This is really one of the crucial works of antiquity. By understanding Job in context, we improve our understanding of ourselves, humanity, and the Bible. No sacred cows, let's dive into her.
Topics for this video: religion, spirituality, and Ken Wilber's AQAL Integral Theory. I highly recommend his writings.
Here's the book I mentioned, I skimmed a bit, but I doubt I'll ever have a chance to read this wonderful work of theology: https://books.google.ca/books?id=kE2k36XAkv4C&pg=PA346&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
My LinkTree; bookmark it so you can find me if I suddenly disappear from YouTube again: https://linktr.ee/SatW_Aurini
My purpose in making this video is to help build a map of the different stages of moral development, of where we were at different periods in history, of how we ought to interpret historical and religious documents to properly understand them,
to integrate them.
And the book of Job is a very interesting artifact that stands out, especially to us moderns, that it's such perfect material to illustrate Ken Wilbur's theory.
And so my goal in making this video is to help you improve your own map.
Now that said, the map is never the territory.
And in researching for this video, I came across a 700-page book that I'm never going to have time to read, even though it looks absolutely fascinating.
I'm going to link it down below if you're interested.
Contrasting the book of Job to 3,000-year-old Babylonian texts about the suffering of the righteous man, who, rather than engaging with Yahweh, was engaging with Marduk.
There's other Egyptian texts that it also compares and contrasts to quite vividly.
There is so much literature.
There is so much history that I'm only barely scratching the surface here.
So take everything I say with a grain of salt and please understand I'm building a very high-level bird's eye view map of what's going on.
And I'll bet you if we could get a hold of that guy that wrote the 700-page book, he'd feel like he didn't know what he was talking about either and was also only just scratching the surface.
So the deeper you go, the more there is, folks.
But that said, even though none of us are qualified to talk about anything when you get right down to it, let's talk about something.
Let's talk about the book of Job.
Now, I know you've all heard of this, but how many people have actually read it?
And of the very, very small fraction of people that have actually read the Bible, how many of them even understood what they were reading?
The book of Job concerns the question of theodicity.
Theodicity is the question of if God, why bad stuff happen?
It's quite ironic that so many atheists point to the book of Job as proof that God is a bastard when that's literally the whole point of the book of Job.
I mean, have you looked outside lately?
Life ain't easy, and the parts they find so objectionable are actually the smallest part of the work.
If your typical atheist redditor actually read the book of Job, they would agree with 99% of it.
So what's in the book of Job?
Let's break it down.
There's two chapters of setup.
The setup is Job is a righteous man.
He runs a righteous business.
He treats his servants well.
He makes sure that his kids are in check.
He does all the right things that a guy is supposed to do.
And then one day God is holding court with his children, his angels, and Satan is there, who's been back from going to and fro on the earth, walking up and down on it.
God, that's a fantastic line.
And God says to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job?
And Satan says to God, I'll bet if I took away all of his wealth and his family, he would curse your name.
And God says, go ahead, so Satan does it.
And Job still doesn't curse God.
So then Satan comes back and says, I'll bet if I took away his health, then he'd curse you.
And this launches into the book proper.
So we have two chapters of the divine setup.
This is followed by 23 chapters where three of Job's friends show up.
And Job never curses God, but he does curse his own life.
I cursed the day I was born.
I suffer for no reason.
No, I did not sin.
There is not a lesson God is teaching me here.
There is no lesson to be learned.
I am suffering for no reason whatsoever.
Then there are six chapters of parable where Job laments that wisdom is something that no man can discover.
Then there's six chapters of a young man shows up.
And far more aggressively than Job's friends, Job's friends were saying to him, come on, Job, you must have done something wrong for all this tragedy to visit your life.
This young man that shows up is full of piss and vinegar.
How dare you deny God by saying that you don't deserve this?
You absolutely did something to deserve it.
So it's the same argument, but more intensely.
And then God shows up in a whirlwind and says, Job, were you there when I built the foundations of the earth?
