Biblical Series XIII: Jacob's Ladder

[Music] thank you very much hahahaha thank you very much for showing up again that's a really good to see everybody here so one of the things that I've been realizing as a consequence of going through these stories is that the degree to which they're about individuals is quite remarkable and I think that's really telling you know one of the reasons I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy is because Tolstoy is more of a sociologist he's more interested in the relationship between groups of people this is an oversimplification because obviously Tolstoy is a great author but I like dusty husky better because he really delves into the souls of individuals and I think it's remarkable the degree to which all of the stories that we've covered so far in Genesis are about individuals and they're quite realistic which is quite remarkable - they're not really romanticized to any great degree because all of the people that are regard as regarded let's say as patriarchal or matriarchal figures in Genesis have no shortage of ethical if no shortage of ethical flaws and also no shortage of difficulties in their life and the difficulties are realistic there they're major-league problems you know like familial catastrophes and famine and war and revenge and hatred and all those things it's not a it's not a pretty it's not a pretty book and that's one of the things that makes it great I mean that's one of the things that characterizes great literature right is that it doesn't present you with a whitewashed view of humanity or of existence and that's really a relief I think because as you all know because you're alive there's no such thing as a whitewash existence like you're to be alive is to be in trouble ethically and existentially I've been reading this book recently I'll talk about it a little bit later it's called better never to have a bean and it was written by a philosopher in South Africa in Cape Town name Benatar that's his last name and he basically argues I think it's a specious argument and I think it's artificially constructed but he basically argues that because life is so full of suffering even good lives are very much full of suffering that it's wrong to bring children into the world because the suffering outweighs the good even in good lives and it's actually wrong it would also be better not to exist for exactly the same reason and my sense in reading the book is that he came to that conclusion and then wrote the book to justify it which is actually the reverse of the way that you should write a book what you should do when you're writing a book is you should have a question and you should it should be a real question right it should be one you don't know the answer to and then you should be studying and writing like mad and reading everything you can get your hands on to see if you can actually grapple with the problem and come to some solution and you should walk the reader as well through your process of thinking so that they can come to the well not necessary to the same conclusion but at least track what you're doing and I don't think that's what he did I think he wrote it backwards but then and so I was thinking about it a lot because that's actually a question that I've contended with in my writing there are Memphis da Philly and our satanic figures for example in girth is Faust and also Ivan in in that in the brothers karamasoff who basically make the same case you know that existence is so rife with trouble and suffering that it would be better if it didn't exist at all and the problem I've had with that there's a variety of them but one of the problems I've had with that is what happens if you start to think that way because what I've observed is that people who begin to think that way that isn't where they stop like that they get angry at existence which is what happened to Cain as we saw in the Cain and Abel story and then the next step is to start taking revenge against existence and that cascades until it's revenge against well I think the best way of thinking about it is revenge against God for the crime of being which is I think the deepest sort of hatred that can entertain and and and when you're in the grip of a really deep emotion like a really profound emotion right at the bottom of emotions you're in something that's like a quasi-religious state and that's more or less independent of your belief saying a transcendent deity I mean you can be in a profoundly emotional state that's as deep as it can be and it can have religious significance without that necessarily signifying anything about a transcendent being you know but but then I was thinking you see the problem with that argument is you can gerrymander it endlessly you know because first of all how do you measure suffering and how do you measure happiness it's like how do you assign weights to them and god there's just no way of doing that you have to do it arbitrarily and so you can make an argument that the suffering outweighs the happiness you just wait the suffering more heavily than you wait the happiness and that's the end of that you know and so that's that's a problem but I think there's a deeper problem and I was reading this other book while back as well which was written by the guy who ran the human genome project and I don't remember exactly what it was called but it was something like a scientists case for God is something like that and one of the things he referred to which didn't strike me as hard as it should have to begin with was the he thought that one of the phenomena say that justified a belief in a transcendent being was something like the moral intuition of human beings that you know we have a sense of right and wrong and you know it's certainly in what happens in Genesis in the story of Adam and Eve is that that that story announces the coming of the sense of right and wrong right the knowledge of good and evil and it isn't something we ascribe to animals it's something that's unique to human beings animals can be predators and you know and they can be gentle and and you can have a relationship with them but you never think of an evil cat or you know or an evil wolf even though they're you know they're predatory about human beings we have this capacity to judge between good and evil right and wrong and it's really an integral part of our being and I think you can make an evolutionary case for that a biological case for that as you can make a biological case for most of what is relevant about human beings because we're biological creatures but we don't really understand the significance of that like what happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that that's that realization not coming to the knowledge of good and evil is actually represented as a shift of cosmic significance right it puts a it puts a permanent fracture in the structure of being and you know if you think of human beings as insignificant ants on a tiny dust mote in the middle of an infinite cosmos cosmos that cares less for us then who cares fundamentally if human beings have the knowledge to distinguish between good and evil but if you give consciousness a central role in being and you can make a perfectly reasonable case for that because without consciousness there's no being as far as anyone can determine so it may be much more central than we think and and I really don't think there's a counter-argument to that like not a solid one you can state that consciousness is epiphenomena land and that the world is fundamentally materialistic and it doesn't matter that there's consciousness you can state that but you can make an equally credible case the other way and certainly our lived experience is that consciousness is crucial obviously and we treat each other as if most of the time we're valuable conscious beings and we wouldn't give up our consciousness even though it's often consciousness of suffering and so then I think another problem with the book is that it's it's sort of predicated on the idea that life is for happiness and I don't think that's right and I don't think that's how people experience life and I might be wrong but it seems to me that people experience life as something like a series of crucial ethical decisions it's something like that I mean when I just can't imagine maybe I'm being naive about this but I can't imagine that I can't imagine another being that's like me in in most senses that isn't constantly wrestling in some sense with what the next proper thing to do is it's not like it's obvious it's not bloody obvious and it doesn't mean you'll do the right thing because you don't law lots of times and you know that by your own judgement right because you're making mistakes all the time sometimes you don't know what you're doing and maybe it's a mistake and maybe it isn't and who's to say that isn't what I'm talking and what I'm talking about when you know that what you're doing is wrong and you go ahead and do it anyways people do that all the time and that's also extremely peculiar you bloody well think that if you knew it was wrong and you told yourself that it was wrong that that would be sufficient so that you just wouldn't do it but that isn't what you're like at all you know and you can tell yourself something is wrong a fifty times and you'll do it the 51st time and then you'll feel you know like like you deserve to feel probably and but it doesn't stop you and so so then I think the other problem with the viewpoint the idea that the suffering of life eradicate sits utility is that it's predicated on the idea that happiness or lack of suffering even is is the right criteria by which to judge life and I don't think that's how we actually experience life I think what we do instead is put ourselves through a series of excruciating moral choices you know when one of the things that that's really significant about the biblical stories and I think about the the entire implicit philosophy you know that's embedded in the stories is that that's how life is presented in in the stories is all of these individuals first they're individuals - not groups and second they're agonizing over their moral choices all the time all the time and they have a relationship with God and but it's not a it's not a directive relationship exactly even for the people to whom God speaks directly which I suspect is not something you'd exactly want to have happen is it's there's still even the fact that they have a direct relationship with God doesn't stop them from being tormented continually by their moral choices and so the world is presented as a moral landscape not as a not as a place that justifies itself by happiness it's presented as a moral landscape and people are presented as preachers who traverse through the moral landscape making ethical decisions that determine the course of the world and that seems to me to be right and that's not a that's not the same as happiness by any stretch of the imagination it's a whole different category of being and you know and then I thought that through a lot and I think well we do make choices and what we do is contend with the future you know and that the future seems to appear to us as a realm of possibility that's a more accurate way of thinking about it then then that the future presents itself to it to us as a realm of determined things it's it's presents itself as a realm of possibility and there's good choices in that realm and there's poor choices or even evil choices in that realm and we're negotiating continually deciding which of those choices we're going to bring into being that seems to me to be phenomenologically indisputable and we certainly treat each other as if that's what we're doing because we hold each other responsible for our actions you know with some exceptions and that we're deciding each moment whether to make things better or worse and that seems to me to be correct and I think that that's what these stories illustrate they don't say that directly you know although I think it gets more and more explicit as the narrative unfolds but and then part of the realism of the stories is that the people aren't the people that are being presented are by no means good I mean maybe with the exception of Noah no one seemed to be a pretty good guile they did he did get drunk and you know and and end up naked exposed to his sons and so forth and but I mean he isn't talked about a lot as a character it's a pretty compressed story but Abraham I mean Abraham had plenty of problems not least of which was in his inability to leave home and then you know his lying about his wife and their there's all sorts of mistakes and then Jacob who were going to talk about tonight is an even more morally ambivalent character he's especially at the beginning of the story he's it's it's he isn't the sort of person that you would pick out especially if you were a hack writer you wouldn't pick him out as the hero of the story he does a lot of things that are really pretty reprehensible and takes him an awful long time to learn better and yet he's the person who's put forward as the father of the 12 tribes of Israel it's from this flawed person that the people that that may be that whose story you might say is that the fundamental constitutes the fundamental underpinning of our culture it's it's from this deeply flawed individual that that group emerges and so you might think of that as a relief to because you know you're no knight in shining armor you know with with a with a pure moral past I mean people make mistakes of catastrophic proportions non-stop you know and that also means that these stories put forward something approximating hope because in their realism in their moral realism they present heroes I suppose the heroes of renown right the patriarchs of old let's say who are realistic people who have fits of anger and rage and who are murderous at times and who are deeply deeply embroiled with family dispute and and who who have adulterous affairs and and like they do all the terrible things that people do and the weird thing is is that God is still with them and you know it isn't obvious what that means or even if it means anything but it's very it's not disputable as far as I can tell that a were conscious and that consciousness is a transcendent phenomena which which we do not understand and that the landscape that we traverse through is moral like every story you ever watch anything that grips your imagination on the screen or in the theater like any story that grabs you is a story of moral striving it's just not interesting otherwise right the person has to be confronted with complex moral choices and then you see the outcome and you know the good guy doesn't and the bad guy does it badly and things don't go so well for the bad guy generally and if it's a bit more sophisticated than good and the bad are in the same individual and that's you know that's a more compelling story but so we could say well let's we could make the assumption that it might be worthwhile thinking of the world as a as it has been thought of classically as a theater upon which the forces of good and evil continually strive for dominance and I for the life of me especially after I started reading deeply into 20th century history and all the terrible things that happened in the 20th century and all the terrible unbelievably incomprehensible things that people did to one another I just couldn't see seeing things any other way is realistic you know because I don't think that you can immerse yourself in 20th century history without coming to the conclusion that evil is a reality and if it's a reality that it depends on what you mean by reality but it's fundamental enough reality for me and if it's a reality then I don't see how you can escape from the conclusion that the cosmos as we experience it at least is a place of moral striving and well that's one of the things that's really illustrated in the story of Jacob and and I found that quite striking so so the last time last lecture I ended with the Abrahamic stories with the death of Sarah and that was Abraham's wife and so we're gonna continue from from there remember Abraham had a son Isaac and he was asked by God to sacrifice his son which we talked about in in some depth and I was attempting to make the case that you know the idea of sacrifice was one of humankind's great discoveries because it meant the discovery of the future essentially but it also meant the discovery that the future was something that you could make a bargain with and that you could give up something now something impulsive some pleasure even a deep pleasure in the moment and you could strive and hypothetically you could make a covenant a bargain with the future and if your sacrifices were acceptable and that seemed to mean an ethically acceptable you had to sacrifice the right thing that that vastly increased the probability that not only you would be successful let's say but that your descendants would be too and I don't think that that's an irrational proposition I mean you have to leave in it a bit with the realization that sometimes you know you get sliced off at the knees no matter what right because life has an arbitrary element and and that can't be tossed out but building in the arbitrary element will say you still want to think well what's your best bet given a certain amount of randomness and it seems to me that conscious self-aware sacrifice and proper ethical striving is your best bet and you know there's another idea that well I've always explained it when I've explained it to people I've always used the movie Pinocchio as an example you know that when Geppetto was trying to make his puppet into a self-aware and autonomous moral agent which is what he wants above all else you know he aims at the highest good that he can conceive which is the star that he prays to essentially and hopes for the transformation and there's also something in that that's unutterably profound