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May 26, 2013 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:20:29
Maps of Meaning 5 (Harvard Lectures) [Edited]
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- Uncut version of the lawsuit. - They just sell me out.
- Yes, I have no idea.
- Well, I don't see any way you could - I'm not watching it.
Basically, they thought the subjects that they focus on on the floor of the floor is reasonably normal.
So that people can come in and do it on a computer instead of-- They didn't look-- they looked like they had one.
So have you read his book?
No, I've read-- The ocean.
The ocean.
That ocean is composed of the waters that were there before anything was there.
Taimant's a feminine figure because she's the wife of Apsu, but she's also a dragon.
And it is the case in mythology.
That the figure of the terrible mother, the mother in general, is often contaminated with the figure of the dragon.
I don't exactly know Most mythological stories describe the creation of the world out of one of two things.
It's either the body of a giant or it's the body of a serpent.
I don't exactly know why it's the body of a serpent, or a giant for that matter.
It's difficult to tell.
It's in part because the serpent is a serpent that eats its own tail.
That's the Ouroboros, as you've been reading about.
And it's a symbol of the union of opposites.
From the mythological perspective, whatever it was that the universe was made out of, before it was discriminable objects, was everything that's now discriminable combined into one thing.
And the symbols that myth uses to represent that state, which by definition can't be represented, circulate around attempts to represent the union of paradoxical opposites.
Apophis, for example, the Egyptian serpent, that's the serpent that eats the sun every night.
It's the serpent that Ray, who's the sun god, kills every morning when he rises again.
Ray is the god that the Egyptian pharaoh is assimilated to.
Apophis, for the Egyptians, was the god that was there before time began and the same god that will be there after time ends.
Not at the beginning of time or at the end of time, but outside of time entirely, something that surrounds time, and that's what these figures are attempting to do.
Well, these figures here are attempting to represent the same sort of idea.
This is from Benin in Nigeria.
There's a serpent designed here.
The serpent's enclosing the world on a brass shield.
This is a Mexican calendar stone with an encircling serpent.
You see the serpent's head up there?
That's the world again.
The world is...
The reason the serpent is around the year is because the year is also the world.
Mythological language tends to mix things up again.
It's very frequent for cultures to regard the creation of the new year as equivalent to the creation of the new world.
That's why, again, as in Samaria, that's an extraordinarily widespread ritual that the day that the dragon is dispatched and her parts pulled apart to make the world is also New Year's Day and the day that the state is renewed.
The state is equivalent to the world from the mythological perspective.
The state is where order rules as opposed to chaos.
Chaos has two symbols, one being the serpent and the other being the great mother.
The serpent is the most primordial form of chaos.
It's the chaos from which everything else is engendered.
So you could say there's two types of chaos.
There's the chaos that preceded the division of order and disorder.
And there's the chaos that stands for disorder, as opposed to order.
In the Sumerian, in the earliest Sumerian creation mythology, for example, the world parents arise from the body of the serpent.
World parents are the sky and the earth.
The earth is assimilated to the female.
Female stands for chaos, but you have to understand that once you've circumscribed an area, say like a state, The area outside of that state is conceived of as chaotic.
It's where anomaly rules.
It's where novelty rules.
There's a slightly different form of chaos than the kind of chaos that preceded the establishment of any order whatsoever.
You can see that's kind of a subtle distinction.
And I think that's part of the reason why the figure of the serpent and the figure of the Great Mother get contaminated so easily.
The Great Mother is novelty from the standpoint of order.
The serpent is novelty before there was any division between order and chaos.
Let's see if we can take a look at some representations here.
Here's two more.
This is from Babylon.
That's the ocean reigning the world.
You can't see much of it.
The world's in the middle.
The oceans are on the outside.
And you can just see the edges of a serpent's tail there.
There's not much left of the tablet.
And then this is from Italy in the 17th century.
These are the four corners of the world.
The world, by the way, is often, and this is also very difficult to understand, the world of order is generally represented by a symbol that looks like that.
That's the world.
It's a Mandela.
It's a circle.
It's divided into four parts.
Like paradise.
Paradise in Genesis has exactly that structure.
There's a fountain from which four rivers flow.
The fountain's right in the center of it.
Four rivers divided up into four parts.
It's a circle, and that's a model for Jerusalem.
And Jerusalem is the heavenly city, and the heavenly city of Jerusalem is the archetypal model, so to speak, upon which all actual cities are predicated.
So they're always built in an attempt to imitate the heavenly city.
And that's a common model for city Construction again, it seems to be more or less distributed all around the world.
And the funny thing is, my daughter started drawing the world here about three weeks ago, and she drew a figure exactly like this.
She said, this is the world, she draws her, and then divide it in one line and divide it in another.
