Biblical Series XIV: Jacob: Wrestling with God

[Music] [Music] all right so the last time I was here many of you were as well we got halfway through the story of Jacob and I've been digging underneath the story sporadically since then to try to find out whether other themes are being developed and I've got some things that I think are really interesting to talk about so so we'll get right into it so I'm gonna review a little bit first so we were talking about Jacob and I'll read eight his biography a little bit so that we can place ourselves in the proper context before we go on so his mother Rebecca gave birth to twins and the twins even in her womb were struggling for although they were struggling and of course the story is that they were struggling for dominance the older are the younger against the older really because Jacob Jacob means usurper and Rebecca had a what would you call a vision from God that said that Jacob would supplant Esau and so even before her twins were born they were in a state of competition and that's a recapitulation of the motif of the hostile brothers right it's a very very very common mythological motif and we we already saw that really well developed in the story of Cain and Abel right and Cain and Abel were essentially the first two human beings the first two natural born human beings and they were instantly locked in a state of enmity which is symbolic of first the enmity that exists within people's psyche between the part of them you might say that's aiming at the light and the part of them that's aiming at the darkness and I think that's a reasonable way of portraying it obviously it's a way that sort of rife with symbolism but my experience of people especially when you get to know them seriously or when they're dealing with serious issues is that there is quite clearly a part of them that's striving to do well in the world or even to do good and another part that's deeply sinned and embittered that that says to hell with it and is self-destructive and lashes out and really aims at making things worse and so that seems to be a natural part of the human psyche and that's also reflected in the the idea of the fall and so those ideas are not easily cast away they're associated with the rise of self-consciousness right and in the story of the Garden of Eden and I think that's right because I do think that our self-consciousness produces that division within us because more than any other creature were intensely aware of our finitude and suffering and that tends to turn us at least to some degree against being itself you know I was watching a bunch of protesters in the US last week scream out the sky about Trump you know and it was interesting like I thought it was an extraordinarily narcissistic display but but despite that there was something symbolically appropriate about it I also there's a movie I really like sadly enough called fubar I don't know how many of you have seen that yeah you know that movie I take it yeah it's about the people I grew up with so yeah that's true man I'm telling you that's true so the the guy the main actor in fubar who's quite bright but completely uncivilized gets testicular cancer and there's one great scene where he gets far too drunk and he's stumbling around the street you know in in a virtually comatose state and of course he's not very thrilled with what's happened to him and he's shaking his fist at the sky it's pouring rain and he's cursing God and you know it's like well you can kind of understand his position so that kind of reminded me of these people who were yelling at this guy you know they were basically they were out dramatizing the idea of in rape they were enraged at well you could say god of course most of them wouldn't say that but but they were the ones yelling at the damn sky I mean you know so you got a he got a look at what they're doing rather than what they say and they were outraged that being was constructed such that Trump could have arisen as president and so well so this idea you know that we can be easily turned against being and work for its destruction is a really it's a really common common common theme it never goes away you see it echoed in stories like with the new Marvel series for example you see the enmity between Thor and Loki that's a good example of the same thing or between Batman and the Joker there's there's a Superman and Lex Luthor these there's these pairs of hero against villain that's a really dramatic and easily what everyone can understand that dynamic right it's a basic plot and the reason it's a basic plot is because it's true of the battle within our spirits our own individual spirits it's true within families because sibling rivalry can be unbelievably brutal it's true between human beings who are strangers it's true between groups of people like it's true at every level of analysis and then in some sense it's it's archetypal true at least with regards to deep religious symbolism because you see that echoed in many stories as well so I think the clearest representation is probably Christ and Satan that's the closest to a pure archetype although there's in the old Egyptian stories there's Osiris and Seth or Horus and Seth and Seth is a precursor to Satan etymologically so it's a very very common motif and so that's what happens again in Rebecca's womb is that this thing this idea is played out right away and the two two twins are actually what would you call it there they have a superordinate destiny because one of them is destined to become the father of Israel and of course that's a pinnacle moment in the Old Testament obviously and arguably a pinnacle moment in human history now you know degree to which the stories in the Old Testament actually constitute what we would consider empirical history as a matter of debate but it doesn't matter in some sense because as I mentioned I think before in this lecture series know there are there are forms of fiction that are met a true which means that they're not necessarily about a specific individual although I generally think they are based on the life of specific individuals it's the simplest theory but who knows right but they're they're more real than reality itself because they abstract out the most relevant elements of reality and present them to you and that's why you watch fiction you know you don't you want you want your fiction boiled down right you want to boil down to the essence that's what makes good fiction and that essence is something that's truer than then plain old truth if it's handled well and so you know if you watch a Shakespeare play half a lifetime of events can go by in a Shakespeare play and it covers you know a wide range of scenes and so on and and so it's it's cut and edited and compressed all at once but because of that it blasts you with with a kind of emotional and ethical force that just the mere videotaping of someone's daily life it wouldn't even wouldn't even come close to approximating so then this motif of the hostile brothers that's a that's a deep deep archetypal truth and raychel two nations are in thy womb and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels and one people shall be stronger than the other and the elder shall serve the younger and so there's a inversion there right because as we've discussed historically speaking and traditionally speaking it's the elder son that to whom the disproportionate blessings flow there's some truth in that too even more what would you say more empirically iq tends to decrease as the number of children in the family increase the younger the old is the smartest generally speaking it isn't clear why that is but it might be that they get more attention and who knows so those of you who are younger can be very unhappy about that fact now Jacob okay so there's another there's another plotline here too because Abraham and and Rebecca are at odds at sorry Isaac and Rebecca are at odds about the children right so there's a there's an eatable twist to it too because well Isaac is allied with Esau who turns out to be the hunter type so he's your basic rough-and-tumble character you know and he's kind of a wild looking guy he'll Harry and he likes to be outside he lives in tents he likes to hunt he's a man's man that's one way of thinking about it whereas Jacob dwells in tents you know he doesn't go outside much he's more well maybe he's more introverted but he's certainly this sort of kid adolescent say who hangs around home and it there's some intimation that he's his mud well he's clearly his mother's favorite and with all the advantages and I suppose disadvantage does go along with that and Isaac and Rebecca don't see eye-to-eye about who should have predominance among the sons and Rebecca is quite complicit with Jacob in inverting the social order so the first thing that happens that's crooked is that Esau comes in from hunting and he's you know maybe he's been out for a number of days and he's ravenous and he's kind of an impulsive guy doesn't really seem to think about the long term very much and Jacob was cooking some lentil stew and Esau I want some of it and Jacob refuses and and then says that he'll trade his his birthright for it and Esau agrees which is a bad deal right it's a bad deal and so you you could say that Esau actually deserves what's coming to him although at minimum you'd have to think of them both as being equally culpable it's a nasty trick and so that's Jacob's first trick and then the second trick is that it's later and Isaac is old and blind and you know close to death and it's time for him to bestow a blessing on his sons which is a very important event apparently among these ancient people and Esau again is out hunting and Rachel dress dress is Jacob up in a hairy it puts a goat skin on his arm so he's kind of hairy like Esau and dresses him and Esau is closed so he smells like he's so and Isaac tells Esau to go out and hunt him up some some venison I think it is and which is a favorite of his and Rebekah has Jacob cook up a couple of goat kids and serve that to Isaac and play the role of Esau and so he does that it's pretty net damn nasty really all things considered you know to play a trick like that both on your brother and on your blind father and the inclusion with your mother it's not the sort of thing that's really designed to promote a lot of familial harmony and so especially because you've already screwed him over in a big way once you know you'd think you'd think that would be sufficient so anyways he's successful and Esau loses his father's blessing and so that Jacob ends up really in the position of the firstborn and it's quite interesting because you know God tells Rachel that Jacob is going to be the dominant twin and you'd think again with God's blessing or at least the prophecy that Jacob would end up being a good guy but he's certainly not presented that way to begin with which is also quite interesting given that he's the eventual founder of Israel and it's another indication of the realism of these old stories you know and it's it's quite amazing to me it's always been quite amazing to me how unpretty fight these stories have remained you know because you'd think that if you're even the least bit sinned especially if you had the kind of Marxist religion is the opiate of the masses kind of viewpoint which which is a credible viewpoint you know although it's wrong but it's correct well I I think it's a shallow I think it's a shallow interpretation and not part of the reason I think it's a shallow interpretation is because the stories would be a lot prettier if that was the case these characters wouldn't have this strange realistic moral ambiguity about them you know if you're gonna feed people a fantasy then it you want it to be like a Harlequin novel or or our greeting card or something like that you don't want it to be a story that's full of betrayal and deceit and murder and mayhem and genocide and all of that if that just doesn't seem all that what would you say calming I guess would be the right right answer so anyways Jacob gets away with this but Esau is not happy and and Jacob is quite convinced that he might kill him and I think that was a reasonable fear because he saw was a tough guy and he was used to being outside and he knew how to hunt and he knew how to kill and he actually wasn't very happy about getting seriously screwed over by his you know stay-at-home younger brother twice and so Jacob runs off and goes to visit his uncle and on the way and this is a very interesting part of this story he stops and to sleep and he takes a stone for a pillow and then he has this vision it's called a dream but the context makes it look like a vision of a ladder reaching up to heaven and with angels moving up and down the the ladder let's say and there's some representations of that I showed you some of them the last time we met but I'll read it to you first he lighted upon a certain place and Ty read there all night because the Sun was set and he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows 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 behold 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 father and the god of Isaac land whereon thou liest to thee I will give it and to thy seed and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and the south so that lays out the canonical directions right so now there's a center with the canonical directions like the thing that you see you know that little symbol you see on maps it's the same thing that symbolically placed upon the earth so a center has been established with radiating well with with what with with directional lines radiating from it so it establishes as a place and in the end I seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed so that's pretty good news for Jacob and it's not self-evident why God is rewarding him for running away after screwing over his brother but that seems to be what happens and so here's a couple of representations classic representations the one on the right is William Blake is what I particularly like you know and Blake assimilates God with the Sun and with light right so that's quite a common mythological idea that that God is associated with light and the day behold I am with thee and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest and will bring me again into this land for I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of and Jacob awaked out of his sleep and he said surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not and he was afraid which is exactly the right response and said how dreadful is this place it is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven and 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 the top of it and that's that's a more important thing than you think and we'll go into that a little bit more deeply because up to this point in this story there isn't anything really there isn't anything that's really emerged to mark a sacred space right there's no there's no cathedral there's no Church there's nothing like that but here's this idea that emerges that you can mark the center of something that and that's important and you mark it with a stone and stones a good way to mark things that that are important because the stone is permanent right and we mark things with stones now like we mark graves with stones for example because we want to make a memory and to carve something into stone to carve a stone and then to carve something into stone is to make a memory and to use stone is to make a memory because stone is permanent and to set it up right is to to indicate a center and so that's what happens and pours oil on the top of it which is kind of offering and he called the name of that place Bethel but the name of the city was called Las at 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 then a tenth of what I earned I will give him I missed that that's interesting too because now there's a transformation of sacrifice right because until that point sacrifices have had been pretty concretize dit was the burning of something whereas here all of a sudden it's the offering of of productive labor per se like a tithe because it tithe is a form of sacrifice and so there's an abstraction of the idea of sacrifice no sacrifice it's really important that the idea of sacrifice gets abstracted right because it should be abstracted to the point where it's it's used the way that we use it today which is you know we make sacrifices to get ahead and everyone understands what that means but the sacrifices are generally some combination of psychological and and and practical so we're not acting