and maybe that is somewhat independent of the idea that you have to believe in God I would also say that what it means to believe in God in the old testament is by no means clear and that's something I also really want to talk about tonight it's not obvious what it means and well Gepetto what he does at least is aim at the highest good of which he can conceive you know and that that's actually in a philosophical definition of God upon occasion that God is the highest good of which you conceive and you know that's different than the idea of a transcendent being precisely but it's in line with it's in line with certain interesting psychoanalytic speculations this is one of the things I really liked about Carl Jung you know Jung was so radical a thinker it's just beyond belief like I've read a lot of critics of you and I've always I've always got too kicked out of them because the things they accused Jung of are so trivial compared to the things that Jung actually did that it's like accusing a murderer of jaywalking like because Jung was unbelievably radical like here's one of his ideas you know he thought that it was necessary he believed that psychotherapy could be replaced by a supreme moral effort and so the moral effort would be something like aiming after good and then trying to integrate yourself around that and that the the good at which you aimed would be something approximating what you would be like if you manifested your full potential and that you have a glimmering of what that full potential was so that would be the potential future you and he thought of that he thought of people as four dimensional entities especially essentially that were stretched across time and that you as a totality across time including your potential manifested yourself also in the here and now and that part of what your potential manifested itself was something like the voice of conscious conscience or intuition it's amazing idea it's an amazing idea right because it's like what you could be in the future beckons to you in the present and helps you determine the difference between good and evil it's a mind-boggling idea and you know I think that it's an idea you have to contend with and then he went further than that and this is this is also remarkable idea you know he was interested in this symbolic representation of Christ and I mean psychologically speaking and he thought of Christ as the representation of the ideal potential human it's something like that so it was a symbolic rip thats what Christ was is a symbolic representation of the ideal potential of a human being and so for young there was no difference between there was no psychological difference between who you could be in the future beckoning to you and the prey in the present and orienting yourself in relationship to Christ psychologically those were the same thing and then so that's a pretty mind-boggling idea like seriously that's a mind-boggling idea you know especially when you add the psychological idea that the one of the things that characterizes your ideal future self is the ability to make sacrifices right and the deeper the sacrifice the better and then also to recover from the sacrifice right so that's the death and rebirth so the part of you that's most essential to your full flowering as a as a being is your ability to let things go and then spring back from that so to die in some sense and to be reborn in the service of a higher good and then well then the next part of that is that the direction of the world depends on you doing that so not only your own life but your family's life and and because we're networked so intently together you know that the whole panoply of humankind that may be the structure of the of the cosmos and you know you might think well no but you know it's not so simple it's not so simple first of all one person can wreak an awful lot of havoc there's absolutely no doubt about that and as we get more technologically powerful that becomes even more relevant and important and and and crucial you know one of the things that Young said was that we had to wake up because we are too technologically powerful to be as morally asleep as we are and that seems to me just to be self-evident that's yeah for sure that's true we're we're we're half asleep with nuclear bombs it's not a good idea it's seriously not a good idea and so well and then you might ask yourself - you don't well like what is the ultimate potential of a fully developed human being and well we certainly know that you have admiration for people who are more developed rather than less developed that's that just happens automatic or resentment that but that's okay it's the same thing it doesn't matter but it's not like you can't identify them you can identify them you know and and they're put forward to you in in in drama and fiction and all of that constantly so that's another form of moral intuition you know you can write you can discern the wheat from the chaff let's say and and so the other thing that I was thinking about that's worth consideration too is that you know and maybe this is maybe this is petty but I don't think it is somebody asked me the other day if I believed in miracles and I hate being asked questions like that you know and you know it's also people ask me do I believe in God and like I don't know what they mean when they say that and so I don't know what the answer because I don't think we're talking necessarily going to talk about the same thing but in any case I said yes and I have a variety of reasons for that but one of them is that you know the consensus among physicists is that we can track the origin of the cosmos to something like a hundred millionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang it's like it's so close to the Big Bang that the difference is literally infinitesimal but the consensus is that before that whatever that is the laws of physics themselves break down well what what do you call an event that exists outside the laws of physics that by definition that's a miracle now that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a transcendent Adi that caused the event that's a separate issue but it does imply a barrier of some sort beyond which we can't go where some other set of rules apply and so I find that interesting as well so all right so Sarah dies and Abraham makes a bargain with the Hittites to purchase a burial place for her and they offer it as a gift and he insists upon paying for it it's a little story that basically indicates two things that Abraham was the kind of guy that you trust pretty much when you see him and that even if something is offered to him as a gift he's going to do everything to be reciprocal about it and and so it's not a massively important part of the story but it's it's in keeping with the same narrative flow and so Efron who's a hit I'd offer Zabar you'll place as a gift and Abraham says no you know you have to let me pay for it and Efrain says he will and that works out very well and so he has a good burial place for his wife and then Abraham decides that Isaac needs a wife and so he sends his eldest servant to Mesopotamia to find a wife for Isaac and there's a strange ritual that's performed so it says in the story that the servant places his hand under Abraham's thigh to to swear but that isn't really what it means it means that he places his hand I don't know exactly how to say this properly well use your imagination how about that and the idea is that as far as I can tell that he's swearing on the future he's swearing on future people it's something like that so that's that's sort of what testified means right think about the route well I'm not kidding I'm not kidding that is what it that's that is the derivation right it is the derivation so so so anyways this is a serious issue and so that servant has to go and find Isaac a good wife and he wants him to find Isaac wife who is willing to accept the same fundamental belief system which is something like the belief in a god that's a unity rather than a plurality you know the other thing that Jung was very insistent upon was that there was a relationship between polytheism and psychological confusion and monotheism and psychological unification I really like that idea too that you know that what you're trying to do because you are a plurality that that's one of the things the psychoanalysts we're really good at figuring out that the cognitive scientists haven't touched yet as far as I could tell they're way behind the psychoanalysts in that element of thinking is that you are composed of sub personalities which all have their own desires and their own viewpoint their own thoughts and their own perceptions and they're in a war with each other constantly maybe even a Darwinian war it's been it's been portrayed that way by certain neuroscientists and that that one of the goals of life is to integrate all of that plurality into a hierarchical ethical structure that has some canonical ethic at the pinnacle right we've talked a little bit about that and it's not obvious what should be at the pinnacle but we can guess at it it's it's that which we admire that's one way of thinking about it it's that that describes fair play across a sequence of games that's another good way of thinking about it it's it's the heroic ideal that's another way of thinking about it but it's it's combined with generosity you know because the hero the mythological hero goes out into the unknown and slays the dragon and gets the gold but then comes back to the community and distributes what's found and so it's courage plus generosity and and so all of your all of that interior struggling that you're doing is an attempt to bang yourself against the world with challenge constantly to hit everything together like you're beating on a piece of iron to to to cure it let's say so that you don't you're not an internal contradiction you're not massive competing gods something like that because it's just too psychologically stressful and hard on everyone else and impossible for them to get along with you if you're one thing one moment and another thing another moment and so so anyways Abraham insists that Isaac find a wife from among people who are likely to carry off forward the monotheistic tradition and I'm not sure that the monotheistic tradition is actually indistinguishable is actually distinguishable from the individualistic tradition I think they might be the same thing at different levels of analysis you know so because individual means undivided in some sense right to be an individual means to be one thing and the other thing that mitigates against the idea of life as happiness is it isn't obvious to me that it's happiness that is what molds you and shapes you you know it's something more like optimal challenge voluntarily undertaken it's something like that right and I think that's echoed in the idea that everyone has a moral obligation to raise their cross something like that to accept the fact of their mortality voluntarily I believe that that's the case and I do actually think that that's a prerequisite to proper psychological development because if you're not willing to take your mortality on voluntarily like if you're kicking and fighting about it constantly and you have every reason to don't get me wrong then you can't act forthrightly in the world right you're going to be afraid and when you're afraid then you can't voluntarily take on a challenge and then if you can't take voluntarily take on a challenge then you can't develop and so again the life seems to be something like if it's a proper life is the voluntarily voluntary taking on of great challenges and maybe that's better than happiness like it's certainly more noble you know it's not a word we use very much anymore the idea of nobility because we're so obsessed with happiness but I think happiness is a like if it comes along man great you know wonderful don't don't take it lightly or for granted because it's fleeting but the idea that that's what you should be for in some sense - seems to me if that's what life is for then maybe it shouldn't be maybe that's correct because that isn't what life is but so doesn't it isn't obvious to me that that's what life should be you know I mean if you really loved someone like like your son let's say what do you say well I hope he has a happy life or would you say I hope he accomplishes great things it seems to me that that's better the accomplishing of great things and because that's admirable you know it's like a happy person is a happy person but a noble person is an admirable person and and that's that's better man and so maybe there are better things than happiness and so you can't judge being on the basis of the ratio of suffering to pleasure something like that it's and I don't think we do that I don't believe we do that I mean comedians are happy right but everyone doesn't aspire to be a comedian and you don't watch comedy all the time even though you could laugh non-stop more or less if the comedian's funny you want to get your teeth into something it also seems to me that this is one of the reasons I like the existential philosophy was that you know the existentialist believed it's sort of an original sin idea they believed that we came into the world with an ethical burden already laden upon us something like something like that and that we had a felt sense that it was necessary for us to justify our being and if we didn't do that then we weren't authentic to ourselves we weren't moving towards individuality we weren't sustaining the community we weren't living properly and that and that that idea was deeply embedded in people as part of their ordinary experience and that also seems to me to be accurate and you know I've dealt with lots of people say in my clinical practice and they don't really cut they are they will come and say I wish I wasn't so unhappy but they don't usually come and say I wish I was happier and those things aren't the same and and then when we when you talk to people who are having trouble you know they want to straighten things out and figure out how to do them right it's something like that and and that that's the primary that's their primary goal and so anyways Abraham sends his eldest servant off to his the place that God has granted him to find a wife and interestingly the borders of the promised land are quite similar to the current borders of Israel in these are estimates right based on on the biblical and I mean that's not a fluke obviously but it's it's interesting to see the concordance between these ancient stories and the present-day world so I thought that was very interesting and it shows once again that the past you think the past is the past but it's not it's it's still here it's embedded in the present you know just like the future and somehow in some ways is folded up inside the present waiting to unfold the past is all folded up inside the present too so anyways the servant goes to the land that he's been charged to go to and and he's trying to figure out how in the world am I going to find a good wife for Isaac I mean I don't know any of these people and so he has this little dialogue that's presented in the form of a prayer I suppose and he thinks well I'm gonna go to the place where you water where people get water and water the animals and because that's a place where everyone gathers so that's a good place to find someone and and it's it's not a place of fun and lightness and relaxation and impulsivity it's a place of life-sustaining work and and he thinks something like well what would a decent girl do at a watering place and he thought well maybe she would offer a stranger some water and also offer to water the camels because that would be brave to approach the stranger and then generous and then indicative of the willingness to make an effort and when you know that a camel I think he took ten camels was quite a few camels anyways just one and that a camel can drink 20 gallons of water and Rebecca who was drawing water from the wet turns out to be Rebecca I was drawing water from the well which is hard right because water is heavy and you have to lift it up and it's ten camels and so that's like 200 gallons of waters so you know she has to put herself out a fair a bit in order to make this stranger happy and so that's what happens and then the servant has brought along gifts and that sort of thing and anyways to make a long story short Rebecca agrees to come back to come back with the servant and huh marry Isaac and so then she has she gets pregnant and she has twins and this is an interesting thing the twins fight inside her she can tell that that they're not getting along and this is an echo right it's an echo of Cain and Abel and there's a mythological motif that the unions have called the hostile brothers the hostile brothers and you see them all the time Batman and the Joker are hostile brothers and Thor and Loki or hostile brothers and it's an unbelievably common motif and you know the ultimate hostile brothers are Christ and Satan so that's the that's the archetypal representation of the hostile brothers right the ultimate good and the ultimate evil and so and so it's an echo of the cain and abel story although it's a little more complex I would say from a literary point of view because it isn't obvious which of these brothers is Cain and which of them is Abel they have parts of both in each of them so Esau who turns out to be one of the brothers in Jacob movie turns out to be the other both have their admirable qualities and their faults anyways Esau comes is born first but Jacob has him by the heel and so there was a fight within the womb to see who would emerge first now that's relevant because the firstborn had a special status well has a special status in many communities especially agricultural communities and there's a reason all these people were more herds people but if you divide your property equally among all