The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Why Your Marriage Feels Like A Prison Instead Of An Adventure

Episode Date: October 25, 2026

What does it mean to actually live your life, not just survive it? In this lecture, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson explores the story of Abraham and what it reveals about identity, sacrifice, and the call to adventure. Why do people with everything still feel empty? Why does comfort, without purpose, corrupt rather than satisfy? And what does it actually cost you to keep playing it safe? Peterson also digs into what marriage and parenthood really demand. Commitment isn't a cage. It's the condition for becoming someone worth being, and why the people who take it seriously end up with more, not less. This is a lecture about what it takes to become who you're supposed to be, and why most people never do. This lecture was filmed in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 5, 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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So I actually did a fair bit of the work that I'm going to talk about tonight when I lived in Boston. That was between 1992 and 1998 when I had the privilege of teaching at Harvard. And I worked on my first book. I finished my first book there. In fact, I think I really did the majority of the work. I did summon McGill when I was there in Montreal beforehand, but I did a lot of the work that culminated in this book, Maps of Meaning, very academic book.

One that was probably really in some ways mostly written for me. This is not exactly the right way to write a book, because obviously when you're writing a book, you're trying to sort through ideas, but also to communicate them. And I put a lot more emphasis in that book on sorting through the ideas than on communicating them. You know, and that made it... That's not a criticism precisely,

although it is an indication of a certain kind of limitation. It took me 20 years of lecturing about that book, really, before I could make the ideas that I had been wrestling with communicable to... well, communicable. That's the simplest way of thinking about it. A lot of lecturing and then a lot of writing. And that resulted in two books that were quite popular,

12 rules for life and an antidote to chaos, and then beyond order, 12 more rules for life. And now I have a fourth book, which I sent off to the publisher in its more or less finished form two weeks ago, which is we who wrestle with God. And all of these books are attempts to address what I think of as the fundamental issue of our time.

Both Tammy and Jonathan made allusions to that because the fundamental issue is one of identity. And there isn't a more fundamental issue than that. So one of the things I realized when I was writing maps of meaning was that there are two fundamental forms of knowledge that we need to have about the world. About life, that's a more accurate way of putting it. We need to know what is in the world, and in some ways that's the domain of scientific inquiry. But that isn't all we need to know. And it might not even be the most fundamental thing we know.

We need to know how to be in the world. We need to know how to act in the world. We need to know what to attend to in the world. And we need to know how to prioritize our action and our attention in the world. And that's not the same as knowing what the world's made of. And there was a famous philosopher David Hume who pointed this out several centuries ago. that there's no simple way of moving from a description of the world to action in the world. There's no easy way of deriving a sense of what should be in the world from what is in the world.

That's the gap between what is and what ought to be. And we live our life in relationship to what ought to be. Jonathan made an allusion to that, too, when he talked about what it meant to be an American. It could be that being an American is a simple consequence of something that could be stated as a fact, which is that you're born in the United States, which is a description of you in some ways that's you as an object, you as a thing, you as a set of facts. But then he put a twist on that and said, well, maybe being an American is actually something that's aspirational, that's predicated on a pursuit.

and that fits more in with the idea of the American dream, right? Being an American is something that you participate in, so it's an identity. It's something perhaps that you are, but that you also become. And you know that to some degree, because, of course, you understand that there are greater and lesser Americans, and what that implies is that there are better and worse ways of being American,

and that implies, in turn, that it's not merely a matter of a description, of a set of facts, but something like an aspiration, an aim, you might say, an aim that might be signified by the flag that you look up at, right, and that flutters against the sky as an object of aspiration that you pledge allegiance to, which means that it's not only something that you aspire to, but it's something that you all collectively aspire to. And so then it's not only an aim, but it's a collective aim, and it's not only an identity, and that you're an American in your aspiration, but it's a collective identity,

because you're all American in your aspiration. And what that implies is that something approximating an aspiration or an aim unites you. And that implies, in turn, that something like a structure of value unites you, right? because you aim at something of highest value. And when you pledge allegiance to the flag, you swear to embody to act out the ideals that sit at the base of your culture and to be the standard bearer for those ideals, but not only conceptually, but in the manner that you comport yourself,

in the way that you're an ideal, and in the way that you pursue an ideal. And so all of that consideration can help you understand that you need to know how to be in the world. You don't just need to know what the world's made of. You can't follow the science, let's say, because science is a descriptive enterprise, and your existence is not a descriptive enterprise. It's something that you have to cobble together on the fly.

It's something that you have to commit to. it's something that's beyond you that you have to aim at. And that's an interesting thing too, because we always aim at what's beyond us, because if you have what you want at hand, there's no aim, right? There's nothing to do. It's already there. And so every aim is aspirational, and that means every identity is aspirational, that you're searching for what's beyond you as you formulate your aim.

I think that's a very interesting observation from the religious perspective, because you could define God as the good that's always beyond you. That's not an exhaustive definition of God. There's no such thing as an exhaustive definition of God. You have partial definitions, but that's a good initial starting place for us tonight when we're trying to delve into what it is that you, You need to know. You need to know what is and you need to know what should be.

You need to know how the world is constituted at an objective level, but you also have to understand how to act in the world. You have an existential problem at hand. You need a way of being. That's an identity. And you don't just need a way of being. You need a way of being that is collective because it can't just be your identity. And the reason it can't be your identity is for the same reason

that there isn't just one of you in the audience in the theater, is that for better or worse, you're stuck with, and you have the opportunity of other people, and that obviously necessitates something approximating negotiation in relationship to your identity. And it also indicates that a collective identity is necessary so that people can be unified in their aim. Well, why?

Well, if you're unified in your aim, you can cooperate. If you're unified in your aim, you don't have to fight. Those are both very useful things. How do we unify our aim? How do we bring the multiplicity that defines us into the unity that makes us an individual? And then how do we make the individuals that we all are into the collective that constitutes a functional society? That's the question on the identity side. That's the question on the value side.

That's the question on the aim side or the aspirational side. One of the things that I learned, maybe, think this is right. And it was something I hypothesized in Maps of Meaning, the book I made reference to. And it's been a predicate of my work ever since, certainly a predicate of this new book, We Who Wessel with God, is that a story is a description of our identity.

So now this is a question. a good thing to know. We seem to have two ways of conceptualizing our knowledge or representing our knowledge or of knowing the one formalized by the scientific endeavor, again, that gives us access to a robust description of the facts that make up the world, but the other that informs our mode of being, our patterns of attention and action. Well, why patterns of attention and action? When you go watch a movie, which is a story, when you read a work of fiction, you're trying to determine what the character, who's the protagonist of the tale, is up to. And the author puts the character in a variety of different situations,

and you see what they aim at, and you come to understand the world they inhabit by inferring their aim, and you come to feel the emotions of the character as a consequence of understanding that aim, which is how you understand other people. As well, you start to understand someone who isn't you or even that is you by starting to understand what that person is aiming after, what that person's up to,

what it is that they're attending to, what they focus on, what they devote their resources to, and what they act in relationships, relationship to. That's something like their hierarchy of value. And you're interested in that because investigating the patterns of attention and action that characterize other people and evaluating the consequences of those patterns of attention and action that informs you. If someone that you know has a particularly dismal life, then you can observe that and embody it. understand it and with any luck you can derive from that example a counter example you might not

by viewing someone's suffering especially if the suffering is unnecessary you might be able to understand how you could avoid such suffering yourself hence the utility of the pattern of failure that might be typified in in fictional form in movies and in drama and on stage and in novels. Likewise, you want to see the pattern that moves you upward, that transforms you upward. That's the protagonist in a story who's a hero. A hero is someone who's moving upward

and making the transformation is necessary to continue that journey upward. And you want to observe that pattern and you want to embody it because in principle then your life can unfold in a manner that spirited, you upward in an unending cycle and that's how you address the problem of how to be in the world. There's a fundamental thing to understand as far as I'm concerned that a story is a description

of identity and aim. It explains why it is that stories are so important to us if you understand that the two problems you face as a being that has to know in order to live is the nature of the landscape and how to conduct yourself in that landscape, then you can understand why you need science as the foremost example of the description of things and why you need story, because the story tells you how to live. The story is a description of the consequences of a pattern of life. And so we're fascinated by stories

because we need to inform ourselves in relationship to our utmost aim and I suppose as well our most possibly cataclysmic end. That's in some ways that you could think about that as the landscape of heaven and hell. If heaven is the best, is the place that you occupy if your mode of being is as close to perfect as it could be, and hell would be the mode of being that characterizes you if everything is gone to hell. And so those are the poles of existence.