them out we're precisely we're not dramatizing them at ritualizing and we actually act them out in our in the covenant that we make with the future and we do that well unless we're extraordinarily impulsive and aimless in our lives and have really no conception whatsoever of the future and are likely to sacrifice the future for the present which is it what he saw does right then we make sacrifices and you got to think like the idea of making sacrifices to make the future better is an extraordinarily difficult lesson to learn it took people god only knows how long to learn that you know like we have no idea it's not something that animals do easily chimpanzees don't store leftover meat you know they just and neither do wolves they just a wolf can eat about thirty pounds of meat in one sitting and that's that's where the idea of wolfing it down comes from they're not hiding it saving it for later you know they can't do that so they can't sacrifice the present for the future so this is a big deal that this that this happens now I want to tell you a little bit about the idea of the pillar because it's it's an unbelievably deep idea and it Orient's us in ways that we still don't it's still orienting us in ways that we don't understand and in fact it's actually the mechanism by which we're oriented or and if it's lacking then we become disoriented and so I'll show you some pictures and describe them first okay so first of all there's a walled city so let me tell you that you could think about that as an archetypal human habitation maybe it's a reflection of something like a fire in the middle of the plain or the forest or the jungle for that matter although it's kind of hard to get a fire going there imagine a fire ringed around with logs and perhaps ringed around with dwellings right so the fire is in the center and the fire defines the center and then as you move away from the fire you move out into the darkness right so the fire is light and communion and safety and as you move away from the fire you move out into the darkness and what's terrifying out beyond the perimeter so what's beyond the perimeter is terrifying you can feel that if you go camping somewhere that's wild you know you're pretty damn happy especially if the wolves are howling you're pretty damn happy to be sitting by the fire because you can see there the fire keeps the animals away and you know if you do wander into the bush into the darkness then you're on alert and you know you're predator detection systems are on alert and so you could think about the classical human habitation as two places one where your predator detection system isn't on alert another where your predator textured detection system is alert on alert and you could think about that roughly as the distinction between explored territory and unexplored territory and really the the founding of a place is precisely this is a lot of this I got from reading your chair le ah de the founding of a place is precisely the definition of a explored center set against the unexplored periphery and you know what's interesting about that so you can kind of think about that with regards to the walled city right everything in the wall is cosmos and everything outside the wall is chaos and you know but it also extends to the conceptual realm because imagine that you're the master of a field of study and so that's an interesting metaphor because a field is a geographical metaphor right and if in the center of the field are those things that everyone knows really well the axioms that everyone abides by in the field and then as you move towards the fringes you get to work towards the unknown towards the frontier of the discipline and as you become expert you move from the center to the frontier and so then you're on the border when you're when you're when you're a scholar a competent school you're on the border between the unexplored or the explored and unexplored and you're trying to further that border so even if you're just doing this abstractly it's the same thing and it's a reflection of the fact that every human environment concrete or abstract it makes no difference recapitulates the cosmos chaos dichotomy or the order chaos dichotomy and that's why in Taoism for example it's the union of chaos and order that constitutes being itself and that you stand on the border between chaos and order because that's the proper place to be to orderly to much in the explored you're not learning anything too much out there where the Predators lurk then you're frozen with terror and neither of those positions are desirable so and that's what you know and so you think and this is a concur reality obviously as well as a psychological reality there were reasons for those walls right because inside the walls where all the people like us and so that begs the question what does it mean for people to be like us and then outside the wall there rose all those people because they were the worst forms of predators because people are actually the worst forms of predators who aren't like us and the wall is there to draw a distinction between like us and not like us and so and that was a matter of life and death if you can tell that because I mean look at those walls they had to build those by hand and you know you do see walled cities that have three rings of walls so these people were terrified but not so terrified as the people who built three walls they were really terrified and they had their reasons so okay so now there's an idea that's that's reflected in the Jacob's Ladder story that the center where you put the pillar is also the place where heaven and earth touch and so that's that's a complicated idea I think that you can you know I'm trying to look at these stories from a psychological perspective and so then you could say that that's a symbolic place where the lowest and the highest come together and so it's a place where earthly being stretches up to the highest possible ethical abstraction and that's the center because one of the things that defines us say as opposed to them is that we're all united within a certain ethic that's what makes us the same this is a complicated line of reasoning and but I'll go back to it after I show you some more pictures but so that's that's the first idea is that the center is the place where the lowest and the highest touch simultaneously and so you could say that in some sense it specifies the aim of a group of people that's another way you know if you get together with people make a group even at work you group yourself around a project and that unites you and it unites you because you all have the same aim you're all pointing to the same thing and that makes you the same in some ways because if you're after the same thing I am then the same things are going to be important to you that are important to me and the same things are going to be negative to you that are negative to me because our emotions work out that way and that means I can instantly predict you I know how you're going to behave and so our aim which is basically our ethical aim it's because we're aiming at something better at least in principle we're aiming at something better so our ethical aim that unites our perceptions and that's what aligns our emotions and so that sort of begs the question if you're going to build a community around what aim should the community congregate okay so the idea here is that the center of the community is the pillar that unites heaven and earth so it unites the lowest with the highest so there's some intimation of the idea that it's the highest that unites the community okay and so keep that in mind and that's a very old idea as well that's the idea of the axis mundi which is the center pole that unites heaven and earth it's an unbelievably old idea tens of thousands of years old it might even stretch back to whatever our archaic memories quasi memories I don't know how what you would describe them archetypal memories of our excessively old ancestry and trees when the tree itself was in fact the center of the world and that it was ringed by snakes and chaos and so well we have no idea how old these ideas are but they're very very old and evolution is a conservative business once it builds a gadget then it builds new things on top of that gadgets like a medieval town right the center of the town is really old and new newer areas of the town get built around it but the center is still really old and that's what we're like you know our platforms like our our basic physiological structure this this skeletal body is some tens of millions of years old or older than that if you think about vertebrates it's much older than that and that's all conserved so everything's built on top of everything else alright so there there's a kind of a classic town and there's the idea I showed you this is Scandinavian World Tree same idea at unites heaven and earth and around the roots of that tree are snakes that eat this tree constantly so that's the idea that there's stability but there's constant transformation around that stability and at the same time the snakes are knowing in the roots there's streams that are nourishing it so it's sort of it's sort of an echo of the idea that life depends on death and renewal constantly because your cells are dying and being renewed constantly right if they are just proliferating then you have cancer if they're just dying then you die it you have to get the balance between death and life exactly right so that you can actually live which is also a very strange thing so and that tree is something that reaches from the bottom layers of being maybe the microcosm all the way to the macrocosm that's the idea anyways so then there's okay so there's there's Jacob and his and his pillar he's got this idea that you can mark the center with this stone like it sort of symbolizes what he was laying on when he dreamt but now he's got this idea you put something erect and it marks the center and it symbolizes his vision of the highest good something like that and the promise that's been made to him and then this is an Egyptian obelisk the pyramid on top of it that's in Paris it was taken from Luxor and it put in Paris and so that's a much more sophisticated instance of the same idea okay and there was a Stone Age cultures across Eurasia that put up these huge obelisks everywhere these huge like the Stonehenge is a good example of that although it's it's very sophisticated and there are also markers of places we don't know exactly what their function is but they're very much akin to this some permanent marker of place there's a good one so that's in st. Peters and I really like this one because you can see the echoes of jacob's vision for the establishment of a territory there right you've got the obelisk in the middle and then you've got the directions radiating from the center and of course save Peters this is the st. Peter's Basilica in Rome which is an absolutely unbelievable place it's just jaw-dropping and so there's the Cathedral at the back of it and then there's this circle of pillars that surrounds it you can just see them a little bit on on the middle left there that goes all the way around that entire enclosure and you know very large number of people can gather there and then so that pillar marks the center and that would be the center of Catholicism essentially that's what that represents right the the symbolic center of Catholicism although you could make the case that the cathedral is the center it doesn't really matter they're very close together and it's it's half a dozen of one and six or the other and then here's another representation of the same idea right is that this is why people don't like the flag to be burned you know because conservative people see the flag as the sacred thing that binds people together and so they're not happy when that sacred thing is destroyed even if it's destroyed in the name of protest whereas the people who burn flags think well there are times to dramatize the idea that the center has been corrupt and you can demonstrate that by putting it to the torch you know as a representation that that this that the corrupt center now has to be burned and transformed and the thing is they're both right they're both right all the time because the center is absolutely necessary and is sacred and is almost always also corrupt and in need of reparation that's also an archetypal idea and and that's a useful thing to know because you know it it's easy for young people in particular to think that well the world's going to hell in a handbasket and it's the pot fault of the last generation they've left us this terrible mess and you know we've feeling pretty betrayed about that and now we have to clean it up it's like yeah yeah people have been thinking that for like thirty five thousand years it's not new and the reason it's not new is because it's always true you know what you're handed is a sacred center with flaws always always that's partly because it's the creation of the dead right and the dead can't see and they can't communicate and so they're not in touch with the present and so what they've bequeathed to you apart from the fact that it might actually be corrupt which is a slightly different thing is at least blind in dead and so what the hell can you expect from something that's blind and dead you know you're lucky if it just doesn't stomp you out of existence so so that's a lovely photograph obviously and that's the establishment of a new centre then the the centre can be a cathedral too and often is of course in in classic towns European towns in particular although it's not only European towns that are like this there there's a center that's made out of stone so that would be the Cathedral and it's got the highest tower on on top of the tower there's often a cross and that's the symbolic centre so people are are drawn together around whatever the cross represents now that the cross obviously represents a center because it's an X right x marks the spot so the centre of the cross is the center and then the Cathedral is often in a cross shape which also marks the center and then in the cathedral there's a dome often and that's the sky and that's that ladder that reaches from earth to heaven so it's a recapitulation of the same idea so and people are drawn to that Center and the centre is the symbol of what unites them and what unites them is the faith that the cathedral is the embodiment of and you think well what does the faith mean and again we're approaching this psychologically and what it means is that we everyone who's a member of that group accepts the transcendent ideal of the group now the thing is if you're the member of a group you accept the transcendent ideal of the group that's what it means to be a member of a group so if you're in a work team and you're all working on a project what you've essentially done is decided that you're going to make the goal unquestionable right I mean you might argue about the details but if are tasked with something you know here's a job for you ten people organize yourself around the job you can argue about how you're going to do the job but you can't argue about the job then the group falls apart and so there's an act of faith in some sense the reason that the act of faith is necessary is because it's very very difficult to specify without error what that central aim should be given that there's any number of aims right and it's a very very difficult thing to figure out and this is something we're gonna do a little bit tonight is like what should the aim be around which a group would congregate you know that so so especially if it's a large group and it's a large group that has to stay together across very large swathes of time and the group is incredibly diverse you know what possible kind of ideal could unite a large group of diverse people across a very large stretch of time that's a really really hard question and I think part of the way that question has been answered is it's been answered symbolically and in images because it's so damn complicated that it's almost impossible to articulate so but obviously you need to have a center around which everyone can unite because if you don't then everyone's at odds with one another like if I don't know what you're up to and you don't know what he's up to we have no we're just strangers and we don't know that our ethics match at all then the probability that we're going to be able to exist harmoniously decreases rapidly to zero and that's obviously just no good that's a state of total chaos so we can't have that it's it's not possible to exist without a central ideal it's