Can you go and hook Leviathan on your fishing lure and drag him to the surface?
Who are you to question me, Job?
Who do you think you are, little man?
followed by a one-chapter denouement, where Job's friends help him restore his riches.
Like, yeah, it has a happy ending.
But If your goal, if religion is nothing but the opiate of the masses, if your goal is nothing but to tell people to sit down, shut up, and vote liberal, then this doesn't seem like the best way to go about it.
The people that point out that God's kind of a dick in this book, yes, congratulations on your media literacy.
You're really making the most use of that college education I can see.
You figured out that reality kind of sucks.
The two chapters in the beginning where God sets up a bet with Satan, that is just the setup.
And the one chapter at the end where Job's fortunes are restored, that comes about with God chastising his friends, saying, help this man.
Laws of Morality Echo Job00:14:39
The fact of the matter is that it rains on the just and the unjust alike.
That is a quote from the book of Matthew.
However, it echoes the book of Job.
This is the whole topic of the book of Job, that life isn't fair.
And why should it be fair?
Well, what is religion in the first place?
In the past, I've discussed how the laws of morality are very, very akin to the laws of strategy.
And I like using the laws of strategy because it's easier to abstract that.
Right?
Our ego isn't invested in strategy.
When you read the works of Sun Tzu, when you read, good lord, any of the books on strategy.
When do you attack?
When do you defend?
When do you retreat?
When do you hold fast?
So much has been written on these topics.
And there are these higher laws to it.
is this.
When you have the momentum, you must keep pushing forward.
The best defense is a good offense.
Like, these are universal rules.
There is this thing, there is this pattern that we can comprehend, that we can attain.
And the laws of morality are the exact same thing, except they don't just apply to warfare.
The cheater never prospers.
There's all these little holistic little remedies like that.
You are your reputation.
Yes, you can benefit quickly in the short term by lying, cheating, and stealing.
Hey, hard work and talent not paying off?
Try lying, cheating, and stealing.
But you'll destroy your reputation in the process.
You'll never feel like you earned anything.
Integrity and character matter.
The same way that depth matters in a military formation.
That supply lines are more important than shock troops.
All of this stuff is true.
And our early attempts to understand how to win were our attempts to understand God.
And eventually our attempts to understand God became our attempts to understand what is good.
And so the point that Job is making.
Replace God with the good.
Okay?
When Job says, I don't curse God, but I cursed the day I was born.
Job is saying, I don't envy those that lie, cheat, and steal.
I don't want to be a liar.
I don't want to be a cheater.
I don't want to be a thief.
That holds no glory for me.
I have no desire for that.
And so I don't curse the good.
I do not call good evil and evil good.
However, we live in a world where far, far too often the thieves make off like bandits.
And they get away with it every single time.
And they oppress the poor.
They steal from those that have the least.
And I'm not cursing God.
I'm not saying that they're right to do what they do.
And I wish I'd done what they'd done.
I'm not hating the player.
I'm hating the game.
Why the hell do we live in a reality where bastards like that win?
I refuse to play that game.
That game is evil.
And yet I'm calling out God because God, you let these people win.
What the hell is the good if the good doesn't win?
And that whole dialogue with his friends is them trying to point out, Job, there must have been something you overlooked.
Clearly, if you followed all the rules, things would have turned out right.
You just missed one of the rules.
And Job says, absolutely not.
Point out a single thing I did wrong.
If you can point out a thing I did wrong, I'll acknowledge it.
But I didn't do anything wrong.
What happened to me was unjust.
And then the point's really hammered home when you've got a young man.
A young man in his messianic phase.
Right?
When you're 15, you're 20, you think you've got life really figured out.
That good guys always win and only bad guys lose.
You get that kid showing up and really going to task on Job.
Starts off with the criticism from the wise old man.
It ends with the criticism from the young man, and then God shows up.
God shows up in a whirlwind and speaks to everybody there.
He says, I'm God, baby.
You can't judge me.
Who the hell are you to take issue with the reality I built?
