Biblical Series XV: Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors

[Music] that's a hell of a welcome for someone who's gonna talk about the Bible so I thought I would get farther than through Genesis by by this point but I'm not unhappy about the pace either I've learned a tremendous amount and so hopefully what we'll do today is finish Genesis completely and then I think I'll try to start up with Exodus in May depending on what happens next year I have a busy travel schedule and but I would really like to do it I really like the Exodus story and I understand it very well a lot of the stories in Genesis especially after the first few stories say up to the Tower of Babel I had to do a tremendous amount of learning about which is really good but I do know the Exodus story so I'm really looking forward to that so so let's dive right into it and see how far we can get today so we'll review first so Joseph's father is Jacob and Jacob is the patriarch of Israel essentially that the father of the twelve tribes and we might remember that he had a very morally ambivalent pathway through life and it's one of the things that I think so interesting about the stories in the in the Old Testament is that these so called patriarchal figures are very realistic and it's something that I was also being struck by that accounts in the New Testament that way there's lots of things that Christ does that you'd think would have been edited out over time and sanitized but they're not and that the Old Testament is definitely not a book that's been sanitized and that's it quite interesting that that's the case so you sort of see people with all their flaws and I've been trying to also derive some general conclusions about them the moral of the story of the Genesis stories and because these stories are fundamentally moral and moral as far as I'm concerned has to do with action right because moral decisions are the decisions that you make when you're structuring action when you decide to do one thing or another generally you want to do things that are the best things that you can think of to do and hence good but sometimes you also want to do things that are they're worse things you can do you know because you're angry or resentful or bitter and so the moral decisions that you make that govern your actions are really the most important decisions that you make in your life and it's not that easy to figure out how to make moral decisions we don't have an unerring technology for that the same way as we do for say making decisions about empirical reality which in some ways seem a lot simpler partly because we can work collectively at it partly because we have a rigorous methodology for deciding what's true and what's not so one of the things that's really struck me like it's an overarching theme I would say that the emerges out of Genesis especially after the really ancient stories say especially after the stories of Cain and Abel and Noah and the Tower of Babel when you get to the accounts of the historically or historically real people one injunction seems to be get the hell out there and do something you know one of the major themes for all of the patriarchs that we've talked about Abraham say Jacob and Joseph is move out into the world regardless of the circumstances at hand now that's in in in the Old Testament stories that's basically portrayed as harkening to the voice of God something like that maybe you could think about his destiny or a psychological calling and the funny thing too is is that it's not that these people have an easy time of it when they heed that call so what's what's fascinating is that they often run into extreme difficulties right away and I think that's very interesting first of all because life is obviously full of extreme difficulties and second it's another example of the failure to sugarcoat things which is one of the things I think makes a mockery of anti religious theories that are even quite sophisticated say like Freud's because Freud thought of religion as a and it was a wish fulfillment essentially and and also Marx who thought about religion as the opiate of the masses it's if those were true it seems to me that there'd be a lot more wish and a lot less reality a lot less stark harsh reality you know in the first thing that Abraham encounters is a famine and then he has to hide his wife and then he he basically journeys into a tyranny so that's about as bad as it gets in some ways and those themes recur continually and no one ever lives where they're supposed to live they'll even live in Canaan and not the promised land and so it's a pretty rough it's a pretty rough series of stories but the fundamental idea is something like there's no time for sitting around there's time to go out into the world and engage and then there's there's hints about the proper and improper ways of engaging right so clearly the improper way to engage is I think most clearly delineated in the Cain and Abel story and with Cain exemplifying the inappropriate way to engage with the world and that's to engage with the world in a bitter jealous and resentful manner now one of the things that I really like about the Cain and Abel story and that theme recurs continually with the with the duality of the brothers right there's there's constant conflict between a perspective that's essentially like Cain's and and the and the opposite perspective which all which I'll get to in a minute but Caine sees that the world is a very tragic place and that the rewards are distributed unfairly and that there are people who do better and people who do worse and as a consequence of that he becomes bitter and resentful and curses God and then he becomes homicidal fratricidal which is even worse than he destroys his own ideal then his descendants basically become genocide or something like that so that seems to be the wrong way to go about things you know unless your goal is to make things worse like it's not like it has a limited number of things has nothing to object to he's got plenty to object to his situation actually is bad he's overshadowed terribly by his brother who everyone loves who does extraordinarily well and who's good at everything and the story is a bit of nivel inton for Keynes failure although a fair bit of its laid at his own feet but he's definitely failing and so you can understand why he would have this terrible attitude but the problem is all it does is make it worse so it doesn't seem to be one of the things I've also learned as a psychologist sort of pondering these sorts of things it's often a lot easier to identify what you shouldn't do than what you should do like it's I think evil is easier to identify than good I think good is trickier but evil stands out to some degree and then at least you can say if you're trying to get as far away from that as possible we could even say just for practical reasons so your life doesn't become hell and your family life doesn't become hell at least you could get as far away from that as possible even if you weren't able to conjure up what would constitute the good as a name you could at least avoid those sorts of pitfalls and I do also think that its pitfalls like that that really threaten our society right now you know that I see a tremendous rise in resentment fueling almost all of the political polarization that's taking place and seems unfortunate given that by and by large everyone on the planet is richer than they've ever been now that doesn't mean there's no disparity there's but there's always disparity anyways Jacob of course Jacob on see so and so the and Jacob ends up with with with Isaac's blessing and so that's that's a moral catastrophe and then he has to run because his brother wants to kill him and so that's the fratricidal motif again I like that too I think that's real really realistic you know one of the things that Freud noted constantly and this is where Freud really is a genius is that the most intense hatreds and also sometimes the most intense love is within families you know and in the Freudian world of psychopathology it's all it's all inside the family and in fact the pathology in the Freudian world is actually the fact that it's all inside the family because people who get tangled up in the Freudian familial nightmare which is roughly eatable in structure can only conceptualize the world in terms of their familial relationships they've been so damaged by the enmeshment and the trauma and the deceit and the betrayal and the blurred lines and all of that that they just can't expand past the family and go out in the world so the idea that brothers can be at each other's throats I think is that's a very powerful idea and it's not something that people like to think about so so Jacob has to leave and it's not surprising because I mean what he did was pretty reprehensible he betrayed his brother but nonetheless he's the person who dreams of the ladder that unites heaven and earth and that's a very perverse thing you know what but one of the things I think it does is give in some sense it gives hope to everyone because it isn't you know if only the good guys win we're really in trouble right because it's not that easy to be a good guy it's it's it's really not that easy and most people are pretty keenly aware of all the ways that they fall short even of their own ideals and so if there was no hope except for the good guys almost all of us would be lost and so that's one of the things I really liked and was more surprised about with the Old Testament stories is that these people are a very complex and they make very major moral errors by anyone's standard and yet if and yet the overall message is still hopeful and the the message that runs contrary to the message of evil say that message of good is something like well there's a lot of emphasis on faith right and the that's a tough one because cynics people who are cynical about religious structures like to think of faith as the willingness to demolish your intellect in the service of superstition and well there's there's something to be said for that perspective but not a lot because the reality is much more sophisticated part of the faith that's that that is being insisted upon in the old testament is something like and I'm speaking psychologically here again that it's useful to pause it a high high good and to aim at it so and I really think that's practically useful to the research we've done with the Future authoring program for example indicates pretty clearly that if you get people to conceptualize an ideal and a balanced ideal you know so what do you want for your family what do you want for your career what do you want for your education what do you want for your character development how are you going to use your time outside of work how are you going to structure your use of drugs and alcohol in places where you might get impulsive how can you avoid falling into a horrible pit if you really think that through and you come up with an integrated ideal and you you put it above you as something to reach for then you're more committed to the world in a positive way and you're less tormented by anxiety and uncertainty and so and that makes sense right because here you are alive and everything and so unless you were capable if you're not capable of manifesting some positive relationship with the fact of your being then how could that be anything other than hellish because you it would just be anxiety provoking and terrible because you're vulnerable and there'd be nothing useful or worthwhile to do well that's just not I just can't see that as a winning strategy for anyone you can make a rational case for adopting that strategy in that you know you can say well there's no evidence for for a transcendent morality or for an ultimate meaning there's no hard empirical evidence but it seems to me that there's existential evidence as well that has to be taken into account and of course psych psychologists have talked about this a lot Carl Rogers for example in Hume for that matter Freud for that matter most of the great psychologists have pointed out that you know you can derive reasonable information that's that's solid from your own experience especially if you also talk to other people and you can kind of see in your own life when you're on a productive path that sort of in Nobles and enlightens you or a destructive path and I think it's kind of useful to think that maybe the dichotomy between those two paths might be real you know and and because that also allows you to give credence to your intuitions about that sort of thing but I don't anyways I don't think it's unreasonable to posit that since you're alive adopting the highest possible regard for the fact that you're alive and that you're surrounded by other creatures that are alive I just can't see how that can possibly be construed as a losing strategy and so that's the first thing so that's something like faith right it's faith it's not it's not only faith in your being but it's faith in being as such and the faith would be something like if you could orient your being properly then maybe that would orient you with being as such and you never know like I mean it might be true there's no reason to assume that it wouldn't be true I mean even if you just take a strict biological perspective on this and think about us as the product of three and a half billion years of evolution I mean we have struggled over all those billions of years to be alive and to match ourselves with reality and so because one of the things I've often wondered is you know life is definitely difficult there's no doubt about that and that's unfair and there's inequality and all of those things and people are subject to all sorts of terrible things but I also wonder if you weren't actively striving to make things worse just how much better could they be you know because people are very they like houses that are divided amongst themselves they're pointing in six different directions at the same time they're working at cross-purposes to themselves because of bitterness or began and resentment and on what unprocessed memories and childhood hatreds and unexamined assumptions all sorts of things and you you just gotta wonder if you could push that aside and or int yourself properly and then the other thing that of course is stressed very heavily in the Old Testament and of course that goes through the entire biblical corpus is that it's not only enough to establish a positive relationship with being which I think is the essential it's a good description of faith you have to make that decision right because being is very ambivalent and you can make the case that maybe it's something that should have never happened but that doesn't seem to be productive to me and faith seems to be I'm going to act as if being is ultimately justifiable and that if I partake in it properly I will improve it rather than making it worse so I think that's the statement of faith and then what seems to go along with that is something like truth in conception and action you know even people like Jacob who are pretty damn morally ambivalent to begin with get hammered a lot by what they go through and what seems to happen is that they're hammered into some sort of ethical shape right so by the mid point of their life's journey there are people who are solidly planted who you can trust and who don't betray being or themselves or their fellow man and so it's an interesting I mean it seems reasonable to me to first assume that you have to establish a relationship with something that's transcendent it might even be just the future version of you but and then second that you have to align yourself with reality in a truthful manner and that that's your best bet and the biblical stories are actually quite realistic about that too because they don't really say that if you do that you're going to be instantly transported to the promised land like even Moses as we'll find out in the Exodus stories he never makes it to the Promised Land and so it's not like you're offered instantaneous final Redemption if you move out forthrightly into the world establish a faithful relationship with being an attempt to conduct yourself with integrity but it's your best bet and it might be good enough and even if it's not good enough it's really preferable to the alternative which seems to be something closely akin to hell both personal and social so Joseph's father is Jacob later Israel he who wrestles with God and we've talked about that a little bit it's sort of implicit and what I've been saying is that I think we all do that to some degree we wrestle with reality itself that's for sure not only the reality we understand but the reality we don't understand which is sort of a transcendent reality and then maybe whatever reality is outside of that you know because the classic judeo-christian conception of God is that there's time and space and of course there's lots of things about what exists in time and space that we're completely ignorant of and that's transcendent in that sense but then there's an idea that there's a realm outside of that which is a well it's an interesting idea it's a very sophisticated idea I think rather than a simple idea it's it's difficult to know what to make of it but it doesn't really matter because I think regardless of what your attitude is towards those sorts of things intellectually you still end up in the same position as Jacob for all intents and purposes practically speaking because I don't think that there's anyone who at some point in their life or perhaps even everyday doesn't at some level wrestle with God and you could just call it well the nature of reality I suppose if you want to be say reductionistic about it but I don't think it makes any difference it's still something you're stuck with and it's not only the nature of reality itself that you have to struggle with but it's also the nature of your moral relationship to it your behavioral relationship to it so that's how you should perceive it and how you should conduct yourself and then whether or not the the advantages of doing it properly are worth the difficulty and the disadvantages so that seems to me just a straight existential statement then you know Jacob gets damaged by his wrestling which is also very realistic so anyways he also ends up his father of Joseph who's the favorite son son who's born in his old age to his favorite wife and that's who we're gonna talk about to you today so you remember so Jacob is the forefather of the twelve tribes of Israel and there's his his wives and this son and the offspring that resulted those are all the sons there's a daughter named Dinah as well and rachel is the woman he really loved and the first son he had with Rachel was Joseph and that was when he was older and so that's in some sense why Joseph is his favorite so this is the beginning of the story of Joseph now Israel Jacob 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 there's a lot packed into those two sentences you know the first is that now Israel loved Joseph more than all his other children that's probably not so good one of the things we've seen in the stories that have preceded this is that whenever