not possible and it's deeper than that it's deeper than that partly because it's I don't know I'll try to get this right this is the sort of thing that I was arguing with sam harris about you see your category system is a product of your aims that's the thing like if you have a set of facts at hand the facts don't tell you how to categorize the facts because there's too damn many facts there's a trillion facts and there's no way without imposing some ape I already order on them of determining how it is that you should order them so how do you order them well that's easy you decide what you're aiming at now how do you do that well I'm not answering that question at the moment I'm just saying that in order to organize those facts you need a name and then the aim instantly organizes the facts into those things relevant to the aim tools let's say those things that get in the way and a very large number of things that you don't have to pay attention to at all right it excludes Verte like if you're working on an engineering problem you don't have to worry about practicing medicine in your neighborhood you don't there's a bunch of like if you're focusing on a particular what would you say any any job any any set of skills implies that you're good at a small set of things and then not good at an incredibly large number of other skills it simplifies things and so you can use your aim as the basis of a category structure and so you also have to keep that in mind because what it means is as far as I can tell that what it means is that your category system itself which is what structures your perceptions is actually dependent on the ethics of your aim it's directly it's a moral thing it's directly dependent on your aim and that's a stunning idea if it happens to be true it's not how people think about thinking we don't think that way we like we think that we think deterministically let's say or that we think empirically or that we think rationally and none of that appears to be the case what we do is we pause it a valid aim and then we organize the world around the aim and there's plenty of evidence from that in in in psychological studies of perception right that that does look like how the the perceptual systems work mostly they ignore because the world is too complicated they focus on a small set of phenomena deemed relevant to whatever the aim is and then of course the aim is problematic again it's complex because the aim I have has to be a name that some of you at or at least don't object to because otherwise I'm not gonna get anywhere with my damn aim it has to actually be implementable in the world it has to be sustainable across at least some amount of time it can't kill me like it's really hedged in this aim it's it isn't any old thing there's hardly any things that it can be so you know Jacob's aim for example in undermining Esau almost gets him killed and you can understand why that's the other thing you think well that that was a nasty bit of work you can understand Esau's rage it's even though we're separated from the people in these stories by what four thousand years three thousand years something like that you know in immediately why everyone feels the way they do at least once you understand the context of the story that none of that's mysterious in the least so so there's the church and the church is underneath the cross right and so that's st. Peter's Basilica and so there's the cross on the globe on top of the Basilica and then there's the cross on the obelisk as well and so what that means is that and this is where things get insanely complicated is that the center is defined by whatever the cross represents now the cross represents a crossing point geographically it's it's certainly that the cross probably represents the body to some degree but then the cross also represents the place of suffering obviously and more importantly it represents the place of voluntary suffering transcended I'm speaking psychologically right not theologically that's what it represents and so you might say so here's the idea behind putting down the obelisk with the cross and saying that that's the center so that's the thing that everyone's aiming at and so the the idea would be well if you're going to be a member of the group defined by this obelisk then what you do is accept your position at the center of suffering voluntarily and therefore transcend it that's the idea and that is one hell of an idea it really is man that is a killer idea because it's actually a signal it's a really clear signal of psychological health you know because one of the things you do if you're a clinical psychologist and someone is paralyzed by fear is what you do is you break their fears down into relatively manageable bits and then you have them voluntarily confront their fears and it might also be things that they're disgusted by it's a if they have obsessive compulsive disorder but it produces very strong negative emotion whatever it is and then you have them voluntarily confront whatever it is that produces that overwhelming negative emotion and that makes them stronger that's what happens it doesn't make them less afraid it makes them more courageous and stronger and that is not the same thing it's seriously not it doesn't decrease the fear it increases the courage and so that's a mind-boggling idea and it's deeper you know one of the things that's really interesting about these archetypal ideas is that and maybe it's partly because of the hyperlink nature of the Bible that's part of it but it's not the whole thing is that no matter how deep you dig into them you'll never get to the bottom you know you hit a bottom you think god that's so unbelievably profound and then if you excavate a little underneath that you find something else that's even more profound and you think wow that's got to be the bottom and then you dig under that's like there's no bottom you can just keep digging down well as far as I can tell you can keep digging down layer after layer and we'll talk a little bit about more a little more about what the cross signifies as the center because you see what people were trying to figure out is what is it that we need to unite under right what's the proper thing to unite under I can give you another example so in the Mesopotamian societies the Emperor you know who was more or less an an absolute monarch he lived inside what was essentially a walled city and the god of the Mesopotamians was mardik and Marduk was the figure who had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words who is very attentive and very articulate and it was Marduk who went out and confronted the goddess of chaos the dragon of chaos and cut her into pieces and made up the world okay so you can kind of understand what that means so mardik goes beyond the frontier into the place of predatory chaos and encounters the thing that's terrifying and then make something productive out of it so it's a hero myth and an mardik is elected to the position of preeminent God by all the other Mesopotamian gods because he manages that so the the mardik idea emerges up the Holy dominance hierarchy and hits the pinnacle so that and god only knows how long that took it would be the amalgamation of many tribes and then that the what the the distillation of all the tribal myths to produce this emergent story of what constitutes Tok God and then the job of the Emperor was to act out Marduk that's what gave him sovereignty so the reason that he was the center around which people organized themselves wasn't because he was when he was being a proper Emperor it wasn't because there was something super special about him like the power didn't exactly reside in him which is a really useful thing to separate right you want the power which is why it's kind of nice to have a symbolic monarch you get the symbolic power separated from the personality power right because otherwise they get conflated that's what happened in Rome it's a very you know you can see it tending to happen now and then in the u.s. like with the Kennedy dynasty's and that sort of thing so the idea was the Emperor had sovereignty as long as he was acting out Marduk properly and going out into the chaos and cutting it into pieces and making order that was his job so they used to take him outside the city on the new year's festival and strip him of all his Emperor garments and humiliate him and then force him to to confess all the ways that year he hadn't been a good Marduk so he wasn't a good ruler and so that was supposed to clue him in and wake him up right and then they would ritually reenact the Battle of Marduk against time out the chaos monster using statues and then if that all went well then the Emperor would go back in and the city would be renewed for another year and we still have echoes of that in our New Year's celebration right it's the same idea that's echoed down all those all those centuries thousands of years so it says such a staggeringly brilliant idea right because so part of the idea is that the thing that's sovereign so that's the pillar at the center that that everyone gathers around is at least in part the thing that courageously goes out into the unknown and make something useful out out of it for the community so that's very very smart it's very smart so this is another example of a center so these this is the flag this is the Union Jack and so it's made up of a bunch of crosses right and so the first cross the English cross that's the flag of st. George that's the flag of England and st. what is st. George do slaves the dragon exactly same idea right so safe George patron saint of England goes out and slays the dragon and frees the Virgin from the grip of the dragon same idea right so that's the center and then the second cross is called a saltier but it's another crucifix so it's the cross on which st. Andrew was crucified says so it's the same idea it's that the center is the center of suffering voluntarily undertaken cuz Saint Andrew was a martyr and then st. Patrick is the third cross what did st. Patrick do in Ireland chased out all the snakes right so it's the same thing right and so the flag of Great Britain is the combination of all of these three crosses that defines the center and that's what the flag is so that symbolizes all of that so that's you know completely mind-boggling so and there's more about st. Patrick - so he banishes the snakes after a 40-day fast and so that's an allusion to the 40 years that Moses spends in the desert and also the 40 days that Christ fasts in the New Testament and his walking stick when he plants it grows into a tree so that echoes all of this ideas about the center that we just described and he also speaks with the ancient Irish ancestors which if you remember is a characteristic of the shamanic rituals where we're so in the typical shamanic ritual which seems to be elicited by psychedelic use the shaman dissolved down past their bones and then they go up into heaven and speak with the ancestors and then they're introduced into the heavenly kingdom and then the flesh is put back on their bones and they come back and tell everybody what happened and that's a repeatable experience right the shamanic tradition is unbelievably widespread so all over Europe ancient Europe and Asia and perhaps as far down as South America right it's highly conserved and it's out of that tradition in all likelihood that our religious city Asian emerged so and you can see echoes of that here so so back to the story of Jacob and his ladder so that I can 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 that that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee so that's that's also an echo I would say of the obligation of those who climb the power higher hierarchy to attend to those who are at the bottom right because if you think about the tithing as a form of wealth distribution which is essentially what it is the part of the ethic that defines the proper moral endeavor that's related to that Center is not to advance yourself at the expense of the entire community so if you're if you're fortunate enough so that you can rise in in authority and power and competence within the confines of a community you still have a obligation to maintain the structure maintain and further the structure of the community within which you rose now that's obvious right because if people didn't do that after a couple of generations the whole thing would fall apart so you know you you you it's it's not reasonable to destroy the game that you're winning it's reasonable to strengthen the game that you're winning and so that's another thing that also describes the ethic that should allow you to be an active member of the community around which that that gathers around that Center so so so one of the things I've learned about the hero mythology that I really really like is so you see this pretty clearly in the figure of Christ but because two things are conjoined in that story but Christ is also the here there's two kinds of heroes say there's the hero that goes out into chaos and confronts the dragon of chaos and gathers the the treasure as a consequence and then shares it with the community that's that's that's one the other form of hero is the hero who stands up against the corrupt state and rattles the foundation of the state has it collapse and then reconstructs it right so because the two great dangers to human beings are unprotected exposure to the catastrophes of the natural world and subjugation to tyranny right those are the two major dangers and so a hero is their ultimate hero is the person who reconstructs the structure of the state by using the information that he gathered by going out into the unknown that unites them both and so what that means here's that here's the rub as far as I can tell so a structure a center has two risks associated with it one is that it will degenerate into chaos and the other is that we'll rigidify into tyranny and it'll degenerate into chaos even if it just stays doing what it's doing so if it just does exactly what it's doing and it doesn't change it will degenerate because things change and if it doesn't change to keep up then it gets farther and farther away from the environment and it'll precipitously collapse and so and then if it just changes willy-nilly so that nobody can establish a stable centralized a game then it degenerates into chaos immediately and no one can get along so there's a rule for being longing to the community and the rule has to be that you have to act in a manner that sustains and that sustains the community and increases its competence that's the fundamental moral obligation for belonging and well and obviously soul right because why would you belong to a why would you walk into a clubhouse that was on fire like that's just not smart right if you're gonna be part of the game if you've decided that being part of the game is worthwhile you've also taken on the moral you've also decided even if you didn't notice it that you have to work to support that game because by deciding to play that game you've said that it's valuable and if it's valuable then obviously you should work to sustain and expand it because that's the definition of having a relationship with something that's valuable and so that's the criteria for membership in the community and that's partly why if you regard the cross say as the symbol of voluntary suffering you know suffering accept it voluntarily something like that which is means that there's another element of that too that's worth thinking about so you know the reason that cane gets so out of hand is because he's suffering and he won't accept it he certainly won't accept responsibility for it he's angry and bitter about it and no wonder right I mean we have to be realistic about these sorts of things there you guys all of you people are gonna suffer at some point in your life to the point where you're angry and bitter about it I mean there's just absolutely no doubt about that and you're even gonna think well it's no bloody wonder that I'm angry and bitter about it everyone would be and things are so god-awful that there's no excuse for them to even exist and like that's a powerful argument although I think it's ultimately self-defeating well that's kind of what the story of Cain and Abel that's kind of what the story of Cain and Abel what would you say that's the moral of the story of Cain and Abel essentially so what that means instead is that even under those conditions of relatively intense suffering you have to accept it voluntarily because otherwise it turns you against being and then you start to act in this terrible