The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why Listening Beats Every Argument

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

What does a golden rope in a dying man's dream have to do with the person in your life you can no longer reach? In this lecture, Jordan Peterson sets out after three questions that turn out to be the same question, what is a man, what is a woman, and what is the highest thing a person can aim at, and pursues them through the strangest doorway imaginable: the despair of the most successful author who ever lived, who had everything a human being could want and still could not find a reason to stay alive. From Tolstoy's vision of something infinite suspended above the abyss, to a treacherous brother who remade himself into the founder of a nation, Peterson builds toward a practical answer with startling reach. And in the most moving moment of the night, his wife Tammy steps on stage to tell the true story of how she won back a sister she was losing, using nothing more than the one thing almost no one is willing to do. What begins as a lecture on identity ends as an instruction manual for getting back the people you thought were gone for good. This lecture was filmed in San Antonio, Texas, on December 12, 2024. 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

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Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. 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. Last night, I figured something out that I'm going to expand upon a bit tonight. So when I, in an event like this, I have a, what would you say, or something I'm always trying to accomplish.

And I've learned how to do it, and then I learned how to identify what I'm doing and to explain it. So, because often, you know, if you're living beyond your own understanding, If you're really living, you're living beyond your own understanding. You sort of catch up with yourself as you go or not. So I use the opportunity, this opportunity, and I did this when I was a university professor. I used the opportunity to speak, to think about something. So I'm not presenting my audience, let's say, with a pre-conceived notion

and attempting to convince them that that's the case. You can do that, and you can do that better or worse. But the problem with doing that is that it doesn't move you along in exactly the right direction. It doesn't move the audience along in the optimal direction. It moves, it cements you in your own presuppositions, and it moves the audience towards, a predetermined end. And there's something to be said for that, but it's more exciting to take yourself

and the people you're talking to along for the ride. Towards what? Well, when I come out and start a lecture, I have a question in mind. I have three questions in mind tonight. So one of them is, what's the nature of man and woman? So that's a question about identity.

How do you conceptualize identity? It's a very major preoccupation with our whole culture at the moment. It's identity politics. What's that a dispute about the nature of identity? So we'll investigate that. We'll investigate the identity of the divine. And both of those investigations will be in some manner, a matter of definition.

right? So, and then the third question, they're all interrelated these questions, is what's the nature of the relationship between man and woman and the divine? Okay, so now those are the questions. Now, one thing that really struck me hard last night is that question and the word question and the word quest are the same word as the word inquiry and question and quest are the same word. A quest is an adventure and a quest that you'd find fascinating, a movie quest, let's say, and most movies are quests, is it's a journey towards an unspecified destination that transforms in an unpredictable way. That's a quest. And if it's, say, a heroic quest, which is a true adventure story, then the destination is worth, the destination is worth the effort and the quest is difficult but but meaningful and a question sets up a quest and if you know that then you can use the question to set up a quest and that could

be the talk and that could be the base that's the basis of a good conversation someone like Joe Rogan for example who's obviously spectacularly good at conversations by at least insofar as the opinion of people everywhere in the world is concerned. He's always on a quest, right, because Joe asks questions because he wants the answers, and he doesn't know where it's going to go. And he has his opinions, but those are expressed as questions, right? They're not so much impositions of his belief on the person he's talking to or the audience as the foundation of the questions that he's using to interrogate his guest,

let's say, and to move the conversation along, in the direction of what enhanced knowledge, something like that. So it's a pretty high order quest. And the goal would be to be wiser at the end of it, in a valid manner, and then also to be engaged along the way. And that would be good.

Like if you could live your life like that, that would be good so that you get wiser as you move along, and it's engaging along the way. That would be good. and so that's what a quest offers and so a quest

a question is a quest and that's good a quest for meaning and wisdom okay so now we have three questions in front of us and they're complicated questions what is a man and a woman I mean

Matt Walsh as many of you know he right well we're right what is a woman it's very strange that we're asking that question. But we are, but we are. And that's worth noticing.

You could parody that, and he did, and quite effectively, but that shouldn't blind you the fact that that's actually become a question. And there's a lot of foolishness in that, but there's also a reason that question has come up, and it's not trivial. And if you're asking the question, what is a woman? You're asking the question, what is a man? Because you can't ask one of those questions without asking the other. So that's where we're at in the culture is that we're questioning our most fun, truly our most fundamental assumption.

I don't think there's a more fundamental assumption, even speaking biologically, than what constitutes male and female. It's more fundamental than down and up or black and white or night and day. Creatures differentiated sexually before there were nervous systems. I could say the old distinction. So that means things without brains can tell the difference between male and female. Right. But it's become a question. Okay, so I'm going to start this.

Remember the questions. What is a man? What is a woman? What's the nature of the divine? And what is the relationship between man and woman and the divine? Those are the three questions. Now I'm going to hit those questions. from a variety of different perspectives.

And hopefully that'll culminate in something like the goal of the quest, let's say. So I'm going to start by telling you a story. This is from Tolstoy's Leo Tolstoy. It was a great Russian author. He wrote War and Peace in Anna Krenna. Many people believe that War and Peace is the greatest novel ever written. I don't think so, because I'm more of an admirer of Dostoevsky. but Tolstoy is more of a sociologist, and Dostoevsky is more of a psychologist, and I'm more psychologically

minded, so I like Dostoevsky, but Tolstoy is a great author, and Warren Peace is a masterpiece by any definition, and so whether it's number one or number five in terms of great books, it's still, you know, doing well. And Tolstoy was an extremely successful man by any standards. of success. So he had immense estates. He had a huge family. He had a, he was extremely wealthy because of the success of his literary works, which is a pretty hard thing to pull off. He was, and he was a renowned author, so it wasn't just that he was famous and rich because of his writing. He was also extraordinarily admired. And so, and at the height of his fame, literally at the height of his success, he was deeply suicidal, deeply suicidal.

He was constantly afraid on his estate when he was there walking, that he'd hang himself in the barn or shoot himself. He had this very strange combination of success at the highest conceivable level and absolute despair. And I think it was also the disjunction between those two things that drove them to despair because, you know, it's one thing to be miserable when you're actually miserable, right? And that's kind of understandable. Everything's not going your way. But then to have everything that you could think that anyone would want and to have even earned it and deserved it,

and then to still be in a state where you're desperate beyond belief, there's a kind of a perverse hell about that. That's, you know, you could argue it's better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable. And, you know, fair enough. But you don't have to use your imagination to any great degree to understand that that's a very perverse and paradoxical form of suffering. And that that might have. Because what would he think? It's like, I've got everything that I could have. And I can't see any way to be grounded in my life.

I'm drowning in misery. And yet there's nowhere to go. So there's a kind of particular desperation in that. Now, Toil story wrote a book called Confessions, or Confession. I don't remember if it's singular or plural. And it's a relatively short book. It's very much worth reading. It's a pretty straightforward read, all things considered,

although it's a deep book, and it's a meditation on success and suffering. And it ends in a very interesting manner, because he didn't commit suicide. He reconciled himself to life, and he turned his attention increasingly to religious matters as he became an older man. And he wrote some very great books that were religiously oriented, specifically. One had a fairly major impact on me

called The Kingdom of God is within us. It was a great book. And he had a dream or a vision while he was starting to recover from his intense suffering. And the dream was that he was suspended in mid-air at extreme elevation so that the earth was spread out below him, but thousands of feet below. And he had that feeling of vertigo that you'd get appropriately if you found yourself suspended thousands of feet in the air.

He's looking down, and it was... extraordinarily painful, physically and psychologically, to contemplate the depth of the abyss that was beneath him. And it doesn't take Freud, it doesn't take the genius of Freud to understand how that vision related to his predicament, because Tolstoy was suffering from gazing into the abyss, right? the abyss of meaninglessness, the abyss of chaos, and the dream was representing that. But then, and he could see that he was, there was a rope descending from him

that reached all the way to the ground, and that was somehow stabilizing him, that was establishing the relationship between him around, but in looking down, he was overwhelmed. And he realized that he could look up. And what he saw when he looked up was the same rope, golden rope, except it was extending so far above him that he couldn't see its culmination point, and that that was suspending him over the abyss.

