Biblical Series XI: Sodom and Gomorrah

[Music] three difficult stories tonight and hopefully my plan is to get through all three of them so we'll see how that goes so we're going to talk about the story of sodom and gomorrah and then the story of the sacrifice of Isaac which is an extremely complicated complicated story and so we'll try to make some headway with that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is plenty complicated - all right so what we established last week at least in part was this idea that the Abrahamic narratives are set up as punctuated epochs I suppose in Abraham's life and we were hypothesizing that you know you set out a goal for yourself in your life it's like a stage in your life you might say that and then when you run that goal to its end when that stage comes to an end then you have to regroup and orient yourself once again and I was making the case that that's a good time to make necessary sacrifices you know and part of that because as you move through your life you have to shed that which is no longer necessary and because otherwise it accretes around you and holds you down and you perish sooner than you should and I think that's in large part because if you don't dispense with your life as you move through it then the stress of all that undone business and all those unmade decisions turns into a kind of chaos around you and that chaos puts you in a state of psychophysiological emergency preparedness chronically and that just ages you and so it's necessary in some sense to stay light on your feet and also I think to renew your commitment to your aim upward and I believe that that's what the sacrificial routines in the Abrahamic stories dramatized I said already that these things are often first portrayed very dramatically and concretely before they become psychologists and we'll see because one of the things that happens tonight as well in these stories is that when God makes his covenant with Abraham this is the next part of the story it's also when the idea of circumcision is introduced into ancient Hebrew culture and others every bit of evidence that other cultures were utilizing circumcision beforehand so it wasn't necessarily a novel invention of the Abrahamic people but I see its introduction as a step on the road to the psychologize ation of the idea of sacrifice right first of all it's giving up something concrete and then second it's signified by the sacrifice of a part of the body instead of for the sake of the whole it's something like that it's dramatizing the idea that you have to give up a part of yourself for the sake of the whole and eventually well by modern times that becomes virtually completely psycho psychological and it's in its essence in that we all understand perhaps not as well as we should but at least well enough to explain it that it's necessary to make sacrifices to move ahead in life one of the themes that I'd like to explore tonight in relationship especially to the sacrifice of Isaac is that you know once humanity had established the idea that sacrifice was necessary to move ahead which is really it's a discovery of incalculable magnitude right the idea that the idea that you can give up something in the present and that will in some sense ensure a better future is an unbelievable achievement it's equivalent to the discovery of the future it's equivalent to the discovery of the utility of work like its importance can't be overstated okay so it took a long time for people figure this out animals haven't figured it out at all right we've figured it out and it's hard it's hard for people to make sacrifices because of course the present has a major grip on you as it should because in some way you live in the present so anyways there's the twin problem of getting the whole idea of sacrifice up and running and then figuring out exactly what it means but there's a problem that branches off that too or a two-fold problem so the hypothesis is that sacrifice is necessary to ensure the that the future is safe and secure and productive and positive and all of those things ok so then then a question immediate two questions immediately rise from that right one is well what's the proper sacrifice now we already talked about that a little bit with regards to Cain and Abel and one of the things we saw was that Cain's sacrifice whatever it was was wrong and Abel's was right Noah's seemed to be right Abraham seems to be right there is something about a sacrifice that can be correct there's something about a sacrifice that can be incorrect the question is what would be the maximally correct sacrifice so because that's an obvious question to arise from the mere observation that sacrifice is necessary okay if you're going to sacrifice and it's necessary well how is it that you would behave if you were going to do it really well if you're going to do it perfectly okay so that's question number one and then question number two might be well if the future can be better because of the sacrifice and sacrifices can vary in quality then how much better could this set the future be if your sacrifice was of the highest quality right there's a limit issue there and it the limit is something like well how good could your life be if you really got your act together and you gave up all the things that we're impeding you in your movement forward if you did that forthrightly and and and with with integrity and with seriousness with with dead seriousness and you tried to set your life right what is the upper limits with regards to how your life might lay itself out and I would say well we don't know the answer to that but I think that like the idea of something like the City of God or the kingdom of God on earth or the re-establishment of paradise something like that is the answer of the imagination to the court how good could the future be if sacrifice was optimized and those are archetypal questions right an archetypal question is a question that everyone asks whether they know it or not because sometimes you can act out a question an archetypical estin is a question that everyone asks and an archetypal answer is the answer that can't be made any better to that question so I can give you an example of that the reason that Christ's passion is an archetypal story is because it's a kind of limit right it's the worst possible set of things that can happen to the best possible person so it's a story that constitutes a limit it has nothing to do with the factual reality of the story that's a completely independent issue I'm speaking about this psychologically is that certain stories can exhaust themselves in a perfect form and that would be the archetypal form so that's the territory that we're going to wander around in a little bit today and we'll use the stories as anchors in thinking a lot about the Sodom and Gomorrah story because it has its classically associated with a biblical injunction against homosexuality and that's often how it's read I would say in particular by the more fundamentalist end of the Christian spectrum and I've thought about that a lot because it's pretty damn clear that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has something to do with sexual and propriety but I've really come to the conclusion and it's very little to do with homosexuality so we'll see how that interpretation prevails as we walk through this tonight okay so we'll start with a bit of a recap from last week so Abraham's had had his last adventure and he's 90 years old ninety nine years old actually the Lord appeared to Abram and said unto him I am the Almighty God walk before me and be thou perfect well that's quite the command now Alexander McLaren who we talked about before it elaborated upon this slightly and this is what he had to say it's this is not precisely walking with God the idea of walking before God it is rather that of an act of life spent in continual consciousness of being naked and opened before the eyes of him to whom we have to give an account okay so that's that's an idea that's in keeping with the notion that what we're seeing an Abrahamic story is the call to adventure of the of man of the typical person right because your life in some sense is an adventure and I suppose the reason for that is that you're confronted by things that you cannot understand that you have not yet mastered there's a heavy price to be paid if you fail to conduct yourself appropriately and there's a large reward to be gained if you conduct yourself properly and so that pretty much defines an adventure story and God calls to Abraham and tells him to move out into the world to leave what he's familiar with to go into the strange lands of famine and tyranny and to find his place and that works out quite nicely for Abraham and so what that also means is that because Abraham is doing that consciously at least according to this interpretation that he's not naive in his in his determination to move forward you know I mean I've dealt with lots of people who have anxiety disorders you know and one thing about people who have anxiety disorders is they are not mysterious to me I understand it's no problem for me to understand why people have anxiety disorders or why they're depressed or why they have substance use problems the mystery to me is always why people don't have all of those things at once because everybody has a reason to be anxious in fact we have the ultimate reason to be anxious because we know that we're vulnerable and we know that we're going to die and how you cannot be anxious under those circumstances is a great mystery it's a massive mystery and the same thing applies with regards to depression and then the same thing applies to some degree with regards to drug and alcohol abuse because I said last week there's plenty of reasons to drown your consciousness in alcohol that's for sure we could refer to the aforementioned anxiety depression not least and so and the and the sorts of drugs that people are prone to take our chemicals that take the affective edge off the tragedy of life so so back to back to the issue of fear being Abraham is self-conscious that's what this commentary says but the thing is as he moves forward despite that he's self-conscious and he knows the danger but he moves forward despite that and that's actually the appropriate response in the face of actual non naive understanding of what constitutes life like if you're naive and you move forward it's like well what the hell do you know you know there's no courage in naivety because you don't know what there is to stop you you don't know what dangers you might apprehend but to be aware of what it is that your problem is so to be alert existentially let's say or to be fully self conscious means that you're perfectly aware of your limitations and how you might be hurt and then to make the decision to move forward into the unknown and the land of the stranger anyways that's the I would say that's one of the secrets to a good life and I can say that really without fear of contradiction I would I would say because the clinical literature on this is very very very clear what you do with people who are afraid and to some degree depressed but certainly anxious is you lay out what what they're anxious about first of all in in detail what is it that you're afraid of what might happen and then you decompose it into small problems hypothetically manageable problems and then you have the person expose themselves to this thing that they're afraid of and what happens isn't that they get less afraid that isn't what the clinical literature indicates exactly what happens instead is they get braver and that's not the same thing right cuz if you get less afraid it's like well the world isn't just dangerous as I thought it was you know silly me if you get braver that's not what happens what happens is the other world am world's just as dangerous as I thought or maybe it's even more dangerous than I thought but it turns out that there's something in me that responds to taking that on as a voluntary challenge and grows and thrives as a consequence and there's no doubt about this even the psychophysiological findings are quite clear if you if you can if you impose a stressor on two groups of people and on one group the stressor is imposed involuntarily and on the other group the stressor is picked up voluntarily the people who pick up the stress or voluntary voluntarily use a whole different psychophysiological system to deal with it they use the system that's associated with approach and challenge and not the system that's associated with defensive aggression and withdrawal and the system that is associated with challenges much more associated with positive and much less associated with negative emotion it's also much less hard on you because the the defensive posturing system the prey animal system man when that thing kicks in it's all systems are go for you you know you're the gas is pushed down to the are the pedals pushed down to the metal and the brakes are on you're using future resources that you could be storing for future time right now in the present to ready yourself for emergency so there's there's there's nothing simple or trivial at all about the idea of being called to move forthrightly forward into the strange and the unknown and there's a real adventure that's associated with that right so that's an exciting thing which is part of the reason why people travel and then also to see yourself as the sort of creature that can do that is willing to do that on a habitual basis is also the right kind of tonic for I hate this word for your self-esteem you know because the self-esteem has nothing to do with feeling good about yourself as I already mentioned there isn't necessarily reason why a priori you should just feel good about yourself but if you can view yourself acting in a courageous and forthright manner and encountering the world and trying to improve your lot and and and taking risks you know in a non naive way well then you have something that you can comfort yourself with at night when you're wondering what the whole damn point of is of your futile and miserable life and so and that's necessary because it's often the case that you wake up at 4:00 in the morning or at least sometimes the case that you wake up at 4:00 in the morning when things haven't been going that well and wonder just what the hell the point is of your futile and miserable life you have to have something real to set against that it can't be just rationalizations about how you know you're a valuable person among others even though that's true that's not good enough you need something that's more realistic to set it against that an observing courage in yourself is definitely one of the things that that that can help you sleep soundly at night when when things are destabilized a little bit around you so back to the covenant God tells Abraham me make my covenant between me and D and will multiply the exceedingly and Abram fell on his face and God talked with him saying as me behold my covenant my contract is with thee and thou shalt be a father of many nations neither shall thy name anymore be called Abram but thy name shall be called Abraham for a father of many nations have I made thee an abram means High father and Abraham father of a multitude and I'll make thee exceedingly fruitful and I will make nations of thee and Kings shall come out of thee and I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee and I will give unto thee and thy seed after thee the land wherein thou art a stranger all the land of canaan for an everlasting possession and I will be their God I love that line really the line about the land where you are a stranger you know and everything that happens in the Bible almost everything that happens in these more archaic stories in particular is laid out geographically the metaphor is Geographic so you move to a land that you haven't yet occupied maybe that's full of strangers and then the land is what's granted to you but it's perfectly reasonable to think about this from the perspective from a more abstract perspective it's much more relevant to modern people with our incredibly complex societies you know it's definitely the case that if you go into the land of the stranger which is exactly what you do when you try out any new endeavor right when you start a new job or when you start a new educational enterprise or when you start a new relationship doesn't matter you're out there in unexplored territory like the physical geography is the same but we don't live in in the physics in the spatial world only we live in the temporal spatial world and what that means is that the same place can be different at a different time and maybe it can be completely different and so if you're in your house but you have a new person in your house while your house is new for all intents and purpose because the territory surrounding that new person is the territory of the foreigner essentially and the same thing happens to you when you start a new job and you'll find that when you start a new job especially if you stretched yourself a little bit beyond your zone of comfort that you very much feel like an imposter right when you're first there and then the question is well how do you master that and the answer to that seems to be well it seems fairly straightforward if the place that you're