manner that makes everything worse and it seems to me that there's a contradiction in that if if the reason you're complaining that things are bad then it isn't reasonable for you to act in a manner that makes them worse right I mean even if it's no wonder that people do that but it's it's a degenerating game and so that's so the the idea part of the idea of the cross and the suffering that it represents is that if you can accept that voluntarily regardless of its intensity then you won't become embittered and resentful and vengeful to the point where you pose a danger to the stability of the community so or to your own stability for that matter cuz it's you know it might be your own stability the stability of your family the stability of the community and the stability of the world it might be all of that and increasingly I think it is all of that so okay so now Jacob we get the second part of Jacob story he goes to meet his uncle Lebon and he meets Rachel there again by oh well he falls in love and goes to live with levan there are two daughters there Leah as well as Rachel Leah is not a particularly attractive person it isn't exactly clear why but the story makes it quite clear she's definitely the least desirable of the two daughters and the story makes reference to her eyes and it isn't clear if there's something wrong with her physiologically or if there's something wrong with her attitude it's not obvious but doesn't really matter the point is she's the older daughter but she's the less desirable one Jacob stays a month which is the limit of hospitality in in that time if you stayed for a month you were welcome but you had to work for your keep I think after about three days something like that which seems rather reasonable and so he stays a month and then he has a chat with Lebon and he says he's fallen in love with Rachel by this time and he says I'll stay with you and work for seven years and then all weird Rachel if and the band says that's a fine deal and then the seven years passes and there's a wedding ceremony it's quite a long thing and the bride is veiled and the bride goes into the tent with with Jacob and if I remember the story correctly I haven't looked at it for a month or so rachel is outside the tent speaking but leah is inside the tent and so Jacob thinks he's getting married to Rachel but he's actually getting married to Leah and this is it's an inversion a because he's in the dark like Isaac was when he fooled Isaac so now it's Jacob's turn to be in the dark and he gets betrayed by his uncle and his bride-to-be Rachel and her sister in a manner that's broadly parallel to the trick that he pulled on Esau and so there's a karma notion there which I which I'd like you know I mean you might think of karma as a superstitious idea but and there are ways of interpreting it that might make it the case but I don't think that's what it is it's that no bad deed goes unpunished it's something like that it's like you know maybe you've done something bad to someone and therefore there's part of you that feels quite guilty about that hopefully and that part is looking for punishment to set the stage right and you might think well no but things are yes unless you're a psychopath that's how things work if you're interested in that kind of thing you should read Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment because it's the definitive study of that sort of phenomena right because in that book the main protagonist Raskolnikov gets away with murder like he does it successfully no one suspects him and he drives himself so crazy with guilt that he basically falls into the hands of the police he drives himself into the hands of the police because he can't tolerate what he did it's very it's amazing it's amazing book but anyways the point is he Jakub falls prey to the same sort of crookedness that he used to ratchet himself up the ladder and that happens far more often in life and people think and it's really not like he can complain about it right not if he has any sense it's like he does he brings Leah out to see Lebon and he says what's what's with this sister you know and Lebon basically says to him in our culture it's the custom to marry the eldest daughter first which is exactly right and he said well it would bring you know he's rationalizing obviously because he's just screwed over Jacob in a major way but it's a little late to take it back that the marriage has been consummated and the ceremony has been complete and all hell would break out if there was any attempt to sever the relationship so that's how it is so Leah's married and Jacob has the wrong wife so then so this is Jacob there you see on the left he's got the little flowery hat and he's pointing to Leah and he's saying like what what's up here and love the band you know Laband 'is tough old goat and he's not really all that sad about it in fact you can imagine that he's kinda good so so okay then he has to work another seven years and he gains rachel but because god is a tricky character there's another twist in this story Rachel turns out not to be very good at having children or Rachel and Jacob turn out not to be very good at having children but Leah she's really good at having kids so she provides Jacob with Reuben Simeon Levi or let's leave I believe and Judah and the names of those meanings of those names are there Reuben means see a son Simeon means hearing though I think that was the Lord heard my prayer I think that's what that was Levi means joined Judah means praise to yahwah and it's Judah from whose tribe Christ arises Judah is essentially promoted to the status of firstborn later in the story this is important because Reuben Simeon and Levy all do something reprehensible and so Judah gets gets promoted to firstborn and that's partly why in the logic of this narrative that it's from the tribe of Judah that Christ arises so so now while this is going on Rachel is like suicidally desperate for children she's jealous of her older sister who's rather ill-favored as we pointed out but who seems to be damn good at producing sons and she's really not happy with Jacob and so she choose him out and Jacob basically says like what do you want me to do about it I'm not God which is a reasonable response I would say and so in her desperation she gives Jacob illa who's her maidservant we've seen that sort of thing happened before and - Billa produces two children Dan and Neff Kelly the reason I'm detailing out all these sons it's Gordon because Jacob is the founder of Israel and his sons are the founder of the 12 tribes so it's a pivotal moment in the story right it's it's because he's that he's the fundamental patriarch of of those who wrestle with God because as we'll see that's what the name Israel means he gets the name Israel you'll see why in a while but but it's you need to know these genealogies in this situation because they play an important role in everything that happens afterwards so Naphtali is the second and her name or his name means with great wrestling's I have wrestled with my sister right contended with her and have prevailed so that gives you some indication of the tension in the household now leah is now past bearing children she gives Jake Jacob her maidservant to Zilpah to keep up with her sister I guess and now Zilpah bares to children for Jacob so he's piling up the kids left right and center here one of them is named gad good fortune and the other is named Asher happy or blessed so there's more rivalry going on between the sisters this is quite an interesting little story so Reuben who's Lea's daughter goes out and looks for Mandrake's now Mandrake's have aphrodisiac property so that's a little odd to begin with but it doesn't matter that's what happens and Rachel is Rachel wants the Mandrake's because she's still interested in having some children and so she bargains with Leah to give her a night with Jacob in exchange for the Mandrake's and more sons emerge as a consequence of that so then Rachel finally gives birth Joseph and Joseph plays a key role in the last story in Genesis which I hope we'll get to in the next lecture and then we can close off Genesis that's the plan anyways so now Jacob isn't really very happy about the whole arrangement because he he's been there 14 years and he's got two wives it's not too bad but he you know he got he the bargain wasn't exactly clean he doesn't really trust la Bannon and there's no reason for him to do so levan was poor before Jacob came Jacob turns out to be a very useful person to have around and so he tells Lebon he wants to leave and go back to his home country and that he'll take the speckled and spotted cattle the brown sheep and the spotted and speckled goats from the flock and they're in the minority so that's the idea and sola ban or lab and takes all those animals out of his flock so there was an idea that the speckled goats and the brown sheep would breed true so if you have two male goat and a female goat and they're both speckled they'll have speckled kids that's the theory and the same with brown sheep and so what Lebon does is he takes all the speckled animals out of the flocks gives them to his son and they go three days away with them so that Jacob is left with the flock but with no with none of these animals now the idea was that all the what newborns were going to be his and so what Lebon is basically done is set it up so that in principle Jacob is going to get nothing for his work so that's another time when Jacob experiences betrayal you know it's almost as if God isn't done with reminding him of the magnitude of what he did in the past that that's the moral of the story in some sense now there's a weird little twist in the story here so what Jacob does is some sympathetic magic and so when the animals are rutting he puts speckled objects in front of them speckled branches and so forth I guess to remind them about what they're supposed to be producing something like that and it works and so all these animals that Lebon left are are producing spotted animals like mad and so that's I guess God's changed his mind and let Jacob off the hook slightly here so soon he was very wealthy much cattle maidservants men servants camels analysis Laban's son sons become jealous and Lebon is outraged well you know obviously there's some competition there between Jacob and the sons which is hardly surprising and the blonde played this trick to strip Jacob of all his property and instead he got far more than he was going to get to begin with so you can imagine that's been a bit annoying so Jacob thinks he better get out of there so he tells Rachel and Leah and said unto them I see your father's countenance that is not toward me as before but the god of my father has been with me and you know with all my power I've served your father and your father has deceived me and changed my wages ten times but God so far has suffered him not to hurt me if he said thus the speckled shall be thy wages then all the cattle bore speckled and if he said thus the ringstraked shall be thy hire then all the cattle bore ringstraked thus God has taken away the cattle of your father and given them to me and they decide to sneak away and they're unhappy with the inheritance lack of inheritance from the man so as they sneak away Rachel steals the idols that her father has in his house and it's not exactly obvious why there's a lot of contention about why she's doing that some of them is to punish him to bring with her the images of her ancestors you know maybe she's lonesome moving away from home just out of spite to show him that the idols were actually powerless for protection to stop her father from divining the route of their escape that last one is the strangest one because the idea would be that Lebon would have used some sort of ritual with the idols that would help him infer their escape route and then could chase them so anyways that's the range of speculation about that I think it sounds to me mostly like a little act of revenge maybe with a bit of loneliness mixed in Laband pursues them but God comes in a dream to tell him to leave Jacob unharmed hmm LaVon catches up with him and reproaches Jacob saying that he would have thrown a great party if he would have known that they were going to leave you know he didn't want them to sneak away in the night and you can't tell from the story whether that's true or not and you know these people were pretty rough and pulse of I would say and maybe there was a 50% chance of a slaughter and a 50% chance of a party who knows I've been to parties like that actually so Laband complains that his gods are gone and Jacob says that whoever has them he will have them killed and Rachel who's really quite a sneaky character all things consider basically claims that she's having her period and she's sitting on the carpet with all the idols underneath and she can't move and so they search everywhere and can't find them and she's like laughing away behind her hand about that sneaky little maneuver but she doesn't die so that's probably a good thing so the ban checks everything out checks the camp out and he can't find anything so they reconcile and so that's the first reconciliation that Jacob engages in it's sort of like the what would you say the karmic dad is being paid that's one way of thinking about it that's so he got punished for his wrongdoing he's learned his lesson perhaps and it's it's that's good enough as far as he's concerned you know he got away good enough and they make peace so then the next thing that happens as they're travelling is that Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a man man angel God it's not clear we'll go with angel with them until the breaking of the day or God and when he saw that he prevailed not against him he touched the hollow of his thigh and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him and he said let me go for the day breaks and Jacob said I will not let you go unless you bless me and the angel said unto him what is thy name and Jacob said Jacob and the angel said thy name shall no more be called Jacob so the supplanter right the the overthrow ur with that kind of intonation of or implication of crookedness but Israel which means Hui who wrestles or strives successfully with God for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men and has prevailed that's quite a story I like it's it's I don't know I don't know exactly what to make of it there's obviously a symbolic level of meaning which is that that is what human beings do in some sense is they they wrestle I would say they wrestle with the divine even with the concept of the divine for that matter and but the question is do they prevail like it's got an odd thing that Jacob actually seems to win this battle right or at least he wins it enough so that whoever he's wrestling this divine figure that he's wrestling is willing to bestow a blessing on him I guess maybe that's a testament to his courage it's something like that maybe it's an indication that he has paid for his sins sufficiently so that he's sort of back on the moral high ground but but I think it's really telling that the transformation of the name from Jacob to Israel and that what Israel means is he who wrestles with God or who struggles with God and perhaps successfully but it's also so interesting that he actually emerges victorious you know you wouldn't necessarily think that that would be a possibility especially given you know God's rather hot-headed nature in the Old Testament you don't wanna mess with him too much but but Jacob does it successfully but even more importantly is the idea that whatever Israel constitutes which would be to say the land that Jacob founds is actually composed of those who wrestle with God I think that's an amazing idea because it also seems to me to shed some light on perhaps what was meant by belief in those days you know like I've often thought of Rett of marriage as a wrestling match right if you're lucky the person that you marry is someone you contend with it's not exactly I don't think it's exactly it's not tranquil precisely you know you might have noticed that some of you and but but the thing is if you have something to contend against then that strengthens you and and that's actually better than having nothing to contend against and so Jakob is the person who's also strengthened by the necessity of this contending and that seems to be the proper relationship with God or the angel is that contending the battling right rather than some sort of kind of loose weak statement of belief I mean I'm not trying to denigrate that to any great degree it just