It was what was stopping him from plunging to his death. And he saw the rope and he gazed upward, and that's when he woke up, and that was the beginning of his recovery. Now, what Tolstoy realized, it's very complicated that image. But he realized, I'm going to unpack it for you. This is the way you would unpack a complex dream, which is a very difficult thing to do. A dream is a place where ideas are born.

And so in a dream, a new idea can emerge, but not in full-fledged form. It emerges as a vision or an image, and it may be beyond you to transform it into words. If you look at a profound painting, profound religious Renaissance painting, for example, dealing with like a deep religious matter, you could write about it forever. Like images can be of infinite depth, which is often why cathedrals, for example, are decorated with complex images

because they're inexhaustible in their meaning. And dreams are like that, and they mean a lot, but you might say even that they mean so much that they can't be easy, they comprehend it, or put into practice. Ideas have to be born somewhere. An idea won't just... A truly creative and original idea would not just emerge in the theater of your imagination, fully fledged.

It has a developmental history like anything complex. And the birthplace of the explicit idea is the image, the dream. A dream is a moving image, like a movie. And so Toll's story is trying to work out this problem. problem he has, which is how to cope with the abyss of life, even when the material abundance that life can bring, is insufficient to provide orientation. That's a complicated problem, and the dream is a step towards solving that. And what Tolstoy saw in the dream was the fact that as deep as the abyss is below us, the expansion.

above us is infinitely as infinitely high and that there was some relation just as there was a relationship between Tolstoy and the abyss beneath him there was a relationship with between Tolstoy and the infinite expanse above him and it was that relationship with what was above that was sustaining him even though he didn't know it over the abyss okay now the question of course then is well what is the infinite expanse upward. Toastoy knew what the infinite abyss downward was. That was suffering and misery and nihilistic catastrophe and hopelessness and pain. But he only got a glimpse of what it was that was extended equally above him. Okay, so now if you're critically

minded, you might think, well, why assume that there's anything above? And And that would be a nihilistic stance, let's say, or an atheistic stance. Possibly a hopeless stance, if your experience of gazing downward was hopelessness, there's nothing that sustains us over the abyss. Well, that's a hard claim to make, because people do live in spite of their suffering and their misery. so we obviously can prevail and it's clearly the case that we're not suicidally miserable all the time

so despite the fact that we confront our own limitations and death there are things that sustain us it's called Peterson Academy Peterson Academy it's called Peterson Academy Peterson Academy if you want an actual education with hand-selected professors from top universities around the world.

Bringing the best professors together, making sure they're not censored in any way, giving them the audience and the remuneration and appreciation they deserve. And you were true to your word. You gave me absolute intellectual autonomy. I have had it through every course. We figure we can offer people a high-quality university-level education for under $2,000.

Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's honestly brilliant. I can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Funjo. Now, tolstoy, I would say, spent the rest of his life trying to puzzle out what that might be, that upward relationship. And he turned to traditional Christianity to flesh out his vision,

which is a wise thing to do, because it's a very difficult. The problem of defining the infinite upward expanse is a very complicated problem, and other people have tried to specify that expanse, and our relationship with it, and there's no reason not to draw on that if you have any sense. Just like with any endeavor, you would want to gather as much knowledge as you can about the territory before wandering off on your own. And so, okay, so now that's one story. So keep that story mind.

Now I'm going to tell you another story. It's the same story. And so there's a parallel between them. And the point we're aiming at is illustrated by the parallel. I'm going to tell you a bunch of stories that are parallel, and it'll be in that the exposure to those parallels that the understanding will emerge. That's part of the investigation. Okay, so now there's a story in the Old Testament about a man named Jacob.

And Jacob is a man whose identity transforms as he has his adventure. Okay, that happens to all of us. is that we know that, is that you're not the same as you were when you're a child. You might not even be the same as you were last week. People can get stuck so they are in a rut and they can remain static for decades, or they can transform so completely that it's as if they become a completely new person. There's a lot of range in the mutability of our identity. And Jacob is a man who starts as a very bad man and ends as a very good man.

And so that's a radical transformation. And he does that in part because he decides that he's going to do that. So that's an interesting, that's an interesting beginning. So Jacob becomes Israel. And the word Israel means the chosen people first, but it also means those who wrestle with God. And I learned that seven years ago, something like that. And it struck me because I thought I understood

what it meant. And it means something like, well, who are the chosen people of God? Those who wrestle with God. Or what does it mean to wrestle with God? Well, it means to wrestle with your destiny. It means to wrestle with the difficult moral decisions that constitute your navigation forward. And it means if you're striving to do that, wrestling, which is the striving, then you're one of the chosen people. of the divine. And so that's an interesting thing to know, to know the next time that you're trapped in a difficult ethical decision and that you're trying to find your way forward, that the fact that you're plagued by ethical consideration puts you in the game. Now, Jacob famously transforms his identity in the final sense one night when he's off to reconcile himself with his brother after being absent from his family 14 years, after 14 years previously, after being really quite a terrible person who was dependent on his mother in a way that wasn't good, who betrayed his father in a very deep manner repeatedly, and who

deceived and manipulated his brother in as profound a way as possible, in a manner so egregious that his brother became homicidal enraged and Jacob had to leave the family. And Jacob's brother had every reason to be as angry as he was, because what Jacob did was not forgivable in some ways. he, there was a law in place at the time that if you were the oldest son, you inherited the lion's share of the estate. And there's a reason for that. Modern people might not think that's fair, but there was a reason for that, particularly in agrarian societies, because if you kept splitting the land or the onings, the agricultural owners, over successive generations, everybody would end up with just enough land to starve to death on. And so it was, it made for a more sustainable society

to keep the agricultural holdings intact to give them to the firstborn because there had to be some arbitrary decision and that's an arbitrary decision in some ways and to tell the other children that they more or less had to fend for themselves. And you might say that's not fair. It's like, that's not a very thoughtful analysis.

It's a complicated problem that these people were facing and for better or worse, that was their solution. And so Esau had the rights of the firstborn, and Jacob conspired to take those rights to himself. And so, and he did that very treacherously. So he wasn't a good guy. And yet he became one of the greatest heroes, let's say, of the biblical stories. And the founder of Israel, the founder of the people of God.

So that's quite something, given that he was not such a good guy to begin with. And it's one of the things that might give you hope from a narrative perspective is, right? Because you're probably not as good as you could be. And like maybe your past was, you know, pretty shady. And you might think, well, there's no hope for you. And, you know, the more sin you've accumulated as you've moved forward, the harder it is going to be for you to aim up. But so the story goes.

That doesn't mean it's hopeless. And so Jacob's story actually lays out the pattern of upward transformation. So when Jacob leaves his mother, who he connives with, when he runs away after his crimes, he leaves his mother, he leaves his father, he leaves his brother, he goes to visit his uncle, and on the way he decides that he's going to be a new guy. And so he builds an altar and he makes sacrifice. and then he has a dream. Okay, so what does it mean that he builds an altar?

So all these story elements, they meld together. They're all pointing in the same direction. They're coherent. He builds an altar to signify his willingness to sacrifice towards what's highest. Okay, so there's no difference between doing that and deciding that you're going to sort yourself out. It's just the concretization of that, you see,

because if you decide you're going to sort yourself out, then you're establishing a relationship with what's up instead of down. By definition, you wouldn't think that you had to sort yourself out unless you were willing to draw a distinction between the terrible things you'd already done and some other way of being that was better, right? So you're establishing a gradient between good and evil, and then you're deciding that you're going to serve good, even though what the hell do you know?

because, you know, you're just, you're not a good person. And so you're going to do it pretty badly, but at least you've decided that that's going to be your intent. That's going to be your aim. And then you might say, well, why the sacrifice, the answer is, well, you're going to have to give up some things to do this, like who you are, right? Because the more corrupt you are,

the more you're going to sacrifice to aim up. And you see this as the story unfolds. You see this in the story of Abraham, too, because these people, they transform so completely. It's as if they're new people. That's why they end up with a new name. Jacob becomes Israel, which is a name bestowed upon him by God. The same thing happens to Abraham. Abraham starts as Abram, A-B-R-A-M, and ends as Abraham.