your children then in like three generations everybody has one goat and everybody starves to death you know or the same thing happens with lands so one of the ways that that traditional communities solve that is they just give them almost everything to the firstborn and then the everyone else knows well you go out and do whatever you can and it's kind of arbitrary and unfair but you know at least it's predictably arbitrary and unfair instead of doom over for generations you know so it actually mattered to be the firstborn and and God generally favors the firstborn and then you might think well what is it about being born first that's so relevant apart from the the cultural practice of abort generous inheritance and I would say well the firstborn is something like the model for the leader of the family right because the firstborn child should be if there's a number of siblings they should take care of the siblings at least to some degree but also should be a role model for them so it's like a natural position of leadership but there's a site there's a cycle psychologize ation of the idea of the firstborn in these stories because god often passes over the firstborn in favor of a later born child he seems to do that on the basis of moral character essentially and so there's this idea that well there's a natural proclivity towards leadership that's just a biological fact that would be associated with being a firstborn but there's a element of characterological development that transcends that and so that you it's more important to be spiritually a firstborn let's say than to be biologically a firstborn and God recognizes that continually in these stories and inverts the natural order and favors a later born who's who's done more work with regards to characterological development and that's also interesting to you know I've talked to lots of business people about leadership and there's a literature on leadership but it's not a good literature it's it's pretty shallow partly because it's not that easy to define leadership and partly because there are different you know you people have different temperaments and different temperaments can be leaders they just do it in different ways now there's something in common about being a leader though and I would say one is that if you're an actual leader you actually know where you're going right because what are you gonna do lead people in circles it's like maybe they'll follow you but you're not a leader you're just a charlatan so you have to know where you're going and then you have to be able to communicate that and then people have to trust you so you actually have to be honest because people are at that stupid at least not for a long period of time and then where you're going has to have some value because otherwise why would anyone want to go along with you so and then you might say well what what are the attributes then that make you a leader and I would say well they're characterological fundamentally and this is not naive optimism or or or casual moralizing it has nothing to do with that you know we know for example that conscientiousness that the personality trait is a good predictor of long-term success in in most occupations not all but most and that one of the things that's associated with conscientiousness is that people keep their word they're trustworthy and that's certainly one element of a leader especially across any reasonable amount of time you have to be able to trust the person they can even be harsh right it doesn't matter because you can see harsh leaders and kind leaders but as long as they do what they say they will do then then you can follow them and you know that the future payoff is is is secure something like that so the idea that character logical development is more important to leadership than primogenitor I think that's the right word primal Genesis anyways being a firstborn that's a very crucial psychological realization that it's character logical development that makes you favored of God you know and I do think we've forgotten this in many ways because there isn't a lot of emphasis in our education system on characterological development and that's very very surprising to me I think maybe it's partly because in our fractured society we can't agree on what constitutes a reasonable characterological goal so we just throw up our hands and don't educate our kids to any degree at all especially in schools about what an admirable person is like or even let them know that well maybe you should actually try to be one you know that that's actually the most important possible thing that you could learn right [Applause] so and I also think and I think this is laid out very thoroughly in the biblical stories as well is that if there are enough people who are admirable then things work and if there aren't and things things are terrible you get wiped out you remember when Abraham is bargaining with God with regards to Sodom and Gomorrah he asks God to save the city if there's like 40 admirable people right respectable but let's say admirable right I don't want I don't want to say good because good is being corrupted in some sense by casual usage I mean admirable noble people right I think Abraham bargains got down to like ten if there's ten of them in the city the city won't be destroyed and that that's not very many in this city so there's an interesting idea there which is that there there doesn't have to be that many people in a group who have their act together but zero is the wrong number and if it's zero then then we're seriously in trouble and I think that goes along with the idea of the Pareto principle in economics too which is that it's a small minority of people who do most of the productive work in any given domain but so so a small number of properly behaving people might have enough of an impact to keep everything moving and that might also that might actually be true but it can't fall below some crucial level and I do think that we're in some danger of allowing it to fall below some crucial level because our society seems to be at war in some ways against the idea of the individual and individual character per se and I think that's absolutely I think that's absolutely catastrophic and that's part of the reason that I'm doing these biblical lectures you know because I think that I've known for a long time that the moral presuppositions of a culture are instantiated in its stories they're not instantiated in its explicit philosophy there might be a layer of explicit philosophy and of course there is in the West and a layer of explicit law but underneath that there are stories and there isn't anything under the stories except maybe behavior you know and that's so implicit it doesn't even actually count it's not a cognitive operation and so this is the story these are the stories that are underneath our culture and so there better be something to them that's what we hope and but more importantly maybe we shouldn't toss them away without knowing what they mean because if we toss them away then we're throwing everything that we depend on away as far as I can tell and we'll we will pay for it we'll pay for it individually because we'll be weak you know because if you're not firm in your convictions then someone else who's firm in their convictions can you're their puppet like instantly and then you're also the puppet of your own doubts right because unless you have convictions you're gonna generate doubts like mad because everyone does and then the doubts win and and you'll be paralyzed because there'll be you know 50% of you moving forward and 50% of you frozen stiff and that'll be enough just to lodge you in place and so okay so there's a psychologize ation of the idea of leadership which is very important and then it's associated with the idea of character or logical development and it's associated with the idea of struggle not happiness and it's also associated with this Abrahamic idea which I really liked and which was something that's been very useful to me as a consequence of doing these lectures because remember at the beginning of the Abrahamic stories abraham's like a stay-at-home guy right he's like the guy who's 40 years old living in his in his in his mother's basement and god says like get the hell out of there you know get out in the world where you belong go do something difficult because what you're doing isn't acceptable and you know the first thing he does is go somewhere there's a terrible famine and then he goes somewhere there's a tyranny so you know it's it's pretty funny he follows God's call and it's not like sweetness and light and paradise immediately it's nothing like that it's it's instantaneous combat you know of the most difficult kind so but but Abraham does in fact follow that impulse and you know it's interesting too I mean I don't know here's another thing that made me a really an advocate of psychoanalytic thinking and it was the sort of thing that started to terrify me about what the human psyche was out like I started to understand that not only were we like an amalgam of relatively autonomous subpersonalities each of which had the possibility of gaining control but that we were also victim you might say or beneficiary of impulses that were beyond our conscious formulation or or or understanding or capacity to resist so here's this here's a funny story so I was talking to one of my patreon people online this week and he said he was a committed atheist and that's fine you know lots of atheists are very honest people and they're atheists because they don't know how to reconcile what they know with traditional claims let's say and they're not willing to just mangle them together you know and there might be cynicism all that associated with it as well but he said he was he said he was entranced by these biblical lectures you know which is pretty weird and he said if someone would have told him a year ago that he was going to like be obsessed with the sequence of biblical lectures he would have told them that they were mad and so we had a bit of a discussion about that and because this is an interesting thing you know and he mentioned this he said it was something like you don't choose your interests they choose you and that's really worth thinking about to man because you know it's really hard to get interested in something you're not interested in even if you know there's a good reason for it you know you're studying for an exam you find the material boring you know anything will be more interesting than than the studying even though you know that that's what you need to do you can't voluntarily grab yourself by the scruff of the neck let's say and shake yourself and say sit down and concentrate your mind will just go everywhere but then if you're interested in something and even if it's something you shouldn't be interested in because that happens all the time then it's like you're a laser focus man you can pay attention forever you can work until you're exhausted you won't even notice it then you remember everything it's like okay if you can't control your interest what does and man I tell you you can think about that for a very long time so Jung talked about the spirit mercurius you know Mercury's the winged messenger of the gods and and here's how he conceptualized it psychologically he thought is what the ancient people who thought about mercury has the winged messenger of the gods were trying to state psychologically you know your your interest Flitz around it's like there's something that captures it and that moves your interest from place to place you know like if you walk into a bookstore you'll get interested in a particular book it's as if the book grips you is you don't know why you're interested in that you might but often you don't know why you're interested in that book and you know your interest is flitting around and so that's mercury the thing that makes your interests like flicker around is mercury the winged messenger of the gods and mercury is the messenger of the gods because it's the things behind the scenes psychologically that are manipulating your attention and for Jung those were equivalent in some sense to the lost gods and so for Jung your your interest was being manipulated behind the scenes by unseen forces that were associated with your character illogical development across time that was the manifestation of the self so the self is this the the potential you let's say and the way it operates in the present is by gripping your interest in directing it somewhere and that's part of the instinct of self-realization it's a mind-boggling idea man really it's I think it's correct I can't see how it can't be correct it doesn't mean I understand it completely but it certainly seems phenomenologically correct and I mean the potential that you are has to manifest itself somehow in in the here and now it has to and what better way than by directing your attention you know it's like it seems like this might be useful for you or maybe you get attracted to this person or maybe you admire this person that happens with kids a lot they'll admire someone and then copy them and you can see that that's obviously part of their developmental progression right it's a form of hero worship but kids are very imitative and they hero worship at the drop of a hat and so they're they're entranced by the the next stage of development and if they see someone who embodies that especially if it's in the zone of proximal development it's it's um it's something they could achieve stretching a bit they find someone who embodies that next stage of development and then they start to imitate them and act like them well we're adults are no different we're no different we're just we do it at a perhaps more abstract and sophisticated level so okay so Jacob and Esau are hostile brothers there they're like Cain and Abel except the mixture of Cain and Abel and they're very different Esau was red and covered with hair he was a hunter and a man of the field so he's like your basic jock right he's extroverted he's outgoing he's really tough he's like extraordinarily masculine he hunts and he's a real favorite of his father and so and and Jacob isn't he's a dweller in tents and yeah right exactly exactly exactly right and it says Isaac loved Esau but Rebekah loved Jacob now that's a problem right that that's a big problem and that there's a Freudian element to this it's like this family is now divided because one child is the favorite of the mother and that's Jacob and one child is the favorite of the father and so Jacob is kind of a mother's boy I guess to use an rather archaic phrase and certainly not as admirable from his father's perspective as Esau who's a tough guy who goes out with a bow and arrow and like you know wanders around in the plains and brings animals home and and he's tough he's a tough guy so and but but there's this discord in the family because one parent prefers one child and the other parent prefers the other and it's obvious from the story that the parents do not communicate about this because they really take sides and so there's a split in the family and that's I think very realistic because one of the things that you do learn if you have a family and of course most of you do but if you also think about families is that there's there's deep divisions within families very very frequently that no one will ever talk about and or even think about often because it's too painful to think about you know and Freud himself said Freud was clearly his mother's favorite and the family sacrificed a lot including some of the potential ambitions of the other children in order to kind of put Sigmund Freud up on a pedestal and and advance his education and it worked I mean you know he turned into a great man but there was a cost to his siblings and Freud himself said that there was something about being the favorite of the mother that gave a person additional confidence throughout their life and you know there's there's something to be said about that even someone like Eric Erickson you know he noted that very interested in child development that that first bonding with the mother was the it was the place where trust was established maybe trust even in the goodness of existence was established and so anyways Jacob is Rachel's favorite and he saw his Isaac's favorite now he saw being extroverted let's say is also a bit impulsive and maybe he's not he's a man of action he's not a forward thinker and but he's also doing hard work and so you know he goes out and he's hunting and he's worn out and he comes home and he's faint with hunger and Jacob is at home cooking he's boiling up lentils red lentils and you know Esau comes in from the hunt and he's like half starved to death and he's sitting there in the aroma of these red lentils reaches them and he's exhausted and and and he tells Jacob that he wants some of this stew and Jacob who's being a pain in the neck fundamentally they basically says no there's a there's a teasing thing going on here and and we won't give him any and and and there's you have to imagine this because it's not laid out explicitly in the story but there's some dispute about whether Esau gets to have lunch and Jacob finally says well I'll give you some but you have to you have to give me your birthright and he saw you think he must say something like you know well to hell with it take it you know you son of a take it just give me some damn stew it's something like that so that's what happens but you know with these archaic people once he made a statement like that that was you were done that was it and so Esau sells his birthright and this turns out to be incredibly significant Manson who wrote biblical commentary said oh there's a bit of a twist to it so Esau eats the the red lentils and then from then on his name is red and you've got to use your imagine in a bit I mean people are making fun of him right that's why they're calling