Biblical Series IX: The Call to Abraham

[Music] so I've been thinking this week about doing this one from once a month on a continuing basis so so I think if I do that I think it'll be here although it's harder to rent this theater during the academic year but if it isn't here it'll be somewhere else and because I'd like to continue doing this I'm learning a lot from doing it and and once a month would really be good because then I could really do the background work and and I could probably do that for a couple of years because obviously this is going very quickly but that's okay you know I mean it shouldn't go any faster than it can go and that's how it that's how it seems to me anyways so this has been this has been a very steep learning curve for me with regards to these stories because I didn't understand them very well and I got better at using the resources on line to help me do my background investigation I have a lot of books and some of you may have noticed that online I posted a conversation I had with Jonathan Powell and his and his brother Matthew I hope it's Matthew ivory names escape me so badly but I believe that's right he just finished a book on them on the Bible and so I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories trying to understand what they're about and and then there's all these commentaries there's a great site I think it's called Bible hub that has every single verse of the Bible is listed there and then with each verse there are like they've aggregated ten commentaries from about ten commentaries from over the last four hundred years and so there's like a dense page on every line and that's one of the things that's really interesting about this book too is that it's it's aggregated so much commentary that it's that it's it's much bigger than looks the book is much bigger than it looks and so it's been very interesting to become familiar with those two and the fact that this site is set up with all the commentaries split up by verses means you can rapidly compare the commentaries and get a sense of you know how people have interpreted this over while at least several hundred years but of course much longer than that because the people who wrote the commentaries were of course reading things that were older than that so that's been very very interesting so last week we talked about a couple of things we talked about how you might understand the idea of the divine encounter and then we also paralleled that with the idea that God disappears in the Old Testament he he boughs out as the stories progress and that seems to be a an emergent property of the sequencing of the stories right because all the books were written by independent people different people and then they were aggregated by other people and so the narrative continuity is some kind of emergent property that's it's a consequence of this interaction between people readers and writers over centuries and it's it's strange that given that there are also multiple coherent narratives that United you know it's really it's really not that easy to understand that but it does at least seem to be the case and so and the third thing we talked about was that as God bows out so to speak the the the individual personality seems of the characters that are involved the human characters that are involved seems to become more and more developed and it isn't exactly clear what that I mean what it means is that God steps away and man steps forward that's what it means but why it's arranged like that or they or they say ultimate significance of that is by no means clear and so so Abraham who we're going to concentrate on today is quite a well-developed character and I would say there are two there multiple endings and beginnings in the biblical stories the most important ending I suppose is the ending of the the garden of paradise and and the disenchantment of the world and the sending forth of Adam and Eve into history right into the future into into a mode of being that has a future as part of it and that has history as part of it and that has the necessity of sacrifice and toil as part of it that's obviously crucial and then that's that is replayed with the story of Noah because everything is destroyed and then the world is created anew and then sacrifices have to be made in order for the world to begin and then you see the same thing happen again after the Noah story in the Tower of Babel because history as we really understand history seems to start with Abraham because the stories of Abraham sound like historical stories and no scholars debate about the historical accuracy of the Bible and I suppose there's no way of ever determining once and for all the degree to which you might regard the accounts as equivalent to modern empirical history but this is a psychological interpretation of the biblical stories not a historical interpretation and it certainly does seem to be the case that from a psychological perspective we enter something like the domain of the modern conceptualization relatively modern conceptualization of history with Abraham beyond the accounts of divine commands that Abraham carries out this is from Freedman man I mentioned in the last lecture who wrote the disappearance of God a variety of other books that are well worth reading the narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham acts on his own initiative he divides land with his nephew lot he battles Kings he takes concubines he argues with his wife Sarah on two occasion he tells Kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife he arranges his sons marriage in the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness there are in the case of Abraham the stories of a man's life and one of the things I was really struck by reading this in depth and read the commentary is how much like a story about a person it is you know Abraham isn't a divine figure in any in any archetypal sense precisely when he has archetypal elements because he's also obviously the founder of a nation but fundamentally he's a human being and and he makes he has the adventures and he makes the mistakes of a human being and that's it's the mistake part that really struck me you know because it did I was talking with a friend of mine this week Norman Doidge who's a very remarkable person in many ways and he was taking me to task he was reading my book which I'm going to publish sure which will be out in January and in in the book I in one section I contrasted the God of the Old Testament with the god of the New Testament and made the case sort of based on north of Freud's ideas that the God of the Old Testament was really harsh and judgmental you know and that the god of the New Testament was more merciful and you know at least to some degree more sweetness and light and Norman took me to task about that saying that that was a overly Christianized interpretation which would make sense because I derived it in part from Northrop Frye and I really have come to understand that more that he's right because that he's right about that because the God in the Old Testament is actually far more merciful than he's generally made out to be and you really see this with it's good news fundamentally if you regard the representation of God as somehow key to the description of being itself I mean Abraham makes a lot of mistakes you know serious mistakes and and yet he has a life and he's and he's blessed by God despite the fact that he's pretty deeply flawed and engages in deceptive practice I mean he's a good man but he's not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination and and things work out really well for him and he's the founder of the nation and all of that and that's good news for everyone because perfect people are very very hard to find and if the only pathway to having a rich and meaningful life was through perfection then we would all be in deep trouble and so that that's very satisfying to read that and the other the other thing that I've been struck by is that you know Abraham and I think this is actually absolutely key to the interpretation of the story Abraham goes out and does things that's the thing and so one of the things that I've noticed in my life is that nothing I've ever done was wasted and by done I mean put my heart and soul into you know like like attempted with with all of my effort that always worked now it didn't always work the way I expected it to work that's a whole different issue but the payoff from it was always positive I always something always a something of value always accrued to me when I made the sacrifices necessary to do something worthwhile and so I think part of the message in in this in the story of a and the Abrahamic stories is go do something and and I thought about this in a variety of ways outside of the interpretation of this story because I have this program some of you might be familiar with which is called future authoring program and it's it's designed to help people make a plan for three to five years into the future you know and we so what you do is you you answer some questions it's a writing program you know answer some questions about how you would like your life to be what you would like your character to be three to five years down the road if you were taking care of yourself like you were taking care of someone that you actually cared about so you kind of have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself like you like someone you have respect for and that you want the best for now it's not easy because people don't necessarily have respect for themselves and they don't necessarily want what's the best for themselves because they have a lot of self contempt and a lot of self hatred a lot of guilt and a lot of existential angst and and a lot of self-consciousness and all of that and and so people don't necessarily take care of themselves very well and and I think it's I think it's I think you have an obligation it's one of the highest moral obligations to treat yourself as if you're a creature of value and and that is in some sense it's in some sense that's independent of your actions and you might think about that metaphorically as a recognition of your divine worth in the biblical sense regardless of your of your sins so to speak and I think that's that's that's powerful language as far as I'm concerned once you understand it anyways with the self authoring program the future authoring program you you ask you answer questions about what what how you would like your friendships to be conducted because it's useful to surround yourself with people who are trying to move forward and more importantly who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move back backwards not when you fall that isn't what I mean but when you're doing self-destructive things your friends shouldn't be there to cheer you on and because then they're really not acting like friends obviously you know I know it's obvious but it still happens all the time and people allow it to happen it's not a good idea and you know how would you like to sort your family out and I was thinking about this this week too because I was thinking about Noah's Ark and there was a phrase in that story that I didn't understand which was that Noah was perfect in his generations I don't know what that means you know when you're when you're going through a book like the Bible if you don't understand the phrase that actually means you've missed something it doesn't mean that that's just not you know that's not germane to the story it means you're stupid you didn't get it man you didn't get it you didn't standard and so the idea that Noah was perfect in his generations and that's why he could build an ark that would sustain him and him and and humanity itself through the flood it meant that he not only did he walk with God which is something that we talked about in the context of the Sermon on the Mount but he established proper relationships with his family with his children and so what that meant was that his not only was he well integrated as a person but his level of integration had reached the point where it stretched out beyond him and encompassed his family and so it was Noah and the family that was in the ark and I can tell you and I really understood this this year because I had a very tumultuous year you could think about it from a personal perspective I could think about it as a year that had no shortage of floods and might and part of the reason that I was able to get through it I also had terrible health problems and one of the reasons I was able to get through it was because my family really came together around me my kids my wife my parents and my friends as well and particularly a certain group of friends and that's partly all of that came together in my mind that's we can I thought well that's what it means to be perfect in his generations meant that he hadn't just straightened himself out he'd also straightened out his relationships with his family and I can tell you that when crisis strikes you which it will it will the flood will come right that's why the apocalypse is always upon us the flood will definitely come in your life and to the degree that you've organized yourself psychologically and also healed the relationships between you and your family that could be the critical element that that determines whether you live or die when a crisis comes or or whether someone in your family lives or dies and so the idea of the Ark containing the man who's who walks with God and who's generations are perfect and that that's what sustains humanity through the crisis it's like you couldn't be more psychologically accurate than that no the other thing I was thinking about this weekend I was thinking about another line in the New Testament I think it's from the Sermon on the Mount but I'm not absolutely sure Christ compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a mustard seed and so I was thinking about a mustard seed as a very tiny seed and it grows into a spectacular complex plant and I was thinking about how you should operate in the world in order to make it a better place assuming that that's what you should be doing and that is what you should be doing and there's lots in the world to fix everything that bothers you about the world and about yourself should be fixed and you can do that and my dawning realization I have a friend he is in Montreal his name is James Simon he's a great painter and he's taught me a lot of things helped he's helped me design my house and beautify it and I bought some paintings from him a couple of years ago and he did this series of paintings where he went around North America and and stood in different places and then he painted the view from here down and so it's his feet planted in different places on roads in the desert on the ocean I have one actually hanging over my toilet which is him standing at a urinal yeah well you know he was trying to make a point and the point was that wherever you are it's worth paying attention and that's because you know so all these places that he visited he looked exactly where he was from standing by the side of the road in the desert sort of mundane in some sense but then maybe he put 40 hours into that painting you know it's very very realistic painting with really good light and what he's telling you as a painter is everything is worth paying attention to an infinite amount but you don't have enough time so the artist does that for you right the artist looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and then gives you that vision and so then you can look at the painting and it reminds you that right where you are is there's every everything that there is is right where you are and that's a hard thing to realize but it's actually true and so I've been telling people online in various ways and in lectures that they should start fixing up the world by cleaning up their room and I wanted to just elaborate on that a little bit before I get back to the lecture itself so as it's becoming this internet weird internet meme you know and and and it's a joke and good it's a joke I'm really happy about the fact that so much of this has got like the leaving of humor and it's really important because that's what stops things from degenerate getting into into conflict humor and I was thinking about this idea of cleaning up your room in relationship to the mustard seed idea and you see the thing about cleaning up your room this is also something I learned from Carl Jung and his study is on alchemy because for Jung when the alchemist was attempting to make the philosopher's stone he was not only engaged in the transformation of the material world but he was engaged in the process of self transformation that occurred at the same time as the chemical Trent as the chemical transformation so the psychological work in some sense let's say you want to sort out your room and beautify it because the beauty is also important and let's say that all you have is just a little room like you're not rich you're poor and you don't have any power that's another thing but you've got your damn room and you've got this space right in front of you you know that that's a part of the cosmos that you can come to grips with and you might think well what's there in front of you right in front of you and the answer to that is it depends on how open your eyes are that that's the proper answer because you could say and William Blake said this for example Aldous Huxley made comments that were very similar that in a transcendent state you can see infinity in the finite and you might say well you can say and you can see infinity and what you have within your grasp if you look and you could say maybe that's the case with your room and so you want to clean up your room well okay how do you do that exactly well a room is a room is a place to sleep and so if you say your room ups properly then you figure out how to sleep and when you should sleep and how you should sleep and then you figure out when you should wake up and then you figure out what clothes you should wear because they have to be arranged properly in your dresser then you have to have some place to put your clothes and you're going to have some clothes you have to figure out what you're going to wear those clothes to do right and then that means you have to figure out what you're going to do and then your room has to serve that purpose because otherwise it doesn't set up properly and if it doesn't set up if it doesn't serve your purposes you will be unhappy and not happy in the room because the way that we perceive the world is as a place to move from point A to point B in and then if the place