And the meaning of this story is that aiming up can take you on a journey that can transform your character, completely that it's as if you're a new person, as if you've been reborn. That's a way of thinking about. In fact, baptism itself is a symbolic portrayal of that radical capacity to transform. It's a way of dramatizing it. So you, in a baptismal ceremony, you're plunged into chaos. That's the water, the baptismal water. That's a disillusion into the water that existed at the beginning of time. That's a good way of thinking about. The waters that the Spirit of God rested upon at the beginning of time. You're plunged into that.

Your old self is dissolved and your new self emerges. It's like the rise of the phoenix. That's another image of the same thing. And it's a dramatic portrayal of the human capacity to transform. And possibly to transform upward. Now remember, in Toastoy's vision, Tolstoy had a vision of up, right? It wasn't a delineated vision. There was not any information in the vision about the nature of up,

except that the rope that connected the suffering author to the transcendent was what was suspending him above the abyss. So that's a very interesting idea, is that your relationship with what's up in the highest sense is what suspends you over the catastrophic abyss, what maintains you. That's a proposition that Tolstoy's dream is offering. Now, dreams are a very interesting phenomenon because they don't lie. You can trust a dream. You might not be able to figure out what a dream means, and that's a problem.

But a dream is a natural phenomena like a tree or a rock or an animal. There's no guile in it. There's no deceit in it. It just portrays something. And so the dream portrayed to Tolstoy, the idea that he was suspended over the abyss of his despair by his relationship with what was highest. Now, there's still plenty of problems with that formulation, because, for example, it shows, it sheds very little light on what's highest.

Right? What's the nature of what's highest? Now remember, we talked about the questions. What's the identity of man and woman? What's the identity of the divine? And then what's the relationship between the two? So the question of what's highest is part of the question. What's the nature of the divine?

What's highest? Okay. So Jacob decides he's going to be a good guy. Now, you've done this lots of times. I hope you've done this, at least to some degree, many times in your life. You looked at the way you're acting, the way you're acting, the way you're attending, and you think, God, you know, I've got to do something about that

because it's not going in the right direction. And I'm going to change. I'm going to try to put myself together. And, you know, depending on how disciplined you are and what sacrifices you're willing to make and whether your new direction is appropriate, that's all going to determine whether you succeed or fail, but you need to understand what experience is being represented here.

It's the experience of guilt, let's say, and shame and recognition of wrongdoing, and then the determination to do something else. Or maybe to figure out what that something else would be, because if you're steeped in sin, so to speak, it's going to be hard for you to see what's up. But you can at least decide that that would be your aim. Now, Tammy pointed out something interesting,

which is, once you aim at something, the world of your perceptions rearranges to show you the pathway to that goal. And so that's a, this is a remarkable, this is dead true, this is how perception works, because you wouldn't get anywhere if your perceptions didn't mark out a goal for you, right? Because if you want to walk across the stage, you look at the destination and you see the pathway, and that's how your perceptions work. Your vision is a aid to navigation. And so the path that reveals itself is going.

going to be defined by your aim. This is an amazing thing to understand because it means that you could decide to aim up and without even knowing what up meant, but to really mean to aim, and the pathway there would start to reveal itself. And so now you might not be very good at it. And the Old Testament heroes, they're not very good at it when they start. They stumble around pretty badly in their initial adventures, you know, because they got to get going. But you know this too, because you know when you decide to transform yourself to some degree and you're stupidly trying something new as the fool you are, that you're not great at it to begin with, but as you do it, you do get better.

And so what that means is once you decide to aim up and you start acting that out, you would gather more information that sharpens your knowledge about your direction and makes you more skillful. Obviously, because if that didn't happen, you'd never learn anything. So clearly that can happen. So you can establish the intent of up, and then you can make the presumption that the path will appear, however, obscured, and that if you walk it, it will clarify,

and your understanding of up will improve. And that's, I would say that's part of the covenantal offering of relationship with the divine. As a matter of definition, like one of the insistences of the biblical stories is that you can establish a relationship with what's up. That's part of your nature. Okay, so let's take that apart. So I'll close with one more episode from the story of Jacob. So the night that Jacob decides to change his life

and build an altar and make the sacrifice, which is a dramatization of his willingness to offer something valuable in the hope of changing, let's say, he goes to sleep and he dreams. He has a famous dream, and it's the dream of Jacob's Latter. And he dreams of a staircase, it's often represented as an upward turning spiral. I like to think about it as a piece of music. That's a nice analogy, because I think music represents the same thing. In any case, he has a vision of a structure that unites the earth with up, with the heavens,

and that there's a pathway and that the top of the pathway disappears into what's unknown. And he saw angels descending and ascending on the ladder. And that was a vision of the structure. relates the earth and heaven and man and God. That's the claim. Now, a skeptic would say, well, what's your evidence for that? That's what we'll investigate. Now, you'll note, if you're using your imagination,

that there's an analogy between Jacob's vision and Tolstoy's vision, right? Jacob and Tolstoy both saw something ascending upward that disappeared into an infinite expanse above. So part of the idea there is that what's the highest form of up, so the highest good, isn't within the realm of your conception. It's just like if you're a materialist and you dig into the bottom of the world, you eventually run into a completely impenetrable mystery. right, you run into whatever the hell's going on at the quantum level, which is, it's incomprehensible. Even the people who can model it mathematically don't understand it. So if you drill down into the material world, you hit something beyond your comprehension. The same idea obtains here is if you go up instead of down, so to speak, if you go up into the spirit, domain of spirit, instead of down into the domain of matter, your knowledge, finite,

as you are, your knowledge cannot conceive of what's at the pinnacle. Okay? If there's an up, there's a greatest up. That's one way of thinking about it. What's the nature of the greatest up? Well, in Tolstoy's vision and Jacob's vision, that's not an answerable question.

So here's another way of thinking about it. The good, the highest good recedes as you approach it. Otherwise, you'd exhaust it. And you're not going to exhaust. No matter how good you get, you're not done. And maybe even at the end of your journey, you're as far away from the pinnacle as you were when you started. And you might think, well, that's hopeless. It's like, no, not exactly.

You wouldn't want it to be exhaustible because then you could be finished. Now, you kind of understand this in your own life, you know, because you can work to improve your circumstances, and then you can improve them. But you don't want to be done. You want to now, in your improved circumstance, have a vision of how you can improve circumstances, have a vision of how you can improve your circumstances, right? And then when you improve them again, your circumstances and your character, let's say, then hopefully you'll be wise enough and well situated so that you can see the next step.

And why would you assume that that has... Suffering doesn't seem to have a limit. Why would the ability to move away from suffering, let's say, have a limit? Okay, so the hypothesis. in the vision of Tolstoy, in the vision of Jacob, is that that which is it, the highest place is beyond our comprehension. It moves out of our field of understanding. But that doesn't mean it isn't real.

It just means that it's beyond us. Now, you see, this insistence occurs repeatedly in the biblical texts, and this is an important thing to understand if you're trying to wrestle with the idea of religious belief. I believe in God. I don't believe in God. It's like, what do you mean by God? Exactly. The atheist types, they'll parody that. It's like the old man with a beard in the sky. It's like, that's an image. It's not the reality that's portrayed in the biblical texts.

It's an image. It's a characterization. It's a fragmentary characterization. Why do I say that? Well, it's simple. All you have to is read the text and you figure that out, so I'll give you some examples. and these are relevant to the notion of what's at the pinnacle. So Moses encounters the divine twice directly, and then multiple times periphery, but in a visionary manner, at least twice. The first time, both of these episodes are very famous, almost everyone knows them, even in the secular society.

The first time is when he encounters the burning bush. So now the situation there Moses has killed someone in Egypt kind of impulsively and he has had to run away so it's not a great beginning and he's like an older adolescent when that happens and he leaves Egypt because word of his actions gets out

he's kind of impulsive and a little bit tempted by power that's Moses' pattern of sin and it recurs repeatedly throughout his life he leaves Egypt and he goes to Midia Midian

he joins the Midianites and he gets married and he establishes an adult identity and he likes his father-in-law who's a midianist and he likes his wife I think he has two wives and he's become an adult

and so that's a transformation right an upward transformation he's become an ordinary responsible adult and good for him That's better than impulsive power-seeking junal. And so now he's a shepherd in this new land that he's occupied, and that's a demanding job. It's a responsible job. You have to take care of these sheep, and they're sheep.