him red I mean he's already red because we established that but no one was calling him red before this and so for the rest of his life you know every time he goes out amongst his friends and family they call him red and sort of snicker because he's the you know half famished idiot who sold his birthright for a bowl of lentils and so it's it's not it's not that funny actually and so Esau is not happy about this and and it actually turns out that this so what does it mean it means don't sell the future for the desires of the present and don't be casual about what you have and then there's an archetypal element to this too and Benson says various have been the opinions what this birthright was which Esau sold but the most probable is that together with the right of sacrificing so determining what should be sacrificed and when and being the priest of the family it included the peculiar blessing promised to the seed of Abraham that of being the progenitor of the Messiah and the error of the special promises of God respecting Christ's Kingdom it was at least typical of spiritual privileges those of the firstborn that are written in heaven well that's a lot harsher than meets the eye to begin with and so there's a very interesting deep moral story there which is it's sort of Esau does the opposite of a sacrifice it's the reverse right he sacrifices the future for the present and so the story basically says the way it's laid out across stories is that if you're the sort of person that sacrifices the future to the present then that eradicate the possibility that you will bring the the most noble being into existence that's what it means and you can again this is the psychological significance of the biblical story so that's a bad thing to do if you want to realize your potential let's say you don't do reverse sacrifices that's a very bad idea and so Esau really did himself in by being too attached to the present without a vision of the future so he's - in the moment you know and and he pays a heavy price for it I mean he's the first of all he loses his birthright and and his double inheritance so there's a practical consequence and then there's a spiritual consequence and then he's well he's been made a fool of by his brother Jacob means supplanter by the way that's what the name means and Jacob is always trying to usurp Esau as we see and so Jacob gets one over on him and you know that's not doesn't make an older brother happy when a younger brother gets something over on him that's for sure and then he loses the opportunity to be the progenitor of the Messiah which is like people already didn't realize that precisely but it seems to be you know it's kind of rough that so and then there's there's a statement in Matthew 16:26 for what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul or what shall a man give in exchange for a saw it's an echo of the same idea you know when you think well what is this idea of soul mean and it's not intellect it said it's something like it's something like consciousness allied with character I think and I think the reason that it's valued so much is that because you got to ask yourself well what do you really have when it comes down to it so life is suffering let's say and you know you can you can pile up worldly goods and the God in the Old Testament doesn't seem to have anything against that really right the people who he favors seem to prosper quite nicely in the world but they also have to make a choice between whether they're going to fundamentally sustain their character or whether they're going to prosper in the world when push comes to shove and the idea constantly is that really what you have in the world that allows you the best possible defense against the suffering that's intrinsic to being is your character that's what you have period and I don't think there is anything that's more psychologically true than that you know because everything else well first of all your relationships with others depend on your character and certainly this is part of the story of Noah's Ark you know because his generations were perfect so he had a very tight familial arrangement everyone trusted each other that's a big deal if you hit a rocky patch in your life right and it's character that it's character that determines that you know if you're generous and honor and all of those things and people know they can rely on you assuming they're not resentful that's a whole different story then they're gonna come to your aid when when it's necessary they're gonna pull together with you and you know when people are really after you for one reason or another and they're accusing you of all sorts of things and you're guilty because you you have a past it's laden with characterological errors then it's very easy for people to take you down because they'll poke until they hit a place where you're guilty and then you're done because you'll do yourself in with your own judgment and so well so ESO makes a very big mistake and there's a sacrificial idea here too which is you know now and then you're going to be faced with a situation where it's something you really want or your character maybe you'll have to lie about something you know and you'll think what difference does it make you know a lie about it Jacob does this but the problem there's a bunch of problems with that one is that well now you know that you're the sort of person that will in fact deceive yourself about the nature of reality if something shiny is dangled in front of you and that's not good because it undermines your faith in yourself and when you're really in trouble they call that the dark night of the soul when you're really in trouble that's what you've got you've got whether or not you can trust yourself and that's it you know when things are really harsh and so if you've betrayed yourself in that manner then you weaken yourself under the worst possible circumstances and that's just that's really not a good thing so this is very practical advice it's not casual moralizing there's very little casual moralizing in these stories in the next part of this story there's some parallels with Abraham and that's built into the narrative I think because Isaac is Abraham's descendants and so we have to keep the narrative echoing forward otherwise it loses its its continuity and there's a famine in the land that Isaac sin and God tells him to stay the course anyways repeating the promise he he gave to Abraham although Isaac goes to AB Emelec also telling the King and people that Rebecca was his sister exactly what Abraham did when he went to Egypt and so there's another echo there of the same the same it's as if the story is being told for a second time essentially and that's supposed to remind you of the of the previous story but they're careless the King sees that Rebekah and Isaac are intimate together and luckily he doesn't have them put to death he just tells everybody in the kingdom that they're to be left the hell alone and then Isaac prospers in that land just like Abraham did in Egypt until the Philistines asked him to leave he's just getting too rich and powerful things are going too well for him so he's asked to he's asked to leave now in the meantime Esau gets married Hannah this is a funny little story he says he marries two women who give grief to Isaac and Rebekah so they who every so marries they're not popular with his with their in-laws not in the least that actually becomes relevant a little later because they drive Rebekah quite mad so I get a kick out of that because that's very common you know it's not easy to integrate new people into your family and and hope that that will go smoothly it's actually one of the real catastrophes in life right you have a kid maybe you get along with them and maybe you don't but let's assume you do but then they marry someone that you just don't like and or maybe you think is wrong for them I mean that's really rough that's what are you gonna do about that you know because you're you're basically screwed both ways if you have the person you love around then you have to put up with this Prentis creature that they allied themselves with and if you if you get rid of them completely well then you know you don't have your child anymore so it's a very very difficult position and so that's another example of the realism I think of the stories now Isaac who's hypothetically on his deathbed asks Esau to hunt for venison because he likes venison and he's happy that his son is a hunter and Rebekah over here is this and so she conspires with Jacob to to slaughter two small goats and make his father some stew because he wants Esau to make him stew out of venison but Rebecca who's being I would say let's say slightly deceitful or probably lying that would be more accurate she conspires with Jacob so Jacob kills two little goats kids and boils up a stew and then he puts on some goat skins because Esau is a hairy character and and Rebecca dresses Isaac in Esau is clothing because Isaac can't see very well at this point and so then Jacob goes into his father with the stew and he's trying to disguise his voice but it doesn't work very well and so Isaac asks him to come close and Jacob puts out his arm with the goat skin on it and and Isaac smells him too and he smells like he's oh and which maybe wasn't the best thing but and feels like him and and so because Isaac thinks he's on his deathbed he decides to deliver a blessing - hypothetically - Esau and so but it's Jacob and so that's a big deal - because the blessing is actually as I said before with these ancient people it appeared as though once you said something you didn't get to take it back you couldn't say well look you've you deceived me so it doesn't count it was like they weren't maybe as as what week might be one way of thinking about it but another way is they weren't quite as attentive to context you know because if I make you a deal and then it turns out that you've betrayed me I may feel that the deal is no longer valid because the assumption was you were being honest to be giveth in that you know violates the whole spirit but that isn't how these people thought they said once he promised man you promised and that was that so Isaac blessed Jacob he says that God give you the dew of heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of corn and wine let let people serve you and nations bow down to you be lord over thy brethren that's gonna be rough on e so let thy mother's sons bow down to the cursed be everyone that curseth thee and blessed be he the blesseth thee and so there's a quite a remarkable painting of that so there's Rebekah she's looking pretty old and Isaac's looking pretty blind and Jacobs taking directions from his mother and we might say he's perhaps a little old to be taking moral lessons from his mother especially given how she's acting and so it's a pretty ugly scene altogether especially that we also know that Jacob already tricked Esau out of his birthright and so now he's like taking the birthright and he's taken the blessing and so as I said that Jacob he turns out to be the father of Israel it's like he's a reprehensible character these are major-league betrayals that he's engaging and it's not trivial he really really pulls the rug out from under his brother and you know you could say well Esau is not as awake as he might be you know he's kind of a wild man and fair enough but it certainly seems to me that the the predominant moral error falls on Jacobs shoulders it's very treacherous behavior what he's doing so then he saw shows up and he's got a nice stag for his dad and it's like little late for that and he states that his brother was rightly named Jacob which means supplanter because he's been deceived twice and Isaac says Isaac answered he's asking funny I was asking fundamentally if there's anything at all left over for him and Isaac can't give him the same blessing because that's already been given so he has to think of something else and Isaac says behold I've made him thy Lord and all his brothers I've given to him for servants which includes you and with corn and wine have I sustained him and what shall I now do unto thee my son and Esau said unto his father have you even one blessing for me my father and blessed me also and an e so lifted up his voice and wept and you know we already know that Esau is a pretty tough guy by all appearances and you know he's out there hunting on his own and camping and it's like he's no pushover and the fact that this reduces him to tears is an indication of the magnitude of the betrayal and Isaac says behold thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth and of the dew of heaven from above and by thy sword thou shalt live and thou shalt serve your brother and it shall come to pass when you will have the Dominion and you'll break the yoke his yoke off from thy neck and Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his father blessed him and Esau said in his heart the days of mourning for my father are at hand then I will slay my Jakub so fundamentally you know if Isaac dies or when he dies then we'll mourn for him and then Jacob better look the hell out because it's like it's it's serious death coming his way and you know he's got a he's got a point he's in in Dante's Inferno I think I mentioned this at one point so Dante's Inferno it's a very interesting story it's a descent into hell and it's it's actually one of the places that we sort of derive the popular conception of Hell was partly based on Dante's on Dante's imagination on his work and what Dante was trying to do was to discover the hierarchical structure of evil and you know you might think there's a hierarchical structure of good some things are better than other things but there's also a hierarchical structure of evil some evils are greater than other evils and he put betrayal in the in the in the lowest part of health right so if you were betraying people you were right besides Satan himself and so and I think that's good that's very smart well Dante was a genius after all and I think the reason for that is that you see if someone trusts you they're laying their vulnerability open to you now they might just be naive let's say and that's we won't think about that because you're just a child if you're naive you can still be betrayed but if you're an adult and you trust it's often because you if you're an actual adult its you willingly open yourself up knowing that you could be hurt right because you're not naive anymore so you decide to trust and you see all open myself up and I know that I'm laying myself open to you if you choose to use that power and then that's a good thing to know you know if you've been hurt as a child or hurt as a naive person you might say well why should I ever trust again which is a really good question and the answer is the reason you trust again once you're an adult is because you're courageous you're courageous it's an act of courage to trust and the reason it's useful is because if you trust someone you open the door to reciprocity and negotiation and cooperation and you entice the best part of the person forward and so it's a it's a courageous act but then if you betray someone then what you've done is you've taken the best part them which is the part that will courageously trust you know with open eyes right and you've stuck a dagger in that and so you've purposefully damaged the best part of them and so that's why it's such a egregious fault and and it's often people don't recover from that sort of playing at you if you betray someone badly enough you can you can damage them like you can give them post-traumatic stress disorder if you really if you really put your mind to it and you know that's not just a psychological disorder if you have post-traumatic stress disorder it produces permanent neurological alterations that make you more neurotic more sensitive to negative emotion really for the rest of your life like you can you can recover from it to some degree but stress will tend to reinstate the PTSD so you you hurt someone and it's not merely cycled not not that psychological is merely but it's not merely psychological right it's it's fundamental physiological damage so anyways Jacobs smart enough to get out of there and which is also not really a testament to his integrity right I mean he's done these terrible things at the behest of his mother because he wants power and and he wants to get it without deserving it and then you know he finally goes too far and he hightailed it out of there to his to another family member to his mother's brother and so it's not exactly the world's most heroic story that's for sure and so now there's an interlude here and this is a really interesting interlude it's the story of Jacob's Ladder so he's off to visit Lebon or lab and who's his his mother's brother and on the way he he has asleep and he lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all night because the Sun was set and he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows which seems to indicate very bad planning on on his part and and lay down in that place to sleep and he dreamed and beheld a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven and beheld the angels of God ascending and descending on it and behold the Lord stood above it and said I am the Lord God of Abraham thy far and the guard of Isaac the land were on thou liest to thee I will give it and to thy seed and so this story of Jacob's Ladder has really possessed the imagination of the West and there's a reason for that it's because it's an archetypal story because the idea of a ladder that reaches to heaven is one of the oldest ideas of mankind so you find it widely distributed among the shamanic cultures for example and it's a hallmark of psychedelic experience that's another way of thinking about it which is a very peculiar thing so there's one representation of of the ladder you see god up at the top there peeking out