The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why Being Nice Is Destroying Your Family

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

What does a punk rock concert full of sneering nihilists have to do with the oldest question about how to live? In this lecture, the final numbers of a long tour, Jordan Peterson begins somewhere unexpected: a Ramones show decades ago, where a room full of people who claimed life was meaningless could not stop moving to the music. That contradiction becomes a thread he pulls until something enormous comes loose, a case that the meaning you insist isn't there is woven into the way you perceive, the way you listen, and the aim you set without realizing you have set it. Along the way he takes apart the fantasy of a life without struggle, asks why a seventy-year-old man asleep in comfort is the least enviable figure in the Bible, and arrives, in the quietest moment of the night, at a piece of advice about love so simple and so practical that you will wonder why no one ever told you. What begins with a joke about slam dancing ends with a question you answer every time you decide what to look for. This lecture was recorded on February 5th, 2024 in Manchester, New Hampshire. “Use code JBPESSAY for 40% off Essay or click here: https://essay.app/?promo=JBPESSAY” Unlock the ad-free experience of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast and dive into exclusive bonus content on DailyWire+. Start watching now: http://dwpluspeterson.com/yt ALL LINKS: https://feedlink.io/jordanbpeterson // LINKS // Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com Books - https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/books/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app today. Hi everybody. Welcome to the release of the ninth lecture from my extensive tour archives. They've been received very well. I've been happy to have the opportunity to offer everyone lectures, a style of YouTube utilization that I began with, you know, more than 10 years ago now. I think I started really in about 2013, maybe even before that. When YouTube was just cute cat videos,

I've been writing a lot this week, trying to puzzle out a conundrum. I guess it's the conundrum of monotheism. It's a topic I refer to in the lectures fairly frequently. What unites a culture? What has to unite a culture? What hierarchy of values, because values are comparative, they have to be rank ordered. What hierarchy of values best serves a culture? And if it's a hierarchy, that implies it's a unity,

and that there's something at the pinnacle or reversed something at the foundation. I'm trying to puzzle out what that has to be and why and how that's related to our religious thinking. While doing this writing, by the way, several hours a day now, so I'm pretty happy about that. I'm using a program, an app that my son and I developed called sa.com. And it's turned into a really elegant word processor that also teaches you how to write, teaches you how to organize sentences, teaches you how to rewrite the sentences, to organize the paragraphs, to rewrite the paragraphs, to write your first draft, to do the finessing. And I'm finding it very helpful. It's a mature product now, and it flows seamlessly from computer to telephone. So if I'm

traveling, it's very easy in the car, for example, to keep writing. And so, and I'm out a bit now. So, That's been very helpful. Anyways, I thought I'd put in a good word for essay. Because it's quite an elegant program, and I found it real useful. In any case, welcome to the ninth lecture. I hope you find it useful. I hope you find it as useful as I found it a privilege to be able to deliver it. I loved being on tour, and it was such a remarkable adventure

and such a remarkable opportunity to speak with so many thousands of people on a continuing basis. So on with the show. Thank you. I found out in 2017 when I was doing a lecture series on Genesis, Book of Genesis, which was really the first fully public lecture series that I had done. We rented a theater. My family and I rented a theater of about 500 people in Toronto. And it was something I, this series was something I had. dreamed about doing for a long time. I suppose this lecture tonight is an extension of that dream.

I had an ambition to walk through the body of biblical stories publicly at some point. And so that's where it started. And that was in fall of 2017. My YouTube channel was doing well. and there had been a lot of political, it was really philosophical scandal around me, I would say. A lot of what is actually philosophical scandal in our culture is masquerading as political scandal because we don't render unto Caesar what is Caesar and unto God what is gods.

And so that means the sacred has collapsed into the political and that's why nobody can talk to anyone anymore. right? Because you tread on sacred ground at your peril and you'll have no doubt experienced exactly that phenomenon in the inability that many of you now have to even talk to close family members or people who were once friends. In any case, I was interested in elaborating on these biblical stories, not least because I had spent a lot of time lecturing at Harvard and at the University of Toronto. You know, I used to be able to say at Harvard with a certain sense of, what would you say? In credulity that I had the privilege to teach there, and now I got to tell you, when I utter that word, there's some shame. And that's a catastrophe. What happened in D.C. with Claudine Gay, with the president of MIT, with UP, UPenn, you want to pay attention to that.

That was a catastrophe. It's appalling. And I have launched. I am launching this new university endeavor with my daughter, but I take no satisfaction whatsoever in the fact that these truly, these once truly great institutions, Harvard and MIT, perhaps foremost among them, have now become not only incapable of doing what they are required to do, but actually doing the reverse, because no education is better than miseducation.

So, in any case, I decided to embark on this series of biblical lectures. I really had no idea what was going to happen. I had been lecturing about stories for a long time. And I'm a clinical psychologist, and as a clinical psychologist, really what you do is have people tell you their stories and listen and see if you can help them. see if you can provide them a forum so that they can put themselves together by telling someone who they are. And that's an extremely interesting endeavor.

And one piece of information you might leave here with tonight is this observation, which I certainly found to be true in my clinical practice. If the person you're talking to is dull, you're not doing a very good job of listening. And if you're tired of your wife or your husband, you're tired of your friends, you find people in general dull, it's probably not them. And that's a really useful thing to know, and I would say there's a certain kind of cowardice in that. There's a certain kind of ignorance, but there's a certain kind of cowardice because it's actually

the case if you let people reveal themselves, and they will if you listen. People will tell you everything, everything, if you listen. And then they become unbearably interesting. And I think it's to shield, we shield ourselves against that unbearable connection by failing to listen. And so whenever I was in a clinical session and I found my mind wandering, I realized that I wasn't listening intently enough, I wasn't asking, searching, questions to keep the conversation deep enough so that it was entirely and thoroughly engrossing.

And, you know, I used to, my clinical practice was mostly, not entirely, but mostly limited to one day. And I, you would see usually about 13 people, which took about 14 hours. It was a very long day. I used to go to the restaurant, a little cheap restaurant with my family afterwards. And the rule was, don't say anything to dad that is more than, one sentence long because I couldn't pay it. I was done by that point. But it was fascinating. It was fascinating to have the opportunity to walk through people's stories. The courses I taught were story predicated. I learned especially from the psychoanalytic thinkers that our personalities

make themselves manifest across time as a story were characters on the stage as Shakespeare observed. And in those courses, I dealt with an array of deep stories, some from the Taoist tradition, some from ancient Mesopotamia, some from ancient Egypt, and then a variety of stories from the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition, Hindu stories, Greek, Scandinavian, all of them with something profound to offer. and I did a lot of analysis of pop culture, movies like The Lion King, rap videos, like the one Ben Shapiro just released in this most bizarre of all possible universes.

And the Genesis series was a logical extension of that. And I'd come to understand very deeply by that point that those stories, they sit at the base of our culture. and they're not replaceable. Well, they're replaceable by idols. That's a good way of thinking about it. But this is true culturally, but it's also true psychologically. Although you don't know this, and this is a realization that I've really come to recently,

the biblical corpus of stories is implicit in the structure through which you see the world. Now, that's not much more than saying that because you're the inheritance, of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that shape the way you view the world. But you have to think through and understand what that means. It means that within the confines of your imagination, the imagination that structures your vision, are nested better or worse representations of these fundamental stories.