in has any degree of possibility if it isn't inhabited by demons so to speak the best way to act is to lift your aim upward an attempt to get your act together and to tell the truth and to live a meaningful life and to do difficult things all of that and that is the best way of mastering a new territory and you know I all probability the degree to which you're able to act that out is precisely proportionate to the degree to which you're going to become a master in that territory and not sort of thinking having a lot faster than people think you know it's it's really quite remarkable how fast you can move forward if you can establish yourself somewhere and prove yourself useful assuming that you're around people to whom proving yourself useful actually matters like I know perfectly well that you can end up in an employment situation where you're punished for your virtues right in which case you should just get the hell out of there and really really you get out of there and you go find somewhere where if you work hard and do what you're supposed to do you're actually going to be rewarded right because that's not a workplace that's hell and you should just leave there so and God said unto Abraham thou shalt keep my covenant therefore thou and thy seed after thee in their generations this is my covenant which he shall keep between me and you and thy seed after thee every man child among you shall be circumcised that's a mystery they're like why that particular right what's dramatic I mean it certainly it certainly affects a man where he's most concerned to be affected there's something like that and so it's it's a sacrifice that has a certain I would say a certain degree of unforgettable 'ti that would be the first thing and a certain degree of pain and threat that goes along with it so it's not nothing that's the thing now you can argue and I think there is an argument a case to be made about whether or not in the modern world circumcision is a reasonable is something reasonable to inflict on infants I don't want to have that conversation at all but I don't think that's relevant to this particular issue because we're talking about something different we're talking about humanity's attempt to reconcile themselves to the fact that something has to be given up in order something else to happen and to try to really work through that idea and to make it into a psychological reality and so far what we've seen in the biblical stories is that when you make a sacrifice it's not really something personal or psychological right it's something external and dramatic you give up something that you own you don't give up something that you are or that's part of you and it's actually more of a sacrifice to give up something that's a part of you or something that you are than to give up something that you own I mean it's a subtle distinction between because in some sense the distinction between what you own and what you are is subtle right I mean it's not overwhelmingly subtle but but people identify with their possessions and they need to because otherwise they wouldn't care for them and they need their possessions in order to live so their possessions are in some sense integral to them but this transformation here of an act that was external and associated essentially with possessions to something that was actually at least part of the body brings it much closer to it brings it much closer to the to the to the individual as a psychological reality it's something like that and you shall circumscribe is circumcised the flesh of your foreskin and it shall be a token of the Covenant betwixt me and you it's also a permanent marker you know and I've read a fair bit about practices like tattooing and body scarification you know which is those are very very common practices right they're human universals actually no matter where you go around the world you mean you see a couple of things first of all almost without exception people wear clothing and sometimes it's relatively minimal clothing but but it's and often it's more decorative than protective but it's almost inevitably clothing and the other thing that you see is that people do scarify and tattoo themselves and they do that in some manner to catalyze their identity right they're trying to transform themselves from a generic person in some sense to a person that's been designed by their own hand it's something like that they're it's a marker of developing identity and some of it seems to be catalyzed with pain you know that modern people who tattoo and I'm not saying that I'm in favor of tattooing because actually I'm not but that but that my own particular bias and if you have a tattoo that's fine with me I'm also not saying that there's anything wrong with it but one of the things you do see what we the people who have it to tattoo do report is a couple of things is that the pain is actually necessary and that the pain is actually something that seems to establish something like a memory so well it's a memory because of the pain because you plenty well remember things that hurt but it's also a memory because it's actually etched on you right it's not something that you can just abandon and forget and so a circumcision is exactly the same thing it's like you don't forget it because it's part of you and so it makes a good token for a covenant and so that seems to be the rationale here from from speaking from a psychological perspective it's to indicate as well that the the damn thing that's happening is serious and I think also that was the case with the earlier sacrifices of animals it's like modern people don't do this like you don't know how serious you would take a vow if you sacrificed a goat in your backyard you know it's actually a very dramatic thing to do you know you think about it as primitive and perhaps it is archaic and and and no doubt it is but it's also to take the life of something and to spill its blood that's no joke that's something you remember especially if you haven't done it before and we actually don't know what we would need to do in order to take some things seriously you know because we all do things like make new year's resolutions about how we're going to be better people and we don't do it and the reason for that at least in part is because we don't know how to make the sacrifice sufficiently bloody let's say so that we remember that it's necessary right we don't take it with seriousness we don't think I should quit smoking because I'm going to die and we don't think through what that means like coughing your lungs out for three months in a hotel bed well your entire family is like a half repulsed and horrified and sorrow stricken at the fact that this has happened far too early you know we won't make that real enough to make it serious and serious and without that seriousness we won't do it so there's something to be said for rituals of seriousness and I think this is one of them and he that is eight days shall be circumcised among you every man child in your generations he that is born in the house or bought with money of any stranger which is not a dice seed this is from Charles John Ellicott who was bishop of Gloucester the fitness of circumcision to be a sign of entering into a covenant and especially into one to which children were to be admitted consisted in its being a representation of a new birth by putting off the old man and the dedication of the new man unto holiness it's like a baptism that's right that's that's what's that's what's echoed there and of course baptism is returned to the pre cosmogonic chaos because that's what the water indicates and return to this source of life and and then the renewal that comes along with it so it's the it's it's it's a sacrificial idea in some sense that if there is to be a new you that the old you has to dissolve has to return to the solution from which it emerged initially and to reconstitute itself and so there's an echo of that idea here the flesh was cast away that the spirit might grow strong and the change of name and Abram and Sarai was typical of this change of condition they had been born again and so must again be named and though women could need be admitted directly into the could not indeed be admitted directly into the Covenant yet they shared in its privileges by virtue of their constant annuity to the men who were as sponsors for them and that Sarai changes her name equally with her husband well you could make a case and and anthropological observers have made this case to that women undergo a sufficiently a set of sufficiently radical psychophysiological transformations merely as a consequence of being part being feminine in nature such that the additional rituals of transformation that might be necessary for men aren't necessary and one of those might be menstruation because that's a pretty dramatic transformation and there has been some indication that circumcision is like a male it's like the male equivalent of menstruation something like that because of the blood that's involved and because of the locale and then of course the same thing is the case with women when they give birth because that's a particularly dramatic thing as I just witnessed because my daughter just had a baby this week so thank God for that [Applause] recent investigation this is from the Cambridge Bible for school and colleges which if you want to read it is only 58 volumes recent investigation is not tended to support the theory that circumcision has any connection with primitive child sacrifice nor again that it took its origin from hygienic motives apparently it represents the dedication of the manhood of the people to God in the history of Israel it has survived as the symbol of the people belonging to Jehovah through his special election this corporeal sacrament remained to the Israelite when when every other tie of religion or race had been severed the other thing that that I read about in relationship to this idea of the multi-generational covenant had something to do because God told Abraham to include all of the people of his household into this covenant and and that that that really meant that he was establishing it a territory of ethics around them like the ark except the psychological equivalent of the ark right so it was it was a spiritual or psychological or ethical territory that everyone who was of that household was required to occupy or obliged or perhaps privileged to occupy and there was also an injunction to Abraham with regards to his children which was that as he had established a covenant with God which we could say is something like his decision to to aim as high as possible and to live properly as a consequence it's more than that but it's something like that that he also was under the supreme moral obligation to share that with his with the other men in his family especially as children and so and so I think there's also a call here to adopting a sacred the sacred responsibility in relationship to children that has to do with ensuring that they understand how to take their place in the world and I think that that's definitely something very much worth considering especially given the emphasis in the Noah's story in the story of Noah that Noah had his that his generations were perfect right as I said before it wasn't merely that he had walked with God that he had perfected his own relationship with the divine let's say with the transcendent and I want to make that concrete which is a strange thing to do with the transcendent I mean people ask me all the time about what I believe and of course that's what I'm trying to explain while I'm talking but but but and and many people of course are skeptical about the idea of anything transcendent and and and say transcendent and eternal but that can also be addressed from a psychological perspective because I would say well if you have an ideal of any sort how is that not transcendent it transcends you that's the first thing and it doesn't exist in reality it exists in a place of possibility and believe me man we treat places of possibility as if they're real because people will call on you you know about your possibility in your potential they'll say to you you're not manifesting your full potential and you might say well what do you mean by that potential it doesn't exist it isn't here now you can't measure it or weigh it you can't get a grip on it and they'll say don't rationalize you know perfectly well what I mean when I'm talking about your potential and so we could and you do and everyone does and everyone knows exactly what that means and so that's a metaphysical reality that will immediately accept as real and also castigate ourselves for not fulfilling and others to like because you're just not happy when the people around you especially if you love them don't fulfill their potential you really feel that something has gone wrong and so there's a transcendent reality and potential and then when you hypothesize an ideal that you might pursue which you always do if you pursue anything right because to pursue something means you don't already have it you're pursuing something that doesn't exist you're probably not pursuing something that's worse than what you already have because why the hell would you sooo it right that's completely counterproductive so in in the mere fact of your pursuit you you pause it a transcendent reality that you can that you can that you can journey towards that's more valuable than the reality that you have now that's predicated in some sense on something like an eternal Verity or an eternal truth it partakes in the ideal and so we have an relationship with the transcendent and you might say well that doesn't mean you have to personify the transcendent say as Jehovah you know the God the Father but there's also some damn good reasons for doing that because one of the things that I've realized thinking through this covenant idea and also the sacrifice idea is that the idea that the future is a judgmental father is a really really good idea you know because you think about what the future is in part I mean the future is however the natural world is going to lay itself out over the next endless amount of time that isn't what I mean I think more about your future now mostly your future is the future that you're going to negotiate with other people but they're going to be other people in the future and some of those people are going to be you in the future and family members in the future and so what's happening right now is that if you make the sacrifices properly then you're actually pleasing that future set of people and that future set of people is definitely going to serve as a judge that's exactly what it does that's precisely what it does and so you might say well it was the brilliant imagination of mankind that hypothesized that the best way to think about the social group including the family but also including you as your future self was to consider that you live in relationship with a future father who's a judge it's like yes that's exactly right now is it right right or is it psychologically right well it's at least psychologically right and you know one of the things I've learned about the biblical stories is that to say that they're psychologically right doesn't exhaust the ways in which they're right but it at least gives rational modern people who are skeptical properly so a better way of getting a grip on them so and the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised that soul shall be cut off from his people he had broken my covenant so it's a serious contractual relationship now I was thinking about how to understand this and I remembered this old story which I'm going to read to you about a monkey so there's an old impossibly apocryphal story about how to catch a monkey that illustrates this set of ideas very well first so goes the story you have to find a large narrow neck jar just barely wide enough in diameter for a monkey to put his hand inside and then you have to fill the jar up with rocks so that it's too heavy for the monkey to carry away and then you scatter some treats around the jar that are attractive to monkeys and close to the jar and then you put a few of those treats inside the jar and so that's the first part of the trick and then the second part of the trick is the monkey comes along and gathers up the treats and then puts his hand in the jar and grabs the treats that are in there but it's narrow necked and so once the monkey puts his hand in there and grabs the goodies then he can't get his hand out of the damn jar and so then you can just come along and pick up the monkey and like too bad for the monkey rights like he shouldn't let go of what he had so that something terrible didn't happen to him but that isn't what the monkey will do because he can't sacrifice the part for the hole and there's something about the circumcision story that's about that it's about sacrificing the part to save the whole and I mean there's an echo of that in the New Testament if I remember correctly I believe it's I believe this is correct although it might not be where Christ tells his disciples to pluck out their eye if it offends them seems like a very dramatic you know piece of advice but it's it's partaking of the same idea which is that now if there's something holding you back we'll see this when we get to the story of law - if