You're not that bright. And so you have pay attention to them, and they're vulnerable, the lambs in particular, and edible. And that's a big problem when there's wolves and lions about, which there were plentifully at that time in that part. of the world. And so if you're a shepherd, you have to be the sort of person that can guard the vulnerable from the predator. It's a good definition of what a man is, by the way. And so, well, that's why the shepherd is a recurring image that's associated with redemption in the

biblical text. A shepherd isn't a high status job, but it's a hard job and it needs to be done. and it's also emblematic of a certain pattern of ordinary heroism. And the value of the shepherd is indicated, for example, in the fact that Christ is often represented as a shepherd, but also that the news of Christ's birth is first revealed to shepherds, and low-status shepherds at that. And so, and David, of course, King David is a shepherd. And so, and why a shepherd?

Well, I said why, because if you're a shepherd, you have to be the person who can take out the real predators. So that's a monstrous element, but who protects the most vulnerable. And that is what a man does, if he's a man. That's a perfect definition of being a man. It might not be exhaustive, but it's dead on the money. And it's what women look for in men. They look for men who have a monstrous element so they can keep the real monsters at bay, but who have associated with that, that capacity to protect and serve. And that's a tough

set of opposites to bring together. So Moses is a shepherd, and good for him. He's an adult. And, you know, he could live his life as a shepherd, let's say, but one day he's wandering around by a mountain, which is where the messages, mountains connect the earth and the heavens. And so, it's very frequently the case that because the mountain is up and heaven is up and up is good and up is towards the light and up is towards the heavens

and so the mountain is a place where earth stretches up to the heaven that's a place where revelation can be received that's symbolic significance and Moses is by the mountain and something attracts his attention

okay so that's a good thing to know something attracts his attention because things attract our attention right and in some ways independent of us you know it's not exactly the case that you can decide what's going to attract your attention

sometimes it seizes you well and then a very tricky question arises in consequence of that realization it's like well if it's not you maybe you're attending to something despite yourself That's often what happens, for example, if you fall in love with the wrong person. It's like, well, what's gripping you?

It's not you. You're thinking, man, I wish I could get out of this. It's like, it's not you. What is it? That's a hard question. Okay, so Moses is being a shepherd and mine in his own business, and something captures his attention, and he makes a decision, which is a decision we all make all the time.

His decision is he's going to go investigate what, captures his attention. Now that's worth thinking about, right? Because that story tells you how to establish a relationship with the divine. Is that you watch while you're about your ordinary business and you see what captures your attention. Now, it might be something that calls to you, it interests you, it makes you enthusiastic, or it might be something that pulls at the heart, strings of your conscience, but it makes itself manifest with a kind of independence, and it presents itself to you. Now, you do not have to pay further attention. Maybe you're intrigued by something. Maybe you have a dream of starting a new business, let's say, and you have a kind of an ordinary job, and you're feeling a little constrained by it,

and you've got this dream, and you're interested in this new, positive, And you can just put that aside. But then what? Well, then you forego the opportunity of relationship with what compels you forward. Now that's a dangerous thing to do because life is hard. And if you don't have a relationship with what compels you forward, then you have suffering without meaning.

And if you turn away enough times from what compels you forward, because you want to remain ordinary, let's say. You want to remain as a shepherd, let's say. Then all of what calls you forward will vanish. And that is not a good idea. And that's not what Moses does. Moses goes off the beaten path to investigate. Now, this isn't a forest fire, right?

It's a burning bush. It's not even a tree. It's a bush. It's not that big. So he could ignore it. But he doesn't. goes off the beaten path and he investigates. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, a bush is a living organism. It's a small tree, let's say. A tree is a symbol of life, partly because it's alive,

partly because life has a branching quality. Like all the blood vessels in your body are tree-like. All the neural structures in your brain are tree-like. The genetic history of an organism is tree-like, and a tree is alive. And so why would it be burning? Well, because alive things burn. That's metabolism. Everything that's alive is on fire. I think when you fall in love with someone, you see them on fire. Everyone else is, you're blind to everyone else.

Like you're blind to other people's children in a way. Your own children are on fire for you if you love them. That's because you see them properly. You see them accurately. And so you're compelled by them. That's the burning bush phenomena. Phenomena. That word, it's from the Greek, phaenaes thigh.

That means to shine forth. That's what phenomena means. Now, if you watch, you'll see that in your life, things shine forth. They call, because they grip you. They grip your interest. And then you have a decision to make. You can forego that interest, or you can investigate. That's a quest.

Moses investigates. Now, he gets closer and closer to this object of interest. So imagine that's what you do when you start to take something that interests you seriously. That's what a scientist does who's curious about some minor phenomenon, hypothetically minor. And so he decides to focus his attention on it, and he studies that phenomenon for years. And as he studies, his knowledge of it grows and grows, and his understanding the world deepens and becomes more profound. And if he's committed to that, then he'll get to the bottom of things and figure things out. And that's what happens to Moses.

He interacts with this burning bush. He gets closer and closer to it. Then he realizes he's on sacred ground. What does that mean? He gets to the depths. What's the moral? Things that attract your attention, the deep is calling to you in the guise of the things that attract your attention. They'll glimmer to begin with.

and they might even be trivial initially. If you take them seriously and you dive in, you'll go farther and farther down into the structure of the world itself. And that's how you learn deeply. That's how you become an expert. And that's what Moses does. And he takes off his shoes while he's doing this.

And that's to signify his transformation of identity. Shoes are a symbol of identity, like work boots or dance slippers. He takes off his shoes because he's going to be going somewhere new is going to be being someone different, which is what will happen to you if you establish a relationship with beckons to you. And so the culmination of that process is that the voice of the voice of the divine speaks to Moses. He gets to the bottom of things. And that's what people do when they take what beckons to them seriously. They get to the bottom of things.

And they become the sort of person whose words have weight because they know what they're talking about. And God who speaks from the depths of the bush tells Moses that he's going to become a leader and that he is going to speak to the Pharaoh, the tyrant, and he's going to free the slavish Israelites and lead them to the promised land. He's going to take them on a journey.

He's going to take them on a quest. He's going to aim them upward. And Moses says, why will anyone listen to me? And the answer to that is, God says why. The voice that speaks to Moses says, tell them I sent you. And Moses has had that experience, and the ground on which he's standing when he speaks is firm.

And so his words are compelling in the way that the words of someone who speaks compellingly and is believable are compelling. And you might ask, well, why is that? And the answer is, well, it says in the Gospels that Christ spoke as one with authority, right? And that his words were compelling. Well, there's a reason that words are compelling.

And the moral of the story of Moses is that words are compelling in precise proportion to their connection with what's deepest. Right. And that's a very hard thing to dispute. So Moses establishes a relationship with the divine, and that's what makes them into a leader. And there's leader as defined in that text. A leader is someone who stands up against tyranny

and who frees those who are enslaved. That's always true. Right? Always. That's what you do for yourself, if you stop tyrannizing yourself. That's what you do with your family. If you stop tyrannizing them, That's what you do with your children if you encourage them not to be slaves. That's how you set your culture right.

It's always the case that the leader is he who delves deeply into something, establishes a relationship with what's fundamental, faces down the tyrant, and brings the slaves on a journey towards the promised land. That's a definition of leadership. Okay, so that's an idea about the divide. So that's a characterization in part of what's at the top. of the rope that Tolstoy saw or the top of the ladder that Jacob envisioned. Okay, it's just one characterization.