They're there. They guide the way you understand the world, insofar as you're inculturated in that tradition. They make it possible, for example, for you to understand a movie like The Dark Night with its antithesis between the hero, Batman, the dark hero, and the Joker, because that's a retelling of Canaan Abel.

Now, I'm not saying if you never heard the story of Canaan Abel, you wouldn't be able to understand Batman, although there's some real truth in that. I'm saying that the structure of comprehension that enables you to understand that story is a consequence of your incorporation in part of the network of stories that lies at the base of your culture. Now, the people who founded your country knew this

because they said strange things when founding your culture, like, we hold these truths to be self-evident. Now, a self-edity, truth requires no further explanation, in some sense by definition. But a psychologist might ask, well, what is it that makes a truth self-evident? And the answer is something like, it emerges out of the corpus of stories that you take for granted. Right. And those are the stories that organize. They are the stories that organize our life. And so one of the things that you might realize in consequence of that is that if you're not fleshed out well on the cultural side,

so for example, if you don't know the biblical stories, and there are other stories as well that you could and should know, but if you don't know the biblical stories, there are holes and the web of meaning through which you view the world is incomplete and tattered and torn. And other things will move in there to occupy you. And that's a terrifying thing to understand. You know, I started to understand this when I

was studying the psychoanalysts deeply because Jung, for example, Carl Jung, who was a compatriot of Sigmund Freud, who was the founder of the psychoanalytic tradition. Jung was a student of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher who so famously

announced that God was dead. He could see the deterioration of our explicit belief in the deity of our ancestors within the confines of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He could see that falling apart under the onslaught of the materialistic, atheistic rationalists of the Enlightenment. And that's why he made that prophetic pronouncement. And Nietzsche knew that there would be dreadful trouble in the aftermath of the death of God. And he knew that that would, he knew, for example, that that would produce the rise of totalitarian super states like the Soviet Union in Maoist China, and that millions of people would die in consequence. So when Nietzsche announced that God was dead, it wasn't like he was doing it in triumph.

He called us the murderer of all murderers. And so Nietzsche tried to come up with a solution to that, and his solution was that human beings could take it upon themselves to a state. their own values, that we would have to become the creatures who determined the rules by which things were valuable, who determined the moral order. And, you know, that sounds attractive. It sounds like captain of your own ship. But even if you're captain of your own ship, you're not master of the waves. And even if you're captain of your own ship, you still have to navigate

towards some desirable destination. And as a consequence of that, you're locked in this wrestling, you might say, with the fundamental structure of existence itself. I learned in the 2017 series that the word Israel, the chosen people of God,

means we who wrestle with God. And then you might say, well, who are those people? And the answer is, well, do you ever feel like shaking your fist at the sky in despair and rage? Do you ever lose hope? Are you ever inspired? Are you ever in a moral quandary when you're caught between two terrible possibilities, both good? And you're attempting to wrangle an estimate of your fate.

that's life. Life is wrestling with the domain of value, even with the central essence of value itself. And there's no escape from that. And there are worse and better solutions to that problem. And part of what I'm trying to understand is what is the best possible solution to that problem. Is there a best solution?

solution to that problem. And if so, what is the best solution? And so that's what this lecture tonight will be part and parcel of. Imagine your favorite lecture. Dial that on max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture. I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to. I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago, and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college. The traditional universities, a lot of times, it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy.

It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you. If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time. That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself. You have the opportunity to investigate that calling. Now, Nietzsche said we should create our own values, but Jung in particular, Freud first noted that, well, we can't. And you might say, well, what did they mean by that?

They said, well, if you contend with people, if you wrestle with people, what you find is that they're like demon-filled warehouses. There's all sorts of things going on in the background that aren't exactly under people's control. they're possessed by strange ideas or if not ideas strange impulses and impulses that act contrary to their own will and you know this you know this because you'll have been in the situation where you've told yourself to do something and maybe you've told yourself to do something over and over and not only that you've told yourself to do something that you know would be good for you And not only do you not do that, you do exactly the opposite and repeatedly as if there was something inside you that was trying to do its worst. Well, so then you might say, well, how can a creature as perplexing and paradoxical as that possibly hope to, in the span of a single lifetime, re-value all values and create his or her own destiny.

It's like, maybe what you do is you search for the implicit moral order and you align yourself with that. There's a reason I opened these lectures with music. I spent a lot of time thinking about music. 40 years ago, I was obsessed with music from a psychological perspective for about a year. I made a piece of art, which is on the cover of my books. It's a Mandela, essentially, a kind of a fiery geometric explosion of chaos and order. And I made that over about four months when I was trying to understand the ineffable significance of music. And the reason I was so interested in music was because I was interested in nihilism.

I was interested in meaninglessness, and music seemed to me to be the in arguable counterpart to nihilism, in that even the most nihilistic of people find deep meaning in music. And at about that time, it wasn't much long. The punk rock movement was still flourishing at about that time in the early 80s. And I went to a Ramon's concert, and it was in a theater, just a movie theater with sat about 1,200 people. and I was up on the balcony with my wife, right on the first row. And those bloody musicians, the Ramones, they brought their stadium gear into that theater. And I tell you, I listened to the whole concert with my ears plugged.

And I was still ringing. My ears were still ringing three days later, even though it was tremendous fun. And beneath us, where we could peer over the balcony, beneath us was a kind of an empty space in front of the stage. And all these crazy, nihilistic punk rockers were out there while the conference. concert was going on slam dancing into each other. They looked like ants on a frying pan. And it was ridiculously comical because they're all nihilistic and they hate life and they have their middle finger up to the sky and it's screw this and to hell with that. And there's no meaning in life and yet they're all out there like dancing away now pretty violently and all that. But

the thing is the music gripped them nonetheless. And that was a great mystery to me. And I started to think about music, and there is this conceit that music is a non-representational art form, because especially a piece of music without lyrics, it's hard to say what it's about. You know, like it can have a sad tone, perhaps, if it's in a minor key in it, it can be cataclysmic and thunderous, or it can be puerile, like musac in an elevator, which really isn't music. It's music filtered through stupidity. But I started to try to understand what is music exactly. Well, music, what is music exactly? Well, it's a pattern. Pattern is something that repeats.

It's a pattern with variations. It's a layered pattern with variations. It's layers stacked on top of one another. And the more sophisticated the music, the more layers there are. are stacked on top of one another and the more the layers interplay with one another, maybe one instrument per layer or something like that. But it's layers of harmonious patterns. And then I thought, that's what the world is. We think the world is a world of objects because we're implicitly atheistic, materialist, rationalists.

And so we think the world is made out of self-evident objects. And by the way, it's not. it's made out of patterns. And it's made out of patterns that when optimally arranged, operate together in a hierarchy of harmony. And that's what music tells you. And it tells you so directly that it compels you to move to it. And what the music is doing to you is inviting you to align yourselves

with the central pattern of, harmonious being and everyone loves that and the reason they love that is because that it's right that's what you're called upon to do and and that's why and you know that even though you might not be able to say it you know it and you can tell you know it because when a great musician comes to town you'll pay and take time to go sit with thousands of people and all do that together and you'll enjoy it and you'll and you won't regard it as work. And if the place gets jumping, you're pretty damn thrilled to be there and you think, well, that was damn near a religious experience.