from the clouds now you know that's sort of where we get the idea that God is in in heaven and then heavens up in the sky and and that's an easy story to make fun of because you know we've gone up to the moon and there's no God there and and but but this this is not a reasonable way of conceptualizing what these experiences are about these experiences what this is the opening up there that's more like an opening into an alternate dimension that's a better way of thinking about it's beyond like from from the judeo-christian perspective one of the things you have to understand is that God is beyond space and time he's not in the universe he's outside the universe in some manner and so the idea that that you have an experience of God and it's up isn't the OP is the best that the human imagination can do with what's essentially a form of extra dimensional experience or that's the best way to conceptualize it and these experiences aren't rare you know they they make the they make up the core of of the shamanic tradition and so there's an intrusion of the ancient shamanic tradition which is tens of thousands of years old into the biblical stories at this point now why Jacob had a essentially shamanic experience is very difficult to tell because we don't know what these old people were up to right and we don't know how much of the archaic tradition archaic religious tradition was still extant about at that point in time but we certainly do know that our ancient forebears were using psychedelic substances constantly like Amanita muscaria mushrooms for example which were widely used in India before they became extinct that's the theory anyways that seemed to be the basis of the chemical soma which much has been written about and so we here ever this as a dream that were as a vision and perhaps that's what it was but perhaps that wasn't what it was either and perhaps it was an experience that was induced by or by the same processes that shamanic people have always induced these experiences and so we're gonna go through this a little bit so anyways there's a there's a connection between heaven and earth that opens up that's that's that's the that's the vision and there's messengers moving up and down now one way you can conceptualize that is psychologically as we already discussed that you know there there are forces within you that are active and alive and you can think of them in some sense as messengers of the higher self and so you could think about this as an image of a psychological reality but and so we can stick with that but but here's some of the representations that have been made I really like the one on the right that's William Blake I like the helix idea and I don't think that that's that's fluke there are helixes and double helixes and all sorts of imaging imagery very ancient and very modern that are associated with both healing and with this kind of vision so and you see it in the Blake representation God is associated with well really with the Sun and with light and and you see that on the left as well that wherever God is is where light is and so that's a very interesting idea as far as I'm concerned as well there's some other representations one by Chanel so now there's this idea that there's a there's the possibility of opening up a line of communication between the human psyche and the transcendent divine and there's a there's a great image of Christ as Pam - they're so creator of the world that is one of the first mosaics if I remember correctly and I wish I knew remember where it was but I don't but it's a very interesting image I'm having a carving of it made at the moment by a friend of mine but you see Christ's face portrayed in a medieval manner and he's holding a book so it symbolizes the importance of the book you know as a means of transmitting wisdom and his face is very asymmetrical and that the eyes are different one side and the other and one half of the face represents the human part and the other side of the face represents the divine part and you know I also think about that psychologically because I do think that that's the right way to conceptualize human beings is that there's an aspect of us that's mortal and human and limited but there's an aspect of us that's transcendent and divine as well and it's latent in some sense but there are times when it manifests itself and this is not speculation right this is like the oldest experience of human beings now it's not necessarily an easy experience to have but it's reported everywhere and it can be reliably induced as we've discussed before by chemical means which and I don't know what that means exactly we've talked a little bit about psilocybin mushrooms for example and you could say that the mystical experiences that have been invoked in the newest experiments down it Johns Hopkins are arrangements or forms of psychosis you know because they have some similarity to psycho psychotic experiences although psychotic people were given LSD in the 60s and they always said that that was something different than what they were having and if you give psychotic people amphetamines you could make them worse so their bio chemically separate and we know that and but also the thing that's so interesting about the psilocybin experience is is that they reliably produce mystical experiences that the people rate as among the most important experiences of their life and among those who have the psychedelic experience positive things happen to them and so that kind of messes with the whole psychosis theory right because what are you gonna do you got a claim that you give someone a pill and they have a psychotic break and then they're healthier it's like no that isn't how psychotic breaks work you're not healthy or after having one you're like you're a broken egg and it's not easy to put you back together so and we know that people all over the world have discovered every manner of psychedelic substance that you could possibly while you imagine there's lots of hungry people wandering the earth for a long time and they eat every damn thing they could get their hands on and now and then something very peculiar happened as a consequence so so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the shamanic tradition because it's associated with Jacob's Ladder so according to le a de murcia le odd it was a great historian of religion a comparative Jung's and and and they influenced each other quite substantially le otta believed that shamanism that used psychedelics was a degeneration from the original more pure shamanism but I think later scholarship has demonstrated that that's incorrect that that the shamanic ritual per se was a direct consequence of the use discovery of an and ritualistic use of psychedelic substances but anyways Eliana identified three pathways to shamanism and the shaman in it in a tribe was more educated than the typical person with a larger vocabulary and was the repository of the oral tradition and so learned all the stories that had been passed down word to mouth and people by the way are very very can very very accurately tell the same story across generations that's been quite well documented so and and people who can't read really can remember because what else are they going to do their memories are far greater than modern people's memories because we can forget everything because we can just look it up but they remembered things because they had no choice my father knew someone who was illiterate and and and and couldn't use numbers either when he grew up in Saskatchewan you know sixty years ago and he was a he had a sheep if I remember correctly and although he couldn't count he knew if one of his sheep was missing because he knew all the sheep and so he could tell just by looking if one of the sheep was missing but he couldn't count and so well so people who don't have our particular set of skills first of all they're not stupid and second they have other skills that we don't understand to fill in the gaps so le ah de identified spontaneous vocation so you were just you have this spirit of a shaman let's say so you're probably extremely high in openness let's say from a modern perspective hereditary transmission so you know your father was a shaman and your grandfather was a shaman and so forth and you got initiated into that process or a personal quest in Siberia this is from Ileana in Siberia the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior for example he seeks solitude becomes absent-minded loves to roam in the woods or unfrequented places has visions and sings in his sleep you know if you put someone in a place that's deprived that's where you're you're deprived from a sensory perspective it normal people will hallucinate quite quickly so it seems what happens is that if you dampen down the sensory input then you start to become aware of the background processes of your mind it's something like that it's like the signal-to-noise ratio I got to get this right as the noise decreases some of the noise becomes signal the background noise become signal and you start to become aware of your own internal psychological process is it something like that he has visions and sings in his sleep in some instances this period of incubation is marked by quite serious symptoms among the accout young man sometimes has fits of fury and easily loses consciousness hides in the forest feeds on the bark of trees throws himself into water and fire and cuts themselves with knives we went to a part lash in northern northern Vancouver Island about a year ago and they had this one dance it was the croc Wakulla natives and they had this interesting dance that was the dance of the wild man and so the person who invited us was the wild man and he was dressed up and in tree branches and so forth and so he was the person who'd been in Bush too long and he came in as a cannibal and there there was genuine cannibalistic rights among these people not so long ago he came in as a cannibal and everybody had to wear this like cedar headdress because if you had a cedar headdress on then the cannibal wouldn't take a bite out of you and they actually took this rather seriously so you should have your cedar headdress on and so he's looking around the crowd and there's like 400 people in this place and he could really act - so he's doing this wild man dance and then all the women stood up and started to kind of dance in place and sing and they were taming him so that was really cool you know it was really interesting to see that because those people are about they've had an unbroken culture for about 13,000 years say that's how long they've been out there and it was very interesting to see that dramatization of the domestication of of man by women laid out in that dance in that way but it was also interesting in relationship to the shamanic tradition because he came in as a wild man right and he had to be re civilized in some sense and brought back down to earth so but by whatever method he may have been designated as shaman is recognized as such only after having received two methods of instruction the first is ecstatic dreams trances visions the other thing that this guy told me and I have no reason to doubt him he's also not a literate person and so has a great memory he does carving traditional carving and he's very good at it he carved a 53-foot totem pole that's now in front of the Museum of Art in downtown Montreal so if you ever go there you can go see it I won't be there forever but it's there right now and he was taught to carve by his grandparents and he said that he dreamed in you know you know what the Haida images look like so the Crocker walks are kind of like the high that same sort of imagery he told me that he dreamed in those images so when he dreams that's the form that the things he dreams about takes and he also said that he would talk to his grandparents in his dream so if he was working on a piece of wood and trying to figure out how to carve it and he ran into a particularly difficult problem he'd dream and his great he'd have a conversation with his grandparents and they'd help him figure to solve the problem and then he wake up and he could go Karva and the thing is he told me these things sort of matter-of-factly right like you don't you know what I mean it wasn't like he was telling me these weird things that happened to him although he was doing that to some degree he I asked him a lot of questions about what he carved and what it all meant and you know that was just part of his explanation of how he did it and he he carved me a couple of doors that I have in my house and one of them is quite interesting well the to make a panel and they're an underwater scene and under the water there's a bunch of you know mythical monsters some of them are killer whales and I think there's an octopus down there and carved in this particular style and he said that the other thing that happens to him when he dreams is he goes down to the bottom of the water where these mythical creatures are and he gets inspiration from them and so I thought that was extremely interesting too you know we we don't know what a mind that isn't hyper civilized let's say hyper literate like like our minds are cuz we're so bombarded by external stimuli we have no idea what the natural mind is like really and so it was quite interesting to to to listen to that and also to see the consequences cuz he's quite a great he's quite a great carver so the first is ecstatic dreams trances visions the second is traditional shamanic techniques names and functions of the spirits mythology and genealogy of the clan a secret language this twofold teaching imparted by the spirits and the old master shamans constitutes initiation well so you know modern people have a problem with that because we don't really get initiated but I would say that you know let's say that we reach out a quest of some sort you wouldn't be here I don't think if you weren't because why else would you be here and so you're on a quest of some sort to figure out to struggle with the meaning of life let's say and you don't want to do that alone because you only last like 70 years and good luck figuring it out on your on your own it's just not gonna happen it's too complicated and you'll be too isolated right if it's just you that's insanity that's no one can stand that and so you hope that other people have things to tell you and that your culture has something to tell you you know so you're on a quest maybe not with the same intensity as a shamanic initiate but you know let's give you some credit and then you're also trying to understand the wisdom of the past and that's the second part of this it's like okay well you're a human being and human beings have been telling stories for a long period of time trying to figure out what's going on trying to figure out how to orient themselves in the world and so you know partly what you're doing here is exactly what the shamanic initiatives in the second part of the process which is to expose yourself to the degree that you can - names and functions of the spirits mythology and genealogy of the clan and the secret language this twofold teaching imparted by the spirits and the old master shamans constitutes initiation so it's that's the rebirth right yeah that's that's what a nation is it's being born again and and that's a birth of the spirit rather than over the body it's something like that and so it's the rebirth of an integrated psyche that's one way of thinking about it and a psyche that's that's individual but also grounded in common humanity and the wisdom of common humanity and that makes you strong or at least it makes you stronger because there's a limit to your strength but God Only Knows to some degree what that limit is you know people can be unbelievably tough unbelievably tough and I think it's even the more admirable for human beings to be tough because we're so conscious of how we can be hurt and we're so conscious of what that hurt can lead to you know you can have your family taken away from you and you can be destroyed and the fact that you can be courageous in the face of that at all is something that is absolutely unbelievable right and people deserve a lot more credit I think then people give themselves because the fact that we can be honorable under conditions of life and death right of suffering that's that's a testament to the human spirit and there's a profound anti human ethos I think that pervades our culture you know that considers human beings cancers on the planet something like that you know and that there should be less of us it's the same spirit that motivated the guy who wrote the book about it better to have never been it's like I don't see it that way you know I mean I think people do pretty well for you know for having their leg caught in a bear trap and their head caught in a vise they're actually doing pretty well because life is really hard and the fact that we're not absolutely brutal and murderous all the time is really something remarkable given what we actually have to contend with that we can go out of our way to be honest and generous and altruistic and to care for each other under unbelievably dire circumstances and to act nobly sometimes under the most trying conditions you know in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago he tells story after story of people who acted abysmally but also people who under the worst threats imaginable never sacrificed their character you know in reading about that is really well it really makes you wonder that's that's what it does the future shamans among the Tungus as they approach maturity go through a hysterical or a history would crisis but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age the boy runs away into the mountains and remains there for a week or more feeding on animals which he tears to pieces with his teeth he returns to the village filthy blood-stained and it's only after 10 or more days