there's marked preference on the part of parents for one child over the other and in with with with with Jacob and Esau it was Rachel was Jacob was Rachel's favorite and ISA was Isaac's fav that didn't work out so well that put a real twist in the entire structure of the family and so there's a warning there right off the bat you might say well you can't help having a preference for one child or for another but I don't know if that's true and it's certainly something that you should be very cautious about because it doesn't seem to work out very well because he was the son of his old age fair enough and he made him a coat of many colors that's a very interesting image that coat of many colors that that idea and so I'm gonna delve into that idea because it sets the stage like it says what sort of person Joseph is he's favored he's younger he's favored but he also has this particular garment that characterizes him you know and one of the things I've really learned from analyzing women's dreams in particular is that women very frequently in my experience very frequently dream of clothing as a role and so if you're interpreting women's dreams then if they put on the shoes of their grandmother for example then you understand very rapidly that the dream is trying to make an association between their own behavior and something that's characteristic of either the state of being a grandmother or the particular grandmother and it makes sense right because clothing protects but it also signifies a role and it's interesting in in the Old Testament stories often if someone is going to act deceitfully they change their they change their outfit and that's kind of what you do when you act deceitfully right you dress up like someone else you present yourself like someone else so anyways back to the coat of many colors well for something to be many colored it sort of spans the entire gamut of possibility and so there's a hint there that if you want to be a full-fledged person that you have to manifest a very large number of traits and so I want to go into that idea a bit the first thing I want to talk about is some of the things that we've learned about what happens to you when you go to a new environment now there's this idea in very deep idea in clinical psychology a fundamental idea which is that if someone's a just about something what you do is you and it's getting in their way you take what they're anxious about and you define it because that already delimits it right because one of the problems with being anxious about something is you won't speak of it it's like Voldemort and then if you don't speak of it you it's way bigger than it should be as soon as you start talking about it you cut it down to size and so and it it's for a bunch of reasons it's because you're not as afraid you're not as afraid of as many things as you think and you're braver than you know and more and more capable so as soon as you're brave enough to start talking about what you're afraid of then you see that there's more to you than you thought and that there's less to the problem than you thought and then you can decompose it further into smaller problems and then you can figure out how to approach those smaller problems and so and then it doesn't seem to me to be that you get less frightened it seems to be that you get more courageous which is way better than being less frightened because there's lots of things to be frightened about so if you're courageous that that really does the trick now the question is what happens if you like let's say that you're very socially inept and you don't know how to introduce yourself or to make any establish the initial parts of a relationship with anyone and so then you start putting yourself in situations where you're required to do that and so then the question is how is it technically that you transform you say well you learn well we want to be more specific about that what does it mean that you learned well if you're dealing with someone who's particularly socially inept and you're doing psychotherapy with them you might teach them how to shake someone's hand properly and say their name and remember the other person's name and so you just practice that with them so that they have the motoric routine down so that form of knowledge is built right into your body it's like look at the person put out your hand shake it don't not like a dead halibut but you know with a reasonable grip say your name don't mumble it look look at them so that they can hear you and then when they say their name try to remember it and that's then so you can practice that with people and so then they develop something that's motoric right it's embedded right in their body and so and then you can say to them well the other thing you can do is when you start a conversation is don't sit there thinking about what you're gonna say next because then you won't be paying attention to the person and you'll make a fool out of yourself because you'll manifest non sequiturs right because you'll get out it's like if you're dancing and all you're paying attention to is where your feet are and you're gonna step on the other person all the time so you want to pay attention to the other person and then whatever automatized social knowledge you have will come to the forefront so it's a good thing to know if you're socially anxious right if you're socially anxious one of the things you should do is pay way more attention to the person you're talking to rather than less and you should pay as little attention as possible to yourself so if you feel yourself falling in because you're anxious then what you do is you push your attention out and pay attention to the person because to the degree that you've been socialized then all your automatic responses will kick in so but anyway so you go out into the social world and you learn to shake someone's hand and you learn how to listen to them and ask them questions because that's the next thing because people love you can't just ask them random questions obviously but if they start talking to you and you don't understand something about what they're saying or maybe something they said is interesting and you ask them a question they're pretty damn happy about that because it means you're actually paying attention to them and people actually love to be paid attention to because it hardly ever happens so they really really like it and so okay so so what's happening well first of all your mastering them automated motor movements right where to point your eyes where to put your hands how to move your lips like really embodied knowledge it's a special kind of memory and you're practicing them so that's building new skills for you and then by listening to the person and watching yourself interact you're also generating new new abstract information that enables you to conceptualize the world in a different way so if you go out to ten you go out and talk to ten different people or 50 different people then you get to listen to what those 50 people said you get to watch how they're how they express themselves and you gather a corpus of knowledge that changes the way you perceive that broadens you as a social agent okay so that's two forms of knowledge but then there's a third one which is real interesting which is that you know you have a lot of biological potential and it's hard to know what potential is but part of it is that you're capable of generating proteins that you haven't been generating so you should get right on that by the way so but what the way that works in part is that if you put yourself in a radically new situation then your brain that there are genetic switches that turn on because of the demands of the new situation that code for new proteins so it's as if you have latent software that would be one way of thinking about that will only be turned on if you go into the situation where that's necessary and so then you might think well if that's the case how much of you could be turned on if you went a whole bunch of different places and that's a really really that's a profound question because one of the deep answers to how you should get your life together is you should go a very large number of places and turn yourself on and I want to walk through that a little bit because there's a very rich symbolic world that expresses that so now the idea about having a coat of many colors would be that the person who is the appropriate leader because remember or the proper person which would be the same thing one of the things that these old stories are trying to express and to figure out is how is it that you should act which is the same as what constitutes the ideal those are the same question and the hand here with Joseph is well you should wear a coat of many colors which means that you should be able to go have a drink in the pub with the guys who are you know drywalling your your house and you should be able to have a sophisticated conversation with someone who's more educated in an abstract way and that maybe you should be equally comfortable in both situations right because you might think well there's more one of the indications that there's more to you is that you can be put more places and function properly and that would be a good thing to aim at because here's the other issue is that you know perfectly well that the fun the mental tragedies of life and your exposure to malevolence in the course of that life so those being the worst things there's not a lot you can do to to alter that fundamentally because their conditions of existence you're going to be subject to your vulnerability and you're going to be subject to malevolence that's that and you can't hide from it because it actually makes it worse so you're stuck with it so then the question is well what are your options and one option is to curse the structure of being for being malevolent and tragic and fair enough and now there is to make yourself so damn differentiated and dynamic and able that you're more than a match for that now that's not an easy thing but doesn't matter because like what what's the alternative there's no good alternative and that's also worth knowing so you see these ideas expressed in the strangest places and so we've talked a little bit I think in this video series about Pinocchio but if we haven't it doesn't matter you see there's Jiminy Cricket at the opening of the Pinocchio movie pointing to a star which is roughly the nativity star for all intents and purposes and it's a it's a symbolic indicator of something Dimond like and pure right glimmering in the darkness that's transcendent and above the horizon upon which to fix your eyes and so that's the thing is you need that technically and the reason you need that is because we know enough about psychology now to know that almost all of the positive emotion that you're going to experience in your life and positive emotion is analgesic by the way right it actually quells pain so it's not just positive it also gets rid of negative which is a big plus almost all the positive emotion that you're going to feel you're going to feel in relationship to a goal because you feel positive emotion as you approach a goal and so if you want to feel positive emotion then you need a goal and then you might think well if you want to maximize that positive emotion which is enthusiasm and also what pulls you out into the world as well as feeling good then you need the possible goal well not because that's gonna engage the largest segments of your being like if your goal is too narrow then a bunch of you isn't gonna be on board for it you know if the goal is well-developed and multifaceted then all of you can partake in that even your negative elements even your anger and and your fear can get on board with that let's say so you need a goal man that's worthy you've got us thank you good you need a goal that justifies the tragedy and malevolence of life that seems to be the bottom line now maybe you think well there's no goal that can do that it's like well there are still better and worse goals so and I'm not convinced that there are no goals that can do that I think that's an open question you'd never know that until you pursued the proper goal long enough to find out who you would be as a consequence of pursuing it so that's also your destiny or your existential voyage right it's also not something that anyone else can do for you someone can say get your act together for Christ's sake and get it get get at it that's that'll make the world unfold best for you but there's no way you can know that without doing it so and unless you think you've done a particularly stellar job of that then you have no reason to doubt its potential validity so plus like crickets are telling you this and so you know they're a very reliable source okay so you see the star the star recurs as a motif in Pinocchio and one of the more interesting elements of it here is that when Geppetto wants to transform his puppet the marionette who's being played by forces that operate behind the scenes which is a really good definition of the persona from a union perspective right and also something indicative of something like an ideological or conceptual possession Geppetto who's a good guy is positive father figure Reid lifts his even though he's a patriarchal figure right and a very competent one he still even lifts his eyes up to something that transcends his mode of being positive as it is and wishes that his creation would undertake the kind of transformation that would make it autonomous and fully functional as a moral agent no strings right so that's very interesting I think Solzhenitsyn said the salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all that's a pretty decent star-like goal I would say and so what happens in the Pinocchio story is that because and I think this is a symbolic representative of what I just described you that happens at a genetic level if you put yourself in new situations so Geppetto is roughly culture in the Pinocchio story right he's he's a craftsman he's he's a and and he makes Pinocchio so he's he's who's his son he's the socializing agent and he aims for something above mere socialization which is I think part of the mysterious element of human beings you know in our scientific models we basically have socialization and biology but there's always a third element in mythological stories which is whatever you might construe as the spontaneous action of consciousness that's associated with freewill and you know that's just basically being conceptualized in religious terms as something akin to the soul now we don't have a category for that scientifically because what we try to do scientifically is to reduce everything either to socialization or to biology but it isn't clear to me that that's it's perfectly reasonable from the perspective of practicality at a scientific level you don't want to multiply explanatory principles beyond necessity but there's many things that that doesn't come to terms with such as the fact that we all treat each other as autonomous beings with freewill and that that seems to work and that if we stop doing that then things go to hell very very rapidly so and the mere fact that we have been able to conceptualize what that conscious freewill might be metaphysically or physically doesn't mean it doesn't exist it just means that we don't understand it I mean what it was only in the last 15 years that we discovered that 95 percent of the universe was made out of some kind of matter that we can't even whose properties we can't even imagine except that it seems to have mass so anyways what happens is when Geppetto reach lifts his eyes up to the star he so it's society aligning itself with the proper goal with regards to individual development right so so the instead of society being at odds with the individual they line up and then what happens is nature comes onboard and that's the blue fairy in the in the Pinocchio story and that seems to me to be a symbolic representation of what happens biologically when when you set the goal properly get your culture behind you and move into the world it's that there's a biological transformation that occurs as a consequence of that which means that a bunch of you that hasn't been turned on turns on and I guess one question would be is what would you be like if you turned on everything inside of you that could be turned on well that's a good goal that's a good thing to find out so now I'm going to introduce a couple of other ideas so there's this idea in union psychology called the circumambulation and you only had this idea that you had a potential future self which would be in potential everything that you could be and that it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things and the things that you're interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development now it sounds of like a metaphysical idea or a or a mystical idea even but but it's not it's it's not it's a really profoundly biological idea the idea is something like well you're set up so that you're automatically interested in those things that was fully expand you as a well adapted creature well like there's nothing radical about that idea how else what else could possibly be the case unless there's something fundamentally flawed about you that is what the the situation would be it's kind of interesting to think about how that would be manifest moment to moment but the idea is something like well your interest is captured by those things that lead you down the path of development well that better be the case okay so that's fine and so there's some utility in pursuing those things that you're interested in that's the call to adventure let's say so and the call to adventure takes you all sorts of places now the problem with the call to adventure is like what the hell do you know you might be interested in things that are kind of warped and bent and often it's the case that when new parts of people manifest themselves and grip their interest say they do it very badly and shoddily and so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new that's where the fool is the precursor to the savior from the from the symbolic perspectives because you have to be a fool before you can be a master and if you're not willing to be a fool then you can't be a master so so you're gonna it's it's an error mmm error ridden process and that's also laid out in the Old Testament stories because the first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God kicks them out of their father's house when they're like 84 is that they they run into all sorts of trouble and some of its social and some of its natural and some of it's a consequence of their own moral inadequacy so they're fools and but but the thing that's so interesting is that despite the fact that they're fools they're still supposed to go on the adventure and that they're capable of learning enough as a consequence of moving forward on the adventure so that they straighten themselves out across time and so it's something like this so this circumambulation that young talked about was this continual will return to this this continual circling in some sense of who you could