that were in facilitates that movement then we're happy to be there and it's the place that we're in serves as an obstacle to that movement then we run happy to be there and so what it means to set up your room is that you have to have somewhere to go that's worthwhile or you can't set up your room and then your room has to be set up to facilitate that and then the next thing is well maybe you have to make it beautiful but that's not easy right that means you have to have some taste and that doesn't mean you have to have money it doesn't because you can be garish with money and you can be tasteful with nothing all you need is taste and taste beats money when it comes to beautifying things you know I mean not that money is trivial because it's not the taste is crucial and people who are very artistically oriented can make beautiful things out of virtually nothing and not only that the literature suggests that if you're going to make beautiful things putting real constraints on on what you allow yourself to do facilitates creativity instead of interfering with it because let's say you have to make something out of nothing right which I suppose would be a godly act right you have to make something out of nothing it you have to be creative in order to do that and so then to beautify your room means that you also have to develop your capacity to be creative and so then you can make your room shines but then what will happen is that if your family isn't together they will interfere with that you'll interfere with that because you won't have the discipline to do it properly but then when you start building this is this little microcosm of perfection with what you have at hand and Italy evoke all the pathologies of everyone in your household they'll wonder what the hell you're up to in there and they won't necessarily be happy because if you're if they're in a lowly place let's say and so are you and you're trying to move out of that then the higher you move out of that the more the place they're in looks bad and you might say well what they should do is celebrate your victory over chaos and evil but that isn't what will happen what will happen instead is that they will attempt to pull you back down they'll attempt to and I mean obviously all families don't do that but but all families do that to some degree and some families do almost nothing but that and so what that means is that if you're going to organize your room then you're going to have to confront the devil's in your house and that's often that's often a terrifying thing because some of those Devils have have lineages that go back many many many generations and god only knows what you have to struggle with in order to overcome that and so and so to sort your self out and to fix up your room is a non trivial matter you know and you can do that you'll learn by doing that and then maybe you'll learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little bit and then having done that you'll have enough character so that when you try to operate in the world at your job or maybe in the broader social spheres that you'll be a force for good instead of harm because you'll have learned some humility by noting just how difficult it was to put your damn room together well and yourself for that matter and so you'll proceed cautiously with your eyes open towards the good and so well those are some of the things I've been thinking about this week and they're Jermaine they're like they're germane to what we're going to discuss tonight because what happens at the beginning of the abrahamic stories is basically God comes to Abraham and just says go get going man do something do something get going and you might think well where should I go and God God is somewhat vague about that and where he sends Abraham it's a real fixer-upper man it's like there's starvation there and there's tyranny and there's and there's marital dissolution and there's deceit like it's it's just like where you live you know it's exactly the same thing it's it's it's tyranny and catastrophe so that's you know the the great the tyrannical Great Father because because Abraham ends up having to sojourn in Egypt and and there's a famine and so mother nature is on the rampage and Abraham lies about his wife as we'll see and so it's the world it's the world it's tyranny and and vulnerability and deceit and the other God says Gold because if you do go then you'll become a father of Nations and you think well again that's pretty good news although it's strange because you'd expect that if God chose Abraham then he'd send it immediately to the land of honey land of milk and honey and that isn't what happens at all it doesn't happen at all and Abraham never gets there but his mission is still regarded as divine and thank God for that because that's what your mission will be because that's what you will encounter in your life those are archetypal things everyone encounters is the tear of the social structure and and the rapaciousness of nature and the deceitful the deceitful quality of the human psyche it's like that's the world now it's a negative that's a negative view in some sense but it's positive in this story because what it basically says is something that's akin to the Sermon on the Mount which is that if you're aligned with God and you pay attention to the divine injunction then you can operate in the midst of chaos and tyranny and deception and flourish and you could hardly hope to have a better piece of news than that given that that's exactly where you are so and I didn't see any of that me Abrahamic stories to begin with so it's been very interesting to have that sort of reveal itself Baberaham section nuff develops the personality and characters of man to a new degree in biblical narrative well picturing him in a new degree of responsibility in him a new degree of responsibility so here's the other thing that's really struck me and I think this is absolutely crucial importance and I don't know how much importance but it's certainly important to me one of the things that has just blown me away in the last year because I've talked to lots of people lots of people live you know but also lots of people online but it's more obvious live and it's obvious in this theatre as well is that I've gone around and spoken and a large proportion of my audience is being young man young you know under 30 something like that and I've spoken to them a lot about responsibility and what's so odd about about this is that of all the things that I've spoken about if I can see the audience and I can feel how the audience is reacting because I'm always paying attention to all of you it's insofar as I can manage that so I get some sense of how what I'm saying is landing you know what you have to do if you're going to speak effectively to people and what what happens is if I talk about responsibilities everyone be is silent just like they are now it's silent and and not moving right focusing attentive say pick up your responsibilities pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it and the room goes quiet and everybody's eyes open and I think whose makes me break up I was [Applause] I don't I don't know why I was speaking to an English journalist today he was going to write an article in Spectator magazine I was talking about this and at the same point in the discussion the same I had the same emotional reaction I don't really understand it I think it's something something about it that's so crucial because you know we've been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms and there's something about that especially there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong and people are starving for the antidote and antidote is truth and responsibility right and it isn't it isn't because that's what you should do and some you know and some some I know better or someone knows better for you what you should do sense it's that it's that it's that it's that that's the secret to a meaningful life and without the meaningful life and all you have is suffering and nihilism and despair and all about and self contempt and and that's not good and so the man it's necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility and they all know that and and are starving for that message and and the message is more that that's also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility because you're cursed so much now from come from from when you're young with this notion that you're active engaged with with the world is part of what is destroying and undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems it's like how about not so much of that Hey because it's it is to soul deadening its anti human right to the car and my sense instead is that you know if you if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world that you would be an overwhelming force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works and that's the other thing that you see in the Abrahamic stories because Abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination he's a real person and he makes mistakes but it doesn't matter the overarching narrative is you know maintain your covenant with God and despite your inadequacies then not only will you prevail but your descendants will prevail it's like great that's really good news you know so it's been really something to see that in the in the stories it's not that so that's responsibility it's not just that Abraham is kinder gentler more intrepid ethical or a better debater than his ancestor Noah rather both the Noah and Abraham stories are pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the deity before the story is over humans will become a good deal stronger and bolder than Abraham oh that's really something to say because Abraham is pretty bold so we'll let's read the stories the first one is about Abraham Sarah and lot now these are the generations of Tara Tara begat Abram so his name is Abram to begin with and that actually turns out to be important it's not Abraham Nahor and Haran and Haran begat lot so Haran is Abraham's brother and Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his Nativity in ur of the Chaldees and Abram and Nahor took them wives the name of Abraham's wife was Sarai and the name of nahor his wife Milka the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and the father visca but Sarai was barren she had no child and Terah took Abram his son and lot the son of Haran his son son and Sarai his daughter-in-law his son Abraham's wife and they went forth with them from the ur of Chaldees from ur of the Chaldees to go into the land of canaan that's exile and they came unto Haran and dwelt there and the days of Terah were 205 years and Terah died in Haran and there's a reason that Sarah is is introduced as barren and and it's to set the stage I think it was anton chekhov who when he was talking about the stage setting for a play that if there was a rifle hanging on the walls and it had better been used before I believe the second act or it shouldn't be hanging there at all right and so this is stage setting and I give part of the reason that the biblical writers are pointing out that Abraham's wife is barren is because it's a real catastrophe for Abraham oh and for Sarah as well that she's barren and so it's showing the trouble that Abraham's in at the beginning of the story and it's also it's also see what happens as the story progresses is that Abraham Abraham and Sarah are eventually granted the Sun but it's way late in the story and they're very very old by the time it happens and of course you're not going to be a father of Nations without having a child and so the writers are attempting to to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue let's say that all things are possible that's that's the idea in the narrative you know you might say that's naive and you know it's not it you think it when you're naive right and then you dispense with that idea and then when you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas then you come to another place and that's the place where you think you have no idea what might be possible for you with you if you've got things together and pursued what you should pursue you don't know how much what's impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions it's an unknown phenomena and like I've watched people who put themselves together across time you know incrementally and continually and they become capable of things that are taught not only jaw-droppingly amazingly but also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand and so we don't know the limits of human endeavor we truly don't and it's premature to put a cap on what it is that we are what that what it is that we're capable of and so you you know you're already something and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration but you might wonder if you did nothing for the next thirty years except put yourself together just exactly what would you be able to do and you might think well that's worth finding out but of course that's that's the adoption of responsibility and one thing I've also learned over the years because I've been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism to know and I mean I mean I could see for a long while the rationale in nihilism and the power of the nihilistic argument but it occurred to me across time that despite that the power of the nihilistic argument is more powerful than naive optimism but it's not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive because the optimism that is not naive says it's self-evident that the world is place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that and it's self-evident that people are flawed and that there's things to be done about that and then the non naive optimist says the suffering could be reduced and the insufficient see could be overcome if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing and I do not believe that that's deniable I do I do I think that human potential is virtually limitless and that there's nothing perhaps it's beyond our grasp if we're careful as individuals and as a society and so I think that there's no reason for nihilism that there's no reason for hopelessness and and there's no reason to bow down before evil because we're capable of so much more and I think that you can easily you know that first because you're not happy with who you are and you're ashamed and embarrassed about it as you should be and you know it because if you look out there you see people who are capable of doing great things and you know that we're not giving it our all and still we're not doing so badly you know and so you might wonder if if if we devoted 90% of our effort to putting things right instead of fifty-five percent of our efforts or maybe even less than that you might wonder just how well could things be put together and I think that you can figure that out by starting with your room by the way and the Lord said unto Abram and this is this is the this is the opening of the story get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee and this is one of those phrases where every clause is significant go somewhere you don't understand that's the first thing get the out of thy country you know back in the 1920s there was a whole slew of American writers who ended up as expatriates in Paris Hemingway among them and and who wrote the Great Gatsby Fitzgerald yes and then a variety of others it was very inexpensive in Paris at the time and part of their transformation into great literary figures was the fact that they were out of their country and now they could see what their country was because you can't see what your country is until you leave it so you have to go into the unknown that's that's God's first command go into the unknown because you already know what you know and so and that's not enough unless you think you're enough and if you're not enough and you don't think you're enough then you have to go where you haven't been and so that's the first commandment to Abraham it's like okay that that's a good one that makes perfect sense go to where you don't know yes and from my kindred well that what does that mean means grow up right that's what it means it means get away from your family enough so that you can establish your independence and that isn't because there's something wrong with your family although perhaps there is you know as there is perhaps wrong with you but it means get away you know I talk to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection and they know it themselves and that means they're deprived of necessity you know one of the things that you see in the United States for example is that the children of first generation immigrants often do better than the children they're children and the reason for that is that the children of first generation immigrants have necessity driving them and you don't know how much you need a necessity to drive you because maybe you're not very disciplined and if the catastrophe doesn't immediately befall you if you don't act forthrightly today then maybe you never act forthrightly right because the the gap between your foolishness and the punishment is is lengthened by your unearned wealth and so you never grow up and learn and you have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity to drive you forward and that's to become independent and to become mature and I think part of what's happening in our culture is that the the force that's attacking the the fourth right movement forward of young men in particular is afraid of the power of men because it's confused about the distinction between power and authority and competence like an a man who's who has Authority and competence has power as a byproduct but the authority and competence is everything and and and people who can't understand that failed to make the distinction between power and authority of competence and they're afraid of power and so they destroy authority and competence and that's a terrible thing because we need authority and competence what else is going to what else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run and so you get away from your country and you get away from your kin and from your father's house right and you go out there and you establish yourself in the world it's a call to adventure that's what this the first lines in the Abrahamic story is a call to adventure so great unto a land that I will show you well you know what does that mean you know one of the things that I'd been struck very hard by a number of writers Carl young obviously among them I mean he he wrote things like Nietzsche that if you