The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Phenomenology of the Divine

Episode Date: August 22, 2017

Lecture 8 in the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series. In the next series of stories, the Biblical patriarch Abram (later: Abraham) enters into a covenant with God. The history of Israel proper begins with these stories. Abram heeds the call to adventure, journeys courageously away from his country and family into the foreign and unknown, encounters the disasters of nature and the tyranny of mankind and maintains his relationship with the God who has sent him forth.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. Thank you. Hello everyone. Thank you again for showing up. So tonight we're going to finish off the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel. And I don't think that will take very long. And then we're going to turn

to the Abrahamic stories. And they're a very complex set of stories. They sit between the earliest stories in Genesis that I would say end with the Tower of Babel. And then the stories of Moses which are extraordinarily well developed. The Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them. Multiple stories can join together. The Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them, multiple stories, conjured together, and there, I found them very daunting, they're very difficult to understand.

And so I'm going to stumble through them the best that I can, I would say, that's probably the best way to think about this, because they have a narrative content that's quite strange. I was reading a book while doing this called The Disappearance of God that I found quite helpful. The author of that book argues that one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is that God is very manifest at the beginning in terms of personal appearances even.

And then that proclivity fades away as the Old Testament develops. And there's a parallel development that's maybe causally linked. I'm not exactly sure how to conceptualize it, but that appears to be causally linked is that the stories about individuals become more and more well developed. So it's as if as God fades away, so to speak, the individual becomes more and more manifest.

And there's a statement in the Old Testament, the location of which I don't recall, but I'll tell you about it in future lectures, where God essentially tells whoever he's speaking with, and I don't remember who that is, that he's going to disappear and let man essentially go his own way and see what happens. Not a complete disappearance, but maybe a transformation to something that

modern people regard more as a psychological phenomena rather than the sort of objective entity that God seems to be in the beginning of the biblical stories. And so I've been wrestling with that a lot because the notion that God appears to Abraham multiple times. And that's not a concept that's easy for modern people to grasp. For us, generally speaking, apart from, say, issues of faith. God isn't some thing, someone,

who makes himself personally manifest in our lives. He doesn't appear to us. That's, I suppose, why the question of belief is so paramount for modern people. I presume that if God was in the habit of appearing to you, you likely wouldn't have a problem with belief. I mean, it might be more complicated than that, but that's how it seems to me.

And so when we read stories about God making himself manifest either to a nation, say in the case of Israel or to individuals, it's not easy to understand. It's not easy to understand why people would write stories like that, if they thought like we thought. And I mean, really, it wasn't that long ago that the Bible was written, say, from a biological perspective.

It's really only yesterday. It's a couple of thousand years, say, four thousand years, something like that. That's not very long ago, from a biological perspective. It's nothing. So the first thing I tried to do is to see if I could figure out how to understand that. And so I'll start the lecture once we finish the remains

of the story of Noah. I'll start the lecture with an attempt to situate the Abrahamic stories in a context that might make them more accessible, these to contexts that work for me to make them more accessible. Let's conclude the Noah's story first, however. When we ended last time, the ark had come to its resting place

and Noah and his family had debarked. And so this is the stories of what occurs immediately afterwards. It's a very short story, but I think it's very relevant for both of these stories, the Tower of Babel as well, very relevant for our current times. And the sons of Noah, they went forth of the ark, were Shem and Ham and Japheth. And Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah,

and of them was the whole earth over spread. And Noah began to be a husband's man, and he planted a vineyard. And he drank of the wine and was drunken, and he was uncovered within his tent. And ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren, without. And Shem and Jaffeth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father, and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, "'Cursed to be Canaan, "'a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.'" And he said, "'Blessed shall be the Lord God of shaman, "'canon shall be his servant,

"'and God shall enlarge Jafeth, "'and he shall dwell in the tents of shaman, "'canaan shall be his servant, and God shall enlarge Jaffeth, and he shall dwell in the tents of shaman, Canaan shall be his servant. And Noah lived after the flood 350 years, and all the days of Noah were 950 years, and he died. And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. Okay, so I remember thinking about this story, it's got to be 30 years ago. And I think the meaning of this story stood out for me.

Sometimes, when you read complicated material, sometimes a piece of it will stand out. It's for some reason, it's like it glitters, I suppose, that might be one way of thinking about it. It's, you're in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I've really experienced that reading the Dal Te Ching, which is a document I would really like to do a lecture on at some point, because some of the verses I don't understand, but others stand right out, and I can understand them.

And I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant, and I think it means, you know, we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve. And the idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability, the physical, your physical boundaries in time and space, and your, your, your physiological, your fundamental physiological insufficiencies as they might be judged by others. So there's biological insufficiency that's sort of built into you because you're a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half insane creature.

And that's just an existential truth. And then, of course, even merely as a human being, even with all those faults, there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be judged harshly by the group, well, might be, will definitely be judged harshly by the group. And so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious and to know your limits and to know your vulnerability. And that's what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked.

So the question is, what does it mean to see your father naked? And it seems to me, and especially in an inappropriate manner like this, it's as if Ham, he does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth. When Tymat and Apsu give rise to the first gods, they're the father of the eventual deity of redemption. Marduk, they're very careless and noisy and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse. And that makes time out enraged, and so she bursts forth from the darkness to do them in. It's like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story.

And I see the same thing happening here with Ham is that he's insufficiently respectful of his father. And the question is exactly, what does the father represent? And you could say, well, there's the father that you have. And that's a human being. That's a man like other men, a man among men. But then there's the father as such. And that's the spirit of the father. And insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time. You have the personal father that's a man among other men, just like anyone else's father. But in so far as that man is your father,

that means that he's something different than just another person. And what he is is the incarnation of the spirit of the father and to see that, to take it to what? To disrespect that carelessly. Maybe even, like Noah makes a mistake, right? He produces wine and gets himself drunk and you might say, well, you know, if he sprawled out there for everyone to see, it's hardly Ham's fault if he stumbles across him, but

the book is laying out a danger and the danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at And the danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, and if you're disrespectful, then you transgress against the spirit of the father, and if you transgress against the spirit of father and lose the spirit of the father, and lose respect for the spirit of the father, then that is likely to transform you into a slave. That's a very interesting idea, and I think it's particularly interesting, maybe not particularly interesting, but it's particularly germane, I think, to our current cultural situation,

because I think that we're pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that's directed towards our culture and the patriarchal culture, so to speak, we're constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities and let's say nakedness. And there's nothing wrong with criticism, but the thing about criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's not to burn everything to the ground, right? It's to say, well, we're going to carefully look at this.

We're going to carefully differentiate. We're going to keep what's good, and we're going to move away from what's bad. But the point of the criticism isn't to identify everything is bad. It's to separate what's good from what's bad so that you can retain what's good and move towards it. And to be careless at that is deadly,

because you're inhabited by the spirit of the father. Insofar as you're a cultural construction, which of course is something that the postmodern Neomarchists are absolutely emphatic about, you're a cultural construction. Insofar as you're a cultural construction, then you're inhabited by the spirit of the father. And to be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes you,

not all of what you are, certainly not all of what you are, but a good portion of what you are, in so far as you're a socialized cultural entity. And if you pull out, if you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own. You know, it's just not possible.

You're a cultural creation. And so, Ham makes this desperate error and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father, something like that. He does it without sufficient respect. And the judgment is that not only will he be a slave, but so all of his descendants. And he's contrasted with the other two sons who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt, something like that. And so when they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect and don't capitalize on it. And maybe that makes them strong. That's

what it seems to me. And so I think that's what that story means. It has something to do with respect. You know, and the funny thing about having respect for your culture, and I suppose that's partly why I'm doing the biblical stories, is because they're part of my culture. They're part of our culture, perhaps, but they're certainly part of my culture. And it seems to me that it's worthwhile to treat that with respect to see what you can glean from it and not kick it when it's down, let's say. And so that's how the story of Noah ends. The thing too is Noah is actually a pretty decent incarnation of the Spirit of the Father,

which I suppose is one of the things that makes Ham's misstep more egregious, is that, I mean, Noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood, man, you know, it's not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify humiliating him. And I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note on a daily basis that we're all contained in an arc. And that's the arc that you can think about that as the arc that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers.

That's the tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit, that we take for granted, because it works so well, that protects us from things that we can't even imagine, and we don't have to imagine, because we're so well protected. And so one of the things that's really struck me hard, I would say about disintegration and corruption

of the universities, is the absolute ing in gratitude that goes along with that. Criticism, as I said, is a fine thing. If it's done in a proper spirit, and that's the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff, but it needs to be accompanied by gratitude. And it does seem to me that anyone who lives in the West, in the Western culture at this time in history, and in this place, and who isn't simultaneously grateful

for that is half blind at least, because it's never been better than this. And it could be so much worse. And it's highly likely that it will be so much worse, because for most of human history be so much worse. And it's highly likely that it will be so much worse. Because for most of human history, so much worse is the norm. So. Then there's this little story that crops up that seems, in some ways unrelated to everything that's gone before it.

But I think it's also an extremely profound little story. It took me a long time to figure it out. It's the Tower of Babel. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plane in the land of Shinnar and dwelt there. That's Noah's descendants. And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plane in the land of

Shinar, and they dwelt there. And they said to one another, go, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly, and they had brick for stone and slime they had for mortar. So they're establishing a city. And they said, go, let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower

which the children of men built. And the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they all have one language, And now this they begin to do. And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down and their confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from dense

upon the face of all the earth and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel because the Lord did their con-found the language of all the earth and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. It's a very difficult story to understand. It's on the face of it. It doesn't seem to show God in a very good light. Although that happens fairly frequently in the Old Testament as far as I can tell. But, you know, the thing to do if you're reading in the spirit of the text, let's say, is to remember that it's God that you're talking about. And so, even though you might think that he's appearing in a bad light,

your duty as a reader, I suppose, is to assume that you're wrong and that what he did was right, and then you're supposed to figure out, well, how could it possibly be right? Because the axiomatic presupposition is that it's God, and whatever he does is right. And you might say, well, you can disagree with that. And it's also the case that some of the people that God talks to

in the Old Testament actually disagree with him and convince him to alter his actions. But the point still remains that it's God, and if he's doing it, then by definition, there's a good reason. There's an idea much later that John Milton develops in Paradise Lost, which is an amazing poem. And it's a profound enough poem

so that it's almost been incorporated into the biblical structure, I would say. So the corpus of Christianity, post-Milton, was saturated by the Miltonx stories of Satan's rebellion. None of that's in the biblical texts. It's only hinted at in very brief passages. And Milton wrote his poem to justify the ways of God to man,

which is quite an ambition. Really, it's an amazing profound ambition to try to produce something, to produce a literary work that justifies being to human beings, because that's what Milton was trying to do. So one of my readers here sent me a link the other day or viewers to a work of philosophy by an Australian philosopher whose name I don't remember.

Basically wrote a book saying that being as such, human experience is so corrupt and so permeated by suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all. It's sort of the ultimate expression of nihilism. And Gerthe in Faust, his mefistophiles, who's a satanic character obviously, has that as a credo. and Geirtha in Faust, his mefastophiles, whose satanic character obviously has that as a credo,

that Satan's fundamental motivation is, his objection to creation itself is that creation is so flawed and so right with suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all. And so that's his motivation for attempting to continue to destroy it. But in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan is an intellectual figure. And you see that motif emerge very frequently, by the way, in popular culture. So, for example, in the Lion King,

the figure of Skar, who's a satanic figure, is also hyper-intellectual. And that's very common. It's an evil scientist motif, or the evil advisor to the king, the same who's a satanic figure is also hyper-intellectual. And that's very common, you know, it's the evil scientist motif, or the evil advisor to the king, the same motif. It encapsulates something about rationality. And what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that rationality, like Satan, is the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom. It's a psychological idea, you know,

that the most powerful sub-element of the human psyche is the intellect. And it's the thing that shines out above all within the domain of humanity and maybe across the domain of life itself, the human intellect, there's something absolutely remarkable about it. But it has a flaw, and the flaw is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions and to assume that they're total. Sozzynitsyn, when he was writing the Goulagar Capellago, had a warning about that with regards to totalitarian ideology. And he said that the price of selling your God-given soul to the entrapments of human dogma

was slavery and death essentially. And Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan decides that he can do without the transcendent, he can do without God, and that's why Foments rebellion. It's something like that. And the consequence of that, the immediate consequence from Milton's perspective was that as soon as Satan decided that what he knew was sufficient, and that he could do without the transcendent, which you might think about as the domain outside of what you know, something like that,

immediately he was in hell. And when I read Paradise Lost, I was studying totalitarianism, and I thought, you know, the poet, the true poet, like a prophet, is someone who has intimations of the future. And maybe that's because the poetic mind, the philosophical or prophetic mind, is a pattern detector, and there are people who can detect the underlying, it's like the melody of a nation. Melody isn't song, the song of a nation, and can see how it's going to develop a...

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description. Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com. Thank you. Hello everyone. Thank you again for showing up. So tonight we're going to finish off the story of Noah and also the story of the Tower of Babel. And I don't think that'll take very long. And then we're going to turn to the Abrahamic stories

and they're a very complex set of stories. They sit between the earliest stories in Genesis that I would say end with the Tower of Babel, and then the stories of Moses, which are extraordinarily well developed. The Abrahamic stories, there's a whole sequence of them. Multiple stories can join together, and there, I found them very daunting, they're very difficult to understand. And so I'm going to stumble through them the best that I can, I would say that's probably

the best way to think about this because they have a narrative content that's quite strange. I was reading a book while doing this called The Dis called the disappearance of God that I found quite helpful. And the author of that book argues that one of the things that happens in the Old Testament is that God is very manifest at the beginning in terms of personal appearances even. And then that proclivity fades away as the Old Testament develops. And there's a parallel development that's maybe causally linked.

I'm not exactly sure how to conceptualize it, but that appears to be causally linked is that the stories about individuals become more and more well developed. So it's as if as God fades away, so to speak, the individual becomes more and more manifest. And there's a statement in the Old Testament, the location of which I don't recall,

but I'll tell you about it in future lectures, where God essentially tells whoever he's speaking with, and I don't remember who that is, that he's going to disappear and let man essentially go his own way and see what happens. Not a complete disappearance, but maybe a transformation to something that modern people regard more as a psychological phenomena rather than the sort of objective entity that God seems to be in the beginning of the biblical stories. And so I've been wrestling with that a lot because the notion that God appears to Abraham multiple times. And that's not a concept that's easy for modern people

to grasp, for us, generally speaking, apart from, say, issues of faith. God isn't something, someone who makes himself personally manifest in our lives. He doesn't appear to us. That's, I suppose, why the question of belief is so paramount for modern people. I presume that if God had was in the habit of appearing to you, you likely wouldn't have a problem with belief.