that have passed that he begins to babble incoherent words the strange behavior of future shamans has not failed to attract the attention of scholars and from the middle of the past century several attempts have been made to explain the phenomena as a mental disorder but the problem was wrongly put from the one hand it is not true that shamans always are always have to be neuropathic in mentally deranged on the other hand and this is the critical issue those among them who had been ill become shamans precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cured so it was it's not the descent into this strange subterranean psychological state that constitutes the transformation that makes the shaman but it's the emergence back out of it and that's a journey to the underworld in a and a rebirth right and so and there's this great book this is a great book by a guy named Henry Ellen birch a and he was an existential psychoanalyst and philosopher and he wrote a book called the Discoverer of the unconscious which I would highly recommend it's on my list of recommended readings it is a great book if you want to know about the psychoanalytic tradition it's the best introduction there is and he discusses Adler and Jung and Freud and there's a very credible job of all three but also takes the history of psychoanalytic thought back three or four hundred years before Freud and so it's it's very engaging reading and and and and very interesting and one of the things alan burridge a points out quite clearly is and he associates this to some degree with this shamanic tradition that both Freud and Jung Jung in particular underwent very intense periods of psychological disturbance let's say and I would say what was happening is that because they were questioning their axioms at the most fundamental level they were deranging their cognitive and perceptual structures right and Jung was also experimenting with imaginative techniques with visionary techniques which he which he did a lot and there is a period of his life where he was having constant a constant stream of visions which he wrote down in a book called the red book but at the same time he was still functioning as a psychiatrist and operating normally in the world and so you know people have suggested that what he had was a psychotic break but that's ridiculous because you don't know that's not how it works man if you're having a psychotic break you you know I've been an effective psychiatrist those things do not go together especially not for a long period of time and so there there's the possibility of extreme experience without psycho psychopathology and so and Allen Burgess he says much the same thing about Freud and about Charles Darwin as well who underwent a terrible period of of mental confusion I would say as a consequence of formulating his theory of evolution which was really hard on him because he was a he was a die-hard Christian and he knew what he knew what the implications of his theory word he didn't know what to do about that you know so it was very very hard on him so it's quite common for people of genius to go through an intense crisis psychological crisis but then resolve it and the genius is in the resolution right the precondition for the genius is the dissolution in some sense because you have to be obsessed with the problem it has to grip you completely before you're going to concentrate it on it's so obsessively that you might come up with a solution but it's the people who come up with a solution that are the prophets in the shaman and so forth and so on and and and so that's not this isn't something that only characterizes archaic cultures we just don't recognize it in our own culture properly and and that's a problem well sometimes we do right you remember that in the Lion King right that Rafiki shows up he's the shaman he brings he brings Simba down that tunnel dark tunnel that's the dark night of the soul he has him reflect upon himself in a pool when he reflects upon himself deeply he sees the reflection of his father then that becomes a car thing of cosmic significance and his father appears in the sky just like God appears to jacob and basically tells them that it's time for him to grow the hell up and to return to the devastated kingdom and to set it right you know and so and that's right that's exactly right I mean we live in the devastated Kingdom that's an eternal truth and it's the responsibility of the individual to grow the hell up and to set it right because when it's devastated and when things are not in place then everyone suffers too much and that's not good and there's no excuse for not doing something about it because you don't have anything better to do so and even like children's movies tell you this so [Music] this is a fun one this is from the Eid wine Psalter 9th to 12th century and that's Adam and Eve but the there is speculation that the fruit that they're eating there you see it is psilocybin mushrooms right because they're the only kind of mushroom that grow like that so that's pretty wild you might say and then this is the I think it's called Bannister realign if I remember correctly and it's what ayahuasca is made out of and it has this double helix form which is very very interesting and they the people the natives nobody could figure out how the hell they made this ayahuasca we which transports people spiritually in a very intense manner and there's a whole religion based on it like a modern religion as well as the archaic religion and to make this stuff they had to take two plants that don't grow anywhere near each other and like there's like a million plants in the Amazon so like how do you figure that out nobody knows and then you have to cook them in this very particular way for a particular amount of time before you produce this stuff so one of the plants has DMT in it which is a very intense psychedelic but it's very short acting and the other has an MAO inhibitor so if you take the DMT and you take the MAO inhibitor then the DMT trip lasts for much longer and so that's what these Amazonian natives figured out and no one has any idea how they managed it and if you ask them they tell you that the plants told them how to do it which isn't much of an explanation as far as modern people are concerned but then when modern people take the ayahuasca and the plant so to speak starts to talk to them there are a little less leery of the whole theory that the plants had something to do with this so you know and these things that these I'm loathe to talk about this because I'm not an advocate for drug use but by the same token you can't ignore empirical data it's not reasonable and the empirical data that psychedelic substances can produce mystical experiences and that those often have a transformative effect I mean one of the latest studies showed that if you took people who are dying of cancer and you and you gave them psilocybin in a sufficient dose to produce a mystical experience that you radically it decreased their their fear of death it's like you go to think about that man that's that's tough that's a tough experiment you you just wouldn't expect that that you think you take someone you'd arranged them intensely and then when they come back they're not even though they're dying they're not nearly as afraid of dying you know you got to kind of wake up and smell the roses when you see something like that and the people who are doing this research are very reliable people so there's the Amanita muscaria you know there's this old idea it's quite a funny idea toadstools so flies like Amanita muscaria and there's some this is ridiculous there's some evidence that they actually like getting stoned so cuz animals will eat these like reindeer will eat these things too and they get pretty tripped out by them and so I have this book on psychedelic use among animals which is a small book but and so so there's there's this idea that toads used to sit around the they have any NamUs carry and wait for the stone flies to like buzz badly around them and then snap them up so that's pretty funny I think and so and you know there are mushrooms in in the u.s. that are the oldest the oldest organisms on the planet a there's one mushroom I can't remember where it is but it covers something like oh god I don't know like square hundreds of square miles it's like this huge thing because it's all underground right and they have these very complex networks of my Celia they're called and they think the thing is like a hundred and fifty thousand years old something like that so there's plenty of things about the world that we don't know that's for sure there's the chemical makeup of the classic psychedelics you see they all have the same fundamental structure this is serotonin that's the one of the major brain neurotransmitters and so what happens with the psychedelics is that they they alter the they alter the brain function by altering the neuro chemical utilization of serotonin they changed the manner in which the serotonergic systems worked and the serotonin system is very basic system because when you're an embryo and your brain is developing it's the serotonin projections that basically orchestrate the development of your brain so they're and they're very archaic circuits very very archaic circuits so and this is the paper I think I stole this from psilocybin Griffiths who's been doing a lot of this research psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance so why that's a good question right like so so here's a question for you it is beyond dispute that human beings are capable of religious experience why why is that exactly and like you can associate it with psychosis but that doesn't work if the theory doesn't hold theory hold water it's not the same thing so why is it there exactly and it's not an easy thing to figure out like I've been trying to figure I'm always trying to figure out a biological explanation for everything right because if you want to find something to stand on you want to make sure that it can resist a challenge and so if I can find an explanation for something that's reductionistic and materialistic and biological then I'm going for that that's a tough one consciousness is a tough one the moral sense is a tough one they're not easy things to crack the Big Bang is a tough one so you know I mean a cynic might say that maybe sometimes when people are close to suicide they'll have a mystical experience you know and you maybe you say well it's a last-ditch attempt of your brain to delude you into thinking that your life has some significance you know and that's a plausible theory but I don't think it counts for the generality of the phenomena so so I don't buy it what happens in the shamanic experience is that the shaman has the experience of being reduced to a skeleton first so death a deaf experience very realistic death experience and then the next thing that happens is that he finds himself in a place where he's communing with his ancestor or the ancestral spirits and then after that there's the climbing of something like the ladder Jacob's Ladder se and an encounter with God for all intents and purposes and it's very widespread phenomena it's the World Tree and I've thought about this a lot trying to figure out what this what this represents according to a yeah coot informant that's in Siberia the spirits carry the future shaman to hell and shut him in a house for three years here he undergoes his initiation the spirits cut off his head which they set off to one side for the novice must watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes dissolution to the primary elements in some and hack his body to bits which are later distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses it's only on this condition that the future shaman will obtain the power of healing his bones are then covered with new flesh and in some case he is also given new blood so there's a death and resurrection experience that's associated with the shamanic ritual we're here in the presence of a very ancient religious idea which belongs to the hunter culture bone symbolizes the final route of animal life the mould from which the flesh continually rises it is from the bone that men and animals are reborn for a time they maintain themselves in an existence of the flesh then they die and their life is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton from which they will be born again that's a good graphic representation of the experience that's an old painting by I think it's her own amis Bosch if I remember correctly and I really like that because it's it's reminiscent of the near-death experiences that you hear people describe and they're quite common as well and and I had that very weird experience once I don't think I've told you this story I was I was assessing someone who had gone through a car windshield and he was very depressed it had happened a long time before but he was very depressed and the insurance company was basically accusing him of malingering because he'd been depressed for so long and you know he'd sort of healed up and everything but if your left hemisphere is damaged especially the frontal part of your left hemisphere then you can be in a chronic state of depression because the left hemisphere generally speaking is responsible for positive emotion and so if it isn't there then it's like negative emotion for you and so I wouldn't assess him and I was giving him this I think it was called the MMPI the Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory which is a kind of a standard path personality test half psychopathology test and he was filling it out he was a very serious guy middle-aged guy nothing about him was new agey in the least he was like an accountant I think I think in fact he was an accountant if I remember correctly and there was one question and it said my spirit has left my I think that's right it's very close and he stopped and he asked me well he said I'm not sure how to answer this and so I said well why and he said well after I went through the car windshield I was in a coma for three weeks something like that and I died I think he said he died three times and he said that he could remember he couldn't remember anything during that period of time and he couldn't remember the car accident that's retrograde amnesia it's quite corn common with head injuries and he said that during one of those experiences and this is all he remembered from the hospital was that he came out of his body and went down the long tunnel of light you've heard these near-death experiences and then saw his family members there and saw the heavenly light and then realized that it wasn't his time and came back to his body now what was interesting about this guy was that well first of all I didn't ask him about this right he basically volunteered this story and it was instigated by this question and and he didn't know that anybody else at any ever had an experience like that cuz I asked him if he'd ever heard anything about like that he said no so that was interesting but what really was interesting is how the hell did he remember that right because he had amnesia during that entire period of time he was in a bloody coma so he didn't remember anything they remembered that and so well those experiences are more common than you think and then there's a you know there's a painting of one which is quite interesting and that's like a tunnel to heaven it's the same basic idea it's a little bit more suffering going on in this one I think but that's pretty much typical of Hieronymous Bosch I mean I don't know what was up with that guy but he was he was one strange character now the Scandinavians have this idea that the world is a tree and I've been thinking about that a lot I think that the tree idea tree is something that is grounded in in matter let's say and that reaches up to heaven in the Scandinavian tree at the bottom there's quite a cool idea at the bottom of that see this tree is constantly being gnawed by snakes you can sort of see the snakes at the bottom and at the same time it's being watered and the water makes the tree grow at the same rate that the snakes gnaw on its roots so it's like a yin-yang idea you know that there's continual chaotic destruction and replacement at the basis of whatever this process is but the tree seems to me to be a representation not so much of its it's like a different dimensional space that's that's what's trying to be represented so imagine that you know you're structured if you take powers of ten magnification say human beings are about in the middle of the tiniest thing and the largest thing if you do it by my powers of 10 and so you know you have a subatomic level in an atomic level a molecular level and you know then that may be a level of organs and then there's you and then there's your family and so on all the way up the the tree fundamentally and so I think that what this tree represents and this is the things that thing that the shaman moves up and down I think that's what it represents it's this it's this different view of of its dimensionality it's something like that and I think that what happens in the psychedelic experience is that consciousness can travel up and down that structure it's something like that and maybe not only up and down it but maybe right through it and I know that's a radical claim it's a really radical claim and it might be wrong but it's probably wrong even because most radical claims are wrong but but but I'm not so sure it's wrong and here's something cool so that's the Scandinavian world tree and that was drawn by an anthropologist who visited the tribes in the Amazon who use ayahuasca now you see it's a snake it's a tree with snakes well you know that's reminiscent of the story in Adam and Eve obviously but it's also reminiscent of our primate dwelling place right because that was basically our ancestral home a tree surrounded by snakes and the snakes like