Jordan Peterson ~ What Interests You Is Involuntary

and part of it is is that there you have levels of understanding that make you up but that you don't simultaneously understand you can't articulate them so you're a multi levered multi-leveled creature and the part of you that's conscious and articulate is floating on a massive sub structure that's neither conscious nor articulate you know that's in some sense striving to become conscious and articulate but that can never be completely either of those things so it's part of the pain of being half spirit and half matter and so then on the right you know you have another set of symbols which are quite similar although you know they come about the story in a completely different way so I told you a little bit about them before you have Mary at the top and she's regarded she's she's represented here is that which encloses everything right and so in that representation culture is the child of nature that's one way of looking at the statue there are many ways of looking at this statue that's the other thing that's strange about symbolic representations because in some sense you can't exhaust them with words there's always something more you can say about them and that's partly because they're they're associated with everything and so if something is associated with everything then you can talk about it forever and you've never run out of things to say they're inexhaustible so and you have God the Father who already talked about it then if you notice in that image I hope you can see that the figure is open and there's a crowd of people gathered around right and they're all looking at the central symbol which is the crucifix and you know you might be thinking that you know billions of people over the last two thousand years have spent a substantial amount of time doing nothing but gazing at the crucifix it's like why you know and one answer is well those people are all superstitious they believe in stupid things like you know death and resurrection and you know the virgin birth and all those things that make no empirical sense it's like yeah well think again you know it's not a matter of simplistic belief it's a matter of belief structures that are so profound that you can't articulate them you don't know what they mean and so to gaze on the figure of the dying and resurrecting hero is to understand that a huge part of what redeems you in life from evil and from the things that terrify you is your capacity to let go of things that are outmoded and dead and to revitalize them as a consequence of new learning and it's the very soul it's your very soul it's the very it's the it's the living part of you and that's the part the thing that's so interesting about this is according to the to the wisdom traditions of mankind that's the part of your spirit that protects you against fear and pain because you might say well you know if you don't want fear and you don't want pain you should build a big wall around yourself and wrap yourself up in styrofoam and sit right in the middle you know where nothing bad is ever going to happen to you but you know first of all that's obviously ridiculous and second of all you die of boredom in no time flat if you did that you cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you but if you identify with the part of your being that has the capacity for transformation then you're always pretend you're always you're always the equal of what it is that's opposing you or maybe more than the equal of it so you can either depend on the walls that protect you from things and so those could be like actual walls or cultural walls or totalitarian beliefs or rigid thought patterns or anything like that or you can rely instead on the part of you that's voluntarily able to confront things that are frightening and painful and triumphs and the the deepest story of of humankind is that that's the part of us that's the most powerful you know weak as we are and subject as we are to all sorts of terrible things what do you need for protection that's what you need you have to be willing to let go and come back and let go and come back and then you can stay dynamic through your through the ups and downs of your life it makes you incredibly strong and so you know one of the things that you could think about in relationship there's to this we'll talk about this more when we talk about Carl Rogers Rogers talked a lot about the importance of listening you know he said most people can listen because what they want to do instead is impose their viewpoint on the other person because if you listen to people they're gonna tell you all sorts of weird nonsense about their own lives and about what they think and you know some of its gonna be it'll still set you back you don't to hear that people have gone through that and to actually understand their opinions if you can listen to them well then you can open up an exchange of information and that can transform both of you and Rogers regarded that as an absolute necessity in the therapeutic context and even in the context of profound relationships but he said you know most people won't do that because they want to cling to what they already have and so one of the things you can think of and this is this is worth thinking about for five years here here's something to think about what's your friend the things you know or the things you don't know first of all there's a lot more things you don't know and second the things you don't know are the bird is the birthplace of all your new knowledge and so if you make the things you don't know your friend instead of the things that you know well then you're always on a quest in a sense you're always looking for new information on the off chance that somebody that doesn't agree with you will tell you something you couldn't figure it out on your own it's a completely different way of looking at the world so it's the antithesis of opinionated so okay so here's some you can think of these terms let me give you an example so I was just reading this research paper by one of the people in our department and he was looking at he's found out that people are better than chance at determining sexual orientation when they look at cropped faces that are gray scaled with no hair for 50 to 100 milliseconds that's pretty fast eh it's like you're not thinking about it at that speed takes you half a second to think about something maybe a little less but 50 milliseconds 200 milliseconds man that's automatic processing okay so he found that if you show people faces then they can predict with better than chance levels of accuracy accuracy what the sexual orientation of the person is now we don't know exactly how they do that do that but the other thing he found is that if you're exposed say to a face that you judge as homosexual let's say and then you're given a bunch of cognitive tasks where if you stare if you use the articulated stereotypes of homosexual people you'll perform better that you do perform better so you see a face that you instantly categorize as homosexual then you're given a cognitive test that you can do better at if you rely on cognitive stereotypes and you do do better on it so what that means is the brief perceptual exposure activates a whole complex of associated ideas and it's not exactly obvious why those things are associated you might say well what does it mean to be gay or for that matter what does it mean to be straight well it means a whole bunch of things and you probably couldn't tell me all the things that it means and some of it some of them are things that you perceive rather than fake no matter when you're exposed to that particular image that entire complex of associations which is like a met the mapping of a personality right because to be gay is to be a personality of a certain sort it's to embody a certain mode of being and so you have a picture of that personality that's partly made out of all your cognitive assumptions and that can be activated at 50 milliseconds by exposure to just a black and white picture okay so that's like a complex just so you know you'll hear about the idea of complex when you read when you read you and it complex is a set of associated ideas that tend to take on embodied form and you might ask well why would ideas tend to take on embodied form and then the answer to that is what the hell good is an idea if it doesn't take on embodied form your embodied so to say that an idea is useful and you make that judgment by the way when you find an idea interesting just like why is it interesting you don't know which is also something that's really worth thinking about right because to be interested in something is to be in the grip of a particular mode of being and you don't have any voluntary control over that some things you find interesting and some things you don't and you know you might say well I'm gonna concentrate on this boring thing as hard as I can because I have to master it maybe you have to pass an exam or something it's like good luck trying to get your unconscious to cooperate because usually it won't you know you'll be thinking about oh god only knows what you'll be thinking about doing the dishes vacuuming up under the bed like anything not to concentrate on that particular boring piece of information

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, Jordan Peterson 2019, Jordan Peterson New, Psychology, Philosophy, Personality, personality disorders, self-improvement, Truth, Self Improvement, Jordan Peterson Personality, Jordan Peterson Personality Disorder, Jordan Peterson 2018, How to cure Personality Disorders, Motivation, Inspiration, How to improve myself, Self Help, Clinical Psychology, Depression, Jordan Peterson Depression, Jordan Peterson anxiety, Counseling, Jordan Peterson Psychology

Id: qsIQjy2EVDs

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019