It's not total. Now, here's another example. So at one point, Moses, who's worked very hard in the service of his people, he's rewarded by God, and God says that he'll get a chance to see God. Now, he's already saw to see him a bit in the, the Burning Bush episode. But it's a little more complete vision this time. But it's still not very complete because God puts Moses between like two cliffs so that he can only see out a crack. And then he says, I'll let you see my back after I've passed for quite a distance. And so Moses

gets to peer out through these two cliffs and see God as he's passed by. And well, why is the story set up that way? Well, it's to point to the same. reality that we already described is that what's at the pinnacle of up, what's at the top of everything, so to speak, is not comprehensible, right? It's beyond you. It's not, it's something you can establish a relationship with, but whose final comprehension is, exceeds the capacity of even a prophet like Moses. So you have to remember this when you're talking about God, let's say it, about your belief. It's like, what is this God that you believe? in. Well, the biblical insistence

in the final analysis is that there's a that the essence of the divine is beyond comprehension. And that's no different than the claim that there's no limit to up as you move upward. And it's no different than the idea in a way that

at the base of material reality itself is an impenetrable mystery. The foundations of the world from a material perspective, the nature of the foundations exceeds your comprehension. Just as the nature of the ultimate divine exceeds your comprehension. Now that doesn't mean that you can't establish a relationship with it. Right. Now, much of what the biblical text do is describe that

relationship. They describe it as covenantal, for example, that it's a contractual relationship. It's a deal. It's a bargain. And the bargain is something like this. It's likely a bargain that you act out to some degree. We assume that if we do well, we'll do, if we, conduct ourselves properly, will do well. That's sort of the essence of faith. You can say that's essence of faith in the goodness of being itself. And you wouldn't do well if you didn't believe that in some fundamental way. You're willing to bargain. You're willing to take your bet, especially once you decide to be good, because your bet is, well, if I'm good, then the world will sort itself out properly around me, within me and around me. But you don't know. You don't know. That's why faith

necessary. There's no way of determining whether that's going to happen before you do it. Just like there's no way of determining how your marriage is going to go before you get married. Right? You have to stake yourself on the game. And you do that in this contractual manner. Okay, so now I want to build another ladder that's associated with identity, and it should shed light on the identity of men and women and the identity of women, and the identity of the divine in the relationship. Okay, so for a long time in the West,

we've had a liberal idea of identity. And I mean classic liberal identity, classic liberal conceptualization. And the conceptualization is that the fundamental reality of the person, man and woman, is the individual. Now, there's truth in that. But it's truth that only holds. in a certain condition.

There are preconditions for that being a tenable hypothesis. There are preconditions, social preconditions, contractual preconditions, that must be in place before the decision to focus on the individual at the level of of interaction, individual interaction, or society works. Now, when the Scottish Enlightenment types conjured up classic liberalism, they conjured it up within the confines of a society that had very profoundly established Judeo-Christian roots. That was the, that was what? That was the ecosystem in which the liberal philosophy emerged and flourished. And whether it can flourish in the absence of that underlying structure is doubtful.

So now we need to think about what that underlying structure might be. That would be the structure that allowed your founding fathers to say, we hold these truths as self-evident. What made them self-evident? It means everyone takes them for granted. That means there's a social contract in place that's so profound and deep that there are certain propositions, what is a woman, for example, that everyone takes for granted without further discussion.

and that means that society has to be structured in a certain manner so that that agreement can take place and that structuring was a consequence of the propagation of Judeo-Christian ideas throughout the West for 1,500 years or more. And that's all shaky now, which is why we have intense debates about the nature of the individual. So let's investigate the individual a bit.

the nature of man and woman. So we could build a person from the bottom up. So you say, well, there's a level of analysis that characterizes you at the subatomic realm. It's a mysterious level, but you partake in that. There are people who believe that your consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon. I have no idea if that's true.

My point is that, down into the material world, you exist at levels. You exist at the quantum level. You exist at the subatomic level. At the atomic level, at the molecular level, at the level of the cell, at the level of the organ, then at the level that we perceive. And then you might say, well, that's that. That's the whole story.

That's not the whole story. That's foolish. I'll give you an example. Why? So, when psychotherapy had its origins, it was a very liberal enterprise. It focused on the individual. So the idea would be, your mental health is a consequence of how you're structured internally, how your psyche is structured. What's inside you, you can even think a variant of that would be your psychologically healthy if your brain is healthy. And obviously there's some truth in that because you can develop a brain tumor and it can derange your perceptions and your behaviors extremely significantly. But then, as the psychotherapeutic enterprise proceeded, there were people who started to object to that conceptualization because they noticed that, well, you could find a family

where one person was really not doing well, and if you analyze the dynamics of the family, you'd find something like, well, that, let's call them Hunter. that person bore the brunt of all the pathology of the family. Yes, it'd be good if that was funny, instead of true. And so then the right level of analysis for that situation wasn't necessarily the problems of that individual, although those were relevant. The right level of analysis would be the dynamic within the family.

Well, why? Well, let's think about your identity. It's like, if you're married, what's the difference between you and your wife or husband? Like, why would you assume that you're different? Like, I mean, the insistence in a sacralized marriage is that you become one thing. And that isn't how liberal types think. And I mean, most of us, insofar as we're classic liberals. Because we have an notion of us as separate individuals,

but it's a weird idea because let's assume that your marriage is permanent, and which is a marriage is supposed to be, it means that person is there with you all the time, right, right to the end of your life. And your identity is going to be characterized to a great degree in consequence of the pattern of interactions that you have with your wife or your husband, like continually. And so to think of you and your identity is somehow not a subset of that, coupling, that's, it's just not reasonable. It's so that your boundaries, if you're an individualist

liberal, your boundary is your skin. But that completely, that's completely belied by the fact that if you're married, your wife is as important as you are to you. And why? Well, because you're, the quality of your experience is absolutely dependent on one another. Because you're continually, it's like you're playing tennis, right? There's no sense thinking about yourself as the only person playing tennis if you're in a tennis game. And the game is real.

If you focus on the single player, you miss the game. And then it's not just the marriage, obviously, because, well, then you have kids. And so to what degree is your identity then not primarily, that of father? So that means you're nested inside a higher order system family.

And is that not real? Is that not as real as what's happening inside you? And is it not the case that even your psychological stability is going to be absolutely dependent on the stability of your family? So that even if you're a well-constituted individual, if one of your children start to suffer terribly, that's going to affect you directly. And so that means your mental health isn't inside you. It's a consequence of the nature of the relationship that you have with your wife and your kids, let's say. But that's not all. There's wife and kids. Then there's community.

There's career and the business that you're embedded in. There's your town, your city, your state, your nation. And then there's whatever your nation is founded on. Maybe that's the nation is embedded in the natural world. And then all of that's embedded in whatever everything is embedded in. All of that is part of you, all of it, equally, strangely enough. And so the notion that your identity ends at your physical boundaries as an individual, that's not right.

And you can tell that it's not right, in part, because that identity is fragmenting in our culture. Right? That identity is not maintaining its coherence. And part of that is that your identity as an individual cannot maintain its coherence in the absence of your relationship with other people. Obviously. Why, obviously? You can take the most antisocial people there are, like serious criminals, and you can punish them by isolating them.

That tells you everything you need to know about people. You take people who are the least social people you can imagine, and you can make them seriously miserable by making them alone. Well, that shows you how much we're individual. Now you could say, and should, imagine now that you're in a well-constituted marriage, in a well-constituted family, in a town that's functional and stable, in a state that's abundant and predictable, in a country that works, in a metaphysical reality that's, what would you say, wise, in a natural order that's sustainable. then you can be an individual.

But that's a lot of preconditions that have to be met before you have that dynamic flexibility that enables you to focus here and now on you. And those higher order levels of existence, let's say, they're predicated on an ethos. They're a kind of game. There's a way you have to treat your wife for it to work. Ask her.