I mean, it might be more complicated than that, but that's how it seems to me. And so when we read stories about God making Himself manifest either to a nation, say, in the case of Israel or to individuals, it's not easy to understand. It's not easy to understand why people would write stories like that if they thought like we thought. And I mean, really, it wasn't that long ago that the Bible was written, say, from a biological perspective, it's really only yesterday. It's a couple of thousand years, really, it wasn't that long ago that the Bible was written, say, from a biological perspective. It's really only yesterday. It's a couple of thousand years, say, four thousand years, something like that. That's not very long ago, from a biological perspective.

It's nothing. So the first thing I tried to do was to see if I could figure out how to understand that. And so I'll start the lecture once we finish the remains of the story of Noah. I'll start the lecture with an attempt to situate the Abrahamic stories in a context that might make them more accessible, these to contexts that work for me to make them more accessible.

Let's conclude the Noah's story first, however, when we ended last time, the art had come to its resting place and Noah and his family had debarpt. And so this is the stories of what occurs immediately afterwards. It's a very short story, but I think it's very relevant for both of these stories, the Tower of Babel as well, very relevant for our current times. And the sons of Noah, they went forth of the ark where Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Ham is the father of Canaan.

These are the three sons of Noah, and of them was the whole earth over spread, and Noah began to be a husband's man, and he planted a vineyard, and he drank of the wine and was drunken, and he was uncovered within his tent, and Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father

and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Jaffeth took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were backward. And they saw not their father's nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

And he said, cursed to be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.'" And he said, "'Blessed shall be the Lord God of shaman, "'canon shall be his servant, "'and God shall enlarge Jafeth, "'and he shall dwell in the tents of shaman,

"'canon shall be his servant.'" And Noah lived after the flood 350 years, and all the days of Noah were 950 years and he died. And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. So I remember thinking about this story, it's got to be 30 years ago. And I think the meaning of the story stood out for me. Sometimes, when you read complicated material, sometimes a piece of it will stand out.

It's for some reason, it's like it glitters, I suppose. That might be one way of thinking about it. It's, you're in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I've really experienced that reading the Dalte Ching, which is a document I would really like to do a lecture on at some point, because some of the verses I don't understand, but others stand right out and I can understand them.

And I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant. And I think it means, we talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve. And the idea essentially was that to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability, the physical boundaries in time and space, and your physiological,

your fundamental physiological insufficiencies as they might be judged by others. So there's biological insufficiency that's sort of built into you because you're a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half insane creature. And that's just an existential truth. And then, of course, even merely as a human being, even with all those faults, there are faults that you have that are particular to you that might be judged harshly by the

group, while might be will definitely be judged harshly by the group. And so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious and to know your limits and to know your vulnerability. And that's what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked. And so the question is, what does it mean to see your father naked?

And it seems to me, and especially in an inappropriate manner like this, it's as if Ham, he does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth when Tymat and Apsu give rise to the first gods, they're the father of the eventual deity of redemption, Marduk, they're very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse, and that makes time out enraged, and so she bursts forth from the darkness to do them in.

It's like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story or an analog to the flood story. And I see the same thing happening here with Ham is that he's insufficiently respectful of his father. And the question is exactly what does the father represent? And you could say, well, there's the father that you have. And that's a human being. That's a man like other men, a man among men. But then there's the father as such, and that's a human being, that's a man like other men, a man among men, but then there's the father as such, and that's the spirit of the father. And in so far as you have a father,

you have both at the same time. You have the personal father that's a man among other men, just like anyone else's father. But in so far as that man is your father, that means that he's something different than just another person. And what he is is the incarnation of the spirit of the father and to see that, to take it to what, to disrespect that carelessly.

Maybe even, like Noah makes a mistake, right? He produces wine and gets himself drunk and you might say, well, if he sprawled out there for everyone to see, it's hardly Ham's fault if he stumbles across him. But the book is laying out a danger. And the danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment. And if you're disrespectful, then you transgress

against the spirit of the father. And if you transgress against the spirit of the Father, and if you transgress against the spirit of Father and lose spirit of the Father, and lose respect for the spirit of the Father, then that is likely to transform you into a slave. That's a very interesting idea, and I think it's particularly interesting, maybe not particularly interesting,

but it's particularly germane, I think, to our current cultural situation, because I think that we're pushed constantly to see the nakedness of our father, so to speak. Because of the intense criticism that's directed towards our culture, and the patriarchal culture, so to speak, we're constantly exposing its weaknesses and vulnerabilities

and, let's say nakedness. And there's nothing wrong with criticism. But the thing about criticism is the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's not to burn everything to the ground, right? It's to say, well, we're going to carefully look at this, we're going to carefully differentiate, we're going to keep what's good and we're going to move away from what's bad. But the point of the criticism isn't to identify everything is bad. It's to separate what's good from what's bad so that you can retain what's good and move

towards it. To be careless at that is deadly because you're inhabited by the spirit of the father. Insofar as you're a cultural construction, which of course is something that the postmodern Neomarchs are absolutely emphatic about, you're a cultural construction. Insofar as you're a cultural construction, then you're inhabited by the spirit of the father and to be disrespectful towards that

means to undermine the very structure that makes you not all of what you are, certainly not all of what you are, certainly not all of what you are, but a good portion of what you are in so far as you're a socialized cultural entity. If you pull out the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own. It's just not possible. You're a cultural creation. And so, Ham makes this desperate error and is perilous about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father, something like that. He does it without sufficient respect. And the judgment is that not only

will he be a slave, but so all of his descendants. And he's contrasted with the other two sons who, I suppose are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt, something like that. And so when they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect and don't capitalize on it. And maybe that makes them strong. That's what it seems to me. And so I think that's what that story means.

It has something to do with respect. And the funny thing about having respect for your culture, and I suppose that's partly why I'm doing the biblical stories, is because they're part of my culture. They're part of our culture, perhaps. But they're certainly part of our culture, they're part of our culture, perhaps, but they're certainly part of my culture. And it seems to me that it's worthwhile to treat that with respect to see what you can glean from it

and not kick it when it's down, let's say. So, and so that's how the story of Noah ends. You know, and the thing too is Noah is actually a pretty decent incarnation of the Spirit of the Father, which I suppose is one of the things that makes Ham's misstep more egregious is that, I mean, Noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood, man, you know, it's not so bad. And so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn't enough to justify humiliating him. And you know, I don't think it's pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note

on a daily basis that we're all contained in an arc. And that's the arc that you can think about that as the arc that's been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. That's the tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit, that we take for granted, because it works so well, that protects us from things that we can't even imagine, and we don't have to imagine, because we're so well protected. And so one of the things that's really struck me hard, I would say, about the disintegration and corruption of the universities, is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that. You know what criticism, as I said, is a fine thing, if it's done in a proper spirit, and that's the spirit

of separating the wheat from the chaff, but it needs to be accompanied by gratitude, and it does seem to me that anyone who lives in the west, in the western culture at this time in history, and in this place, and who isn't simultaneously grateful for that is half-blind at least, because it's never been better than this, and it could be so much worse. And it's highly likely that it will be so much worse, because for most of human history, so much worse is the norm. So... Then there's this little story that crops up

that seems, in some ways, unrelated to everything that's gone before it. But I think it's also an extremely profound little story. It took me a long time to figure it out. It's the Tower of Babel. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plane in the land of Shinnar and dwelt there. That's Noah's descendants.

And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plane in the land of Shinnar and they dwelt there. And they said to one another, go, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and slime they dwelt there. And they said to one another, go, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and slime they had for mortar. So they're establishing a city. And they said, go, let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven.

And let us make a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they all have one language, and now this they begin to do. And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down and their confound their language

that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth, and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel, because the Lord did their confound the language of all the earth, and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. It's a very difficult story to understand.

It's on the face of it. It doesn't seem to show God in a very good light. Although that happens fairly frequently in the Old Testament as far as I can tell. But you know, the thing to do if you're reading in the spirit of the text, let's say, is to remember that it's God that you're talking about. And so, even though you might think that he's appearing in a bad light, your duty as a reader, I suppose, is to assume that you're wrong and that what he did was right, and then you're supposed to figure out, well, how could it possibly be right?

Because the axiomatic presupposition is that it's God and whatever he does is right. And you might say, well, you can disagree with that. And it's also the case that some of the people that God talks to in the Old Testament actually disagree with him and convince him to alter his actions. But the point still remains that it's God, and if he's doing it, then by definition there's a good reason.

There's an idea much later that John Milton develops in Paradise Lost, which is an amazing home. It's a profound enough poem so that it's almost been incorporated into the biblical structure, I would say. So the corpus of Christianity, post-Milton, was saturated by the Miltonx stories of Satan's rebellion. None of that's in the biblical texts. It's only hinted at in very brief passages. And Milton wrote his poem,

to justify the ways of God to man, which is quite an ambition. Really, it's an amazing, profound ambition to try to produce something, to produce a literary work that justifies being to human beings, because that's what Milton was trying to do. One of my readers here sent me a link the other day, or viewers, to a work of philosophy

by an Australian philosopher whose name I don't remember, who basically wrote a book saying that being as such human experience is so corrupt and so permeated by suffering that it would be better if it had never existed at all. It's sort of the ultimate expression of nihilism. And, Gerthe in Faust, his mefistophiles, who's a satanic character obviously, has that as a credo. That Satan's fundamental motivation is is his objection to creation itself, is that creation is so flawed and so right with suffering

that it would be better if it had never existed at all. And so that's his motivation for attempting to continue to destroy it. In Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan has an intellectual figure. And you see that motif emerge very frequently, by the way, in popular culture. So for example, in the Lion King,

the figure of scar, who's a satanic figure, is also hyper-intellectual. And that's very common. It's the evil scientist motif, or the evil advisor to the king, the same motif. It encapsulates something about rationality. And what it seems to encapsulate is the idea that rationality, like Satan, is the highest angel

in God's heavenly kingdom. It's a psychological idea, that the most powerful sub-element of the human psyche is the intellect. And it's the thing that shines out above all within the domain of humanity and maybe across the domain of life itself, the human intellect. There's something absolutely remarkable about it. But it has a flaw, and the flaw is that it tends to fall in love with its own productions

and to assume that they're total. Sozzynitsyn, when he was writing the Goulagar Capelago, had a warning about that with regards to totalitarian ideology. And he said that the price of selling your God-given soul to the entrapments of human dogma was slavery and death, essentially. And Satan, in Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan decides that he can do without the transcendent, he can do without God, and that's why Foments rebellion. It's something like that.

And the consequence of that, the immediate consequence from Milton's perspective was that as soon as Satan decided that what he knew was sufficient, and that he could do without the transcendent, which you might think about as the domain outside of what you know, something like that, immediately he was in hell. And when I read Paradise Lost, I was studying totalitarianism, and I thought, you know, the poet, the true poet, like a prophet, is someone who has intimations of the future. And maybe that's because the poetic mind, the philosophical or prophetic mind, is a pattern detector.

And there are people who can detect the underlying, it's like the melody of a nation. Melody isn't song, the song of a nation. And can see how it's going to develop across the centuries. You see that in Nietzsche, because Nietzsche, for example, in the mid-1860s or so, I mean, he profusied what was going to happen in the 20th century. He said that specifically that the specter of communism would kill millions of people in the 20th century. It's an amazing prophecy. He said that in the notes that became will to power. And Dorosthiewski was of the same sort of mind someone who was in touch enough with the fundamental patterns

of human movement that they could extrapolate out into the future and see what was coming. And I mean, some people are very good at detecting patterns. And Milton, I think, was of that sort. And I think he had intimations of what was coming as human rationality became more and more powerful, and technology became more and more powerful. And the intimation was that we would produce systems that dispensed with God, that were completely rational and completely total that would immediately turn everything they touched

into something indistinguishable from hell. And Milton's warning was embodied in the poem is that the rational mind that generates a production and then worships it as if it's absolute immediately occupies hell. So what does that have to do with the Tower of Babel? You know what, back in 2008, when we had that economic collapse, the strange idea emerged politically, and that was the idea of too big to fail. And I thought about that idea for a long time,

because I thought there's something deeply wrong with that, is one of the things that made Marx wrong, was Marx believed that capital would flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and that the dissociation between the rich and the poor would become more extreme as capitalism developed. And like so many things that Mark said, that's, it's kind of true.

It's kind of true in that the distribution of wealth, and in fact, the distribution of anything that's produced follows a peridopatter, and the peridopatter, and basically is that a small proportion of people end up with a peridopatter. And the peridopatter basically is that a small proportion of people end up with a bulk of the goods. And it isn't just money. It's anything that people produce creatively ends up in that distribution.

And that's actually, the economists call that the Matthew principle. And they take that from a statement in the New Testament. And the statement is, to those who have everything more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. And it's a map of the manner in which the world manifests itself where human creative production is involved,

and the map seems to indicate that, as you start to produce and you're successful, the probability that you will continue to be successful or accelerate increases as you're successful. And as you fail, the probability that you will fail starts to accelerate. So your progress through life looks like this or like this, something like that. And the reason that Marx was right was because he noted that as a feature of the capitalist system, the reason that he was wrong is that it's not a feature that's specific to a capitalist system. It's a feature that's general to all systems of creative

production that are known. And so it's like a natural law. And enough of a natural law, by the way, that the distribution of wealth can be modeled by physical models using the same equations that govern the distribution of gas molecules in a vacuum. So it's a really profound, it's a fundamentally profound observation about the way the world lays itself out.

And it's problematic because if resources accrue unfairly to a small minority of people, and there's a natural law-like element to that that has to be dealt with from a social perspective, because if the inequality becomes too extreme, then the whole system will destabilize. And so you can have an intelligent discussion about how to mitigate the effects of the transfer of creative production into the hands of a transfer of creative production into the hands of a small number of people.

Now the other reason, however, having said that, the other reason that Marx was wrong, there's a number of them. One is that even though creative products end up in the hands of a small number of people, it's not the same people consistently across time. It's the same proportion of people. And that's not the same thing.