be you might notice for example that there are themes in your life you know when you go back across your experiences you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself and there might be variation on it like a musical theme but it's it's like you're circling yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time that's the circumambulation now you remember that for a second as well go back to it okay so imagine that something glimmers before you it's an interest that's dawning and you decide well first of all you're paralyzed you think well how do I know if I should pursue that it's probably a stupid idea and the proper response to that is you're right it probably is a stupid idea because almost all all ideas are stupid and so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you're gonna get it right the first time is zero it's just not gonna happen and so then you might think well maybe I'll just wait around until I get the right idea and which people do right so they're like 40 year old thirteen year olds which is not a good idea so they wait around until it's Waiting for Godot until they finally got it right but the problem is you're too stupid to know when you've got it right so waiting around isn't gonna help because even if it the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero you might even think it's the worst possible idea that you've ever heard of anywhere highly likely highly likely so so you had there's niches nature called data will will - stupidity which I really liked so because he thought of stupidity as being it you know it's it's you have to take it into account fundamentally and work with it and so and so you can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny and you can assume that you're gonna do it badly and that's really useful because you don't have to beat yourself up it's pretty easy to do it badly but the thing is it's way better to do it badly than not to do it at all and that's the continual message that echoes through these historical stories in Genesis it's like these are flawed people they should have got the hell out of their house way before they did and they go out and they stumble around in tyranny and famine and self betrayal and and violence and but it's a hell of a lot better than just rotting away at home and that's the that's great so that's good and so why is that well okay so you you start your path and you think that you're heading you know towards your star and so you go in that direction and then because you're here the world looks a particular way but then when you move here the world looks different and you're different as a consequence of having made that voyage and so what that means is that now that thing that glimmers in front of you is going to have shifted location because you weren't very good at specifying it to begin with and now that you're a little sharper and more focused than you were it's it's going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you and so then you have to take you know it's almost like 180 degree reversal but it isn't because you know you've I mean you've gone this far and that's a long ways to get that far but that's a lot farther than you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting and so it doesn't matter that you overshoot continually because as you overshoot even if you don't learn what you should have done you're going to continually learn what you shouldn't keep doing and if you learn enough about what you shouldn't keep doing then that's tantamount at some point to learning at the same time what you should be doing so it's okay so it's like this now what's cool about it though I think is that as you progress the degree of overshooting starts to decline right and that we know that there's nothing hypothetical about that as you learn a new skill like even to play it play a song on the piano for example you over shoot madly you're making all sorts of mistakes to begin with and then the mistakes they disappear there's a great TED talk I think it was about this guy set up a really advanced computational recording system in his home and recorded every single utterance his young child made while learning to speak and then he put together the child's attempts to say certain phonemes and put them in the list and you can hear the child deviating madly to begin with and then after hundreds and hundreds of repetitions just zeroing right in on the exact phoneme so you know I you might not know this but when kids babble because they start babbling when they're quite young they babble every human phoneme including all sorts of phonemes that adults can't say and then they they die into their language so that after they learn say English then there's all sorts of phonemes they can no longer hear or pronounce but to begin with it's all there which is really quite interesting but so they zip as they learn a particular language they zero in on the proper way to pronounce that and their errors minimize and every time you learn something that's how it is and that's really useful to know too because it means that it's okay to wander around stupidly before you fix your destination now you see that echoed in exodus right because what happens is that the Egyptians or the Hebrews escaped a tyranny which is kind of whatever you do personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly held and ignorant and stubborn axioms it's like away from that tyranny it's like great I freed myself from that well then what well you think well now I'm on the way it's no you're not now you're in the desert where you wander around stupidly you know and worship the wrong things until you finally organize yourself morally again and head in the proper direction so that's worth knowing too because you think well I got rid of a lot of things baggage excess baggage that I didn't need in my life and now everything's okay it's like no it's not you've got rid of a whole set of scaffolds that were keeping you in place even though they were pathological now you have nothing and nothing actually turns out to be better than something pathological but you're still stuck with the problem of nothing and and that's well that's exactly why exodus is structured the way that it is it's that you escape from eternity its terrain we're no longer slaves yeah well now you're nihilistic and lost it's not necessarily an improvement but it is but it is the pre see it's also useful to know that because you can also be deluded into the idea that imagine that you're trying to become enlightened which might mean to turn all those parts of you on that could be turned on you think well that's just a linear pathway uphill you know it's just from one success to another it's no it's not it's like here you are and you're not doing too badly and the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe it's worse and then maybe you can pull yourself together and you hit a new plateau and then that crumbles and shakes and bang it's worse again and so because part of the reason that people don't become enlightened is because it's punctuated by intermittent deserts essentially by intermittent catastrophes and if you don't know that well then you're basically screwed because you go ahead on your movement forward and you collapse and you think well that didn't work I collapsed it's like no that's par for the course it's not indication that you failed it's just indication that it's really hard and that when you learn something you also unlearn something and the thing you unlearned is probably useful and unlearning it actually is painful you know let's say if you have to get out of a bad relationship it's like not every not any real there isn't any relationship that's a hundred percent bad and so when you jump out of it well maybe you're in better shape but you're still lonesome and disoriented and you don't know what your past was and you don't know what your present is and you don't know what your future is it's that's not that's why people stay with the devil they know instead of you know looking for the devil they don't know so so anyways the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean you have to stop and thank God for that that's a really useful thing and the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean that you can't learn and so you can pause it an ideal and you're gonna be wrong about it but it doesn't matter because what you're right about is positing the ideal moving towards it if the actual ideal isn't conceptualize perfectly well first surprise surprise cuz like what are you going to do that's perfect so it doesn't matter that it's imperfect imperfect it just matters that you do it and that you move forward so that's really that's really positive news as far as I'm concerned because you can actually do that right you can do it badly anyone can do that so that's that's useful okay so like if you were an efficient person you would have just done that but you're not but who cares you know you still end up in the in the same place and maybe the trip is even more interesting who knows probably two interesting young I began to understand that the goal of psychic development by which he means psychological development or spiritual development is the self there's no linear evolution there's only a circumambulation of the self a getting closer it's like it's like you're spiraling into something something like that and the thing that you're spiraling into recedes as you move towards it and gets more and more sophisticated and well developed as you move towards it because you're not gonna run out of goals right no matter how much you have your act together there's probably undoubtedly 30 dimensions along which you could get your act together a lot more so and some of those aren't even conceivable to you when you're in your initial on carved state let's say uniform development exists at most at the beginning later everything points towards the center this insight gave me stability and gradually my inner peace returned so this is fun on the left there that's the short Cathedral that's the one that has the maze in it that I told you about they actually light that up with lasers now and so that's it lit up with lasers and so so they're turning it into a Cathedral of light which i think is really fascinating and it's a it's a continuation of the same idea right because the stained glass windows were obviously I wouldn't call them primitive attempts to do that I mean stained glass windows are pretty impressive you know buddy it's an elaboration of the same thing so now you can go to that Cathedral they light up the whole town like that which is really something and so there and there's how the cathedral is built it's a cross and remember the cross is an X that marks the center of the world and the cross is the place where each individual is and I think that's the fundamental message of Christianity is the cross marks the place where every single individual is and it's a tragic place that consists of suffering and exposure to malevolence and that the only way to come to terms with it is to accept it and that seems to me I don't see anything metaphysical about that statement whatsoever it's like well x marks the spot fair enough you're in a spot you're right in the center of your world it's right in the center of the world as far as you're concerned and the same with the rest of us it's characterized by suffering and exposure to malevolence there's no doubt about that what are you gonna do about that bitter resentful hateful all that does is make it worse so you have to accept it now that's not an easy thing because that's actually I would say a heroic task to voluntarily accept the conditions of your own existence and that happens out the cross so that's fine and that's associated with light well that's good that that's associated with light you wouldn't want that to be associated with darkness that would be a bad thing so and so there's the there's the the labyrinth that was built in 1280 and so the idea is you walk in here it's the same idea as that star sequence of slides that I just showed you so here's the ideas that north south west and east so that's the whole world laid out in two dimensions and so the question is how do you get to the center now we already know what the center is the center is the center of the cross that's the place of maximal suffering you could say maximal malevolence as well but it's also the place where that's transcendent so how do you get there well the answer is well you don't just stand on the outside looking in that's not gonna help so and you can't just run right to the center even if you're in California and so you have to walk in here and then you see you go like this and you go to every single place every single place on that on that little cosmos and then once you've gone to every single place and expanded yourself as a consequence of going north and west and east and south then there's enough of you so that you're at so that you can tolerate being first of all that you could figure out where the center is but also that you can tolerate being at the center and so that's what that represents that's pretty and look I mean let's make no mistake about it hey people were pretty damn serious about those ideas like that's a that's quite the piece of work for people in the 12th century you know those some of those damn cathedrals took 300 years to build we don't build anything that takes 300 years people were putting a lot of effort into whatever these things meant you know and if you think they meant bearded man in the sky then you know it's hard to it's hard to account for the kind of motivation that would produce these buildings with that kind of paucity of conceptualization you know the towns and and it was certainly the case in charge is that they groaned under the tax burden that was required to produce these now you might think well that's partly tyrannical and no doubt that's the case but but that's not the whole story the whole story is that the people who produce those buildings they thought about every bit of it it's nothing's accidental and they're trying to portray something just like that window is trying to portray something that's the same thing as this it's the center from which all things manifest themselves you see it that's Christ there and being portrayed as as that center or the center within him something like that very much like the chakras and in in yogic practice same basic idea it's the opening up of the internal structure and and and its proper realization so there are people walking the labyrinth so that's the coat of many colors right that's that's this differentiated mode of being that enables you to be competent and at home in the widest possible number of places and that that's a real differentiation of your personality it's a breaking through the boundaries of your personality including the ones that you impose on yourself to become someone who's useful wherever they're put and that's really relevant to this story of Joseph - because one of the things that happens to Joseph is that well a lot of bad things happen to him because he's the favorite of his father his brothers hate him and so the first they're gonna throw him in a pit I think they do throw him in a pit then they sell them to be a slave then he ends up in we'll go through the story he ends up some places where you probably wouldn't want to go prison being one of them but it doesn't matter because even when they put him in prison he's actually not imprisoned he just figures out how to make the prison work way better and then he's in control of the prison and it really it's an interesting I had this friend you know and he was very smart but very cynical and he wasn't employed very well and he got a little older and he should have given his level of intelligence and employability and so he had to take jobs that weren't very intellectually challenging you know and one of the things I tried to convince him of was that even if he worked he wanted to work behind the parts department in an automotive store because he liked cars but it was beneath him you know because it was sort of a as far as he was concerned it was a he was too smart for a job like that which actually turned out not to be true he wasn't smart enough for a job like that or he wasn't wise enough but you know what one of the things I tried to tell him was then you're looking at the situation wrong because even in a simple job so-called simple job like let's say dishwashing in a restaurant which I did an awful lot of it's not that simple you're dealing with a lot of other people very fast staff changeover you're feeding people you're helping them have a celebration you're helping them take a break like you can do it really well and then the kitchen can operate properly and then people can come out to the restaurant it's not a bloody catastrophe and like your even when you're doing something that's a menial job so to speak like dishwashing there are ways of doing it really badly resentfully and horribly and doing it really well and as soon as you do it really well it's not a menial job anymore it immediately transforms no I mean you can be around people who won't let that happen and you should go get another job if that's the case but if you do it properly then it's not menial at all and that's also a good way out of resentment you think well I've just got this you know two-bit job it's like yeah what if you did it as well as you possibly could you know what would happen well the first thing that would happen is you'd get a lot smarter that's for sure and that that's hardly a negative thing okay so that's the coat of many colors so it's an intimation of what Joseph is like and what we're seeing with all of these patriarchal figures is the continual realization of the ideal person right you could think about it as successive approximations of the ideal person and the story is exploring all sorts of different possibilities including ones that are very violent and catastrophic and malevolent it's trying to cover the entire territory and to focus in on what's the proper way through the maze the maze of life the labyrinth and the hint here is that while you should be multi-dimensional these are the generations of Jacob Joseph being 17 years old was feeding the flock with his brethren and the lad was with his sons of Bilhah and with the sons of Zilpah his father's wives and Joseph brought unto his father their evil report well we already know that Joseph is Jacob's favorite so that doesn't make him very popular among his brothers he's younger and now we also find out that he's been set up more or less as you might say a snitch because that's what this phrase means is that he goes out and watches his older brothers and if they do something they shouldn't do then he comes trotting back to Jacob and reports well that's not gonna make you popular so and you would say well is that Joseph's problem or jacob's problem and I would say and this is something I learned from reading dealing to is that that's a conspiratorial problem right is it's the parents at fault but so is the child who agrees to do that they've they've got a little cabal