there's something holding you back even if it's beer to you you have to let it go you seriously have to let it go because there isn't anything more important than progressing forward and cheap sympathy cheap empathy cheap nostalgia none of that is sufficient none of that will work because the consequences of not putting things together immediately are dire and there's no time to wait and God said unto Abraham as for Sarai thy wife thou shalt not call her name Sarai but Sarah shall be her name my princess that was suraíh Sarah is mother of Nations and I will bless her and give thee a son also of her yea I will bless her she will be a mother of Nations kings of people shall be of her then a hebrew ham fell on his face and laughed and said in his heart shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old he's got a lot of doll I would say I mean there's God talking to him any laughs you know but that's okay that's he's a courageous guy and that's what people are like and and shall Sarah that is 90 years old bear and Abraham said unto God oh that Ishmael might live before thee and God said Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed and thou shalt call his name Isaac and I will establish my covenant with him for an everlasting covenant and with his seed after him and as for Ishmael I've heard thee behold I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and will multiply him exceedingly 12 Prince's shall he beget and I will make him a great nation now what does this mean this is this is a miraculous story in some sense right because well Sarah it's what the Isaac want or what Abraham wants most is to have a son but it looks like it's pretty much impossible and I I think what the story is attempting to indicate is something like god only knows what will happen to you if you put your house in order certainly things that you do not currently regard as possible will happen and the more you put your house in order the more things that you regard as impossible will happen and it might be the case that if you put your host together sufficiently things that were of miraculous impossibility would happen to you well and there's no way of knowing until you try it but there's no way of being sure that it's not the case unless you do and my experience has been that I don't mean just personally I mean that the world is a remarkable and mysterious place and the relationship between the nature and structure of the world and your actions is indeterminate they may be more tightly related than you think and I don't know how to square that with the fact that well you're obviously in a mortal body and constrained by all sorts of serious constraints and none of that none of that can be trivially overcome and I don't really understand how there can be that seriousness of mortal constraint and the infinite potential that also seems to characterize human beings all at the same time but then I don't really understand anything about the nature of reality so that's just one more mystery to add to the pile so but my covenant I will establish his Isaac which share a Sarah shall bear unto thee at the set time next year and he left off talking with him and God went up from Abraham and Abraham took Ishmael his son and all that were born in this house and all that were bought with his money every male among the men of Abraham's house and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in the selfsame as God had said unto him that must have been an interesting conversation that's I mean really this is what God told you to do it like okay and Abraham was ninety years old and nine when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin and Ishmael was thirteen years old when he was circumcised in the cell same day was Abraham circumcised and his son and all the men of his house ORN in the house and bought with money of the stranger were circumcised with him all right so that's the renewal of the Covenant that's the next part of the story that's the circumcision that's the circumcision story and as I said it seems to indicate to me something about seriousness of intent something about the responsibility that Abraham determines to take for everyone that's part of his household the psychological increasing psychological transformation of the idea of sacrifice the necessity of doing something memorable and the the what would you call it the end the utility of rekindling the aims of your highest values when you come to the end of an epoch in your life when you have to take stock again right you take stock of yourself that's really what that phrase means to take stock is to take stock of yourself and to decide ok well what should move forward in time with me and what should be let go as if it's Deadwood and the more Deadwood that you let go of and burn off when you have the opportunity the less it accretes around you here's something interesting about forest fires you know people have been trying to prevent forest fires for a long time especially that damn bear smokey right he's trying to prevent forest fires and so because forest fires burn up the forest and that can't be good but here's what happens if you don't let forest fires burn is that well forests collect a lot of dry branches right because tree branches guy and wood falls on the forest floor and collects and so the amount of flammable material keeps increasing with time and that's not so bad if it's wet but if the amount of flammable material is increasing and it gets really dry and then it burns then you have a real problem the forest fire can burn so hot that it burns root does pop soil right off in which case you don't have a forest at all anymore you just have a desert and lots of trees are evolved to withstand forest fires of a certain intensity and some won't even release their seeds unless there's been a fire and so a little bit of fire at the right time can stop everything from burning to the ground and that's also a really useful insight a metaphorical insight into the nature of sacrifice right it's also a lot easier to let go of something when you're deciding to let go of it because you've decided yourself that it's you're done with that it's a weak part of you it needs to disappear you do that yourself it's much better and much easier than it is if it's taken away from you forcibly in which case you're very much likely to fight it these other there's another interesting thing here a motif that runs the entire Bible it's a very very powerful motif and it's partly associated with this idea of walking with or walking before God and you know in the New Testament Christ says something like thy father's will be done and he means that that will should be done through him and so I can't I won't build a state that's exactly right but it's something like this you know a lot of what people regard as their own personalities and and are proud of about their own personalities aren't their own personalities at all they're useless idiosyncrasies that differ them differentiate them trivially from other people but they have no value in and of themselves they're more like quirks I remember once I was trying to teach a particularly stubborn student about how to write and she had written a number of essays in in University and got universally walloped for them and the reason for that was she couldn't write really at all she was really really bad at writing and so I was sitting down with her trying to explain to her what she was doing wrong and she was being very annoying about it very recalcitrant very very unwilling to listen that was a pearls before swine thing you know and at one point she said it I can write perfectly well this university professors just don't like my style and I could see all my hands creep towards her neck yeah well then I'd be funny if it wasn't true but was also true you know and I thought what the hell's with you you can't even write and you think you have a style and normally do you think ya know not knowing how to write is not a style that's the other point right and so you know she she instead of humbling herself which was necessary and okay right cuz she was a new University students like of course you don't know how to write when were you gonna learn in school I don't think so so she had this you know this this this style issue and it it just it just didn't go anywhere at all and so now let's see I lost my train of thought and telling you tell me all those jokes oh yes in terms of above letting things burn off yeah well so she was proud of her insufficiency that's arrogance right that's not humility it's self-deception and arrogance to be proud of your insufficiency that's a very foolish thing and that means to cling to the parts of you that are dead okay now there's this idea that runs through the Bible I think as a whole that okay I'll tell you another little side story here I was reading about Socrates today and I was reading about Socrates trial you know he was tried by the Athenians for corrupting for failing to worship the correct gods and corrupting the youth of Athens by like teaching them stuff and asking them questions you know which is great way to corrupt people and so he knew the trial was coming and Athens wasn't a very big place only on about 25,000 people everybody knew everybody everybody knew who the powerful guys were and everybody including Socrates knew that the trial was a warning do you like get out of town right we're going to put you on trial in six months and the potential penalty is best got that it's like so so Socrates had a chat with his compatriots and they were contemplating fair means and foul to set up a defense for him so that he could or to leave so that he could not be tried and put to death and he decided that he wasn't going to do that and he also decided that he wasn't going to even think about his defense and he said why this is quite an interesting thing he said why he told one of his friends that he had this voice in his head a daemon a spirit something like that that he always listened to and that that was one of the reasons he was different from other people because he always listened to this thing it didn't tell him what to do but it told him what not to do it always told him what not to do and if it told him not to do something then he didn't do it if he was speaking and the little voice came up and said no then he shut up and he tried to say something else and he was very emphatic about this and he said that when he tried to plan to evade the trial or even to mount his own defence the voice came up and said no don't bother with it and he thought well what would he what the hell do you mean by that like there's a trial coming and I'm going to be put to death and well he eventually concluded that he was an old guy you know the next 10 years he was in his 70s perhaps the next 10 years weren't going to be that great for him he got a chance maybe the gods were giving him a chance just to bow out you know to put his affairs in order to say goodbye to everyone to avoid that last descent into catastrophe which might have been particularly painful for a philosopher and to and to walk off the world on his own terms something like that the point I'm making with that is that Socrates attended to this internal voice that at least told him what not to do and then he didn't do it and of course Socrates was a very remarkable man and we still hear about him today and we know that he existed and all of those things and so back to the back to the walking with God idea you know as you elevate your aim you create a judge at the same time right because the new ideal which is an ideal you even if it's just an ideal position that you might occupy even if it's still conceptualized in that concrete way that becomes a judge because it's above you right and then you're you're terrified of it maybe why you might be afraid when you go start a new job right because your this thing is above you and you're terrified of it and it judges you and that's useful because that's the judge that you're creating by formulating the idea tells you what's useless about yourself and then you can dispense with it and you want to keep doing that and then every time you make a judge that's more elevated then there's more useless you that has to be dispensed with and then if you recreate an ultimate judge which is what the archetypal imagination of humankind has done say with the figure of Christ because if Christ is nothing else he is at least the archetypal perfect man and therefore the judge you have a judge that says get rid of everything about yourself that isn't perfect of course that's also what Abraham that's also what God tells Abraham right he says to be perfect to pick an ideal that's high enough and you can do this the thing that's interesting about this I think is you can do it more or less on your own terms you have to have some collaboration from other people but you don't have to pick an external ideal you can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you you can say okay well if things could be set up for me the way I need them to be and if I could be who I needed to be what would that look like and you can figure that out for yourself and then instantly you have a judge and I also think that's part of the reason people don't do it right why don't why don't people look up and move ahead an answer is well you know you start formulating an ideal you formulate a judge it's pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal that's what happens to Kane vs Abel for example then it's really easy to destroy the ideal instead of to try to pursue it because then you get rid of the judge but it's way better lower the damn judge if it's too much like if your current ambition is crushing you you know then maybe you're playing the tyrant to yourself and you should cap down your ambitions not get rid of them by any stretch of the imagination but at least put them more reasonably within your grasp you don't have to leap from point one to point 50 and one leap right you can do it incrementally but I really like this idea I think it's a profound idea that the process of recapitulating yourself continually is also the process of it's a phoenix-like process right you're shedding and all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you're that you're valuing and then I would say the idea here is that as you do that you shape yourself ever more precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life and that can act as a as a beacon to the world that's the right way of thinking about it maybe first to your friends and then to your family it's like it's a hell of a fine ambition and there's no reason that it can't happen you know every one of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis and people that you admire right those are all you can think of all those people as you admire that you admire us partial incarnations of the archetypal Messiah that's exactly right and the more that that manifests itself at any given person then the more generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations and we don't know the limit to that but people can be unbelievably good for things you know it's really something to behold so that's what God tells Abraham okay so the next story is about Abraham and these angels Ames will show up on his doorstep and this is part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah but I don't think as I said this story is generally read as if it's about homosexuality but I don't think it is here I think it's about two things primarily one is how do you treat the strange so the strangest strange things and strange ideas and strange people and strangers right it's all about it it's that which is not you it's like the strange lands that God asked Abraham to move out into how do you interact with this strange and here here's one possible rule because you could say to yourself well what what do I want to make friends with more where do I want to be more comfortable do I want to be more comfortable with that which I already know and so that would be the circumscribed territory that you've already mastered or do I want to be comfortable with all those things I don't know and then the right answer is that you should want to be comfortable with all those things that you don't know because there is a bloody lot of things that you don't know and if you can be a Sojourner among what you don't know well then you're so protected because well you're going to go lots of places where you don't know and you're going to be able to manage it so you want to be you want to be that person that can act where they don't know and so also what happens with with Abraham well he's at home and these angels show up now we don't know whether they're angels or men precisely because well as this part of the story reads as the Lord appeared to him in the plains of Mamre and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day so he's not a visionary state by the by all appearances and he lifted up his eyes and looked and lo three men stood by him there's real ambivalence in the story about the men are the three men are the three angels are the two angels in God it's all mixed up in the story so we won't clarify that we'll leave it ambiguous and I think the ambiguity is important because you don't know who the stranger is when you encounter them and it depends on whether