You know, like imagine that there's water going down a drain, and you say, well, look at the spiral. It's permanent. You think, well, the spiral's permanent, but the water molecules aren't. They're moving through it. And it's the same, in some sense, with the pre-dodistribution

is that there's a 1%, and there's always a 1%, but it's not the same people. It's, and the stability of it differs from culture to culture, but there's a lot of movement in the upper 1%, a tremendous amount of movement. And one of the reasons for that movement is that things get large and then they get too large and then they collapse. And so in 2008 when the politicians said too big to fail, they got something truly backwards as far as I can tell.

And that was a reverse, the statement was reversed. It should have been so big it had to fail. And that's what I think the story of the Tower of Babel is about. It's a warning against the expansion of the system until it encompasses everything. It's a warning against totalitarian presumption. So what happens, for example, when people set out to build the Tower of Babel, is they want to build a structure that reaches to heaven. So the idea is that it can replace the role of God.

It's something like that. It can erase the distinction between earth and heaven. And so there's a utopian kind of vision there as well. We can build a structure that's so large and encompassing that it can replace heaven itself. That's an interesting, the fact that that doesn't work and that God objects to it is also extraordinarily interesting. And it's an indication to me of the unbelievable profundity of these stories.

It's like, I think one thing we should have learned from the 20th century, but of course, didn't, was that there's something extraordinary, dangerous about totalitarian utopian visions. That's something Dostoevsky wrote about, by the way, in his great book Notes from Underground because Dostoevsky had figured out by the early 1900s that there was something very, very pathological about a utopian vision of perfection, that it was profoundly anti-human and notes from underground. He demolishes the notion of utopia. One of the things he says that I loved, it's so brilliant, said, imagine that you brought

the socialist utopia into being. And Dostoevsky says, and that human beings had nothing to do except eat, drink, and busy themselves with the continuation of the species. He said that the first thing that would happen under circumstances like that would be that human beings would go mad and break the system, smash it, just so that something unexpected and crazy could happen, because human beings don't want utopian comfort and certainty.

They want adventure and chaos and uncertainty, and so that the very notion of a utopia was anti-human, because we're not built for static utopia. We're built for a dynamic situation where there's demands placed on us and where there's the optimal amount of uncertainty. Well we know what happened in the 20th century as a consequence of the widespread promulgation of utopian schemes and what happened happened was Ahem on a scale that had never been matched in the entire history of humanity.

And that's really saying something, because there was plenty of Ahem before the 20th century. I guess there wasn't as much industrial clout behind it. And so so early, you see, so early in the biblical narrative, you have a warning against hubris. And some indication that properly functioning systems have an appropriate scale. I read an article in the Economist magazine this week

about the rise of nationalist movements all over the world as a counterbalance to globalization. Maybe it's most market with the European economic community. And the economist writers were curious about why that counter movement has been developing, but it seems to me that it's also a tower of Babel phenomena is that, and maybe this is most evident in the European economic community, to bring all of that multiplicity under the, what you call it under the umbrella of a single unity, is to simultaneously erect a system where the top is so far from

the bottom that the bottom has no connection to the top. You know, your social systems have to be large enough so they protect you, but small enough so that you have a place in them. And it seems to me perhaps that's what's happened in places like the EEC is that the distance between the typical citizen and the bureaucracy that runs the entire structure has got so great that it's an element of destabilization in and of itself. And so people revert back to, say, nationalistic identities because it's something that they can relate to.

There's a history there and a shared identity, a genuine identity, an identity of language and tradition. It's not an artificial imposition from the top, an artificial abstract imposition. In the Egyptian creation, myth, the version I'm familiar with, in the previous creation, myth, older one, the Mesopotamian creation, myth, mostly what you see menacing humanity is Tyomat. She's the dragon of chaos. And so that's nature. It's really mother nature, read in tooth and claw. But by the time the Egyptians come along,

it isn't only nature that threatens humanity. It's the social structure itself. And so the Egyptians had two de threatens humanity. The social structure itself. The Egyptians had two deities that represented the social structure. One was Osiris, who was like the spirit of the father. He was a great hero who established Egypt, but became old and willfully blind and senile. and Seenile, and he had an evil brother named Seth, and Seth was always conspiring to overthrow him. And because Osiris ignored him long enough,

Seth did overthrow, chopped him into pieces, and distributed him all around the kingdom. And his son Horus had to come back and fight. Osiris's son Horus had to come back and defeat Seth to take the kingdom back. That's how that story ends. But the Egyptians seemed to have realized maybe because they had become bureaucratized

to quite a substantial degree, that it wasn't only nature that threatened humankind. It was also the proclivity of human organizations to become too large, too unwieldy, too deceitful, and too willfully blind, and therefore liable to collapse. And again, I see echoes of that in this story of the Tower of Babel. So it's a calling for a kind of humility of social engineering. One of the other things I've learned as a social scientist, and I've been warned about

this by, I would say, great social scientists, that you want to be very careful about doing large-scale experimentation with large-scale systems. Because the probability that if you implement a scheme in a large-scale social system, that that scheme will have the result you intended is negligible. What will happen will be something that you don't intend and even worse, something that works at counter purposes to your original intent. And so, and that makes sense because if you have a very, very complex system and you perturb it, the probability that you can predict the consequence

of the perturbation is extraordinary low, obviously. If the system works though, you think you understand it because it works. And so you think it's simpler than it actually is. And so then you think that your model of it is correct. And then you think that your manipulation of the model which produces the outcome you model will be the outcome that's actually produced in the world. That doesn't work at all. I thought about that an awful lot, thinking about how to remediate social systems because obviously they need careful attention and adjustment, and it struck me that the proper

strategy for implementing social change is to stay within your domain of competence. And that requires humility, which is a virtue that is never promoted in modern culture, I would say. It's a virtue that you can hardly even talk about. But humility means you're probably not as smart as you think you are, and you should be careful. And so then the question might be, well, OK, you should be careful, but perhaps you still want to do good, you want to make some positive changes. How can you be careful and do good? And then I would say, well, you try not to step outside of

the boundaries of your competence and you start small and you start with things that you actually could adjust, that you actually do understand, that you actually could fix. I mentioned to you at one point that one of the things Carl Jung said was that modern men don't see God because they don't look low enough. It's a very interesting phrase. And one of the things that I've been promoting, I suppose, online is the idea that you should restrict your attempts to fix things to what's at hand. So there's probably things about you that you could fix, right? Things that you know that aren't right. Not anyone else's opinion, your own opinion that aren't right.

You can fix them. Maybe there's some things that you could adjust in your family. Well, that gets hard. You have to have your act together a lot before you can start to adjust your family because things can kick back on you really hard. And you think, well, it's hard to put yourself together. It's really hard to put your family together. Why the hell do you think you can put the world together?

Because obviously, the world is more complicated than you and your family. And so if you're stymied in your attempts, even to set your own house in order, which of course you are, then you would think that what that would do would be to make you very, very leery about announcing your broad scale plans for social revolution. Well, it's a peculiar thing because that isn't how it works because people are much more likely to announce their plans for broad scale social revolution than they are to try to set themselves straight or to set their family straight.

And I think the reason for that is that as soon as they try to set themselves straight or their families, the system immediately kicks back at them. Right? Instantly, whereas if they announce their plans for large-scale social revolution, the lag between the announcement and the kickback is so long that they don't recognize that there's any error there. And so, you know, you can get away with being wrong if nothing falls on you for a while. And so, and it's also an incitement to hubris because you can now see your plans for large scale social revolution and stand back and you don't get hit by lightning

and you think, well, I might be right even though you're not. You're seriously not right. I might be right and then you think, well, how wonderful is that, especially if you could do it without any real effort. And I really do think fundamentally, I believe, that that's what universities teach students now. That's what they teach them to do. I really believe that. I think it's absolutely appalling. I think it's horribly dangerous, because it's not that easy to fix things, especially if you're not committed to it.

I think you know if you're committed because what you try to do is you try to straighten out your own life first. That's enough. I think it's a statement in the New Testament that it's I think it's in the New Testament that it's more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city and That's not a metaphor. It's like all of you who've made Announcements to yourself about changing your diet and going to the gym every January No perfectly well how difficult it is to regulate your own impulses and to bring yourself under the control of some, what would you say, well structured and ethical, attentive structure

of values, extraordinarily difficult, and so people don't do it and then instead they wander off and I think they create towers of babble and the story indicates well those things collapse under their own weight and everyone goes their own direction. I think I see that happening with the LGBT community. I think because one of the things I've noticed, it's very interesting because the community is some sense, it's not a community, but that's a technical error. But it's composed of outsiders, let's say.

And what you notice across the decades is that the acronym list keeps growing. And I think that's because there's an infinite number of ways to be an outsider. And so once you open the door to the construction of a group that's characterized by failing to fit into the group, then you immediately create a category that's infinitely expandable. And so I don't know how long the acronym list is now, it depends on which acronym list you consult. But I've seen lists of 10 or more acronyms. And one of the things that's happening is that the community is starting to fragment in its interior, because there is no unity once you put a sufficient plurality under the

sheltering structure of a single umbrella, say, the disunity starts to appear within. And I think that's also a manifestation of the same issue that this particular story is dealing with. So that ends, I would say, the most archaic stories in the Bible. There's something about the flood story and also the Tower of Babel. I think they outlined the two fundamental dangers that be set mankind. One is the probability that blindness and sin will produce a natural catastrophe or entice one. That's something modern people are very aware of in principle, right, because we're all hyper concerned about environmental degradation and catastrophe. And so that's the continual

reactivation of an archetypal idea in our unconscious minds, that there's something about the way we're living that's unsustainable and that will create a catastrophe. And so interesting, because people believe that firmly and deeply, but they don't see the relationship between that and the archetypal stories, because it's the same story. Overconsumption, greed, all of that, is producing an unstable state, and nature will rebel and take us down. You hear that every day in every newspaper,

and every TV station, it's broadcast to you constantly. So that idea is presented in Genesis in the story of Noah, and then the other warning that exists in the stories, one is beware of natural catastrophe that's produced as a consequence of blindness and greed, we'll say. The other is beware of social structures that overreach because they'll also

produce fragmentation and disintegration. And so it's quite remarkable, I think, that that, with at the close of the story of the Tower of Babel, we've got both of the permanent existential dangers that present themselves to humanity already identified. At the end of the story of Adam and Eve, there's like a fall into history. Right, so in one way history begins with the fall, but there's like a second fall, I think, with the flood in the Tower of Babel. And history, and even more real sense, begins now. It begins with this story of Abraham. And it's, we're no longer precisely in the realm

of the purely mythical. That would be another way of thinking about it. We have identifiable person who's part of an identifiable tribe who's doing identifiable things. We're in the realm of history. And so history begins twice in the Old Testament. I suppose it begins again after Moses as well, but we've moved out of the domain

of the purely mythical into the realm of history with the emergence of the stories about Abraham. This is from eldest Huxley. So the first thing that I want to talk about in relationship to the Abrahamic stories is this idea of the experience of God because Abraham, although quite identifiable as an actual individual, is also characterized by this peculiarity, and the peculiarity is that God manifests himself to Abraham, both as a voice, but also as a presence.

The stories never describe exactly how God manifests himself except now, and then he comes in the form of an angel. That's fairly concrete. But it's a funny thing that the author of or authors of the Abrahamic stories seems to take the idea that God would make an appearance more or less for granted. And so it's very, I think the part of the reason that I've struggled so much with the Abrahamic stories is because it's so hard to get a handle on that and to understand what that might mean.

And so I'm going to hit it from a bunch of different perspectives. And we'll see if we can come up with some understanding of it. The first thing I'll do is tell you a story about a female neurologist whose name escapes me at the moment. She wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte, I think is her name. And she was a Harvard trained, she had medical training from Harvard in neuropsychological function and knew a lot about hemispheric specialization. We talked a little bit about hemispheric specialization before.

One of the ways of conceptualizing the difference between the two hemispheres is that the left hemisphere operates in known territory and the right hemisphere operates in unknown territory. That's one way of thinking about it. The left hemisphere operates in the orderly domain, and the right hemisphere operates in the chaotic domain, or the left hemisphere operates in the domain of detail, and the right hemisphere operates in the domain of the large picture. It's something like that. Now people differ in their neurological wiring, so those are overgeneralizations, but that's okay. We'll live without for the time being. It's certainly not an overgeneralizations, but that's okay. We'll live without further time being.

It's certainly not an overgeneralization to point out that you do, in fact, have two hemispheres and that their structures differ. And if the connections between the mercut, which could happen, for example, if you had surgery for intractable epilepsy, that each hemisphere would be capable of housing its own consciousness.

That's been well documented by a neural, a neurologist named Gazaniga, who did spary, who did split brain experiments, must be 30 years ago now. And we know that the right and the left hemisphere are specialized for different functions. The right hemisphere, for example, seems to be more involved in the generation

of negative emotion and the left hemisphere more involved in the generation of positive emotion and approach. So the right hemisphere stops you and the left hemisphere more involved in the generation of positive emotion and approach. So the right hemisphere stops you and the left hemisphere moves you forward. Anyways, Jill, Voltae, I hope I've got that right, had a stroke and maintained consciousness during this stroke and analyzed it while it was happening. And she was able, while it was happening, to hypothesize about what part of her brain was being destroyed.

And so she had a congenital blood vessel, malformation, and had an aneurysm. And it just about killed her. But she said that it infected her left hemisphere. And she said that she experienced a sense of divine unity as a consequence of the stroke because the left hemisphere function was disrupted and destroyed. And so she became a right hemisphere dominant. And her experience of that was the dissolution of the specific ego into the absolute consciousness,

something like that. Now, that's only a case study, and you don't wanna make too much of case studies, but there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that those two kinds of consciousness exist, one being your consciousness of you as a localized and specified being. And the other being this capacity to experience oceanic

disillusion and the sense of the cosmos being one. Now why we have those capacities for different conscious experiences is very difficult to understand. I mean, part of me thinks that maybe we have a generic human brain that's the brain of the species and allied with that, we have a specific individual brain. And one is the left hemisphere and the other is the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere being the specific individual brain.

And usually it's on and working because you obviously have to take care of yourself as a specific entity and not as a generalized cosmic phenomena. It's hard to dice salary when you're a generalized cosmic phenomena. So you have to be more pointed than that. But look, let's make no mistake about it. The fact that those different states of consciousness

exist is not disputable. They can be elicited in all sorts of ways. And so I'm going to read you something that Elvis Huxley wrote about this back, I think, in 1956. This was after he started his experimentation with masculine. Because the psychedelics were introduced into Western culture in the 1950s, in a whole bunch of different ways. Silicide in mushrooms, LSD, that was discovered right at the end of World War II. It was discovered by accident, actually, laboratory, sandows, labs. The guy who discovered it,

Albert Hoffman, and spilled some on his hands, you can absorb it through your skin. And he was biking home and had the world's first LSD trip, which was somewhat of a shock to him, and then to the entire world. Huxley, who was a great literary figure, a real genius, experimented with Mesklin in the late 50s.