going and you might say well it's only the parents fault but the son will be taking advantage of every advantage that offers him because he could say no to I won't do that so anyway so Joseph is the favorite he's a bit of a teacher's pet that's what it looks like now Israel loved Joseph more than all his colors because he was the son of his old age and he made him a coat of many colors and when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren they hated him and could not speak peaceably unto him so let's say you have a child or number of children and one of them is your favorite how should you treat that child well it isn't obvious that you do them any favors by overtly making them your favorite right I mean first of all maybe you don't challenge them as much as you should and second of all you definitely set up a Cain and Abel like scenario in the household and that or maybe it's an eatable situation too because you happen to love your child more than you love your your spouse which is that's not a recipe for familial harmony so it seems to be a bad idea okay so now we have two reasons that Joseph is not liked by his brothers is one is well he's a bit of a Rat Fink and the other is that he's the peas the favorite and he's playing that to the hilt by the looks of things and when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren then all his brethren they hated him and could not speak peaceably unto him okay and Joseph dreamed a dream and he told it to his brethren and they hated him the more he said unto them hear I pray you this dream which I have dreamed for behold we were binding wheat sheaves in the field and lo my sheaf arose and behold your sheaves stood round about and bowed to my sheaf and his and remember he's yeah the young one right and and also the daughter of the favorite wife which is another thing that's or the son of the favorite wife which is another thing not really working in his favor and his brethren said to him shalt thou indeed reign over us or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us and they hated them yet the more for his dreams and for his words well there there's a shock you know that makes perfect sense so and it gets worse so you see here well there's the wheat sheaves bowing there and and then you see this what's going on here well that's not the end of his let's call it grandiosity and there's an idea to in in the Old Testament especially in the stories of Joseph that if God sends you a dream twice he really means it and so I don't know if that's true although I do know that people have repeating dreams it might be true that the a dream you have twice is really trying to punch something home you know it's certainly the case that recurrent nightmares are meaningful and that recurrent nightmares are associated quite tightly with decreased states of mental health and that if you can treat the nightmare which is often quite easy by the way then the some of the mental health problems will decrease so repeated dreams seem to be important anyways he dreamed yet another dream and told it to his brethren and said behold I've had another dream and be and behold the Sun and the moon and the Eleven stars bowed to me and he told it to his father and to his brothers and his father rebuked him and said unto you unto Him what is this dream that thou has dreamed shall I in my and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth and his brethren envied him but his father observed to saying well what the hell do you make of something like that right if someone tells you that it's like are they responsible for their dreams we don't really seem we don't really hold ourselves responsible for for the dreams we have at night and what do you make of a dream is like one of the things that Jung pointed out this is where he differed from Freud substantially as Freud tended to think that the dream hid its meaning because its contents weren't acceptable to the conscious mind and Jung said no no you don't understand that's not what happens what happens is the dream is doing the best it can to express something that the person doesn't yet really know and Jung thought about the dream as a manifestation of nature it wasn't associated with the ego at all it was just like you have a dream and there are things happening and it the same way that when you walk into a dinner party there are things happening there you know it's not the dream isn't something that's subject to your capacity for manipulation it's something that happens to you not something that you do and so so if someone has a dream like that well you've got three options you can just discount dreams altogether which is what people in the modern world tend to do which is a very bad idea because there are thoughts and you shouldn't discount them you know I mean and they're hardly random as some neuroscientists claim that's absolutely cockeyed theory that random he like television snow on a TV set if it was random so so one is while you just discount dreams the other is that you consider the person a liar and a braggart and a narcissist and the third is well what's the third it's like he dreamt that the Sun and the moon and the stars bowed down to him you might think about that two or three times so but it's not necessarily something that's going to make you happy and his brethren went to feed their father's flock and shechem so they took off and Israel said unto Joseph do you not thy brethren feed the flock and Shechem come and I will send thee unto Him and he said him and he said to him here here am I and when they saw him afar off even before he came near unto them they conspired against him to slay him rough people back then right this is this sort of thing is happening quite frequently and they said to one another behold the dreamer cometh come now therefore let us slay him cast him into some pit and we will say some evil beast hath devoured him and we shall see what becomes of his dreams so there's an echo of the Cain and Abel story there obviously you know I mean it's not quite as clear because in the Cain and Abel story Abel is clearly just doing well and here you can't quite get a handle on Joseph's character you can't tell if he is actually the elect or if he's just a spoiled brat with delusions of grandeur you know and but it doesn't matter because his brothers are so irritated at his the fact that he's favored and perhaps even the fact that he might be someone destined for for something special that they find it perfectly reasonable to destroy that and it's so hard so interesting how often that motif of pulling down an ideal manifests itself in these old stories right it's it's the pattern is established in the Cain and Abel story it just repeats and repeats and repeats and I think that's dead true I think it just repeats all the time so that people are annoyed about how tragic their lives are annoyed that they're subject to malevolence and they're annoyed that they're not doing as well as other people are doing and that makes them that puts them exactly into this state of mind now maybe with modern people if you're gonna kill someone because you're resentful as a modern person you don't generally slay them and throw them into a pit you know what you do is you just kill them slowly over a few decades and it isn't obvious to me that that's any better so I've seen plenty of married couples who were in that situation it's like it's like yeah well there is this mitch hedberg he used to complain about turtlenecks hey so it was like being strangled by a really weak it's probably really politically incorrect jokes but it's a funny joke so and then you see you see relationships that are like that it's like each person has their hands around the neck of the other person but they don't have enough courage to actually to squeeze they just put enough pressure on just cut the circulation off a tiny bit so the person just gets like they die over a 30-year period something like that so yeah and you all laugh because you know it's true that's why and we will say some evil beast half devoured him which would be true actually it would be the evil beast that's inside the brothers and we shall see what will become of his dreams haha that's a that's interesting too because so they want to spite themselves because maybe Joseph is something special and then they want to spite their father which is probably not the wisest idea because they owe him some gratitude I mean maybe he's acting like a pain in the neck there's some evidence for that but this is a little bit harsh but they also want to spite God just like Cain did because that's what it means we shall see what will become of his dreams right because then as soon as you're in some sense trying to fight against the intuition of someone the natural intuition of someone you set yourself up against the structure of being itself and so pretty bad and Ruben heard it and he delivered them out of their hands and said no let us not kill him and Ruben said unto them shed no blood but cast him into this pit that's in the wilderness it's like Rubens the good guy in this story yeah and and there's no water in the pit by the way inlay no hand upon him that he might rid him out of their hands to deliver him to his father again hmm so Ruben was actually trying to save him said he might rid him out of their hands to deliver him to his father again and it came to pass when Joseph came unto his brethren that they stripped him of his coat his coat of many colors that was on him and they took him and cast him into a pit and the pit was empty and there was no water in it and then they sat down to eat bread and lifted up their eyes and looked and behold a company of Ishmaelites come came from Gilead with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh going to carry it down to Egypt and Judah said unto his brethren how does it profit us if we kill our brother and conceal his blood so he's the practical guy here's what why would we kill him when we can sell him it's like come let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and let not our hand be upon him for he is our brother in our flesh and his brethren were content then there passed by Midianites merchantman and they drew and lifted up joseph out of the pit and sold joseph to the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of silver it's a amount that echoes through into the future and they brought Joseph into Egypt I'm never really sure how these slavery stories work it's like so it's two 2,500 3,000 years ago and I decided I'm gonna sell you to the Ishmaelites and that just works out they I get the money you get to be a slave and they take you away I don't really understand how that works I can't figure out how people weren't just selling each other all the time but maybe if your family you can do it so they're they sold him and Reuben returned to the pit and behold Joseph was not there and Reuben rent his clothes so Reubens very upset about this and he returned unto his brothers and said the child is not and I where shall I go and they conspired they took Joseph's coat and killed a kid of the goats and dipped the coat in the blood that's interesting too because blood is actually another color right so he's got this coat of many colors and blood is definitely a color and so this is the addition in some sense of the color of blood to Joseph's coat and I would say it's probably a necessary color because I don't think that you're serious enough till your coat has been dipped in blood that can happen in many ways and they sent the coat of many colors and they brought it to their father and said so they lied to him it's very very nasty business this they they sell his son to slavery they claim that he's dead they lied to him they they put him into an extreme state of grief there's a lot of hatred underneath that right tremendous amount of hatred for Joseph and also for Jacob this we have found know now whether it be thy sons coat or not and he knew it he said it's my son's coat and evil beast has devoured him Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces and Jacob tore his clothes and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for many days and all his sons and daughters rose up to comfort him but he refused to be comforted and he said I'll go down unto my grave mourning my son does his father wept for him so that's Jacob collapsing at the news and the Midianites sold Joseph into Egypt unto Potiphar an officer of Pharaohs and captain of the guard and Joseph was brought down to Egypt and port afar an officer of Pharaoh captain of the guard and Egyptian bought him of the hands of the Ishmaelites which had brought him down thither so now he's a slave so now you'd think well that would be this is a man who has a lot of reason to be irritated at the structure of reality right he's gone from being the favorite to being betrayed by all of his brothers that's pretty rough and then he's being transformed into a slave and now he's being he's being sold to work as a slave so you'd think that that would corrupt his character because you know one of the things I think this is the case anyways I think people are always looking for an excuse to have their character corrupted because if your character is corrupted then you get to lie and you get to cheat you get to steal and you get to betray and you get to act resentfully and you get to do nothing and that's all easy it's easier to lie than to tell the truth it's easier to do nothing than to do something so there's always part of you thinking well I need a justification for being useless and horrible because that'd be a lot less work and so then if something terrible comes along you think AHA that's just exactly the excuse that I was waiting for and then out all that comes you know Solzhenitsyn when he was in the concentration camps in Russia watching how people behaved you know he said that there were people that were put in the camps who immediately became trustees or guards and they were even more vicious than the people who had been hired as guards and his idea was that they had collected all that he called it foul Ness if I remember correctly around them in normal life but they didn't have the opportunity to express it but as soon as you gave them the opportunity it was like there it was right away and so so one of the messages that seems to echo through these old testament stories is that just because something terrible happens to you doesn't mean that you get to be that you get to wander off the path and make things worse and maybe it doesn't matter how terrible it is that what happens to you that's a tough call you know because you see people now and then in life who they've really got it rough man like 50 bad things are happening to them at the same time and you think oh it's no wonder if you were bitter and resentful and hostile be like yeah no wonder but then you meet people and Solzhenitsyn again talked about this in the Gulag Archipelago he said he met lots of people in the North Lodz he met enough people to impress him in the concentration camp system who didn't allow their misfortunes to corrupt them and that's something because maybe the only real misfortune is to become corrupted that's a really useful thing to think you know maybe the rest of it maybe the rest of it is trivial in comparison I know that's a rough thing because you can be in very harsh circumstances but I do think there's something to that and the Lord was with Joseph and he was a prosperous man and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian and his master saw that the Lord was with him and that Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand so that's an echo of the idea that we encountered earlier about walking with God right so Adam walked with God before he ate the fruit with Eve and then he wouldn't walk with God and then Noah walked with God and Abraham walked with God and so the idea is well that's that alignment with the highest ideal I think it's something like that and you know we could think about that as a metaphysical claim as well but I don't think it is I mean I've got thousands of letters now in the last year from people who have told me that they were in a pit that's exactly right and that they decided that they were going to try to put their lives together and that it worked and so that's really something you know when they write surprised it's like well I decided that I was gonna work hard at what I was doing and I wasn't gonna lie any more than absolutely necessary I thought I'd give it a try for a few months you know and all sorts of good things started to happen to me it's like maybe that's how the world works now obviously it doesn't work like that all the time right because you can get sliced off at the knees I mean there's an arbitrary element to existence that that you can't wish away but that doesn't mean that there are it doesn't mean that there aren't bad strategies and good strategies and so I do think that one of the most fundamental existential questions is like if things aren't going well for you and your life is are you absolutely certain that you're doing absolutely everything you can to put things in order because if you're not then you shouldn't complain because you don't know to what degree you're actually contributing or even causing the circumstance now that's a very annoying thing to think and I'm not trying to blame the victim you know I know that people end up with lung cancer because they were exposed to asbestos you know and I'm not trying to although I also know too that if you have lung cancer because you've been exposed to asbestos that can be a tragedy or it can be hell and to some degree that depends on how you conduct yourself so I mean I know that's pretty gloomy possibilities right but so anyway so Joseph is a slave but it turns out that he's uh he hasn't sacrificed the integrity of his character and so it turns out that being it turns out that he's not a slave it's just that everyone around him thinks he's a slave but he's not so that's pretty interesting he was a goodly person and well favored well so he's a good guy and he's an impressive specimen as well this is pretty interesting given the current political climate I would say and it came to pass after these things that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph and she said lie with me that means that actually has two meanings right but he refused and said unto his master's wife behold my master does not know what's with me in the house and he's committed all that he has to my hand there's no one greater in this house than I neither hath he kept back anything for me but you because you are his wife how then can I do this great wickedness wickedness and sin against God and it came to pass as she spake to Joseph day by day that he hearkened not unto her to lie by her or be with her it's being sexually harassed Joseph and it came to pass well its rounds right I mean look look at the painting and it came to pass about this time that Joseph went into the house to do his business and there was none of the men of the house there with in and she caught him by his garment saying lie with me and he left his garment in her hand and