understand them they just break you into pieces you know and and one of the things that Jung understood in the psychoanalysts understand it's one of the most terrifying elements of psychoanalytic thinking is very tightly allied with religious thinking which is that you are not the master of your own house there are spirits that dwell in within you meaning you have a will and you can exercise a certain amount of conscious control over your being but there are all sorts of things that occur within you that seem to be beyond your capacity to control your dreams for example that's a really good example or your impulses for example you might you might think of those as so foreign from you that they're not even you don't even want them to be part of you but but more subtly even how about what you're interested in what compels you like where does that come from exactly because you can't you can't conjure it up of your own accord you know so if you're a student and you're taking difficult course you might say to yourself well I need to sit down and study for three hours but then you sit down and that is what happens your attention goes everywhere and you might say well whose attention is it then if it goes everywhere because you say it's your attentions like well if it's your attention maybe you would be able to control it but you can't and so then you might think well Jenin just exactly what the hell is controlling it and you might say well it's random it's the vall it's better not be random I can tell you that that's that happens to some degree in schizophrenia there's an element of randomness and it's not random it's driven by the action of phenomena that I think are best considered as something like subpersonalities although even that's only a partial description you can't make yourself interested in something interest manifests itself and grips you that's a whole different thing and so what is it that's gripping you and how do you conceptualize that is that a divine power well it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it and so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by and what you're interested in and sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not but you're compelled forward by your interest and so and so the idea that what moves you away from your country and your father's house and the comforts of your child at home is it's something that's beyond you and that you listen to and hearken to that's exactly right and you can say well I don't want to call that God it's like doesn't matter what you call it exactly it doesn't matter to what it is what it's called it still is and if you don't listen to it that's the other thing if you don't listen to it and I've been a clinician and talked to enough people now as old as I am to know this absolutely if you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine you'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good and worse you'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had so this is not only a calling forth but a warning unto a land that I will show thee and that's it that I will show thee that and you don't want to be too concrete about this you know there's all sorts of new territories that you can inhabit if you there's this abstract and conceptual territories of guilty University and you study biology or you study physics or or any discipline you're in a territory right you're in the territory that all the scholars have established and then as you master the discipline you move out beyond the established territory into the unknown and that's a new land right maybe it's even the land of your enemies for that matter but it's a new land the frontier is always in front of you and so you know when the earth was less inhabited than it is now the frontier was the psychological frontier and the geographical frontier was the same thing and now they've separated to some degree because there's not so much geographical volunteer but there's the frontier is a place that never disappears and the land that's beyond the land that you know is always there and it's always where you should go and all of that packed into these what four phrases so well so when I've been thinking about narrative you look at the world through a story you can't you can't help it and the story is what gives value to the world or or the story is what you extract from the value of the world you can look at it either way you're somewhere and it's not good enough right that's the eternal human predicament wherever you are isn't good enough and to some degree that's actually a good thing because if it was good enough well there's nothing for you to do so it's actually maybe a good thing that it's insufficient and that might be why sometimes having lessons is better than having more and I don't want to be a Pollyanna about that I mean I know that there's deprivation that can reach to the point where it's no where it's completely counterproductive but it isn't always the case that starting with little is you if you start with little you start with more possibility it's something like that so you moved from always from what's unbearable about the present to some better future right and if you don't have that then you have no you have nothing but threat and a negative emotion you have no positive emotion because the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the better future and then the evidence that you generate yourself that you're moving towards it that's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes so you want to set up the structure properly it's very very important and so what it means is that you want to be going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is worth the while and you can ask yourself that and that's partly what we tried to build into the future authoring program which is well we know what's wrong with life it's rife with suffering and insufficiency and deception and evil it's all of that obviously okay what would make the journey worthwhile or you can ask yourself that it's like alright in order to bear up under this load what is it that I would need to be striving to attain and if you ask yourself that that's to knocking and the door will open that's what that means if you ask yourself that then you will find an answer and you'll think you'll shrink away from it you'll think well there's no way I could do that it's like well you don't know what you could do you don't know what's possible and you're not as much as you could be and so god only knows what you could what you could do and have and give if you sacrificed everything to it and that's the reason that Abraham is constantly making sacrifices and it's archaic right he's burning up like baby lambs but like well they're alive you know that's something and and they're valuable and that's something it's you have to admit even if you think about it as a modern person but the act of sacrificing something might have some dramatic compulsion to it you know to go out into a flock and to take something that's newborn and to cut its throat and to bleed it and to burn it might be a way of indicating to yourself that you're actually serious about something and it isn't so obvious that we have rituals of seriousness like that now and so it's not so obvious that we're actually serious about anything and so maybe that's not such a good thing and so maybe we shouldn't be thinking that these people were so archaic and primitive and superstitious it's possible that they knew something that we don't it's certainly in the or hammock stories one of the things that maintains Abraham's covenant with God is his continual willingness to sacrifice it it's so that sacrificial issue is so important because you are not committed to something unless you're willing to sacrifice for it commitment and sacrifice are the same thing and I think it's borders on miraculous that those concepts are embedded into this narrative at the level of dramatic action you know instead of abstract explanation people are acting this out and then the fundamental conception is so profound that it's really quite it's quite inspiring it's breathtaking really when you understand what message is trying to be conveyed you have to make sacrifices and what you have to sacrifice you have to sacrifice that which is most valuable to you currently that's stopping you and god only knows what that is it's certainly the worst of you it's certainly that and god only knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of you so well so you move from the unbearable present to the ideal future and and you can't help that you have to live in the structure like that that's your house that's another way of thinking about it and if you want to get your house in order and if it you want it to be a place that you can live properly then you have to plan the future that is perfect and then I think well what does that mean and it means it's good for you right and one of the things that I'm I do all the time with my clinical and consulting clients is trying to figure out what would be good for them but we do more than that we try to think okay well what how can we set this up so it's really good for you and that all the side consequences of that are things that are good for other people and so because people are often also tended about trying to get something that's good for themselves because they feel that it's selfish or that they don't deserve it so we set it up so that well look we're going to set it up so that it's plainly obvious that this will not harm the structure of the universe for you to have what you need and to do it in a way that's of benefit to other people there's no downside to that and so it's okay it's okay if you reach out and take that and one of the things that's interesting about the biblical stories Abrahamic stories as well is that God doesn't really seem to be opposed to the success of the people that he's chosen you know what happens to them is that they progress through their journey as they they get larger flocks and they they get more authority and they they get they get more they get life more abundant that's what happens it's God isn't does it seem to be a miser in the Old Testament it's like if you put in the effort and you and you accept the covenant and you make the sacrifices then you get to be successful and maybe successful beyond your wildest dreams and that that's actually seems to be okay with God and that's pretty cool given that you know that the general notion of Old Testament God is that all he's doing is casting out curses and death you know wherever he happens to wander and I mean there's certainly no shortage of that but but again it seems to me that that's very good news and that you also don't have to be perfect in order for to have that happen and then the other thing this is the issue about going into the unknown it's like well if you leave your country and your kin and your father's house and you go out into a land that your intuition guides you to you're going to undergo these radical transformations this is the sacrificial transformation too because you're you're moving forthrightly and voluntarily into chaos right and that's the same as the dragon fight that's the hero story and what will happen there is that you will transform yourself and so the call to an ideal is also the call to a sequence of deaths and rebirths that move you closer and closer to the ideal and that's what that's what God is calling Abraham to do in the first sentence of this story you see these things echoed in the strangest places and so these are stills that I took from Pinocchio and this little cricket so he's the still small voice right that's the thing that calls to you it's your conscious conscience and part it's your intuition in part and it's the thing that opens up the great book of the world the great sacred book of the world and that's what happens here right and the animators are at pains to show you that it's a leather-bound book with gilt lettering it's a valuable book and it's something that's quiet that's showing it to you right you have to meditate let's say you have to be somewhere where the world isn't drowning you out in order to understand how to open this to listen to that voice that tells you where you should go with what you should do next and then what happens is that something beckons to you in the night it's a star right it's something that transcends the horizon it's it's glitters it's brilliant it's it's not day to day it's something that's beyond you it's something that represents a transcendent ideal and that makes it manifest to you if you're quiet enough to listen and that's what you wish upon so strangely right and people do that they wish upon a star they teach their children that and they don't know why well what do you mean you wish upon a star what the world does that mean it means you lift your eyes to the heavens and make a pact with the transcendent and then you're and then what your hearts desire will come to you that's what it means and you think well that's so that's not naive it's the most sophisticated thing that you can know and it's the birth of the hero right because that's the that's the nativity star obviously and this is where it takes place it's just anywhere and the person it is just a carpenter and a toy maker but that's pretty good a carpenter if you're a deceitful carpenter then your house falls down and if you're a toy maker then you love children it's that's good start you know so so Geppetto who lives in this little it's it's a it's not a grand house it's it's just in every day house but everything that's happening and it is good and so that means it's it's a palace because everything in it is how that's happening good there's the saying and I don't remember where it comes from then it's better to have bread and water in peace than a feast in conflict and that's not a saying that's just the starkest possible description of the truth because there's nothing worse than eating a grand meal with people you hate and despise that are at each other's throats it's much better to have bread and water in peace it's it's not it it's just clear-headed analysis of the structure of the world to say things like that and so the magical transformation can happen in the most mundane of places because and the reason for that is that the mundane nature of places is an illusion because every place is the potential birthplace of the kingdom of God that's the case and so Geppetto he's a good guy he has a kitten you know the kitten likes him he makes puppets and he's humble person and he knows that compared to the ideal that he's attempting to subscribe to that he's he's not a based before it or anything like that he's not despicable in relationship to it but the reason he's on his knees is because the thing he's pointing at is above him you know he he it wouldn't be the right aim if it wasn't above him and so the fact that he's on his knees so to speak is only an indication that his aim is proper because you should be on your knees to something that you actually admire and if you don't feel like being on your knees in front of it then perhaps you don't actually admire it and then that means you haven't got the stage set properly it could be it should be something that fills you with awe your aim should should be add something that fills you with awe because whatever why do something else well perhaps because it's easy and perhaps because it's malevolent and all of those things but but those are no answer to the problems that beset you they just make things worse and that's clear and so then Gepetto have is having made his pact his covenant just like Abraham he falls into a dream right he falls into a dream and the rest of the movie actually takes place in a dream and it's a dream it's the dream within which transformation takes place and that's laid out at least in part time stops in in the pinocchio story and everything happens to Pinocchio in some sense in a land it's outside of normal time and that's that's the infinite archetypal space and that's a real place that's a real place the infinite and the finite coexist and most of the time we're in the place of the finite but that doesn't mean that the place of this infinite doesn't exist it just means that we can't get access to it we just get intimations of it from time to time you know when things are going perfectly well for you on those rare occasions where everything comes together for the brief moment you inhabit that divine place and you have some sense of what your life could be like if you organized it from the smallest element to the largest element and that's a place that you can inhabit if not forever in a manner that at least felt like forever well because of Gepetto's decisioned the transcendent manifests itself it takes the form of the blue fairy here that's the positive element of nature right so we could say well nature it's not so clear that she's on your side right she's the Red Queen and Alice in Wonderland who runs around screaming when you go down the rabbit hole she runs around screaming off with their heads and who says in my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place that's mother nature but then we might say well how do we know that mother nature's attitude towards you isn't negative because your attitude towards things isn't proper and that's what this film attempts to indicate the idea is that if you aim properly then nature aligns itself behind you now it also arrays itself in front of you perhaps even as an antagonist but the power that it it it provides you with from within might be sufficient to overcome it from without and i think that i think that the clinical evidence is clear about that because one of the things that we do know is that if you take people who are confronting terrible things and shrinking from them and you teach them how to structure their behavior so that they can advance with courage everything works better for them their fears decrease and their character grows and so there might be enough of nature within us to help us withstand the nature that's outside of us and it depends at least to some degree and how it is that we orient ourselves in the world to some into some unknowable degree now Geppetto wants an autonomous individual as a son and that's also something that makes him a great person because autonomous individuals have their own will and if you're a tyrant it's the last thing that you're going to want and if you're the tyrant who's jealous of his son it's even more so the last thing you're ever going to want and so to aim high and to want the development of the autonomous individual are the same thing