She'll tell you. She'll certainly tell you, even if she won't tell you the rules, she'll tell you when you break them. Right. And you want that. You want that. We're doing that to each other all the time, you know? It's like if I'm interacting with you in a way that you accept as desirable, then you'll want the interaction to continue. You'll be enthusiastically and voluntarily engaged and will progress and likely upward, assuming that we're not doing something together that's,

nefarious. And we might not even know what the rules of that dynamic are, but we will know when one or the other of us breaks the pattern. Right. There'll be a disjunction, an awkward pause in the conversation, let's say, right, or a mutual misunderstanding, a breakdown of the relationship. And so here's a way of conceptualizing mental health. It's a musical conceptualization. You know how a note has its place in a phrase and in the melody, then in the piece as a whole. Well, that's how you're, that's your mental health. It's like if you're well-constituted in your higher-order relationships, then the harmony that exists is your mental health. That's not something you carry around inside you like a well-constituted

psyche or a healthy brain. It's partly that because there's all those underlying levels that we talked about, right? Molecular, the molecular level, the level of the organ, that's all real too. You want that whole thing to be harmon... That's hard. You want that whole thing to be harmonious. Right from the quantum level to whatever's at the pinnacle, right? One nation under God. What is that superordinate reality in which everything's embedded? Well, we saw a little bit of that in the story of Moses, right? Moses makes contact with that when he pursues what interests him and delves into it deeply.

He establishes a relationship with that transcendent reality that underlies everything. And one of the insistences in the biblical corpus is that that's one of the ways God, this is a definition. The divine is what makes itself manifest in what calls you forward. Now that's a wonderful thing to know. And I think it's technically true. So imagine this, is that, imagine that

you have a vague apprehension of these higher order systems in which you live right now some of that knowledge will be explicit and some of it won't be you don't know exactly how to be a good brother exactly how to be a good father

or good husband you have some sense of that but you definitely let's say you want that so now that's your aim that's your That's the arrangement you make with the structure of the world. You want to be a better husband.

Okay, so now what happens to you is that the pathway to better makes itself manifest as those things that grip your attention. That's what will happen. And then you can think about that as the voice of what's... You can think about that as the voice of your higher aim conferring with you. And that's correct. And then you, that's correct. That's how your perceptions work.

That's how your emotions work. Once you establish your aim, your perceptions lay out the pathway in the world towards that aim, and your emotions come into alignment. So that if you're aiming at point A, and you see yourself moving towards point A, that fills you with enthusiasm. And if you see that you're deviating from the path,

that produces negative emotion. That's how emotions work. So your aim determines the structure of your perceptions and your emotions. Now, once you've established an aim, I'm going to be a better person. Then the spirit of that aim makes itself manifest to you in what grips your attention. Now, you might say, well, what does that have to do with the divine? That's a hard question, because it's the same question is, well, what relationship does your approximately, of what's good have to what's ultimately good.

Now you wouldn't say none because then it wouldn't be good, right? I mean if you're if you're aiming at the good, you've established some proximal relationship with what's ultimately good. It's you're participating in that process and then you don't know if what grips your attention or perhaps disturbs your conscience. You don't know how high up the ladder that message is coming from. Now, the story of Moses is predicated on the insistence that if you do this seriously, you'll establish contact with as much contact as is possible for you to withstand with what's actually at the highest point. Now, you kind of know this because you know that there are times when you're enticed forward into action, say, by something that really makes you feel committed.

You think, yeah, this is for me. this is something I'd work for I'd sacrifice for because work and sacrifice that's the same thing this is something that would get me out of bed in the morning even if I was miserable so let me tell you the other

let's see I'll tell you the story of Abraham a little bit of the story of Abraham because it makes this clear okay so now what have we done in terms of answering these questions so I made the case that we're connected to what's above us

to speak in this manner that speaks of our nesting within higher order structures, right? Marriage, family, town, city, state, nation, natural order, and then whatever that's all grounded in. That's that structure that Tolstoy envisioned that sustained him above the abyss. And you know this is true. Like when you're doubtful about your own validity, let's say, which was Tolstoy's situation, Why wouldn't you make reference in your own imagination to the service that you've been for your wife or your children or your community? Why wouldn't you justify your own miserable existence to yourself by remembering how you were in service to what was highest? That is what you do. That's what gets you through a long night.

And why the biblical insistence is that it's the establishment of that upward-oriented relationship with what's transcendent that does characterize the relationship. relationship between the individual and the divine. And I can't see anything wrong with that reasoning. It seems to be how things are structured. It seems to be how our perceptions work. It seems to be how our emotions work. And so, okay, so let's return to the questions. What's the nature of man and woman? Well, we exist at multiple levels from the microcosm to the macrocosm. And we're related, we're not only related to everything at all of those levels, we're actually constituted at all of those levels. That's why you're a citizen of your country. Is that not part of your identity? So we exist at all those levels. And then, well, what's the nature of that existence?

Well, the higher levels are beyond us. They're transcendent. Do we have a relationship with that? Well, as a citizen of your country, you certainly have a relationship with that. Do you have a relationship with your aim? Well, if you don't, then there's no way it's going to manifest itself in the world. If it doesn't shape the way that you see and think and feel, then that's a non-sure for you. Your aim better shape you because otherwise you're not going to pursue it

and you're certainly not going to attain it. What's the nature of the divine? The divine is the ineffable up. And that's a definition, you see. And this is a good thing to know when you're plagued by religious doubt. I don't know whether I believe in God. Do you believe in the good?

And do you believe in the good that could get better? And is there an end to that? And wouldn't you characterize what's at the pinnacle as the place towards which all good moves? And then what, are you going to say that's not real? If it's not real, then why are you doing anything? Because the whole presumption of your action is that the sacrifices that you're making move you towards somewhere better.

I mean, unless you're working at cross purposes to yourself, right? You can work to make yourself miserable. You can work to turn everything into hell. But assuming you're not doing that, you're aiming up under the presumption that if you aim up, that up exists and that you can continue with that process. And so why would that be without end? Why would it be without end?

And that's Jacob's vision. And that's Tolstoy's. vision. And that's embedded in the notion of the burning bush. And it's part of the characterization of the divine. And it's very useful to understand, especially when you also understand that that is what calls to you, that you can make that connection, is that what, I've laid this out psychologically, partly in this book. You do get intuitions about how to act as a consequence of your relationship to your higher aims. That's how the intuitions work. Well, of course, That's how they work.

Right? I mean, if you're imagining establishing a restaurant, let's say, you want to establish your own business. You're going to have a vision of the restaurant. If you let yourself go there, and that's going to be this, that'll become this city on the hill, let's say, hospitable city on the hill that you're aiming at. And you're going to think, well, I'm interested in that. It's gripping me. And then having established that as an aim, you're going to tell yourself when you're moving toward it, when you're not, that's how your emotions orient yourself and you're going to have ideas that are related to the goal

or what good would your ideas be and so it's obviously the case that your intuitions are informed by your vision and your emotions are structured by your aim and so then the logical conclusion to that is aim is highly upward as you can that's what christ tells his followers in the sermon on the mount right It was actually an instruction manual of sorts. Christ says, Love God above all else. Okay, so what does that mean? Practically, it means

whenever you do anything you do, start by aiming up. That's what Jacob does when he builds an altar. Sequentially, that's what Abraham does. When he builds an altar and rekindles his covenant with God, he makes a decision at the beginning of every adventure to remember the aim. Well, and what should your aim be if you could have the aim you want?

It's like, well, why not aim at what's highest? Like, what, you'd aim at what's lowest? That's not a good plan. You know, if you're going to start a restaurant, you might as well start one that people want to go to, and then that, you know, one of the insistences in the Old Testament is that hospitality is a divine virtue. Well, if everyone made everyone else welcome, then

the world would turn into the Garden of Eden. And so what attracts you in your vision of, let's say, a hospitable cafe is a walled garden, because that's what paradise means, that's hospitable. And that's the divine itself, laying itself out to you as an ambition within the confines of your own vision. And that's a great thing to know. And as far as I can tell, it's just true. It's true theologically. It's true philosophically.

It's true biologically. It's true practically. It's true materially. That's just how things are. And the contrary hypothesis is your aim has nothing to do with your perception, which is a staggeringly foolish proposition, and that neither your aims nor your perceptions

have anything to do with your ideas or your vision. It's like, yeah. No. That's... Look, I'll give you an example. Let's say you're fighting with your wife, an example of possession. Let's say you're fighting with your wife or your husband, and you're resentful. So that's your aim, is to express your resentment. And so that's what you're orienting yourself towards.

And so what speaks to you in that moment? The voice of the spirit of resentment. Obviously. Is that possession? Let it possess you for a year or two, and you'll find out. And so yes, definitely, 100%, the spirit of your aim informs your emotion and your perceptions. That's a hell of a thing to understand. As it means, too, in part, if the world isn't laying itself out to you as a space of expansive opportunity, then perhaps your aim is wrong.