you're thinking about it in the normative manner or if you're thinking about it in the transcendent manner because with each person that you meet well they're just a person that's one way of thinking about it and and then they're the person that you know or they're the person as they choose to reveal themselves to you and people keep themselves shielded but then they're also something of great metaphysical potential right and you might say well do you believe that and I would say well yes you believe it because you expect a lot from people generally speaking and are not happy if they betray you but more importantly our entire culture is predicated on the idea that each person has an indefinite intrinsic worth and I'm not talking about self-esteem I'm talking about something like the what would what would you say it the implicit presupposition in our legal structure that no matter who you are even if you're a murderer even if you're a condemned murderer that there's something about you that's of transcendent value that has to be respected by the law by the law and by other people right and so that's that's a remark net and you might say well do I believe that and answer that is well yak it out because you follow the law and it's not an easy thing to pull out of the law it's kind of the idea that you have intrinsic natural rights and you don't pull that out of our law man without having the whole thing fall down and I think the whole idea that you have intrinsic natural rights is predicated on something like the biblical hypothesis that human beings have a logos nature and that we are involved in the speaking forth of being and as beings who are involved in this speaking forth of being there's something about us that has to be respected by ourselves in relationship to ourselves by ourselves in relationship to other people but even more strangely by ourselves in relationship to even to criminals even to vicious criminals you can't remove that transcendent element and that's that to me that's also a mirror a miracle of conceptualization because who the hell is going to think that up right even the most vicious of murderers has a touch of the transcendent that needs to be respected of all the ideas that are unlikely that's going to top the list and of course without that you you have a very barbaric legal system right because no one is protected as soon as you make a mistake then you're in the Damned then you have no rights whatsoever and that isn't what happens in the West which isn't an absolutely amazing thing so anyways Abraham is a master of the stranger that's one way of thinking about it he knows what to do when strangers come along and he opens his he opens himself up to them and I would say he does that we know he's not a naive guy Abraham right he's no weakling a couple of stories ago he took a big army and you know went and harassed a bunch of Kings and took his nephew back he's he's a tough guy and so if strangers show up and he welcomes them it's not because he couldn't do otherwise he could certainly do otherwise and it's not because he isn't aware of what people can be like he's perfectly aware of what people can be like but he determines to take a particular attitude towards them and that is to welcome them and so and why would you do that and I think the answer to that is you hold out your hand entrust to someone and you evoke the best from them if that's their to be given so it's an act of courage it's like it's it isn't me meeting you exactly not exactly it's more like the transcendent part of me making a gesture that allows the transcendent part of you to step forward and that happens all the time it happens all the time in normative discourse you know this perfectly well because sometimes you can have a real casual conversation with someone that just goes nowhere right it's just shallow as can be or now and then you can actually make contact with someone right and you're both I would say enlightened and ennoble by the conversation and that's a de we would call that a deep conversation first for some reason because we made a deep connection whatever that means it means well it certainly means that it's not shallow we're not sure about what these metaphor means but it means that it reaches deep inside of you it's something like that you make direct person-to-person contact and those sorts of conversations are replenishing that that's the right way to think about it they genuinely are and I think that's because they provide you with that bread that's not Material bread and that's the information that you need to to thrive and to put yourself together and so it does matter how you meet someone and it does matter how you treat them when you first meet them and it's amazing I've learned to do this at least in part partly because I'm a clinical psychologist I've learned how to talk to people very rapidly and I have the most amazing adventures with people in cabs and when I travel because I'll talk to them directly right away and they'll tell me the wildest stories and show me the craziest things because I'm actually interested in what they have to say and I'm not afraid well I'm somewhat afraid but I'm not I'm not sufficiently afraid to have that stop me and I'm acting on the presupposition that the person has something of great interest to reveal and that's a very useful thing to know too because one of the things that's really cool about people and you really learn this as the clinical psychologist is that if you can get people talking they're so damn interesting you can hardly stand it you know because they have these idiosyncratic experiences that are only theirs right they're only theirs personally no one else could tell the story and that's the kind of stories that you want to hear and when they tell you those stories you learn something you didn't know and so what that means is that you can treat the landscape of strangers as an endless vista of places to learn things you didn't know and if you know enough so that you're satisfied with your life and everything has ceased to be a tragedy around you well then you could be comfortable in your circumscribed domain of totalitarian knowledge let's say but if you're if your life is insufficient and you're suffering more than you want to and everything isn't what it should be then you need to look where you haven't looked for what you don't have and then you can look outside beyond you and then you can make friends with what you don't understand and that's a huge part of what this story is about because what happens is that Abraham welcomes the men God angels and treats them very well and reaps a tremendous benefit as a consequence and then well then the story reverses and we end up in Sodom and Gomorrah where the same angels sojourn and they're treated terribly and all hell breaks loose and so that's what the story is about it's not fundamental now there's a there's a sexual impropriety thing going on that I'm also going to delve into but I don't think that's the critical issue in the story the critical issue in the story is how do you act in the face of the stranger you know there's a statement in the New Testament Christ says something like when you when you do something to the least of people you do it to me him right and that's a very difficult statement to understand too but it's something like it's something reminiscent of the requirement to keep the idea of the transcendent reality of the person in mind at the same time you keep their proximal reality in mind to have to have your mind in two places at the same time when you're talking to people you know I learned from a friend of mine in Montreal who is very socially sophisticated in some ways whenever went in whenever he went in to us always like going shopping with him and whenever he went into a store and he talked and he had an interaction with a clerk the first thing he would do is have an interaction with the clerk and he wouldn't have an interaction with the role of the clerk he'd like look at the person sort of take stock of the fact that they were there and then asked them something genuine about their job or their store how they were doing like going to a conversation right away and he didn't get personal about it because that can be intrusive right you have to be very sophisticated to do this but he did indicate to the person that he was there at least in part for the good that could be done between them it's something like that and then the person would be ridiculously helpful you know and and so then you know if people mistreat you you see this with antisocial kids it's a very tragic thing to see because if you're an antisocial child by the time you're about 4 you're very hostile and distrustful to people and so you'd like a growling puppy and if you're a growling puppy you can not to get petted you're more likely to get kicked and if you're a growling puppy and you get kicked and you have even more reason to grow and that's sort of the story of antisocial kids if they're not well socialized by the time they're four and they're more on the aggressive side then they alienate themselves from the community and all they get is rejection well and then they look at the rejection and they think well to hell with humanity you know and you wonder they think that but but the part of the catastrophe is is that they get what they evoke and I'm not saying it's their fault precisely but it doesn't matter that's still what happens and so you might ask yourself if you're not getting from people what you need there is some possibility that you're not approaching especially if this happens to you repeatedly across people and this is a virtual certainty if it happens to you repeatedly across people especially if you have the same bad experience with people it's not them it's you I would say three is the limit if something happens to you once you write it off if it happens to you twice it's like you open your eyes but you write it off but it happens to you three times it's probably you or it's the rest of the world better it's you because you're not going to change the rest of the world and he lifted up his eyes and looked and lo three men stood by heaven when he saw them he ran to meet them from the tent door and bowed himself to the ground and said my lord if now I have found favor in thy sight pass not away I pray thee from thy servant let a little water I pray you be fetched and wash your feet wash your feet take the dust from your feet extract yourself out from your journey write and sit and I'll fetch a morsel of bread and comfort ye your hearts and after that you can pass on for therefore are you come to your servant and they said so do as thou hath said and Abraham hastened unto the tent into the tent unto Sarah and said make ready quickly three measures of fine meal knead it and make cakes upon the hearth powerful call to hospitality here and abraham ran unto the herd and fetched a calf tender and good and gave it to a young man and he hasted to dress it and he took butter and milk and the calf which he had dressed and said it before them and he stood by them under the tree and they did eat some commentary from here Hebrews 13 to be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares this is a commentary from Matthew Henry with a nonconformist minister and author cheerful and obliging manners in showing kindness are great ornaments to piety though our condescending lord vouchsafe has not personal visits to us yet still by his Spirit he stands at the door knocks when we're inclined to open he deigns to enter by his gracious consolations he provides a rich feast of which we partake with him this is from revelations 3:20 behold I stand at the door and knock and If any man hear my voice and opened the door I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with me well a hyperlink nature of those quotes is quite obvious there's 10 or 15 things being said at the same time right one is a reference to the idea that if you ask for something it will be given to you right it was a very strange idea but I like that idea a lot and I believe my in my experience that has been true if it was that I wanted what I was asking for because that's the real issue right because the question is if you want something what does it mean to want it and what it means is to sacrifice whatever is necessary to get it because otherwise you don't want it and so there's an equation here and I'm not claiming its ultimate accuracy but the equation is something like you don't want it unless you're willing to sacrifice for it and if you don't want it you're not going to get it because you're scattered but if you do want it and you make the proper sacrifices then god only knows what might happen and that's a see one of the things I really like about the existential philosophers is their emphasis on personal responsibility you know that many of them had an emphasis on the role that people had in shaping their own destiny the exists for the existentialists and I think this was a consequence of the religious substructure of philosophical thinking it was self-evident that life was tragic and bitter but and then fair enough but that isn't where it ended the the next issue was well there are better in ways better and worse ways of dealing with that and the better way of dealing with the fact that life is tragic and bitter is to pause it the self you could be and live authentically in relationship to that and then the next issue and something is something Kierkegaard talked about particularly when he talked about the necessity of being a night of faith is that the thing is and this is I think part of the light part of life that's the intractable adventure no one can take the adventure of life away from you that that's they can't deal with good advice for example because no one can demonstrate to you that if you straight yourself out a name it what you want and make the proper sacrifices that your life will turn out in the manner that you might want it to turn out it isn't in anyone else's purview to make that judgment the only person that can possibly figure that out is you it's something that can't be stolen from you I would say it's your destiny it's a destiny that cannot be stolen from you and you can forego it you can say well I'm not willing to put in the effort because what if I fail well first of all if you don't put in the effort you will fail because life is hard and it takes everything out of you to do it properly so you will fail and if you make the proper sacrifices you might fail that's why I like the ambiguity and the story of Cain and Abel because we're never really told why God rejects Cain's offerings there's hints that Cain maybe isn't doing as good a job as he should and he certainly gets bitter about it but there's no smoking pistol it doesn't say well Cain is a bad guy he made terrible sacrifices so God rejected him you never know Cain might have been working pretty damn hard and things still didn't work out for them and I think that ambiguity is appropriate in the story because that imbued ambiguity is in life it you'd be a fool to say that everything always works out for everyone if they just do things right I mean I think that's a very that's a very careless thing to say given how much tragedy and catastrophe there is in the world and how much of it seems to be undeserved but that still has very little bearing I think on on your own individual adventure and the necessity for the necessity for opening the door to who you could be and the necessity to do that seriously and I do believe and I think I think that's why this most impossible of verses you know knock and the door will open why that's believable is that I have never met anyone who couldn't hypothesize a better them in some manner all they had to do was ask it's like well how could you be better I think well here's three ways it's like it's no problem right you can think about that no time cloud maybe it's small ways but you can almost always at least think of something stupid that you're doing that you could quit and so that means that you do have this it's a strange thing in people that we have this built-in capacity to pause it a higher self and then to move towards it and maybe maybe that's part of where the religious instinct really came from speaking like really reductionistic ly like as a materialist as an evolutionary psychologist we we have this notion of the transcendent ideal right that it seems to be pervasive across cultures well maybe that's the ultimate manifestation of the human proclivity to be able to pause it an ideal at all and to move forward you pause an ideal okay that you need that to move forward well if you can pause it an ideal why can't you pause it the ultimate ideal well if you can then instantly you've got a religious sensibility instantly and so maybe that's the kind of puzzles like as a biologist what the hell is the basis of the religious instinct because the idea that it's mere superstition like we can just dispense with that that's wrong it's a human Universal you can evoke religious experiences all sorts of ways so we're not going to play that game there's there's some reason that that instinct exists and this the first thing to do with it is to try to reduce it to something that's biological and leave it at that not to mess with the metaphysics but it certainly could