and I would say that's the core story in some sense of Western culture is that to aim high and to develop the autonomous individual are the same thing and that's what happens in Pinocchio that's what happens in the story of Abraham and the transformation takes place the magical transformation and in the Pinocchio story one of the things that's so interesting about it and this is part of its mythological substructure from the scientific perspective there's only two determining forces with regards to the destiny of the individual there's nature deterministic and culture deterministic and then scholars wrangle about which of those is the greater force but in mythological stories there's always a third element and that third element is something like autonomous consciousness and there's no place for autonomous consciousness in the deterministic story of nature and culture but we all act as if autonomous consciousness is the primary reality and the biblical stories are predicated on the idea that autonomous consciousness is what gives rise to the world and I don't think that we're in a position to presume that that is necessarily in error and so what that means is to aim high and to develop the autonomous individualist is simultaneously the decision to formulate an allegiance with the the conscious power that brings being into existence and that all takes place inside this little puppet and then he has his adventures right he's he's he's still half jackass and half deceptive but he still despite that and despite all the errors he has the capacity to move forward and to transform it into something to transform himself into something that can be properly considered described as a true son of God and that's the Rite Aid and it works like this as far as I can tell you know when I talk to people about doing the Future authoring program they often put it off and it's not surprising because it's hard and and be it but it's more than that they think well I don't know how to write I'm going to do a bad job I don't really like assignments I'm going to have to do it perfectly I need to wait till I have enough time and like one of those is enough to stop you cold and all five of them you're just done and so I tell people do it haphazardly a tiny bit at a time and badly because you can do that I tell my students when they're doing their thesis master's thesis write a really bad first draft and then we have a little conversation about that because they don't think I mean that because it sounds like a cliche in some sense it's not a cliche it's not a cliche at all it means you're a terrible writer but but if someone put a gun to your head and said you have to have your hundred page pieces done by next Monday or I'll shoot you but I don't care how terrible it is you would sit down and write it and the thing is then you have it right then then you have something and then you can fix it you could iterate and fix it that bad first draft that's the most valuable thing and so that's what you need you need a bad first draft of yourself and there's there's an idea that young developed about the trickster and the Jester the comedian right that the trickster is the precursor to the Savior that's one of the things I learned from young it was just it's so unlikely you never think that it's so amazing that that my be the case but the the the satirical in the Iran Akande and the troublemaker that the comedian the fool the fool is the precursor to the savior why because you're a fool when you start something new and so if you're not willing to be a fool then you'll never start anything new and if you never start anything new then you won't develop and so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation and that's the same as humility and so if you're going to write your destiny you can do a bad first job you're going to get smarter as you move forward that's the thing is that so something beckons to you that's what happens here maybe the star that Geppetto wished on was the wrong damn star but at least it was a star right at least it was in the sky at least it moved him forward and so you say in your life well something grips you and it fills you with interest and you think well should I do that an answer is if not that then something what if it's a mistake it's a mistake rest assured what do you know you're going to stumble around right and what's going to happen is this you're going to move to you're going to not stay in stasis you're not going to wander around in circles and I see people like that they said well I never knew what to do and now I'm 40 it's like that's not so good that's not so good and you might say well and there is a literature too that suggests that people are a lot more unhappy when they look back in their lives about the things they didn't do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things and so that's really worth thinking about too because there's redemptive mistakes and a redemptive mistake would be a mistake that you make when you go out and try to do something you know you actually you think okay I'm going to try to do this when you're not good at it you make a bunch of mistakes it's like what's the consequence if you pay attention is you're not quite so stupid anymore that's the thing is you've been informed by your by the results of your errors and so what happens is you follow the beacon you follow the light and and you're blind so you don't know where the light is it's dimly apprehended only and you're afraid to follow it but you decide to take some stumbling steps towards it and as you take stumbling steps towards it you become illuminated and enlightened and informed because of the nature of your experience because you're pushing yourself beyond where you are and you're going into the country that you have not yet been in and you learn something and so what happens then is the star moves you move 10 feet towards it you think no that's not right I didn't get it right it isn't there it's actually there and so then you you see it somewhere else and you shift yourself slightly and you move forward and that's what happens is that you continue as you change the thing that guides you forward moves right it's like God in the in the in the desert in Egypt the pillar of light that you're following it's moving it's not a permanent thing you move towards it it moves away it guides you forward and so you say well is what I'm aiming at paradise itself and the answer to that is no because what do you know you you couldn't see paradise if it was right in front of you but you might get a glimmer of it and so you move towards it and you grow and then the next time you open your eyes you see a little bit more clearly and that's what happens is that just happens over and over right it keeps moving and so you move like this but the thing that's so cool is that although zigs and zags you say in each of those zags is it and zigs is a catastrophe I hit a wall my god and then I had to die a little bit and I barely got back up it's a Phoenix transformation at each at each turn and it's painful but the thing is is that even though you've you've traveled 20 miles let's say on that road and you've only moved 3 miles forward you've moved three miles forward instead of falling backwards because that's the thing too is that if you stand still you fall backwards you cannot stand still because the world moves away from you if you stand still and there's no stasis there's only backwards and so if you're not moving backward back forwards then you're moving backwards and that's more more of the underlying truth of the Matthieu principle to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything we'll be taken it's a warning do not stay in one place well as you dig and zag maybes and maybe the Cataclysm of each transformation starts to lessen there's not so much of you that has to die with every mistake and maybe you end up oriented at least reasonably properly if you were sensible that would have been your trip but it wasn't right it's that and perhaps it's a lot worse than that perhaps there's no shortage of backtracking but it doesn't matter because as you stumble forward you illuminate and inform yourself and perhaps that's partly because the world is made of information and if you encounter it and tangle with it then it informs you and then you become informed and then your information and then you're ready and so God says to Abraham I will make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee and make thy name great and thou shalt be a blessing that's that's a good offer fundamentally I mean it means what does it mean to to be made a great nation of well perhaps it has something to do directly with your descendants but I don't think it's just that you know is if you're a force for good in the world then that radiates out from you and if you're good enough it's difficult to say how much of an impact on things you could have you know Dostoyevsky who is a very crazy person partly because of his epilepsy he said a man is not only responsible for everything he does but for everything that everyone else does and you think well no no no and yes sometimes no sometimes that's what you think if you're cataclysmic cataclysmically depressed right is that your sins are so egregious that that they're unforgivable and that in some manner you're at you're at fault for everything that's terrible with world but there's actually truth than that and there's actually redemptive truth in that is that things wouldn't be so bad if you weren't so if you weren't so far from what you could be and that's terribly pessimistic because it's all on you man but it's terribly optimistic because God there's a lot of things that you could do and if you're crying out for something to do then that's the best news you could possibly have it's like things aren't so good but you know are you so if you stop doing the things that you knew to be destructive which is the right place to start you know if you're going to clean up your room what do you do first well you just get rid of the mess you know and you know what now no one has to come in and tell you hopefully what's the worst mess it's just it announces itself to you and you can certainly know yourself and this is a very easy meditative exercise to sit down and think okay I'm doing one thing really stupidly that I should stop doing it's like how long is it going to take you to figure out what that is it's about two seconds right you've known it forever but you could even make it less demanding you could say there are some stupid things that I'm doing that I know are stupid and wrong that I could stop doing that I would stop doing and then you can just start with that and you can just do that and maybe it's just a little thing although it's not because it's it's a it's a step forward on the proper voyage it's not a small thing and you think well what would happen you could say let's do this for a year even a month just try not to do things you know to be stupid and wrong for a month and that means not to say things you know to be stupid and wrong as well maybe that's the most important thing just do it as an experiment see what happens and so fun because I have people writing to me from all over the world who are saying they're doing that they're saying well you know I cleaned up my room and and then I stopped saying stupid things and my god it's like things are way better it's like who would have guessed it you know and so it's low-hanging fruits man because they're saying that's the other thing if there's a lot of things wrong with you then it's it's really easy to start fixing it you know you got so much there's so much territory that you can inhabit I will make of thee a great nation I will bless thee that's good I mean the whole nation thing that's positive but to have God on your side that's you know you might want that when things get rough that would be good and make that name great and now it shall be a blessing wonderful that's a good deal then I will bless them that bless thee that's good too and curse him that curseth thee and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed that's something that's something that wouldn't it be something if you could wake up and your day was composed in part of people thanking you for all the good things you've done in the world would that be good it's not impossible for that to happen so Abram departed yes as the Lord had spoken unto him and Lord went with and the neighbor him was seventy in five years when he departed out of her and that's all now Abraham lives a long time but this is also part of the story so he has a wife who can't have children he has nothing obviously he's been hanging around dad's Shack for a little too long given that he's 75 right it's kind of time to get a fire lit underneath him a bit and so it is not got much going for him but he still decides to to move forward and I've seen this too you know like if you don't have your destiny in hand by your time you're thirty it's it's rough you start hurting and if you don't have your destiny in hand by the time you're 40 then you really start hurting and 40 is a real fork in the road the fork in the road that's always where you meet the devil by the way and that's because every time you have to make a decision the possibility of evil beckons that's why that is I had a friend I told you a little about him and he killed himself just after 40 you know he had had a book published and with a very small press he was quite a good writer but he could not get himself together and it hit him too hard at 40 and I'm not saying that it's hopeless at 40 I'm not saying that and I'm not saying that partly because of these verses but also partly because of in my clinical practice I've had people come to me who have had very chaotic and ill-spent lives let's say who were in that neighborhood of age and and it's true for people who are older as well who then decided to make a real effort and to try to make where they were better you know instead of being bitter about where they weren't because that's better nasteria lee does you in it's really not good it's the opposite of gratitude it's it's it's the manifestation of resentment it makes you malevolent it's very very bad to be better it's not it's not it's hell to be bitter and if you're 40 and you're not successful then you have to accept your lot and you have to start to improve what's right in front of you and if you do that it doesn't take very long it's quite interesting to watch people things can be a lot better in six months and they can be way better in two years like it's a struggle uphill struggle but it's by no means impossible and and I don't know again what the limit of that is I suppose it depends to degree to some degree on the degree of your commitment but anyway so abran other indication of the real validity of this story God isn't setting this up to be easy right Abraham's old and his and his wife is old too and more than that she's barren how is he going to be the father of Nations how is he going to be successful well the initial departure point is insufficient radically insufficient and and that's very inspiring because it means that you can start from where you are so Abram departed as the Lord had spoken unto him and lot went with him and Abram was 75 years old when he departed out of Haran and Abram took Sarai his wife and lot his brother's son and all their substance that they had gathered and they know he has a relationship with law right he doesn't have his own son but he his brother died and so he takes his nephew as his son that's grateful you know he could be very angry and have nothing to do with him because he didn't get his own son but that isn't that isn't what happens is he's offered a substitute let's say and he accepts it and so good for him you know and and that's an it's also something that I've seen that characterizes people who can make the best of a bad lot is they don't get exactly what they want but something comes along that offers possibilities that are sufficient perhaps if exploited properly and they open their heart and welcome them in instead of rejecting them in bitterness and so that's a good thing and that's part of Abraham's character and Abram took Sarai his wife and law his brothers son and all their substance that they had gathered and all the souls that they had gotten in her on and they went for us to go into the land of Canaan into exile let's say and into the land of Canaan they came and that's another repetition of the transformation story right you have to go to a land where you're not welcome an abram passed through the land unto the place of CGM unto the plain of mora and the Canaanite was then in the land and the Lord appeared unto Abram and said unto thy seed I will give you this land and there he builded an altar to the Lord who appeared unto him and he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of the cell and pitched his tent having the fell on the west and high on the east and there he built an altar unto the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord now we don't understand these rituals precisely you know I don't know if the people who did this engaged in a meditative ritual without the idea that you take something of value you do this youyou undertake this dramatic transformation a life and death transformation and is that an aid to meditation and what you do do you sit down and thank you you pray pray being to ask you know - what do I do next how do I orient myself in the world as a useful exercise to do that - I think it's something that people could do every morning I think it's useful to sit down and think okay what's the most important thing I should do today what I have an array of things that call to me to be done some of which I will do with joy and some of which I will bear as responsibilities but I raised em selves in front of me and with what should I attend to first well do you ask or do you decide and it seems to me when I do it because I do it all the time I do it every morning I try to sit down and think okay I've got things that I would like to do and things that call to me out of necessity what do i do first and it's not so much a decision as it is a question and I don't know what I'm calling on it's I'm calling on my capacity to think I suppose but that's not my capacity exactly I'm there I can I can commune with whatever provides answers and I can think that that's me thinking but and I didn't that I believe that I can't think I do believe that I can consciously think but that's not the same as calling for inspiration it's not the same process just like a dream is not conscious thinking it's