doesn't seem like the right mode of conceptualization right because human beings are aren't like that were contentious creatures and that's actually seems to be something that meets with God's favor in this situation so especially given that that's actually what he names the well the whole kingdom of the chosen people is the idea is that that's composed of those who contend with God so that's that's a hell of an idea that that's for sure and Jacob asked him and said tell me I pray thee thy name and he said wherefore is it thou dost ask after my name so there's no that's not happening and he blessed him there and Jacob called the place of the name of the place Peniel for I or penny'll for I've seen God face to face and my life is preserved and he passed over Peniel the Sun rose upon him and he halted upon his thigh now Jacob does walk away it injured from this right so he has a permanent limp after that and so that's also an indication of just how dangerous that contention actually is like he gets blast he wins but he doesn't get away scot-free and so now so Jacob goes back to Esau and he's terrified even though it's been 14 years he thinks maybe his heart headed brother hasn't calmed down yet and he has good reason to think that I would say so he sends messengers to Esau who then sets out with 400 men and so Jacob is not very happy with this whole idea and he breaks his people into two bands so that maybe half of them cannot be killed and then he takes from his large flocks a bunch of animals and a bunch of servants and he sends them out to meet he saw basically to say look I'm I'm I'm a jerk and sorry about the whole birthright thing and and here's some animals and you know maybe maybe that's the beginnings of an apology it's something like that and so but he's not very convinced that that's actually going to work but he saw who actually turns out to perhaps have matured in the interim perhaps that's one way of thinking about it meets Jacob and says that just seeing him is enough but Jacob insists that he takes the gift and Esau accepts and which is probably a wise thing because even if he saw is 95% convinced that just seeing his brother is enough there's probably 5% of him that's still really not all that happy and so you have to be careful you know when you say that you forgive someone because there might be a part of you that really doesn't that really needs something else before you can actually say okay look fine you know and you don't want to fool yourself about that because that 5% that hasn't been completely convinced will find its voice at some point and then maybe undermine the whole reconciliation process you don't want to think that you're any better than you are or any nicer than you are it's not helpful and so he saw a smart I think so while Jacob smart to say no no like thanks a lot but take the damn goats and Jacob and Esau is smart enough to accept that and he might do that maybe - you know - please Jacob but also I think so that there really is the possibility of establishing peace because hypothetically the gift that's being offered is of sufficient magnitude to erase the debt of the loss of the birthright it's something like that right it's it's it's it's it's the payment of the real debt and Esau said what meanest thou by all this drove which I met and Jacob said these are to find grace in the sight of my Lord and Esau says I have enough brother keep thou keep that that thou hast unto thyself and Jacob said and this is interesting statement I think no I pray you if if I have now found grace in thy sight take the present at my hand for therefore I have seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God and now was pleased with me and so that's so he's he's taking the Honorable judgment of his brother because it is honorable because he saw did get betrayed so he has a right to be standing in judgment and he equates that judgment with with what would you say with the highest of virtues it's appropriate judgment and so he wants to make complete amends to Esau as if Esau as a representative of the divine element of justice and I guess that's convincing to ease so it's quite a thing to say you know that I need to be reconciled to you because that would simultaneously reconcile me with God it's like it's crucial this is between us but it's there's a higher principle at stake that's vital and I think that is the case with betrayal that's very frequently the case because if you betray someone you really have violated you've deeply violated what can only be called a sacred trust it's the right terminology for that take it I pray the my blessing that is brought to thee because God has dealt graciously with me and because I have enough and he urged him and he took it so you know the story seems to be something like well Jacob was kind of an arrogant crooked deceitful character maybe / impressed with his own ability he thought it was pretty amusing to pull a fast trick or two on his brother then he ran off which is not all that brave and then he got walloped of a lot and perhaps learned something and then when he came back you know he was a different person and so that's a that's a reasonable story and you know he he has to repent completely of about what he did before he can rectify the situation properly and he's willing to do that so that's an interesting idea too because it's it's it's the early reflection of the idea that it is if you do something wrong in the past a that you can learn from it right so that you're actually capable of learning and be that you can set the balance right in the present those are very optimistic ideas you know because you might say well once you've committed some sort of crime that's it there's no hope for you but that's pretty rough because the probability that you've done unethical things at some point in your life is a hundred percent and so if there was no way of setting the balance right after that then everybody would be doomed so so then the story gets rough again Jacob settles in Shalem Shalem Dinah his daughter goes looking around for friends Shechem the son of Hamor lays with her and then once her for his wife he actually has the order reversed there that turns out to be a problem Jacob hears of this the fathers talk and so they make an agreement the agreement is is that if all of hammers men including hammer and his son are circumcised so that's the proper offering I guess that brings them into the familial fold and indicates that they're willing to make a sacrifice to do so especially after you know Shechem put the cart before the horse let's say the man of hammer or circumcised they agree to do so that turns out to be a big mistake so well they're laying around the next day suffering madly from the circumcision Simeon and Levi come in they sneak in and kill all of them and take their wealth and their women and children that's rough it's rough yeah I guess you guys noticed that a so-so at their honor societies right and there's still lots of honor societies in the world and so they don't take kindly to what happened to their to their sister although they don't kill her so now it turns out that yeah it says as it came to pass on the third day when they were sore the two of the sons of Jacob Simeon and Levi Dinah's brethren took each man his sword and came upon the city boldly and slew all the males and they slew hamor and shechem his son with the edge of the sword and took Dinah out of Chekhov's house and went out the sons of Jacob came upon the slain and spoiled the city because they had defiled their sister it took the sheep and the oxen and the alysus and that which was in the city and that was which it was in the field and all their wealth and all their little ones and their wives took they came captive and spoiled everything else that was in the house and Jacob actually turns out not to be very happy about that because he'd met with hammer and they'd like hammered out a deal and that and that's where they were living and so he figured well that he was making the best of a bad law let's say and his sons went behind his back and Jacob says to Simeon and Levi you have troubled me to make me meat to make me stink among the inhabitants of the land among the Canaanites and the perizzites and I being few in number they shall gather themselves now together against me and slay me and I shall be destroyed I had my house and they said should he deal with our sister as with a harlot and God said unto Jacob and this is where we get back to the idea of the center God says to Jacob arise go to Bethel and dwell there okay so Bethel was where Jacob had originally put that pillar so now it's back so he it's it's it's a real hero's journey right there's there's the place that he has a set place he goes out and has these adventures and and undergoes a moral transformation reconciles and then he comes back to the same place right as it transformed person so that's a full hero cycle arise go to Bethel and dwell there and make that there an altar unto God that appeared to thee when thou fled us from the face of Esau thy brother and Jacob said to his household and to all that were with him put away the strange gods that are among you and be clean and change your garments and let us arise and go up to Bethel and I will make there an altar unto God who answered me in the day of my distress and was with me in the way which I went and they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand and all their earrings which were in their ears and Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem and they journeyed and the terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob so Jacob came to laws which is in the land of Canaan that is Bethel so that's the place where he put up the pillar to begin with he and all the people that were there with him and he built there an altar and called the place el Bethel because their God appeared to him when he fled from the face of his brother and God appeared to Jacob again when he came out of peda an aram and blessed him and God said unto Him thy name is Jacob thy name shall not be called any more Jacob which you remember means usurper but Israel shall be thy name he who wrestles with God and he called his name Israel and God said to him I am God Almighty be fruitful and multiply a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee and Kings shall come out of thy loins and the land which I gave Abraham and Isaac to thee I will give it and to thy seed after thee will I give the land and God went up from him in the place where he talked with him and God set up Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he talked with him a pillar of stone and he poured a drink offering thereon and he poured oil thereon and Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him Bethel so he's returned to the central place which had been given to him as his territory Rachel dies in labor in the process giving birth to an only son of my sorrow whose name was then changed to Benjamin son of the right hand now Reuben so Simeon and Levi have already done something unforgivable now Reuben it's Reubens term he sleeps with Bilhah who's Jacob Israel's concubine so he's the third of the sons to make an unforgivable error and Jacob / Israel gets wind of it so Reuben is no longer he would have been the premier son given that the two older sons were put out of the running so to speak because of their disobedience and impulsive vengeful cruelty and then Reuben can't keep is what do they say well you get the idea yeah yeah seems to be something that's still quite surprisingly common so then we have this story that that basically ends with this establishment of the twelve tribes of Israel from Leah there's Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Issachar and Zebulun from Zilpah there's gad and ashur from billah there's Dan and Naphtali and from Rachel there's Joseph who figures extraordinarily importantly in the next story that we're going to cover which hopefully will wrap up Genesis and Benjamin and so now Israel itself is established and so then we turn to actually going to end this early tonight that's quite bloody miracle so the story then turns to Joseph and the story begins essentially now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age and he made him a coat of many colors and so what that seems to me to indicate you know coats in dreams very often seems to be particularly true of women's dreams that's that's been like my clinical observation clothing and footwear in particular symbolizes a role and that makes sense right because you address for the roles it's not that big a mystery but so then you might say well what does a coat of many colors indicate and you know if you think of that multiplicity there it's something like the mastery of multiple domains right or maybe something like plural potentiality and so Jacob is is Israel's or Joseph is Israel's favorite and because he sees in him this excess possibility and he basically tells his other sons that Jacob is going to be the head son which they are not happy with right because he's just this young punk fundamentally and he's clearly his father's favorite and he gets this coat that's sort of indicative of this higher status and so Israel inadvertently sets up a tremendous amount of sibling rivalry in the household again and that that's the the understructure of the last story in Genesis and so in in the last of this lecture series for 2017 we'll cover the story of Joseph and and his coat of many colors and what happens as a consequence of his of the favoritism shown to him by his father and we'll track what happens as a consequence of that and so I'm going to stop there because I'm finished so hello dr. Pearson this is an idea I've been wrestling with for quite some time now this idea of a lot of like the greatest sources of wisdom that we've received through human history either through texts experiences or scriptures seems to always come from people going to isolation and then coming back so I've had a hard time trying to figure out from a scientific point of view or evolutionary point of view what would compel an organism to that is that is centered around its behave its behavior centered around surviving in especially for humans as social groups as well as reproducing to want to go into isolation and then not only that but obtain some level of information that actually helps the group in coming back that's a really good question okay so there's this neuroscientist neuropsychologist named el Conan Goldberg and Goldberg was a student of Alexander Luria and Alexander Luria was a Russian neuropsychologist perhaps the foremost neuropsychologist of the mid to late 20th century and he had students Sokolov in vineger dov'è who discovered the orienting reflex for example the orienting reflexes the reflex that Orient's you when something anomalous interferes with your goal directed behavior it's a major discovery like one of the one of the four or five most important discoveries that have ever been made in in in psychology I would say certainly in neuroscience so Luria was a big deal and he was the first person who really established the functional role of the prefrontal cortex as well so and had it very nice overall view of how the brain function his book was written in 1980 and it's still there's still loss in it that's really useful which is pretty strange for a science that's advanced that quickly anyways so Goldberg came from a great pedigree I believe Maria's teacher was have if I remember correctly so anyways Goldberg you know you hear some of you may have heard the idea that the left hemisphere is more or linguistic than the right hemisphere is that left hemisphere is specialized for language and the right hemisphere is specialized for nonverbal imagistic communication the left hemisphere has a pretty well organized microstructure and the right hemisphere is more diffuse as well and that's true in left-handed males in particular so the circuitry can be switched around a bit but it's okay the modules are basically the same although they can be moved a little bit but Goldberg thought that it isn't language versus non language it's routine versus novelty and so the left hemisphere and there's a neuropsychologist physician named Ramachandran who's done some very interesting work that's pertinent to this maybe I'll tell you a story about him anyways Goldberg believed that the right hemisphere say you have very old systems underneath both both cortical hemispheres that do things like respond to anomaly to the thing that doesn't fit to the predator in the distance some of that's extraordinarily fast so