be the case that it's the ultimate extension of our capacity to posit an ideal and we also might say well that's good enough because well the ideal moves you forward it fills your life with meaning there's no doubt about that because it is in the movement towards your ideal that life's meaning is to be attained and then the question is well how much meaning is there in moving forward towards an ultimate ideal well more meaning even though it's more difficult how much well that's the open question behold I will stand at the door and knock and if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come in to him and will sup with him and he with me that's a pretty good deal and the angel said unto Him where is Sarah thy wife and Abraham said Behold in the tent and he said I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life and lo Sarah thy wife have a son and Sarah herded in the tent door which was behind him now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age and it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women therefore Sarah laughed within herself saying after I am waxed old shall I also have this pleasure my lord being old also well she's kind of skeptical about the whole angel man God having a child at a hundred thing and and and and well write and so rightly so and the Lord said unto Abraham why did Sarah laugh saying shall I've Asura T bear a child which I'm old is anything too hard for the Lord at the time appointed I will return unto thee according to the time of life and Sarah shall have a son then Sarah denied saying I laughed not for she was afraid and he said nay but thou didst laugh and the men rose up from thence and looked toward Sodom and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way I'm gonna make a small detour and talk to you about this idea of potential again because it's really I've really thought about it a lot I think music speaks of potential like I think music speaks of potential bursting forward it's something it's something like that and that's why it's so deeply meaningful and and it's this continual pattern revelation of the next wonderful thing that might happen it's something like that so there's that and people find that deeply meaningful and then there's the idea that we all have potential that isn't realized but that we regard that potential even though it's not realized as real which I can't get my head around at all it just doesn't make sense and then although everyone acts that way and everyone believes it because what you act reflects what you believe and you make judgments about yourself and others based on those beliefs and their deep judgments so the idea that you believe that there is such a thing as human potential I think I think it's undeniable if you act at all if you expect things of people at all then you're demonstrating your commitment to the idea of potential but then I wonder if there's something even deeper going on because we are very materialistic modern people and there's great power in that obviously I mean we've obtained great control over the material world for better or for worse but we do have a tendency to think of the world purely as a material structure and isn't really obvious to me that the world is exactly a material structure it seems to be to be something more like constrained potential you know because everything is a certain way but everything that is a certain way could be a multitude of other ways in almost an infinite multitude of other ways and the degree to which something that is could be a multitude of other ways is dependent a large part on how you interact with it right even with materials that we're very familiar with we continue to discover new properties and put them to use it's like things are things are compacted into their material form but that doesn't exhaust what they are especially not in relationship to other things and so it seems to me even if you can't replace the materialist perspective with the perspective that it's better to construe the world construe being as if it's made of possibility rather than the world as if it's made of matter it's at least useful to have that as an additional viewpoint is that because you could say well the material philosophy is very useful as a tool for obtaining certain sorts of benefits which it clearly is but then this more metaphysical perspective which i think is more accurate in some ways that the world is a place of potential is also an extraordinarily useful way to approach the world and and it's practically useful you know what we talked last week a little bit about doing something as simple as trying to organize a room it's it's by no means obvious how much potential there is in a room right there's a very large amount of potential in any given room tremendous amount of potential especially if it's connected with people I think maybe an inexhaustible amount of potential and maybe there's an inexhaustible amount of potential everywhere and we just don't know how to get access to it well that's certainly true and it's certainly true to some degree we don't know how to get access to all the potential of our children for example or ourselves or our loved ones or it or or the people that we know so well so I think the this story is trying to hammer that idea home to which is don't be so sure that it's impossible or maybe don't let the assumption that's it's impossible stop you from going forth into the world that would be and that's a that's a what would you say that's like an inoculation against nihilism and I'm for a long time I understood nihilism very well I could I could understand its rationale associated with the tragedy of life associating with suffering and evil associated with the observation of finitude and the arbitrary and unjust nature of the world but the more I thought about it the less I've come to believe that there's any excuse for it whatsoever and I think the reason for that is that it forced all the effort it four stalls the ability to discover for yourself maybe there's no reason to be so goddamn hopeless except that it's easier to be useless now on a not believe me I'm not making that case I'm not saying that that's what's besetting people who are clinically depressed for example that's that's not my point clinical depression is a terrible thing there's lots of reasons to be rendered to be to be tossed into a catastrophic condition that isn't what I mean I mean that kind of cynical arrogant rational hyper-intelligent nihilism that throws the world away as if it's of little use before it's been properly engaged with better to engage with it and see what happens and better to make the assumption that if the world isn't returning to you what it is that you need then either you're not doing it right or you've conceptualized what you need badly why not at least open yourself up to that possibility right because you could be wrong hopefully if you're suffering this is a great thing to know hopefully if you're suffering you wrong because if you're suffering and you're right then there's nowhere to go so it's very useful to find out whatever errors you might be committing another thing that's really interesting about the Jews in the Old Testament it's a remarkable thing every single time they get flattened by God it's always their fault they never say the world that God created was corrupt and God is evil they never say that no matter what happens right no matter what catastrophe occurs when they have every reason to at least put that hypothesis forward they don't they say we erred we walked off the path it's our fault and that's hard you know because it puts all the weight of human capacity on the human being that's very hard but the outside is it gives you the control it opens up the door that it opens up the possibility that you could be the person that could set it right if you would just let go of what's in your way whatever that is and the men rose up from thence and look towards Saul to man Abraham went with them to bring them on the way and the Lord said shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I'm about to do seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great mighty nation and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him I guess God is talking to himself here or maybe he's talking to the angels but I think he's trying to make a decision for I know him that he will command his children and his household after him and they shall keep the way of the Lord to do justice and judgment that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he has spoken of them and the Lord said because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great and because their sin is very Grievous I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it which has come to me and if not I will know well we don't know what's happened in Sodom and Gomorrah but we know that God's got wind of it and that that's not good and we know that sin means to miss the mark and so we know that whatever has happened in Sodom and Gomorrah means that something about the natural ethical order of things has been seriously violated and there's a strong intimation in the Old Testament which I think by the way is completely correct that if the proper order of being is violated and that's something like the balance between chaos and order say if the proper balance of being is violated then all hell will break loose and one of the things I can tell you from reading a very from reading a very comprehensive set of myths from around the world is that that's a conclusion that human beings have come to everywhere stay on the goddamn path and be careful because if you start to mess around and you deviate especially if you know that you're deviating things are not going to go well for you and that idea is everywhere and I think it's right I think the idea is right because there aren't that many ways of doing things right and there's a lot of ways of doing things wrong and if you do things wrong the consequences of doing them wrong can be truly catastrophic you know one of the things I learned from reading Viktor Frankl first but then Alexander Solzhenitsyn who I think did a deeper job was that and vaclav havel thought the same thing that these people were very much trying to understand what happened in places like Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union so schnitzel school like our Capello's caligo is a particularly good analysis of what happened in the Soviet Union and his conclusion and it's a 20 100 page conclusion and it's like hammered home with a hammer it's it's a book that everyone should read you know assuming that you can read a 20 100 page screen because that's basically what it is you know first of all what he does is document just how terrible things were in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 and no matter how terrible you think they were unless you know the stories they were a lot more terrible than that and they were terrible personally because everyone lied they were terrible in families because two out of five were government and farmers they were terrible among friends because no one could tell each other the truth they were terrible socially because the whole system was corrupted ban on slave labor and they were terrible philosophically because the doctrine of man upon which the state was founded was hopeless and nihilistic and and they were murderous destructive and genocidal it's like they got it wrong at every single level of analysis simultaneously and the question is why and Solzhenitsyn's answer and to some degree Victor Frankel's answer as well and vaclav havel and I would say also Nelson Mandela and Gandhi they all they all ended up in the same conceptual sphere and the answer was because individual people lived crooked lives because individual people swallowed lies and spoke them and didn't stand up for the truth and the corruption that spread from each individual pulled the entire state mechanism into that corruption and made everything into hell you know there are other theories obedience right that's kind of the Milgram idea from that it's easy to make human beings OBD obedient to people in authority and I've explored that idea quite a bit with regards to what happens happen for example in the Nazi concentration camps yes you can set circumstances up so that people are likely to be obedient to orders that are pathological there's no doubt about that and yes sometimes that's indicative of the weakness of their character but that's not the issue and the idea that what happened in Nazi Germany was because a population of good people listen to a tiny minority of bad people that's a really that's really not a good theory the the the Nazi ethos was there at every single level of the social organization right right from the personal right from the personal right from the familial all the way up to the leadership it was the same thing all the way up and all the way down and the same thing in the Soviet Union and so well so if you miss the which is apparently what the people of sodom and gomorrha did their sin was Grievous than they risk destruction and I just cannot see how after the 20th century anyone with any sense could possibly not see that as true and I think that there's a line in the Old Testament you know that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I can tell you one of the things that frightened me badly was the realization from reading Souls nets and and a variety of other things that I was reading at the same time that Dostoyevsky as well because he makes the same point he said that a human being is not only responsible for everything they do but for everything that everyone else does now you know that's crazy and he was an epileptic and a mystic and that's a crazy thing to say but it's also there's something about it that's true because if you were better the people around you would be less worse than they are and if you were good enough you don't know how much better the people around you would be and so there's this idea too you know that Christ took the sins of the world unto himself that's a complicated idea that I wrestled with that one for a very long time but I think I figured out at least in part what it means it meant that it's something like the realization of complete humanity you see to take the sins of the world unto yourself is to realize that is to understand the Nazi concentration camp guard because that person is human and so are you and so if you can't see you in that then you don't know who you are and if you can see you in that well then you've started to take the sins of the world onto yourself because you've actually started to take responsibility for those terrible things you know I think it's the motif of the the motto of the Holocaust Museum in Washington we must never forget that's close and I think well you can't forgive you can't remember what you don't understand you will forget what you don't understand and the question is what are you supposed to remember about the Holocaust historical event that six million people died that's not what's to remember what's to remember is that's what people can do and you're one of them and if you don't understand that you could do that then you don't know who you are so God's making a case here he's making a case that the people of the Sodom and Gomorrha have sinned and it's making a large racket that even God has heard about that's a very common mythological motif by the way that the sins and and and and what would you call it the sins and noise of humanity can read such a clamor that even the gods hearin and are forced to intervene that comes all the way from the Mesopotamian creation story so anyways it's logical yeah their sinning okay well so what well no not so what it means that God's offended and that everything is at risk that's what it means it's like that's a something worth taking seriously and the men turned their faces from thence and went towards Sodom but Abraham stood yet before the Lord and Abraham drew near and said will thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked this is a very interesting part of the story um friend of mine took me to task the other day when I was writing about portraying the Old Testament God is pretty harsh and judgmental and the New Testament God is sort of all loving which he isn't because there's the whole Book of Revelations thing but um but I got that partly from reading Northrop Frye but going through the Old Testament more detail I realized that that's that is too low resolution interpretation and that God who's dispensing a fair bit of harsh justice in the Old Testament it's also someone who can be negotiated with weirdly enough and that's what happens here you know Abraham has just been told that whatever's going on in Sodom and Gomorrah is seriously not good and that God's going to do something about it and he takes it upon himself this is an act of mercy to to ask God to be a bit more judicious right it's like okay you're gonna wipe out the city well bad things are happening there but you know there's probably a few people in the damn city that aren't completely corrupted by what's going on there of course that's an open question you know because it's an open question for example how many people were there were in Nazi Germany who weren't completely corrupted by what was going on in