something that happens to you and that kind of inspiration is also something that happens to you because I ask myself well what's the most important thing I could do next and then I have an answer to that but it isn't because I decided exactly I've decided that I'll do it whatever it is and that I want to know what it is those are the decisions but but there's an involuntary aspect to the sorting that occurs and and that's the psychological equivalent I suppose to this and I guess the sacrifice is when I feel that I will do whatever it is that calls to be done then I don't do the other things that I might want to do and that's a sacrifice it's to me it's the proper sacrifice because my sense is that things don't go properly unless you do what's most important and if I want things to go properly and I do because I've had my taste of things not going properly I want things to go properly and so then it's not so difficult to do what's necessary to to do what makes things go properly under those circumstances and it's partly see this is partly why the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is embedded in the Abrahamic stories I think because that's an apocalyptic story right if things go badly enough the whole city is destroyed and then and the reason it goes badly is because the people in the city do not behave properly and the people in the city might bu and so if you're not behaving properly then you go and so does the city and maybe you don't want maybe you do want that but maybe you don't want that and if you don't want that then maybe and you know that if you don't do things property then it's you and the city if you actually know that then maybe that terrifies you badly enough so that you're willing to make the sacrifice to do the right things instead of the impulsive things that you might otherwise want to do you know I learned from Viktor Frankl and from Karl yoga and from Alexander Solzhenitsyn and for many of the people whose works on the Holocaust that I read and on the catastrophes in the Soviet Union and the people who studied it most deeply always came to the same conclusion the state became corrupted because each individual allowed themselves to be corrupted or perhaps participated joyfully in the process of being corrupted and the consequence of that was the end of the world and so what that means is that if you don't behave properly then you bring about the end of the world and maybe you think well that's only the end of your world fair enough or maybe it's the only the end of your family's world you know which I suppose might give you some pause but there's more to it than that because you're connected to everyone else and what you do that isn't good distributes itself and all the things you don't do that could be good take away from the whole and so if you know that and I do think you know that if you take it seriously because if you look at if you look at historical events the cataclysmic events of the 20th century seriously I do not think that you can fail to come to that conclusion and Abraham journeyed going on still towards the south that's interesting because to go south means to go downhill too it's not good to go south it's colloquial for going to where you shouldn't go and this is what happens to Abram you know he his a cent is preceded by a descent and that's very common in life I would say and so it's a little the redemptive element of this narrative is that if the Covenant is constructed properly so it's an arc which is your decision to align yourself with God for all intents and purposes then even the journey south can be part of a broader journey upward and there was a famine in the land that's Mother Nature failing to cooperate I mean that's going to be pretty disheartening for Abraham don't you think is he finally gets it together when he's 75 to leave and then you know because God says well do you not get going and and so the first place he goes everyone's starving to death it's like you know you might think about that as a test of faith wouldn't you say but he keeps going and then what happens well he has to go to Egypt so great he goes where he's starving where everyone's starving and then to get away from where everyone's starving he goes to a tyranny so the whole beginning of the story is not particularly auspicious and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there for the famine was Grievous in the land it's a repetition of the same idea again there's downhill voyage out into chaos right it's repeated over and over that the beginning of Abraham's journey is basically a sequence of of experiences of Exile chaos tyranny and catastrophe well you should be able to relate to that you know how hard it is to get things together you know you go out to do what you're supposed to do say and there's you're beset by the intransigence of the world and failure well so what are you supposed to do about that well maintain your faith in the good and continue to move forward that's the idea and part of that even if even if you don't buy the metaphor it's like what are you going to do instead that won't make it worse so even if there it isn't enough that you're pursuing your at least for stalling the transfer may of the chaos into your of your life into sheer hell and that can certainly happen you know you see people who are having a terrible time and then you see people who are having a terrible time who are also in hell and it's a lot better to just have a terrible time than to have a terrible time and be in hell at the same time and it came to pass when he was come too near to enter into Egypt that he said unto Sarai his wife behold now I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon therefore it shall come to pass when the Egyptians shall see thee that they shall say this is his wife and they will kill me that they will save thee alive so look I mean Abraham is Abram is really having a rough time he's a failure right I mean he's wandering around through the land of starvation now he's going to go be a quasi slave in Egypt he has this incredibly attractive wife and all he can look forward to is the fact that the most successful man in Egypt the Pharaoh will take her from him so he's got the whole embitterment thing pretty much nailed down as far as I can tell and this is when he makes one of his errors let's say and one of the errors that humanizes him say I pray thee that thou art my sister that may be well for me for thy sake and my soul shall live because of thee and it came to pass that when Abram was coming to Egypt the Egyptians beheld the woman that was she was very fair the Prince is also a pharaoh saw her and commended her before Pharaoh and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house and he entreated Abram well for her sake and he had sheep and oxen and he houses and menservants and maidservants as she houses and camels so actually things work out pretty well for for Abram despite his deceit right which is quite interesting and I guess it's because if the overarching structure is solid something like that it's something like that then then errors can still be forgiven to speak about it from a metaphorical perspective and the Lord plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abrams wife well it doesn't seem very fair but because the Pharaoh didn't know but but it's not the right way to look at it the right way to look at it see there's a story later in the in the Bible about David and David David could be a pretty bad guy you know so one of the things he does is when he becomes king he's in his castle and he's looking over the city and he sees a woman nude bathing nude sunbathing nude on a roof out on the city and he's smitten by her floored by her and he has inquiries made about who she is her name is Beth Sheba and and he finds out who her husband is and her husband actually happens to be a general in his army and he arranges for that general to be put at the thick of the battle and killed and then he takes Bathsheba so and and and the Lord is not pleased by that let's put it that way and that's interesting is only did it's an interesting story because you might say well why can't the King do whatever the hell he wants like seriously he's the king he's not just he's not like the Prime Minister the president right he's the king and so you might say well why is the King subject to any rules whatsoever what's the rationale for the king being subject to rules well the rationale emerges in these stories if there are social strictures that are such that even if the ruler of the land transgresses against them there will be hell to pay and that's continually presented over and over in the biblical stories and it's a natural law sort of idea that there are there are intrinsic rules to the game of social human being and if you and maybe intrinsic rules to this to the natural state of human being you break those rules consciously or unconsciously at your absolute peril and not only at your peril but at the peril of the state and it doesn't matter who you are and so I would say this is actually an indication of God being fair rather than being unfair because the rule here is Pharaoh or not you don't get to take someone else's wife and the ignorance is no excuse now you might say that's a little bit harsh and perhaps it is a little bit harsh but it's not without merit the idea is not without merit and of course Abram is implicit in this despite that he is successful and Pharaoh called Abram and said what is this that thou has done unto me why did so now tell me that she was thy wife why said Stowe you she is my sister I might have taken her to me to wife now therefore behold thy wife take her and go thy way and Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him and they sent him away and his wife and all that he had and Abram went out of Egypt he and his wife and all that he had in lot with him into the south and Abram was very rich in cattle in silver and in gold and that's it so what's interesting you know big Abraham he he goes to the place of famine and then he goes to the to the place of charity and then he he lies and then he almost loses his wife but because he goes things work out for him and so hooray for that and he went on his journeys from the south even to Bethel unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning between Bethel and high unto the place of the altar so he makes another sacrifice which he had made there at the first and there Abram called on the name of the Lord well so he's had an adventure right he's he's he's finished his journey and and so there's a culminating point in this narrative and now I just know what to do he's left the place he said he doesn't know what to do so it's time to build an altar and make a sacrifice and figure out and to ask for divine guidance once again to figure out okay well I've done that been there done that what's next and I'm the question is asked seriously and this is something to consider if you want to know what to do ask seriously and say I'm willing to see Abraham sacrifices a life to his vow well so what do you do well you don't sacrifice an animal you don't you don't make a blood sacrifice you do it psychologically you say I'm going to sacrifice my life to the same that's what you do if you're serious what do I do next well I'm going to sacrifice my life to this aim what is it that I should do that's worth sacrificing my life to that's a serious question well then maybe that's the sort of question that people don't ask because they're afraid of the seriousness of the question and and what the magnitude of the potential answer do you really want to know what you should do that would be worth sacrificing your life to well the answer is yes because it's worth it but the answer is also no because what really it's your life you know what if you're wrong and you're probably wrong but maybe that doesn't matter maybe it doesn't matter because maybe the rightness is in the process and not in the and not in the decision right because it's not it's the beginning of a sequence of decisions as we've already pointed out to the place of the altar which he had made there at the first and there Abram called on the name of the Lord and Lord also and Lord also which went with Abraham Abram had flocks and herds and tents and the land was not able to bear them that they might dwell together for their substance was great so that they could not dwell together and there was a strife between the herdsmen of Abrams cattle the Cowboys and the herdmen of lost cattle and the Canaanite and the perizzite dwelled then in the land well that's interesting too because you know Abraham's having a pretty good time of it now right he's out of starvation hey that's good he's out of the tyranny now he's kind of wealthy and then the story flips on him he's wealthy and now a bad thing happens to him right it's that he's got all this wealth and so does his nephew now they can't get along because they have too much stuff so that's quite comical as well that I think that's a comic interlude here now they handle it properly and Abram said unto Lord let there be no strife I pray they between me and thee and between my herdmen and I heard them because we're brothers it's not the whole land before they separate thyself I pray thee from me if you'll take the left then all take the right or if you depart to the right then I'll go to the left so basically they sit down and say well you know one of us has got to get out of town and it can be one or the other it doesn't really matter we can flip a coin or but we have to we have to separate and so they do it amicably and Lord lifted up his eyes and looked at all of the plain of Jordan that it was well watered everywhere so that's an intimation of Eden right because you remember he even means well watered place before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah even as the Garden of the Lord like the land of Egypt as thou comest unto Zoar so interesting you get foreshadowing here again right so Lawton Abram are making the decision about where to go and and law it looks out and and sees a reasonable place but then this warning comes up that there's a city out there there's a place out there where things are not going to go well things are being done badly and things are not going to go well then Lord shows him all the plain of Jordan and law journeyed East and they separated themselves the one from the other Abram dwelt in the land of Canaan and lot dwelled in the cities of the plain and pitched his tent towards Sodom but the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly now the word sin I've mentioned this to you before I think it's an interesting word it's it's the derivation of an archery term in my understanding of its derivation and it the Greek word was hamartia and Hammar he is an archery term which means to to miss the bullseye and you think it's worth thinking about that metaphorically because you've got to think about all the ways that you could miss the bullseye right you can close your eyes that's very common you could just not lift up the damned bow and arrow to begin with you could face the wrong way you could be unskilled in your aim but I'm and I also like the the archery metaphor because human beings are built on a hunting platform right and we always aim at things were things that were ballistic creatures on a trajectory always and we're always aiming at something we're always aiming at the mark and which is of course what you do when you hunt right because you have to hit the mark precisely and that's what we're like and so what we're like that psychologically we have to aim at something and then move towards it and and so to sin is to miss the mark is to is to miss the bullseye to to fail to take aim to aim badly gain carelessly or to not aim at all and that says well that's that's like a sin of omission that's to not do and then to be wicked is to aim at what you know you shouldn't aim at and again I don't I don't think of that as an external morality precisely I think that you can read the entire biblical narrative again from a psychological perspective and say we're not talking about external codes of conduct here although we could we're not the wickedness that's being described is the act of you doing something that you know to be wrong period you know and you may do something you don't know if it's wrong or not that isn't a sort of thing that we're talking about and we're not talking about the things that you do that are right there that other people think are wrong we're not talking about those either we're talking about those things that you consciously do although you know them to be wrong yourself and that's the things that seem to get people into the most trouble in these stories and I believe that to be the case I think that's very accurate psychologically it's amazing because I see this all the time if you do something wrong it's because you're Stig nur n't you don't know better it doesn't go well for you that's the case but if you do something wrong and you know it's wrong the punishment is is manifold and I think the reason for that I think the reason for that is because that makes you Cain it means you betray your own ideal right if you just don't know well you haven't betrayed your ideal you're just not together maybe you're even willfully blind but if you do something you know to be wrong then you've betrayed your own ideal and that lands you Cain says to God once Cain destroys Abel he says I cannot bear my punishment and the Lord said unto Abram after that lot was separated from lift up now thine eyes look upward and look from the place where thou art northward and southward and eastward and westward for all the land which thou seest to thee I will give it and to thy seed forever and I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth so that if a man can number the dust of the earth then shall all the I seed be numbered arise walk through the land in the length of it and the breadth of it for I will give it unto thee in the cathedral at shark I can't say that properly because my French is non-existent so a cathedral is across and the transformation takes place at the crux of the cross which is exactly right because the transformation takes place at the point of maximal suffering and the cathedral is designed to indicate that right symbolically now what happens in the religious ceremony is also a journey and it's a journey in some sense to the holy city and then that's also played out in the idea of pilgrimage right because you go to the holy city actually you go to Jerusalem or wherever it is that you think the holy city is you go there and that takes you out of