to eat us and this is a long time ago this is like 50 million years ago it's really a long time ago and so we don't know where these images come from precisely but I do have the suspicion that we use the circuitry that we developed to detect snakes to represent the unknown as such because like a snake is something that comes out of the unknown and like we evolved right we all evolved out of an animal sub structure and so we had to get our our biological cognitive structure from somewhere and we have this capacity of thinking about the absolute unknown and the terrors that are involved in that that the horrors that can emerge from what we don't understand and it stands perfectly to reason that we would use circuits that were already pre developed for that and that this is a reasonable representation of the existential structure of the world so I think I might have showed you this before but it never ceases to amaze me this this picture so my son drew this when he was nine eight and so on the right you see mushroom houses and they have the names of all his friends on them and so that's order right and then on the left side you see chaos there and that little orange thing is a bug and then there's a river that runs right down the middle and so that's like the you know the yin-yang symbol with the divide in the middle that's quite cool and then there's there it is there's Jacob's Ladder it's like Jack and the Beanstalk which is by the way another variant of the same shamanic story and there are bugs going up and down it they're taking messages from heaven and then up there in heaven it's got the Sun and there's st. Peter and I don't know where in the world he got this it's not like he had a lot of religious education I mean despite me and you know there's the pearly gates up there and then that was the world as far as his he had a very well ordered psyche I would say and and still does but when he drew that it just absolutely blew me away and so I had it laminated and it's in my office because well I don't know because like what the hell do you make of that you know that's that's why so well you sort of get the picture there you know the cathedrals the great cathedrals of Europe are there like the forests in stone right and they try to represent the light coming through the leaves and so it's sort of our ancestral forest home but it's it's transformed into these great sculptures of stone and you know they produce all because of the combination of light and darkness and color but also I think for the same reason that huge trees produce awe and people you know and we don't want them cut down they seem sacred in some sense and perhaps they are but you know it also seemed to me this is an intuition that the the architects of these great cathedrals were trying to get they're trying to express something that's deep and structural they're trying time trying to express the idea that if being was constituted properly then it would be organized from the subatomic level all the way up to the highest cosmic level perfectly so every layer stacked on top of each other without any contradictions now that would be an ideal mode of being and everything would come together under those circumstances and that's what's being expressed in these cathedrals it's not all that's being expressed because they're also shaped like a cross and you know the idea is that the center of the cross which is the center of suffering is also the place of the individual the place where the transformation takes place that's all built into the architect as well and so then there's the tree like structures that make us up it stretched down to the tiniest realities the microcosm and there's this this idea it's all represented in the same way again it's this idea especially the Mandela up in the top-right it's the idea of is perfection of crystalline structure and that's what the Yogi's are trying to attain when they organize their bodies they're trying to get every single layer of their being aligned properly and it's something like and you can kind of see an echo of that in the I think that's a Tibetan sand painting if I remember correctly left the idea is that if you get yourself a line properly then information can flow along that tree that that's you without without impediment something like that and that would be like a state of optimal health and that both physical and spiritual exercises can put you in that state and that's well those are all clouds of ideas that surround this idea of a ladder to heaven so Jacob is talking to God and God says behold I am with thee and I will keep thee in all places where you go and bring you again into this land for I won't leave you until I have done that which I have spoken to you of and Jacob awakened out of his sleep and he said surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not and he was afraid and said how dreadful is this place this is none other but the house of God and this is the gate of heaven when Jacob rose up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put for his pillows and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on top of it that's a sacrifice and he called the name of that place Bethel but the name of the city was called l-'izzat the first and Jacob vowed a vow saying if God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on so that I come again to my father's house in peace then shall the Lord be my god and this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house and of all of that that is given to me I will surely give the tenth unto thee and that's a pretty good place to stop so now I'll just conclude so you have this very morally ambivalent character right who's so far pretty much everything he's done that we're familiar with is not good so he's he's betrayed his brother horribly twice badly enough so that he his brother wants to kill him and everyone can kind of sympathize with his brother so and then he runs away essentially because his mother tells him to which is not exactly a testament to his character and despite that strangely enough he has this experience you know and that's heartening I guess and that's the point is that people are predisposed to terrible error there's no doubt about that and yet when I was writing my latest book I had a friend of mine Norman Doidge wrote the foreword and Norma's written a couple of great books and he's Jewish and he read some of what I'd written and he took me to task for making the god of the Old Testament you know from a Christian perspective too harsh and unforgiving and I rewrote a fair bit of it because of his criticism and because of what I've learned doing these lectures it's like it's not exactly right you know I mean what happens in the Old Testament is if you screw up especially if you know you do and you decide that you're not going to do anything about it so it's conscious and deliberate then like look the hell out you are in serious trouble and I actually think that's also psychologically accurate one of the things young pointed out and this always struck me was that if you don't know what you're doing this is actually in the Gospel of Thomas as well interestingly enough as one of the caustic Gospels Christ tells his followers something like if you make a mistake and you don't know what you're doing then you'll be forgiven for it but if you make a mistake knowing what you're doing and you do it anyways then like good luck to you and and and I think that's I think that's that's psychologically accurate I mean one of the things that's very interesting about the judgmental God in the Old Testament however is that he can be bargained with and even if you make mistakes especially if you're unconscious of them if you haven't learned yet let's say then you always have the opportunity to return to the proper path and that's people get cynical about that because there's no this mostly Christian idea that you could live a terribly sinful life but if you repented on your deathbed it's like heaven for you and it's like oh that's that sounds like a great deal right it's like you can do whatever the hell you want until just before you die of course you might not know when that is so that's a problem you then you can just say well I'm sorry and you know everything's forgiven but the problem with being cynical about that sort of thing is that it's no trivial matter to repent you know because to repent means a figure out what you actually did and the worst things that you did the more horrible it is to figure it out it's no joke right and there's no genuine repentance without understanding of the depth of your depravity and so if you lived a particularly reprehensible life and you come to understand it I think that in and of itself could kill you you know it's a terrible thing to wake up and see what you've done if what you've done is truly terrible so there's no easy out it's not an easy out it's it's just pure cynicism to associate that idea with with an easy oh it's not but there is that positive idea that it's continually represented is that the individual is the source of moral choice and the individual is prone to genuine error and temptation in a believable and realistic way but that that doesn't sever the relationship between the individual and the divine and the possibility of further growth and then I would say well thank God for that because without that like who would have a chance right who would have a chance and so the idea that the daddy has presented the infinite let's say as presented in the Old Testament is merely judgmental is definitely wrong and and is in fact something that you can contend with and Argan with oh I'll close with one thing one of the things that I learned that while I was going through this was the meaning of the name Israel because Jacob eventually gets named Israel and and I'm jumping ahead a little bit to the next lecture but Israel and so he's also the father of Israel and the father of the twelve sons who make up the twelve tribes of Israel but what Israel means is he who struggles with God and that's such an interesting idea because it's again a psychological idea and that's why I said earlier that it isn't obvious in the Old Testament what it means to believe in God because what Jacob does is struggle with God and I think that that's a really good characterization of an ethical life because if you're trying to lead an ethical life that's what you're doing is you're struggling like blind belief isn't helpful because you don't know what you're believing in like it's just not that helpful but if you're possessed by by the desire to orient yourself properly but also confused by the by the existential structure of the world which we all are then then what you're doing when you're trying to orient yourself properly in life is struggling ethically and Jacob actually gets quite hurt he wrestles with God literally and God dislocates his his his thigh and so you know the idea there is watch the hell out right the thing that you're contending with is powerful although you can contend with it that's the thing that's so interesting but you know you do it at some genuine peril which i think is exactly right but the idea that Israel so there's Israel the state let's say it Israel the promised land and all of that but there's this more important idea which is again a psychological idea which is the State of Israel which is the promised land is the state that everyone who wrestles with God exists in and that's not happy naive belief in you know an eternally blessed afterlife it's not that it's not a wish fulfillment it's it's it's to be actively engaged in life in the difficulties of life right and trying to find the path because that's what wrestling with God is is trying to find the path and that seems to me what belief means fundamentally in the Old Testament perhaps in the New Testament as well is that belief is expressed in trying to find the path and that's an ethical struggle and it's a real struggle it's the struggle of life so as long as you're willing to engage in that struggle then hypothetically you have the divine behind you and so I believe that I think that's true because the other thing I see is that the people who set things right so that yeah the the horrible forces of cosmic destruction don't do us in the people who are trying to set things right are the ones that are struggling ethically and so and that there is a redemptive element to that and I don't think there's any way of being cynical about that so well so thank you will [Applause] so remember to speak right into the mic because there are all these other people watching that will hear it will hear us so okay hi dr. Peterson so with the story of Jacob today there was a theme of betrayal and you can see that from the beginning because he was very angry and jealous at his brother I was thinking are there new stories or we can say about betrayal that does come from a loved one right where it's not from a place of so black and white of anger resentment and bitter and how do the parties kind of recover from that or is there any way to redeem that or is it as black and white as if you betray someone then there it's like Jacob where hatred no and in fact in this story it's not black and white because we know we're only halfway through it and one of the things I've noticed as a clinician let's say is that and as an observer of people in general is that I've never ever seen anyone get away with anything and Jacob doesn't get away with any of this and so you know he's humbled by his eventual experiences and he learns that he did it wrong and there's reconciliation that happens throughout the story of Jacob so and there's minor betrayals and major betrayals you know that some of them have tremendously serious consequences and some of them have lesser consequences but there is an underlying idea that things can still be set right even though it's well I think it takes Jacob some 20 years something like that to set things right and even then it's like touch and go so if I answer your question okay yeah hey you speak frequently in your lectures about I guess the war between good and evil or the struggle of life really is a struggle between good and evil being at the core of a conscious lived existence and I guess on that note if you were 100% certain that there was no afterlife would you still be able to preach that there's a positive meaning in life if you were a hundred percent certain some atheists seem to be 100 percent certain and yet they still preach that there's some positive meaning to life would you be one of those or would you turn into Cain you know so cynical I think that well as far as I'm concerned one of the things I learned from studying 20th century history is that like even if the idea that even if you take the most cynical of ideas let's say that life is irredeemable suffering and and perhaps isn't even justified because of that it still seems to me that you have an ethical duty let's say to live in a manner that reduces that to the degree part that that's possible and so and I think that that can be experienced as meaningful in some sense independently of the transcendent context now I don't exactly know how to strip off the transcendent context because one of the things I would say that's happened to me is because I've spent so much time looking at the horrible things that people have done is that it's like Jung said that he when this is one of his famous quotes he said no tree can reach up to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell and so as I've dug deeper into the depravity of human beings my sense of the possibility of human beings has also grown what would you say in proportion and until I've become convinced actually that good is a more powerful force than evil even though evil is an unbelievably powerful force and so I can't really strip the transcendent away now whether what bearing that has on eternity say on an afterlife i mean i i i I can't say anything about that the only thing I guess I can say is that there are many things about being that we don't understand in the least and we don't understand the nature of consciousness or the nature of time so I I'm not I wouldn't despair about that but yes I think that life can still be meaningful without without there being a necessity of an afterlife no no no no hi dr. Pederson so since studying your work one of the things that I found most fascinating is your analysis of the story of Cain and Abel and my question is if if Cain got to the point that he did right before killing his brother murdering his ideal and decided that that was something he didn't want to do what advice or guidance would you would you give a person that got to that point well there's a story I read called the cocktail party I've mentioned this before by TS Eliot and in the cocktail party there's a scene it's a play where this woman approaches a psychiatrist and and starts talking to him about her problems and she says something that surprises him she says I hope that I'm the problem he says well why would you hope that and she says well I thought about it a lot and if the world is the problem then I'm done because I can't change the world but if I'm the problem then maybe there's something about myself I can change and I can undo this terrible situation that I'm in and so I would say that's repentance fundamentally it's like there if and I say this carefully because I understand that people are susceptible to bad fortune sin and ignorance can make that worse but independently of that like good people suffer make no mistake about it but if things aren't right for you if you're resentful about being because that's the right way of because that's the deepest way of thinking about if you read the writings of the people who do the mass killings for example that's what you see over and over it's cain it's like they're angry beyond comprehension at the in tolerability of being and they're angry at God even if