And he wrote a book called The Doors of Perception, which had a huge impact on the emerging psychedelic culture, both on the East Coast at Harvard and on the West Coast with Ken Kizzi and his Mary Pranksters, the people who popularized LSD. That's all documented in a book called the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I would highly recommend.

It's Tom Wolf, it's brilliant book. On the East Coast, it was Timothy Liri. I had Timothy Liri's old job at Harvard. So that was kind of cool, you know, warped way. So I met people there who knew him, who didn't think much of him also, but who did know him. Huxley had this masculine experience, and it transported him to this alternative consciousness. And he said that during his masculine experience, and it transported him to this alternative consciousness.

And he said that during his masculine experience that the entire world glowed from within, like there was an inner light, like a paradisal inner light, and that everything was deeply meaningful and symbolically suggestive and overwhelming and beautiful and timeless. So he had an experience of divine eternity, I suppose, is this most straightforward way to put that. And we know perfectly well that the psychedelic drugs that all share the same chemical structure, they interact with the brain chemical called serotonin,

which is a very, very fundamental neurotransmitter. They all have approximately the same range of effects, although those effects are very large multitude of effects that sort of exist underneath that umbrella. Huxley was staggered by his masculine experience. He didn't really know what to make of it. And I think that that's the common experience of people who have exceptionally profound psychedelic

experiences. And I'll tell you some documentation about that at a moment. But he spent quite a long time trying to come to grips with what this might mean from an intellectual perspective. And Huxley had a great brain. I mean, if someone was going to wrestle with a problem

like that, he was a good candidate. He must have had a verbal brain. I mean, if someone was going to wrestle with a problem like that, he was a good candidate. He must have had a verbal IQ of 180. I mean, his books are incredibly literate, incredible mastery of language and complexity of characterization and intellectual discourse, really remarkable. So this is what Huxley had to say after his masculine experience. He talked about heaven and hell, and he talked about that in reference to bad trips, essentially, because it was known by that point that psychedelic experience could transport you

to an ecstatic domain of divine revelation, but could take you to the worst imaginable place as well. And Huxley was very interested in why you would even have the capacity for experiences like that, which I think is a very good question, and it's completely unanswered question. I mean, we don't know much about consciousness, and we know even less about psychedelics. I would say they are an absolute mystery. I don't think we understand them in the least. Huxley did a good job of starting to at least map out the mysteries of the terrain.

He said, like the Earth of 100 years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africa's, its unmapped, porneos, and Amazonian basins. In relation to the fauna of these regions, we are not yet zoologists. We are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens. The fact is unfortunate, but we have to accept it. We have to make the best of it. However, lolly, the work of the collector must be done before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks

of classification, analysis, experiment, and theory making. Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remotor regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless, they exist. they are facts of observation. And as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.

When psychiatrists started to study LSD, that was mostly in the late 50s and running forward from that, they thought about the drug as a psychotomematic, which was a chemical substance that would induce psychosis. But that turned out to not be true, not with the psychedelics, because schizophrenia were given LSD,

and the schizophrenia reported that, while the experience was certainly extraordinarily strange, it wasn't like being schizophrenic. And then it was found later that if you gave schizophrenic amphetamines, that made them worse. In fact, you can induce a paranoid psychosis in a normal person by overdosing them with amphetamines. So whatever the hallucinogens or the psychedelics are doing,

it's not the same thing as mania, and it's not the same thing as schizophrenia, not at all. So, so you can't just write the experience off as an induced psychosis. Whatever it is, independent of its utility or lock thereof, it's not that. Now it can be induced by drugs, it can be induced by deprivation, right? I mean, there are accounts throughout history of people putting themselves in extreme physiological situations

in order to induce transformations of consciousness. Fasting is one of the roots to doing that. Dancing is another root. Isolation, prolonged periods of isolation, will also do it. Now, you could say that exposing yourself to any of those in excess produces a state that's indistinguishable from illness and that there's no reason to

assume that the phenomena that are associated with illness have any utility whatsoever. Although it's interesting to me that a disrupted consciousness can produce coherent experiences. It's not exactly what you expect. If it was just an illness, if you develop, say, a high fever, your experience isn't transcendent and coherent. It's fragmented and pathologized.

And the difference, I think, is quite distinct. Although we don't have to only speculate about that, because there's been enough experimental work done now with hallucinogens and psychedelics to indicate that the notion that what they produce is something that's only akin to pathology is wrong. It's not a matter of opinion at this point in the sequence of scientific and historical investigation. In fact, there was a large scale study done 10 years ago, five years ago, of 200,000 people who had experimented

with psychedelics, and they were mentally and physically healthier than people who hadn't on virtually every parameter they examined. In fact, the rate of flashbacks, you've heard of LSD, flashbacks, mostly a hypothetical phenomena, but the rate of self-reported flashbacks was higher among the non-psychedelic users than among the psychedelic users. So that was very interesting.

It was a huge study. Now, it might be that you could say that those who had experimented with psychedelics were prone to be healthier to begin with, but that still contradicts the pathology argument. So it doesn't matter. Either way, the pathology argument, so it doesn't matter, either way, the pathology argument is contradicted. Now, oh, I did put that in. It was Dr. Jill Bolt Taylor. This is what she said about her stroke.

I remember that first day of the stroke with terrific bitter sweetness in the absence of the normal functioning of my left orientation association area. My perception of my physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air. I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle. It's a good metaphor. The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. The absence of physical boundary was one of glorious bliss. Recently, as Dr. Roland Griffith, I met him once at a conference in San Francisco, surprise, surprise. A conference on awe, and this was just when he was embarking on his experiments with

psilocybin, which were the first experiments on hallucinogens that were permitted by the National Institute of Mental Health in some three, four decades. He had to be very careful to lay out the scientific protocols so that the ethics committees would approve the experiments and so that the ethics committees would approve the experiments and so that the federal funding agencies would also allow the experiments to go through. He started to experiment with Silasayban, and he's found a number and published a number of very interesting results. results, one was that a single psilocybin trip, and I specify trip because sometimes when

people take psilocybin out the doses that Griffith uses, they don't have a psychedelic experience. Most people who take the dose do, but not everyone. Those who take the dose and don't have the mystical experience don't experience the consequences of taking the drug. And the consequences can be quite profound. So one consequence is that if you have the mystical experience that's associated with psilocybin ingestion, you're liable to represent that to others and yourself as one of the two or three most important experiences of your entire life.

So that would be at the same level as the birth of your child or your marriage, let's say, assuming that those were transcendent experiences. But that's how people describe them. So that's very interesting in and of itself, then the next thing that Griffith, another thing that Griffith reported was that one year after a psilocybin dose, a single psilocybin dose, profound enough to induce a mystical experience, the trait openness of the participants had increased one standard deviation, which is a tremendous amount. And so it looked like one dose produced a permanent neurological and psychological transformation.

Now, you know, I'm not saying that that's a good thing. I'm not saying that because I don't think that openness is an un-troubled blessing. But it's certainly a testament to the unbelievable potency of the drugs. There's about a 10% chance, by the way, with psilocybin ingestion of a trip to hell. And so that's certainly something very much worth considering when you're thinking about the potential effects of this kind of experience. So the mystical experience produced by psilasivan is rated by people as the most profound, among the most profound experience of their life, as life-changing. It produces permanent personality transformations, 85% success in smoking cessation with a single

dose. That's another thing that Griffiths demonstrated. Now, that is mind-boggling because there are chemical treatments for smoking cessation. Bupro-Pryon is one. It reduces craving to some degree, but its success rate is nowhere near 85%. Certainly not with a single dose. And so we don't understand how it can be that that occurs, but it's nicely documented by Griffith's team.

In this experiment, he gave psilocybin to people who were dying of cancer. Cancer patients often develop chronic clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety. Previous studies suggest that psilocybin may decrease depression and anxiety in cancer patients. Eldis Huxley took LSD on his deathbed, by the way. So the idea that there was something about psychedelic substances that could buffer people against the catastrophes of mortality is an idea that's as old as experimentation with the drug itself.

The effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life-threatening diagnoses and symptoms of depression and or anxiety unsurprisingly. I don't really know if it's reasonable to describe the emotional state of people diagnosed with cancer of uncertain prognosis or mortal significance as depression precisely. You know what I mean? If you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have intractable fatal cancer, the normative response is to be rather upset and anxious about that.

And so one of the things that bothers me about clinical psychiatry and clinical psychology is the automatic presupposition that even overwhelming states of negative emotion are properly categorized as depression. Because I don't think you're depressed when you get a cancer diagnosis. I don't think that's the right way to think about it.

I think that you have a big problem. And it's not surprising that you're overwhelmed by negative emotion. And to think about that as a psychiatric malfunction is a major error. But anyways, it's a side issue with regards to this study. The effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life threateningthreatening diagnosis

and symptoms of depression and or anxiety. I cannot imagine how they got this through an ethics committee. It's just, we're going to take people who have uncertain diagnosis of cancer that are potentially life-threatening and we're going to give them psychedelics. It's like, but they did it. They did it. I think it's a testament to Griffith's stature as a researcher that that was allowable. This was a randomized double-blind crossover trial, very carefully designed clinical investigation. People were assigned to the treatment group or to the drug

group or the non-drug group randomly, blindly. And it investigated the effects of the drug also with different doses, which is another hallmark of a well-designed pharmacological study. Very low placebo-like dose, one or three milligrams per 70 kilograms of body weight, versus a high dose, 22 or 30 milligrams per 70 kilograms of psilocybin, chemical psilocybin administered in counterbalance sequence, with five weeks between sessions and his six month follow-up. Instruction to participants and staff minimized the effects of expectancy. Participant staff and community observers rated participant moods, attitudes and behaviors throughout the study.

That's also the hallmark of a well-designed study because they didn't rely on a single source of information for the outcome data, right? They go self-reports, that's fine, but they had relatively objective observers also gather data at the same time. Hydro-silocybin produced large decreases in clinician and self-related measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety. And that's interesting.

It's a subtle and scientifically sparse statement, but it's a very interesting one. It was the int- there's an intimation of a causal relationship here, increases in quality of life, life meaning, and decreases in death anxiety. I mean, the intimation there is that one of the ways of decreasing your anxiety about of life, life, meaning, and decreases in death anxiety. I mean, the intimation there is that one of the ways of decreasing your anxiety about death is to increase the felt meaning in your life. And the psilocybin dosages just potentiate that, but it's a good thing to know in a general manner,

if it happens to be a generalizable truth, right? If you're terrified of mortality, terrified of vulnerability, there's always the possibility that the life path that you're following isn't rich enough to buffer you against the negative element of existence. It's a reasonable hypothesis. And an optimistic one, I think, although a difficult one. At six month follow-up, these changes were sustained

with about 80% of participants continuing to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety. Stephen Ross commenting about this, he was a co-investigator, said, it is simply unprecedented in psychiatry that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results. Right, which means we have no idea why this happens.

Participants have attributed improvements in attitudes about life slash self-mood relationships and spirituality to the high dose experience with more than 80% endorsing moderately or greater increased well-being and life satisfaction. Community observers showed corresponding changes. Mystical types silasilisibin experience on session day mediated the effect of silasibin dose on therapeutic outcomes.

What that means is that, well, when researchers were trying to look at a causal relationship between drug and gestion and the positive outcome. The causal relationship was drug and gestion, mystical experience, positive outcome. It wasn't drug and gestion, positive outcome. There had to be the experience produced by the pharmaceutical agent in order for the pharmaceutical agent to have had its effect. Now, we don't, again, we don't know why that is either. I mean, maybe some people need a higher dose. Who knows? Because people very tremendously in their sensitivity

to pharmaceutical substances. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, I'm telling you for a variety of reasons. One is, the first is, make no mistake about it. Human beings have the capacity for forms of consciousness that are radically unlike our normative forms of consciousness. And the evidence that those alternative forms of consciousness are purely pathological, which is the simplest explanation, right?

A perturbative system produces pathology, that's negative. That is the simplest explanation. The evidence for that is weak at best, leaving out the bad trip issue, which is non-trivial. The empirical evidence, as it accrues, in fact seems to suggest that the consequence of mystical, positive, mystical experiences associated with psychedelic intake is overwhelmingly positive, even in extreme situations, and you really can't find a more extreme situation than uncertain cancer diagnosis with concomitant depression and anxiety. I mean that's not as bad as it gets but it's kind of in the ballpark. And so the fact that even under circumstances like that there was the overwhelming

probability that the experience would be positive because that's another thing you wouldn't expect, you know, even from some of the earlier earliest discussions about psychedelic use that we're put forth by people, including Timothy Larry, describing the importance of set, right, so that the early experimenters noted that if you had a psychedelic experience and you were in a bad state or in a bad place, that that was one of the precursors to a bad trip that the negative emotion that you entered the Experience with could be magnified tremendously by the by the chemical substance and so that it was necessary to Be somewhere safe to be around people that you trust to be in a familiar environment to get all the variables that you could control under control.

But here is a situation where that isn't what's happening at all because people have this cancer diagnosis of un-specified outcome and they still, the vast majority of them, had a positive experience and the positive experience had long-lasting positive consequences. So the case that the transcendent experience is not real, that's wrong. It's real. Now we don't know what that means because it actually challenges to some degree our concepts of what constitutes real. But it's certainly well within the realm of normative human experience. So it's part of the human capacity. And, you know, there's been other neurological experiments too. There's a researcher, a Canadian researcher, if I remember correctly,

who invented something he called the God Helmet, and it used electromagnetic stimulation, brain stimulation, to induce mystical experiences. Now, I don't remember what part of the brain he was shutting off or activating with that particular gadget. But, and, you know, there's all sorts of other indications of this sort of thing that have cropped up in other domains of the neurological literature, for example.

It's very common for people who are epileptic to have religious experiences as part of the pro-dromat to the actual seizure. That was the case with Dostoevsky, for example, who had incredibly intense religious experiences that would culminate in epileptic seizure. And he said that they were of sufficient quality that he would give up his whole life to have had them. And the funny thing too is that, in my reading of Dostoevsky at least, is that I think that epileptic seizures

and the associated mystical experiences were part of what made him a transcendently brilliant author. I don't think that he would have broken through into the domains of insight that he possessed without those strange neurological experiences. And it was certainly not the case that his epilepsy or the experiences that were associated with it produced what you might describe as an impairment in his cognitive function, quite the contrary,

at least that's how it looks to me. Here's another, here's another something worth considering, and I don't know how important it is, but it might be really important. It depends on how important this is something that Carl Jung said, so it depends on how important Jung is. Now Freud established the field of psychoanalysis, and with it, investigation, I would say, rigorous investigation into the contents of the unconscious. A modern psychologist and psychiatrist like to, what would you say, denigrate Freud.