It's like, yeah, not damn near. Like, definitely. It was just the kind of religious experience that the prideful linguistic intellect can't criticize out of existence. That doesn't make it any less real. Quite the contrary. It speaks of something tremendous. tremendously deep. It speaks of the spirit of the redeeming story. That's a good way to think about it. And that's the spirit that makes itself manifest in the biblical corpus. And well, we'll wander through some of that tonight. And I'll do what I can to explain some of the opening parts of that story in a way that I hope makes sense. In the beginning, God, created the heaven and the earth. Now this is an interesting image. They say a picture is worth a

thousand words. We'll see how many words we can get out of this image. So that's an image of God as a father. Now what does it mean? What does it mean to for there to be a father first? This is a father who brings light. And maybe you were fortunate enough to have a father that brought light. Not everybody is. Tammy was. I was. I know the people that I've interviewed who've thrived. Almost all of them had a father that brought them light, who encouraged them and who stood behind them, who was dedicated to developing and encouraging the best in them. Okay. So what is that exactly? Well, you might say that's your father, but you have to observe that father is actually a generic term, right? You don't call your father his name unless you're Bart Simpson.

You call your father a generic name. And that means in some sense that you're referring in your relationship with him to, you could say a role he's playing. That's one way of looking at it. A part he's playing. Or you could say that you're referring to something deep that he's embodying insofar as he's a good father. That's a better way of thinking about it. Now, here's a way of understanding that.

Imagine you were, you're three years old, and your eyes are open, man, and everything's coming in at you. You know how imitative three-year-olds are? You send a three- or four-year-old off, well-behaved three- or four-year-old off to daycare, and they come back completely infested with demons. And they'll, I saw this in my son all the time. He'd come back from daycare,

this kid who was reasonably civilized, he'd only have to be there for an hour, He'd pick up some pathological pattern of miserable misbehavior from some wretched little brat with parents who were foolish, and he'd come home and play that out. It was like, what the hell do you think you're doing? You know, perfectly well, that's not going to go very well. It's like, nope, he's absorbed that sucker, and he was going to see if that was a trick that would work at home. It's like, kids are very good at this. They absorb spirits.

That's a good way of thinking about it. Now, we're very imitative human beings. We're unbelievably imitative. Like, if you're socially skilled, you don't even know this. If you're socially skilled, when you're sitting and talking to someone, you're dancing with them. And if you recorded your interactions and you sped it up, you'd see that. Two people who are really engrossed in a conversation, they're just dancing. That's being done with mothers and babies.

Depressed mothers don't dance with their babies. Right? And it's because they're too, they've withdrawn within, and they're not attending to the relationship. And the babies suffer as a consequence. And so you dance with someone and you absorb their spirit or you create a spirit between you when you're conversing. And if you're both pursuing the truth, when you're conversing, then you jointly construct the spirit that pursues. the truth and that inhabits you and that fills you with enthusiasm. And that's the logos that Tammy made reference to earlier, that Christ described as present if two or more were gathered in his name.

That's what that means. Well, children are very imitative and it's really the basis of their knowledge. And so when you first start to adapt to the world, you learn how to move in it, right? But you learn how to you learn how to imitate movements in the world in a complex way. If a child does something interesting, you'll have seen this with nine months old. You know, you would try to feed them, say 13 months. They're in their high chair. You're trying to feed them.

And then they knock something off the high chair table on top, and it falls on the ground, and that's pretty interesting. And so then you put it back on, they knock it off again, and that's pretty interesting. And so you put it on, they knock it off again. And what they're doing actually is imitating themselves, right? Because they did something kind of random, and it produced an interesting consequence. And so they duplicate the interest in consequence.

And so kids copied themselves. Now, you know that because that's how you learn to play peekaboo with them. Right? You can get them into an imitative game very quickly, even if they're very young. My granddaughter, when she was nine months, four months old, I had her on my lap, and she was standing up. And she's very alert, this girl, an extremely extrovert. And she was really like zeroed in on me. And I thought, I wonder if I can play a game with this kid.

So I went one, two, three, little pause, and bonged her head on mine. Like very lightly, eh? And then she kind of looked. And then I was slow and careful with her because babies are slow, you know, which is a good thing. And then I did it again. And I kept repeating it. And she caught on, eh? She got the pattern, right?

She was starting to align herself with it. And then I did it like six times, let's say, to establish the pattern. And then the seventh time I counted, and I didn't bop. I moved her forward, but I didn't bop heads with her. And she laughed. And I thought, perfect. She got that theme and variation, right? That's part of a game.

That's what you do when you play peekaboo too. And there's mimicry in that. You set up a pattern, then you repeat it, then you repeat it, then you repeat it. Then you vary it, like interestingly. And that's a game. And that's a social interaction. And that's the structure on which all of our social interactions are predicated. A certain predictability of interaction with a leaven of novelty.

There's something deeply musical about that. Now, children will imitate themselves, but they'll also imitate their father. So now, let's imagine we have kids who are four years old. And it's a boy and a girl, and they're trying to get to know each other. And so what they are going to try to figure out is, could they play a game together? Which is, by the way, what you're doing when you get to know someone, at least under optimal circumstances. And so maybe the boy says to the girl, or vice versa, would you like to play a house? Which means would you like to dramatically re-represent a domestic environment spontaneously in your behavior?

But generally, that isn't what four-year-olds say. They just compress that. Would you like to play house? And the girl who's invited has to say yes, because if she doesn't do it voluntarily, then it's not a game. And that's something you should bloody well learn when you're four, so you never forget it for the rest of your life. And so maybe she says yes. And then you say, well, he says, the little boy says, well, I'll be the daddy and you can be the mummy. And hypothetically, although God only knows both of them agree that that's appropriate.

And then the boy starts to act out father. But then you might ask, this is so cool, it's so amazing. It's such a miracle. You might say, well, now he's going to imitate his father. But that's not what he does. Because kids are way smarter than that. Like if I was going to imitate someone, I'll imitate this gentleman right here in the front row. So this is what I would do.

And so what I'm doing, and you know, it's kind of annoying when someone imitates you directly. even if it's a little kid. And you can do that as a joke. But what imitation means directly is that I do exactly what you do, either when you do it or a little later. But that isn't what kids do. Not at all. They're so much smarter than that, and it really is a miracle.

What they do is they watch their father act across repeated instances and situations, right? Thousands of them, because they're watching you like a hawk. And they're building a model of you that helps them understand you, but it is also the scaffold on which they build their masculinity. That's a good way of thinking about it. And so they're watching you like mad. And they're testing you out too. They're going to pull out every trick they can possibly manage to poke you with

just to see how the pattern that constitutes you will react to all these different experiments. And that's, you might ask, why do your children misbehave? And the answer is, well, it's an exploratory tool. I mean, that's why you provoke your wife. And that's why she provokes you. It's like, who the hell are you anyways? Like, you could ask someone, but like, what do you know about who you are? It's like, you're mysterious, just like everyone else.

