Jordan Peterson: Men who know this are ahead of the competition

if the person beside you does something spectacular ly weird you move from explored territory to unexplored territory as soon as you don't understand what they're doing so it's not exactly spatial-temporal territory it's more like it's more like temporal spatial territory it's time and space because the same place can be a different place from one moment to the next that happens all the time when some event that you don't expect occurs in the place that you are so and your body is prepared to react it's instinctively prepared to react to the emergence of chaotic circumstances it basically does that by hyper activating your preparation for action and increasing your capacity to pay attention and preparing you to do a very large number of things at once because you don't know what to do it's a high stress reaction but it's built into you and it's so interesting because what that means that is part of what's built into people is the ability to deal with what they don't understand which is a real paradox right because how can you deal with what you don't understand you don't understand it so but the answer is well you you ramp up your ability to react in a very large number of ways and you do that by increasing your general level of arousal and your attention and it's a good that also increases the probability that you're going to be attentive to new information and pull it in and utilize it so that you can decide how to act rapidly so other things happen for example you know some of you may have been in car accidents or events like that where you knew for a few seconds that the event was going to occur and time slowed down it's quite a common commonly reported phenomena I've experienced it a number of times actually and it was actually experimentally tested they threw people off bungee cord apparatuses you know so apparatuses so they were plummeting down you know in a quite frightening manner and had them look at digital timers that were flashing information while they were falling and it turned out that the people who were falling could process the digital information faster than people who were just standing there under normal circumstances how they got that passed an ethics committee is beyond me but but it brilliant it really is a brilliant experiment for us consciousness is associated with enlightenment and illumination and daytime and sunrise in them and the bright noon sky and the unconscious is associated with the nighttime the reason for that partly too is that your unconscious is actually a lot more active at night first of all that's when you dream and it's also the time when if you're frightened of something or if you're depressed and ruminative the frightening thoughts and the depressing and ruminative thoughts are going to come up so many many people have the experience of waking up caught in a kind of quasi cold sweat at 3:00 in the morning and having you know nothing but a continual stream of worries run through their head and there's pretty good evidence that a lot of what you're doing at night when you sleep when you're dreaming and when you're not dreaming is actually processing threat you know but most of the time you're asleep for that sometimes you wake up during it and it's like yeah it's not something you really want to be conscious about you know it's it's hard on you and it's very very common among people who are depressed you know so if you want to diagnose someone for depression one of the things you ask them is well is your sleep chopped-up you know do you wake up multiple times at night and when you wake up what happens and if they say well you know I have worries running through my head and I can't stop them that's rumination because it's it's an automatic process it's an unconscious process then you know that the balance between positive and negative emotion has shifted too far for that person there's so much chaos and pain in their life or their their emotional systems have become dysregulated that it's starting to pop up into consciousness and dominate it so now the yin-yang symbol is interesting for a variety of other reasons too because the Taoist believed that that symbol represents being now being is not the same thing as objective reality being is what you experience as a conscious creature that's being and for the Taoist being is made up of these two elements order and chaos and the reason for that is quite straightforward the reason for that is wherever you go and whenever you live and whoever you are each environment that you're in is composed of things you understand and things that work the way you expect them to and things you do not understand and that can be that can pull the rug out from you at any moment and so you can say in some sense that these symbolic representations are representations of the most unchanging elements of being so the most real things because you know a typical modern person look at this and think well those aren't real it's like they are real in fact they're hyper real because one of the things that defines real is that it's permanent and it is permanent no matter where you go there are things you know and things you don't know and it doesn't matter who you are it's permanent so it's part of the existential landscape of human being now the other thing that's there's two other things that are quite cool about the yin-yang symbol and one is that the each of the the block pazi has a little white dot in it and white paisley has a little black dot in it and the reason for that is the Daoists also recognized quite well that chaos could turn to order at any moment you know so a new order can rise out of a chaotic structure that's like that's a revolution in some sense but by the same token if you're in a place that's orderly and predictable something can happen that casts you into a chaotic situation right away so there's a dynamic even though these two things oppose each other in some sense there's a continual dynamic interplay between them and then the final thing that's quite interesting about this symbol this is a mind-boggling ly brilliant idea is that because Dao also means the way and the way is the line between the two and so what that indicates is this is a brilliant idea is that the optimal position for a human being isn't in chaos or in order because if it's too much order then it's totalitarian and if it's too much chaos then its disgust and fear and emotional pain and depression so where's the proper place and the Taoist answer is right on the line where you have one foot in order so that you're fairly stable and you have another foot in chaos so that new and interesting and compelling and transforming things are happening to you and one of the things that you might note is that your nervous system basically tells you when you're there and the way it tells you is by making you interested in whatever it is that you're engaged in because the fact that the thing that you're engaged in grips you which is really an unconscious process you can't really control that it's something that happens to you is because your nervous system which is actually adapted to the environment of chaos and order is telling you that if you're engaged and interested you are at in the place where the balance between chaos and order is what is perfect now you think about that it's no use reading a paper that you cannot understand at all even though hypothetically that would be a tremendously informative paper right but you can't understand it because it's all chaos to you and then there's absolutely no reason reading a paper the tenth time if you've already extracted the information out of it it's going to be boring okay so what do you want well you want a paper that you can almost understand so there's you