they don't say it exactly like that they come so close to saying it like that that it's there's no difference you know what God says to Cain is look to yourself first before you criticize being and that strikes me as right it's because to not do that is arrogant beyond belief that's satanic arrogance literally if something like that can be literal it's like don't make yourself the judge of being before you clean up your your room let's say and because the other thing to it this is something I learned in some part from Solzhenitsyn when he was in the prison camps and trying to understand how these heroic people he saw could possibly manage it one of the exercises he undertook and he really viewed this within a Christian Orthodox context of repentance and redemption is he said he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb and tried to imagine all of the ethical mistakes he made in his entire life that he knew were mistakes it was it was this was the soul searched not he wasn't relying on external standards of morality except insofar as we're inevitably influenced by those and then his idea was is there something I could do right now to put that right and that's the right question like if things aren't going your way and I think that means that you're resentful and arrogant and deceitful those are the three things that clump together I think that constitute the core of evil it's something like that and so if you're possessed by that which is a hell then its repentance that's the right answer and what that means is you have to figure out what you did wrong and you have to pay for it and then at least you could think well look I can try that with all of my soul let's say and see what happens right it can at least be an experiment and then I would also say that that's an act of faith it's an act of faith to conduct that experiment because you put yourself on the line right and that's what an active faith is you don't know the outcome but you don't know the outcome of your life so live in some sense is an act of faith you're putting faith in something that that's why you're moving forward you couldn't move forward without an act of faith you know and people say well I own move forward on the basis of the facts it's like yeah but you select the facts and there's an infinity of facts and they don't just tell you what to do so it's not a credible answer so if you're in that situation it's like look to yourself you know and one of the things about Solzhenitsyn that's so bloody amazing is that's what he did and then he wrote the Gulag Archipelago and you know he took an axe to the intellectual and moral substructure of of the totalitarian communist states so while he was redeeming himself let's say he was simultaneously redeeming the world and you know you see something like that like you you gotta wake up man that's that was really something so yeah dr. Peterson I have a lot of questions that arise from your comments at the Bell for one hundred event your m103 video your recent discussion with ayaan Hirsi Ali and your comments on Islam in the West in general and in your comments there's this common theme that one of these things is not like the other you put the judeo-christian tradition on the one side and Islam on the other specifically the quote complex problem of Islam in the quote as a quote totalizing system and before I go further let me state that if hypothetically a final analysis of Islam resulted in as total of denunciation as your analysis of post-modernism or near Marxism I wouldn't be personally offended at all this isn't a a personal question in your recent interview with ayaan Hirsi Ali she said Western values are superior to Islamic law and Islamic values I agree with that basically certainly in the context of let's say current global affairs I'll skip the quotes from a recent magazine interview but you should read them because hers is a worldview which is very much the West versus Islam not radical Islam but Islam including necessarily the military option so my question is at the level of psychological significance of these stories at the level of mythology and archetype how is Islam so different from the Jo Christian tradition you know because Adam Adam Eve of Shaitaan Shaitaan so on and so forth everything from the fault of the flood a lot of what you've discussed in this lecture series is necessarily part of Islam as well and in fact I think one of the strongest criticism of Islam that it's perhaps pretty unoriginal you know tonight you said that the moral presuppositions of a culture are instantiated in its stories I see a lot of the same stories so current global affairs aside I'm asking at the deepest levels how different are these stories in the morals presuppositions ok well that's that's a killer question well ok so the first thing I would say is fundamentally I don't know and so part of the reason that I'm one of the things I'm planning to do is to have a series of discussions and plenty of people have contacted me about discussing with ayaan Hirsi Ali as you know she has powerful and serious folks and they're not happy with her black and white distinction and so now I read infidel and I really liked that book like I my sense was that she she was a heroine now what that means in relationship to Islam that's a different story because she came out of a like a totalitarian let's say family structure in a relatively totalitarian society and you could make the case that there's a correspondence between that and his lemon you could make the case that there isn't and and of course that's the critical issue and so there's a couple of things that I can't wrap my head around with we have wrap my head around easily in relationship to Islam and so one is what I see as the failure to separate church from state and that's a problem now it may not be a problem as such but it's certainly a problem in relationship to the relation between Islam and the West because we separate church from state now there's fundamentalists in the United States Christian fundamentalists who think that that separation is a mistake so it's not only it's not only an idea that's rooted in Islam that those should be United but it's definitely a problem with regards to our coexistence because that's a fundamentally different presumption okay so that's problem number one problem number two for me and again this may be a consequence of my ignorance which I'm trying to rectify Muhammad was a warlord and I I don't know what to do about that fact like one thing you can say about Christ hypothetically let's say I'm not talking about a historical reality necessarily although I'm not denying it either is that of all the things he was warlord was definitely not one of them and I don't know what to do about that and so I don't know how to reconcile that and I don't know how to reconcile like not only was Muhammad a warlord which I don't think is an unreasonable thing to proclaim the expansion that he initiated was unbelievably successful I mean within six hundred years it was the biggest empire of the world had ever seen and a demolished Byzantine Christianity which is something that Western people don't even know you know I've read thinkers who said that the West was so traumatized culturally let's say by the demolition of Byzantine Christianity that we can't even study it now and so I don't know if that's true but I don't know that it's not true either and the Buddhists were wiped out of Afghanistan and we saw that echoed in talibans destruction of those great Buddhist monuments and so so what I'm hoping is that there's a bridge there better be a bridge and that's why I want to have these discussions because I'd like to understand if there's a bridge and so lots of people have sent me people who I should talk to who who they think represent Islam far better than ayaan Hirsi Ali and perhaps they're correct and hopefully I'll get an opportunity to talk to them because I would like to know why I would like to know if what I think is wrong because if it's wrong it's important that I know it's wrong but at the moment I don't a I don't know it's wrong and B I don't see I'm not sure what it signifies so and I don't think anyone is sure right because we have this entangled entangling of the civilizations you know when there's other things too like I'm not very happy with the Saudi Arabs and the Wahabis I don't think they're our allies I don't see how any Western woman can possibly think that they're our allies and I'm not happy with the fact that the petrol dollars that we send them are transformed in substantial part into the kind of propaganda that's definitely a threat to the West and I'm not very happy with the fact that our politicians appear stupidly blind to that now that may again be a consequence of my ignorance it's certainly possible but those are the sorts of things that that I can't reconcile and so you know I've seen that I've also seen parallels between the ideas that I'm presenting here and other religious traditions Taoism and Buddhism Hinduism it's harder for me to bridge the gap with Islam and I'm not sure why that is I think it has something to do with the things that I just laid out now what I don't know about Islam would feel very many volumes many of which I have sitting on my shelves at home right now because I want to do the reading you know as I progress through this but good evening dr. Pearson thanks for continuing this series even as atheists appreciate the interaction and the the conversation I wanted to ask you something that is both emotional and analytical because oftentimes you're basically pegged as seeing things very analytically so you were talking earlier about you were talking about the the the juxtaposition between happiness and honor even though I don't think they're mutually exclusive personally but if there's a situation let's say where someone is truly in love with someone else and they love them for many years and decades they have a whole history together and then someone and then one of the people in this grouping start falling in love with someone else so it's not that there's less love for the original partner how analytically and emotionally do you take care of a situation like that when you feel that you want to stay honorable and be happy okay so the first thing I would say is the devil is always in the details right so one of the things that I'm not happy about with much modern moral theorizing is that it takes a story like that you know and then tries to extract out a general moral principle and often that's impossible because the particulars of the situation are very important but having said that all right so let me think about that for a minute I'm not sure that it's possible to be honorable in a situation like that because I think that you've acted out the violation already and having acted out the violation to confess it might be the right thing to do although perhaps not you know because if you it isn't obvious to me that if you betray someone then you get to have the right to tell them about it I know I know you're not yeah yeah I understand I understand my observation has been that if there's a tight relationship and if one party is betrayed by the other in that matter that it's almost always irreconcilable it breaks it and you know I've helped people try to struggle through that but on both sides of it the person who was betrayed and the person who did the betrayal I've seen people grow up and not do it again and this was in situations where their partner didn't know and in a couple of those situations it seemed to me that it might have even been a necessary learning experience for the person who did it you know it it helped them develop and that doesn't mean I'm justifying it but life is complicated but but I think that society works better all things considered when you make a promise and you stick to it and one of the things I learned from reading young which which I really liked was you know he believed that and he had his affairs too so you might think about it as somewhat hypocritical but but I think that people can make mistakes without having what they think necessarily be wrong you know he said that there are things in a marriage that you can't have unless you're all-in and I believe that I believe that and so if there's a back door open or though like to begin with or a back door opens then I think that there's something about the relationship that is lacking at least and I think you pay a big price for that so I mean it depends on whether you regard a marriage as a practical arrangement or a spiritual arrangement now really it's both you know and both are important but if it's a spiritual arrangement or a psychological arrangement above all then I do think that you don't get the transformation without being all-in and if you violate it then even if you can work it out with your partner there's something that you will never get as a consequence so [Applause] last question okay I hope I'll make this good thanks also for a continuing the lecture series I haven't listened to all of the lectures but it seems like you focus very much on the appeal of the bible-- of stories to the individual psychology you have any thoughts on the relative importance of crowd psychology to the appeal and staying power of the bible and also the the reason why the Bible or the biblical stories took precedence over other ideologies which could have taken its place okay well let's go to the second one first I think it's the same thing that happens when someone both creates and edits a great movie it's no one knows like imagine how many choices are there in a great movie let's say it's an animated movie because absolutely everything in an animated movie is constructed everything there's God only knows how many choices like maybe there's millions of choices you know and each choice is guided by some intuition of narrative suitability or beauty or there's some higher ideal motivating it right the desire to produce a masterpiece maybe that's it that was certainly the case with the Disney movies for example and so that that aspiration then then makes the decisions and so I would say well something like that guided the writing and the selection of the stories in in the biblical canon now could have there been other stories included well the Catholics and the Protestants don't have the same biblical tradition and neither do the Jews and the Christians and so it isn't exactly clear what to make of that you know I mean that's akin in some sense to the discussion we just had about Islam and Christianity in some sense I've left that aside that specific question except insofar as I've just answered because I'm trying to take what we have which I know is that their route of our culture and to figure out what it is that we have why it is that we have it well I've made some attempt to explain that in the manner that I just described but I don't have a final answer I could it have been different it could have been different at some levels but the same at others you know I mean one of the things it's the scholars of comparative religion who haven't been infected fatally with post-modernism have definitely realized so young for example in Le ah de people who are interested in grand narratives one of the things they pointed out quite clearly is that there's there's there's a set of common mythological themes across many cultures and I tried to outline that in maps of meaning and that worked out quite nicely for me at least as far as I was concerned because once I had the basic archetypal structure mapped out it opened up all sorts of stories to me from all sorts of different cultures and that's been unbelievably useful like the Mesopotamian story of it the Anu mulisch when I figured out what that meant as far as I was concerned like I've never forgotten that it just seared itself into my memory and the same with the Egyptian stories and you know some Buddhist writings that I've read in some the daodejing is also very powerful so I think that things can be different on one level and the same at another but that humanity kind of coalesce is on what's the same over a reasonable period of time because there isn't that many ways that human beings can live properly as individuals and as groups together and so there's this constant force that makes our ethical presuppositions converge and then that's automatically expressed in the stories it's something like that now it's an imperfect process and it's full of error so so just one announcement well two announcements the next lecture I believe is November 14th so I'll hopefully finish off the story of Jacob looks like it and then I'm also appearing on a panel with God's odd and or an Amity on November 11th and there's still quite a few tickets available for that so if you're interested you could go to my website and pick up those tickets huh it should be well hopefully it'll be interesting I think it will be and might be too interesting that's one possibility so we'll see but I'm gonna do two more of these this year and I hope I get through the story of Joseph and then I can start in the New Year with it with Exodus and that's a story that I know quite well and that the Exodus and Leviticus and what's the one after that yes thank you so I'm very much looking forward to that because that is one killer story that so and I've got some surprises for that as well so anyways thank you very much for coming and hopefully we'll see you November 14th

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,505,228

Rating: 4.7994595 out of 5

Keywords: Atheist, bible, christ, christian, christianity, existentialism, faith, free speech, god, gods, jesus, jordan peterson, lecture, openness, personality, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, religion, spirit, spirituality, toronto, University of Toronto, Jacob

Id: A9JtQN_GoVI

Length: 153min 57sec (9237 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017