And so if you want to get to know someone, you have to sneak up on them and do something little out of the ordinary and see how they respond. And so children are doing that all the time. they're doing that, they're mapping you, like mad, and they're learning to imitate you. And then they're not just doing that by watching you. They're doing that by watching other fathers. They're doing that by watching TV shows about fathers. They're doing that by watching movies about fathers. They're doing that by being read books about fathers.

And what they're doing is they're extracting out a representation of the father as such. And then when they play, they embody that spirit, and they experiment with. it in real time. And if they're good at it, they can do it in a way that invites the girl to play so that she'll keep playing. And that's what you're doing if you're married. Really? Really. And if you're doing it properly, then you're playing. And if you say, well, my marriage isn't much of a game. It's like, maybe you're not that good at playing. That's a good secret. It's a good secret to know because one of the things that you can extract from that piece of knowledge is the following. If you notice the manner in which you and your wife interact, let's say, are you and your husband,

you'll see that sometimes you're playing. And then you may see also that when you're playing, you remember at least briefly that this is a person you love and that you wanted to be with. and then you get a little glimpse into what your life could be like if you got it right all the time. And then you could be humble enough to think, for whatever reason, I just did something right there. That's unlike what I often do that leads to whatever misery characterizes our relationship.

Maybe if I was careful, I could figure out what that game was and I could get better at it. And that's something to understand and focus on it. And that is what children are practicing when they're young, because if the little boy likes the little girl or the reverse, what they want to do is establish a pattern of iterative play. So play that repeats across many circumstances that moves upward that they both want to participate in. That's a friendship. A friendship is a chain of games that are increasing in complexity. And that's what a marriage should be. That's what a marriage should be. And if it was

conducted properly. Now, I understand that life gets in the way of play. But that doesn't mean that life properly mastered wouldn't be play, right? Maybe you just have to be sophisticated enough to play the most difficult of games and maybe even under the most difficult of circumstances. Now, and that's what Tammy was trying to do, for example, when she was attempting to set her head in the aftermath of the death of her father, which is truly a catastrophic loss, and in the face of the resentment that she was liable to feel, not merely because of that loss,

but maybe because the circumstances surrounding his death weren't, could be deemed suboptimal, as they so often are. Her realization was that even under those circumstances, your best bet is to aim up, is to aim up. In whatever manner up means to you. In the knowledge as well that if you aim up, even if your aim is off to begin with,

if you learn along the way how you err in your aim when you're aiming up, all that will happen is that you learn to aim up better and better and better and better, indefinitely, without end. Because you might say if you're a cynic, well, what's better anyways? And the proper answer, that is, that's up to you to figure out. Not because you make your own values, that's up to you to discover.

Our aim is often off. That's what to sin means. To sin means to miss the target, by the way. It's derived both in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. The equivalent word for sin is always derived from an archery term. To miss the target. Well, the more you practice aiming at a target, the better you get at hitting it,

the farther away you can be from it, and still have your aim be unerring. To begin with you might be so without skill that you can hardly even make out the target. But that doesn't mean that practice won't make perfect. Back to the child, playing with his would-be girlfriend. He's embodying the spirit of the father.

He's embodying the spirit of the benevolent father insofar as he's entertaining to play with. He's learning to allow that spirit, which is the essence of what is repeatable across instances of proper fatherhood to take residence within him. When the instance, insistence is made in the opening of chapters of Genesis that God is the spirit that creates.

In the beginning, there's an insistence that that's the same thing that makes itself manifest in the form of the most benevolent father. And that's something very much worth thinking about. There's a lot of ways of bringing light and the old. order that is good into the world. A family is a realm of potential. A family is a realm

of unformed potential. The spirit of the benevolent father transforms that into the order that is good or very good. And it does that by making itself,

let's ask, how does it do that? Someone says, my father was great. He loved me and I loved him. A great gift for a child to receive. What does that mean? To love someone. To offer the best in them, the best in you.

How's that? See, my father gave me a gift that many of my friends didn't have. My father was a very harsh taskmaster, and it was very difficult for me to do anything that was good enough. And you could argue that there was something about that that's cutting. And that's certainly the case. It's the cutting that cuts away everything that isn't worthy. That's what sort of cutting that is. But at the same time, he, in his deepest relationship with me, he communicated to me that if I set my spirit to it, there was nothing I couldn't figure out. And that

faith took hold within me as an unshakable conviction. And that's a revelation mediated by my father insofar as he was a carrier of the spirit of the benevolent father of the fact that human beings are made in the image of God. And there's no greater gift than that, not least because it's the truth.

Why is it true? Well, you might ask yourself, off. What do you see when you look at the world? And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. There's a proposition here.

The proposition is that the proposition is a characterization of the unformed nature of what exists before reality makes itself manifest. Okay, what does that mean? What do you see when you look at someone? Well, you think you see the person you know. And I would say, what makes you think you know them? And secondly, I would say, no, you see a concretized starting point for a range of potential adventures. And you might say, well, what do you mean by that?

And I might say, do you remember when you fell in the way? love. What did you see? And you might say, what do you mean by see? And I mean the all-encompassing, encompassing, seeing. You saw someone that for some reason you could envision spending time with for the rest of your life. And you saw that as deeply as you could see anything, insofar as you had a sophisticated and well-developed capacity for love. And that love that makes itself manifest, when you fall in love, is a vision of the highest possibility that you could attain

if you conducted yourself properly in the presence of that person. And that's a gift from God, that vision. And you can do what it with. You can do with it what you will. you can minimize it as a chemically induced delusion you can become bitter about it

because it vanishes because you mistreated it you can reduce it in any manner you choose to see fit but all that means is that you've squandered it or you could accept the invitation which is in some sense what you do when you get married and say

I'll stake my life on what I see. What are you doing if you do that? You're encountering the ground of possibility itself and making the determination guided by love to bring order, the order that is good or the order that is very good to the part of the world that you have under your influence. And you're doing that, according to this story, because you are literally an embodiment

of the process that does that everywhere, that engenders reality itself out of the underlying chaotic possibility. And there's nothing about that. That's mere superstition. There's nothing about that that's archaic or outdated. There's everything about that that's as advanced a view of the structure of reality as that we could possibly imagine. That offers to us an infinitely expanding adventure that unites us psychologically and with other people in a peaceful, productive, and generous union and that moves us all eternally up Jacob's ladder to the highest possible heights.