And I think there's a reason for that. I think that Freud's fundamental insights were so profound and so valuable that they got immediately absorbed into our culture. And now they seem self-evident. And so that all that's left of Freud is his errors. Because we believe everything else, we believe all the profound things he discovered. We just take them for granted. And so we don't believe the things that he said that weren't quite on the money.

And that's all we credit with him with now. But he was certainly the first person who brought up the idea of the unconscious in a rigorous manner. And he was the first person to do a rigorous examination of dreams, because the interpretation of dreams is a great book. It's a well worth reading. And he was the first person to note that people were, in some sense, inhabited by subpersonalities that had a certain degree of autonomy and independent life, brilliant observation, the cognitive psychologist haven't caught up with that at all yet.

Jung was profoundly affected by Freud. Jung was profoundly affected by Nietzsche and by Freud. Those were his two main intellectual influences. I don't think one more than the other. He split with Freud on the religious issue. That was what caused the disruption in their relationship. And I think it's an extremely interesting historical occurrence. It might be a profound significance. Freud believed that the fundamental myth of the human being was the Edipel myth.

And the Edipel myth from a broader perspective is a failed hero's story So the Edipal myth is the myth of a man who develops who grows up, but then accidentally Becomes too close to his mother sleeps with her He doesn't know who she is and as a consequence blinds himself and there's a There's a there's a warning about human development gone wrong in that story. And I think that Freud put his finger on it extraordinarily well, because human beings

have a very long period of dependency. And one of the things that you do see in clinical practice is that many people's problems are associated with their inability to break free of their family, like they're consumed by the family drama, right? They can't get beyond what happened to them in their family. They're stuck in the past. And that's equivalent symbolically speaking, you might say, to the idea of being too close

to your mother of the boundaries being improperly specified. That happens far more often than anyone would like to think. As I said, Freud thought it was a universal. But Jung, see, he had a different idea, and his idea was that it wasn't the failed hero story that was the universal human myth. It was the successful hero story. And that's a big difference. I could seriously, a big difference. Because the successful hero story is,

remember in Sleeping Beauty, you may remember this in the Disney movie, the evil queen traps the prince in a dungeon, and she's not going to let him out till he's old, right? And so there's this comical scene where she's down in the dungeon, he's old in chains and she's laughing at him, telling him what his future is going to be like.

She's quite evil. And she paints this wonderful picture of him being freed in like 80 years and hobbling out of the castle on his horse that's so old, he can barely stand up in him with gray hair. And she recites this story of his eventual triumphant departure from the castle as an old and decrepit man. And she has a great laugh about it.

And it's nice. It's a real punchy story. It's really something wonderful for children, that story. And he gets free of the shackles. And the things things that freedom are three little female fairies. So it's the positive aspect of the feminine that frees him from the dungeon. So it's very interesting and very accurate from a psychological perspective. It's the negative element of the feminine that encapsulates him in the dungeon. And it's the positive element of the feminine that frees him.

And then he has a, the queen, the evil queen, is not very happy when he escapes. You may remember that she stands on top of her castle tower and starts to spin off cosmic sparks. I mean, she's quite the creature involved in flame. And then she turns into a dragon. And then the prince has to fight with her in order to make contact with sleeping beauty and awaken

her from her comatose existence as her unconscious existence. And what's a brilliant, it's a brilliant representation of the successful hero myth, he doesn't end up staying in an unholy relationship with his mother, let's say. He escapes. And then conquerors, the worst thing that can be imagined and is enabled by that. And that as a consequence, he's able to wake the slumbering feminine from its coma. And that's a Jungian story.

And that's the story that he juxtaposed against Freud. See Freud thought of religious phenomena as part of an occult tide that would drown rationality. That's why Freud was so vehemently anti-religious. And Jung thought, no, it's not the case. You're throwing the baby out with the bath water. There's something profound and central to the hero myth. And Jungian clinical work is essentially

the awakening of the hero myth in the, in the, in the, in the, in the client or in the patient to conceptualize yourself as that which confront chaos and triumph and that that's associated with an enobling of the of consciousness and the establishment of proper positive relationships between male and female. And you know, I'm a skeptical person. I'm a very, very skeptical person. And I've tried with every trick I have to put a lever underneath Jung's story and lift it up

and disrupt it. And I can't do it. I think he was right, and that Freud was wrong. I mean, I have great respect for Freud. I think he got the problem diagnosed very, very nicely. And in my clinical work, I see the phenomena that Freud described emerged continually, constantly. The best, if you're interested in that,

there's a documentary you should watch. I may have mentioned it before. I think it's the best documentary ever made. Certainly the best one I've ever seen. It's called Crum. And it's about an underground cartoonist, Robert Crum, who was part of the hippie movement, and although he hated hippies,

he was part of the hippie movement in the 60s in San Francisco and started the entire underground comic, what culture that manifested itself eventually in graphic novels. There's quite a significant figure from the perspective of popular art and a very very intelligent man. And also I would say a hero, although a very bent and depraved and warped one, someone

very acutely aware of his own shadow, and the documentary outlines his attempts to escape from his absolutely dreadful mother. And the failure of his two brothers to do the same thing, one of whom ended up as a street beggar in San Francisco and the other who drank furniture polish and died six months after the documentary was produced, it's an unbelievably shocking documentary. It's the only piece of film that I've ever seen

that captures Freudian pathology. I've never seen anything. Because you can't see it generally unless you're in a clinical situation unless you know the details of someone's lives, the personal intimate details. You cannot communicate it. But the documenterist who made the film,

who was Robert Zweigoff, if I remember correctly, was a friend of the crumbs. And so he got access in a way that no one else would have. And there were also very forthright and forthcoming about their situation in general. I would highly recommend that. It's a real punch. If you want to know how a rapist thinks,

like if you actually want to know, because maybe you don't want to know, in fact, you probably don't want to know. Right, because do you really want to know that? Because to understand that means to put yourself in that position and to understand it. If you really want to know how a serial sexual predator thinks and why, if you watch Crumman, you pay attention,

you'll know. And that's only a tiny bit of what the film has to offer. It's really quite remarkable. Anyways, Jung's really quite remarkable. Anyways, Jung split with Freud on the issue of the Edipoll story as the fundamental myth of humankind and on the issue of the validity of the religious viewpoint. And Jung came down heavily on the side of the validity of the religious viewpoint. And Jung came down heavily on the side of the validity of the religious viewpoint.

And he established that in a book called Symbols of Transformation, which was written in 1914. And that's the book that produced the permanent split with Freud. And that book, I would say that book's actually been written three times. It was written as symbols of four times, written as symbols of transformation, which Jung extensively revised when he was old. And then it was rewritten

in a sense by a student of Jung's called Eric Neumann, who is also someone I would really recommend. Eric Neumann, I think, is Jung's greatest student. And he wrote two books. He wrote one called the Origins in History of Consciousness, which is a description of the development of consciousness out of unconsciousness using the hero myth as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as an interpretive skeleton. So Newman viewed the hero myth as the dramatized story of the emergence of human consciousness out of the surrounding unconsciousness in which it was embedded. The struggle for consciousness, the struggle of consciousness upward towards the light,

like a lotus flower struggles up through the mock and the water to lay itself on the surface of the water and bloom and reveal the Buddha, which is of course what the lotus flower does from a symbolic perspective. For Neumann, the hero's story was the story of the successful development of consciousness. And the origins of consciousness, the origins and history of consciousness is a great book.

Interestingly, Camille Pallia wrote, read, the origins and history of consciousness. She's one of the few mainstream intellectuals that I've ever encountered who read that and commented on it. And she believed that it would be sufficient antidote to postmodern denigration of literature. She thought it was that powerful of work. And I believe that.

I think it's a remarkable book. Carl Jung wrote the forward to that book, and he said in the forward that it was the book that he wished he would have written. So sort of like Jung, he wrote, I don't remember how many volumes, dozens of very thick, difficult volumes, was like, Noiman was able to distill those into a single volume statement. And so I would also say if you're interested in Jung, the best book to read is the origins in history of consciousness. It's the best intro into the Jungian world.

Jung's very difficult to understand. It requires a real shift of perspective in order to understand what he's talking about. And Neumann wrote another book called The Great Mother, which is a little bit more specialized in some sense, but it's also extremely interesting because it flashes out the archetype of chaos and its representation as feminine. It's a brilliant book as well, and highly worth reading, both those books. Anyways, Jung was a very strange person and a visionary.

And so that's kept him outside of the academic realm, almost entirely. I mean, I was constantly warned as an undergraduate, and then a graduate student, and then a professor, against ever talking about Jung in any way whatsoever. When I went on the job market, when I was at McGill, when I graduated from McGill, I had done my scientific research on alcoholism and I had a fairly lengthy publication record

that was pure empirical research and really neurophysiological research into the pharmacology of alcoholism. And I established a reasonably solid dossier of publications but at the same time I was writing this book that became maps of meaning. And so I'd split my time in graduate student school between these two endeavors,

one very specifically neurological and pharmacological and really biologically based and the other very abstract, religious, symbolic, psychoanalytic. The complete opposite, but I could see that the two things overlapped really nicely. And there was a number of scientists at the time that were also drawing the same conclusions, the same relationship between the biology and the psychoanalysis, Yacht Panks'ep, who wrote a book called Effective Neuroscience, which is a great classic, is one of those people who saw the relationship between the neurobiology of emotion and motivation

and the psychoanalytic insights. Never became a mainstream view, but I think it's too complex. I think that bridging the gap between the biology and the symbolic is too much for people, generally speaking. It was certainly virtually too much for me because I got quite ill when I was a graduate student. I think for a variety of reasons, I also would go out and party three nights a week.

And so that probably had something to do with it. But working on those two things simultaneously was also rather exhausting. Now, Jung was a tremendously insightful clinician. And he was a strange person, introverted visionary, high in introversion, very, very, very, very, very high in openness, like off the charts. And also, God only knows what his IQ was. I mean, every time I read Jung, it's like reading Nietzsche. It's terrifying because, you know, he's so damn smart that he can think up answers to questions that you don't even, it's not like you don't understand the answers. It's never conceptualized the damn questions. It's really something to read someone like that, right? Who says, well, here's a mystery and you think, wow, I never thought of that as a mystery. And here's the solution. It's like, OK, that's something.

You know, and he could read Greek, and he read all the ancient. He read a very large variety of ancient languages, and was very familiar with the entire corpus of astrological thought, and of alchemical thought, and of classic literature, and biblical stories, and I mean, educated in a way that no one is educated now. And so he's very daunting person to encounter and terrifying, absolutely terrifying.

His book, Ion, which is the second volume of volume nine, which is the archetypes of the collective unconscious, that damn book is just absolutely terrifying because Jung, he's one of these visionaries who can see way underneath the social structures and look at patterns that are developing across, in Jung's case, across thousands of years and lays them out. And so that's a really something to encounter. Ion is a terrifying book. Anyways, one question might be, well, because I read you,

and I think, how the hell did he know these things? How could he figure these things out? I can't understand how he could possibly know these things. Well, here's a partial answer. Jung was a visionary. And so what that means, as far as I can tell, and we could do a little quick survey here. How many of you think you think in words? Put up your hands.

Do you think in words? Okay, so it looks like, what about pictures? How many of you think in pictures? Okay, so that's interesting. How many of you think, that's about half and half, by the way, probably a fewer on the word side. How many of you think in pictures and words? Okay, and so, all right, so it was roughly a third in each category, but that's also something that I really haven't encountered any research on from the neuropsychological perspective. It's like,

well, do you think in pictures or do you think in words? And is that actually a reliable distinction? I think I think in words most of the time, but I can think in pictures, like if I'm trying to build something I can think in pictures very almost instantaneously, but it isn't my natural mode of thinking. I'm hyperverbal and so my natural mode of thinking is to think everything through in words. But I know my wife isn't like that.

She thinks in images and then has to translate them into words. And so anyways, Jung was very literate and he could really think in words, but he could really think in images also talking to my wife quite extensively, like her, the intensity of her visualization vastly exceeds mine. So for example, if I close my eyes and try to imagine the crowd in front of me, it's pretty low resolution and vague and not brilliantly colored and vivid. It's like I'm seeing through a glass darkly, let's say. I can't bring images to mind with spectacular clarity, but my wife is very good at that, and Jung seemed to be absolutely adgenious at that kind of thinking.

And he had a lot of visionaries in his family history as well. So I don't know to what degree there's a hereditary component of that. And I don't know to what degree that's actually like a neurological specialization. I presume it would be associated with the trade openness distinguishes itself differentiates itself into interesting ideas and interested in aesthetics. And my suspicion is that the people who are more interested in aesthetics are the visionary types,

the ones that think in images. Anyways, Jung could really think in images, and he could imagine beings. And I had a client once who was a lucid dreamer, and how many of you have had a lucid dream? So you know you're dreaming, well, you're, okay, many. That phenomenon wasn't really even identified as a phenomenon until the end of the 19th century.

There was a book written about it that Freud tried to get his hands on, but couldn't, because it was a very rare book. And then there was a researcher, about 30 years ago, who started to study lucid dreams. But anyways, I had a client who was a lucid dreamer. And one of the things she could do was ask her dream characters what information they were trying to convey, and they would tell her.

So that was very interesting. And one of the consequences of that was, and I don't have this story completely right in my memory, but it's close enough. She was afraid of a very large number of things, and in her dream, I think it was a gypsy standing by a wagon, told her that if she was going to be successful in university, that she would have to visit a slaughterhouse, And that was something that was way beyond her capacity to tolerate. She was a vegetarian.

She couldn't stand the sight of raw meat, even. And so she was very oppressed and depressed and anxious because of the slaughterhouse nature of existence. And so her dream focused on that. And one of the consequences of that, because the slaughterhouse was out of the question as a clinical intervention. I took her to an embalming,

right, because I asked her, I asked her, what might be equivalent to that, and so she suggested that, and exposure therapy is a hallmark of clinical psychology, right, one of the things you do with people as a clinician is you find out what they're afraid of, and you gradually and voluntarily expose them to that, and that cures them. And that's associated with the hero myth, right? It's exactly the same thing.