The poles of narrative existence, the ultimate reaches of the story. What's it 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. So why am I interested in religious topics, let's say, we who wrestle with God in in my books, in Maps of Meaning, in 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order and in the current book, I spent a lot of time assessing stories and also telling them and trying to understand what they signify. And as I've done that over the years, the stories that I've included have been,

have more and more often been religious or sacred stories derived from a variety of different cultures, but most particularly focusing on the sacred stories of the Judeo-Christian culture. Sacred stories, this is a definition. Sacred stories are the deepest stories. This is a definition. Now, we know that stories vary in depth. Everyone understands this,

because you know that if you're looking for a night's entertainment and you turn on your smart TV and you search out a movie and you're exhausted, you might want a shallow story, right, that doesn't require a lot of thought or a lot of emotional commitment. It might teach you something. It might merely affirm what you already know, and so it's simple and easy in that manner, but you don't fool yourself or anyone else

into thinking that you're doing something profound or life-changing. But you also know that there are stories that people have told you or that you've read, especially if they hit you in particularly problematic periods of your life, that have transformed you deeply and that hit you profoundly. And you know that there are authors who are reliably better at that,

than other authors, and those are the authors we regard as great, and we regard them as deep, because they move us, whatever that means, they move us at a level that's deep, and we can feel that emotionally, and there'd be no hierarchy of value in the world of literature or art, for that matter, if we didn't have something like an intuition of depth, and some stories are deeper than others, and the deepest stories are sacred stories. And I'm not trying to convince you. you of that, I'm offering that as a definition of what constitutes the sacred. The deeper story is, the more it verges on the religious. And we tend to think in our culture, because we're so obsessed with what is, we're so obsessed with the scientific description that we think that the religious

claim is something akin to the scientific claim, that it's a description of what is. But it's, it is that in a sense in that you can't figure out how to be without also knowing what is, but the fundamental aim of the religious enterprise is existential. It's the attempt to provide you and the culture that you exist in with an integrating identity. All right, so let me give you. you an example of that. So I'll tell you a little bit to begin with about the story of Abraham. And Abraham is a story of character and identity development and sacrifice. Both of those together.

Those things always occur together. You could say in some ways that they're the same thing. Now Tammy made an allusion to this when she talked about marriage, knowing naive young people often regard marriage only as a sacrifice and often as a negative sacrifice. You pick one partner and that means that you forego all other partners and that's obviously a sacrifice and once you're married and committed to one person, you can't do just what you want all the time. Now, whether that's a sacrifice of something real or something illusory is a very complicated question because young people in our culture in particular, tend to think that they're free and individual actors,

and then they're locked into something like a power relationship, a constraining power relationship, if they take on any long-term responsibility like marriage. But the truth of the matter is that young people are not autonomous individuals. They're barely not children, and children. And that can be true even if they're 40 or 50. And that freedom isn't freedom, it's grip, it's the unconscious grip of whims that demand immediate gratification. Because when people say that they're afraid, let's say to be married, because they won't be able to do what they want,

what they actually mean, even they don't know it, is that they won't be able to pursue the hedonic gratification that all the immediate whims that possess them would demand. that they do. And that's nothing but immaturity, and giving that up actually isn't a sacrifice, not in any fundamental sense, it's actually progression, because we know that when your character develops from childhood to adulthood and you mature, that the advantage of maturation is that you learn to act in a way that stabilizes you now and gives you hope and stabilizes your future and gives that hope and makes you useful to your future self and to people around you, and that that only happens if you give up this narrow self-centeredness that characterizes someone radically immature.

And there's nothing in that that's a bad deal except on the occasions where, in principle, your idiot whim could have found gratification. But anyone with any sense, by the time there are certainly in their mid-20s, realize is that you tend to gratify your immediate whims at substantial cost to the medium term in the future and to the people and to yourself, so yourself in the medium term in the future, but also to the people around you. I mean, that's the objection to hedonistic immaturity is that's not going to work out for you in the long run, and it's very hard on the people around you. They can't rely on you, but you can't rely on you either, and that's not a good thing. And so that sacrifice in

relationship to character the sacrifice that necessarily occurs in relationship to characterological development is the giving up of something insufficient and inadequate in favor of something more functional of a higher order of a more profound foundation of a higher aim of a of it's a manner of incorporating the future into the present and it's a way of integrating the way that you are from moment to moment with what you need in the future, but also what everyone else around you needs now and in the future. Right. And so it's not so much a sacrifice of your creative hedonistic individuality as it is an integration of the multiplicity that characterizes you

into a structure that takes much more into account, communally and temporarily and that works much better for you all things considered as well as for everyone else. Okay, so this is what happens to Abraham. So we meet Abraham when he's in his 70s. Now, the story has it that the patriarchal types of the Old Testament lived longer than modern people live,

and that's a consequence of their raising, you might some, into the status of sort of quasi-godlike heroes. But Abraham is 70 when we first encounter him, and we don't know really anything about him when he emerges on the scene. This is quite typical of the heroes of biblical stories. The story opens in the middle of their life when their great adventure is about to occur,

and we don't have a lot of background about the people. And I suppose this is partly because the great adventures of our life that define us do come about when we're pursuing our nondescript pursuits. And the heroes in the Old Testament stories are every man in a sense. And that's a good thing because if it wasn't the case, then the stories couldn't be used as models. And the biblical stories are sophisticated in a manner that exceeds even that, too, because Abraham, for example, who we mentioned, Jacob has the vision of Jacob's ladder spiraling up to heaven. Right? That's the vision of endless character development upward.

They are not good people when they start. Their adventures, their characterological transformation. When their story initiates and then develops, they move from being sinful and inadequate in very profound ways into being characters who are heroic, who are models, and who transforms so radically that they require an entirely new name, they require an entirely new identity. And this is a very optimistic portrayal,

because what it indicates is that the possibility for this upward spiraling sacrificial adventure that defines identity is available to everyone, no matter their starting place. And that a lowly starting place is not necessarily an impediment, and might even be an advantage. Moses himself, for example, is born as a slave and not only as a slave, but as a slave who's under the threat of death. And then Christ himself, obviously, is born under conditions that are analogous to parents who are poor in a town that's non-descript,

in a society that's subject to tyranny and religious hypocrisy, and in an economic situation that's dire. That's why he's born in a manger among the animals, right? threatened at birth. And what that indicates is that the mere fact of lowly present status is no impediment whatsoever to the grand adventure of life. And that's an extremely useful thing to know because that's the best inoculation against the temptation

to portray yourself and the impediments that you encounter, however arbitrarily, as you as victim, right? the fact that you have impediments in your way and that you occupy a relatively nondescript position let's say in the socioeconomic hierarchy in the status hierarchy that's no impediment to your upward moving sacrificial transformation and it might even be an aid you know in in the gospels a rich man has a discussion rich young man has a discussion with christ about his existential misery. He says he's rich in all material ways,

and that he's a follower of the law. He keeps the Ten Commandments, he honors his parents and so forth, and yet his life is still empty and without meaning. And Christ listens to him and says, it sounds to me like you have to sell everything you have and follow me. And that's not a blanket communist condemnation of materiality and wealth.

It's a specific diagnosis for this young man that describes to him the fact that his material comfort and perhaps material comfort itself as a pursuit or aim is insufficient to solve the existential problem of life. And so Christ suggests to the wealthy young man that his wealth is an impediment to his spiritual development, rather than something that's solving his problem or furthering his development. And, well, the disciples are all unhappy with that claim. And they say, well, if that's the cost of salvation, giving up all of your faulty security, then who could possibly be saved. And, of course, that is a very complex question.