And why would that not be not only the most accurate description of reality possible, but simultaneously the most desirable? Well, the price you pay for that, you might say, is that you're called upon to live in accordance with that spirit. And you're called upon to take the responsibility to do so. You're called upon to act in love, to aim up,

and to step forward with all due care in action and word. Here's a proposition. The spirit of God that descends in Genesis has been identified in the Christian tradition as the word. And the word is symbolically associated with the person, of Jesus Christ. This is a very strange set of meaningful associations. There's nothing about that

that's obvious. But I'll give you a hint. Carl Jung described the story of Christ as archetypal. And he meant something very specific by that. He meant something like this. Imagine you took a selection of interesting stories,

a large selection of interesting stories. Stories that were compelling and moving and memorable. And then by some mechanism, you were able to distill out of those stories the story, the meta story that was most compelling and moving and interesting. Look, you see a range of superhero movies,

and you think one of those movies was better than all the others. Now, you know all of them make a set, they make a set of superhero movies. You know they have similar themes and similar characters. characterizations, you have a sense that there's a qualitative distinction between the movies and that one of them hit the mark better than any other. And that's the one you're most happy to go see. That's the one you're most likely to remember. It's the one you'll recommend to friends. It's the one that'll get the best reviews. Well, imagine you took 10,000 superhero movies and you distilled them to their essence. You have a myth. That's what a myth is. It's a distillation. It's an abstraction. The reason that Jung said that the story of Christ was archetypal was because you can't tell a more tragic story.

It's a limit case. Why? Well, imagine all the terrible things that could happen to you. Let's walk through them. Death. You might think there's nothing worse. If you think there's nothing worse than death, you've had a very sheltered life. People aren't generally traumatized by death, even their own.

They're often traumatized by malevolence. If you want to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, one of the best ways to do it is to watch yourself doing something you couldn't imagine you were capable of doing. That often happens to soldiers, naive soldiers in particular, who are placed in a battlefield for the first time and find themselves doing things they couldn't possibly imagine they were capable of doing. and maybe even discovering that the darkest part of them that was still unrevealed enjoys that in a way they couldn't have possibly imagined. And that's enough to shatter them because they've had an encounter with malevolence itself.

And so we could add that to the list. Death and malevolence. The ultimate symbolic representation of the encounter with malevolence is a descent into hell. And that's what happens in principle in. the story of Christ after the crucifixion. Three days down. Right. The harrowing of hell. It happens in the desert with the encounter with Satan.

And what does that mean for each of us? It means you're going to have to contend in your life with the reality of death and the reality of evil. One way or another. Kicking and screaming or voluntarily. Those are your options. Or I suppose with head firmly buried in sand, which is probably the worst of those three options. But that's not enough. That's not bad enough. Bad as it is. How about how about betrayal? How about betrayal at the hands of someone you've done nothing but be good to and who is your

best friend? How about justice delivered by the mob? How about justice delivered by the mob in alliance with a tyrant who oppresses your people? Etcetera, et cetera. The Christian story is the panoply of catastrophe with a redemption at the end. It's the pattern of human adaptation as such. Why? Because to live properly, you have to hoist all that on your shoulders. And so what does that have to do with the word of God that makes itself manifest at the beginning of time? if you confronted the realm of possibility

in the manner that would generate the order that was good or very good you would do that by confronting voluntarily everything that comes your way in your life and that's the explanation at least in part for the trinitarian vision of Christianity that that capacity to face whatever comes at you, no matter its form,

with head held high and eyes gazing upward, speaking the truth, that's equivalent to the embodiment of the spirit that generates reality itself, not only at the beginning of time, but continually and forever in eternity. And to understand that, to live it out is to take your proper role as a son of God.

And that's equivalent to re-entry into the paradise that was barred to Adam and Eve. And so that's what all that means. And I would say further, and you can think about this for yourself. One of the pieces of, one of the suggestions that I've made online is that young men could strive to their characters so that they could be the strongest person at the funeral of their father. And many young men have come to me and said that that was a very helpful piece of orienting advice. Because one of the things you don't know what to do, one of the situations where you might not know how to act is in the face of death itself, especially in the face of the death of someone you love.

Because in some ways there's not much that can be said about it. right? Because everyone at a funeral confronts the abyss simultaneously. And so then you might ask yourself, well, how best to confront the abyss? And that's no different in the deepest possible sense than how to confront the deepest problems in your life. And you might say, could you under those circumstances be of great service to others? Could you be the staff upon which they lean? And if you were capable of doing that, despite or even incorporating your own grief into the effort, is it possible that that would be the best possible way through that particular valley of the shadow of death?

Well, think about this. I interviewed this monstrous character, Jocco Willink, multiple times. And Jocco is about four feet wide and about three feet. and he eats tough guys for breakfast. And Jocco knows perfectly well that had he made a few inconvenient decisions when he was a young man, that he could have been one criminal monster.

And he went to the military instead, a civilized form of possibility for mayhem. And he learned there that he, because he had the opportunity to foster the development, of young men as an emerging leader. He was a special forces guy, not an easy thing to manage. And he was mentoring young men, and he found that more interesting than causing trouble, which is a good definition of a deep interest,

because causing trouble is extremely interesting. And so if you find something better than that, you're pretty damn fortunate. He found that if he conducted himself as someone that, younger men looked up to who could serve as a model and who could pull them forward, who could encourage and develop, who could help them, who he could encourage and help to develop that there was nothing that spoke more directly, even to his savage soul. There's no difference between that and being the staff that people rely on at a funeral.

And you know, we know that the more you focus on yourself, the more miserable you are. We know as psychologists that there's no doubt. difference between being miserable and being self-conscious. And you might say, well, what's the antidote to miserable self-consciousness? It's all about me and all of my pain and my terrible suffering and what I want right now. And that's a pathway to misery. And the antithesis of that isn't to stop doing that. The antithesis of that is to do everything you can to be of utility, productive, generous utility to others, particularly when they're in need. And that is something that you could do at a funeral.

And if you were a master at that, maybe the funeral would be a celebration. And I'm not trying to be naive about that. I know there's a loss in it. But there is, in that grief, there is also an element of the celebration of the fact that the person that you love existed. And perhaps that sentiment could take predominance even in those dismal times. And perhaps the most appropriate manner, perhaps the surest path, to that possibility realizing itself is to take time even in the midst of your own grief to make sure everyone else is welcome and comfortable to make sure that you're grateful for their presence to make sure that you attend to their grief and to find the meaning the deep meaning that's available to you in the deepest of all possible service at the most inopportune possible moment. And then you might also ask yourself, you tell me, you tell me if you would not admire someone who

could do that. And then you might think, well, imagine that you could do that. Would you not imagine as well that you were then allied with something that you found deeply admirable? And I mean from the core, right, I don't mean as a rational interpretation. You'd walk away from a situation like thinking, well, that was really something. That's really something to think about. That was really inspiring. That was really something to aim for. And that's something that's calling. That's a manifestation of something that calls to something inside you that's looking for that pathway forward. That's what admiration is. Admiration is the instinct to imitate. It's more than that. It's an instinct to imitate the central animating spirit of the benevolent father. That's a very good way of

thinking about it. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. You can feel that when you're inspired, when something occurs to you, when you have a flash of insight, when you find your way, when you see where to put your foot down next on firm ground, when you're sure of your step, when you're precise with your words, when every syllable lands, when you're saying exactly what's right in the right time and the right place. If you do that, if you have the grace to do that, it's because you've had the good fortune and possibly the humility to allow what's best about the human tradition

to take residence within you and speak. Your conscience will tell you how to do that, or at least when you aren't. That's a messenger of God. That's Hermes. That's the winged messenger of the gods. It's one of them. Your conscience is one of those autonomous spirits