So, I said I would talk to you about Abraham, but I won't because I'm out of time. And so if you want to know about Abraham, you have to read this book, apparently. So thank you very much, everyone. See, you are a hot crowd. All right, Tam. Question time. Are you one? Tammy's microphone needs to be turned on.

You could ask me a question and all. What? Oh. There we go. Yeah, lots of questions. Okay. Okay, let's see. My sister.

had fallen victim to the woke virus. How would I go about closing the distance? She is between herself and her family. Close the distance between herself and her family because she's, I think, getting further and further away from them. Well, here's a good rule. If people aren't listening to you, stop talking. Okay, so I mean,

I mean something very, I mean something very specific by that. You can think about it as a strategy, but it's not a manipulative strategy. It's an existential strategy. It's a variant of the idea that Christ puts forward in the Gospels, which is do not cast pearls before swine. And I'm not associating your sister with swine, by the way. And I'm seriously not.

I want to delve into the meaning of that statement. There's no what will be misdoed. you're talking to someone and they're not listening. You aren't where you think you are. You've got the terrain wrong. And this is something I really learned as a therapist because you want to keep the space where the dialogue is progressing active.

And if, as a therapist, you make a verbal move and the person resists resistance in psychotherapy or circumvents the topic or doesn't use the offering as an invitation to continue to play, then you said the wrong thing.

You said the wrong thing. This is a really useful thing to know. It's like you're trying to make your point and you're not going anywhere. It's like you're not where you think you are. You're not talking to who you think you're talking to. God only knows who you're talking to. The person you're talking to might not even know who they are at that moment,

or what possesses them, so to speak. If you're talking to someone who's ideologically possessed, the probability that you're talking to the ideology is extremely high, and good luck with that. And I mean that technically, because you can tell this, because if there are 10 people and they have the same ideology, you could talk to any of them and you'd get the same answer. So you're obviously not talking about.

talking to the person. You're talking to the ideology and the probability that an ideology will listen to you is, especially if you insist, it's, forgive it. Like, going directly at it is probably, is more likely to fortify it than anything else. So what can you do instead? Well, I would say in that situation, don't offer any of your opinions, none, zero, just take yourself out of the game completely and instead listen and watch remember your aim you have an aim you said your aim in the question right your aim is to reestablish a relationship with your sister okay now you have no idea how you're

going to be able to do that and the probability that you'll do that by talking or out of radiology is well you already know that's basically zero that hasn't worked, the family's fractured, that's not working. So you don't know what to do, but you know what you want. Okay, so now you're, well, you look for an opening, right? Maybe you invite her for dinner, and then you watch and you think, you watch and you see, when is what we're doing working and when is what we're doing not working? And you try to find your pathway, right? And you're searching, that's a quest. It's like, what's the quest for? I, want my sister back.

You've got to remember that. I want my sister back. I don't want to win the argument. I don't want to talk her out of anything. You can want that, but then you're not going to get your sister back. Because you're not going to get all the things you want. You don't want to sacrifice the lower thing. You're going to win the argument to the higher thing, which is you want your sister back.

Now, if you really want your sister back and you pay enough attention, she'll tell you how to get her back. She won't even be able to help it. So there's something I learned as a therapist. This is so interesting. It's so cool. Well, there's two things, I guess, that go together. One is that if you're bored by a conversation, you're the dull one. Okay?

So if you find people boring, it's like you should take a look at the mirror. Because what you're doing is reducing all your interactions with other people to only that which is trite. And you're doing that to protect yourself for some reason. because if you listen to people, and I don't care who they are, if you listen to people, they're so interesting that you want to run away screaming. Because people are very weird, they're very strange, and they're full of snakes and twists and bends, and that's just true for so-called simple people as it is for sophisticated people. And so you want to engage it with the person in a way that keeps the fascination alive.

And then you want to listen. because if you really listen, they'll tell you what they're up to. They won't be able to help it. Because if you run across someone who listens, especially if no one's listening to you, you will tell them everything. And as soon as someone tells you everything, then you can figure out how to get them back. And that works.

It might take a while. And it might take a while before your sister trusts you, that's for sure. And what will happen is, you know, you'll invite her over and hopefully she'll come. Or you'll say to her, look, is there some circumstance under which I could meet you? Like, could we meet? Can you want to come over for dinner? Well, no, I don't think I can do that. You know, you voted for Donald Trump. It's like, okay. You don't say, well, you know, don't you like Trump too?

It's like, that's kind of obvious. I think you, we already know the answer to that question. Then you might say, well, you know, would you meet me for coffee in the morning for like five minutes and see how that goes? and if she still says no then you might say well is there any circumstances under which we could speak or meet any well and if she says no well you know

wait wait you say look the offers on the table and I'll phone you in three months and we'll try again you know like you gotta find a place where you can meet and then when you meet you go listen and she's not going to trust you and

if you listen enough, she'll tell you something private. And then she'll be really mad at you and probably won't talk to you for like three weeks again. Because, you know, you sucked her in and that'll make her mad. And so then you'll have to kind of start not quite again, but sort of again. And but if you keep that up, she'll start talking to you. And then when she talks to you, she'll tell you what she needs. And if she tells you what she needs, then you can deliver it. And I don't mean in a way that's going to violate your own integrity.

That's not helpful. And then you can get her back. But you don't do that by winning the political argument. That's for sure. It's not a political argument. If your sister is willing to sacrifice your relationship with her to the political, this is nothing to do with politics. It's way deeper problem.

Way deeper problem than that. And so you're certainly not going to solve it by discussing the political. Why do you not cast pearls before swine? because they make no use of them. It's the wrong place for treasures. And so this is a good thing to know if you're talking to someone and they're not listening. It's like, shut up. You're not where you think you are.

You're not who you think you are to that person. And that person is not who you think they are. You're in the wrong place, delivering the wrong message to the wrong person. And so what do you do? You do what Tammy said at the beginning. beginning of her talk, you pay attention. You think, okay, who the hell are you? And that's what I do to journalists when they start torturing me. It's like, you know, I thought you were a journalist, but you're not. There's something wrong with you. Now I have to treat you like there's something

wrong with you. That's annoying, but you made it necessary. So Tammy resolved a relationship with her sister by listening to her. Tammy's sister had the wrong idea about her. Really like an old idea. She was a lot older than me. She was a lot older than me. And she lost her fiance when she was 21 and I was like 13. And then she was probably 40 and we saw each other as regularly as I saw anybody else in my family, but we always ended up in some sort of misunderstanding. And we had just found out that my mom had dementia and we gave my sister a cognitive test and it looked like she was developing the same problem.

And I said to George, I need to do something because, you know, I need to do something. I want my sister back. Yeah, I want my sister back. Time is wasting. And he said, what he thought would work would be to listen. So I didn't say anything for the rest of the weekend.

Really, I just listened. And I didn't get in any more trouble, so that was good. And at the end of the weekend, we went whale watching. We were on Vancouver Island. We went whale watching. At the end of the day, we went to a restaurant with my aunt and Jordan and I. and we sat down and she started to tell me who she thought I was. And she was saying you were, I was dependent on my parents,

that they did everything for me. That you got everything you ever wanted without any effort? Yeah. Yeah. And I was kicking Jordan under the table. I wasn't saying anything. I was like, wow, just listen. No defend.

You didn't defend yourself at all. No. And then at the end of that, she said, you know, you're a really good mother. So I think she had never said out loud what she had. had been thinking maybe I hadn't given her a chance. And then we got along very well. The next year she said the same thing, the same thing. Story.