Abraham faces this problem at the beginning of his adventure. And he's an extremely interesting character because he has this, in a sense, he has the socialist or materialist utopia at hand. Right? So his parents are rich, that's what we know about him. His parents are wealthy. And what that means is he doesn't have to do anything

to have his needs or maybe even his wants satisfied. And so the rich young man in the gospel story suffers from the delusion that earthly bread is sufficient to bring about redemption. And Christ suggests that the bread that descends from heaven is a necessary prerequisite for full development. That's something like that upward spiraling aim. And Abraham experiences the same thing, is that there's a disquiet in his heart, despite the fact that he has everything that anyone could hope for or imagine,

given the conditions of his time. Now, we have that problem in our culture. I mean, one of the things that astute cultural observers have noted, as of late, that as we become more materially secure by international, let's say, our historical standards, it isn't obvious that our lives have become richer and deeper, and more meaningful and more stable.

In fact, there's some indication that the contrary is happening. And what that does seem to imply is that man does not live by bread alone, let's say. Now, why might that be? Well, Dostoevsky tried to work through that problem very early on in the mid to late 1800s. He was a very astute critic of the socialist utopian dreams of that time, which are very much like the same dreams in modern time. He wrote about this in a book called Notes from Underground,

which is a character study of a deeply resentful bureaucrat who, was prone to shake his fist at God and curse the conditions of the world. And the story is a confession on the part of this resentful person and an existential analysis of his situation, but the situation of human beings in general. And Dostoevsky is trying to take apart the problem with the claims of those who believe that a plentiful materialism would be a utopia. And he says he has his character say something like this.

imagine that you set up a situation where men and women could do nothing but sit in bubbling pools of hot water and eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, which is as clear a vision of California as any Russian managed in the 1800s. Well, you might say, well, what could be better than that? It's a life of ease, a life of immediate hedonic gratification, hence the cakes. a life of instantly satiated sexual desire, all your needs are taken care of. There's nothing but what does he say? Bubbles of bliss floating up to the surface, and then Dostoevsky puts his hallmark twist on the plot and says, well, if you offered that to people, because human beings are, this is said with tongue and cheek to some degree, profoundly ungrateful and able to curse in a manner that no other animal

has ever managed, that what a human being would do if offered that static, utopian, materialist perfection is look around desperately for some way to break it and shatter it, just so that something interesting and perverse could happen so that they would have something to do. Right, and this is the conundrum, essentially, that Abraham faces, because although he doesn't get around to figuring it out till he's like 70, and so he's real failure. to launch in an extreme case. But what the story, it's a story of revelation and character development

and the revelation is a revelation of God and that's a definition that's offered within the story. So one of the things that's worth understanding about the biblical library, because it is a library, is that it's a collection of stories and stories are portrayals of identity and the biblical library offers a multi-dimensional

characterization of God and man and woman. And so our characters are very complex, and the character of what might be our highest aim is very complex, and the only way that we can understand that is to see it from very many different angles and to infer something. In consequence, the biblical authors insisted that these multidimensional characterizations,

let's say, of God, were reflective of something, that at bottom was a unity. That's the monotheistic hypothesis or at the apex was a unity. And so God might make himself manifest in many ways, but what is being manifest is in the final analysis something that's at the pinnacle or the foundation and a unity. Now, in the story of Abraham, God has a very particular characterization, and especially initially because God comes to Abraham as something likes the voice of adventure. Okay, now this is very much worth taking apart.

What does it mean that God comes as the voice of adventure? Well, we might first inquire into what an adventure is and then also what the voice might be. Now, an adventure is something that we appear to desire. And that's something different than desiring, let's say the materialistic infantile security that Abraham has. Now, when we go to movies, for example, or when we read stories or tell them, we cannot to tell stories about people eating, right, or shopping.

You don't go to a movie and just watch two hours of rich Californians shopping or people all around the world eating. You go to the movies to see someone, well, to see someone what exactly? Well, how about push themselves to the limit? Something like that. And not only that, but to push themselves to the limit perhaps voluntarily, and then to push themselves to the limit voluntarily in a manner that improves their character. Right?

That would be a heroic struggle against insuperable odds and a triumph, or a sequence of triumphs, or even better, a sequence of ever-improving triumphs, which would be a lovely aim for your career, for example, or your marriage. It's a very good way of conceptualizing identity, right? It's not only an aim and the framework that an aim provides, but a sequence of aims that become higher with each transformation in a cycle that never ends and that spirals upward.

Upward toward what? Well, the monotheistic hypothesis is that the character that beckons at the pinnacle of the upward spiral of transformation is identical to God. That's a definition. So God is the up that lurks behind all upward aims. That's a good way of thinking about it. And that actually makes God something quite concrete.

And you can see that in the story of Abraham because God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure. Now, we already characterized adventure. It's an adventure to put yourself on the edge and dance there. And you might say, well, why is that compelling? And the answer has to be something like, well, because it's the, process that fosters further development. Like one of the things you want to see with your kids, if you have an iota of sense, is you don't want to see your kids packed in styrofoam and

stored in the basement where nothing can possibly damage them under any conditions whatsoever, which would be your aim. I mean, you could still feed them through a little opening in the styrofoam, I suppose, but that isn't what you want. You want your child to be out there contending with the world, right, as a competitor, as someone who's striving upward, who's continually expanding themselves beyond their current restrictions of their ability. And insofar as you're a wise and encouraging parent, you're going to push them to that edge. Right, and it's a very delicate place to be,

because if you push too far, then they fall off the edge. But if you don't push far enough, then they don't develop as thoroughly as they might. And partly what you're doing when you develop a relationship with a child, is to determine the precise parameters of that encouraging challenge, right? Because some kids are very adventurous and exploratory, and you have to do a little bit of restricting on them because they might bite off more than they can chew,

and then you might have a different kid who's relatively timid and less prone to explore, and you've got to kind of push them harder, and it's the same with you, and it's the same with your friends, and developing a relationship in part is determining exactly the battle between the provision of security and the provision of encouragement and challenge that optimally develops the person that's what you want in a marriage.

The word Eve means in Hebrew something like it's partly Iser Conneggdo is what Eve is and it means something like combatant and ally in something approximating a military struggle

and so that's a very useful thing to know is that to be married is to have someone with you so that you can battle as a unity against the social and natural catastrophes of life, but also so that within the relationship, each of you puts the other on the edge in a manner that makes you both develop and that furthers the development of the relationship. Right?

And that's a challenge and that's an adventure and that's a romantic adventure. And of course, one of the fundamental fiction tropes in movies is romantic adventure, right? I mean, James Bond's stories, for example, which are clear hero stories, although at a rather, what would you say, they're not overwhelmingly sophisticated, but they're clearly romantic adventures, and that would mean that the highest form of challenging adventure is both the adventure that challenges and that provides romance, and to be able to combine those is, well, that would be the ultimate goal of a marriage, the ultimate goal of relationship between man and woman would be a romantic adventure. And the adventure is there because you don't, you aren't constructed so that enough is enough.

You're not an infant who's satiated by the provision of what's necessary for what would you say, the gratification of your basic instates. It's an insufficient way of conceptualizing people. It's a meaningless way of conceptualizing people. It's a way of remaining immature as well and hedonistic and maybe eventually narcissistic and psychopathic to only pursue that. You're pursuing this upward aiming transformation. Now, God comes to Abraham as the voice of adventure.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, voice. Well, revelations come to people in a variety of forms, and this is a useful thing to know because modern people have no idea, generally speaking, what is meant by God, let's say, at the level of definition. and the Old Testament stories in particular make that quite concrete. One of the definitions of God is the impulse to adventure.

And so that would be the impulse that makes your son, when he's young, jump out of bed and want to face the world, right, to take on a new challenge. That you could think about it as the deepest of instincts. If you think about instinct as part of the force that impels people to develop, I don't really care if you build it from the bottom up or you think about it from the top down. it boils down to the same thing.

And what does it mean by a voice? Well, you know, when you're sitting there trying to solve a problem, you have a problem, whatever it might be, the spirit that answers that question, which is what happens when you think, makes itself manifest in a number of potential forces, forms. You might have a feeling about what to do, right? An emotional impulse to move one way or another.

you might have an image of what needs to be done next, of what pathway you should choose to solve the problem that's confronting you, or if you think in words, the solution might come to you in words. And to some degree, that would be a manifestation of the logos if the voice that comes to you in words is impelling you upward to further characterological development. And we don't exactly know how God makes himself manifest to Abraham when he first appears, but it appears that it's in something like a voice,

because Abraham is instructed in one way or another to leave the comfort of his home, to leave his tent, to leave the security that he has that's real behind, and to go out into the world. Okay, so what does that mean? That's a definition of God. God is the spirit that impels even the secure out into the world to have the adventure of their life. and you might say, well, do you believe in that? Is, well, did you leave home?