that makes mockery of the notion that you can create your own values. Because your conscience, your conscience is the voice of suffering itself. It tells you that you're on the wrong path. It tells you that you've slipped off the golden path upward and that you've moved on to the path of perdition. And you can do what you can to ignore that and to rationalize it away,

and all that will do is make things worse, and every single person who's ever been born knows that. When else do you feel that moving? When something grips your attention, when something calls to you and compels you forward, when something elicits your interest, when some gateway to something new makes itself manifest, have a plan that's inspiring, when you have a vision that's inviting, that dichotomy of forces,

conscience and calling, that's the voices within the two pillars of God, you might say, that guide you through the desert. Modern people, Carl Jung said, modern people don't see God because they don't look low enough. They're not humble enough. That's a good way of things. but they're waiting for the miraculous manifestation. They're waiting for God to break the rules of time and space so that their doubt can be alleviated. Well, that's a lot to ask for. It's a lot to ask for the laws of reality

themselves to be suspended for any moment just to eliminate your faithless doubt. And it's especially a lot to ask for when it's crystal clear that even if that happened a week later, you wouldn't believe it anyways. This is a Greek representation of the same kind of idea. You know what it's like in life when everything gets out of control? That's too much possibility and not enough actuality.

That's too much chaos and not enough order. It's too much potential even, because too much potential makes itself manifest as nothing but potential for trouble. You know the story of the Hydra. It's a terrible serpent. If you cut off one head, seven more grow. Right.

And it's very straightforward and likely that you, it's very likely that you'll be in a situation like that in your life and fairly often. Well, there are echoes of this imagery in the opening sections of the Genesis narrative. There's the insistence, as God describes much later to Job, that it was the spirit that made order out of chaos that defeated the primordial Leviathan. That's an echo of the old hero story, of the hero against the dragon, the hero who cuts the dragon into parts and makes the world. That's a hunting myth, you might say.

And that's part of the spirit that inhabits us, that capability of human beings to go out into the, vast wastelands and encounter that which is most terrifying and transform it. And by taking up arms, let's say, eradicate the predator and bring home the beast. And that's part of the same collection of ideas that speaks to the courageous human capacity to confront potential and create the order that is good. That's the origin of the dragon myth, right? That's the Harry Potter story.

That's the story of the Lord of the Rings. That's the story of the movie Jaws, the hero who encounters the terrible beast and discovers the treasure that's buried deep within its lair and brings that back to the community and distributes it. That's equivalent in the symbolic realm, in the narrative realm, to the spirit that uses the word that confronts,

mortality itself with spirit held high to generate the order that is good. All of that fits in a piece. None of that's accidental. And the reason for that is that it is a direct reflection of what's

being captured in imagination about the deepest structure of reality itself. And we're at a point in the development of our culture where we have to begin to understand these things explicitly and consciously. so that we can rediscover what they mean. And God said,

let there be light, and there was light, and God saw the light that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. That's a representation of what you might say. It's the most primordial form of moral discrimination. That's a good way of thinking about it. These lines contain references to many things.

The Bible, technically speaking, a deeply hyperlinked text. Virtually every verse refers to multiple other verses. And so every poetic line is next to an associated web of connotative meanings that amplify the text. What does this mean pragmatically speaking? Look, think about what you do when you make a decision. If you have any sense at all, at least partly what you're trying to do,

to move towards the light or to bring light to the circumstance, to illuminate your circumstance. And more than that, you're actually trying to divide the light from the darkness. What does that mean? Well, don't you think when you're making a decision that you try to figure out what's right? Now, you might fail and you might think, how can I get what I need right now out of this situation?

Now, I wouldn't recommend that as a standard pattern of approach because it betrays the you that you will become because it's about right now and it makes everyone else subordinate to your immediate whim which is what a two-year-old does and two-year-olds can't live by themselves because you can't live with that orientation and so what do you do when you make a decision

you divide the light from the darkness you try to see the pathway forward that glistens and gleams And you may be wary of that because of the responsibility to take up your cross, so to speak, that accompanies walking down that pathway. But to the degree that you're wise in the smallest of guises, you will attempt to separate the light from the darkness and to dwell within the light. And the moral of this remarkable so far four-line story is that, In discriminating the light from the darkness and in walking that path,

you replicate the process that generates reality itself, the reality that is good, out of the chaos of possibility that presents itself. Here is something fun to know. How do you know if you're doing that right? It's meaningful. What is meaning? It's the deepest of orienting instincts. People say, life has no meaning.

This is what they mean. In my intellectual pride and presumption, I have allowed the critical faculty that I'm far too identified with to criticize what's most valuable in me out of existence. That is not a claim to virtue. It's a declaration of alliance with the darkest possible spirit. What's Lucifer? The presumptuous spirit of prideful intellect, the adversary of the spirit of being itself, the spirit that if

You allow its residence to be made within you, will demolish your capacity to discriminate light from darkness, or entice you to seek out and pursue the darkness. And there's no difference between that and the pathway to hell. And I don't mean that in some faraway transcendent. in space, although perhaps that's also true. I mean that as the most pragmatic and accurate possible advice that could ever be given to anyone. Hence, its position in the opening lines of the book upon which our culture is predicated. And God called the light day and the darkness he called

night and the evening and the morning were the first day. More differentiation. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water and let it divide the waters from the waters. This is the building up of what is concrete and foundational from possibility. That's what you do when you get to know someone. Because when you don't know them, they're nothing but who they could be. And that's an infinite realm of possibilities and permutations. And as you investigate and discriminate and pursue either the light or the darkness in relationship to them, you differentiate them into solid understanding.

And you do that with everything you encounter in the world. And you might say, well, that has nothing to do with the creation of being itself. And I would say, how could you possibly construe the existence of being itself in the absence of a conscious observer? You certainly act as if your experience is real. Your pain, for example, is real. That reality itself is constituted in consequence of your conscious experience. Maybe that's true. You act like it's true.

In your interactions with other people, when you treat them that with the respect that someone made in the image of God is due, they like being around you. If you treat your children that way, they thrive. If you treat your wife that way, she develops. If you treat your friends that way, you have friends and not just henchmen or people to get drunk with. When I say you act this out, I suppose I mean that insofar as your life is successful and flourishing, you acted out. insofar as you listen to the messages that other people send you about how they want to be treated

you acted out insofar as how you insofar as you acted out the world of possibilities opens itself up to you in ever increasing plenitude that's why in the gospels christ is presented as the who performs the miracle of feeding from nothing. The loaves and the fishes. The pattern that can provide in the midst of absence. What is that pattern? How about your reputation for generous productivity? How about that?

How about if you aimed at nothing but that? The generous productivity that you could offer to others. If you were a master at that, do you think you would ever go hungry? Do you think the people that you love would ever go hungry? Don't you think instead that people would be lining up in your hour of need to serve you in the same way that you serve them? That's the, by the way, the treasure that you store up in heaven that is to be preferred to all earthly treasure. That's the pearl of great price that the wise man sells everything he owns to gather. And that's all a representation of the pattern of existence that's embedded in the first eight lines of this story.