Nazi Germany and the same thing could be said about Mallis China and the same thing could be said about the Soviet Union it's like well perhaps there was a person somewhere who didn't and at some level what was happening but you know the whole issue of willful blindness certainly springs to mind if nothing else anyways Abraham decides to intercede with God on behalf of these people who are going to be destroyed he says will thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked perhaps there be 50 righteous people within the city will you also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are there that be far from thee to do after this manner he's kind of reminding God that he's a good guy as far as I can tell to slay the righteous with the wicked and that the righteous should be as the wicked thought before from thee should not the judge of the earth do right and the Lord said if I find in Sodom fifty right he seems a bit taken aback here to me if I find him Sodom 50 righteous within the city then I will spare the place for their sakes and Abraham answered and said behold now I have taken upon me to speak upon the Lord unto the Lord which but I am but dust in ashes possibly there shall lack five of the fifty righteous will thou destroy all the city for lack of five and he said he said God said if I find there forty five I will not destroy it and Abraham spoke unto him yet again and said he's kind of sneaking up on God here huh her adventure there shall be forty found there and he said I will not do it for forty sake and he said unto him oh let the Lord not be angry and I will speak possibly there shall be thirty found there and God said I won't do it if I find thirty there and Abraham he seems really to be pushing his luck by this point says behold I have taken upon me to speak under the Lord possibly there shall be twenty found there and God said I won't destroy it for 20s sake and he said oh let the Lord not be angry and I will speak yet but this once perhaps ten shall be found there and he said I will not destroy it for 10s sake and the Lord went his way and as soon as he had left communing with Abraham and Abraham returned unto his place well there's two ways you can read that part of the story one is that three let's say you can bargain with God even if you're kind of annoying about it so that's kind of interesting the second is that even if there's a minority of good in a place that isn't good it won't be slated for destruction that's kind of a good thing and the third is a minority of good in a place can keep it from being destroyed and that's a really good thing too and I believe that as well I think that good is more powerful than evil naivety isn't but I think that good is and I think that in a place that's corrupt a minority of people who stand forth against the corruption can prevail now you know I think I think one of the best examples of that again was all Alexander Solzhenitsyn because he was in the terrible work camps when he wrote his book he memorized most of it which is not an easy thing to do when it's 2,100 pages long and set in very tiny font he memorized most of it and then he wrote it and it was one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union you know was published in the 1970s first of all in wet in the West and the first thing that happened at least initially was that the communism as an ethical system lost absolutely all credibility whatsoever among anyone who was even vaguely educated immediately upon the publication of The Gulag Archipelago he pulled the moral slats out from underneath it and the book was definitely one of the reasons there were many but was definitely one of the reasons why the rotten system crumbled and fell without a war and that's a great example of how one person can take on a tyranny and prevail so and he's not the only person who did that sort of thing because well Gandhi did the same thing I mean I don't think the English were the Russians but you know things were not so good in India and what Gandhi did in India under the influence by the way of Leo Tolstoy was also a remarkable example of a single person intervening in a catastrophe and and and and setting it far more right than it could be so and there came two angels to sought him and evening and lot remember Lauda's Abraham's nephew sat in the gate of Sodom and laud seeing them rose up to meet them and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground and he said Behold my Lords I turn in I pray you into your servants house and tarry all night and wash your feet and ye shall rise up early and go on your ways no he's Abraham's nephew and can spend acting in exactly the manner that Abraham does he shows hospitality to these people and they said no no we'll stay in the street all night and he insisted he pressed upon them greatly and they turned in unto him and entered into his house and he made them a feast and baked unleavened bread and they did eat but before they lay down the men of the city even the men of Sodom compassed the house round both old and young all the people from every quarter and they called him to Lord and said unto him where the man which came into thee this night bring them out to us that we may know them well that's the part of the story that's been used as a diatribe let's say against homosexuality because to know is to engage in sexual intercourse and the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah we're willing to care the strangers out of Lots house and use and abuse them as they see self fit right and so what are they doing well they're violating the principle the principles that govern appropriate conduct with the stranger and maybe the stranger is something you shouldn't mess with because you don't know who you're messing with so that's like warning number one well they're violets are under violating the essential principles of hospitality and then there's the sexual thing here I think is isn't the sexual thing here is something more like the absolute danger of immediate gratification sexual included outside the constraints of any civilized structure whatsoever right because that's his uncivilized behavior as you could possibly hope for right strangers come into your city they're in the house of someone who's part of your city they're being shown hospitality a mob shows up and says four come over man we're going to do whatever the hell we want to them and it's not going to be good and if you get in the way things are going to go even worse for you so so that's what it seems to me to be it's completely dysregulated behavior its behavior that's outside the confines of any civilized structure whatsoever it's an indica it's an indication that the entire the social structure of the entire society has collapsed so that there's nothing left for the inhabitants to do except to engage in the most brutal of immediate gratification and destruction well so what does Lott do I pray thee brethren do not do so wickedly behold now I have two daughters which have not yet known man let me I pray you bring them out unto you and you do to them as is good in your eyes only unto these men do nothing and therefore for therefore came they the under the shadow of my roof well it's hard to know what to make of that you know I mean doesn't exactly seem like the advisable thing for a lot to do and but I think at least what it is is an indication of the degree to which he took the solemn vow of hospitality seriously and I think that's the idea that the story is trying to promote and the angel said stand back oh and the men said stand back and they said again this one fellow came in to sojourn to talk to us and he will need to be a judge now we'll deal worse with him than with them and they press sore upon the man even law and came near to break the door maybe what lot thought was something like well we're done like we're all done but this mob and perhaps I can spare some of us and they press sore upon the man even Lawton came near to break the door but the man this is the angels put forth their hand and pulled a lot into the house to them and shut the door and they smote the men that were out the door of the house with blindness both small and great so that they wearied themselves to find the door so they were so corrupt that they were blind and could not see now even to find the door and the man men said unto lot hast thou here any besides any family members son in law and thy sons and thy daughters and whoever thou hast in the city get them out of the place for we will destroy this place because of the cry of them is waxing great before the face of the Lord and the Lord has sent us to destroy it and lot went out and spake unto his sons in law which married his daughters and said up you get out of this place for the Lord will destroy the city but he seemed as one that marked unto his son and sons-in-law when in the morning arose than the angels hastened blood saying arise take thy way for ninety daughters which are here lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city and while he lingered lingered the man laid hold upon his hands and upon the hand of his wife and upon the hand of his two daughters the Lord being merciful unto them and they brought him forth and seven without the city so he still this is an indication of the danger of not acting with appropriate haste when the time has come I mean law it's already seen what happened he saw that the men came to his door he saw that they were murderous rapists he saw that the angels took them out and he still isn't to leave that place and so I guess one of the things that this story requires people to ask themselves is are you in a place that's so bad that you should leave or when are you in a place that's so bad that you should leave and if you are in a place that's so bad that you should leave then the time to leave is now because there's no time to waste and it came to pass when they had brought them forth abroad that he said escape for their life look not behind you neither stay thou in all the plain escape to the mountain lest thou be consumed and Lord said to them oh not not so my lord behold now they serve and have found grace in my sight and now have magnified thy mercy which thou has showed me into saving my life but I cannot escape to the mountain lest some evil take me and I die behold now there's a city near to flee unto and it's a little one which means maybe it's not big and corrupt like Sodom and Gomorrah oh let me escape thither is it is it not a little one and my soul shall live Matthew Henry said Lord linger he trifled thus many who are under convictions about the spiritual state and the necessity of a change defer that needful work and he said unto him see I've accepted the angel and he said unto him see I have accepted the concerning this thing also that I will not overthrow this city for the which thou has spoken the small City hasty escape thither for I cannot do anything to thou be gone hither therefore the name of the city was or that's where Lord went the Sun was risen upon the earth when Lord entered into Zoar then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven and he overthrew the cities and all the plain and all the inhabitants of the cities and that which grew up on the ground but his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt no nostalgia for catastrophe I think that's what that means is that when you leave what's not good you wash the dust off your feet and you don't look back and that's a very harsh lesson this is echoed a bit in the New Testament the idea of the necessity for immediate action these are some of the harsher words that Christ said this is from Matthew 8 Christ is addressing a multitude and asking people to follow him and a disciple comes up to him and says Lord suffer me first to go and bury my father seems like a perfectly reasonable request but jesus said unto him follow me and let the dead bury their dead this is from Matthew 12 well he had talked to the people behold his mother and his brethren stood without desiring to speak with him and one said to him behold thy mother and my brethren stand without desiring to speak with thee but jesus answered the one who was telling him and said who is my mother and who is my brothers for whosoever shall do the will of my father which is in heaven the same as my brother and sister and mother well what does all that mean it means that there's no excuses whatsoever for not getting up and getting at it that's what it means and it means that it even means that when people are beset with a catastrophe like let's say the death of their father that they are prone to use that as an excuse for not going about the business that they should be going about because they can say to themselves well I would accept and accept there's always good reasons I mean believe me there's always good reasons for not doing what you should that's for sure the reasons pile up day after day to not do what you should especially because you're you're aiming at things in the future you can put them off and definitely right because of the demands of the day but these stories they say a variety of things you know in especially in combination they say when you leave somewhere terrible do not look back there's no nostalgia that's that's the letting the dead parts of yourself go and then if you're going to follow the good there's no excuse not to do it and that it means no excuse whatsoever under any circumstances and then it's taken even farther with regards to familiar relationships it is you can't even let them stand in your way and I think that's all true and I think I've seen virtually all of that in my clinical practice like there's no excuse whatsoever for not getting at what it is that you should be doing and I think there's something else that's going on here especially in the New Testament stories which is even made may be worse which is it's absolutely reprehensible to justify you're in action with a catastrophe that extracts mercy from other people right there's a tricky tricky game that's going well of course I can't do that look at the terrible thing that's just happened to me it's yeah okay I understand you're absolved of any necessity to move forward because of your current catastrophe it's like well actually you're not and it's rather rude of you to use it as an excuse and it's certainly counterproductive and Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord and he looked towards Sodom and Gomorrah and toward the land of the plain and behold and lo the smoke of the country went up as a smoke of a furnace and it came to pass when God destroyed the cities of the plain that God remembered Abraham and sent lot out of the midst of the overthrow when he overthrew the cities in the which lot dwelt and lot went out of Zoar and dwelt in the mountain and his two daughters with them for he feeler feared to dwell and Zoar and he dwelt in a cave he and his two daughters and the firstborn said unto the younger our Father is all and there's not a man in the earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth come let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him that we may preserve the seed of our father and they made their father drink wine that night and the firstborn went in and lay with her father and he perceived not when she lay down nor when she arose and it came to pass on the morrow that the firstborn said unto the younger behold i lay yesternight with my father let us make him drink wine this night also and gold out in and lie with him that we may preserve seed of our father and they made their father drink wine that night also and the younger arose and lay with him perceived not when she lay down nor when she arose thus were both the daughters of log with child by their father well it's like the story you know the story is outlined the catastrophe of sodom and gomorrah essentially the ethical catastrophe of sodom and gomorrah the dissolution of the civilized constraints that should regulate all behavior and then the city is destroyed but there's an echo of it afterwards right because laud had lived in sodom and gomorrah and what happens to him even after his escapes is that he gets tangled into an incestuous web and so I think that that's a it's not foreshadow its post shadowing if there's such a thing it's an echo of what it's an echo and a reminder of how terrible whatever it was that was happening in Sodom and Gomorrah was that even after escaping the iniquity still remained well that's a pretty good place to stop we got through two of three stories so that's not too bad next week I'll talk about the sacrifice of Isaac and see if I can get into the next stories as well and next week is the last lecture except I talked to the theater people and it looks like I'll be able to rent the theater once a month at least for the next four months so I'm going to do that and I'll announce when I'm going to do that and I'll continue doing this probably as long as you'll continue to come and listen [Applause] [Music] I could tell you something cool that happened to if you want so some of you may know that there was a memo leaked at Google how many of you know about that Wow law to you so a colleague of the man who released the memo got ahold of me yesterday and said that the man who wrote the memo wanted to talk to me so I interviewed him today I made a YouTube