Well, but that's actually the right question, because if you left home, in the faith that you could make your way, in the faith that you making your way in the absence of the comforts of your home, was preferable to remaining undeveloped and infantile in the secure bosom, even of your wealthy family, then you indicated your belief in that, call to adventure. And the indication of your belief wouldn't it precisely be a statement about what you

believe? It would be the fact that you left. And not everybody does leave. And when they don't, that's pretty ugly. And so the consequence, seriously, the consequence of delayed maturation and the abdication of the responsibility to heat that call of adventure, that's the Edipal nightmare from the Freudian perspective. It's a very bad thing. If we're really, require adventure to tolerate the burden of life without resentment, let's say, because you need an adventure to justify the difficult conditions of your life, then if you forego that, and all you have to protect yourself against existential catastrophe is the mere provision of infantile material security, that's just not going to do it for you. It's not going to do it

for you at all, and you can be depressed and miserable and bitter and resentful and murderous and genocidal in the presence of plenty of wealth, because that's not enough. And so if you forego the call of the spear of adventure to languish in infantile security, it isn't merely that you lack the adventure, even though that's a catastrophe. It's that that lack will corrupt you in a deadly manner. And Abraham, to his credit, even though he's 70, decides to take the risk. And that's heartening.

That means we can start to follow his development. It also means that there's hope for everyone because if Abraham could pull it off at 70, then maybe you're sitting in the audience thinking, you know, oh my God, I'm 45, and things have barely got going for me, and it's too late. It's like, it's never too late.

You know, there is a price to be paid for waiting, but further waiting does not reduce. that price. And so there's an insistence in the gospel accounts that the true followers of Christ have their lamps lit and their wicks prepared and they're willing

to move at the drop of a hat. And what that is is an indication that the time to act in relationship to the upward aim is now. And it doesn't matter what then was. It's still now. And if you seize the moment, let's say,

even if you've delayed seven, as in the case of Abraham, then if it's a true seizing of the moment, well, then you can still make your way upward. And maybe you can even redeem your past in doing that. And maybe you could even make all those delayed years just for the grist for the mill so that you would be able to take what you've wasted and use it now in a way that actually fulfills the promise of those wasted decades, because you can learn from your own stupidity. and failure.

So Abraham, Abraham decides to do this. Okay, that's his covenant with God. Now, this is a very useful thing to understand because one of the things that's mysterious about the Old Testament text in particular is this notion of covenantal relationship. Right? Well, covenant, a covenant is like a contract.

And human beings exist in relationship. Like, we exist in relationship to ourselves. we exist in relationship to the world, we exist in relationship to other people. The monotheistic hypothesis on the narrative end is that we also exist in relationship to the unity that's at the highest pinnacle. And the covenant we have is in agreement with that higher unity. Now, what's the nature of the covenant and the agreement? Well, it's something like this.

It's something like your belief that you can leave home, right? because there's a presumption that accompanies that daring action. The presumption is, if you leave home and you do that in the appropriate, mature manner, then that's the best pathway to future thriving. And that's a contractual arrangement. You're making a deal, in a sense, with the world. Your part of the deal is you get the hell up and you get away from your zone of comfort and you take some risks and you develop your character.

and the return that you expect in the contractual manner is that fate will smile on you insofar as it's capable of smiling on you that you'll increase the probability that fate will smile on you by undertaking the appropriate adventure of your life. And you know that this is true because that's what you encourage your children to do.

Is you don't tell them, look, kid, do your best, that's the quickest pathway to frustrating failure. No one who isn't perverse to the core ever sits down and teaches their children that, even if you've had a life that's been very difficult and your struggles have met with, you know, sequential failure, sometimes merely as a result of perverse fate, you still want to instill the faith in your children

that if they have the adventure of their life and take on the challenges that are in front of them, that that's the best pathway forward. And that's a statement of faith, right? And it's a contractual relationship with, well, with being itself, or even with the spirit of being itself. And it's part of the faith that underlies your decision to move forward into the world. Now, the same thing happens repeatedly in your life, and you know this too,

because there are opportunities that make themselves manifest to you as you develop as an adult that call to you or that torment your conscience and that offer you the possibility of shifting your aim and your focus, right? And so maybe you have a profession, you're young and you have a profession, but there's always something that you really wanted to do. You know, maybe you wanted to travel the world, or maybe you want to find the partner that is going to challenge you optimally, or maybe you want to start a new business, or maybe you want to pursue an interest that you find deeply meaningful. and your willingness to take that risk is your manifestation of faith in something like a covenantal or contractual relationship. If you decide to go off the beaten path and to follow what calls to you, that's the voice of adventure that's calling to you.

It says it calls to you in the form of that which grips your interest and compels you forward. And you can dare in consequence. And you know perfectly well if you review your life biographically that the best moments in your life come when you take a courageous and calculated risk and you commit to it fully and you transform your character in the world around you in consequence of that. And in the times that you're facing the dark night of the soul and you're depressed and anxious and hopeless, you can refer back to those moments of sacrificial success and soothe your soul. soul in consequence of understanding that at least at some points in your miserable existence,

you aimed properly and hit the target. And that begs the question. And the question is, well, what would your life be like if you did nothing but that? And that's what Abraham decides to do. See, not only does he decide that he's going to follow the voice of adventure, but he commits to it fully. Now, that doesn't mean he's perfect at it to begin with, and he's not. He's still a pretty unreliable character at the beginning of his adventure.

It's like Jacob is. Jacob's a cheat and a thief at the beginning of his adventure, and he still becomes a nation-defining hero. And Abraham, despite his incredibly late start, becomes the father of nations. And so that's a hell of a promise. Now, that's the next part of the story, because we've already got like one sentence in. And so that's the next part of the story, because God makes Abraham an offer. and it's very short offer and it's easy just to read over it and not really noticed, but it's very useful to offer, or to attend to, because it's actually the offer of adventure. Right, so what God describes to Abraham, so this is the voice that comes to Abraham

that says to him, get away from your family and your tent and your zone of comfort, get away out into the world. It's the same voice that comes to you when you're inclined to take a calculated and daring risk, right, not because you want to what, show yourself to others falsely as capable of doing that, but because you know that there's something there that's worth pursuing, right? Something that you should take the responsibility for, something that would make you more than you are, and that maybe would spill over to others.

And that's what God tells Abraham. And this is, it's such an optimistic idea. And I think fundamentally we all believe it. So God says to Abraham, if you keep your covenant with me, we already described what that is, then you'll be a blessing to yourself. Now, that's a good deal, right? Because it's rare that any of us who aren't narcissistic and do it falsely regard ourselves as blessings to ourselves, right?

I mean, one of the things I really learned as a clinician is that most people are much harder on themselves than they are on other people. And part of the reason for that is most of us use approximately the same standards to judge ourselves that we use to judge other people, or maybe we're even harder on ourselves, which, by the way, isn't a virtue. It's one of the more attractive vices, right? Because if you had to choose between being harder on yourself

or other people, I think it's more virtuous to be harder on yourself. But it's better to regard yourself appropriately and in a caring manner in the same way that you would regard someone that you cared for. That's a better way of being. And people aren't that good at that, partly because they know all their own flaws, right? I mean, you know it, you might not want to know it,

but you know everything terrible you ever did, and that means you know a lot more about how terrible you are than anyone else, and that's a hell of a burden to take on, but you see, what God offers Abraham in this covenant, is that if he harkens to the voice of adventure, then he'll become a blessing to himself. And that's what that rich young man that's talking with Christ lacks. Right? He's not in harmony with...

What? His deepest self? It's something like that. And so you can think about this even biologically, and I think that's very useful. So imagine that your child has an instinct that impels him to mature and expand. Well, the offer that God makes, Abraham, is equivalent to the statement that the child who follows that instinct to expand and develop will, has the highest probability of living in a manner that will reconcile himself to himself. or maybe even more than reconcile, like you could, like you can live in harmony with other people, like you can be happy that other people are around,

you could be happy and live in harmony with yourself in the same manner. It's a very difficult thing to pull off, given the depth of your knowledge about your own inadequacy, but the offer that God makes to Abraham is that if he keeps his covenant with regards to adventure, that his life will transform so that he will transform, so that he will regard himself as a blessing to himself. Now that's a good deal and such an optimistic deal

because what it posits is that if you pursued the deepest desires of your heart, that's what Pinocchio does when he wishes upon a star, that's the thing that moves him towards away from being a marionette that's the puppet of forces beyond his control to being something that's truly autonomous and real. if you followed the impulse of adventure, which would be the call of the deepest part of your soul, that that would transform your life that would make you a blessing to yourself.