your country and away from your kin and away from your family into the strange land and as you make the journey you transform and when you come back you're not the same that's the Hobbit right that's the story of the Hobbit but let's say you can't afford to go on a pilgrimage so you go to the cathedral at Chartres and there's a huge maze on the ground and it's the world north west south and east just as God describes here so it's laid out and you enter the maze at one side and in the middle is a stone pattern that looks like a flower and it's it's the place where being wells forth and it's at the center of the Cathedral and what that means is that if you accept your suffering then you move to the place where the spirit of being wells forth that's what that means and so you enter the maze and you walk and it's divided into quadrants and you walk one quadrant completely and then the mains pathway takes you into the next quadrant and you walk that completely and then it takes you to the third one and the fourth one and then when you walk the maze completely everywhere when you've gone everywhere in the world north south east and west where you when you traverse the territory completely then you come to the center and then it's yours and that's what this is so I've noticed when I've been renovating houses I like to do that I paid a lot of attention to the psychological process of a house renovation because I learned from young that young said this this is something man he said if he was he was talking about the stages of integration psychological integration and he looked beyond Piaget I would say although Piaget looked very far he said here's a conjunction you have to get your rationality on your emotion together that's a male/female conjunction symbolically speaking male rationality female emotionality you want to bring those together so that they're oriented in the same direction your emotions in your rationality served the same purpose so then you're unified in mind and spirit let's say that's are good enough once you've got that together then there's a boat you have a body and then that's a male/female conjunction again a divine conjunction the recreation of Adam before his division into female and male and the reconstruction of the androgynous Christ that all that all those ideas are linked together so now you have your emotion and your rationality moving in the same direction but you're not acting it out so now you have to unite that abstract part of you with your body and start acting out what you think and feel and that's the next conjunction but it's not the last one the last conjunction is when you realize that there is no distinction between you and your experience they're the same thing and so then when you put together your house you're putting together yourself so I've noticed in when I've lived in places rented or owned didn't matter and if there were part of the place if there was a part of the place that I hadn't attended to whatever that might mean it might meant cleaned it might have meant fix but it certainly meant at least thoroughly investigated then that was chaos it was like it was it was like the desert that part that's that's a way of thinking about it it wasn't mine even if I owned it wasn't mine I had to interact with it before it became mine and I had to interact with it and I had to put it in order and then it became mine and then and then to the degree that it became mine and was in order then I was also put in order now you know that because you go into places that make you uncomfortable and maybe it's your own house it's highly probable it's highly probable I you know I walk into well Chinese doctors do this traditional Chinese doctors they go into place people's place and they they diagnose their health conditions on the on the balance of yin and yang chaos an order they walked into a house that this is easy to do you walk into a house there's too much chaos hey you can detect that in no time flat everything is out of order and chaotic you don't even want to be there you certainly don't want to open the refrigerator that's for sure and there are things that should have been done years ago everywhere and every one of those things is a fight that hasn't happened and something that's being avoided and you can't even walk in there and maintain your health this is you walk in there you're sicker than you were when you were outside and that's one sort of place and then another sort of place is you go and look at the living room and the person has vacuumed the living room rug and the lines that were vacuumed are parallel to one another and the and the furniture is covered with plastic and you get a glass of water and then just as you're going to set it down on the coffee table the person rushes over and puts a coaster underneath it and everything in that house says to you that it would be a lot more perfect in that house if you were either not there or dead and that's there and that's the message that the whole house is blasting at you and if you happen to live there then you're going to be sick and what you're going to be sick from is too much order and in the other house you're going to be sick from too much chaos and so when you interact with a house the unexplored parts are the chaos that have that parts that you have not yet contended with are the chaos that has not yet been transformed by your embodied logos action into habitable territory and it does not belong to you arise walk through the land in the length of it and the breadth of it for I will give it unto thee the neighbor him removed his tent and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre which is in Hebron and built there an altar unto the Lord and it came to pass in the days of amraphel king of shinar arioch king of ellasar chair de L'Amour there's a lot of kings we won't talk about them he's made war with barrett king of sodom and with Persia king of gomorrah she and ab king of admah and the king of bela wishes or and these were joined together in the Vale of Siddim which is the salt sea hmm now this is actually very much relevant because you see the Vale of Siddim which is the salt sea is the farthest south you can go if South is down because it's the Dead Sea and the Dead Sea is the lowest place that there is so what's happened is that there's chaos in the lowest place that there is that's what this story says and what happens to lawd is he gets tangled up in the chaos of the lowest place that there is and in the fourteenth year came Chidori l'amour and the kings that were with him and smote the ref Eames and Ashtaroth her name and the Susan's and ham and the Emmons and shava Korea Korea Thames and the horites in their mount sire unto Alperin which is by the wilderness and they returned and came to end mishpat which is Kadesh and smote all the country the Amalekites Amalekites and the amorite that dwelt in has a cup houses Zonta my hey hey hazards on tomorrow there we go perhaps and there went out the king of sodom and the king of gomorrah and the king of admah and the king of the bulla and the king of bela the same is zoar and they joined battle with them in the Vale of Siddim so this is absolute chaos and mayhem in the lowest place it's hell essentially with cheddar loam or the king of the lamb and with tidal king of nations and amraphel king of shinar arioch king of ellasar four kings with five and the Vale of Siddim was full of slime pits low in hell like with war isn't enough they had to throw the slime pits in there apparently around the Dead Sea there are pits of bitumen like the like the tar pits in near LA and so that this seems to actually be historically accurate and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell there and then that remain fled to the mountain and they took their Goods and they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their victuals and went their way and they took lot Abrams brothers son who dwelt and sought him and his Goods and departed so Abram has a family member who falls into the lowest place and there came one that had escaped and told Abram the Hebrew for he dwelt in the plain of Mamre the Amorite brother of his skull and brother of a nur and these were confederate with abram and the neighbor him heard that his brother was taken captive he armed his trained servants born in his own house 318 and pursued them unto down well so now we also know that Abraham's a pretty brave guy right he gets word that this horrible war has broken out in the worst of all possible places and that his nephew is involved and the first thing he does is you know mount up his posse and get the hell in there and rescue his nephew so Abraham's oh whatever goodness is from the Old Testament perspective it isn't harmlessness right it isn't emasculation and castration it's not that it's not weakness it's not the inability to fight none of that is associated with virtue it's a sort of strength that enables someone to mount an armed team of 300 people when he finds out that his nephew is being kidnapped in a terrible war and to get the hell out there and take them back and so that's it that's a that's a that's a call to - it's a call to power that not know a kind of peaceful meekness that's funny too because you know there's a line in the New Testament the meek shall inherit the earth I got a look at my phone for a sec here I don't know what time it is there's a line in the New Testament that says and send the Sermon on the Mount says the meek shall inherit the earth and that I read that line always bothered me I thought no way that's not that that's not right meat can't be the right word so when I was doing this story of Noah and talking about the Sermon on the Mount I spent a bunch of time looking at commentaries on that line looking at the roots you know the Greek roots and the Hebrew roots and trying to figure out what that meant and in meat does not mean meat that's wrong here's what it means those who have weapons and know how to use them but still keep the machine will inherit the earth Jesus that's a lot different man it's a lot better right because the way it's normally it's normally interpreted is if you're so weak that you're harmless then things will go well for you it's like no that's not right that's and that's not that can't be right it doesn't fit with the narrative it certainly doesn't fit with this narrative and he divided himself against them he and his servants by night and smote them and pursued them unto Hoba which is on the left side of Damascus and he brought back all the goods and his brother lot and his Goods and the women also and the people did work Abraham and the kings of Sodom went out to meet him after his return at the slaughter of charrid Aloma and of the kings that there were there with him at the valley of shaveh which is the Kings Dale and Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine and he was the priest of the Most High God and He blessed him and said blessed be Abram of the Most High God possessor of heaven and earth and blessed be the Most High God which had delivered thine enemies into thine hand and gave him tithes of all and the king of Sodom said to Abram give me the persons and take thy goods to thyself this is that that were the goods that Abram that they'd been rescued of the Kings and Abram said to the king of Sodom I have lift up mine hand unto the Lord what does that mean it means I've made a vow that's what it means that that's what that phrase means I've made a vow to God the possessor of heaven and earth that I will not take anything from a thread even to a shoelace I won't take anything that's yours lest you should say I've made abram rich I'll take only that which my young men Avedon and the portion of men that went with me and inner s : ma'am let them take their portion and so Abraham decides here he's made this immense sacrifice and done this incredibly brave act and rescued his nephew and rescued the king's goods and and they offer him a reward and he says I'm not going to take the reward and the reason for that is that he doesn't want to contaminate the ethical purity of his actions he doesn't want to be paid he doesn't want it he doesn't want to benefit from doing he doesn't want to avoid some what is it exactly he doesn't want to benefit inappropriately from doing the right thing it's something like that and so it's another testament to his character in a very complex Testament right because he's not a sin he's not a good man in any simple sense I mean look what's just happened he's he's mounted and armed he's mounted and armed he's he's led an army into battle and parked in and participated in the slaughter he refuses to benefit from it except to get back what was his that's it he refuses to benefit from it except to get back what was rightfully his and in that way he maintains his covenant with God even to a shul a chit I anything though never so smaller mean less thou should claim a share with God in the honor due to him this is from Matthew pool who was an English nonconformist theologian commenting on that line even to a shoe latchet ie anything though never so meaner small lest thou should claim a share with God in the honor due to him to his blessing alone I do and I will all my riches or lest thou should say Abram is enriched with my spoils and however he pretended kindness and charity yet indeed it was his covetousness that put him upon this work after these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision saying fear not Abram I'm nice shield and I exceedingly and I exceeding great reward a vision issue again [Music] well we went through that last week fear not Abram I am thy shield and my exceeding great reward and Abram said Lord God what can you give me seeing as I'm childless toddlers and that's the only thing that matters to a broom at this point and the steward of my house is this an easier of dem Damascus no kin and Abraham said Abram said Behold to me thou has given no seed and lo one born in my house is mine heir and behold the word of the Lord came unto him saying this shall not be thine heir but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels should be nine hair so he gets promised the impossible once again and he brought him forth abroad and said now look towards the heaven until the stars if thou be able to number them and he said unto him so shall thy seed be and he believed in the Lord and counted to him for righteousness seeing that this is a covenant idea this belief because here's the belief it's the willingness to act as if the world is constructed so that if you do the right thing the best possible outcome will occur it's a decision that's the Covenant right it's a decision about how to live in the world because the evidence can't be there before you make the decision right and so you might hedge your best you know when when Christ comes back in the book of Revelation to judge people because it comes back as a judge and virtually everyone gets cast out with the chaff and not saved with the wheat huh he says something very interesting he appears in a vision with a sword coming out of his mouth it's a horrifying vision and he divides the the he divides humanity into the Damned and the save or the dead yes the Damned and the saved he says something very interesting he says to those who were neither hot nor cold I will spew you out of my mouth and and it's a it's a disgust metaphor right and what it says is that the word punishment isn't waiting for those who committed to something and did wrong the worst punishment is reserved for those who committed to nothing and stayed on the fence and that's really something too that's really something to think about and it's also something I believe to be true because I see that stasis is utterly destructive because there's no progress all there is is movement backwards there's aging and suffering and no progress and so did not commit to anything is the worst of all transgressions to commit means to put your body and soul into something to offer your life as a sacrifice means that you're willing to make a bargain with fate and the bargain is I'm going to act as if I give it my all then the best possible thing will happen because of that and to to not see the analogy between that and the the active faith in God is to misunderstand the story completely and it has to be an act of faith because how are you going to know you can look at other people but that isn't going to do it it's at Kierkegaard was very clear about this sort of thing there's certain sorts of truths that you can only learn for yourself through experience and that's of course why Abram also has to go out alone right he has to leave this kenneth's it's an individual it's the individuation process like dying it's something that you do alone there's no way you can tell what is within your grasp let's say unless you make the ultimate sacrifice and there's no way of finding out without actually making it and so that's the sacrificial act right that's that's really active Abram being called upon to sacrifice Isaac and think about that is Abram he's been doing he's been like breaking himself into pieces trying to progress forward through starvation and tyranny and war and deceit and the potential loss of his wife and child lessness and like everything that can really befall you in some sense and finally God grants him Isaac when he's old it's impossible he gets Isaac his son and then what has got to do next is say well you know that son that you've been waiting for so for so long it's like I'd like to see just exactly what you're made of I think you should offer him up as a sacrifice and I mean it's a very barbaric story in a sense and maybe in more than just a sense but Abraham does maintain his covenant he's willing to make the sacrifice he's made willing to make this is the thing he's willing to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to keep his covenant with God intact and that's that and that's the decision well maybe it's no surprise that people don't do that and he believed in the Lord and he counted it to him for righteousness and he said unto him I am the Lord that brought thee out of ur of the Chaldees to give this land to you to inherit it and he said Lord God whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it and he said to him this is a sacrificial story again taking a heifer of three years and a goat of three years in RAM of three years in a Turtledove and a young pigeon it's fairly specific actually and he took all these and divided them and laid each piece one against another but the birds divided he not now there's a reason for that and I don't know the reason for it and when the fowls came down