that would be like a snake reflex that can move you away from a snake in less time than it takes the snake to bite and it's really a reflex it doesn't even hit your brain it's really super fast and then there's a defensive Crouch that's that's instantiated higher up in the nervous system but that's still remarkably fast and then there's fear as an emotion and and the orientation of attention and then there's the cognitive processing and that all streams out across a time span right and maybe that time span is half a second so you and that's really a long time if something is attacking you so you got those initial responses are quite primitive but they're extraordinarily fast all right so there's subcortical structures that orient you towards novelty and prepare you for for freezing or for it and the right hemisphere seems to be dominated by those systems so imagine that what happens is that something threatens you you orient towards it the right hemisphere produces a bunch of images about what it might be so imagine that's what happens when a child is afraid of the dark the child's on the bed they're afraid of the dark they're crouched because they're frozen like a prey animal and their right hemisphere is producing monsters to inhabit the the darkness that are the child's hypotheses about what might be out there okay because that's what you want to know right you want to know what's out there and then you want to know what to do about it I can tell you two kids dreams that are sort of relevant to that so when my daughter was about three she came into the bedroom that my wife and I had and she was crying she'd had a nightmare and she said that she saw a stream and there was garbage all over the stream and she didn't like that and so I sat her down I said okay so imagine the stream with the garbage in it now imagine that you're taking the garbage out and throwing it in the garbage bin and so she and I got her to like visualize that because that kind of puts her back in the semi dream state and then she cleaned up the mess and then she could go off to sleep now you you could tell the child don't worry about the dream isn't real that's not that's true because it's not real like other daytime things are but it's not like it's not real it's a dream like a dream is real it's just not the same kind of real and so what I did with her was to indicate to her practically that if she saw something a normal uh something that was out of place right something that was a mess that it was within her capacity to set it right okay and so okay so now your right hemisphere tells you what monsters might inhabit the the darkness now what you have to do is figure out there's two things you have to figure out one is what to do about a given monster and now there is to do what about is to figure out what to do about the class of all possible monsters right that's a whole different thing that's something that only human beings are capable of that level of abstraction right and so what you might do about a particular monster is hide or go out and get rid of it if it was just an actual animal right but that doesn't help because there's all the other potential predators that are still there and so maybe you can go hunt all them down but that doesn't help either because you can't hunt them all down it's not or it's not very likely anyways so instead what you have to do is figure out how to configure yourself so that you're in the best possible position to fight off the monsters when they come that's your best bet all right so now people are trying to figure this out forever they're trying to figure out what's the answer to the problem of the class of all possible monsters part of that sacrifice so there are routines for example in in Hinduism with the goddess Kali you make offerings to Kelly who's this devouring goddess and then she turns into her benevolent counterpart and so sacrifice is actually one way that you can tame the monsters if you think about the monster has the set of all negative future potentialities you make the proper sacrifice as those monsters stay at bay but then there's heroism as an alternative to which which means the act of confrontation of the class of all possible monsters and the building of yourself up and into this sort of courageous person that can do that it took a tremendous amount of meditation to transform those images say of the monsters in into it or to solve the problem of the class of those monsters so now I'll tell you another child stream so some of you have probably heard this before but it's such a great dream that it's worth it's worth telling so now is that my sister-in-law's house once and her son was running around he's about four very precocious very verbal very intelligent running around with a knight hat on and a sword so he's engaged in this pretty intense play world and when he goes to sleep he puts the knight hat on his pillow and the sword by his pillow and at the same time he having night terrors so he's waking up and had been for a number of weeks Nate waking up screaming and then but he doesn't know why there's some things that aren't going so well in the household and the parents get divorced shortly afterwards okay so that's oh that's that's what's going on underneath right and he's also gonna go to kindergarten and so he's about to go into the world and so he's coping with this you know so I'm watching him zoom around as this night and thinking that's pretty cool and that night he woke up and had a it was screaming and so we're all at breakfast the next morning and I said did you dream anything and he got really intense and he said yes I had a dream and I said well what was the dream and he said well I was out on this field and all these like dwarfs came up to me they were only about as high as my knees and they didn't have any arms they have powerful legs and they were covered with like hairy feathers and grease and there was cross carved in the top of their head and they had beaks and whenever he moved anywhere they would jump at him with his with their beaks and there were lots of them and everyone like just said nothing at breakfast it was like yeah cuz and he was right into this story and so we were all like yeah well huh there are that accounts for all the screaming and so and then he said yeah and then in the background there was a dragon and every time the dragon puffed out smoke it would turn into these dwarves it's like oh man kid you really got a problem there you got you got beat things that are biting you and you can kill them and that's fine but then there's the dragon just puffing out new ones so it's like a Hydra problem right the old Hydra is the serpent you cut off one had seven more grow it's not a good thing and it's such a cool dream because it really portrayed this class of all possible monsters problem so you've got the specific monsters and that's a problem so you got to get rid of them but that's not the problem the problem is is that there's a there's something in the background that's just generating monsters like mad and so I said to him what do you think you could do about that and that's a that's a loaded question right that's like leading the witness in the trial you don't get to ask a question like that because it implies that it implies the answer what could you do about that is not any different than saying you could do something about that right so so I hinted at that as a possibility and his eyes lit up now you remember he's already running around as at night Hey so he kind of already knew what to do because he had the whole sword in the Hat and with that you know that you can go after the drag and he kind of got that and he said I'd get my dad and then I jump up on top of the dragon and I'd poke out both of its eyes with my sword and then he'd go right down its throat to the fire box where the fire comes out and I carve out a piece of the fire box and then I'd used that as a shield and I thought yes right right man it's so smart eh because he got the thing instantly he knew that he knew so imagine first of all he thought okay I have to go to the heart of the problem right and really to the heart not to the dragon but right down the dam thanks gullet right to the place where the fire was actually being it was actually being created because there it was there you could find the shield and that he'd take this thing that was fireproof and make a shield out of it and so that was just he had bloody perfect it was so cool and you think well how could a kid come up with that and there's a bunch of answers I mean one is we know snake fear is innate we know that now there's been recent research data that that has demonstrated that okay so and we've been preyed on and been predators for a very long period of time so the idea that and I found something else interesting about the brain out that dubrow out about the brain recently - and book I was reading by Ray Kurzweil called how to build a mind I think that's what it was called it was quite a good book so I think it was in that book or it was in the neuroscience paper I was reading doesn't matter but it was in one of those two places so you know that scanning technology has got more and more high resolution over the last few years right it just gets more and more high-resolution all the time and so people are now able to look at the micro structures of the brain in a way that hasn't been possible before and so the old idea with the cortex basically was that cortex was full of a bunch of neurons and then when one neuron and another fired at the same time they would wire together and that's kind of how your brain learned to make connections it's a bit more complicated than that but that will do and then it was found that it wasn't quite that simple because what your cortex is made out of are these columns of neurons that are duplicated sort of like a like centipedes legs you know it's very simple genetic code to add another leg set of legs to a centipede it's sort of like that with your brain it's made out of all these columns and the columns are basically already quite wired up and then as you learn the columns wired together okay so there's some pre-existence structure there but there's more preexisting structure than what that was thought so it's it's basically that there are already tracts that link columns together that are in different parts of the brain and the columns can or the columns themselves can send out dendrites to these superhighways which are already there and then the superhighway is there and then it can generate connections to the columns at the end of the superhighway so what that means is that there's a tremendous amount of cortical structure already in place but there's plasticity around that and when I read that I thought well that's part of the source of the archetypes there's already an archetypal structure there that as well as the subcortical structures so you could say that like the kid already had within him not only the capacity to represent not only the monster but the class of all possible monsters and the fact that the problem wasn't monsters the problem was that monsters could continually be generated which is a way worse problem and then the answer to that isn't to kill an individual monster the answer to that is go to the source of the monstrous itself and defeat it so it's absolutely staggering and you could imagine that it would take a tremendous amount of meditate of effort for people to have come up with that solution over a very long period of time so now the point of the representation is to formulate a picture of what it is that's the threat so that you can then formulate a general purpose solution and so there's this image of Kali which I really like because Kelly is sort of the goddess of the darkness let's say in destruction and so Kelly is she has a headdress of fire her hair is on fire and she has a headdress of skulls and she has hands cut off all around her neck and she has a belt that's often snakes but it's sometimes she sometimes eating the intestines of this guy that she's just given birth to and that she's sitting on she has eight legs like a spider and she's in a web of fire and so she's a monster in some sense that represents everything that might terrify and devour you and the question is so you come up with that representation as an image to represent the class of all terrifying things and then you have to generate a solution in the face of that class and sacrifice is one of the solutions but that heroic encounter is another one of the solutions and that's the one that he catalyzed now he'd been read lots of books he'd watched lots of Disney movies you know and and he'd seen the heroic pattern portrayed many many places and his little brain was working like mad to extract out the essence of that and to embody it and when I asked him that question it just went snap and all those things lined up and his night terrors went away that was it and I followed up with his mom because it was really quite remarkable the whole set of occurrences you know and he didn't have night terrors that night even though he'd been having the nightly and that was the end of them because he'd solved his problem like he needed to be the courageous knight that went after the dragon and so that is what people need to be so I think when we go into solitude we shut off the external stimulation and we let the Dreaming part of our mind emerge and that's this nonverbal pattern detector that thinks in images and it's it's the thing that mediates between what we don't understand and what we do understand like if you understand it completely you can say it and you can act it out if you don't understand it you represent it in images and there it's like it's the emotion fear withdrawal paralysis and then that manifests itself in an image of what that might be and that image is the basis for the story and it's the basis for further development of the idea and to go into isolation is to let those images emerge and to dream a little bit and then that moves you that moves you ahead into the future so language they use before it's enough just to map out the danger that is imminent in front of you but all the potential dangers that you could come up with in abstract form yeah well remember what happens when God throws Adam and Eve out of out of paradise they become aware that they're going to die right the future becomes a problem because you could say the future is the place of all potential monsters right and so just the monster that you have right in front of you it's like yeah well you get rid of that but that doesn't solve your problem does it the problem is how do you exist in a world full of monsters and part of that answer is well you become a monster yourself that's a big part of the answer but it's an incomplete answer because if you're just a monster then you're just as bad as the monsters so you have to trance you have to be a monstrous enough to contend with the monsters but then you have to be civilized enough so that you're not a monster yourself and that's more or less equivalent to the Union inter integration of the shadow so yep yeah hiya dr. Peterson now I've been wanting to ask you this for a while now since I started watching your lectures after I started reading and nici's Beyond Good and Evil I came upon a paragraph in his chapter on scholars that really really bothered me and it actually bothers me to this day he talked about this kind of person like they were just a mirror-like they stretched he said every part of their skin basically to allow every new piece of information that they took on and that all they ever were was just an instrument they were just a mirror on reflecting what they had learned never actually having generated anything on their own and it's it's bothered me because I feel like in a way it's sort of like it's it's it's impacted my identity a lot because I don't know how are you supposed to create something you know ok well that's ok that that's a really good question I mean Nietzsche is often classed with the existentialists right and so one of the tenants of existentialist there's two real tenants of existentialism there's more but obviously we're oversimplifying but one is that life is a problem it isn't because there's something wrong with you it's that life is a problem and so that's often contrasted with the Freudian view which is that if you have a problem it's because something went wrong during your development the existentialist said no no it's like life is a problem make no mistake about it and that the purpose of the purpose of scholarship is in some sense to solve that