video out of it we went over his memo which was scientifically accurate in my estimation and so I'm going to release that hopefully tonight so we'll see how that goes he got fired last night eh right he got fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes he told me today that his last performance review he had been given superb which is the top few percentiles of the employee distribution at Google right perpetuating gender stereotypes I went through his document I don't think he said a single thing that wasn't substantiated by a fairly dense scientific literature not to say that the scientific literature is necessarily a hundred percent correct because it never is but certainly to say that he was not merely spouting out misogynistic and ethnically biased opinion quite the contrary so we had a nice discussion about that today and hopefully the discussion will continue so all right questions hello well it's great I mean look a couple of things about that I mean my my daughter has had a catastrophic life in many ways a lot of things went wrong with her physically really bad things and this went perfectly so like thank God for that so then and then the other thing is I love kids you know now infants well you know it's not that I it's not infants are cool and interesting but I'm not sure exactly what to do with them you know but once they're about six months old and then from then on like I love having kids around so I'm thrilled about the fact that this has happened so hooray you know hooray so thanks for that so more as an aside but what you said about not pushing aside the things the day kind of made me think of Nikes motto just do it yeah I thought cool but um my question was that when you were talking about circumcision being a contractual relationship between sacrifice and compared it to a girl having a period that didn't make a lot of sense to me but also it seems to me that it being a sacrifice requires some form of willingness basically from the one have extreme precision they don't necessarily want to put forward what you did you said you specifically didn't want to address as two infants not having any choice in the matter but more in the context of it being a sacrifice how does that I think I think that's how a modern person would see it and I think that there's some I think there's some utility in that but but it's it's it's an incomplete incomplete to some degree you know because one of the things that happens with God neighbor ham is that God tells Abraham that he has to take care of his family his children now the question is exactly how do you take care of your children and the answer is sometimes you make decisions for them now you might say well be better if they could make the decisions for themselves and that's actually the case so you might say well I won't bring my kids to church because it'd be better if they could make the decision for themselves that's what I did with my kids you know but I'm not so sure that was a good idea and the reason I'm not so sure it was a good idea was because there are a bunch of things they didn't learn now the degree to which a parent should exercise control over his or her child is indeterminate but I guess the hope is that you exercise the minimum amount of control necessary to maximize the child's probability of success and that certainly requires adopting responsibility for making decisions as well because the child can't make decisions you know you can't just let the child lay there and make decisions right there's that's just not going to happen and so you might say well Abraham has no right to impose something like circumcision on his children and because it and the and because it's a sacrifice it's something that they should be doing themselves but the problem with that is that Abraham also has no right to abdicate his responsibility to his children in the name of some hypothetical mercifulness and those two things have to be balanced well just according to the story Abraham got the balance right because of course he's made this covenant with God now exactly what that means in people's day-to-day lives well that's a harder issue but I would say I think in the modern world people err on the side of I don't know I think they're more likely to err on the side of taking insufficient responsibility for their children letting them be free in ways that aren't productive that's how it looks to me often because they're afraid of their children so that's about the best I can do without dr. Peterson I was recently I've recently started reading maps of meaning and there was something in the introduction to that story that I found particularly the introduction that you wrote before you went and tell them that I found particularly compelling I guess the part when you're talking about the split that developed in your psyche when you were you know yeah all your yeah I think he talked about it one of the earlier lecture I talked about it a little bit today yeah a little bit today as well yeah you said something in that paragraph there that what you said was you have to earn the right to identify with an idea yeah certain ideas for sure than ideas for sure so basically my question is how should a young person such as myself who doesn't have a whole lot of life experience like be able to like read literature and psychology and interact with you know the wisdom of culture and then incorporate it into a structure that still authentically their own well look I think the way you ask that question means that you're actually doing a pretty good job of that well I well I mean I mean that because that was a very carefully formulated question and it was obvious that you were actually looking for an answer instead of trying to tell the audience a bunch of things that you knew which often happens with questions right and it's alright often it's very annoying for the audience to be subject to questions like that right because it's a form of because it's a form of manipulation it's like well I'll cap this off with the question but actually it's a speech so so I would say you probably already know the answer to that and but then I could elaborate on that a little bit is like there are a lot of books that people have historically regarded as great you might as well start by assuming that they're at least greater than you right and then and to approach them with that frame of mind because even if there's much in them that perhaps is no longer relevant often less than people assume there's much in them that will be of extreme benefit to you and then with regards to making them yours the kind of wisdom that you get from great books is practical wisdom and you act it out and so then what you do is you try to incorporate what you learn into your life into your practices and then if you incorporate it into your life and your practices you build a bridge between you and the great idea right because you figured out how to manifest itself in the conditions of your own life that's something like making the archetypal personal which is which is the right thing to do right it's the proper thing to do because that expands your life upward and outward and in Nobel's you and brings you up as well but so humility is part of it it's like approach these books as if they have something to teach you and then it's humility again in the second places don't take the ideas to yourself until you live them there'll be lots of time for that and besides you know even as a young person it's not like you have nothing to say but the only things that you have to say are your things to say and it's not necessarily that easy to figure out what they are but as I said you did a fine job of that when you asked the question so I think I think as far as I can tell you already know what to do so good do it read everything great you can get your damn hands on hello dr. Peterson so a lot of your work a lot of your lectures recommend the audience tackle life with a lot of attention and intention and you know in my kind of personal gateway drug to philosophy has been more Eastern philosophy and like the bug hood gita and the work of Alan Watts and tower's Calvinism and what I've noticed I may be wrong but this is a common theme in Eastern philosophy which is more passive non action don't make as many plans I wonder how you reconcile that in how you are reconciling that because you mentioned earlier in previous lectures that you've read the TEL teaching how do you reconcile those two different views well I think first that the daodejing in particular isn't about inaction it's about minimal proper action and it's also about minimal proper action after a tremendous amount of sacrifice right so the sage that's speaking forth in the Dao de Jing has already let go of almost everything that he needs to let go of and a tremendous amount of what you're reading in the Eastern philosophies is predicated I think at least in part on the idea of sacrifice there's lots of things that you're grabbing on to like the monkey you know with the jar that's actually causing your misery and so sometimes letting go is the right way of moving ahead but to me that ties into this idea of sacrifice so now whether there's more than that whether there's more intentionality in Western philosophy and less intentionality in Eastern philosophy I'm not exactly sure one way of mediating between those two was was formulated at least in part by Carl Jung he pointed out that the archetypal figure for what the last died at 32 and so to some degree that outgoing extroverted let's say nature of the West is a consequence of its youthfulness in some sense it's useful ethos and that the East Buddha died at a fairly ripe old age and even in the Hindu practices if I remember correctly for many Hindu temples there's a lot of erotic sculptures an idea is something like it can't get past the damn erotic sculptures it's not time to go into the temple but it's more than that it might also be that if you're young it's not time to get past the erotic sculptures so maybe maybe there's a moving forward into life in youth and a letting go in in the latter part of life and that's well that was Jung's way of mediating between those two traditions I think they're tightly aligned with regards to the importance of sacrifice it frequently is the case that it's your desire Maya let's say your desire that's causing your suffering right and so there's an emphasis in Buddhism even more than in Taoism I would say on letting go letting go of what's making you miserable and but do you remember the thing about Buddha is that he got enlightened under the bow tree right he basically stepped into the City of God he stepped into nirvana and he could have stayed there but he chose to come back because he decided that he had a responsibility to rectify suffering in the rest of the world that it was not sufficient for him to be enlightened well everything else was left in a state of insufficiency and suffering and so I wouldn't call that inaction you know it's a I've made the mistake myself it's in action versus non action I actually had to look up that's that good that's well not - really the daodejing does a very good job of distinguishing between those two because non-action is the minimum necessary action to keep the balance between order and chaos proper right at the end in the egg and the Dao de Jing is very very emphatic about this you detach and you watch and when it's time to intervene you intervene minimally without a lot of arrogant self propagandize ation and you tap and if you do that properly you hardly have to do it at all and it's as if you're doing nothing and there's this great wisdom in that book I really like the Dow teaching it's it's a remarkable document and I've seen managers who were like that who are really good at running their company who did nothing Lauren but and what they did well but that but first of all they set up people to replace them because they're Dirk idea was well if I'm a really good manager then this place could run without me there's a real humility in that let me just kind of wandered around the place talking to people and if there was a bit of a problem then they just you know turned the knob the tenth of a degree and the place ran smoothly and it was as if they were doing nothing and what they were doing was detaching so they weren't being buried by their current concerns they were watching to see what was going on and then they were minimally interacting and that worked like a charm so I think that the I don't like the idea that all religious traditions are the same because that just makes them into like a gray mass but I don't see that there's any difference there that can't be bridged I think as you look into the details the bridge has become more clear [Applause] I'll get you to speak into the microphone especially when you're saying self-deprecating things let everybody hear you okay I much my pleasure what's happened what's happened to you as a consequence yeah yeah well our view seeing it that way anyways well mainly on I've had I've had whatever you say right it's something I thought but not had been able to articulate right so it's been very helpful in that regards and kind of saving a lot of time no yep good good good good my main question is actually on something you said a couple lectures ago it was something along the lines of a family um so I think I'm like god that's the history of your family kind of like the sims or your family something like that yeah be awed you're facing it all the time yeah what's uh how can you stand on that one well there's this idea in the Old Testament that your sins might be visited unto your family seven generations down seems kind of harsh but you know when you're confronting maybe your father's tyrannical yeah but you know maybe his father beat the hell out of him and maybe his father's father was a vicious alcoholic and he just bloody well don't know how far back that goes and and that means also you don't exactly know what you're dealing with right to some degree you're dealing with your father but only partly what you're dealing with is the pathological paternal spirit something like that and it's better to think about that way because it becomes an existential issue at that point you know so you could say that while the father has two components and I mean this psychologically speaking there's the Great Father that's beneficial and protective and that that organizes society and teaches you how to speak and has produced all these wonderful things and then there's the tyrannical oppressive part of the father just like there's the terrible part of mother nature that's destroy than the benevolent part of mother nature that's wonderful and productive and you're stuck with that right you're stuck with having to mediate between those opposing forces just like you're stuck with the adversarial part of yourself and the heroic part of yourself and it's up to you to set those things right otherwise they propagate into the future and it isn't it straightforward thing to say how to set them right there's quite a good movie about that oh now I will Magnolia which I really love it's by Paul Anderson if I remember correctly I hope that's right it's a beautiful movie and it's about this part of it's about this kid whose father's really pushing him to be a superstar at a at a crucial right he's a genius kid and the kid studies this guy named Charles fort you don't understand this movie if you don't know this because you got to know about Charles fort to understand Magnolia Charles fort was this weird old guy who got rich with an inheritance when he was like 20 and spent the rest of his life in libraries looking up impossible things and documenting them impossible things that couldn't happen from a scientific perspective that were well attested to by multiple observers and he produced this news paper called the 14 times which still runs anyways in magnolia magnolia begins with this guy who falls out of a building and then is shot by a woman who misses her husband with a rifle as he falls and I think she's she's charged with murder and the street names have something to do with the deaths and his fall and all of that happened and then in the movie there's a rain of frogs and there are rains of frogs from time to time sometimes they're frozen sometimes they're rains of fish sometimes they're frozen it's like what the hell how does that happen happens quite frequently as it turns out there's a rain of frogs in the in the movie magnolia and this little kid see what happened to him is that he's on stage and he ends up peeing his pants because of the pressure basically and humiliates himself and then there's this rain of frogs which he kind of takes as a sign from God and then he goes to his father even he's like eight years old this kid and he says you have to stop to be and he's dead serious about very careful not being you know what would you call insubordinate nothing like that he decides that that's coming to an end right now and you have to make those decisions in your family because otherwise things propagate down the generations right and every family is rife with pathologies of one form or another and you can learn from that and refuse to push it forward and that's part of I think what you do when you when you when you shoulder your existential burden because everyone