upon the carcasses Abram drove them away and when the Sun was going down a deep sleep fell upon Abram and lo a horror of great darkness fell upon him how did it mean he was afraid of the dark which is what I thought it meant when I first read it it isn't what it means it means that he fell into a trance or something like that and then he was enveloped by absolute horror so that's how this story begins and here's the commentary from Joseph Benson who was an English Methodist minister who lived in 1749 it was born in 1749 and when the Sun was going down about the time of the evening evening oblation the washing for he abode by them praying and waiting till toward evening a deep sleep fell upon Abram this was not a common sleep through weariness or carelessness and what a sloop is that's supposed to be sleep not a common sleep through weariness or carelessness but a divine ecstasy that being wholly taken off from things sensible he might be wholly taken up with the contemplation of things spiritual well it really makes you wonder what Abraham was up to in his campsite so he was participating in something that enabled this experience and Lola or a horror of great darkness fell upon him this was designed to strike upon the spirit of Abram and to possess him with the holy reverence holy fear prepares the soul for holy joy God humbles first and then lifts up echoes of psychedelic experience and he said unto Abram know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and shall serve them and they shall afflict them for hundred years and also that nation whom they shall serve I will judge and afterwards shall they come out with great substance and thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace thou shalt be buried in a good old age but in the fourth generation they shall come hither again to the iniquity of the amorite is not yet full commentaries of Joseph Benson once again they shall come hither again hither to the land of Canaan wherein thou not art thou art the reason why they must not have the land of promise in possession until the fourth generation is because the iniquity of the ammonites was not yet full the righteous God has desert determined that the amorite shall not be cut off till they arrived at such a pitch of wickedness and therefore till it come to that the seed of Abraham must be kept out of possession so the interpretation of the story essentially is that Abraham's descendants will end up enslaved in Egypt for a long lengthy period of time and eventually come back to the land of Canaan and it's interesting to because this is part of Abraham's bargain with God and in this divine vision I mean he's been promised everything but it's a pretty tough bargain because you know when God is pushed or reveals himself let's say he says look you're going to get your damned descendants you know but it's not going to be it's it's it's going to be a tough journey they're going to be slain slaved for a very long time and eventually come back and you won't see it you'll be dead long before then and so it's a realistic promise in a sense and you might say well Abram is so desperate to keep the faith that he's willing to read good into what isn't good but I think I think I don't think that's the right way to look at it I think the right way to look at it is the people who wrote these stories were very realistic and they knew that even if things turned out well for you I mean we're still going to be real you know we're going to be some fantasy it's like let's say you have a family that flourishes is people are still going to die they're still going to get sick they're they're still going to have they're still going to be alive you know with all of its suffering but it'll be the but it'll be a life that's rich enough and complete enough so that it'll justify its its nature essentially and so and it came to pass that when the Sun went down and it was dark behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between the pieces Albert Barnes American theologian commented on this the oven of smoke and lamp of flame symbolized the smoke of destruction in the light of salvation they're passing passing through the pieces of the sacrificial victims and probably consuming them as an accepted sacrifice or the ratification of the Covenant on the part of God as the dividing and presenting of them were on the part of Abram in the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying unto thy seed I haven't given this land from the river of Egypt unto the great river the river Euphrates the key nights and the Kehna sites and the Cadman nights etc now Sarai Abrams wife bear him no children and she had a handmaid wait a second I think we'll stop there I'm tiring out and it's just at its 929 so that's a very good place to stop so yes [Applause] so so I should I should close properly and just sum up so what happens here is that that Abram enters into a covenant with God to act in the world and the action is an adventure story essentially and the adventures repeat and they're and they're punctuated by success and sacrifice and re contemplation right and so it's this it's this journey it's the it's the hero's journey uphill I'm here there's a crisis I collapse i reconstruct myself to a higher place and life is like that continually and that's the story of Abram and that's all contained though it's all contained and this is the thing that's so cool because that is what your life is going to be like whether you plan out your life or not it's going to be punctuated like that maybe it won't go up maybe it'll go down the question is what sort of container of you need to be in in order to tolerate movement up and down and that's what the story of Abraham provides it provides a it provides a description of the Covenant that's like the Ark the Covenant in the Ark are the same thing right except the Covenant is the psychological equivalent of the ark and the Covenant is have faith in the structure of existence and go forth that's the Covenant and that and the story is that's the best possible solution that you have at hand all right so I'm going to make a request with regards to the questions which may mean you have to reorient yourself in the line I would like the first two questions on each side if possible to relate specifically to tonight's lecture and then I can and then I can address more general issues if that's if that's okay so and I again I would like you to carefully speak into the mic so that the people who are watching can hear can you hear me yeah I can I the story about Abraham as saying his wife was his sister you referred to that as him making a mistake I'm not quite sure I understand how you're reading that as a mistake seeing as it was a very deliberate decision and it had a pretty good outcome for him and he does the same thing a few chapters later yes this is true you see I don't I don't I don't feel that I have cracked that part of that story properly now the reason I said it was a mistake is because it's clearly an act of deceit and in it and it does put the Pharaoh in a very awkward position not to mention sir I by the way are sir how do you say that I don't know how to say that sir i sir i it's awry to begin with yes is that right sir I yes okay and then it's Sarah and that so Abram means High King something like that and Abraham means father of the people and Sarai means princess and Sarah means mother of the people it's something I have it exactly right I'll tell you next week but that's part of the name transformation the the it seems to me that at least in part it's an indication of Abraham's willingness to use a suboptimal solution when driven to it by necessity I don't think it's a heroic act to pretend that your wife is your sister now you know and and and maybe you might say well under the circumstances there was nothing else he could have done but it does seem it I can't see how you can interpret it other than as a departure from the truth but I know that that's not all there is to it and it does seem to work out well for him and my interpretation is that well if you're oriented properly in the world the grace of God allows you a few necessary mistake something like that you have an alternative idea well why not what what is it about that that because it's Abraham and it isn't reasonable to attribute mistakes to him or what is it because at least I think it says in the text that he's looking to get out of a bad situation and he does whatever is the best thing that's available to him and not to mention as I said he does the same trick a few chapters later yeah well maybe maybe it is the case that you know it's like a white lie issue you know you say well it's a white lie acceptable I would say well the best that you can come up with is acceptable that that doesn't mean it's it's optimal though right like I I'll give you a foolish example because it's the best that I could do at the moment but you know if you if you have a loved one who says does this dress make me look fat the answer to that question is I don't answer questions like that that's the answer right because the other answer is the white lie I mean at least in this context and that means that on the one hand you're maintaining the positive contract between you and the person who's asking the question but then you're still sacrificing the truth within that so your your you're maintaining your relationship with the higher order truth but sacrificing a lower order truth and that would be better than the reverse but it's not as good as not sacrificing the truth at all and I would say that if you're maybe fortunate because sometimes it's a matter because you can be in a situation where all your choices are bad I've seen people in situations like that I've probably been in situations like that and maybe that is what's happening in that stories every choice Abraham is in front of him is bad but I can't help but think that it's more than that it means that if you're doing the best you can and it's not perfect it can still be good enough that's how it looks to me thank you hello dr. Peterson you mentioned earlier there's been a pervasive problem of nihilism and moral relativism and that that kind of be cured with a nice naive optimism that's grounded in fact and what can actually be done to improve situations is there a way to communicate that message to a younger audience say teenagers in a high school environment which is nowadays a hotbed for this kind of nihilistic morally relativist thinking great I'm glad you asked that so I'm going to tell you I was thinking about saying this at the beginning but I decided not to but now I get to say it because I got this question so that's so cool um I I have plans and so his plan number one I have worked with some people to design a website that will enable high university students to enter their course descriptions their professors name the sub discipline and the university and an artificial intelligence agent will tell them if the course is postmodern neo-marxist indoctrination not not only and I have made tentative arrangements with someone to finance a advertising campaign for that site and so the goal is well to inform the consumer do you want to be educated or do you want to be indoctrinated and happily you'll be able to use the site equally for both purposes right because if you want to if you want to take the the the courses that I would regard as into oxidation then this will give you a way of ensuring that nothing that you get exposed to won't be of that sort so and then I'm going to make a video to introduce that to university students and their parents and I'm going to outline what I think the universities are doing wrong is about 20 things they're doing wrong and and there's seriously wrong things and I'm going to start by describing the utility of a university education in humanities education because the humanities education makes you into the kind of autonomous individual that can go away from that can be independent and can communicate and think and that has immense economic value not not just spiritual value and cultural value but economic value and so there's I don't want to tell people not to go to university I want to tell them to go to university and grow the hell up and and learn to communicate and think and I want them to avoid the people who will take the spirit away from them and so that's what that website is going to do I hope and the goal is to drop the enrollment in the indoctrination courses across the english-speaking world by 75% within five years that's the goal so and then you ask that you ask more specifically about high school students well we have this future authoring program that has been used for university students and it produces about a 30% improvement in retention and we've tested several thousand University students anyone can use it by the way it's not for university students but it was easy for us to test it's beneficial impact even if people only spend under 90 minutes on it it still has approximately that effect especially on young men especially if they're ethnic minorities especially if they're not oriented towards a career and didn't do very well in school and so that's really cool because it's really hard to design a psychological intervention that helps the people who are doing the worst most psychological interventions so imagine there are people who are doing not so well and people who are doing well and you produce a psychological intervention what usually happens is the people who are doing well benefit even more right but this seems to work for the disenfranchised so we're thrilled about that really and so we produced a version for high school students yes and so but we don't have them look three to five years out into the future because they can't and they don't know enough you know it's hard for fully mature adults to look that far into the future high school kids can probably manage three to six months and so we're going to have them concentrate on character development and and what they want for their from their friendships and how they would like to orient themselves in school and to start thinking about the sorts of person that they would like to be and that never happens in schools weirdly enough there's a guy named John Gatto who won the Teacher of the Year award in New York City and then in New York State and then stopped being a teacher by the way he wrote a series of books about the education system that explained why students in pre-university education aren't taught to be autonomous individuals it's very interesting what he's discovered historically but anyways we're going to market that probably to parents and to university students themselves rather than to the schools because our experience has been that producing this sort of material directly for individuals works much better it's much more efficient and so then students will be able to or their parents will be able to purchase the program and the students will be able to use it to design their own personality in a manner that would make them thrilled to be alive let's say that would be the goal right yes [Applause] I'm gonna get you to turn it to put it down a little more heed excellent perfect yes yes yeah and I think I specially the literature in developmental psychology I think bears this out but I think a huge part of learning is interaction and discourse and that seems very difficult in an online setting even if it's through text I don't I don't quite see it it's the same thing and additionally I think there's a huge motivational factor that's difficult to arm it's difficult to keep motivated when you're isolated and nobody else around you is pursuing the same goal so how would you dress though you're absolutely right on both counts um I would say that the idea of an online humanities university is grandiose and it may not be possible and the reason for that is that and as you're alluding to we actually don't understand what the university is we think it's lectures and exams but it's probably not it's certainly being together with people of your own age as you start your life it's moving away from your household it's establishing yourself as a credible intellect right it's it's picking a new group of peers it's all of those things and it isn't clear how that can be replicated online now the people that I'm talking to are sophisticated enough to understand Marshall McLuhan's dictum that the medium is the message and so I think it would be a mistake to attempt to duplicate the University online because you can't but so what we're concentrating on right now is not so much content but infrastructure the question is we want to set up an educated education online that will be autonomously self-governing and self-improving and the content in some sense were not so much interested in the Khan and as we are interested in the process by which people who generate good content might be optimally rewarded and that's what we want to get right and that's probably a discussion that'll take a year or two years to to flesh out we started to conceptualize what the system might look like but but to your point it isn't we're not taking lectures and putting them online although obviously that's what I'm doing that that isn't going to make an online humanities University and we know that I think everything you said is exactly is it's very accurate and also indicative of the high probability that something like this would sail so but well you know where we're going to try to be aware of the pitfalls we're also going to I read this great book I would recommend this book it's a very funny book by a guy named John gall it's called system antics and it's a cult classic systematics and it's about how systems really work and how they fail and it's a work of ironic comedy but it's quite brilliant and one of the things when one line he needs it's made of a bunch of axioms and here's one axiom I just love this is the system does not do what its name says it does and so one guy worked in Alberta Social Services when I was a kid about eighteen or so and I worked as a consultant and I one of the and I got involved in projects that were above my pay grade I would say and I learned a lot about how how large bureaucracies functioned and I was asked at one point to update a report that had been made the year before about what percentage of the spending of the Social Services Department actually went to the recipients of welfare and and social aid in general and the answer was the system did not know and could not find out and they had hired a very expensive consulting firm to answer that question the year before and I was asked to update it which was quite odd to begin