fled and got him out so that's so kind of embarrassing for poor Joseph I would say and a bit on the suspicious side and it came to pass when she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and was fled forth that she called unto the men of her house and spake unto them see see he hath brought in a Hebrew to mark us he came in unto you lie with me and I cried with a loud voice so what is it hell hath no fury like a woman scorned that's the proper commentary on that and it came to pass when he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried that he left his garment with me and fled and got himself out and it came to pass when his master heard the words of his wife so that's the farro which she spake unto him saying after this manner did thy servant to me his wrath was kindled and joseph's master took him and put him in prison a place where the Kings prisoners were was were bound and he was there in the prison well that sort of sucks it's like first his brothers betray him and throw him in a pit and then he gets made a slave which is probably better than being in the pit and then he becomes sort of like King slaves so that's working out pretty well and now someone lies about him he gets betrayed again and now it's into the prison with him and so it's this it's this again right it's the same thing it's Sisyphus up with the rock and then down and it's order chaos order chaos and then you have to think well are you the order or you the chaos or you the thing that's moving between them because that's the right thing to be because otherwise you're just order and that's a really bad idea or you're just chaos and that's a really bad idea you can be the thing that's dynamically mediating between them and that's what he's doing but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him mercy and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison that's no easy thing to do I would think you know it's like you're thrown in prison and now the jailer likes you now how exactly are you going to manage that it's a good thing to think about because you might think well if you were really in dire straits how is it that you should conduct yourself so that you have the highest probability of having things work out and it's not saying well Joseph took over the thumbscrew you know and started using that on the other prisoners that that's not the indication here at all it's that he's doing something he's acting like a person who isn't a prisoner even though he's in the prison just like he was acting like someone who wasn't a slave when he was a slave and so it makes you wonder who you can be despite the fact that other people think that you're whatever you appear to be and the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's hand all the prisoners that were in the prison and whatsoever they did there he was the doer of it the keeper of the prison looked not to anything that was under his hand because the Lord was with him and that which he did the Lord made it to prosper so it's a repeat its a repeat of exactly what happened when he was the slave of the Pharaoh except it's one rung deeper into hell so to speak right so it's slave Pharaoh and here it's prisoner jail master but it doesn't matter the same thing happens so now Joseph is imprisonment the Pharaoh has a fit one day of peak and throws the chief of his Butler's into prison and the chief of his Baker's and they have a dream each of them and Joseph interprets the dreams seems to be something that he can do and he tells the butler that his dream means that the Pharaoh was going to forgive him and put him back in his position and he tells the baker that the Pharaoh isn't going to forgive him and that he's going to take off his head and hang him in a tree which was rather rough dream but that is what huh that's what happens so anyways that the Baker or the butler goes free and Joseph says look you know maybe you could just keep in mind the fact that I did you a bit of a favor here and told you something that was accurate but the chief didn't really remember once he once he was freed interpreting dreams in prison and so now the Pharaoh has a dream and he actually has two dreams so it's another one of those doubled motifs so the ideas these are really important dreams because they came in a pair and behold there came out of the river seven well-favored kind and fat flesh so cattle and they fed the men Oh meadow and behold seven other cattle came up after the Mount of the river ill-favored and lean fleshed starving and stood by the other cows on the brink of the river and the ill-favored and lean flesh I did eat up the seven well-favored and fat so Pharaoh awoke hey fair enough it's pretty nasty dream and then he has another dream to hit it home and he slept and dreamt the second time and behold seven years of corn came up upon one stalk rankin good and behold seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them and the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears and Pharaoh awoke and beheld it was a dream and then it says a little later and for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice it is because the thing is established by God and God will shortly bring it to pass it's interesting you know because one of the better theories about dreams is that they're part of the way that the right and left hemisphere communicate or maybe the nonverbal part of the brain communicates with the verbal brand verbal part of the brain and so the nonverbal part of the brain which is less differentiated and thinks more globally is looking for patterns and anomalies in the world things that don't fit well with the current way of conceptualizing the world things that make you anxious and uncertain and those are things you haven't mastered right so they don't fit well into your conceptualization of the world by definition because if you had mastered them they wouldn't make you anxious nervous and so the the nonverbal parts of your brain are like an alarm system they're looking around for places where you're probably wrong and then they put those in images and try to conceptualize them so that you can update your model of reality to take them into account but that also produces a fair bit of negative emotion especially at night and so so we know that we know if you deprive people of dreams that they go insane very rapidly animals as well necessary part of mental equilibrium the way you do that with rats in case you want to know is that you've got rats that you want to drive insane this is how you do it so you put the rat on a like a pedestal that's pretty small and then when you fall it's surrounded by water and then when he falls asleep his nose hits the water then he wakes up and so you can deprive the rat of sleep and that doesn't the rats don't respond to very well after some period of time so that's one of the ways that that's been discovered but anyways the dream does seem to be an update mechanism and so if if you have a very powerful dream like a nightmare especially if it's repeating it's like something is trying to hammer on the door that needs to be let in and often you don't know how to let it in that's that's a problem so but then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph because he had talked to his his Butler and they brought him hastily out of the dungeon and Joseph shaved himself and changed his clothes and came in unto Pharaoh I guess he didn't want a shark Pharaoh with how people dressed in the prison and Pharaoh said unto Joseph I've dreamed a dream and there's none that can interpret it I've heard say of thee that you could understand a dream to interpret it and Joseph said it's not me God will give Pharaoh an answer of peace it's so Jacob isn't taking credit for his ability to interpret dreams which also indicates quite interestingly there's there's nothing that despite the fact that he's successful incompetent he's not narcissistic like if he happens to have this gift he regards it as a gift and not as something that you know renounced his favor it's just something that he happens to be able to do and so that's that's a hallmark of someone who's got a pretty well put-together personality as far as I'm concerned because you know people have gifts that they didn't really earn those would be your talents your intelligence your good looks if you happen to have good looks etc and they're not there's no sense being all puffed up about that because it's it's great it's luck of the draw though and the proper attitude is to note that it's luck of the draw to be grateful for it it's quite a fine painting that one behold there come seven years of great plenty throughout the island of Egypt and then there shall arise after them seven years of famine and all the plenty shall be forgotten and the famine shall consume the land and the Plenty shall not be known in the land by reason of that famine following issue for it shall be very Grievous so now we to that Jacob he can interpret dreams but he's also the sort of person who can look into the future and think this is sort of what Adam was called on to do when he got kicked out of the garden of paradise is you're going to be able to conceptualize that even if things are going well now that that doesn't mean that they're going to go well into the future and so he's the aunt and not the grasshopper right in the grasshopper and the ant story it's like everything's good but you should wake the hell up and you should test to see how things can go wrong and you can see if your systems can survive them things going wrong and which is something that I think we could all hearken to because I think we do a very bad job in the modern world of testing to see if our systems can go wrong okay so the Pharaoh was pretty impressed by this dream interpretation and pretty worried about it and I guess he's a reasonable person despite the fact that he put Joseph in jail I guess he didn't have much choice now therefore let Pharaoh look for a man dis discreet and wise and set him over the land of Egypt let Pharaoh do this and let him appoint officers over the land this is what Joseph is saying and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years and let them gather all the food of those good years that come and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh and let them keep food in the cities and just like that Joseph is restored to his position so Pharaoh said unto Joseph I am Pharaoh and without thee shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all of the land of Egypt and so he comes out of the prison and he really in some sense as far as I'm concerned he actually occupies a position that's higher than the position of the Pharaoh depends on how you look at it because the Pharaoh has relegated himself to ceremonial status right Joseph has all the responsibilities makes all the decisions so de-facto he's the pharaoh he doesn't get the glory precisely although he's not doing too bad for himself not there's a lesson in that too I wrote these rules for Quora a long time ago and one of them I've written them into this some of them into this book you guys got a pamphlet about today one of the rules that I didn't write about was um note that responsive note that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated which is really interesting I think I mean I've seen people in their jobs they say things like well my the guy I work with doesn't do any work it's like well you could do it I mean I know there's limits to that but one of the things you can do at work is make yourself indispensable I mean you might get the cane types against you if you do that but there's something to be said for being indispensable because when people start to be dispensed with you probably won't be one of them or even if you are then the fact that you're indispensable just means you can go somewhere else and be indispensable there and that's just as useful so it's very very difficult to permanently put down someone who's really good at doing things because they can just go off and do them somewhere else and one of the ways that you get like that is to take responsibility when someone else is failing to do so and you think well I shouldn't have to do that that's one way of thinking about it another way of thinking about it is oh good I get to do that and the seven years of plenty estas that was in the land of Egypt were ended and the seven years of dearth began to come according as joseph has said and the dearth was in all the lands well that's an archetypal story right in the archetypal story it's the business cycle story it's a little harsher when you're starving obviously but that's not the point the point is is that sometimes things are getting good and sometimes things are getting bad and that's you can be sure that that's the case that's gonna happen to you and so the wise person takes stock of the fact that things are going to get bad is this is the same thing that happens with Noah it's like assume the flood cuz it's gonna happen and you think well it's a hell of a world that has floods it's like not if you have a boat right it it helps a lot if you if there's a flood and you have a boat it's like you can float on the flood and then it's not such a problem and so if you refuse to look not the fact that things are going to be going downhill bad and that you're going to be in a pit at some point you and your family perhaps then when it happens it will be as bad as it possibly can be but if you're awake and alert to that possibility then you can mitigate it and the dearth was in all the lands but in the land of Egypt there was bread and when the land of Egypt was famished the people cried to Pharaoh for bread and Pharaoh said unto the Egyptians go to Joseph what he says to you to do you do that and the famine was all over the face of the earth and Joe Joseph opened up the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians and the famine waxed sore in the land of Egypt and all the countries came into Egypt to buy to Joseph to buy corn because the famine was sore in all the lands now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt Jacob said unto his sons why are you standing around looking at each other he said I've heard that there's corn in Egypt get down there and buy from by for us so that we may live and not die it's a pretty straightforward advice that and Joseph's ten brothers went down to buy corn in Egypt but Benjamin Joseph's brother so that's the youngest one right the only one left it's the one that was younger than Joseph the only youngest one and also rachel's other son but Jeb Benjamin Joseph's brother Jacob didn't send because he was worried that something bad would happen to him which kind of indicates to me that maybe Jacob was a bit suspicious about what had happened to Joseph the last time he sent all the brothers on a adventure and Joseph was the governor over all the land and and he it was that sold to all the people of the land and Joseph's brothers came and bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth well there's the dream now the thing is too is that one question you have in your life is who should you bow down to and you might say no one that's not exactly the right answer because that means that you don't have an ideal because you bow down to your ideal that's what makes it an ideal and if you don't have an ideal then what the hell are you do so you have to bow down to something and so what happens here is well the brothers are bowing down to the person who's so bloody resilient and competent that they can take themselves out of a prison and become the ruler of the land that happened to vaclav havel right in czechoslovakia it also happened to Mandela in South Africa like these things actually happen it's really something so you god only knows what you might learn in prison so so they bow down to Joseph and properly so you know he's he is even without his coat he's still the person with the coat of many colors and Joseph saw his brothers and he knew them but he made them so strange unto them it's a number of years have passed and he spoke roughly unto them and he said unto them where do you come from and they said from the land of Canaan to buy food and Joseph knew whose brothers were but they didn't know who he was and they came back to Jacob their father and told him all that befell him and said the man whose Lord of the country spoke roughly to us and took us for spies and we said to him where were true men honest men we're not spies we be twelve brothers sons of our fathers one is not and the youngest is this day with our Father in the land of Canaan and the man said here's how I'll know that you're honest men leave one of the brothers here with me and take some food for the famine of your households and be gone and then bring your youngest brother to me then I'll know that you're not spies but that you're honest men and I'll deliver the other brother and he shall trade in the land so you don't have to starve to death and it came to pass as they emptied their sacks that behold every man's bundle of money was in his sock and when both they and their father saw the bundles of money they were afraid so they had bought food from Joseph and he gave them the food and then he put all their money back and their socks which I could imagine would worry them to some degree and Jacob said me you have already believed of my children Joseph is not as Simeon is not now you'll take Benjamin Benjamin away all these things are against me and Reuben spake unto his father saying slay my two sons if bring him not to thee deliver him into my hand and I will bring him to the again and he and he said no my son shall not go down with you for his brother is dead and he's left alone if mischief befall him by the way in the which you shall go then you shall bring down my great gray hairs with sorrow to the grave now there's a hint see what happens in the last part of the Jacob storage the Joseph's story is and this is associated with the idea of putting your house in order your individual house in order and then putting your family's house in order let's say reversed a little bit in this story because Joseph puts himself together and then he puts the state of Egypt in order which is really quite interesting because Egypt is the canonical tyranny right in the Old Testament and so the idea is very very clear here that the person who wears the coat of many colors can put the tyranny right and then the next extension is well he has to put his family right now you know generally the progression would be put yourself right then put your family right then put the state right something like that it doesn't really hit if you can do it in a different order that's probably ok too but so so that's what happens at the end of the story is that you know Joseph is doing pretty damn well and so is the state that he serves but that isn't good enough for him he wants his family to be functional and put together properly even though they did terrible things to him and that's very interesting because once someone does terrible things to you then the logical thing or a logical thing to think is well go to hell in a handbasket you know like you deserve exactly