Your Potential Future Self: How To Apply Jungian Psychology To Your Life

there's this idea in jungian Psychology called the circumambulation and Jung 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 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 would fully expand you as a well-adapted creature well like there's nothing radical about that idea how well what else could possibly be the case unless there's something fundamentally flawed about you that is what 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 interests say they do it very badly and shoddly and so you stumble around like an idiot when you try to do something new that's why 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 an error error written 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 it's social and some of it's 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 this circumambulation that Jung talked about was this continual we'll 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 you're circling yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time that's the circumambulation now you remember that for a sec because we'll go back to it okay so imagine that something glimmers before you it's an 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 the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you're going to get it right the first time is zero it it's just not going to 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 13 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 going to 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 have there's Nitric called that a will to 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 going to 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 they should have got the hell out of their house way before they did um 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 hitting 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 its 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 a 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 play a song on the piano for example you overshoot madly you're making all sorts of mistakes to begin with and then the mistakes they they disappear there's a great Ted Talk I think it was about this guy uh 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 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 Z 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 escape 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'd 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 maternity it's hooray 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 diluted 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 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 posit an ideal and you're going to 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 conceptualized perfectly while first surprise surprise because like what are you going to do that's perfect so it doesn't matter that it's imperf 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're 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 too interesting

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: TnT8FoX4H3I

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022