There isn't a better deal than that. That's a great deal, because it means you could have what you want and need if you asked for it, and if you did that properly, then it would reconcile yourself to yourself. That's a great deal, man. But that's not the whole deal. It's one quarter of the deal. So the next thing that God tells Abraham is that he tells them four things.

I don't know if I'll get the order right, but I know all four of them. He says, not only will you become a blessing to yourself, but you'll do that in a manner that will establish your reputation as stellar within your community. Now that's a great deal too, because it is important to all of us to have a stellar reputation.

Psychopaths, narcissists, criminals, Machiavellians, they game the reputational system to obtain that advantage. But it can be done genuinely, and you know that, because you know there are people around you who you esteem and others that you don't, and those that you esteem have a reputation, which is what you think of them,

and if their reputation is genuine, the reason that you esteem them is because the manner in which they've conducted themselves has been a benefit to you and perhaps to other people. And those are the people who are stellar in the most fundamental sense. Those are the people, by the way, who become elders in traditional communities. You know, the radical critique of the left is that those who rise up the status hierarchy are people who manipulate and use power. And there's no anthropological evidence for that. That happens when systems fail. But when they're successful, the people who develop high esteem, let's say, in the imaginations of others,

they're not necessarily at all the people who occupy positions of power. They're people who've conducted themselves in a manner that makes everyone want to line up to talk to them when they're in trouble. Right, and so you evaluate someone like that, you look at how they conduct themselves in their life, you look at the adventures they have, you analyze the story they've acted out, and you come to the conclusion that that's the sort of person

you would like to have on your side when the waves rise and the winds blow and the storms at hand. And so God's offer to Abraham is that if he follows the call of adventure, then he'll be a blessing to himself, but in a manner that will genuinely provide his name with esteem. And so that's a good deal, and it speaks of a kind of harmony, right? It's a very cool harmony. It's a three-part harmony, you might say. So there's an instinct within you that compels you to develop upward.

And if you develop that instinct, then you exist in harmony with yourself. But at the same time, that harmony can be deep enough so that it produces a harmony between you and other people, that other people can note and appreciate. And so there's nothing selfish about that, right? And it means that you are pursuing your own adventure, but it doesn't mean at all that you're doing that at the expense of other people. Quite the contrary, if you pursued, this is the offer, If you pursued the adventure of your life properly, you would do it in a manner that would be so beneficial to other people that they would note that. Right?

And so that's a great deal. And it's a great deal because, well, people are happy if they're not cynical that other people think well of them. But it's also a very important form of provision of security and opportunity, let's say, for you and your family. Because there's nothing that's more valuable to you than your reputation, like broadly conceptualized. That's the most certain form of wealth, what other people think of you, like fundamentally think of you. And so that's how you establish a harmonious relationship with the community. And the hypothesis in the story of Abraham is that the instinct that impels us upward is the same instinct that gives us genuine status in the eyes of people who can really see who we are. That's a good deal.

And that's not the end of it. That's only two parts of the offer. The third part is that Abraham has offered the opportunity to establish a dynasty, right, to become the father of nations. Now that's a really interesting offer. It's very complicated. What it means in part is, it's a hypothesis again, what it means in part is that if you followed that impulse to develop yourself upward,

that impulse would motivate you to act in a manner that would best, guarantee the establishment of something permanent. So there's a lot of emphasis in the Old and New Testament, in many religious traditions, in living life eternal. And it's easy for us to think about that as some vision of life after death. And I'm not going to address that issue. But what it also means is that there's a mode of being that works now and tomorrow and next week, and next month, and next year,

and 10 years down the road. and 100 years down the road and a thousand years down the road and maybe 10,000 years down the road. And so you could imagine it, imagine it this way. So possibly you people in the audience had a good relationship with your father. But whether you did or not, let's imagine that you had a good relationship with your father sometimes or that there were other people in your life real or fictional who fulfilled that role. Okay, so now imagine that that role of good father is a pattern, and it's a pattern that propagates across time. It's abstracted and eternal.

That's a good way of thinking about it. Now, when you grow up and you have children, you become a father, which is kind of a generic role, right? Your child calls you dad. He doesn't call you your name. And the reason for that or our reason for that is that your role is what is what is. that role, you've allowed that role of benevolent father to possess you. And you're acting that out, and inacting that out, you're doing everything you can to ensure not only the survival of your children,

but they're thriving. And then not only their survival and they're thriving, but their survival and they're thriving in a manner that makes them most likely to be good parents to their own children. And so on down the generations. And then you could imagine being a father so stellar, that your reputation would shine so brightly that it was a real, it was, what would you say, it was a injunction to imitation on the part of your son, and so he conducted himself as the proper father,

and then his child did that, and so on, for God only knows how long, and the offer that God makes Abraham is that if you fulfilled the call to adventure thoroughly enough, you would learn how to partake in the pattern of fatherhood that would most functionally propagate itself down the generations for the longest period of time. Now, you know that if a family is corrupted and broken, that that can be transferred down the generations. Everyone knows that.

And so what that implies is that the opposite is also true, is that insofar as you are the standard bearer for the pattern of benevolent father, for that eternal pattern, then you're partaking in a pattern of attention and action or a pattern of character or a story that most probably and most likely ensures the establishment of your dynasty.

And that could be true biologically, insofar as that's part of what parents do, what fathers do to ensure reproductive success beyond mere sex, to be a good father, to be committed to the marriage, to be committed to the children, to have a long-term sacrificial view, to live for the future, that works. And human beings are long-lived,

multi-generationally long-lived, in part because our examples as parents are so important. It's not just sex, and that's reproduction. That's complete bloody nonsense. It's sex as a... precondition for reproduction, obviously, but then the pattern of parenthood that increases the probability that your children will thrive and they'll thrive as children and they'll thrive as adults and they'll thrive as parents and so on

down the generations. And it's not only on the biological side that this is true because you could also imagine that if Abraham acts out his commitment to the adventure that develops him, then whatever he touches is going to take on that virtue. And so if he establishes a business or an enterprise or a or a, or friendship, or marriage, that that's also likely to thrive in a manner that's permanent and that establishes the pattern for that sort of enterprise or marriage. And that's life in eternity. And that's what God offers Abraham. And so that's a really cool thing to know because what it implies is that if you hearkened to the call that pulls you out of your zone of comfort and you did that reliably,

like let's say at every opportunity, right, that you would develop into the sort of person that would be a blessing to himself, that would have a stellar reputation, that would have the largest possible chance of establishing permanent and of value. And so that's a good deal. And these are the, what would you say?

These are the non-materialistic benefits, rewards of this adventurous sacrificial pathway. Abraham already had what he needed to survive, right? He already had enough to eat. He already had comfort. And so you might say, well, what's better than comfort? And that's a good question. I mean, we're so desperate for what's better than comfort

that will pick unnecessary misery as a false adventure in preference to comfort. And that's something to really understand. That's what Dostoevsky pointed out when he said that if you gave people nothing but a material paradise, they would smash it into bits just so that something exciting could happen. That's the downside of not heating the call of adventures, that false adventures will be very attractive to you. That's why people have affairs, for example, or one of the reasons they have affairs, or why they cause, maybe your life is being characterized by a pattern of the stupid trouble that you caused yourself.

And you might ask yourself, well, if you were doing something truly vital, maybe you wouldn't be tempted to do the foolish things that make your life interesting, but, you know, in a very counterproductive and suffering-inducing manner. And that's really worth thinking about. Like if you're tempted by the spirit that wants to shatter your comfort, it's very likely that the reason for that is that you haven't taken on enough adventurous responsibility voluntarily. Because if you had, you'd have enough to do. You wouldn't need the unnecessary trouble.

You might not want the unnecessary trouble because it would get in the way, and it has to get in the way of something important, because unnecessary trouble is pretty interesting. That's perhaps part of the reason why Eve plucked the apple off the tree in the Garden of Eden to begin with. It was like a little unnecessary trouble is quite the pathological adventure, and the replacement for a pathological adventure is not infantile satisfaction. It's genuine adventure.