what you get but it's not a very productive attitude especially if you're around people that you have to be around you know so like if it's your family and you go have a family dinner and one of you punches the other and then the other punches you back and then that's like the family dinner for the next thirty years it doesn't seem to be very productive even if you're the person who happened to get in the last blow because you're gonna have to put up with them at minimum it might be nice to just let what you can go go and work to make towards making things better have to get rid of the idea of revenge and resentment and all those things that you carry along but but it's probably better to think about how your family could be if it was really functioning well and then just a money Ringley at that no no that's not easy I mean people are very screw in there's no end to the depths of Pathology within families but of course this story states that very clearly I mean they tried to kill him they've sold him into slavery it's it's a pathological family let's put it that way and but Joseph's attitude is well we got to set this right not least because of his father but it isn't only because of his father as you see and as the story unfolds and the famine was sore in the land and it came to pass when they had eaten up the corn which they had brought out of Egypt their father said unto them go again and buy us a little food and Judah spake unto him saying the man did solemnly protest unto us you not see you will not see my face except your brother be with you they can't go back to Egypt without Benjamin and they said the man asked us straightly of our state and of her kindred saying is your father yet alive have you another brother and we told him according to the tenor of those words could we know that he would say bring your brother down and Judah said unto Israel his father send the loud with me and will arise and go that we may live and not die both we and vow and also our little ones I will be surety for him my hand shall they'll require him if I bring him not unto thee and set them before thee then let me bear the blame forever well so Judah who played a pretty dismal role in the original selling Joseph into slavery seems to obviously have learned something by this point since he's willing to put himself on the line you know to take responsibility for the situation and to put himself on the line and to stand in for Benjamin so he's making himself into a sacrificial object of sorts and so the game that Joseph's playing cuz he's sort of teasing his brothers but he's also testing them the game that he's playing is tuefel is one is have you bloody well learned anything or are you just as corrupt and useless as you were before that's game number one in game number two is maybe if I poke and prod you and put you into a relatively difficult and mysterious situation I can get you to clue the hell in and the Dorp some responsibilities and we can move this whole mess forward and so that seems to be happening so Judah is taking responsibility and Reuben did that as well and the men took presence and they took double money in their hand and Benjamin and rose up and went down to Egypt and stood before Joseph and when Joseph saw Benjamin with them he said to the ruler of his house bring these men home and slay and make ready food for these men shall dine with me at noon and the men man did as Joseph bade and the man brought the men into Joseph's house and when Joseph came home they brought him the presents which was in their hand and bowed themselves again to him to the earth and he asked them of their welfare and said is your father well the old man of whom you spake is whom you spake is he yet alive and they answered thy servant our Father is in good health he's yet alive and they bowed down their heads and made obeisance and he lifted up his eyes and saw his brother Benjamin his mother's son and said is this your younger brother of whom you spake unto me and he said God be gracious unto thee my son and Joseph made haste for his bowels did yearn upon his brother and he saw it where to weep and he entered into his chamber and wept there and he washed his face and went out and refrained himself and said set on the bread and they sat before them now he plays another trick on his brother so he has them all sit at the table but he lines them up according to age and so he's trying to what is he trying to do start to freak them out fundamentally and so it and he manages that because they have no idea how in the world they could possibly he could possibly pull something like that off they think it's magic and the men marvelled at one another and he took and sent messes unto them from before him but Benjamin's mess was five times as much as any of theirs so what's he doing well he's testing his brothers again the fact that when he was the child Joseph that he got more meant that his brothers got terribly jealous and then murderous right and so now he's doing the same thing with Benjamin he's thinking okay well I'll give this kid more mm-hmm then he is share you know what how these reprobates behave and see if they've learned anything and so and he commanded the steward of his house saying fill the men's sock with food as much as they can carry and put every money man's money in the sock as well and put my cup the silver cup in the sacks mouth of the youngest and his corn money and the steward did according to the word that Joseph had spoken as soon as the morning was light the men were sent away along with their transportation the cup is found in Benjamin's sack well so Benjamin is kind of young and Joseph sends out people to find out where the cup has gone and they find it in Benjamin's in Benjamin's sock and they're very upset about this they said that a harsh punishment would befall whoever had the cup in his sock they rent their clothes and laid it every man his house and returned to this city and Judah and his brethren came to Joseph's house for he was they yet there and they fell before him on the ground very unhappy and apologetic and Joseph said unto them what deed is this that you have done ha ha ha don't you know that a man like I can certainly divine I know what's going on and Judah said what shall we say what shall we speak or how can we possibly clear ourselves God found out the iniquity of thy servants behold we are your servants both we and also he with whom the cup is found and he said God forbid that I should do so but the man in whose cup and whose hand the cup has found he shall be my servant and as for you get you up in peace to your father it's the discovery of the cup Judis says now therefore when I come to this servant thy father my father and the loud be not with us and seeing that his life is bound up in the lads life it shall come to pass when he sees that the lad is not with us that he will die and the servants shall bring down the gray hairs of thy servant or father with sorrow to the grave for thy servant became surety for the lad unto my father saying if I bring him not unto thee then I shall bear the blame to my father forever now therefore I pray thee let me stay instead of the lad and let the lad go with his brothers for how shall I go up to my brother and the loud be not with me lest peradventure I shall see the evil that will come on my father ok so what's happened well they learned a lesson so now Judah again is willing to stand in the place of Benjamin and become a slave himself and so now Joseph has determined that his brothers have developed their character to the point where reconciliation might be possible you know it says you should forgive and forget but the conditions for that are quite are quite specific you know if you're if you have a dispute with someone and they've wronged you in some sense and they apologize the question is what's the apology well it's a it's layout of a rationale it's something like as far as I can tell here's the reasons I did this horrible thing and here's what I've learned from it and here's what I'm gonna do to try not to do it again and would you give me another crack at it that's the proper repentance right and then you forgive because you're an idiot too and you'll probably do something stupid and maybe you'd like the same kind of break at some point and and besides if we all held each other completely to account at all possible times for everything then it'd just be hopeless because there would be no room for error so the forgiveness which Joseph is showing is wise forgiveness he's not gonna put himself out on the line for people who haven't learned so that the same stupid thing can happen again so that they can continue to spread misery wherever they go oh he's gonna find out if they've clued in a little bit and then if so then they can move on with putting a family together and so that breaks him up he says Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that stood by him and he cried and then he said get every man away from me so all the people except for Joseph's brother left and there stood no man with him well Joseph made himself known unto his brothers and Joseph said I'm Joseph is my father still alive and his brothers could not answer for they were troubled at his presence it's like yeah understatement of the decade there mmm when Joseph said unto his brothers come nearer to me I pray you and they came nearer and he said I am Joseph your brother who you sold into Egypt but don't be grieved or angry with yourself that you sold me hither for God did send me before you to preserve life so now it was not you that sent me here but God and he's made me a father to Pharaoh and Lord of all his house and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt hurry and go to my father and say unto Him thus say thy son Joseph God has made me Lord of all GE gypped come down unto me and Terry nod and thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen and thou shalt be near unto me thou and thy children and their children's children and thy flocks and they herds and all that thou hast and I there I will nourish you for yet there are five years of famine lest thou and I household and all that thou hast come to poverty so that's the other thing that another bit of a hint it's a bread hint here who's the what's the most reliable source of bread well it isn't bread itself it's whatever it is that gives rise to bread and that's what Joseph is in this story he's the force that gives ride rise to nourishment that's an Joseph is often considered a type of Christ which means like a precursor in some sense that's that's one way of thinking about it and you can see that echoed right there it's like well what do you store up for famine you stir up character that's the best way through now that doesn't mean you don't also store up bread andd they went out of Egypt and came into the land of Canaan unto Jacob and told him Josephus is still alive and he's governor and Jacob's heart fainted for he didn't believe them they told him all the words of Joseph which he said to them and when he saw all the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him the spirit of Jacob their father revived and Israel said it is enough Joseph my son is yet alive I will go and see him before I die and Israel took his journey with all that he had and came to Beersheba and offered sacrifices unto the God of his father Isaac and God spake unto Israel in the visions of the night and said Jacob and he said here am i he said I am God the God of thy father don't fear to go to eat down into Egypt for I will make you a great nation there and so that's how they Israelites end up in Egypt I will go down with the into Egypt and I will also surely bring the up again and Jacob shall put his hand upon thy eyes die dies and Jacob rose up from Beersheba and the sons of Israel carried Jacob their father and their little ones and their wives in the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him so the families now all united in the proper state of being that joseph has arranged and they took their cattle and their goods it's so interesting too because of course Joseph isn't even he's a foreigner as well as being a former slave and prisoner foreigner slave and prisoner and yet he ends up ruling Egypt sure surely because of the force of his character and competence and that's really something to think about and they took their cattle because that story there is that there isn't anything stronger than that doesn't matter what the circumstances are that there isn't a force that's more powerful than that and I don't think that that's naive in fact I think it's the exact opposite of naive no matter where you are you can generally make things better if that's what you want to do and unless you're inside in that place that's really hell itself not usually is something that elevates you and elevates the people around you and you can do that wherever you are because there isn't a place that sews all that you can't do that that's the message of the prison and they took their cattle and their goods which they had gotten in the land of Canaan and came into Egypt Jacob and all his seed with him and he sent Judah before him unto Joseph to direct his face unto Gorshin and they came into the land of gaussian and Joseph made ready his chariot and went to meet Israel his father and presented himself to him and fell on his neck and wept on his neck a good while and Israel said I can now die because I've seen your face because you're still alive and Pharaoh spake unto Joseph saying thy father and thy brethren are come unto thee and the land of Egypt is before thee and the best of the land your father and brothers can dwell in the land of gaash and let them dwell and if there now know any man of activity among them then make them rulers over my cattle gives them a job and Joseph brought in Jacob is farther and set him before Pharaoh and Jacob blessed Pharaoh that's a very interesting little turn of events because you'd expect the opposite under those circumstances so it appears that Jacob was a man of relatively great self possession because that's not it you wouldn't bless Queen Elizabeth in all likelihood su had a lot of gall and pharaoh said unto Jacob how old are you and Jacob said I'm a hundred and thirty years whew and evil have been the days of the years of my life and I've not attained unto the days of the years of my love the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage Jacob blessed the Pharaoh and went out from before Pharaoh and Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt in the country of Gaussian and grew and multiplied exceedingly and Jacob lived in the land of Egypt 17 years so the whole age of Jacob was 147 years and the time drew nigh that Israel must die and he called his son Joseph and said unto Him if I have now found grace in it in thy sight put I pray thee the hand under my thigh and deal kindly and truly with me bury me not I pray thee in Egypt but I will lie with my fathers and thou shall carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burying place and Joseph said I will do as you have said and it came to pass after these things that one told Joseph behold thy father is sick and he took with him his two sons Manasseh and Ephraim and one told Jacob and said behold thy son and one told Jacob and said behold thy son Joseph cometh unto thee and his real strength in himself and sat upon the bed and he Israel said unto Joseph I'd not thought to see your face and lo God also showed me your children and Joseph brought them out from between his knees and bowed himself with his face to the earth and Joseph took them both Ephraim in his right hand towards Israel's left hand and menace' and his left hand toward Israel's right hand and brought them near unto Him and Israel stretched out his right hand and laid it upon ephram's head who was the younger and his left hand upon manases head guiding his hands purposefully for manna so was the firstborn and when Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim it displeased him and he held up his father's hand to remove it from Ephraim's head unto manases head and joseph said unto his father not not so my father for this is the firstborn put the right hand upon his head head and his father refused and said I know it my son I know it he shall also become a people and he shall also be great but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he and his seed shall become a multitude of Nations another repeat of the same thing that happens continually it says when when God wants to intervene in human affairs what he does is invert tradition it's something like that and so that's a sign that that there's something new and special going on and that gives precedence to the younger child rather than the older child precedents to what is new rather than what's traditional of course sometimes that's necessary because tradition is insufficient and sometimes something new has to come into being in order to update it and Jacob called together his sons and said gather together so that I can tell you that which shall befall you in the last days gather yourself together and here you sons of Jacob and hearken unto Israel your father Reuben I'm not going to go through all 12 of these Reuben thou art my firstborn my might and the beginning of my strength the excellency of dignity and the excellency of power now the stories interesting here because Jacob blesses Joseph's sons before he blesses his own sons and so what he's doing is placing the rights of the firstborn into the sons of his favorite son and then he goes to his sons and so that has implications for the way the biblical stories lay themselves out from thenceforward the excellency of dignity and the excellency of power unstable as water thou shalt not excel because thou wentest up to thy father's bed then defiled it he went up to my couch you may remember that Reuben slept with his father's cucum concubine Simeon and Levi are brethren instruments of cruelty are in their habitations stop painting there what happened with Simeon and Levi was that somebody lay with their sister Dinah and then offered to marry her and then head and then became circumcised because that was part of the deal and then held her older men circumcised and then Simeon and Levi went in when they were recovering and killed them all and then Jacob and all his people had to leave because all that irritated their relatives so see me Simeon and Levi are brethren instruments of Cruelty are in their habitations o my soul come not thou into their secret unto their assembly mine honor be not thou United for in their anger they slew a man and in their self self will they dig down a wall cursed be their anger for it was fierce and their route for it was cruel I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel Judah thou art he whom my brethren shall praise thy hand shall be in the neck of mine enemies thy father's children shall bow down before thee Judah is a lion's whelp from the prey my son thou art gone up he stooped down he couched as a lion and as an old lion who shall rouse him up the scepter shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from between his feet until