with but then I did I went and looked at the consulting report and I went into the data and what I found was that none of it was real but even more importantly there was no way of knowing whether it was true or false because the system had never been set up to calculate what percentage of its total spending actually went to the recipients of social aid it just blew me away and then I thought and I was reading this book at the same time and I thought oh the purpose of the social services department is to employ people in the social services department and I mean I wasn't being cynical about that it's like charity most charities you know it's like 90% overhead so what is the charity do it runs itself now you don't want to be cynical about that because big businesses are the same most like even if they're running at a profit the profit is like five percent so the business spends 95% of its time maintaining itself you know and it makes a bit of product and it makes a bit of profit but most of what it does is maintain itself so anyways one of the axioms in that book that was one of them is the system does not do what it says it does so that's then you can face the system with a clear head and say okay well this thing isn't doing what it says it's doing but it's probably doing something and the thing it's doing might be useful but we should figure out what that thing is so that's been really useful to me as a guide to thinking the other thing he said was if you want to build a big system that works start with by building a small system that works and scale it and we've done that for example with the self authoring programs you know has built small scale systems that are very robust with the hope that they'll scale and that's the same we'll do the same thing here is start with a small amount of content see if we can reward see what I would like to have happen is you know there's a lot of people out there who are pretty intensely educated and some of them are really creative and so imagine that there's a timeline imagine you could do a humanity since you imagine there's a timeline say of a thousand years but scalable then imagine that that there would be lectures associated with the timeline at different levels of resolution so we might call for a lecture on the 3rd century AD what happened in the 3rd century ad you've got half an hour to explain it you can explain it any way you want you can use animation you can use lecture you can use text you can make a movie we don't care what you have to do is that's the topic that's the timespan that's the amount of time and then you can post it and so we could generate content that way and let people experiment and then we can have people review the content as part of their generate questions about the content as part of their assignments rate the questions as part of their assignments and rate the content and then if we charge people imagine you had to pay $50 a month to enroll something like that maybe we would allow you when you first enroll maybe you get to use five dollars of it as disposable income you can reward that to any creator you want but as you progress through the courses your right to determine where your money goes would increase as you became more and more educated hopefully that way we would get some quality control built into it so those are some of the ideas that were that we're starting to play around with so the only one I'm consider about is the motivation yeah what's that the motivation issue for individuals well then I'm not going to go into that because it would take too long but but rest assured that we are thinking about that very hard as well we're going to build competition into it we're going to build cooperation into it we hope to build peer into relationships into it I think all that's possible but but complex right because it's we don't know how to build an online education system really and but it would be fun to experiment and see if we can figure out how to do it so thank you hi so I I couldn't really zero in on any particular question so it's more of a family questions that I have about the nature and cultivation of conscience which was in a sense what this story exemplified about Abraham why do you say that why do you think that the story exemplified the development of conscience of conscience specifically well going back to the zigzag yeah right and the star how you have to keep okay so that's what you were referring to okay orienting yourself completely autonomously yeah on your own terms right yeah okay okay so you we hit on some great there I think you know and this is something weirdly enough that I learned most particularly from the Pinocchio movie which I spent a lot of time studying is because in in the Pinocchio movie Jiminy Cricket is an avatar of Christ essentially but it's very because he's a bug that's the first thing that's kind of weird and because Jiminy Cricket is southern US slang for Jesus Christ among other things but and these things get aggregated in in great mythic dramas like that and that's a great mythic drama but you know one of the things that really makes Jiminy Cricket different from Christ apart from the fact that Christ wasn't a cricket is that Craig the cricket learns as he progresses right even though he's the conscience and so you'd think that he would be the infallible guide that isn't how the moviemakers set it up but not so cool is that he is just as muddle-headed as Pinocchio at the beginning and he's a bit arrogant and puffed up too and so it took me a long time to think that through and then I realized that well you you have the voice of you have the voice of culture in you you have the voice of culture within you but it's old and dead and out-of-date and it's not fully articulated and updated and then what happens is that if you enter into a dialogue with it and you hammer yourself against the world then you get hammered into shape and so does your conscience and so you both become elevated and so well so anyways I think that's that's ridiculously cool because it means that your conscience you don't have an infallible guide but you have something within you that you could build into an infallible guide if you cooperated with it and and said it so well so I think that's very interesting so that being said yes the picture that I have in my mind of the cultivation of virtue in general it's kind of like taking a block of wood and trying to carve out a sphere out of it it'll never be perfectly round but the more you carve right the rounder and rounder right that's successive approximation yeah well one of it's also like what do you call that compound interest this is one of the things that's also and I think this puts you on the to those who more shall be given part of the curve it's like you know you don't have to improve yourself very much each week to really improve yourself on the ridiculous amount in a year you know so you could make you could you could you could Wow make your day 1/100 of a percent better than the day before not would do the trick if you were if you were constant about that that would do the trick so that that's this successive approximation is you don't want to underestimate the utility of incremental progress man it's really kids deadly powerful so so let's say you get to the you know the higher ends of the curve right you're like a pretty virtuous person let's say you even become a sage or something of the sort and I mean one should you doubt your conscience like what are things that we should watch out for even when we got great well that's yep okay um just just to get it out of the way right yeah I don't know how much this relates well it does relate but Psychopaths for example the entire idea that they lack a conscience and that's why right that's what psychopathy is whether or not you agree with that definition right but there's an issue of conscience again a play with psychopathy how can we the first question doubt ourselves in a way that's warranted right regardless of how virtuous we've become and can you treat a psychopath could they call fate a conscience okay so let we'll start with the first one part of the reason that that I believe that freedom of speech is the canonical right let's end obligation right more importantly even obligation is that that's how you figure out if you're wrong you know because so I said home and I think and I think and I think let's say but I'm like who am I to think there's so many things I don't know that it's it's just there's the what I know compared to what I don't know is so miniscule that it's a preposterous act just to say something okay so so no matter how much I sit at home and think I'm not going to fix that I'm going to be flat and then I have biases but my temperament and I have biases because of my malevolence and I have biases because of my my gender my sex let's say since we're not so fond of that word so Eva no matter how much I said home and think I'm still going to be wrong and malevolent so then what do I have to do is I have to talk to some other people and I have to say this is what I think and it's going to be ugly you know because what the hell do I know but then if I listen people will tell me why I'm wrong and lots of people have been telling me why I'm wrong like a lot and it's hard you know it's hard but it's but I've learned something from it like I had this revelation let's say about being yelled at by your father now I know that you can be yelled at too much by your father but it's like you're wrong man and so someone's yelling at you and maybe they're only ten percent right but if you shut the hell up and listen then you can figure out where you're wrong and then maybe you can be thankful for that and then maybe if you shut up and listen your father would quit yelling at you you know because he's wrong - what the hell does he know he knows how to yell at you and tell you how you're wrong and he's throwing things out you add you that are probably not true but some of its true and you know if someone can tell you why you're wrong they've given you a great gift because then you don't have to be wrong anymore and you might think well who cares if you're wrong but you know there's a line in the New Testament - is if the blind lead the blind won't they fall in won't they fall into a ditch the answer to that question by the way is yes they will and so the reason that you want to think is because thinking is how you like when you think you creative the fictional world that's an analog of the world and then you make an avatar of yourself to act in that world and then if the Avatar dies you don't act out those actions right well so if you think properly then you don't have to suffer and die and so if you can say what you think and people can tell you why you're wrong and you know to say what you think under extreme circumstances means that you're going to say things that no one wants to hear because those are the things you don't know about those are the things that are conflictual and differ called it are going to be hard conversations man and you're going to be wrong about them a lot if you don't get to stumble forward with your stupidity then you can't be corrected and so so there's no distinction between free speech and thinking and there's no distinction between thinking and thriving and so those who want to inhibit free speech do not wish for people to thrive and I believe that so thinking does not happen inside your head that's only the beginnings of thinking and it's this that we're doing here that's thinking you know so we have to protect that psychopath I don't I say this I hope non naively also having dealt with Psychopaths in my clinical practice and I would say now and then in my life I don't believe in Psychopaths I don't believe that we know enough to say there are people born without conscience um I don't think the psychometric measurement of psychopathy is everything that it should be I've been trying to model it bei in the Big Five domain I think now it's complicated because so I would say a psychopath the classic psychopath is likely extroverted especially assertive disagreeable and unconscious and maybe extremely low in neuroticism so you can't frighten them but so that's a rare combination because it's extreme on many traits right but that I don't believe that that means that someone with that personality configuration is doomed from birth to a pathological existence because there's things about psychopathy that that the that the classifiers those who claim like correctly that the psychopath is born in some sense can't explain it's like well what about the cruelty there seems to be a motive they're you know they're passionless and they lack no they lack emotion well why are they cruel then for entertainment well but then you have to explain the entertainment motivation like there's a failure in some sense with the classic psychopathy theorist to come to grips with the problem malevolence it skirted over and you can't do that if you're talking about psychopathy it's like malevolence is the bloody issue here and so the other issue with the psychopaths is that he's irredeemable right that's the idea I don't think we know enough to make such claims now and that doesn't I know the psych office a literature quite well and I have great respect for their primary research is in the field I want to make that perfectly clear but we're talking at a different we're talking we're approaching the problem from a different level of analysis here something like a spiritual level of analysis and I don't think that there's an easy easy translation from the descriptive psychometric psychiatric approach to the spiritual level they don't match and I'm more likely to say let's not assume the soul is doomed from birth right and I'm loathe to think that there are people born irredeemable although I do think there are irredeemable people know the death penalty issues interesting in that regard you know because I've read a lot about really terrible people and I've also read a lot about what really terrible people said about themselves and many of them wished for the death penalty and so it's absolutely clear that there are things that you can do that deserve the death penalty but that doesn't mean that the state should have the right to impose it that's a different question so yep in the previous lecture you mentioned the 2008 economic crisis and one of the very interesting themes that's emerged at many levels be at universities or economic policies this perceived culture war specifically the idea of Marx versus milk and you've criticized postmodern the neo-marxist thought very frequently one interesting critic of the policies of the EU specifically EC ECB and IMF during the Greek debt crisis was Yanis varoufakis the former greek Finance Minister and his criticism of MIL was deal was Mills alleged contempt for the population and verify his comments on the type of capitalism that results in too big to fail he describes themselves as an erratic Marxist to me personally is an example of someone whose position on the philosophical mooring of policy is interesting to compare and contrast with yours he certainly not your typical Marxist or post modernist even though not really sure what that means but if you look at his work during the Greek debt crisis and his current work with diem25 he seems to be well reasoned well-positioned and and articulate now I wanted to know if you had an opinion on that type of criticism of MIL or his taking of a position as a neurotic Marxist okay I would say I would say no to the specifics of the question I don't think that I have that detailed expertise in order to answer the question at the level of analysis that you where you formulated it but I have something to say that's more general about the set of phenomena that you described there's no doubt that distribution is a major problem that capitalism contends with imperfectly at best and the distribution problem is the pre de distribution problem right and it's something that Marx commented on which mostly in the monetary sphere is that money tends to accumulate in the hands of very few people it's like there's no doubt about that now as we've discussed before the people in whom hands the money accumulates do turnover more than people say think especially in in countries that are functioning me reasonably well and it's really important that that happens yes yes yes but that doesn't that doesn't solve the problem of the fact that produced goods gravitate towards an extreme minority now they're also produced often by extreme minority which is also a problem I would say then that the idea that capitalism is more prone to that distribution problem than any other system I don't believe that to have been demonstrated at all and I think that capitalism is actually pretty good at self-destruction except when that's interfered with and I think that's particularly the case in the United States where generally the policy has been if you're an idle with feet of clay no matter how big you are you get to fail now that's being compromised severely in the last 20 years and we're probably going to pay for that I think they really paid for that in Japan right where there is every attempt to prop out that the gods that should have died so so fair enough for the critique of capitalism that's not the issue the issue is do you have a better idea and if the idea is well we could kind of do it marks suggested then you don't get to have that position and claim what should I say I haven't seen any evidence that systems predicated on that set of actions have done anything but more harm than good thank you yeah and when will you be announcing the monthly extension to the circuses as soon as I find out whether or not I can rent this theater in the fall yeah thank you we'll see you next week you [Applause]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,175,431

Rating: 4.867795 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Bible, KJV, King James Version, Personality, Psychology, Biblical Series, Abraham, Sarah, Lot, Old Testament, New Testament, Jung, Eliade, mythology, scripture, exegesis

Id: GmuzUZTJ0GA

Length: 155min 14sec (9314 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/nd646]

Jung was totally incomprehensible to me without the background that JP gives. Definitely worth giving him a listen if you haven't before.

[u/webauteur]

I'm losing respect for Jordan B. Peterson as he becomes more politically radical. Now he is calling all progressives Marxist. He is pushing a ridiculous red scare narrative based on the monstrosity of Stalin. His conservative perspective was informative but now he is getting unhinged.