It's like, there's a dragon, it's stopping you, because there's lots of dragons, most of them aren't stopping you. You can ignore them, you don't have to just go, you know, slash away it randomly. You're not supposed to be fighting dragons that aren't in your way. But if they are in your way, you can't ignore them. And then you decompose them into sub-dragons. And you have people, you know, take them on. And as they take them on, they dispense with the dragon.

And they gain the power of the dragons, like a video game. Actually, a video game is like that. That's why people like the video games. Well, that's right, right? There's a reason that you absorb power when you overcome things when you play a video game. It's not like that's intrinsic to the video game structure. That's an archetypal idea.

Anyways, we went and saw an embombing, which was a very interesting experience. And quite useful for her, because she knew what she could tolerate after that. And it was a hell of a lot more than she thought she could tolerate. And so that's very useful to know. Back to you, he's a visionary thinker.

Now, my client, I said she could lose a dream, and she could ask her dream characters what they wanted and what they were trying to communicate to her. So that was pretty interesting. That happens spontaneously, had nothing to do with me. I mean, I'm interested in dreams and many of my clients are great dreamers, especially the creative ones, because I think it's a hallmark of creativity to have vivid dreams and to be able to remember them. But that was a faculty that was natural to her.

Jung had this other client at one time, at one point, and she had a variety of fears, and she had this dream that she told me. And she was walking down a beach, and on the side of the beach up a dune, a small dune, there was this old man with a snake, a big python, and there's a crowd around him, and she was walking by the snake handler and the snake and the crowd, and she didn't want to have anything to do with them. He was sort of showing people this snake, and she told me that dream, and I thought, well, you know, you probably need to go see that snake.

And so I relaxed her, quasi-hypnotic technique, it's very straightforward. Hypnosis is generally nothing but pronounced relaxation. Although you have to be susceptible to hypnosis to actually fall into hypnotic trance as a consequence of being relaxed. I just relaxed her. I had her breathe deeply and pay attention to different parts of her body and just relax her muscles one by one essentially so that she could concentrate. And then I told her we'd play with the dream a little bit. It's a union technique. I said,

well, so call the dream image to mind, which she could do quite well. I said, okay, so let's explore it. It's like pretend, It's like pretend play. If you're a kid and you're pretend playing, you don't exactly direct the game, right? You play the game. So it's partly your direction, obviously, because you're the player. But the thing also happens spontaneously of its own accord.

And you can think about that as a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind in some sense, it's a developmental dialogue. It's not a fun game if you just direct it. It's only a fun game if you're inviting and something is welling up as a consequence. It's the same thing that happens when you're engaged in some kind of artistic or literary production.

If it's all top down, if you're forcing it, then it's propaganda, it's empty. What do you want to sort of put yourself in a receptive state of mind, in an imaginative state of mind, and it's sort of half you and half nature itself, manifesting itself in your creative imagination. And that was the sort of state that we were striving for. And I asked her when she was in, relaxed.

I said, well, what do you think about the snake handler? And she said, well, he's probably a charlatan. And he's just there trying to impress the crowd and to show off. And she was afraid to go up there because she thought people would push her towards the snake. And she'd have to touch it. And so there was a fear of the crowd issue going on there, too. And I said, well, just look, go up there,

but do it under these conditions. Is it, you know, if people get pushy, what are you going to tell them? And so we figured out something. He said, look, you just tell is that, you know, if people get pushy, what are you going to tell them? And so we figured out something. He said, look, you just tell them that, you know, you want to look at the snake at your own pace and that you don't need any encouragement or help. And it would be good if you were just left alone. So that enabled her to defend herself. So she was afraid that the crowd would push her to do something that she didn't want to

do. That was part of the theme of the dream. So anyway, she eventually climbed the dune in her imagination and went into the crowd would push her to do something that she didn't want to do. That was part of the theme of the dream. So anyway, she eventually climbed the dune in her imagination and went into the crowd and the crowd turned out to be quite welcoming and not hostile and not pushy, which isn't what you'd expect, right? Because you'd think the crowd would have reacted in accordance with her fear since it was her fantasy. But that's the thing about fantasies.

They have this autonomous quality. But the crowd was welcoming in Nauthaustal and it turned out that the snake handler wasn't a charlatan. He was just an old guy who had this snake and he was out there just showing it to people because he thought it was a cool thing and that maybe it was good for people to come and look at a snake. And so she got close enough to the snake to touch it. And so I'm telling you that because I want you to understand a bit more about what Jung was trying to do. And so he wrote these books, notebooks that haven't been published yet called the Black Books. And the Black Books are the documentation of his experiments with his imagination.

And what he would do is, like a child daydreams, he regained that faculty, although I think with Jung it was a faculty that had never really disappeared. And he had figures of imagination that came to him that he could speak with. And he spoke with these figures of imagination and documented that over a very long period of time. And that was originally, that was eventually distilled into a book called The Red Book, which was published about three or four years ago. And it was a book that young regarded as the central source from which all his inspiration emerged. The way it looks to me is that we embody a lot of information in our action.

And our action has developed as a consequence of imitating other people. Not only the people around us, but the people around us, imitated the people who came before them, and those people imitated the people who came before them, and so on, so far back that it's as far back as you can go. And so you embody these patterns of behavior that are extremely informative, that you don't understand, that are a consequence of collective imitation

across the centuries. And then those patterns can become manifest as figures of the imagination. And those figures of imagination are the distillations of patterns of behavior. And so as the distillations of patterns of behavior, they have content and it's not you that content. It's, you could even think about it as content

that's evolved, although it's culturally transmitted, it's content that's evolved. although it's culturally transmitted, it's content that's evolved. And so these figures of the imagination can reveal the structure of reality to you. And that's what happened with Jung. And that's what he described in the red book. And that was what permeated his psychology, a psychology that was based on the presupposition,

that the fundamental archetypal structures of religious belief were not pathological, not deceitful, not protective in some delusional sense against the fear of death, but quite the contrary, the very stories that enabled us to move forward as confident human beings in the face of chaos itself. And it's conceivable, I think, perhaps, probable, that nothing more important conceptually happened in the 20th century than that. Because it was the first time post-enlightenment

that a rapprochement between the intellect and the underlying religious archetypal substructure occurred. You have in the capacious intellect of Jung, and the same thing happened to some degree with Piaget, the religious domain and the factual domain were brought back together. And the fact of Jung's enduring and increasing popularity and influence, I would say, is a direct consequence of that. Now, some of his work was spun off into the new age, and the new age is a very optimistic and naive movement. It's predicated on the idea that you can do nothing, say, but follow your bliss, and that will take you ever higher to enlightenment. And that's not the Union

idea at all. The Union idea is that what you most need will be found where you least want to look. So there's this story, King Arthur. There's this story of King Arthur. They're all in a round table, right? King Arthur in his's this story of King Arthur. They're all in a round table, right? King Arthur and his knights, they're all equals. They're all superordinate, but they're all equals. And they go off to look for the Holy Grail. And the Holy Grail is the container of the redemptive substance, whatever that is.

It might be the cup that Christ used at the last supper, it might be chalice that was used to capture his blood on the cross, right? When he was pierced by a sword, the story is different, but that's the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is lost. That's the redemptive substance, and the Knights of King Arthur go off to search for the Holy Grail, but they don't know where to look.

So where do you look when you don't know where to look? For something you need desperately, but have lost. Well, each of the nights goes into the forest at the point that looks darkest to him. And that's Union psychoanalysis in a nutshell. It's like that which you fear and avoid, that's which you hold in contempt, that which disgusts you, and that you avoid. That's the gateway to what you need to know. There's nothing new age about that, that's for sure.

Now Jung, when he started this endeavor, he started with this, this is part of the notebooks from the black book. He said, he wrote, my soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak. I call you. Are you there?

I've returned. I'm here again. I've shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet. And I've come to you. I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again. For the Jungians, the hero's journey is a journey within. And I think that that's probably the bias of introverts

to believe that the hero's journey is only an inward journey. I think that it can be an outward journey too, because I don't think it matters where you confront the unknown, whether it's within or without what matters is whether or not you confront the unknown. That's what matters. But he found that what he had ignored was an undiscovered part of himself. So that might be something that was equivalent

to Huxley's notion that there's tremendous potential breadth in the realm of human conscious experience. And Huxley was influenced to some degree by Jung. Now Jung knew of Huxley's experiments and had commented on psychedelic use. And he said something like, beware of wisdom you did not

earn. And Dune was very good at stating things very profoundly, very simply. And that's a very intelligent piece of advice. Beware of wisdom you did not earn. He wrote a paper, if you're interested in this sort of thing. He wrote a paper called the relations between the ego and the unconscious, which is an absolute

master work, but completely incomprehensible unless you know what it's about. And what it's about is the danger of what he called ego inflation. And so one of the things that can happen as a consequence of a revelatory experience is that the division between the individual ego and what would you call it? It's so hard to come up with a word that isn't somehow naive or cliched to erase the relationship, the boundary between the specific consciousness of the ego and the more generalized consciousness and more generalized consciousness as such is a dangerous thing to do.

Because you can start to equate yourself, your specific self with that more generalized consciousness as such. And Jung thought about that is something akin to a psychotic inflation. And the paper, Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious is the ego and the unconscious is a document that tells you how to avoid that if you're playing in this kind of

realm and one of the injunctions is to keep your feet on the ground. He thought that was what partly what happened to Nietzsche was that Nietzsche wasn't grounded enough in lifezsche wasn't grounded enough in life. He wasn't grounded enough in day-to-day rituals and routines and the mundane. Now you can debate whether or not that's the case, whether or not that's a reasonable argument, but that was still what Jung believed. Okay, so why am I telling you all this?

I'll finish with this. From December 1913 onward, Jung carried on in the same procedure, deliberately evoking a fantasy and a waking state, and then entering into it as a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of drama that is thinking in pictorial form. In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness.

The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking masculine. These journals are Jung's contemporaneous clinical ledger to his most difficult experiment or what he later describes as a voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world. Jung believed that we were dreaming all the time, but that during waking life, the pressure of external images was such that the unconscious fantasy imagery was, or that the fantasy imagery was of insufficient magnitude

to be conscious, but that we were always situated in a dream in relationship to the world. So, when we started talking about the creation of the universe at the beginning of the Genesis stories, I spent quite a long time setting the stage for the stories because there's no point in having a conversation about the God who gives rise to being, unless you have some sense of what that might conceivably mean to the modern mind.

And I felt the same way about Abrahamic stories as I couldn't get handle on them until I could understand and articulate more clearly. What it might mean, how a modern person might understand a direct experience of God in the first question would be, is such a thing possible. And the answer to that seems to be a qualified yes. First of all, it's a universal human experience. That's a very strange thing.

It's not something that people have made up, as Freud might have it, as a defense against death. It's not a tenable hypothesis. It's a realm of potential experience. Now, that experience doesn't necessarily have to have the Judeo-Christian content that we've been discussing. Quite the contrary, there are manifestations of this, these alternative forms of consciousness

all over the world that take on their own peculiar forms, although they're patterned to some degree, like the hero myth, for example, a myth of the fight against the dragon seems to be unbelievably widespread. And so it's not as if it's random. Sorry, I should just see what time it is here. But there's not much point in having a discussion about what happens to Abraham, unless you

can conceptualize it in terms that are amenable to modern skeptical consciousness. So we can establish the proposition that mystical experience is not only possible, it's quite common and it's inducible in a variety of ways and the manner in which it's inducible is reliable and there's no evidence as well that it's pathological and in fact there's a fair bit of evidence that the patterns of behavior that are associated

with the mystical experience are core elements of proper human adaptation in the world. The Abrahamic stories open up with a manifest God. Now, I'm going to read you some things from Friedman who wrote the disappearance of God. He was trying to look at the underlying structure of the stories. Now, Friedman noted that the books in the Old Testament were written by a lot of different people at very different times, and then they were sequenced by other people for reasons that we don't exactly understand. But there's still an underlying narrative. There's multiple underlying narrative unities, despite the fact of that rather arbitrary sequencing.

And that's a strange thing. You know, I guess you could say, if you had a collection of ancient books and you were trying to put them together, you'd try to put them together in some way that made sense, right? And it wouldn't make sense unless you stumbled across some kind of underlying narrative that allowed you to order them. And so it's not entirely surprising that they're ordered in a manner that's comprehensible. But Friedman's comments on the underlying narrative structure,

part of it was, well, we'll go through this. The books of the Old Testament were composed by great many authors according to both traditional religious views and modern critical scholarship. The phenomenon of the diminishing apparent presence of God across so many stories, through so many books, by so many authors, spread over so many centuries, is consistent enough to be striking, impressive, and ultimately mysterious.

But the hiding of the divine face is only half the story. There's another development also extending across the course of the entire narrative of the Hebrew Bible, which we must see before we can appreciate the full force of this phenomena. And before we can pose a solution to the mystery of this, of how this happened, gradually from Genesis to Ezra and Esther, there is a transition from divine to human responsibility for life on Earth. The story begins in Genesis with God in complete control of the creation,

but by the end humans have arrived at a stage at which, in all apparent ways, they have responsibility for the fate of the world. The first two human beings, Adam and Eve, take little responsibility themselves. They do not design or build anything. When they're embarrassed over their nudity, they do not make clothes. They cover themselves with leaves. It's God who makes their first clothing for them. Noah, by no means a fully developed personality,

Noah is not an every man either. Broadly speaking, he reflects a step beyond Adam and even human character and responsibility. Abraham, beyond the counts of divine commands that Abraham does carry out, the narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham does carry out, 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 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, and 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 man's life. The Abraham section thus develops the personality and character of a man to a new degree in biblical narrative, while picturing in him a new degree of responsibility.

It is not just that Abraham is kindler, kinder, gentler, more intrepid, more ethical, or a better debater than his ancestor Noah. Rather, both the Noah and the Abraham stories are pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance gentler, more intrepid, more ethical, or a better debater than his ancestor, Noah, rather both the Noah and the 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 great deal stronger and bolder than Abraham. I don't know what that means, you know.