shiloh come and unto him shall the gathering of the people be Joseph a fruitful bough even a fruitful bough by a well whose branch has run over the wall the archers have sorely grieved him and shot at him and hated him but his bull abode in strength and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob for thence is the shepherd the stone of Israel even by the god of life farther who shall help thee and by their almighty he shall bless thee with the blessings of heavens above blessings of the deep that lieth under blessings of the beasts breasts and of the womb the blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills they shall be on the head of Joseph and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren all these are the twelve tribes of Israel and this is it that their father spake unto them and blessed them everyone according to his blessing he blessed them so that what we see here is an echo in some sense of what happens in the Mesopotamian creation story wind in the Mesopotamian creation story is the dragon of chaos timeout and her consort AB su freshwater and saltwater respectively and their mingled together and and that combination of chaos and order gives rise to the first Assembly of the ancient gods and then the ancient gods kill app soo casually and foolishly and enraged time at with their foolishness and ignorance and she comes back with a vengeance in the meantime and then she produces this huge army of monsters and puts King knew the worst of the monsters at its head and then decides she's going to take out her creation and so that's a little warning from 3,000 years ago about foolishly undermining your tradition so anyways the gods in their frenzy go out and try to fight against timeout and they come back with her tails between their legs continually but then a new God appears on the scene and that's Marduk he's got eyes all the way around his head and he can speak words of magic and they know that there's something new about this newest God it his capacity for vision in this capacity for articulate speech and so they say well why don't you go out and try to deal with the chaos and mardik says yeah ok no problem but here's the deal you elect me talk God and now I determine the destiny of the world and so they're desperate because like timeout is coming to get them that's chaos with the worst of all possible monsters they're probably thinking he's not gonna win anyways and so they agree and out he goes and he confronts time out who's the goddess of chaos he cuts her into pieces and he makes the world out of her pieces and one of his name's is he who makes ingenious things out of the combat with taya math which is so interesting that's such a remarkable that's a remarkable bit of nomenclature so who's should be at the pinnacle the force that sees and speaks and goes out to confront chaos voluntarily you know how many years it took people to figure that out that's like the pinnacle discovery of humanity that's what that is it's echoed here you know you see Simeon and Levi they're too angry the other brothers they all have flaws and faults of various sorts and so they're not elevated to the highest place but Joseph because he has his coat of many colors and because he lands on his feet no matter where he goes and because he's not resentful and bitter and malevolent and genocide 'el and and he's not shaking his fist at the sky or yelling at God because of Trump let's say then he's the he's the right he's the right representative of the 12 tribes and so that's brilliant it's a brilliant story all these are the twelve tribes of Israel and this is it that their fathers spake unto them and blessed them every one according to his blessing he blessed them and when Jacob had made an end of commanding his son so it's the last thing he does to state he knows that these are the twelve tribes that will progress into the future of this people and now he's trying it the last thing he does is to try to hierarchically organized their relative virtues as an indication of what has been learned and when jacob has made an end of commanding his sons he gathered up his feet into the bed and yielded up the ghost and was gathered unto his people and joseph fell upon his father's face and wept upon him and kissed him and Joseph commanded his servants to the physicians to embalm his father and the physicians embalmed Israel when the days of his mourning were passed Joseph spake unto the house of Pharaoh saying if now I have found grace in your eyes speak I pray you in the ears of Pharaoh saying my father made me swear saying lo I die in my grave which I have digged for me in the land of Canaan there shalt thou bury me now therefore let me go up I pray thee and bury my father and I will come again and Pharaoh said go up and bury thy father according as he made thee swear for his sons carried him into the land of Canaan and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah which Abraham bought with the field for a possession of the burying place of Ephraim the head before Mamre and Joseph returned unto Egypt he and his brethren and all that went up to him and that all and all that went up with him to burry his father after he is buried after he had buried his father and when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead they said Joseph will now hate us and will certainly pay back to us all the evil which we did unto him and they sent a messenger saying my father did command before he died saying for shall ye say unto Joseph forgive I pray thee now the trespass of thy brethren and their sin pretty snively really for they did unto the evil and now we pray they forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father and Joseph wept when they spake unto him and his brethren also went and fell down before his face and they said Behold we be thy servants and Joseph said unto them fear not for am I in the place of God but as for you you thought evil against me but God meant it unto good to bring to pass as it is this day to save much people alive now therefore fear ye not I will nourish you and your little ones any comfort of them and spake kindly unto them so the the idea there is that there is no evil so evil that good cannot triumph over it and Joseph dwelt in Egypt he and his father's house and Joseph lived 110 years and Joseph saw ephram's children of the third generation the children also of marker the son of menace' were brought up upon Joseph's knees and Joseph said unto his brethren I die and God will surely visit you and bring you out of this land unto the land where he swear to Abraham to Isaac and Jacob and Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel saying God will surely visit you and show and you shall carry my bones from hence so Joseph died being a hundred and ten years old and they embalmed him and he was put into a coffin in Egypt and that's Genesis so so thank you all for persevering [Music] thank you thank you well this has been very worthwhile as far as I'm concerned I learned an awful lot and so I'm very much looking forward to continuing with it and thank you all very much for your support and your rapt attention and your seriousness in this endeavor and your care and all of that it's really being a privilege to be able to do this it's a completely surreal thing to manage and so far you know I think about five million people have watched it so that seems to be a very good thing okay so I'm gonna ask the questioners if you've asked a question in the last three sessions please don't ask a question today because I I never get through everyone and so I'd like to have some questions from people that I haven't answered questions from before if that's okay hi professor Peterson just a 2-second thank you very much from my community in the Jewish community so many people have been inspired you by you to be better people and I wouldn't be able to speak to you without saying that so thank you very much a couple of things the first thing I wanted to do is make a quick comment that you might find interesting that in the Jewish astrological calendar we read the 'really cycle of the the five books of Moses and it just so happens that we are reading this part of the of the Torah story school and synchronistic yeah which brings me into a question I want to ask you about which is one question with two parts about your knowledge of Hebrew because if you look at the Torah scrolls that you find in a synagogue there are no vowels there are no sentences there it is it is chaos chaos and order is trying to be bought into it I'm wondering how knowledge of you knowledgeable are you of the Hebrew which has many layers of I'm staggering the ignorant of it so you know I read a lot of commentaries right I'm trying to zero in on the like with each of the phrases that we went through today I probably looked at ten different commentaries and so and then I have this underlying psychoanalytic knowledge that it's sort of like if you have a bunch of different templates to look at things through and then something shines through all those templates at the same time that's very unlikely and so then you can you know a coincidence is one thing but five coincidences that's no longer a coincidence that's something else and so I think I'm hoping that despite the fact that there's many many things that I don't know that there's enough things that I do know to kind of weave my way through this with some degree of utility if not certainty yeah cuz I just which is the second part which I guess maybe you don't know but the the majestic the Jewish oral stories that date back almost as long as these stories which fill in a lot of mind-blowing ly crazy random so many details about these stories and I was just wondering if you had encountered any of them before I've encountered some of them but again it's it's well as you know it's a very very rich tradition and so I haven't encountered enough of it were you thinking of anything in specific specifically in relationship to this story not in particular I actually forgot it I was I was intending to bring you a book of majestic story that's a hell of a thing to say now to say that but yeah maybe for the exodus version I'll bring you this all right all right that would be good yeah okay hi dr. Peterson I would just like to ask you to please talk about what you called a psychic death also known as an ego death okay sorry say that again would you please talk about what you refer to as a psychic death also called an ego death that's what happens when someone who loves you betrays you right so imagine that like the world is complicated beyond comprehension right and you only see a very little bit of it and the way you structure your understanding is you make assumptions about things and they're simplifying assumptions so if you trust someone you reduce their complexity massively right because like let's say we were married then there's a whole bunch of ways that you're going to act that are going to be simpler okay so then I can tolerate being around you in some sense because you're not everything at once now those simplifying structures are hierarchically assembled and some of them are far more important than others Trust is one of them especially trust in loved ones family members which is why betrayal by a family member is really catastrophic because it you know it destabilizes your past right all the memories you have it destabilizes your present it destabilizes your future it shakes your faith in human beings including yourself and everything collapses and that's an ego death and so now underneath the ego as far as Jung was concerned was another structure that he called the self and the self is the thing that remains constant across ego deaths but it's it's deeper and less personal it's archetypal and it's the thing that the Eagle collapses into when it collapses and then that rebuilds the ego something like that across time but that's when an ego death is now there's variants of that because you can have a voluntary or involuntary ego death and a voluntary ego death is when you learn a bunch and you're willing to let go so that would be your own emulation it's like you're lighting you're a Phoenix and your lighting yourself on fire that's a much better idea even though it can still be really harsh the involuntary ego deaths they're really hard on people people will do almost anything to stop that from happening which is partly why they fight to maintain their group fostered axiomatic simplifications it's not surprising because it's very you'd lose your like that ego death is a journey into the underworld or it's a collapse into chaos and that's not so bad if you do it purposefully but in the Pinocchio story for example that's exemplified by Pinocchio going down to the depths to rescue his father from the whale now he does that voluntarily but a damn near kills it right I mean first of all he hardly gets out of the whale second he actually drowns and dies but he comes back to life so even if you do it voluntarily it's still life it's just better than doing it involuntarily which is the other alternative so that's what it is you bet hello Doctor Buddhism so I've been listening to back to all of these biblical lectures for the second time now and I wanted to show you an observation I came upon because I was trying to find a question that you haven't been asked before which is harder than doing my ryerson exams that's for sure so so I've noticed I think you're getting funnier oh yes oh no I think Michael Coren said that this week I think but the word he used was bizarre I think actually I'm feeling better so that's I actually have a sense of humor it's it's hard to believe that but so it sort of comes back when I'm not feeling like I'm going to die at any moment so yeah I basically noticed one you're making more attempts at jokes so that's great thank you thank you too those jokes are landing more often all right but then there's this third element which I think was what Steve Martin quit because of which is that I think the audience is anticipating jokes more and they're actually you know I've noticed people laughing more at things that aren't intending to be jokes so I was just wondering what you make of that and they're intended I'm hoping they're intended just because I keep a straight face doesn't mean they're not intended to be jokes so yeah no it's good look one of the things is like it's and I try to keep this and the wild goal probably about five years ago that even when you're dealing with really serious matters that if you're not handling it with a light touch you're not an expert at it you know what a master out it and you think well there are some things that are so deep and dark that you can't handle it with a light touch and that's actually not true you can that doesn't mean you make light of them it doesn't mean anything like that it's that you don't it's minimal necessary force it's something like that you don't hit it any harder than you have to and it's a it's an art when you're discussing serious matters and so well one of the up shots of that is that because we're discussing serious Madison because serious matters are being discussed in the ultra large right now it would be really good if everybody could keep their sense of humor you know and I see positive signs of that like there's a lot of satirical activity on the net you know and that could easily catalyze into horror mob but it isn't it is it is you know that's happening to some degree but a lot of its satire in comedy and as long as we can keep a sense of humor about this then I think well we're not as close to disaster as we might be and so what one of the things that I have found rather ominous is that there are comedians first of all being persecuted for under free speech restriction legislation which i think is absolutely appalling but also that there are comedians now who won't perform on university campuses John Cleese won't Seinfeld that's like well you know how offensive he is it's no wonder that I mean he's like the straightest nicest comedian you could possibly imagine he won't perform on college campuses I think louis c.k won't perform on or anywhere else but it's a bad sign but no humor humor is good and it's interesting because I've been kind of watching how I'm represented on the web weirdly enough and there's all these memes that have emerged I don't know thousands of the bloody things and most of them are comical and that's good like people are are there hat there whatever it is that they're doing I don't know what the hell it is but it's being done with a relatively light touch and that's really really good that's how it should be you got to have a sense of humor I mean it's one of the things that makes life bearable so or maybe even better than bearable so you bet hello dr. Peterson just want to say what a great lecture series and this is lesson this year so merry Christmas to you and your family thank you thank you don't get too enthusiastic about that I wrote you an essay of a question and then I used the lecture of the essay writing guide on it's like 2:30 to narrow it down to just a few pages a few lines and then during this at this particular lecture like the zig zag slide manifest again and I thought I basically just had all my questions answered so basically I just I want to ask the idea of your you've made a lecture that was on YouTube many years ago and you keep referring to Cain and Abel and the the death of Abel by Cain and the curse in it and I think well that that was the that was a single brother two brothers conflict but but here we have in the sense of Jacob the twelve there was one who was one who's good one who was an able archetype and there were twelve eleven that came after him so that I don't know maybe there's something about the division or no that's a good observation I didn't thought about that yeah well I mean there's a bit of variability because Reuben and Reuben isn't quite as bad as the rest but yeah I would say it's probably easier for the Cain side to multiply luckily it's not as powerful because it doesn't do anything like it yes yes and you know you know there's young was often included accused of manichaean isn't I'm not pronouncing that properly but there was a there was a variant of Christian dogma that held that good and evil were separate metaphysical realities and that they were battling for the for governance of the cosmos something like that but they both had an independent and the classical Christian idea which one out over that was that no that good was real but evil was the absence of good now that produced all sorts of the absence of good produces all sorts of consequences and it is interesting to read young because he does get kind of Manichean in his discussions and I think it was partly because he was so concerned about what happened in Nazi Germany and then with cold war afterwards you know because evil seemed to be a palpable force but I don't think that it's as powerful as good but I do think it's easier for it to multiply because it's what's easier path it's easy to be resentful and hostile and bitter and and do nothing that's easy it's horrible and it's hard on people but it doesn't require