And so then there's one other element of offering in the Abrahamic story. Abraham says, or God says, you'll also do all this in a way that will be maximally beneficial to everyone else. And so it presents the world that you act in, let's say, not as a zero-sum game, because you might be cynical and say, well, you have to get what you can for you because there's not that much to go around and whatever you get is yours and because there's a limited amount, other people can't have it too.

Or you could take a contrary view, which is the correct view, by the way, that there's more than enough of everything to go around if people comport themselves properly and that if you had the genuine adventure of your life, none of that would have to be a zero-sum game. You could do it in a way that simultaneously improved the probability that everybody around you

would have the adventure of their life. and then that would really be a good deal for you. Imagine that in your business dealings, and this isn't just some utopian dream. I mean, if you can set up a business relationship with someone so that you're doing something that's unbelievably interesting and compelling and that you regard is worthwhile and that leads you upward, and then you make a negotiated covenant with someone else,

and you make an arrangement so that they have their own domain of adventure that has just as much possibility of expanding, then they're hyper-motivated to do that, And the two of you together are going to be much more effective than either of you would be a part, and that's exactly what you're supposed to do in a marriage. If marriage was a zero-sum game, then everyone would be, no, why would you get married? That would be ludicrous. If it's a negotiated story that has an endless upward orientation and possibility for further development,

then it's obvious why you'd engage in it, and people do engage in it, and we engage in it in the faith, fundamentally, that it's better to make a long-term arrangement with someone that's based on trust and possibility than it is to maintain that immature commitment to, let's say, sequential responsibilityless relationships and, you know, nightly short-term sexual gratification. It's better.

It's not just that you should do it. It's not just that it's a duty, right? Although it is those things as well. That's not the offer. The offer is, no, it's just way, better. And I can give you a very comical example of that. And there's recent data showing, I think this is like one of the most hilarious things I've ever read, is the people who have the most sex are religious married people. Right. That's so comical. It's so ridiculously funny because it's

exactly the inverse of what, let's say, we were promised with the dawn of the sexual revolution, because the idea was supposed to be, well, we have reliable contraception, let's say if it's used properly and there's the rub. And because of that, well, anything goes. And then you think, well, everybody's just like the Californians in the Dostoevsky story and there's just sex everywhere. And I suppose in some ways that worked for about four years in the 1960s before things fell apart. And what we are seeing is that one of the consequences of that hedonistic approach to sexual gratification is that sex itself disappears. It's like 30%. It's something like 30% of Japanese people under 30 now are virgins.

And that, they're just ahead of the curve. Like the same thing is happening in North America. And one of the consequences of the pursuit of narrow hedonistic sexual ratification is that sex itself starts to become impossible, which is ridiculously comical. And so it might even be, it could easily be that the world is set up so that the more committed you are, I'm sure this is the case, the more committed you are to, like an ideal monogamous relationship and the negotiation that goes along with that, the more stellar your sexual life.

And that seems, I think that's incontrovertibly indicated by the data that we have at hand, but I also think it's part of the promise that's implicit in the notion that marriage is a sacred and functional sacrificial enterprise. And so it's not just what you should do or what your duty bound to do or even what you do when you mature. It's actually the best solution to the problem. I think there's no doubt about that. All protestations to the contrary. And so what does Abraham do? Well, he built an altar and he makes a sacrifice and cements his covenant to God. And then as Abraham's story develops, his character transforms, right? So he pursues an aim and then he learns something as a consequence of the pursuit.

and his aim transforms, and so he becomes a slightly different character, which is what happens to you as you pursue the opportunities of your life. He starts out as Abraham, A-B-R-A-M, and ends up as Abraham, who is the Father of Nations, because as he pursues his ever-expanding field of adventure and has more and more adventures, his character expands and develops so that he becomes, he's more in touch with what's sacred and foundational.

There's more to him. He's called upon at every transformative point in his life to make a sacrifice. And this is something that people have a hard time understanding in relationship to these archaic texts is, well, why were these ancient people so obsessed with the ritual of sacrifice? And the answer to that is, well, they're acting something out. And once you understand it, you can see why they were acting it out and why it's necessary. I used to ask my students at the University of Toronto, a lot of whom were Asian people. children of first generation immigrants, I said,

what did your parents have to sacrifice so that you could be at university? And believe me, the children of first generation immigrants, Asian immigrants, they knew what their parents had sacrificed is they had been told what the sacrifice was plenty, and that burden was on them as it should have been. But they knew what it meant, and what it means is that to stabilize the future

and to make it a place of opportunity and to serve your family and your community properly, you have to engage in sacrifice, and what's the sacrifice? Well, it's the sacrifice of your immature, short-term, foolish, self-oriented whims. And you can understand this in your own life, as you know this, that as the fields of opportunity that present themselves to you expand, assuming they do, you know that with each expansion of opportunity,

you're called upon to leave something childish and foolish behind in the past. You know, you may find that you're... maybe you were someone who really enjoyed alcohol, but now you're in a position of responsibility where you can't risk that, right, hedonistic, immediate pleasure because there's too much writing on you so that you can have that foolish adventure without undue cost. And with every step upward, let's say, up Jacob's ladder to heaven,

with every step upward, you're called upon to mark the occasion with the sacrifice, and the sacrifice is the elimination of the remnants of your old identity, immature identity, insufficient identity, in a way that allows you to grow into the person you need to be to take advantage of the current opportunity. And there's in principle no end to that transformation. And that's, when Christ talks about the straight, narrow path and the kingdom of heaven,

part of what he's referring to at least is the continual transformation of character and the quality of life attendant on that transformation that is attendant upon that sacrificial upward journey because you know that as you pursue the opportunities, the difficult opportunities that make themselves manifest to you as adventure calls that you put yourself together and you forego the foolishness that marred your past and that the consequence of that is that you're a benefit to yourself and your reputation grows and you're more likely to establish something permanent and you do

that in a way that benefits everyone else. And the better you get at that, the farther you are climbing, you are up the ladder that leads to the heavens, right? And there's no end to that. And you could think of God in that sense, not only as the voice of adventure, let's say, that calls to Abraham and to you, but also as the pinnacle of the ladder of character transformation that recedes as approach it, right? And you want God in a sense to be ineffable, so incomprehensible and undefinable and inexhaustible, because you don't want the adventure of your life in some ways to have a limit. And so the promise is that no matter how good you get at what you're doing, as a consequence of your pursuit of the redeeming adventure and your sacrifices, that no matter which mountain you climb

and no matter which mountain you reach the pinnacle of, you'll see another mountain in the distance that's a higher pinnacle that you could yet climb. And there's no end to that. And in a sense, that's harsh because you can never achieve the final destination. But on the other hand, well, do you want to? I mean, maybe what you want in life is an open-ended adventure that improves as you pursue it without end. And that's a good definition of,

and a good classic definition in the deepest sense of the kingdom of God or the Garden of Eden or the paradox. that's spread on earth that men refuse to see that Christ makes reference to in the Gospels. And so, well, so what's the story? Well, the story is a representation of a pattern of attention and action that in the positive sense, the comedic sense, transforms you upward. And what's the story? Well, it's a representation of your aim.

And then it's a representation of the sequential transformations of your aim as you get better and better at aiming as your character develops and you mature, and that expands in a way that enriches your life and enriches the life of other people and establish something permanent worth establishing and makes you a benefit to everyone else. And that's all allied with the call within you that impels you to dance on the edge and challenge yourself. And that's also the place, and this is a good way to end this. This is so cool. That's also the line between yen and yang, let's say.

That's the border between order and chaos that's maximumly. challenging. And that's the place where the maximum meaning of life is experienced. And you know this, because you know that when you've challenged yourself properly and you're really on the edge, that you're not self-conscious and you're not lost in misery and you're really in the game and that there's nothing better than that. And what that indicates, it's so cool, it indicates that the spirit of adventure, the spirit that should be put in the highest place, the pinnacle of Jacob's ladder, and the deepest responsible meaning of your life are all exactly the same thing. And that phenomena, that unified phenomena, that's a reflection of the God in whose image you're made.