But also, here's all your wealth back, as long as your friends help you.
What a weird frickin' story.
So, let's talk about the context, the historical context of the book of Job.
You know, I think the way that people treat the Bible like holy scripture actually sometimes does the Bible a huge disservice.
So, Job, the earliest mention of Job, to the best of my knowledge, is from the book of Ezekiel, which was written, probably, by a real historical personage around 600 BC or so.
Ezekiel, at one point in chastising the leaders of Israel, says, like, listen, there's like three guys God's not pissed off at for being idiots.
And it's Noah, Daniel, and Job.
It's sure as hell not you guys.
The book of Job is written at some point between 500 BC to 300 BC, somewhere in there.
The book of Job is a work of fiction.
It is a rather recent work of fiction.
It's a great work of fiction.
And it's probably about a real historical personage.
There probably was originally a Job from maybe 3,000, 4,000 years ago.
But the book was written in the first millennium B.C.
And as I mentioned earlier, it's part of a wider school of wisdom literature, which is recognized in the Bible.
Some of it which is very optimistic, that if you follow the laws of God, life will turn out wonderfully.
And others which are very pessimistic, that man is not capable of following the laws of God and all is random.
The book of Job is contemporaneous with the Greek tragedies and Greek philosophy, which slightly came after the tragedies.
So let's talk about those for a moment because this is a pastiche culture from Western Europe to India.
You got a pastiche of culture going on.
So the Greek tragedies, every single one of them, or at least the best ones, were about virtues leading to destruction.
About how the gods could be so arbitrary.
About how people, you know, Medea, Medea's the only one that comes to mind right now.
And I have no idea who wrote it.
I don't know if it was Euripides or not, but Medea marries her alpha male husband, who heads off to fight the Trojan War, if I recall correctly.
And while at the Trojan War, what does he do?
Well, he does what your typical alpha male does.
Which is find a younger wife.
And Medea is so stricken by grief and insult that she kills her own children, disgracing her husband and his new wife, and then the gods send a chariot for her to Deus Ex Machina up into the sky.
You know, nobody takes issue with the Deus Ex Machina in the Greek tragedies, but for some reason, Yahweh showing up in the Bible really gets people's hairs in a twist.
Plato's Republic came after the height of Greek tragedy and was also a discursive meditation, a fake conversation.
Like there probably was the time that Socrates got drunk with some other old deuce after a soccer game and they debated what the nature of justice was.
That probably did happen.
The Republic that Plato wrote down about Socrates, probably mostly fictitious.
Probably most to demonstrate a point.
In the same way that the book of Job is written to demonstrate a point.
So you should put the book of Job next to the Greek tragedies.
Next to the Republic by Plato.
Nobody gets angry at Zeus because Socrates says that we want to be good to our friends and evil to our enemies and justice gets in the way.
Nobody's angry at Tyr for that, which is my point that there's a sort of ecclesiastical...
It's like we're putting the Bible on some sort of pedestal where it's beyond analysis.
And I think that really hurts it.
And it turns something like the book of Job into, if you have to literally interpret the book of Job, if you have to literally interpret Medea, then you're going to wind up with a really weird worldview.
Stage Three Morality00:08:32
The book of Job is clearly intended to challenge you, to challenge your thinking, to challenge what it means to keep the faith even when life is turning against you,
of what it's like to not hate evil, not love evil and hate good, to still love the good, but to look at it all and say life is unfair.
That's the context it's written in.
It is historical fan fiction.
It's very good historical fan fiction.
So are all the works of Plato, divinely inspired abstracts.
Absolutely.
In fact, I guarantee, I guarantee the author of the book of Job had a profound spiritual experience meeting God.
So let's get to the stages and states of integral theory and what this can tell us about the book of Job.
The book of Job was written at the tail end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age.
This is when we were ascending from level four to level five.
So level three of social understanding of how we understood our role in society.
Level three is the power stage.
A great summation of the power stage is from Conan the Barbarian.
What is best in life?