a tremendous amount of faith or effort so maybe that is why it's multiplied in the final story in Genesis yeah and I've been reading ahead and for my own based on the interest of the president presented stories and I I keyed in on a few other books and chapters in the Bible like first Corinthians 13 which is the love chapter and that cycles through the idea of I can have all things in life knowledge power but it's all passing and now and forever our hope faith hope and love and and of course love triumphs over all yeah well the love issue see I've been saying I thought a lot about the relationship between love and truth because I've thought and talked a lot more about truth and I think partly that's because love is a word that you can hardly even say because it's been so it's like it's being dragged behind a car through mud puddles it's something like that but so sorry let me just finish it lab rating this idea but I think that the the love idea is associated with for me at least with what I discussed at the beginning of this lecture with regards to faith I think you have to make a decision about what your attitude towards being is going to be and the proper attitude in my estimation is that you're working for its betterment you know and so maybe maybe you have the same attitude towards being as you do towards someone that you love like a son or a daughter or wife that you want things to be better and that so that's your aim so the aim is basically the aim is motivated by love you want things to be better because I think that's a good definition of love like if you really care for someone you can tell because you want things to be better for them and then I think truth is nested inside that because I think that truth is the best servant of love it's something like that so I've been struggling with an idea recently that I was thinking maybe you'd be able to help me out with basically in a recent interview you talked about how myth is meant to reconcile inherent contradictions in reality right but but I'm sort of stuck between two mythological or psychoanalytic ideas that I think are both really important but they seem to have a inherent contradiction within them that I've been trying to figure out so on one hand you have this idea that there's times in your life where you have to identify things in yourself that are insufficient or there's a problem somehow that you have to kind of have a controlled burn or like a Phoenix like transformation where you discard part of yourself that doesn't fit or is not working but then on the other hand you have talked about this this Union idea where as you become really when you get older you mature by reincorporating things about yourself that you lost when you were younger or that you know you're trying to integrate your shadow or you're trying to find parts of your personality that that maybe you've been rejecting and trying to figure out how to bring them into into the folder in the hole so he's got this quote that I really like which is I'd rather behold and good right right so so on one hand you may identify something as a problem and you want to get rid of it or burn it off but then on the other hand it seems like the the path to being stronger is to figure out how to put everything together so there's that there's a one of the things Jung wrote about in his works on alchemy was an explanation of the prime alchemical dictum which was solve a coagula which meant dissolve and integrate right so so imagine this imagine that imagine you had a fairly hostile father who was not very well controlled in his aggression decent person other than that but let's say that and so your reaction is I'm never going to be aggressive and so you've built a like a moral structure that's part of your personality and there's possibility floating around outside of that did you you've denied an ethical you've denied any ethical what would you say you've stripped the idea of aggression of any ethical utility whatsoever okay so what happens this burns off and then that comes back up now you still have to integrate it so it's associated in some sense with Nietzsche's ideas morality as cowardice because one of nature's most trenchant critiques of traditional morality let's say is that most of what passes for morality isn't morality it's just cowardice it's not that I'm a good person and I don't hurt you it's that I'm afraid to hurt you and because I don't want to admit that I'm afraid to hurt you and then I say I'm moral because then I can mask my essential fear and cowardice in a guise of morality and that happens far more often than you would think because harmless and moral are by no means the same thing so some of what you're burning off you can sit and this is where Freud was such a genius I think is because he concentrated on aggression and sexuality which are perhaps the two most difficult parts of a personality to integrate said that the the hyper simp fied morality stops you from tapping into deeper recesses of your psyche and it's partly because there are primal forces it's not surprising that you don't want to have anything to do with them that you stay away from situations where they might make themselves manifest but the problem is by denying the worst in yourself in that manner suppressing it you preclude the possibility of the best because no one can be a good person without integrating their capacity for aggression because without that capacity of a progression you cannot say no because no means if you really say it no means there isn't anything that you can do to me that will make me change my mind or or conversely it means I will play for higher stakes than you will and unless you've got your aggression integrated there isn't a chance you can say that and if you did no one would take you seriously because they'd know it was just a show so one of the most useful things that Jung did I think was to work on this idea of the integration of the shadow because he was really interested in the idea of evil right especially working with trying to parcel out what happened in Nazi Germany and during the Second World War what do you do with the part of you that's aggressive and and potentially malevolent do you just crush it that's the super-ego response in some sense do you just put it behind you so to speak is that a possibility or do you admit to its existence and bring it into the game and that's see for Freud in some sense morality was super-ego clamping down on the it'd and they were fundamentally opposed both young and Piaget had a different idea and I think they were right it's like no no you invite the bad guys out to play and so you're an aggressive hockey player but it's disciplined aggression that makes you gives you access to the whole source of energy you wouldn't otherwise have and then with regards to sexuality it's like well untrammeled promiscuity doesn't constitute a virtue but neither does unavoidable virginity right in fact I think that's worse because it also masks itself with virtue it's like well you should be able to you should be able to do things that you wouldn't do that's that's like the definition of a genuinely moral person they could do it but they don't and that that's not cowardice and so that's you burn off the things that get in the way of that integration so when you say dissolve and integrate it'd be a good way to sort of bring the two ideas together that the burning off and the difficult process is necessary because the elements of yourself are structured together in a rigid way that is not working properly and that's what happens to Geppetto in the belly of the whale he's so caught in his presuppositions that he can't escape right and so Pinocchio represents the new force so it's very interesting so when you watch Pinocchio try to rescue him the first thing Geppetto does is confuse Pinocchio with a fish because he wants something to eat but Pinocchio is better than something to eat because he could rescue him so he doesn't need to eat and then Pinocchio wants to make a fire in Geppetto objects because he's gonna burn up all the furniture it's like we don't need the damn furniture if we're getting out of the whale you know and so so Geppetto and and he's old so that that that's that that's the rigid structure that's the old year that has to die off before the new year can be born it's a forest fire that allows for new growth and and that's how those things are put together and to see and it's useful to know too because if you burn something off you might think well there's nothing left it's like that's not true if it's dead wood then you have room for new growth and you want to be doing that on a fairly regular basis that's the that's that's the snake that sheds its skin and transforms itself right that's that's the death and resurrection from a psychological perspective it's exactly the same idea now we don't know the upper limit to that right because we don't know what a person would be like if they let everything that they could let go let go and only let in what was seemly let's say but you can see that's funny we don't know that to some degree you can see people vary from you can see people start to do that without that's not an rare experience and people improve very rapidly they can improve their lives very rapidly a lot of its low-hanging fruit like if you just stop doing really stupid things that you know are stupid your life improves a lot so and it frees you up it also means there's a there's an element there that's also associated with pride because people tend to take pride in who they are and that's a bad idea because that stops you from becoming who you could be because if you're proud of who you are you won't let that go when it's necessary you won't step away from it you know and then you end up being your own parody something like that that's also a very bad idea you want to be continually stepping away from your previous self and so big and I guess part of that too is that you you have to decide you know are you are you order or you chaos or you the process that mediates between them and if you're the process that mediates between them you you are the thing that transforms and that's the right attitude for human being because that's what we are we're the thing that voluntarily confronts chaos and transforms that's what we are and so for better or worse you know that's our deepest biological essence you might say and so you can let things go if you know that there's more growth to come so one more thank you for your time and thank you for spending time with us hey my pleasure so if I could since we are at the end of Genesis I like the opportunity to challenge or at least have you take another look at your position you've held with regards to Cain's reflection on the murder of evil I bring this up because it's actually a part of Genesis that has bothered me for a while and it's not like because not as straightforward as its presented usually and it's really I've been wrestling with it so in this series as well as in a couple of your maps of meaning lectures you summarized that something to the effect of Cain coming to the conclusion that what he did leads to a punishment which is more than he believes he can face which I believe to be born out of a natural reading of a specific translation choices incorrectly made or enter a innocently made by editors just for readability sake so in Genesis 4:13 Cain does not say my punishment is greater than I can bear he actually says he meets my sin is greater than I can bear which is this a.m. which is to say it's not his past actions we just say it's not his past sections its futures consequences which it's just past action it's not his future consequences which he regrets for him to say our own iniquity or sin that is too much for him to bear as a reflection on the reality of his corruption and not a plea of Mercy to the deity to spare him mmm okay well that's that seems to be a deeper interpretation I would say and I think it's more that's the same line of reasoning that Dostoevsky pursued in crime and punishment right because in crime and punishment Raskolnikov gets away with murder and then he cannot stand it he cannot stand that he did it because he's no longer the same person but even more he cannot stand that he got away with it so that's more in keeping with with that interpretation so this also is reflected in the falling verse and 4:14 where he states the consequences of his actions mainly that God's presence will hot be hidden from him and that he will be killed the verse opens was the word hane which means indeed more or less and to note the sense of acceptance and not a complaint it is the difference between saying oh no well God now hide his face from me and will I be hunted versus of course God will hide his face for me and I will be hunted and killed which I've been wrestling with and I've taken a way to possibly mean that there are sins that we can do that will just push us too far well okay there there there are well okay so one of the well one of the things that you see in post-traumatic post-traumatic stress disorder situations for example is that people view themselves doing something so terrible they don't know how to put it right so that and so you could say under those circumstances the face of God is hidden from them because they cannot they cannot atone for it they can't reconcile themselves to it it's there all the time and they can't see anything good beyond it it's hell essentially and so I mean sometimes when you're working with people with post-traumatic stress disorder you know you you kind of in initiate them into a philosophy of good and evil so that they can see when Joseph talks to his brothers and they've got all this guilt right and and he doesn't want them to have more guilt than necessary to fix themselves because it just burdens them otherwise he says look don't forget yeah yeah it was you but it's also God's doing and I had a client once who who had obsessive-compulsive disorder and he's a very smart guy he also happened to work in a radioactive lab that had a lot of radioactive materials which wasn't the best place for someone with OCD and he was worried that he would make some mistake this is very common with OCD that would result in someone's suffering which you will you'll do that and it wasn't until I could get him to conceptualize himself and his life in part as a force of nature that he was able to reconcile himself to the possibility that an error on his part would produce catastrophic consequences but people often find themselves in situations where they just they cannot reconcile themselves to what they've done and that it makes sense to me that that the interpretation that you're describing that that makes them that makes plenty of sense from a psychological perspective there are sins that will push us like just beyond our limit that are too far but there are also no consequences to our actions that are devoid of a truth we can accept and learn from and this is what I've kind of dealt out of this bit with Cain and Abel so if this is the case why then does it take us so long and with so much self - now before we accept personal responsibility when faced with tragedy especially when it's self inflicted well I I don't think you want to underestimate the contribution of just sheer difficulty like you know let's say you you you you're grieving because someone close to you died it's like well it isn't just that you've lost them although that's a big part of it it's that you have to rebuild yourself and it's really hard to do that so and it is sort of proportional to the significance of your error so if you commit an error and then you recognize that it's an error if it's a sort of surface error it's like well you can just touch up the paint but sometimes the whole under structure is just rotten and then you don't know what to do and then so that's one problems just sheer bloody difficulty and I see this with people very often it's like they're at a point in their divorce let's say and they don't know what to do they cannot solve the problem it's too complicated they just don't have the resources and maybe they've squandered some of their resources as well but sometimes they just don't have the resources and then if you add to that error and sin and malevolence and blindness and all those other things people there's a guy named Thomas SAS who wrote this really interesting article in the 1960s a book actually called the myth of mental illness and it was classic reading for clinical psychologists when I was training and the reason for that was is that SAS pointed out and this is true is that mmm-hmm lots of times if you're a psychotherapist people don't come to you because they have mental illnesses they had come to you because they have insoluble problems in their life you know like maybe they've had a two-year affair at work their wife is alcoholic and they have a very and their father has Alzheimer's disease it's like they just don't know what to do it's too much now you know they shouldn't have had the affair so there's a moral issue and maybe they should have intervened in the alcoholism in the family maybe they used their wives alcoholism as an excuse to have the affair you know like these things get very tangled it's just it's so bloody complicated that people can't untangle it so and I would say that's in keeping with the interpretation that you laid forth with regards to cain is it sounds like that's one of the reasons why it's so useful to read multiple translations right because nuances matter it sounds to me from that description that he actually woke up at least briefly and noticed what he did and said there's no coming back from this and and it is you can easily get places that you do not know how to come back from now you know they say well all things are possible with God and there's always the possibility of redemption no matter how serious the sin but I'll tell you sometimes people have no idea how to get back from where they went well and you can understand often why people wouldn't do that right yeah well that's a funny thing because one of the things Carl Rogers said too about psychotherapy is that you can't do psychotherapy with someone who hasn't recognized that they have a problem so that it's a massive thing to recognize that you have a problem and it does open the door perhaps to recovery but it also means that you've recognized that you have a problem and that can be very very it's the desert right you're out of the tyranny but you're in the desert and the sun's beating down on you and there's no necessary reason to presume that you're going to survive so think you have goodnight and stay thank you all you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 985,892

Rating: 4.8459949 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, atheist, bible, christ, christian, christianity, faith, free speech, god, gods, jesus, jordan peterson, lecture, openness, personality, philosophy, religion, spirit, toronto, truth, university of toronto, yeshua

Id: B7V8eZ1BLiI

Length: 164min 23sec (9863 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017

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