That's the message of at least a fragment of the biblical library. And that's the story of your life. Right. So that's so optimistic, it's so fun that story because it's ridiculously optimistic, but it's also believable. And things that are ridiculously optimistic and believable, those are rare. Those are very rare. So if you come across something like that, you think, oh, that's a good deal.

It's like, I couldn't ask for something better than that, that the spirit adventure is that which unifies the individual in society and the present and the future and that imbues life with meaning. that's a great deal. And so that's really worth thinking about, like practically, because you think, well, what is it that's calling you to adventure?

Like, what are you afraid of pursuing but would love to if you only dared? It's like, well, what have you got to lose? You know, you're all in the game anyways. And so if you lift your life to the fullest, well, you could reconcile yourself to your fate. And you could set the world right. That's the promise.

And if we're adapted to the world, even in the biological manner, That, it seems to me, that it can't be any other way. Like, how could it be any other way, then the best possible way to live your life would be to live it fully into the utmost? And why would you ever think that you could put things together for yourself or for the people around you without doing that?

And how else could it make itself manifest than what calls you to be more than you are? It's obvious in a fundamental sense, and I think everyone knows it. We don't know it explicitly enough. And, well, that's part of the reason that I wrote this book and I'm doing these lectures is to try to make that more explicit because it's such ridiculously fun thing to understand.

And so thank you for listening. And we'll welcome Jonathan and Tammy back on stage. And then Jonathan's going to make some comments on what I talked about. And then we're going to answer some questions. And so that's what's going to happen. All right. So I get to react to what Jordan said. That's a lot.

That's a lot. So while he was talking, I was like, I was trying to think, Like, are there the most practical examples that I can find of some of the things that you're talking about? And then I remember that if my memory serves me correct, tomorrow is the beginning of the NBA finale here in Boston, right? Which is interesting because I don't think anybody here is actually playing, right? So where does that joy come from? Right? Where does that cheer come from?

Right? there's a sense in which what Jordan is talking about, this capacity for certain people to reach a level of excellence in the name of a community. And that becomes a model and something that unites you, that unites us together into this vision of excellence and even because the sport is also this beautiful image of people coming together and collaborating and accomplishing something together.

So it becomes this model for, for us and it participates in your identity, right? If they win the finale, you'll be proud. What a strange thing. But that happens all through our society, right? It's the same reason why we're proud of certain figures that represent our nation, that we're proud of people in history that represent the ideals that we are looking towards. And then we give like our junior highs, names,

like Martin Luther King, junior, I, or whatever, because we can see in that name and that identity, a model, and a manner that brings us together. But what's amazing about that, and it was really the things we were saying, is that, you know, all of us can play that role. Because the way that you cheer and you're proud of the Boston Celtics when they win is the same way that your child is amazed and proud of you

as a dad or as a mom when they see you as a model, that they can rejoice in and participate in and become one in two. And so you can kind of see it happening at all these love. Her of the death. I want to say one last thing about, because there was this image that came to me also while Jordan was talking. There's a verse in Revelation 2, where Christ says to those who are victorious

will be given to receive the secret mana. The secret mana, the bread from heaven. Right. And they will receive a stone. with a new name, right, a name that only they will know. And so this idea of like, this idea of being victorious and moving towards, you know, through sacrifice, through victory, that it reveals to you this new identity that you can participate in.

Right. Well, the stone is a good image for what, an identity of relative permanence as well. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's why we memorialize the dead with stone. And so what that would mean, what that implies is that the more spiritual, food you feast on, so to speak. So the more your aim is upward, and the more you partake in that, the more rock solid, your identity and revolutionary. Weird, that's a weird thing. It's rock solid and revolutionary at the same time because you change so much, you need a new name, but that name is now a rock.

It's something that's increasingly solid. And that's also why Christ is a cornerstone, right? That's a symbolic image of Christ as the cornerstone of the heavenly building, let's say. right and that that has to do so you might ask what does that mean because it's it's very abstract concept but it means something like the voluntary self-sacrifice is the cornerstone of the community it means something like that and you know that if you're a parent because you're partaking in that like if you're a mother mothers make well the most obvious sacrifice merely in the act of merely in the act of becoming a mother It's a sacrificial act, and it's obviously a sacrificial act on which life itself depends. That's also why cultures that don't hold the mother and infant image as sacred, they just disappear.

It's a sacrificial mode of being. And so sacrifice is the cornerstone of the community, and Christ is a figure that represents the ultimate sacrifice. And that stone that becomes your identity is the cornerstone of the community. And that might change you so radically that you need a new name. Right, right. Can a genuine scientific endeavor that wrestles with God eventually lead to a truthful synthesis of religion and science? Well, I think it has been in some ways leading to that. I think that any true commitment to the truth,

I don't think there is anything different between the true commitment to the truth and the way and the life, right? That's Christ's proclamation in the gospels. See, it's partly because a true commitment to the truth is a sacrificial commitment. You know this if you're a scientist, because I could always tell as a researcher when I found something in my data that was true, because I didn't want it to be true. And so I had to give up something, and that might have been a pet belief, for example. I mean, if all you find in your dad is the things that you wished were there, no, that's not good.

You want to find something that surprises you and shocks you out of your complacence and forces you to reevaluate your a priori commitments. And that's a sacrificial process, right? And, you know, we think in our society, because we're not very bright, that there's an antithesis between the scientific endeavor and the religious endeavor. And that's not true historically. I mean, the first thing we might note is that the universities were the truth-seeking institutions were,

and they grew out of the tradition of the monasteries, right? I mean, the intellectual commitment of the West to truth, and this includes scientific truth, was grounded in the Judeo-Christian notion that the world as such was comprehensible, that that comprehensible order was good, that investigating that order would improve the world and that human beings could participate in that. That's all the faith pre-commitments that scientists make before they even start their adventure, let's say.

And I don't see anything in that at all that's going to conflict in the final analysis with a proper mode of existence and an understanding of religious stories. And I can see now in many disciplines, like there's certainly a convergence of belief in many disciplines toward a more, toward a view of the world that's much more, I wouldn't say sympathetic to, but in alignment with certain forms of religious conceptualization, I mean, one of the people we talk to all the time, John Vervaki, who's on the cutting edge of cognitive neuroscience, he certainly outlines this in great detail.

And the greatest neuroscientists that I know and have had the privilege to talk to are increasingly conceptualizing the world from a biological perspective that's much more in keeping with the vision, let's say, that I outlined to you tonight, than would have been the case 30 years ago. So there's no fundamental, this is a monotheistic claim, I suppose, there's no fundamental contradiction possible between different ways of validly pursuing the truth. They all converge on the same end, which would be some representation of the ultimate integrating unity of things. Why would we bother with the scientific enterprise if that wasn't the case? Right? We believe that we believe most deeply. This is why science emerged out of alchemy. The alchemists believe that if we investigated the material world deeply enough and with the proper ethical commitment,

that we could find a material substance that would make everyone rich and make everyone healthy and make everyone wealthy. That's the dream of alchemy and science emerged out of that from the motivational perspective and the scientific dream is that if we analyze the material world we'll come to the kind of understanding that will help us thrive in the world. Right? And so

we're going to, we will find as things converge that there's no difference between those claims and the claims that are made at the deepest level of the religious enterprise. So we have to stop thinking of the religious enterprise as superstitious science.

It's, that isn't what it is. That's foolish anthropology of religion. How long is too long to date someone before you get married? Oh, that's easy, that's easy to answer. What if you're sure at first? What's that? What if you're sure at first and doubts come after months for years? That's called life.

So the first thing you could do is just ask the woman in the relationship, because she'll know. And then the doubt thing is like, well, who goes through their life even for a day without at least for a moment doubting everything that they think and say and do? Right. I mean, even in an extraordinarily well-put-together marriage, there's going to be periods of extreme doubt, not least. That's almost independent of the quality of the marriage,

because one of the problems of being married is that you're in the same boat. And now and then the boat you're in is in very, very stormy seas. And even if you're both rowing like mad, that doesn't mean that you're not in danger of capsizing. And so you can't be married to someone or in a relationship without doubt because you're going to encounter the things in life that would make anyone doubtful together. And now, you know, if you've constituted your marriage properly

and the vows are real, then you can rely on the other people. person to do their best while they're rowing and to do that, you know, locked arm and arm in you. And that's a great advantage. But the idea that you need to be free of doubt before you commit, it's like, that will never happen to you ever in your whole life about anything. So just, you just give that up. There's one other thing, there's one other thing that you have to understand, too. So we know, for example, that people who live together are more likely to get divorced after they get married than people who didn't live together. Now, this is kind of counterintuitive in a way, because you kind of think, well, you know, why don't we try each other out?