See, it isn't, it is certainly the case that the individual exists in the modern world, the differentiated, self-aware, self-conscious individual. And it's certainly the case that that wasn't the case at some point in the past. And so it's the case that there's been a development. I don't know if you could call it a progression, but a development of the autonomous individual over some span of historical time. Now we don't know how long that's been, but my suspicions are it hasn't been that long. I mean, I read once about a neolithic ceremony that involved the particular placement of a bare skull in a cave, and then I read that, and they had found these placements in caves that were at least 25,000 years old, and then I read that they found caves in Japan among

the Aenu who were the indigenous inhabitants of Japanese territory and rather archaic people who had the same ceremony with the bear and that put the skull in the same orientation and place in caves and that that tradition remained unbroken for about 25,000 years. And you think it well is it possible for an oral or ritual tradition to remain unbroken for spans of tens of thousands of years? And the answer to that is not only is it possible, it's actually the norm. Because like one chimpanzee is like the next chimpanzee, right, in the progression, in the biological progression.

If you took a chimpanzee troop now, and you went back 25,000 years, and you looked at a chimpanzee troop, it'd be the same thing. There's no historical progression. That's how you can tell the chimps really don't have culture. Because if they could even create one-one thousandth of a percent of culture, transmissible culture, per generation, it wouldn't take more than about a million years before they'd have a whole civilization. And they don't. They're the same as they were. And so the continuity, the stability, and unchanging nature of a species essentially speaking

is the rule that the variant is us. It's like, what the hell happened after the last ice age? 15,000 years ago. We went from tribal uniform stable to whatever the hell we are now. It's this transition from generic to specific. It's something like that and I can't help but think that that's reflected in this text and that it has something to do with this transition of consciousness from From what from possession by the generic divine to dominance by the specific individual? It's something like that. Is that a neurological transformation? Is that what this is a record of? by the generic divine to dominance by the specific individual. It's something like that.

Is that a neurological transformation? Is that what this is a record of? I mean, we don't know. One of the things Jung said about God, because Jung's relationship with God as an object of belief is very complex. He, in his technical writing, he always talks about the image of God. He never talks about God. He talks about the image of God.

He said that the image of God dwells within. That's not the same thing as God dwelling within, right? Because we could, I mean, all of these capacities that we have for transcendent consciousness could be a byproduct of biological evolution. They can have no reflection. They can have no relationship whatsoever to an actual transcendent reality. There's no way of telling the transcendent reality seems to manifest itself as an element of experience, but that doesn't mean that it has a reality outside of the subjective, even if it exists, as it clearly does. Friedman suggests that what's happening

in the biblical narrative is the sequential emergence of the individual as a redemptive force. And the Old Testament documents that implicitly, unconsciously, as a consequence of descriptive fantasy, and that that's what's going on in the book. And that, so the cosmos is under the control of generic deity to begin with, something like that, and then that control shifts to localized, identifiable, increasingly personal and detailed individuals.

And you see that in NOAA, and then you see the Abraham, and then you see it in Moses. And then there's this working out of what it would mean to be a fully developed individual. And that's what these stories, they're like prototypes, they're attempts to bring about the proper mode of being. And so Abraham is a manifestation of that,

because he enters into a covenant with God. He's selected by God or enters into a partnership with God. It's not exactly obvious. God provides him with forward motion and intuition and leads him towards a successful mode of being. And it's complex, successful mode of being because Abraham is a very complex life. There's plenty of ups and downs, right? It's not unbroken purity of being towards a divine end.

Abraham lies and cheats and deceives and does all sorts of things that a real person would do. And Moses, for example, kills someone. And so these people, the biblical people, are very genuine individuals. But they're given, with all their faults, with all their sins, with all their deceit, they're still put forth as potential modes of proper models of potential proper being in the world. And the entire corpus of the Bible seems to be nothing but an attempt to keep throwing up variants of the personality,

trying to experiment to find out what personality works in the world. And of course from a Christian perspective, that culminates in the figure of Christ as the redemptive word. And that's associated, as we've already talked about, with the force that brought order out of chaos at the beginning of time. And so, well, that's my attempt to provide proper context for the understanding of the Abrahamic stories. And so hopefully, with that context,

we can move forward being able to swallow the camel, so to speak, of the initial presence of God in the stories. And so we'll return to all of that next week. Let's wait one second. Okay, until people have an opportunity leave, I would very much like to ask the people who are asking the questions to take a few seconds before they ask the question and make sure that the mic is positioned properly so that everyone can hear you

because people keep writing and complaining that while they're very happy with the questions, and I would say the questions have been a very high caliber so far, but they're not very happy that they can't hear them. So I know that you're obviously nervous and in a hurry when you want to ask a question, but take a second or two to set the mic up properly

and make sure that everyone can hear you. And so have a way at it. Hello, Dr. Peterson. Hey, there we go. Tonight, I'd like to ask you about two different psychological disorders, the first being borderline personality disorder.

So two lectures ago, somebody asked you about it and you gave a very sparse answer. I can't remember exactly what you said, but it seemed like it was, there was too much complexity to just answer it right there and then, and then somebody else, also you asked, asked you about the same disorder in your Patreon live stream recently. And when they, when they asked you that, you kind of, you kind of stopped for a moment and something, I don't know, something kind of flicked on in your head. It seemed like, and you, and you thought for a couple seconds and then you said, you know what, I don't think that I can answer that right now because it's just too bloody complex.

And I was wondering just like many young men have gravitated towards your lectures, do you think that there's something about this particular disorder that there's something about people with this particular disorder that might gravitate to your insights and your lectures. Okay, okay, so now I would say probably no to the second one, but I could comment more about borderline personality disorder.

I think I have enough mental energy to do that tonight. So technically speaking, it's often considered the female variant of antisocial personality disorder. So it's classified in the domain of externalizing disorders, acting out disorders. And I think what happens, we don't understand borderline personality disorder very well. I mean it's characterized by tremendous impulsivity, radical confusion of identity, and then this pattern of idealization of people with whom the person afflicted with a disorder is associating with radical idealization of those people and then radical devaluation of them. And then there's another theme that sort of weaves along with it, which is the proclivity

of people with borderline personality to sort of to presume that they will be abandoned and then to act in a manner that makes such abandonment virtually certain. And so it's a very complicated disorder, but that, I think, gets at the crux of it. One of the things that's interesting about people with borderline personality disorder, in my experience, is that they're often quite intelligent. And you see in the person with borderline personality disorder

something like the waste or the squandering of tremendous potential. They seem capable of thinking through the nature of their problems and analyzing them and discussing it, but not capable whatsoever of implementing any solutions. And technically there's no relationship between IQ and conscientiousness. It's very weird because if you read the neuropsychological literature and you read about the functions of the prefrontal cortex, they're usually conceptualized in intellectual terms, and they're associated with planning and strategizing and so forth. And that's what conscientiousness is,

is planning and strategizing and implementation, but the correlation between IQ and conscientiousness is zero, and so is the correlation between working memory and conscientiousness, zero and And so is the correlation between working memory and conscientiousness. Zero and zero is a very low correlation, right? I mean, really, it's hard to find things in psychology that are correlated at zero.

Things tend to be correlated to some degree. They tend to be interrelated. The borderline seems to be able to strategize and to abstract, but not to be able to implement. And so the intellect per se seems to be functional, but it's not embodied in action. It's very, so it can be frustrating to be associated with someone who has borderline personality disorder because they can tell you what the problem is and even tell you what the solution might be but there's no implementation So maybe something went wrong developmentally we don't know exactly how these sorts of things come about the other thing that seems to be Characteristic of borderline people with borderline personality disorder is that they they remind me very much of people who are two years old

and in some manner like people with borderline personality disorder can have temper tantrums in fact they often do and you know now and then you see a temper tantrum and They're usually thrown by two-year-olds, right most people grow out of temper tantrums by the time they're about three They're very rare at four which is a good thing because if they're still there at four, that is not a good diagnostic predictor. That's a, actually, a good diagnostic predictor, but it's not the kind that you want. And, you know, it's funny the way that we respond to two-year-old temper tantrums

because the two-year-old will throw themselves on the ground and eat their hands and their legs on the floor and scream in the gallon, turn red or even blue. I saw a child once who was capable of holding his breath during a temper tantrum till he turned blue, which was really an impressive feat. You should try that, right? It's really hard. You really have to work at it.

And you see that in adult borderlines, they'll have temper tantrums. And the funny thing is, when a two-year-old does it, it's like it's little off-putting, but when an adult does it, it's completely bloody terrifying. It happens very frequently with borderlines. I would also say to some degree, they didn't get properly socialized between that critical period of development between two and four.

You see the same thing with adult males who grow up to be anti-social. Because a large proportion of adult males who grow up to be anti-social are aggressive as children, as two-year-olds. And so there's a small proportion of two-year-olds who are quite aggressive. They'll kick and hit and bite and steal,

if you put them with other two-year-olds. It's about 5% of the males, smaller fraction of the females. But most of them are socialized by the time they're four. But there's a small percentage who aren't, and they tend to stay anti-social, and they tend to turn into long-term offenders. And the critical period for socialization development seems to be between two and four.

And it seems to be mediated by pretend play and rough and tumble play in those sorts of mechanisms. And if it isn't instantiated by the age of four, it doesn't happen. And it doesn't look like it's addressable. Now, there are dialectic behavior therapies that have been developed for people with borderline personality disorder, and they're purported to be successful. But... Okay, thank you.

If I may, so the second psychological disorder I wanted to ask you about is psychopathy. So you've mentioned that psychopaths tend to switch from dominant hierarchy to dominant hierarchy because people get tired of their shenanigans and they have to be bond fresh people. And psychopaths also tend to be very low in conscientiousness. And you said that when you see some of these protesters at your speeches, some of the men in particular, your clinical intuition tells you that there's something seriously pathological about them.

And I was wondering if you would suspect that some of these men might be psychopathic. Well, some of them likely are, but I don't know if a higher proportion of the ones who show up at protests, some of them likely are, but I don't know if a higher proportion of the ones who show up at protests and sort of creep me out are. I don't know if there's a higher proportion of people like that at the protests or not.

I mean, I suspect in general that regardless of the protest, the proportion of people who have personality disorders among protesters is higher than the proportion of people who have personality disorders in the general population. Because you just expect that, you just expect that kind of acting out behavior. I'm not, believe me, I'm not saying that all protest

is associated with personality disorder, I'm not saying that at all. There's plenty of reason for protest, but some of the reason for protests are credible reasons and some of them aren't credible reasons. So, I was just thinking that like the social justice hierarchy, so to speak, would be one of the last that these confused men. That's a different issue.

You know, there are analysis of the dangers of agreeableness. So agreeableness is a personality trait that underlies the radical egalitarian ethos because agreeable people want everything to be shared equally. And it's a good, I think it's a good ethos for a small group, for a family, because a family is kind of a communist system, in some sense, right? It's like, you want the food to be divided up equally among the children, clearly,

and you want all the children, sort of regardless of their inherent abilities, to have the same opportunities and perhaps even the same outcomes. So I think agreeableness, which is associated at least in part with maternal, the maternal instinct, let's say, maternal patterns of behavior, I think it's a good first pass motivational approximation to a localized familial ethic. I think it's a catastrophe at larger scales. I don't think it scales at all.

I actually think that's why we evolved conscientiousness. Because conscientiousness is the principle that allows larger scale organizations to exist. Agribleness won't do it. Now, conscientiousness is a mystery, right? We don't have a neurological model. We don't have a conceptual model. We don't have a neurological model. We don't have a conceptual model. We don't have an animal model.

We don't have a pharmacological model. And we really only have one way of assessing it, which is self and other reports of personality proclivity. So, anyways, the problem with agreeableness, this has been modeled by game theorists is that a population of cooperative people can be dominated by a single shark. So agreeableness is insufficient as a principle, because it opens itself up to, what do you call that? Manipulation and...

I've got that in my last suggestion. Manipulation, let's leave it at that. To manipulation and exploitation. That's the other thing. Exploitation. So... Thank you. Hi, Dr. Beeson.

I had one quick comment in the question. So my comment was about your idea of subpersonalities as one-eyed monsters. Now there's the idea of multiple personality or split personality disorder. It's controversial as to whether or not it exists. But there's some recent research that suggests that you may actually have multiple personalities that use different parts of the brain. So they have differential access to the hippocampus, they have their own memories, and they can use the brain differently. But that seems to be an exaggeration of sub-personalities to me, which is quite interesting.

The question I had was about, so you talked about Jung and how you should confront that, which you don't want to confront the most, or you're most afraid of, or are disgusted by, that you have the most resistance to. But we were talking about psychedelics and the experience of hell. So, at least some of the people I've talked to, they describe negative trips as an experience of constant fear, prolonged fear, and some of the most dramatic and personalized fear that they have experienced a shouldn't negative psychedelic trips

elicit the kind of confrontation that young thought you should engage in could be Could could well be no it I It's conceivable that It's conceivable that I read this strange book once that made the claim that what was in the Ark of the Covenant was a mixture that was made from Aminita, Muscaria mushrooms. And that's not as far fetched as you might think, because there was a mycologist, an amateur and a mycologist named Gordon Wesson, who established credibly the notion that it was Ammonita, Muscaria, potions that was the soma of the Rigveda.

And so it's a strange idea, but it's not an idea that's completely outside of the realm of possibility. It's not an idea that's completely outside of the realm of possibility. And the Aminitas muscaria is the flyagaric, the red mushroom with white dots, and it's used in shamanic rituals in cross-Asia. And it's apparently not toxic in its dried form, although that is not a recommendation. You know, this is serious, serious and dangerous speculation and material. One of the things that the priests had to do before they communed with what was ever in the ark of the covenant was purify themselves. And so one possibility is that the bad psychedelic experience is a involuntary confrontation

with what Jungu described as the shadow. It's like so beware of experimenting with substances that produce divine revelations if you're in a serious state of disorder, and I do think that is what happens to people, is that they encounter everything about them that's chaotic and out of place, and some people get trapped in that, and they can't get beyond it. And that's because there's so much of it. And so. But we don't know enough to know.

So... Yep. So it doesn't pee, doesn't... You're a son of a bitch. How are you? I'm not too bad. You got a question? That's a question, no I've got a real question.

I got a question you're going to like this one. It's about inspiration because you talk about inspiration quite a bit in this lecture series and also I wanted to point out you have a I guess a 45 minute armchair discussion Which you have a video of of one paragraph of Nietzsche's beyond good and evil Yes, and it seems like your awestruck at the structure and the choices and I guess The ideas contained in various layers of this paragraph, and you're inspired, and that inspires you to, I guess, do your work that you do.