problem and so for Nietzsche like he said all truths are bloody truths to me and what he meant by that was that if an idea didn't incarnate itself in you and transform your perceptions and your actions then you were merely possessed by the idea you were merely a spokesperson for the idea or you could say that the idea possessed you you're a puppet for the idea it's not you it's the idea is in you and it has you you haven't taken the idea and incorporated with you and made it part of your life and so there's a romanticism that's associated with that right that's the passionate scholar the person for whom ideas are not merely they're not merely what would you call abstracted representations that can be tossed about as if they're commodities there there there are more like pert they're more like personalities that might be another way of thinking about it and so if you're if if those ideas are compelling then you don't like one thing I learned a long time ago and I think this is probably relevant I know when I was a kid I like to argue and I like to win arguments or or or lose them although I like winning them a lot better but I didn't really mind so much what the content of the argument was you know I could engage in it like a sparring match and it was in some sense to establish dominance right to establish intellectual dominance I quit doing that when I was in my mid-20s because I thought that that was too shallow an approach to the ideas they they're not commodities of that sort they're there they have tendrils that reach down into the living that's the right way to think about it and so Nietzsche's criticism of scholars and he did this a lot was that they were bloodless you know they didn't they were full of performative contradictions that's another way of thinking about they'd say one thing and do another because their intellect was completely dissociated from their from their actions and Heath he he thought that was a very bad idea and I think that that's a good criticism I think it is a bad idea I also think it makes for an extraordinarily boring lecturer you know because you can tell if you're listening to someone whether the idea is that you're hearing are merely being passed through the person as if they're being memorized say or whether they're part of the dynamic core of the person and if they're part of the dynamic core of the person then they're almost always engaging and gripping and so he wasn't a fan of bloodless scholars and I think that's correct because one of the things that I see it's not a good idea to have ideas possess you unless you know what the ideas are up to and lots of people are possessed by ideas rather than possessing them and that what that means is they haven't taken the ideas and integrated them into their own being they haven't it's like an incarnation in a sense they haven't incarnated the ideas in an embodied form and and so they're incomplete you know Nietzsche also in thus spake Zarathustra when Zarathustra comes down the mountain he sees a bunch of people gathered around a famous individual I think maybe a scholar but doesn't really matter and when Zarathustra goes in looks at the person all he sees his little tiny with a gigantic ear and so he's a hyper specialist right and so he has a pretty impressive ear but he's only this big and that was Nietzsche's imagistic commentary on the danger of hyper specialization and also on the danger of adulation for hyperspecialization and and because he thought about it as a kind of deformity now Nietzsche was a pretty harsh guy but but he did address the issue of the relationship between intellectual knowledge and and action because for Nietzsche those things are not to be separated in some sense so yeah so maybe I don't know why it maybe it bothered you like it's hard to say why it bothered you it might have bothered you because it's sort of undermined the idea of scholar but the other possibility and this isn't an accusation because obviously I don't know anything about you but it might also be that it struck a chord you know and that maybe you were doubtful or questioning how tightly associated your intellectual endeavor was with your actual character and your practice so that's another possibility I mean that's a really good thing to think about because generally speaking that integration is it is very much lacking people are a lot smarter and fluid with their ideas than they are ethical and consistent and characterized by integrity so yep hey um so last week you talked about how you hated people asking you if you believe in God or do you believe in miracles or you just like those questions elytis but you also talked about how and I want to put words in your mouth but I think you said something about the idea of an empirical evidence for religious experiences or spiritual experiences and I wonder how those two ideas can a spiritual existence or can a spiritual experience exist without God or who knows who knows you know I don't know what I don't know what to make of that I mean you could it depends on what you're willing to accept as proof I suppose that's where things get tricky you know if you have to demonstrate the existence of God objectively then subjective experiences of the transcendent are irrelevant right but and and that's a perfectly reasonable standpoint if your initial presupposition is the only thing that has actual existence is those things that can be demonstrated objectively and I'm not putting that down like that's a powerful methodology our technology is basically dependent on the acceptance at least a partial acceptance of those axioms but I also think that it's difficult for me to deny the existence of these patterns of thinking that seem to exist cross-culturally like the existence of the representation of the Dragon for example especially given that I can see an evolutionary rationale for the emergence of these representations so and then there's also the indisputable fact that religious experiences are accessible to people through a number of different avenues now and one of the things I mentioned when I discussed this before is well you could say well those are no different than experiences of psychopathology but they are different because the experiences of psychopathology damage people whereas the evidence is that the transcendent experiences actually help people so unless you can unless you're willing to say well there are some forms of psychopathological experience that actually facilitate health which is possibility but you know I think you're you're pushing your hypothesis at that point I'm not sure what you're saying about a religious experience is what I'm well generally a religious experience is something like an experience of the of the renewal of the world that might be one way of thinking about it so that everything sort of leaps forward as crystalline and perfect as if you had been viewing it from behind a mask before another would be a sense of the union of everything and so you're a singular being and you're isolated and in the religious experiences so for example there's a book written recently by a neuroscientist my stroke of what's it called my stroke of insight yeah that's right and I believe she had a left hemisphere stroke if I remember correctly and she was sufficiently well-developed neuroscientists to understand what was happening as she had the stroke and and she had a intense religious experience as a consequence of that and she experienced it as a dissolution of the ego into this state of union with everything and this transcendent experience of awe and and the open well I don't remember the rest of it I mean there are other elements of religious experience that are quite common the idea of the opening of the heavens that's one the communion with the ancestors that's another the reduction of the body to a skeleton that's another movement up into heaven like these are well documented phenomena and a lot of them are associated well of a fair number of them were associated with psychedelic use but that's not the only Avenue to experiences like that and epilepsy can produce experiences like that too and then people usually report a near-death experience as well you know people usually report that those experiences have life-altering significance now that in and of itself only proves that people are capable of having subjective religious experiences right it doesn't definitively prove there's anything outside of that so young Carl young for example most of the time he didn't talk about God he talked about the God image which is not the same thing because you could have a god image that was even evolutionarily instantiated without that necessarily being rep to any transcendent being beyond the image right so who knows who knows again I think it depends on what you're willing to accept as proof now the proof the it's beyond question that can people can have life-changing religious experiences another example of that is that the best treatment for alcoholism is religious conversion it's well documented in the literature and I studied alcoholism for a long time so one of the cures that sticks is religious conversion and the 12-step programs essentially attempt to instantiate religious conversion and it's hard to document their success because they succeed for the people who stick with it but that's not a very good measure right it's sort of it's sort of self-evident that they work for the people who stick with it I'm not cynical about about Alcoholics Anonymous or anything but we don't have good data on on outcome but there is good data showing that religious transformation is a good cure for for alcoholism so and that's an interesting phenomena too it's too complicated I probably can't okay I'll try I'll try this for a second so here's how I think a religious conversion might work so imagine you've got the left hemisphere and it's the place where your habitual interpretations reside so I can give you a quick example of this so this guy Ramachandran who's a neurophysiologist or I think that's his that's his field of study I think he's at UCLA he studied people who hadn't neglect and neglects is a very very bizarre phenomena so if you have a stroke that damages your right parietal lobe you'll lose the left part of your being not just your body it's really weird it's like so for example if you have a right parietal stroke and you look at a clock you only see you only only half the clock exists for you it's not like you only see half the clock it's weirder than that it's that there's only the right side of the clock there's only the right side of you there's only the right side of my body I don't know that this exists and so sometimes people with right parietal damage will wake up after the stroke and grab their left arm and throw it out of bed and or their leg and throw it out of bed because it's not theirs and then of course they fall out of bed which is quite a shock to them so and so now they'll only eat half the food on the plate nobody can really understand this phenomena logically right because we can't imagine what that must be like I think it must be like you know how you know there's things behind you but you don't not see them they're just not there it's not like it's black or anything or there's a space it's just not there and so I think what happens is the not there extends to three-quarters of the field instead of half the field that's a guess anyway so ramas now the funny thing about people with neglect is that if you tell them if you point it out you say well I noticed that you're not moving your left foot today they'll say well it's it's arthritic and I can't move it and say well why do you just try to move it so no look doctor I already told you it's in too much pain to move it was working fine this morning that can be months after the the accident so it's a denial and and people thought actually that that was trauma induced denial for a long time before they figured it out was actually a consequence of the neurophysiological damage you know Ramachandran found that if you irrigated the contralateral ear say now if you pour cold water in someone's ear it upsets their vestibular system and their eyes will move back and forth like this you can try that at a party if you want and anyways Ramachandran was testing vestibular function on these patients and he irrigated the right ear with cold water and they woke up and maybe what happened was that that was shocking enough so imagine the networks in the right hemisphere were degraded but not completely gone and they needed a really high threshold of activation to snap into function so here's an example of that if you have Parkinson's disease imagine you're frozen there okay and I throw a ball at you you'll go like this and catch it but you can't throw it back so you can the stimulus is enough that's enough to push you past threshold but you can't do it voluntarily now if you have Parkinson's like right to the tenth degree you won't even be able to couch it but there's a stage where you could still do that there's a great case study where this grandpa was in a wheelchair he had Parkinson's and his young grandson was playing out on the dock and fell in the water and started to drown and he got out of his wheelchair went into the ocean rescued him brought him onto the beach sat back down in his wheelchair and was paralyzed together so that was enough so you can imagine there was enough network left so if the emotional tension became high enough that the degraded circuits could still function so okay so back to Ramachandran so you irrigate the ear all of a sudden the right hemisphere connections flash the remainders managed to connect and the person goes oh my god I've had a terrible stroke I've lost the left side of my body they're crying they're like completely catastrophic aliy overwhelmed by it and then 20 minutes later the the effects wear off and they snap back in and now they they've lost their left side again they don't remember it and so what seems to happen is that the right hemisphere is collecting anomalous information that's what it does that's what it does when you're dreaming it's it's it's it's representing that anomalous information in image form and sort of slowly passing it to the left hemisphere so it doesn't overwhelm it and maybe if it gets overwhelming you wake up and you're afraid and you tell someone about the dream that helps you figure out what it was but anyways so that the right hemisphere is always trying to tap the left hemisphere into transformation right so now imagine that that can happen a little bit or a lot so maybe you're just ignoring a little bit of anomalous information you just have some mildly frightening dreams or maybe you've just stacked up a whole bunch of things that you're ignoring and there's some major-league monsters that you haven't contended with maybe there's situations where the right hemisphere is stored up enough counter enough of a counter hypothesis let's say about how the world works out make making sense out of all those things that you've ignored that one day it just goes snap and you're a new personality and maybe the new personality isn't addicted so it's something like it's something like that I think so yeah okay joke good morning citizen Peterson oh you got I've prepared a real doozy for you here oh good it's a good thing you've got extra time to handle this one I'd even say it's rehearsed a little bit so it's gonna be ultra ineffective yeah okay now I understand that a lecture on the psychological significance of anything really is going to indubitably wander off into an anthropocentric worldview but as a practitioner of the hard sciences I wanted to dig a little bit deeper you know so I sought out I guess a religious interpretation of both creative freedom and I guess the very nature of time itself and I found it obviously that's why I'm here and if you think you have an anthropocentric worldview it's nothing compared to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger you know now I like to think that you know this microphone here the one that you keep muting out on me you know this microphone is an object which exists outside of our individual perceptions that's just the way I like to look at it but then I think about the concept beauty is in the eye of the beholder and certainly I mean when you're talking about are the appreciation of art there has to be some sort of subjective element integrated into that but there also must be a limit as well I mean certain works of art do we appreciate as absolute masterpieces like Michelangelo's pietà for example which you bring up frequently because it