And God said, let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place to bring everything into a unity that's concretized. And let the dry land upon which life can emerge occur. The solidity, the foundation, the foundation upon which the wise man builds his house. and God called the dry land, earth, and the gathering together of the waters, he called the seas. And that's another re-representation of the separation of order that has habitable from chaos,

the watery chaos that prevailed at the beginning of time. The realm of possibility and potential symbolized by the oceanic depths from which much nourishment can be drawn. And God saw that it was good. Now that's a hint. That line is repeated multiple times in this text. What is the order that is good? Well, I suppose that's the foundation for the kingdom of heaven.

That's one way of thinking about it. How do you participate in the process that brings about the order that is good? How about by aiming at the good? Well, here's a thought for you. Here's a definition for those of you harboring atheistic pretension. Imagine 10 good things. What do they share? Well, they share that which is in essence good.

That's what unites them. The essence of good is what unites good things. God is the essence of good. Do you believe in good? Do you believe in the shared commonality of good things? Well, then at minimum you have an implicit God, beckoning to you and if you had any wisdom you would make that explicit and by and open yourself up to its invitation unless you don't want what's good well that's what we'll

discover that's what you would discover if you continued in the text to the story of Canaan Abel because Abel decides to pursue the order that is good and God rew rewards him with that benefit. And Cain in his bitterness and resentment and his unwillingness to commit pursues the order that's convenient. And the consequence of that is that his suffering is multiplied to the point where he's depressed and anxious and bitter and resentful and hostile and nihilistic and downcast and murderous and genocidal.

And those are the past that diverge in front of you with every glance you take and every decision that you make. Up Jacob's Ladder to the highest possible place or down inside Dante's Inferno to the depths of hell where the ultimate betrayer forever resides. Thank you very much. Thank you.

All right, my dear. Thank you for putting up with that. How you doing, Bucco? Well, that was, you know, a very strange form of entertainment, but a form of entertainment, nonetheless. I liked your talk. Thank you. Yeah, it was good.

Good work. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Okay. Servantes wrote, The road is always better than the inn. You're on the road again. Do you agree with Cervantes and what you have learned?

and giving these talks. Boy, that's a good question. I wish I could give a gold star to the person who asked that question. The road is always better than the inn. Oh, man, that's such a great line. Okay. So, Dostoevsky wrote a very famous book called Notes from Underground. And Dostoevsky was an absolute prophet.

Like Nietzsche, he could see way down into the structure of things. and he knew what was about to happen. He predicted the catastrophe of the communist revolution like 60 years before it happened, which is just an absolutely unimaginable feat. He did that in a book called The Devils or the Possessed, and in many of his other books as well, not least in Notes from Underground.

He was commenting on this building that was erected in London at the world's, at the, at the, I think it was 18, 18, late 1800s world exhibition. They built the first modern glass and steel building. It was called something like the Palace of Crystal. And it was a vision of a kind of technological material utopia. And Dostoevsky got wind of this and the utopian schemes that lay up, underneath it that turned our cities into modern-day wastelands, by the way, that modern-day wastelands of uniform glass and steel.

And he started to think deeply about the utopian offering. So imagine that you just had whatever you need. That's the Marxist dream, I suppose. What do you need? Well, Dostoevsky thought, well, what are our basic requirements fundamentally? He said, well, imagine that you set. up a situation, and I think he was speaking of California, where all you had to do was sit in pools of bubbling hot water and eat sweet cakes and busy yourself with the propagation of the species.

And that does sound a lot like Hollywood. And would that suffice? Now you'd think Well that in some way That that is everything I need Or maybe in some sense Even everything I desire So what's the problem with that?

Well, Dostoevsky said Well, one of the problems is that people are basically insane and In a very curious way And they'll break things into bits Even if they're good Just because they want something interesting To happen

And so if you provide provided a group of people with this garden of hedonistic delights, it would take no time at all until they smashed it into pieces just so they could squabble interestingly among the ruins and curse. And that's very funny and very accurate, and that was Dostoevsky's observation. And that was a devastating critique of the presumptions of materialist utopians. And the reason for that is that's not what we want. And the reason for that is, we're not overgrown infants. And that's an infantile vision of paradise. You can just lay there.

Someone will change your diapers because you don't want to have all of the inconvenience of actually having to move when an intravenous flow into your veins could provide you with everything you need. Maybe you don't even have to be conscious. Well, is that what you want? Well, if that isn't what you want, what do you want? How about the great adventure of your life? How about that? In the story of Abraham, Abraham is an overgrown infant.

He's a failure to launch. He's like 70-something years old. He lives in his dad's tent or his mother's basement. And, you know, he's got food. He's got grapes. He's got slave girls. Or pornography. He's got everything he needs at hand.

Needs at hand. He's got privilege. And it's undeserved. But there's no need for him to do anything. So what does he lock? How about the need to do something? How about that? How about that's the need that becomes paramount in the land of material plenty?

The call to adventure. Well, that's what comes to Abraham. That's what comes to Abraham. That's how God is defined as the... That has how God is defined in the story of Abraham. The biblical corpus is a sequence of stories that contain within them, a definition of God. And so you might say, one manner that you could conceptualize God is the, God is the manifestation of the Spirit within that calls you to broaden yourself in the struggle with life.

It's a definition, do you understand? It's not a proclamation of faith. It's a definition of the highest possible aspiration. Well, now then you ask yourself this. Do you believe in the existence of a spirit that calls you to adventure? Well, if you pursue adventure, then yes. Ask yourself this, then. If you devoted yourself to nothing but that pursuit,

wholeheartedly and with full faith, How great an adventure could you have? That's what God offers Abraham. And Abraham says, I'm in no matter what. And God says, okay then. How about if I call upon you to sacrifice your son? And Abraham says, I'm all in. No matter what.

And that's the ultimate statement of faith. And it's a necessary statement, whether you like it or not, you are all in no matter what. And you can either do that in the most noble possible manner, or you can do it as a second raider. And those are your options. And if you do it as a second raider, all that means is that you have faith in being second rate.

And good luck with that. And I would say that too. that and why? Because life is far too brutal, far too overwhelming, far too magnificent, far too demanding for you to master it without committing sacrificing the very best within you. And then you might ask yourself too, life is a veil of suffering. Maybe it's because you don't make the right sacrifices. Now, let's think that through for a minute. When you look back in your life and you're, and you're happy with yourself, I don't mean prideful, I don't mean puffed out, maybe you don't even discuss this with anybody. I mean, when you're having a colloquy with your conscience and you're

trying to decide if there's anything within you of redeeming value whatsoever, what might you point to, how about a time in your past where you encountered something remarkably difficult and managed it with dignity, grace, and productive generosity. Even once or twice when you stepped out of your way to do something for someone else, not to gain the credit, the public credit in relationship to your reputation for doing so, but because you were moved by the spirit that pushed you to extend yourself beyond your limits. That contemplation of those acts can get you through a very dark time. What if your life was made of nothing but those acts?

Maybe there would be no truly dark times. Maybe you would be able to construe whatever came your way, no matter how horrific as an immense dragon with a commensurate potential reward. That's what happens in the story of Job. Job is tortured almost to the same degree as Christ, And Job's insistence during his torment is, no matter what happens to me, I will not lose faith. And that's a decision.