To defeat your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.
To be on top.
And so this early understanding of God, of what is right, what is strategy, came from this level three, how do I be the guy?
Level four started with agriculture.
Organized agriculture required that everybody show up five days a week on time and do their damn job.
Whether or not you feel like it, show up every day.
It was about 4,000 years ago, yeah, 2,300 BC, so 4,300 years ago, that agriculture kicked into the next stage.
This is the last time we had a conjunction between Saturn and Neptune, I believe it's Neptune, at zero degrees of Aries.
Don't quote me on this video.
This video is not about astrology, but it was about 4,300 years ago that the current conjunction that we're experiencing happened.
And when it happened, a young cup-bearer by the name of Sargon, who lived in Akkad, overthrew his ruler and began the whole idea of building empires.
To build an empire, every cog in the machine needs to function correctly.
There's a great demotivational poster from the old 4chan where it's a bent-up fork next to a bunch of ordinary forks, and it says, just because you're unique doesn't mean that you're useful.
There's a stage 4 morality, a place for everything and everything in its place.
If you're not functioning to build society, what freaking good are you?
So we take this level 3 Conan mentality of I want to be the guy into where do I fit in?
What are my duties?
If we're going to have a civilization, then people need to fulfill their roles.
And the question of theodicity, of if God, why evil?
I did what I was supposed to do.
Where's my reward?
This is something that starts developing towards the end of stage three as we're transitioning, or sorry, stage four, for rules and rules, into stage five, achievement.
And so that's what you're seeing stage-wise with the book of Job.
It's a bunch of people at the stage development of level four questioning, why doesn't it always turn out good?
Now let's talk about states.
I said earlier that I believe the last the last few chapters when God is sitting there and lecturing Job, Job, where were you when I put the foundations of this world?
Where were you when I hung the stars from the heavens?
That's not great rhetoric if you want to convince people to join a religion.
To believe a religion.
That's the sort of thing that somebody who's actually met divine creatures would say, but who met divine creatures from stage four.
Somebody at stage three, the Conan stage, they're going to encounter divine messengers that represent ideas.
strength, fecundity, calmness.
At more primitive levels, they'll mistake animals for those divine beings.
At stage three, they'll have a primordial pagan concept of the gods.
They'll mistake Aries.
They'll mistake Hestia.
Goddess of the earth and the home.
At stage four, rules and social responsibility, you start encountering beings of state, of social roles and responsibilities.
I'm the king.
Realizing Divine Vision00:13:02
Do what I say.
If you don't do what I say, the whole kingdom falls apart.
And you don't want that, so do what I say.
Job is really just saying that line from Casablanca, the problems of two people don't matter a hill of beans in this world.
If you don't know, the plot of Casablanca is that two long-lost lovers get back together, but turns out the woman was married to some French resistance fighter or something like that, and she's his only reason for going on.
And so Humphrey Bogart tells her, go with your husband.
Yeah, we love each other.
We had that romance, and God, I miss you, but we'll always have Paris.
Your husband needs you.
The whole French resistance will collapse if you aren't there to love your husband.
So now that we know he's alive, you've got to bury this deep down.
Got to cover up the accidental infidelity and go be loyal to your husband.
Our love doesn't matter.
The fight matters.
So we have these characters in Book of Job.
We have these people talking about the tragedy that Job went through and getting increasingly profound.
And have you not been in one of these conversations where you start to feel the edges of reality dissolving?
Tragedy and conversation can bring on a psychic state of being.
It can absolutely bring on one for all participants involved.
Where, if you're at stage four, God shows up in a whirlwind and says, where were you when I built the foundations of this world?
And yet God also offers the solution in that story.
Which makes me think that even though it's a fictional story, it's not actually about Job, I think it's based upon a real experience by the author.
And this is the transition from four to five.
Because part of the solution in the book of Job is that his friends help him rebuild.
They don't just offer sympathy, they offer charity to him.
And they work together because they realize that Job didn't bring this tragedy upon himself.