And then at the end said, you're a good mother. And then I never heard that story again. And we had 20 really good years. So it works. Yeah, it was so, it was very cool. It's very cool to watch it because Tam's sister, when we were sitting in this restaurant, really took a strip off her. But it was so, like I knew Tammy,

and her sister had formulated a picture of Tammy like 20 years ago. That was like the picture a 19-year-old might formulate, and it never really questioned it since. And it was so unlike what Tammy was like that it was like she was talking about someone who wasn't even there. And so it was even hard to take offense to. It's like, that's what you think? And then at the end of it, as Tammy pointed out,

she sort of shook her head and realized that actually bore virtually no relationship whatsoever to the reality that she was actually observing. And she would have never figured that out if you would have said anything to defend yourself, right? You had to let her tell the whole story. She didn't know what she thought of Tammy

until she said it. And then it was preposterous. And then it was obvious that it was outdated and useless and not accurate. But it would have never, that would realization would have never come if you would have started defending yourself

because she would have just backed into a corner and you would never heard what she thought. I think she was very traumatized, you know, when she was 21 and that just solidified in time. That was where our relationship was. She must have looked at me at 13, not having had any tragedy in my life and felt some jealousy or, you know,

because she was in such pain. And she never talked about it. until that moment. So that was very interesting. And that only took three days. Yeah, three days. Yeah. Yeah, it was amazing.

It was amazing. So, okay, well, that's that question. Good luck with your sister. It's a good, it's a mystery to crack, eh? Like, you can do it. You can do it. You got to, it's like taming a wild animal, you know. You got to, seriously, you got to, you got to be awake and see where the pathway is.

are we getting along or not? Like, can I adjust myself? Is it time to shut up? Don't take it personally. Don't take it personally. No. Yep. Yeah.

Okay, new question. Yep. I'm newly engaged and my fiancé is here. That's a good thing. I'm newly engaged and my fiancé is here with me tonight. What advice would you give us as we enter into our marriage together? Tell each other the truth. Like right from the beginning and if you've got lies happening now

Get them get them out get them sorted out maybe not all at once the same night You know but look you You want to build your house on a firm foundation and lies are not a firm foundation and the problem with building your house on lies is that when the storms come Your house will fall that is what will happen because the storms will come and the probability that the storms will destroy you is proportionate to the instability of your foundation. And so you build your relationship on the truth and the truth will set you free.

That's the promise. And how could it be otherwise? Because you want to adapt to the world and to your partner and you adapt to the world by admitting to the existence of the world and conforming to its contours. And you do that to it. each other, you have to say, so here's an example of the truth. So let's say I'm having a scrap

with Tammy about something. And, you know, some of that scrap is merely going to be the fact that the two of us are confronting an actually difficult problem. Maybe it's like how to discipline our three-year-old son. Because, you know, kids are tricky. They're full of tricks. They're complex. Every child is an individualized relationship. Exactly how to do it right is very, very difficult. And so you might have a disagreement. You're likely to have a disagreement merely because you're trying to think it through. Right? I mean, if you're trying to figure out how to deal with the brady behavior,

newly emergent bratty behavior of your three-year-old, you're going to have arguments in your own head about what to do. So why wouldn't your wife have an opinion that's different than yours? And unless you know what to do, which would mean he wouldn't have had the problem to begin with, You probably listen. Okay, and so you want to listen, you want to tell each other the truth. And you also want to do that in a manner that is revealing. So, for example, here's something to understand if you have a fight,

because you'll have a fight. Now you'll have a fight partly because you have things to fight about. You have things to think through. Partly because you're both stupid and ignorant, and you want to win, and it'll be contaminated with your own pathology. But some of it's just the fact that you have difficult things to deal with. a couple. Okay, so now if you're having a scrap with your partner and it's kind of auguring in, one of the things you can do, here's two things you can do that really work. One is you can separate

and you can go your own way for a minute or two knowing you're going to come back together because you shouldn't run away from the fight. You can go to your corners, so to speak, like boxers and you can think, I'm, you know, certain that my wife is like 95% wrong in this argument. but there's some possibility that, you know, I contributed to it like maybe 5%, maybe, sometime. How? Now, you have to want the answer to that question, which is very annoying, because you really don't want to know the answer. Because you want her to be wrong, because that would be convenient, except that if your wife is always wrong, then you're married to someone who's always wrong.

And that's really annoying unless you always want to be right. So you don't really want her to be wrong, certainly not all the time. And you don't want to defeat her all the time unless you want to live with someone who's permanently defeated. Well, then you can be a martyr and you can proclaim to your friends how terrible it is to live under the weight of this defeated person. And, you know, that's fun. But it's a hell of a way to have a marriage. And so, anyways, you're sitting there and you think about the stupid thing you did, and then you can go tell your partner the stupid thing you did to contribute to the fight and she can tell you the stupid thing

that she did and then you're both stupid and then you can have a talk and maybe you can sort it out and that's a good thing to do you know look to your own sin so to speak and then the other thing you can do is you can tell the person what you want it's like say you're embroiled in a fight with your partner it's like we've done this like very bluntly is there anything i could say at this moment that would hypothetically satisfy you. Right. And that can be a genuine offer. It's like use your imagination for a second.

We're having a fight. Clearly you want something. Clearly. Now, I don't know if I could give it to you or even would, but I might want to know what it is. And so then it's up to the other person to think, okay, obviously I want something. What is it?

And that's annoying, because what your partner will inevitably say something like, if you love me, you don't know. And that's like, see, everyone's heard that. Everyone's heard that. And what that really means is shut up and leave me alone. That's what that means. I don't want to think about it.

It's like, no, it's like, I would like to give you what you want, maybe, if I knew what it was. And so that's a worthwhile exercise. It's like if you're angry with each other, you're going to try to fight and win, and that's not a good idea. But you could sit there and think, okay, if this situation turned out the way I would want it to, you know, if I was treating myself right

and I wanted my marriage to work and I wanted to treat my wife right, what would that look like? And you'll get that answer because your vision falls into alignment with your aim. And then if your partner will tell you, then you can say the words they want, to hear. But then there's rules about that too. It's like, here's the rule. It's like,

okay, I'm going to try to give you what you need, but I'm not very good at it. I'm not good at it because I'm stupid, which is why I didn't know what you needed to begin with. And I'm going to do it badly the first time I do it. And awkwardly, and maybe somewhat falsely, because she's going to think, well, if I have to tell you what to say, then it's not real. It's like, well, it's not perfect, but maybe the 50th time I do it all have practiced enough so I got it right. I'm dead serious about that. You know what I mean? It's like I used to have people who were having trouble in their marriage in my clinical practice

and I'd say, well, when was the last time you guys went on a date and they'd just like roll their eyes and like that was, they thought, I think she's a stupid therapist. That's what they both agree on. This is a stupid therapist. That's one thing we could agree on. And then often they'd begrudgingly agreed. go have a date. And the whole plan was to go have like the worst date in the world so they could come back and triumphantly report how miserable the date was to prove that they had the stupidest

therapist in the world. And, you know, and I can understand that because they're all frustrated because they hadn't had like a good date for like 10 years. And so they're really pretty frustrated and unwilling even to hope. But, you know, if you haven't been getting, getting along very well and you go to try to have a date, if it isn't a complete bloody catastrophe, it might be a step forward. And maybe if you do it 30 times, you'll be, it'll sort of be 20% enjoyable, which is a lot more than zero. And if you did it 100 times, maybe it'd be like 80% enjoyable. And maybe you could get good at it. And maybe because it's worth doing some mathematics. So, for example, let's say, we'll get right to the heart of the matter.

Let's say that you're going to make love with your partner twice a week for the next 40 years. So let's say if you're lucky. And really, so that's 100 times 40. That's 4,000 times. Okay, so now you have to let each other know what you want. And that's going to be awkward, like for 100 times. That's a lot of awkwardness. But that's, you got 3,900 times left.

I'm dead serious. So, you know, let your partner know what the hell you want and what you could jointly conjure up a vision of what the perfect romantic episode would look like. Like, why not do that? You just sit and think about it. It's like if I could have what I wanted, even once. What would that look like? what would that look like?

And then, you know, you could ask your partner the same thing. If we had like a perfect date, what would that look like? And there's going to be some difference in opinion. And then you could like have a chat and think about how you could meld your visions together. And then you could go practice that stupidly a hundred times. And at the end of it, you'd be a hell of a lot better than you were at the beginning of it. And then you got 3,900 more times to get it right. And so try that.

Try that with your partner once you're married. Yeah, yeah, okay. Are we done? I guess we're done. Well, that's a high note tan, Dawn. All right, everybody.