It's a proclamation, right? It's an orientation. And the orientation is, beset by catastrophe, though I may be, I will maintain faith in the fundamental goodness of being and myself. And I will act in accordance with that proposition. And I will take whatever comes my way, in consequence of that faith.

In dire straits, one faith or another will move you forward. The traditional injunction is to maintain your faith in the ultimate goodness of being, becoming, and the human soul. And that's why the road is better than the end. Because we're not built for comfort. We're built for adventure. We're built for the adventure of the truth to be more precise. So that's that.

That's good one. This year, this year, my teenage brother has come out as a woman. I'm the only one in the family that doesn't call him by his new name. What should I do? Well, I would say, don't fall prey to the machinations of toxic compassion.

and leave here. Imagine 10 years from now. And your brother and you have the best relationship you can imagine and things have worked out for him. Act towards him in accordance with that spirit. That doesn't mean do what he wants you to do in the moment. Establishing a proper relationship never means doing for someone what they only want.

in the moment. That is the worst thing you can do to your children. You act in accordance with what's good for them across the widest possible range of circumstances and times. And that's how you entice them into maturity. And so you need a vision. You need a vision of the relationship you could have with your brother. You could tell a story a bit about your decision and determination to establish an appropriate relationship with your father and your siblings. Just tell that briefly what you did and what happened. Well, my sister and I, both my sisters and I,

they're much older than I. They're five and seven years older than me. And we've always, since I've been grown, we never seem to get along much. And as my mom was diagnosed with dementia, Jordan tested us and we found out that my oldest sister at 49 was showing signs of dementia. And I said to Jordan, what do you think I could do to improve my relationship with my sister?

And he said, you could just listen, just listen. And so I stopped talking to her. I'd stop telling her any of my opinions, anything that I thought about, I just listened. And that weekend went a lot better. I got in a lot less trouble. Surprise, surprise. and at the end of the weekend we were sitting having dinner with her and she started to tell me what she thought of me

and she started to say things like, you never did anything on your own mom and dad. You were spoiled. They did everything for you. Your life was easy. And I didn't say anything because that was what I decided. And at the end of that she said, but you're a good mother.

And I thought that was very strange. And over the years, that was in 2000. and two over the years we've gotten along much much better because i continued to listen and we and she didn't bring that up again except for once other than that we got along fine and so uh i would recommend trying that with anyone that you have a difficulty with their relationship with you is just listen because you're not talking to who you think you are and she had an old memory you know that she had never updated. And she was talking to me about something from the past.

But once she said it, she realized that, oh, actually, I was grown and I was a good mother. And none of that was really true. So I think that's a... Yeah, well, so what happened in that situation is you stop trying to impose your will on your sisters in all ways. She stopped looking for respect. She stopped looking for love. She stopped looking for attention. she flipped the game.

She decided that she was going to aim at reconciling with her sisters. That was the aim. And then she was going to watch and listen to see how the pathway to that would make itself manifest. Now this is so cool. Here's something that's really worth understanding. That's how your perceptions work. You're an aiming mechanism. And so,

once you establish an aim, you lay an interpretive filter on the world that only lets through those things that will move you towards that aim and those things that will stop you and that hides everything else. And so the way the world makes itself manifest to you perceptually is literally dependent on your aim.

And so if you aim at reconciliation, let's say in the case of the questioner. You want what's best for your brother and for your relationship. And then you wait and watch the pathway forward to that will make itself available. Now, how do I know that? Well, don't you ever get where you're going? Well, how? Well, the way you get where you're going is you decide what your destination is.

And then you see the pathway and the facilitators and the obstacles. And so this is such a powerful approach that other people will fall under its spell. So if we meet and I want to understand who you are and I have that goal uppermost in mind and I attend you carefully, you will tell me who you are one way or another. And that's why it says in the Gospels, for example, that if you knock the door will open, and if you ask, you'll receive, and if you seek, you'll find.

And you think, well, there's no way the world can be constituted like that. It's like, if it wasn't constituted like that, you'd never receive if you asked, and you'd never find if you sought. And that isn't how it works. and so if your aim is pure and your heart is in the right place, you'll find your way with your brother. And you can wait.

You can wait until that way makes itself manifest. You don't have to push it. You can't push it. It's not up to you anyways. The best you can do is hope you can help him find his way. And the best way that you can help anyone find their way is by aiming at what's highest in relationship to the two of you and then allowing that process to unfold insofar as you're able to facilitate it.

And there's a kind of grace and dance with that. And one of the advantages of that too is you won't be crushed by an excess of responsibility because you might be tearing out your hair thinking, oh my God, you know, what should I do with my brother? And the answer is, well, if you don't know, recalibrate your aim and wait and wait. The right time will make itself, the right time will make its appearance.

The right words will come to mind. You can feel them as you move along. Something you learn to do is a clinical therapist, you know, if you're listening to people constantly, you want to find the right question to draw them out first, You want to ask them the right question to clarify what they've told you, to seek further understanding. And you can feel those questions bubbling up inside you in relation. Those are the tools that are making themselves manifest to you to attain your aim.

The aim, I told my clients, the aim, I told my clients when they came to see me, well, what's my aim here with you? My aim is to have to best in me serve the best in you. And that doesn't mean I'm always going to be on your side. Right? Because sometimes the part of you that will be speaking will be your worst enemy. And I'm not a fan of that. And that's not what you want from someone who's a friend and certainly not from someone who's a counselor or a brother. Now you're in the terrible circumstance of trying to weave your way forward in an incredibly complicated moral landscape. But get your aim straight and don't lie and act in love.

And that's a good start. And you'll, even if you're the guy who's wrong for five years in everyone's minds, that doesn't mean you'll be the guy that was wrong 15 years from now. Menmo. What's the most important thing I can do to take care of my wife? I didn't make that. Try to remember that you love her. But I really mean that.

By remember, I mean bring that to mind. Like, imagine that. rekindle it. You know, like, people wonder what it means to experience the grace of God. And you could imagine that that's the same question as, what does it mean to receive inspiration from within? That's a good analog. Well, love is a form of grace.

You fall in love, right? You don't, it's not something you do to yourself. It's something that comes over you. And I said it's associated with a vision. It's associated with the vision of heaven itself, essentially. That's really what it is. It's a portal to heaven itself. And it's an offering, but it's a spirit that descends that has to be made welcome.

Else it depart. You have to practice it. Like love is a practice. It's not in its first stages because it's grace. It's offered to you with no effort on your part or little effort or maybe even despite yourself to some degree. But the maintenance of love is a practice and it's best if it's a conscious practice and you can practice it. You could do this. Your husbands do this like 10 minutes a day.

Practice loving your wife. Just pretend that you love her. You know? And in that game you'll rediscover that spark and then it'll be there. And then maybe you'll only be able to practice that 15 minutes once a week to begin with. But maybe then it'll be like 20 minutes a day. And then maybe it'll be an hour a day.

And then maybe it'll be 90 minutes a day. And maybe you could spend the rest of your life trying to make it 12 hours a day. And maybe you could do that, you know. And then every day would be the perfect date. Every day would be the date you imagined you might have once. And if you aim at that, there's a reasonable probability that you'll make your wife happy. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you, my dear.

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