know your the frameworks the cognitive frameworks that you have at hand are sufficient for you to take the next step into the unknown and the paper will will inform you of that and so those are the sorts of things books do that movies do that conversations do that even lines of thought do that if they're exactly at the right level of complexity for you they're going to engage you and people know this man they know it so here's an example let's say you're trying to you know we could say you're trying to teach your child to talk which of course you don't do what you do to a child is talk to it but it's very interesting because there have been studies of how parents talk to children and what they do is always use language that's slightly more complex than the child can understand and they do it automatically it's part of our but in some sense our innate knowledge structure about language so you don't only use words that the child understands use words that they understand plus a few words and phrases and sentence constructions that they don't and so that's sort of pulling them along and a Russian psychologist named Vygotsky called that the zone of proximal development and the zone of proximal development is that place because it's a place in the environment where information flow into the psyche is maximized and that has to be so it has to be quasi comprehensible you know it's something I tried to do in my lectures you know I tried to tell you things that you know and it's associate them with things that you don't know so that you're not swamped hopefully by an excess of incomprehensible information but you don't think oh god he's saying that again I already know that you know etc etc and anything that's dramatic instructure is doing that for you it's keeping me it's keeping you on the edge of attention and that place is where your adaptation is maximized because not only are you firming up the structure that's underneath your feet you're relying on it and you know it's it's part of the platform on which you stand but you're absorbing information at a rate that allows you to increase the solidity and area of that solid ground without undermining you so much that it falls apart beneath you so it's lovely it's such a good idea because think about what it would mean if it was true it would mean that if you pay attention to what captures your interest and you follow that that means you're gonna always be interested in what you're doing but even better than that it's gonna mean that you're gonna maximize your adaptive capacity as much as possible at exactly the same time man that'd be a great deal if it actually happened to be true now it's a bit complicated because what culture wants from you and what is intrinsically interesting to you there's going to be a conflict there right because culture wants you to do what a good cultural entity should do which is to do what you're told to do but you're not you know you're not a robot and so part of the existential problem that you have in life is trying to figure out some compromise between what you find personally engaging and that develops and supports you and what the culture will provide resources to you for pursuing and it's hard there's no simple answer to it but I would say that if you sacrifice your your capacity to engage in meaningful activity to the security of a given position and a dominance hierarchy then you turn into something that's like a soulless slave and that's a really bad idea because there's no way you can do that for any length of time without getting bored and resentful and once you're bored and resentful the move from that to dangerous is a very very small step so it's hard and it isn't even necessarily the case that you're going to make the balance you know you're going to be able to manage it but if you don't you're gonna pay a massive price for it so I would say you know let don't let people mess around with what you find compelling anymore than is absolutely necessary you know so because it's very dangerous to do that it's very dangerous to do that just like it's dangerous not to find a position in the dominance hierarchy at all because then you end up in a chaotic place and my experience is being you might wonder about this it's like what's the probability that someone can live a healthy life healthy productive and stable life outside a dominance hierarchy so without external structure and the answer to that is there might be one person in this class that could do that it's really hard because what happens to most people is that if they don't have a substantial amount of external structure and routine they just fall apart they don't sleep properly they don't eat properly you know they're depressed it's tremendously effortful to continually reinvent yourself day after day and so there's some real there's some real utility in routine and social identity you know and young would say the part of you that has adapted to routine and social identity is the persona and sort of the mask you wear in public it might even be who you think you are and he thought that people who were only persona were dangerous because they were only thoughtless advocates of the system for which they stood but he also believed that people who had no persona were in an equally terrible situation because they are psychologically chaotic and they don't have a social structure around them to hem them in and continually remind them how to be sane and productive so it's a matter of balance you know there's there's Horrors on both sides and there's advantages on both sides and the trick is to place yourself in a location where you're deriving maximal advantage from both and you'll be able to tell if you do that because if you are doing that you're going to find your life engaging and meaningful enough so the fact that it's also tragic and potentially composed at least parsley of slavery is going to be acceptable and that's what that's the goal in some sense it's hard to do that but you know it's hard not to do it too so you're screwed either way so you might as well pick the path that's gonna be of maximal utility to you you know so and hopefully to everyone else okay so this is the individual instead so we have explored territory under an unexplored territory or the known and the unknown or order in chaos and then we have the thing that mediates between them and that's the individual and this is know of medieval representation which I really love you know there's the Dome of the sky there it's a very archaic idea that the earth is a dome because it kind of looks like that if you go out in a flat field you know or if you're out in the ocean the world looks like a dome on a disk and so that's sort of the representation here it's a very ancient idea and this guy at the bottom left of the picture is poking his head through the comprehensible world and looking at the chaos beyond and so he's a heroic figure so the knower is the individual is always the hero of a story right the protagonist of a story now it can be an antihero too because just like the known has a negative element and a positive element and the unknown has a negative element and a positive element the individual has a negative element and a positive element

Channel: Essential Truth

Views: 1,444,661

Rating: 4.9005475 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson, Essential Truth, bite-sized philosophy, philosophyinsights, Matrix, Redpilled, Red Pill, mind blown, Ramble, Intense 5, Psyche Matters, Gravitahn, Ideacity, The Rubin Report, psychology, Tao, Yin Yang, balance, Rebel Wisdom, Jocko Podcast, Manofallcreation, TheArchangel911, Dose of truth, Mixed Mental Arts, Gad Saad, Independent man, Mulliganbrothers, 50 stars, enlightenment

Id: pVuz-EmKP4M

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018