really is that good but there's other things which are just by comparison there like vandalism you know now there's always a temptation all right to invoke the principle of a non-overlapping magisteria but that seems like sort of a capo right so I formulated I guess for myself for standards of measure which help me separate what's the difference between art and mediocrity and here's the four number one education number two time commitment you got to put in the time if you're an artist it's probably gonna become your full-time occupation it's that you have to be that passionate about it number three public display art isn't something that you own for yourself you hide it in your basement then it's not art it's something what you have to express you know something which you've got to share and number four and I think this is the most important one efficacy of vision if you're an artist you've got to have a vision and we talked about the dream state here a lot you go into the dream state you have inspiration but it's not enough to just have the inspiration because that's totally subjective for you the art the art part about it is having the techniques and the skill and the intent and I guess the capacity to turn that into something real you know that you can then express or share so can you read cardinal ratzinger as explanation for the nature of time and then address the concept of beauty in the eye of the beholder with specific reference to the body positivity movement how sheesh misses no I don't think I can I think I think I think that's ha ha ha I think I think that you you tangled together so many things and this is also a tangle of things not that that's a criticism that I can't pull them all together with sufficient rapidity not to bore the audience to death so I'm gonna I'm gonna wait I'm gonna wait ok dr. Peterson I'm fascinated by the idea of faith what faith means Jacob listens to a voice and believes it he probably heard other voices why did he believe this one why what there must have been an a priori sort of functional necessity for him to believe the voice that told him one thing or another and and I think that that's a string that runs through the Bible and then through the New Testament we are expected as well I confess I'm a Christian I'm I act like I believe God is real and and so there is this call of faith and also the in in every hero's story we we see now there is always a moment in that story where the hero must believe something beyond the evidence that is before them which is to say they must take a leap of faith so I'm wondering if you can just kind of unpack that experience of faith and the understanding of how a human being makes the choice to believe one thing or another god that's a great question I mean uh is this still on is this still working okay okay okay good um I don't I don't precisely know the answer that it's it's a very peculiar thing because we think many things or you could say many voices appear in our minds because when Nietzsche took des cartes I think therefore I am apart and he said well it isn't so obvious that there's an AI first of all that it's a unity like a no unity transparent unto itself which of course the psychoanalysts picked up in a big way and then he wasn't sure that it was the AI who thought in some causal manner he said well no it's more like thoughts it's something like thoughts appear in the phenomenal field and maybe you choose between them or maybe they possess you like there's lots of other ways of thinking about it it isn't exactly obvious to me why we choose to take one pathway rather than another when so many of them offer themselves to us you know people tend to talk about that as something like conscience right and now maybe it's that it's got to have something to do I think it's an endless regress because you can always ask why the why any assumption became primary but I'll put that aside for a moment it seems to me to have something to do with your aims you know that you're more likely to listen to a voice that is in keeping with your most fundamental aims and then the question is where do your most fundamental aims come from and from what I've been able to determine and I'll speak psychologically again is that to begin with you're a concatenation of rather primitive sub personalities hungry ones tired one's upset ones laughing one so you can see that in babies you know they cycle through those states very rapidly there's a infantile unity above all that but it doesn't have control right and so then the developing individual has to figure out how to integrate those primitive sub personalities into a unified personality at the same time they integrate the unified personality into a social unity so it's partly individual integration but it's fed by social forces I mean even when you watch a an infant breastfeed its established a relationship with its mother and there's a reciprocity that's already at play there so then that underlying multiplicity starts to form itself into a unity and then the question and I would say that's something like that's something like the emergence of the the individual out of out of the the Titans that's a reasonable way of thinking about it like a sovereign out of the Titans it's something like that but then there's another division which seems to me to paralyse parallel the the Cain and Abel division it's that that integration can be oriented towards something that's positive but it can also be oriented towards something that's negative and that's the split of the world into good and evil I think and then it looks like you're navigating between those and I can only account for that with something like choice like I think the free choice even though I don't understand it I'm unwilling to deny the existence of free choice merely because I don't understand it because it looks to me like that's how people act that's how they expect to be treated and that societies who that that structure themselves in accordance with the idea that people have free choice actually work now that doesn't prove that there's free choice but people have been arguing about that forever so but it looks to me so those are two possible means of integration and then I think what you're doing is feeding one or the other constantly and I think you probably choose which one to feed I think that's and I mean that's how it feels that way to me as well like when I look at my own you know maybe you're really aggravated with something maybe you're aggravated with your wife you know or your child or something like that you know and you're feeling kind of nasty and maybe even know that you're in the wrong and an idea comes into your head you think I could say that and no you could say it and you know what it would do but then you pause and you think would that make it better or worse and then maybe you go to hell with it which is a quite the thing to say I've got a little story about that in a minute and then you say it but you knew you knew that you took the low road right and you know it and then you're guilty about that and defensive and that makes the fight way worse because then there's no damn way you're gonna admit that you actually did that and so things do go to hell and so so here's here's an ugly little idea so that's that's that's relevant to the question so imagine you're playing around with cocaine now I'm using cocaine because it's very addictive but it's a very interesting chemical because it's a dopaminergic agonist and what what dopamine does is two things it makes you feel like what you're doing is worthwhile but it also imagined that there's a bunch of neural circuits that are active and then they get a hit of dopamine or you do then those neural circuits get a little bit more powerful okay so it it has a rewarding property which is that it makes you feel like what you're doing is important and it has a reinforcing property which is it makes neural circuits grow so now what that means is that whatever you were doing just before you took cocaine grows okay so now imagine there's a bunch of different things that you do just before you take cocaine but there's a string of decisions and at one decision point is the same for all of those difference occurrences and that decision point is because you know you're in trouble and that decision point is well to hell with it okay so then you think that each of the 200 times that you take cocaine even though you do it in different places but that one thought is there all the time and that thing grows because you're reinforcing it and it grows and it grows and it grows and so now that's in you let's that's part of you and it's the thing that says to hell with it okay so now and maybe that's not such a good thing to grow inside your brain so then you your idea and they take you to a cocaine treatment center and after a week you're no longer physically physiologically addicted you're not craving you don't have a problem as long as you're there but then they take you back to your normal environment and you see like cocaine Joe your friend and as soon as you see him up that thing comes and bang you're back on the you're back on the to hell with the track and that's well you're in well you're where you will end up - if you reinforce that particular perspective long enough so that's akin in a sense to the this decision-making process you know if you if you take the low road then that wins and it gets a little stronger because everything that wins neurologically gets a little stronger it's like a Darwinian competition so one rule is don't practice what you don't want to become because you really do become that it builds it builds itself right into your neural architecture and that's one of the terrifying things about addiction you know because you think well it's kind of psychological it's like yeah kind of it's also kind of neuro physiological and you build a one-eyed cocaine monster in your head if you hit yourself enough with something that reinforcing so yeah last question I guess it's just a really simple question then about long suffering so when it one of the things that was noticing from the stories of Jacob and a lot of these biblical narratives is you do have this all-powerful God who is able to kind of essentially be the hidden protagonist in the narrative but then the funny thing is that he's kind of revealing some of his qualities throughout the course of the story so you were talking about the weird paradox of the fact that God somehow allows Jacob Israel to win the fight yeah so my question is relating to pants EPs thing about the rats that you told like three or four times and the number of occasions I saw one even more recent videos you talked about it where the bigger rat lets the smaller rat win because then the other the smaller rat won't engage in the game so the question is is twofold for me one is God allowing humanity to win periodically so that's to allow us to actually engage in the dialogue through these stories and to is it a much more primitive version of the virtue of humility which you wouldn't normally characterize of an Amana path of anonymity omnipotent deity well those are excellent questions that's I really like the second one in particular that that that God's decision to allow human victory from time to time is actually a manifestation of something approximating humility or at least mercy but humility is an interesting take on it well it's also connected to Paul's image of how Christ handed him hands himself over and allows himself to be defeated by men and therefore conquers sin which is man's enemy it's a weird it's the same paradox where God enters into that dynamic with people and loses and willingly loses yeah well that's a okay so the first thing I would say is that that's a really interesting analogy I I I can't it's complicated enough question so that I can't go be I don't think I can go be the question actually because it's so complicated that I don't think I can formulate it any better than you already did like it's an interesting string of ideas I'd have to play with it a while to see it does shed an interesting light on why God is amenable to negotiation in the Old Testament which is really a strange as you pointed out it's really a strange thing it's like this is omnipotent God who obviously can do whatever he wants and yet he allow he can be bargained with and that also opens up the question of why like your hypothesis is well if you don't let the little rat win now and then then they get dejected and quit playing and that's I mean that's that's a pretty good observation if people don't get to win now and then you know they that's kind of what happens to Cain God says well you not playing a straight game that's why you're not winning but I don't know there's an intimation in the Old Testament and I think it's more developed in the New Testament maybe not that the straighter the game you play the more likely you are to win and so maybe part of the reason that God lets Abraham bargain and and even Jacob is because they've started to play very straight games and so maybe you do win in your wrestling with God if you play a straight game I mean I think that's I actually think that's I think the reason that's true is because that's actually why we would define it as a straight game now then we could speak psychologically again I think that what we've come to recognize as a straight game is the game that in the broadest number of situations across the widest range of time spans is most likely to produce a positive outcome and that's that's actually the grounds for our sense of ethics that it's really practical not to belabor it too much because there was there was an interesting insight from Chesterton's the man who was Thursday where God sets himself up as the benevolent antagonist so as to accelerate the game yeah well I think that's a really interesting idea I mean there is there is hints I would say throughout the biblical story that the reason that God tolerates Satan let's say is because without an adversary you're soft and that's I mean that's tied in with the notion that life is something like a moral struggle you know that that's the fundamental essence of being a moral struggle now it I think that that's phenomenologically a reasonable observation maybe it's maybe other people don't experience it that way but it seems to me like within my own experience that that's accurate now I don't know what again I don't know what that says about the fundamental nature of reality but I had a vision at one point that I was in a ring with Satan actually believe it or not and it was like a Roman Colosseum and you know I was rather upset to find myself there but I won and I asked God afterwards why he would do such a thing and his answer was he knew I could win and that's interesting you know because like I don't know what to make of that believe me I have no idea what to make of that but the idea was that if you're trying to encourage someone rather than protect them because those are really different things right to protect someone isn't to make them strong to encourage them is to make them strong then you set them a series of challenges right right at the point where they may win and maybe you could make a case that that's what you do if you really care for someone now I know that that's it I'm not saying that that interpretation is correct I'm not but but there's something mean you definitely with your children you know when you're wrestling with them say when you're playing with them you use you push them to the limit of their ability because otherwise they don't transcend their current abilities so yep [Music] so we'll see some of you perhaps most of you in December and I think we'll finish off Genesis at that point and then in the new year probably not till the spring I'll start with exodus which I'm really looking forward to because I really like the Exodus story it's an amazing story and unbelievably deep note well the ones we've covered so far being you know pretty good as well but so thank you all for coming and we'll perhaps see you in about a month

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,064,936

Rating: 4.8317175 out of 5

Keywords: atheist, bible, christ, christian, christianity, existentialism, faith, free speech, god, gods, jesus, jordan peterson, lecture, openness, personality, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, religion, spirit, toronto, truth, university of toronto, yeshua, Jacob, Israel, Angel, Laban, Rachel

Id: DRJKwDfDbco

Length: 152min 9sec (9129 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/gilraand]

I fuckin' love Gustave Dore.