is the beneficiary and the victim of the tyrannical father just like everyone is the beneficiary and the victim of mother nature and of themselves and so you lock horns with that and straighten it out one way or another and you don't move it forward to the next generation so and maybe you detach it a bit from your parents too because god only knows what combination of catastrophes culminated in their particular forms of pathology so good enough so this week we've had the Google thing there was the YouTube thing that happened last week what's going on with censorship and what should people do about it if you're in a workplace and pathological things are happening this is easy I can tell you how you know if pathological things are happening at your workplace or they're happening with you one of the two but you can straighten that out if you're being required to do things that make you weak and ashamed then stop don't do them like one of the things I learned from Solzhenitsyn and Frankel was that systems go terribly under out of control when people don't stop them when they're going mildly out of control you know when you might say I should just keep my goddamn head down and shut up it's like maybe you should like that's not bad advice you know you don't want to make unnecessary enemies and you don't need any more trouble than you need but you got to ask yourself on a day-to-day basis what makes you think you're not selling your soul you know and there's so much foolishness going on in the mid-level bureaucratic world now that's where all the tyranny seems to be focused and the reason that it multiplies is because sensible people say nothing when they should say something and what's so strange about that is that there are way more sensible people than people who aren't sensible they're just not as noisy so whether you'll turn out if like you know so let's say something's bugging the hell out of you at work well then you have to prepare to find another job that's the first thing you have to do I don't think that you should find another job but you should prepare to find another job and if possible you should prepare to find a better job because if you can't tell someone to go to hell then you can't negotiate with them and if and if they've got you over a barrel then you can't say anything so you going to you've got to set yourself up so you've got some ability and actually that's a really good principle in your life period you should set yourself up so that you have a lateral move at hand and you should find out well are there things at work that are disturbing my soul you know when you find that out first of all you ask yourself okay I'm disturbed at work okay I'm probably weak and deceitful and useless and lazy you might as well start with that and then you talk to some people like your your wife your friends your coworkers and find out are you stupid deceitful and lazy or is there something not-so-good going on at work and so if you if you can then eliminate your own personal pathology as a cause of your dissatisfaction then maybe there's something rotten in the state of Denmark and maybe you should say something about it before the whole goddamn thing collapses because that can happen it can happen in companies a lot faster than people ever think you know and you may find that well first of all you may find if you say something well first of all that's an adventure that's for sure that's a bloody adventure and you have to do it carefully and you have to be prepared for it it might be the best thing that ever happened to you and the other thing is if you're careful about it you get your words right like in this is a this is strategic battle right it's not something you wander into carelessly then you may find that there's lots of people who feel exactly the same way you do and that you've actually caught and gone to something you're a canary in a coal mine and not just some like psychopathic mouthpiece so you go to ask yourself when you go and do what you do like is this making you stronger is this making you weaker and if it's making you weaker then you got to ask yourself do you really want to be weaker because the weaker you get the more your tyrannize and then worse than that like the weaker you get the more bitter you get and the more you'll work towards terrible things the more you'll snap at your wife the more you'll kick your kids you know like it's no joke to be terrorized at work and so I would say you have an ethical responsibility as a citizen to forthrightly confront creeping tyranny no matter where it occurs and part of part of what we're learning I would say from these stories if we're learning anything at all is that if you're aimed at the good which is a question you really got to ask yourself you know if you're genuinely end up too good then take heart because you're a lot stronger than you think so I have a follow-up question okay so I'm speaking to there's lots of people who are in this situation like you know people at universities and corporations all over the place I you know Google is not the only company that is no unfindable what's the worst repressive freedom of speech denying workplace codes and everybody feels alone right they're all like why should I stand up be a martyr get fired this guy Google got fired yeah what's the point like I'm asking rhetorical no no it's a good question and how do you how do you convince people that there's a point to standing up when it appears to be futile well the first thing I think is you convince them that it's not futile it might be difficult but it's not futile if you get your words right you have something to say there'll be an impact of those words it might not be the impact that you would choose but but the other thing you got to tell people is pick your poison you don't you may be in a situation where you don't have you don't have a cake walk to the garden of paradise you got tyranny or famine those are your choices but you get to pick which one you have and I would say if if you're being oppressed and I mean in your soul by what you're required to swallow at work well you think you're not paying a price for that you have no self-respect and and rightly so but worse than that you're an agent of your own destruction you're destroying your own ideal and you're letting people who are weak and corrupt win and if you stood up and and stood up property but you have to put yourself in order to do this at least to some degree right you can't do it casually you have to do it from some position of preparedness and strength then what makes you think you couldn't scare them back into the corners and that would be a good thing and you know the alternative personally is bad because psychological degeneration that goes along with it I've seen this with many many of the people that I work with who have been terrorized in the workplace to the absolute detriment of their psychological and physical health right to the point of collapse confronting these crazy crazy things when they were sensible people that's a terrible price to pay man like it's it's a bad price and then if the foolishness isn't dealt with at the local level when it's still relatively trivial then it will multiply until it's dealt with at the social level and we're seeing signs of that already antiphon of that you know and problems that aren't solved multiply and soon people fight and you know better to argue than to fight unless you want to fight and some people want to fight and I can understand why but I wouldn't recommend it because that doesn't lead good places it really doesn't lead good places so I'd say you have a duty maybe that's that's where you stand up it's because you have a goddamn duty to stand up and say just say what you have to say if you don't even have to be trying to make a point exactly or trying to get something done it's like this is how it looks to me that's what that guy at Google did he wrote this memo and he said I talked to him today said well he went to a diversity training seminar and he thought no I don't agree with that and so then they asked for feedback so we wrote this document a month ago this was written a month ago got no real response to it but bounced around inside Google until a lot of people you know got interested and then it escaped into the outside world but all he was doing was he was told a bunch of things he didn't think were true he wrote down a bunch of things he thought were probably true he launched that out and said well I think these things are probably true it's like well probably they're true well so he paid a price for it but maybe we'll see what sort of price he paid for it man it's going to be a lot tougher in two years than he was two years ago so no they didn't answer his feedback no no but well you can watch the video the story's there but that's kind of the outline of it so sorry to monopolize this so I have one other question about this and I think it's important aside from Google just being a workplace right it also controls the own YouTube right yes which in order how is the new censorship scheme and it controls a huge amount of the information that people get then so true and so what happens to society when companies such as Google which control our information start to censor not just how about themselves and and maybe the information that's coming out to the rest of the world how much is this already happening and how much how about if we what happened how about if we refused to find out that would be good you know like I reviewed this this guy's document I did that yesterday and everything he said was validated by the scientific literature so what has happened is that someone has been fired publicly by major corporation for stating well-grounded scientific truths right there are exactly the sorts of things that I say in my classes for example and the reason that I say them is because I read the literature it's not because I'm personally happy about the facts I think I cube research particularly is so dismal that you can't possibly read it without being seriously disheartened if I could reconstruct the world so that IQ the IQ research wasn't true well it'd sure be tempting you know but that's not how science works science doesn't tell you what you what you want to hear it just tells you the way it bloody well is and he got pilloried for he got pilloried for revealing a good fraction of current scientific knowledge about gender differences okay that's not good and as you said that's a big company and it controls our communication how about we do what we can to ensure that these large communication companies don't get to impose a factually false ideological structure on the rest of the planet well you can think about supporting this this guy who blew the whistle there's a fundraiser for him online he could use some money he wants to sue Google yeah you know maybe we could maybe we could let them know that hiring a human resources director who's also concerned with equity is probably not a good idea for capitalist company why in the world would you hire your own enemies I don't understand that so well we'll see how the dialogue continues but back to the personal like you need to say what you think because that's where you come from right and if you don't say what you think then you kill your unborn self that's what you do that's what Cain did when he killed Abel and that's why his punishment was unbearable you know you have things in you that are struggling to come to the light that's the truth you need daughter and you need to either that truth because without that truth you cannot live in the world because the world is real and you need truth to live in the world and if you stifle your truth well how how can that be anything but something that brings about hell how could it be any other way so you think well why should you speak up that's easy because the consequences of not speaking up although delayed are far worse that's the reason that's the reason if it can't be courage it could at least be prudence so yeah one more dr. Peterson first of all kudos for mentioning magnolias in my favorite movie that's a great movie man so a few months ago I had a dream and when I told someone this dream they suggested that I read the Book of Revelations oh yeah that's a bad dream that the there's a lot of interesting stuff in that book the thing that really that I found really interesting right off the bat was the the state is represented in two instances as female positively and negatively and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that in the context of like in maps of meaning you often talk about the state just as as male or as masculine okay first of all I'm going to comment on your t-shirt that's a lobster hierarchy with Horus at the top isn't it it's even better it's the eye of a lobster so that's one that we found yeah that's a good one that's a good one that one really cracked me up when I saw it I really thought that was funny man yeah yeah yeah when my graduate students used to meet when I first talked about this Lobster stuff we meet for breakfast day and they were a very combative snappy group of graduate students and they're always trying to one-up each other with jokes and whenever one really pulled a good joke on another they'd stand up and like it was really it was really funny it was really funny okay let's see can I answer that question you know how if you're looking at a if you look at a room every color that you see is dependent on every other color in the room right your eyes adjust to that so for example if you're in a room based with red light your eyes will in some sense remove the red so you can still see the colors okay so your perception is to some degree on-call is to some degree dependent on Khan context and that's one of the things that makes the symbolic symbolic interpretations tricky because to see how something is represented symbolically you actually have to look at the broader narrative context within which the symbols are embedded so for example you see if I can get this right if the story has an island and an ocean then the ocean is often symbolically feminine and the island is symbolically masculine but if the story's the island and the sky then Island often becomes symbolically masculine and feminine and the sky symbolically masculine and you might think well how can the island be masculine and feminine at the same time and the answer is well it depends on what what it's being contrasted with and why and so that's part of the key to the change in symbolism in the book of Revelation and so it isn't inevitably the case that culture is represented with the patriarchal symbolism but it's most commonly the case so you know there is Mother Russia for example I guess it would depend to some degree to on what your metaphor is for the state because the state can be in all providing mother or it can be a judgmental father and it it seems that we killed more towards the father with regards to terminology relating to the state and I think the reason for that is because I think human hierarchies like chimp hierarchies are fundamentally masculine the fundamental hierarchy is masculine even with chimps there's a female hierarchy but it's like the female hierarchy is nested within the male hierarchy it's not the case with bonobos exactly but I think it is the case with human beings and so I think we have a strong proclivity to masculinize the state but that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions and in symbol symbolic representations are very slippery that way because you can't stamp an entity with a symbol because that would be the same as just giving it a name right and you can't have a dictionary of symbols where you say well you know a house always means the psyche it's like know sometimes the house means the psyche but it depends on the story and so you have to take the the entire structure of the narrative into account to determine why those particular symbolic representations are being used what I offered in maps a meaning was kind of a shorthand you know generally speaking there's nature positive and negative usually feminine generally speaking there's culture positive and negative usually masculine and generally speaking there's the individual good and evil right heroic an adversarial often typically represented as masculine especially in adventure stories but it's a schema and it's an interpretive guide and not a set of hard and fast rules because you're in the domain of metaphor and it's a it's a slippery domain so you have any luck figuring out your dream sorry did you have any luck figuring out your dream at least in some parts I think there's different levels of analysis I mean one was pretty obvious yeah all right all right well thank you very much everyone [Applause]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,898,435

Rating: 4.8085341 out of 5

Keywords: atheist, bible, christ, christian, christianity, existentialism, faith, free speech, god, gods, jesus, jordan peterson, lecture, openness, personality, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, religion, spirit, toronto, truth, university of toronto, yeshua, Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Israelites, Old Testament, New Testament

Id: SKzpj0Ev8Xs

Length: 151min 0sec (9060 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2017