Now, the problem with that hypothesis is that you don't get to try other people out. They're not commodities. It's not a used car market. But there's something deeper than that, which is the person you're going out with is not the same person that you'll be married to. Because when you get married, the relationship changes, and you don't know what that change will be until you get married. And so you can't practice it.

Because the relationship you have before you're married is, tentative and it's also, there's also, especially if it's been going on for a long time, there's a kind of lie in it because when you're living with someone, the underlying covenant is you'll do until someone better comes along. Right, because if that wasn't the underlying agreement, then why wouldn't you be married? And then you might ask, well, how the hell can you have a relationship of quality when the presupposition is, well, you're all right, but, you know, maybe I could find someone more foolish and more desirable who would like me better and I'd like to reserve that right.

Well, the other person is going to trust you if that's your attitude. And if they don't trust you, you're not going to see the best of them and you're not going to know who they are. And so you can't practice. There's lots of things in life that you can't practice. You have to throw yourself into them. And, you know, you try to do that with your eyes open and with a certain amount of gratitude and good, faith, but don't be thinking that you're ever going to get there in the absence of doubt. You do. You get married in the large part despite doubt, just like you take a new job despite

doubt or do anything. You know, if you have to be a fool to start a new business, actuarially speaking, you know, first of all, most entrepreneurs have sequences of failures before they have a success, and most small businesses fail in the first three or four years. So if you had any sense, you'd just look at the data and think, I'm not doing that. But that's a foolish thing to conclude, because failure is often a precondition to later success, and you learn through, partly because you learn through failure.

And that means you have to, in part, that means you have to throw yourself into something before you could evaluate it. And the marriage bond, even the ceremony is an expression of that faith. It's something like, and I remember, you know, our vows, you know, when I said I do to Tammy and vice versa, we meant it. It was like, we're in this, no matter what. And that's, God, if you don't think there's doubt in that, you're crazy.

It's so heartening to have someone bet on you. Right? I mean, it stiffens your spine because you think, oh my God, this person is, like they've committed their life to me. That's a real indication of faith. maybe there's more to me than I thought. Well, really, that's the favor you're doing, the person that you married. You know, and that's a real sacrificial gesture.

And you don't get that any other way than with that commitment. It has to be, the commitment has to be there for that to be a reality. Okay, Jonathan. What would you, how would you approach bringing God to people who have little or no faith, or those who don't even question the existential? It's weird because some people might look at what I do and think that, you know, I'm trying to bring God to people, and I'm trying to,

and I really, that's not the way that I, that I approach things. You know, I, I think that there's great meaning in the religious text. I think that there's great joy in religious participation. and that, I think, is the best way to do it, right? Is in some ways to show people or to help people see the beauty, the power, the joy that is part of that life. And I rarely try to convince people of anything because I don't see how that helps.

Yeah. No, it's an invitation, right? Well, so one of the things you see, for example, in this Exodus story is that the temptation of Moses, who's a leader, He's the archetypal leader. He's the person who architectively leads his people from slavery, so that's subjugation to tyranny in any form.

He leads them out of that through the desert of doubt to the promised land. Every leader always does that. That's what defines leadership. And Moses' proclivity, his temptation, is to use force. And he's punished brutally for that. He doesn't get to enter the promised land because of that. It's like there's to be no compulsion and, religious matters. And it's because the proper mode of presentation of the religious

mode of being is an invitation. That's the invitation to the heavenly banquet. It's like, well, why the hell wouldn't you want to eat manna? Right? I mean, that's the offer that's on the table, is that that's the well that never runs dry and that the water that eternally replenishes and the food that's served in the highest possible place. Well, you invite people to... You don't have to force people to do that. You don't have to force people to do that. If they understand what's on offer, they're going to be stampeding to it. And if they're not, then you've made the offer wrong. And so you don't convince or force. That's, why would you? If you're offering what's best to people, you don't need to use force. You just show, it's like,

this is this. I've been thinking about this. There's something very interesting that happens in the Exodus story. When the Israelites leave Egypt, they take the treasure of the Egyptians. They despoiled the Egyptians. I've been trying to figure that out. And I think partly what it means is that when a society becomes tyrannical, it forgets what's what the true treasures are. And then you can just run off with them. And I think that's really what's happening with the universities, for example, is that the universities have decided that the true, the beautiful, and the good are arbitrary social constructions, and so they've left them on the table, and you can just run off with those, because they're treasures. And if people are too blind or resentful to see that, that doesn't mean the treasures

aren't there. And it's the same thing with the religious enterprise, is that the goal of the job of people who are engaged in the religious enterprise is just to pull back the veil and show the treasure, and the people who are capable of seeing will see and move forward, and the people who would reject even the heavenly treasure to spite God, they'll just continue doing exactly that. And that's how the sheep separate themselves from the goats and the wheat from the chaff.

And you don't need force for that, quite the contrary. Now, you're with the goats if you're using force and not invitation. So... One more? What more? What advice would you have... for someone going into a career in academia, as someone who doesn't align with the current ideologies

being pushed in universities? Well, there's absolutely no point in pursuing an academic career. If you're not pursuing the treasures that are part of that, like you want to pursue the good and the beautiful and the true. Now, the advantage to being an academic in principle is that you have a sense, secure and reasonable salary. Now, the disadvantage is that all you have on the celery side is a

secure and reasonable salary. So you have to forego, this makes academics resentful, say, of business people because a business person who's successful can have an immense financial return. And there's really a cap on that in some ways in the academic realm, but you can have enough. And so why would you be satisfied with that enough? And the answer is, well, if you have with that security the opportunity to mentor young people who want to develop, which is a great pleasure, and you have the opportunity to pursue ideas and to investigate the truth, that's a really good deal. But if you can't do that, well, then it's a stupid deal. And so I would say, if you're going into academia, understand that the reason to go in there is to pursue the good and the beautiful and the

true, and you should try to do that. And if you can't do that, because all the other academics and administrators get in your way, then you should go find something else to do. Because wherever the university is, it's no longer there. The university isn't Harvard Yard. It's not the Harvard endowment. The university could disappear entirely from all of that, and maybe already has. I hope not, because it was a great place, and maybe it could be a great place again. I wouldn't say that it's a great place at the moment, although there are people who are working hard to reverse that and more power to them.

But just so when you go into academia, be an academic. Pursue the truth. Say what you believe to be the case. And take your chances. And like, if you do that and you do that rigorously, you will be successful, although it might not be in the way that you think,

and it might not be the way that would have caused, constituted an ordinary academic career 20 years ago. Like, you can fail, in a tyranny, you can fail upward. In fact, that's the only way to actually move upward in a tyranny is to fail in the tyranny, right? Because a tyranny is defined by the grip of the downward transformation. And so if you go into the university and you say what you believe to be true and you're honestly aiming upward and that gets you in trouble,

you may not be able to see it, but that trouble is actually a form of success. And if you stick with that, you'll find your way. That doesn't mean it'll be easy. It doesn't matter. Like, your life isn't going to be easy. Forget that. Everyone.

It's like life is not easy. It's the voluntary hoisting of the cross. Right. So, you know, the reason I love being a university professor, especially on the teaching side, but it was also true with research, because I did love it. I figured I'd be a university professor

until I was like 100. And it was because I got to tell young people what I truly believed was the truth. And that was great. And then the research was an attempt to further that understanding. And that's ridiculously interesting and adventurous. And so go into academia and try to do that.

And if you can't, well, find another place to work. And if you can't do that, then teach online. Like, if you have valid knowledge, there's a market for it, and it might be real useful for you to have to figure out where that market is. You know, it's not like people aren't screaming out for education. I mean, look, how many people are there in this hall? There's 4,000 people in here. So, and there wasn't anything particularly easy about tonight's lecture,

and it wasn't light entertainment. It was the sort of thing that every academic dreams of being able to do at the university. So this is the university. So find it. All right, everyone. Thank you very much for coming tonight. It was a pleasure being in Boston. Yep.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you, dear. My question. Thanks, gentlemen. Good to see you all. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for coming. The midterms are not just one national race.

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