I encountered, I guess, a similar phenomenon here with one sentence written by the great Joseph Cardinal Ratsinger. And I mean, this one sentence answers the question, why do people search for God? And if you could read it out and then deconstruct it, it's one sentence. It's at the end of page 105, if you want to read it from the book or I just... That's the question that human existence not only poses, but itself is, the inconclusiveness inherent in it, the bounds it comes up against, and that yet urine for the unbounded, more or

less in the sense of Nietzsche's assertion that all pleasure, urns for eternity, it experiences itself as a moment. This simultaneity of being limited and of yearning for the unbounded and open has always prevented man from resting in himself Made him sense that he is not Self-sufficient but only comes to himself by going outside himself and moving toward the entirely other and infinitely greater Well, it's a hell of a sentence Like when I read that sentence I decided I to write, like Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. I had a very similar experience when I watched the Joe Rogan podcast, 877.

I said, I want to speak, like Jordan Peterson. That's what I wanted to do. So, I had this discussion with a patron supporter this week, a young guy from Australia. And he said something very interesting that's related to this. And it's something that's very profound, I think. There's this idea and Christianity that we've discussed briefly that the judge and the redeemer are the same figure. Now you know in the book of Revelation, you may know this and you may not.

Christ comes back as a judge, and he has a sword coming, it's a revelatory vision, that book. It's a very strange. It's the last thing you'd expect conservative Christ is to believe in, believe me. It's such a visionary hallucination, the book of Revelation. But Christ comes back with a sword coming out of his mouth

and he comes back as a judge and he divides the damned from the redeemed and most are damned and some are redeemed. It's a very very harsh. Now Jung believed that the figure of Christ in the Gospels was too agreeable, too merciful, too tilted towards mercy and that that that called out for a counterposition, and that was the counterposition of judgment, very interesting hypothesis. But then there's this melding of the two ideas that the judge and the redeemer are the same thing. Now, this young man told me that his life lacked

purpose and direction and meaning, and that he was nihilistic until he started, he read Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance, which is a book I actually like quite a bit. I've read it three times at different decades of my life. And one of the things that's very interesting about that book is that it's an examination of the idea of quality, of the idea that there are qualitative distinctions

between things and that we have an instinct to make qualitative distinctions. And so a qualitative distinction is simply this is better than that, which is a judgment. Okay, now what Radsinger is hypothesizing is that the person in and up, you know how the idea of the modern ideas you're supposed to accept yourself. I think that's an insane idea, by the way. Really, I think I can't think of a more nihilistic idea than that you're already okay. It's like, no, you're not, and the reason you're not is because you could be way more than you are. So what do you want to be? You want to be okay as you are? Or do you want to strive towards what's better?

And this young man, this Australian, he said the reason that Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance had such an impact on him was because he wasn't happy with his current mode of being. He didn't consider the manner in which he conducted himself sufficient. And the fact that the author of Zen and it was persec laid out the notion that you could make qualitative

distinctions, and there really was a difference between good things and bad things, or great things and evil things. It gives you direction. It gives you the possibility of moving upward. And Radsinger is pointing out, at least to some degree, that human beings are insufficient in and of themselves and need the movement upward.

And so they need to conceptualize something like the highest good and then to strive for that. And the thing is, is that there isn't any difference between conceptualizing the good and being judged, because if you're going to conceptualize the good and move towards it, what you have to do is separate from yourself all those things that aren't good and leave them behind. And that's why the Redeemer and the judge are the same thing. And one of the things that's really appalling, I think, about our modern world is that we're

rejecting the notion of qualitative distinctions. You say, well, we don't want to hurt anybody's feelings by saying that one thing is better than another. It's like, okay, fair enough, it's not fun to be cast off with the damned. That's for sure. But if people are in fact insufficient in their present condition, which seems to be the case, I mean, try finding someone who isn't, then if you deny the possibility of qualitative distinction,

because you want to promote a radical egalitarianism, then you remove the possibility of redemption because there's no movement towards the good. And it seems to me that it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for, well, it's a catastrophe to sacrifice the good for the equal. Because for us to be equal would be mean as far as I can tell

that we would all be equally unredeemed and miserable. And so... He also mentions in the previous paragraph, I believe, that even in the case when you experience the human life at its fullest, that it's most beautiful, that it's most meaningful, you have a deep, I guess, understanding that you have something to be thankful for, you need to thank somebody for that. It's not based entirely on your own merit. And that points you towards something else.

And also in- I don't think that you can have a profoundly positive experience, you know, in the best sense without that accompanying it. That's a feeling of being blasted, something like that. Yeah. That's good. I'll be back and also I'd like to talk. Wait, hold it. I'm going to stop you, okay, because I'm going to ask this person, but I would like to say that those were remarkably good questions. So. Applause Dr. Pearson, thank you for the wonderful lecture. Given you are working definition of truth,

and let's say within the Abrahamic religious tradition, would you say that the more perhaps mystical sects and the nominations, which place more emphasis on the transcendental experience of God, of the all-endous experience, as opposed to the more fundamentalist orthodox literalist, which perhaps emphasize what I've noticed emphasized what I've noticed, moral policing of behaviors. Would you say that the former is more true than the latter? No. And... No.

And... Okay, sorry. And B, could the former in some way serve as an antidote to extremist, literalism, jihadism, fundamentalism? Okay, so yes to the second part. But the first part, it's a great question. We did some research on this a while back, because we were looking at the different religious

proclivities of liberals and conservatives. And liberals, if you're liberal, it means your high in openness and low in conscientiousness. And if you're conservative, then you're high in conscientiousness and low in openness. And the conscientiousness, and if you're conservative then you're high and conscientiousness and low and openness, and that the liberals are spiritual and that conservatives are dogmatic. But it's best to think of those as partners, right? Because the spiritual mystical end is where the revelations emerge and the renewal, but

that's where there's chaos and discord as well. Because what's new disrupts what's stable. And so what's new has to be turned into, it has to be integrated into what's stable. And so you need both those poles. And of course, if the dogma just gets the upper hand, then everything turns into a tyranny of stone. That's Egypt in the Old Testament. But if the mystics get the upper hand, then everything floats off the earth into some impractical ether that is equally counterproductive. And so there has to be a dialogue

between those different poles. And I think you see that in the distribution of human temperament. The conscientious types, they tend to be orderly. The orderly types tend to, tend towards kind of a right wing totalitarianism. That's their proclivity when things get out of hand, especially if they're low in openness.

That's a danger. But you see the same thing with the people who are too open and not conscientious at all. They're dreaming all the time, but they never do anything. There's never anything implemented, and that's a bad thing. So I don't think that you can say that the dogmatic structure is necessary because that

perpetuates the system. And the revelatory element is necessary because that renews it when renewal is necessary. And there has to be a continual dialogue between those elements so that neither of them fall prey to their own particular form of pathology. That's one of the problems with the current political, what would you call it? Polarization that's occurring across the West is that the right and the left are not talking to each other anymore. That's a very bad thing because the left will wander into a pit and fail without boundaries. And the right will enclose itself in smaller and smaller spaces until it can't move

without the left. And one of the reasons that democracy works is because it makes people talk or allows them to talk. You can have it either way. But it's because every virtue has its vice. And so a meta-virtue is something like the amalgamation of singular virtues into something that's a transcendent structure that has more to do with the harmony of virtues rather than with any given virtue, even though I think that freedom of speech

is the clearest manifestation of that harmony of virtues. So, and so all could be a lubricant for the beginning of this discussion. Do you think, between liberals and conservatives? I don't know how to answer that. It doesn't follow immediately from your initial presupposition, So the awe experience is a different issue. The trans-indicator. Yeah, well, the excuse. Yes. At least exposing conservatives to some form of experience.

Could it be a prerequisite for a more productive dialogue? See, I mean, in the church, in a church ceremony, let's say a classical church ceremony, there's some intermingling of both, right? You mean you think about a church ceremony that takes place in a Gothic cathedral. We've certainly got the dogma and the relatively rigid rule structure, but at the same time that's aligned with intense beauty in the architectural forms, in the light that's streaming in through the stained glass windows, and the music. And I mean, the Gothic Ethedrals are forest, right? It's a stone forest with sunlight

streaming in through the trees. And it's a balance between structure and light. They're absolutely unbelievable structures. And they speak of the transcendent, but inside that there's a structure. And so it seems that in order for the religious impulse to be balanced properly, there has to be a reasonable dialogue, even in practice, between the mystical awe-inspiring transcendent and the dogmatic. Yeah, either of those can go as, either of those goes astray without the other. If you're too dogmatic, do you need awe?

Lately. Yes, because that would show you that there's something beyond your own presuppositions. So, aw, I should tell you something interesting about aw, as a physiological phenomena. You know how you're listening to music and you get chills? Some people experience that more than others, open people experience that more, or music is a pretty reliable elicitor of chills. That's pyleo erection. That's your hair standing on end. You see a cat when it sees a dog puffs up. That's awe. It's the same thing.

Like that, that chill is your hair standing on end. And that's the sensation you get in the presence of a meta predator. It's something like that. And so the awe experience is a, I mean, obviously it's become very cognitively and emotionally complex in human beings, but it's fundamental evolutionary underpinning is the instantaneous pylew erection that you see in prey animals when they're confronted by a predator. And of course that would be, if you are a rabbit you can bloody well believe that you see a wolf and it would inspire awe. That's for sure, I mean, if a wolf that was 20 feet high came bounding in here, man, you'd feel awe.

So, now, that will convince you that there's something that you still need to know. Last question. Perfect timing. Hi Dr. Peterson. My name is Gary and I'm a clinical and counseling master student right now. And so one of the key ideas that's been surfacing time and time again in your lectures is the idea that phenomenology is structured and flows mythologically.

And the way that plays out is I'm supposing affectively just pay attention to what comes up kind of naturally and you can locate the chaotic elements in your experience and product them with whatever degree of necessity you think. So, trying to situate this within the clinical context, we can conceptualize psychotherapy as a kind of guided journey just as you touched on in this lecture, where it's more of a meta-journey, in a sense, a meta-heroic journey,

I don't know how you want to think about it, but just for those of us who are interested in kind of grounding and implementing these ideas within psychotherapeutic practice, what should we watch out for in the process itself? What comes up, what should we be afraid of, or fearful of, or cautious about, or what should we tend towards?

That's my question. Well, I think one of the people who I've read that's had the biggest impact on me as a clinician was Karl Rogers. And the reason for that is that Karl Rogers put tremendous emphasis on listening. Like, it's almost impossible to overestimate how useful it is to listen to your clients. Like, you need a meta scheme, in some sense. And the meta scheme, I think, is laid out in the sermon on the mount. It's something like orient yourself and your client towards the good.

The client has to conceptualize what that might be. You can serve as a guide, but it has to come from that person. Because one of the things that you want to find out from your client is, okay, what's wrong, they have to tell you. And what would not having something wrong look like? What is it, if you could have what you wanted and that would be good, what would not having something wrong look like? Like, if you could have what you wanted, and that would be good, what would that look like? Okay, so that establishes your star, right?

It's like, Jepetto establishing the relationship with the star at the beginning of Pinocchio. Here's what we're aiming at. Okay, so now you've got that schema, here's what we're aiming at. Now you might say, you might think, well, now that what happens to the client is they meet their dragons along the way. And their dragons would be, well, now you know what you want. And there are things in your way. And some

of those things might, many of those things are going to be intensely practical. But their practical slash psychological. So like, so maybe someone is, has a job and they would like to move forward in their job, but they're terrified of speaking in public. Well, you know, is that a psychological problem or a practical problem? It's both. It's also a real problem. In many positions, unless you can speak fluently publicly, you're going to hit a ceiling and you're not going to go anywhere.

And so for the person to move towards that goal, then they have to confront the obstacles that manifest themselves within that framework, and part of your job as a clinician is to identify the obstacles, and to discriminate them from things they don't have to worry about, right? Part of it is, you know, you can't just run around and try to combat all the chaos in the world. Some of it is your chaos, and a bunch of it isn't. And the chaos that's yours is the chaos that emerges as you move towards a necessary goal. And so partly what you're doing by listening to your client

is to help them cut their dragons down to size. Because what'll happen if you start to talk to somebody about public speaking, and you really talk to them is that you decompose the problem into a set of maybe 20 subproblems. Like, well, do you know exactly how to give a speech? Like, what's your theory of public speaking? Do you know how to look at people when you're talking? Do you know how to speak loudly enough so that people can hear you? Do you have a philosophy of public speaking? I mean,

all those things are necessary in order to do it properly. You need to decompose that with the client and then to make those problems. You have to decompose them to the point where they can be met by a practical solution. And then you have to guide the person through the implementation of the practical solution. And mostly you do that by listening.

It's like what you need to be is the person who helps the person that you're working with, orient themselves towards a better future. That's the compact. You and I are in this space at this time to make things better. First of all, we have to decide what better would look like. And second, we need a strategy.

And third, we need to, once we have that, we're gonna see the obstacles. And some of those are gonna be psychological and some of them are going to be practical. And we're going to engage in joint problem solving of whatever sort is necessary in order to minimize the impact of those problems or to gain from the problems. Dream analysis can be extremely useful for that, by the way. It's even more useful for helping the person identify what the goal is, because that's often difficult for people.

It's like, well, I know that something's wrong, but I don't know what I want. Sometimes people get so stuck there that they just can't get out of it. So, and then what would you watch out for? No, not, not an logically. The way it shows up, the way it's experienced. Well, I would say as a clinician, one of the things that you should watch out for is resentment.

So there's a couple of rules of thumb I think are useful. Don't do anything for your clients that they can do for themselves. And don't do them any favors. Now, I think you can step beyond the confines of your role carefully, now and then, to show that there's a more human connection than the merely contractual. I think that's very useful. But their problems are not your problems. You do not have any right to their problems.

And so you have to maintain that detachment, because otherwise you can steal their destiny. You don't want to be the person that solves their problems because you steal their destiny when you do that. You want to be someone with whom they can figure things out for themselves. And so there can be hubris in being a clinician because you can be the problem solver.

And that elevates you to a position. You elevate yourself to that position. You'll fall flat on your face, you'll hurt your clients and things will kick back on you very, very hard. Because what the hell do you know? Right? Nothing. Because that person is very complicated and they need to, they need to sort themselves

out. And but you can be a facilitator for that. But that's all you should be. And so you have to watch that, you have to watch over becoming over and over and over and over and tangled. So you have to maintain your detachment in the best sense. And you have to not overstep your, it's easy to become heubristic when the person is looking to you for the answers. It's like you might, you don't have the answers, although you might be able to find, help the person find their way. That's what you do with everyone you love, too, right? I mean, you don't provide them with the answers

because then they become little clones of you and unhappy, bitter, resentful, and angry little clones of you because you serve their destiny. And so, the same thing applies within familiar arrangements or friendships, all of that. So... you you