Bad circumstances happened.
Job is a good man.
And if you give charity to a good man, not just any degenerate, but a good man, that will repay you a thousand fold.
And the book of Job is struggling to say this.
It's struggling to say that there's a difference between somebody asking for a handout and a hand up.
That's ultimately what it is saying, but it doesn't know how to say that.
Because hand out, hand up, that's stage five.
That's achieve.
And Job is one of the first written works talking about this level.
So what does this mean for us today?
Well, first, this is, as I hope I've illustrated, this is a crystallized portion.
Like the Roman Empire was very much a level five civilization.
That's when level five really took over.
The Spartans were a really twisted version of level five.
Book of Job is the end of level four.
The cracks in level four are showing.
Oh, if these social rules are so great, why don't they always work?
The transition from four to five is also something that still happens.
We tend to transition during our late teenage years.
Stage four says everything should be just.
Right?
If you see communists running around on the internet, those are like communism is just a stage four religion for these idiots.
Everything, life should be fair.
Well, you get to level five, you realize life isn't fair.
You ought to make the most of it and accept your losses and get back up and try again.
Sometimes just the roll of the dice, man.
And that encounter with the divine.
As I said, I believe it actually happened.
I believe the book of Job is autobiographical, just that it happened to somebody in 500 BC.
And he wrote down a fictionalized version of his own experience and used Job as the placeholder.
That was a very common thing to do back then, by the way.
Most of the books attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were written by later authors who, in a sense of humbleness, they said, I have something to contribute, but because I learned so much from him, I'm going to put it in his name.
Right?
They're not trying to steal his glory.
They're trying to add to his glory and not be narcissists.
Same thing with the book of Job there.
I'll bet that story actually more or less happened to somebody.
And they had a divine vision and they wrote it down.
And it was a divine vision shared by a group of people.
It was a divine vision with ontological, not merely subjective reality to it.
And yet I don't think any of you are going to experience God in that way because most of you are not at stage four bordering on five.
I think most of you are at minimum five, six, or seven.
And these experiences of the divine, they absolutely exist.
They can exist across multiple experiencers.
Many people can see the exact same thing.
Here's what the book of Job misses from a stage seven perspective.
Job makes the claim that he's always been righteous, that he's always done the rules.
When at stage seven, at second-tier thinking, you begin to recognize you're something, you yourself are something that is changing and evolving and blossoming into the future.
And that who you were in your teenage years, it's not just a less educated version of who you are, a less experienced, but a fundamentally different type of thing that you've grown and blossomed over the years.
And when you encounter the Godhead at stage seven, it's it's far more a part of you.
It's a you know, you could call it your higher self.
It could be that infinite divinity is being shone through a crystal and you are that crystal.
And so inevitably, it is yourself, even though it's also God.
And so on the book of Job, it's experience, because the first stage of perception, levels one through six, are completely dual in nature.
I, thou, me, it.
Second stage is where you start to realize that you can't have a perceiver without a perceived.
perceiving is the perception that I and thou are united.
Anywhere you go, there you are.
Sort of a thing.
This is part of the problem that people have when they're at stage six bordering on seven.
They look at the stage four understanding of the divine and see it as very, very tyrannical.
Well, because from their perspective it is.
It's somebody coming in and invalidating your perspectives as opposed to participating with them.
But note, that's not what God does in Job.
God confronts Job and says, where were you when I built the foundations of reality?
Who the hell do you think you are, Job?
Who that, like, what do you know about how the universe ought to be ordered?
My own counsel will I keep.
As to who is to be ready, to be trained, to be a Jedi?
But he never says Job is wrong, does he?
Never invalidates Job's perspectives.
Instead, the Spirit comes upon the entire group who have this very intense back and forth about what is right.
instead of saying that anybody is right or wrong he says here's how you fix it you know the people that come down on that story for not living up tomorrow like they're really missing the point yeah Yeah, God makes a bet with Satan.
And God says, who the hell are you to judge me, thou puny mortal?