay, no matter how big you are, you get to fail. Now, that's being compromised severely in the last 20 years. And

we're probably going to pay for that. I think they really paid for that in Japan, right? Where there was every attempt to prop out the gods that should have died. So fair enough for the critique of capitalism. That's not the issue. The issue is, do you have a better idea? And if the idea is, well, we could kind of do what Mark suggested, then you don't get to have that position and claim, what should I say? I haven't seen any evidence that systems predicated on that set of axioms have done anything

but more harm than good. Thank you. And when will you be announcing the monthly extension to this lecture series? As soon as I find out whether or not I can rent this theater in the fall. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you. We'll see you next week. you you