I just wanted to ask why a representation of chaos before it was split into the known and the unknown is so important and why there's such drive to represent it since from the time when any representation was possible the world would already have been divided into the known and the unknown.
Well again I think the reason is is because look the argument that I'm trying to put forth in the next few chapters in this book is that The thing you need to know most of all, if you think of a story as a map of meaning, it's a description of behavioral patterns that are designed to help you make order out of chaos.
In order to generate a story that has generalized validity, instead of one that's just relevant for a given occasion, you may know how to do one thing, and you can teach someone how to do that thing.
But knowing how to do one thing is nowhere near as useful as knowing how to generate patterns of knowing things.
And I think part of the drive to represent the unknown per se is part of the overall attempt to come to a representation of the domain, so to speak, of the always present unknown.
Now, your question is why, I suppose, why Is it necessary to generate an image, say, like the serpent, rather than an image of the Great Mother, which is just novelty?
I don't know exactly the answer to that.
I mean, I don't even know if...
All I can say is that as far as I've been able to determine, what people have done is attempt to represent the source of things.
I mean, we still do that, obviously, scientifically.
People are more than willing to speculate about the origin of things previous to even the potential establishment of anybody who could have experienced it.
And it seems to be, well, it seems to be just a side effect or a direct effect of our general curiosity about everything.
So that once, once, so could you say that once we've sort of been able to define ourselves in time, we want to have an explanation for all time?
I would say, yeah.
I don't know about this.
I find this stuff very compelling, obviously.
It seems to me that these aren't necessarily just attempts to describe the unknown.
The representations to me seem to be accurate.
I don't know where they came from or how they developed.
They're approximations that have taken place over thousands and thousands of years.
I don't exactly know why the unknown as such is represented as a serpent.
It has something to do with the conjunction of opposites.
A serpent is something that's winged, and it's something that's on the ground.
So it's an image of the union of whatever it is that's represented by spirit, Which is usually something like consciousness or the domain that consciousness established.
That's the masculine domain, at least mythologically speaking.
The fact that the serpent crawls on the ground gives it the feminine aspect because it's tied to matter.
It can also shed its skin so it can transform.
So the mythological symbol is trying to say that the unknown as such was something that combined opposites that are generally viewed as separable and that can transform itself.
You can't say anything about it.
It's a weird category because Laozi attempted to describe it in this poem.
There was something formless yet complete that existed before heaven and earth without sound, without substance, dependent on nothing, unchanging.
One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.
That's Tao, actually.
And it's the source of everything from the perspective of Chinese mythology.
And Laozi points out that as soon as you talk about it, you're not talking about it.
Because as soon as you categorize it, it's not an attempt to be like, purposefully obscure.
The point that is being made by Lao Tse, for example, is that As soon as you try to talk about something that's uncategorizable, you've already categorized it and you've already got away from it.
So we're in a problematic position here because we're trying to come up with a representation of something that existed before any representations were even possible.
So all I can tell you about it is what the representations are.
Now I think the purpose of them was because we've been attempting to generate a meta-story as a species, and the meta-story is how to adapt to the fact that there is unknown territory.
Remember, the dragon has other attributes, too.
I read a book called Grendel, which was a novel that was published in the 70s recently, or the dragon in there.
There's a mythological character named Grendel who eats people, and he's constantly attacking this one kingdom.
It's from Beowulf, there's an old Scandinavian myth, and it's written from the perspective of the monster instead of the perspective of the people.
And anyways, Grendel is this monster.
He eats, he keeps attacking this kingdom and eating people.
And he's completely, the dragon has made him invulnerable.
He can't be defeated.
But the consequences of his repeated attacks on this kingdom is that the kingdom starts to fortify itself very, very heavily, because it's always being attacked.
And as a consequence, it spreads its dominion everywhere.
So it's a morality play in a sense.
It says that one of the functions of constant death, the constant threat of death, is to produce a tremendous amount of power in response to it.
Anyways, there's one point in the book where Grendel goes and talks to the dragon, and this dragon can see the beginning and the end of time.
He's also invulnerable.
He sits on gold.
That's another attribute of the dragon.
Well, in classic hero mythology, the hero goes out to conquer the dragon, right?
And as soon as he faces the dragon, he gets the gold that the dragon has and then brings it back.
That's another indication of the juxtaposition of opposites.
The story is basically telling you that, well, the dragon is something that can devour you.
Breeds fire, after all.
It's a very potent, transformative agent, and it's eternal.
If you face, it sits on a treasure, though.
It's very dangerous.
If you face the dragon voluntarily, that's the story of the myth, anyways.
If you face the dragon voluntarily, then you can get the treasure.
When you bring the treasure back to the community, then it's changed.
That's a story about adaptation.
That's why those dragon stories pop up over and over.
It's always sitting on treasure.
So it's another, and you can see there how that image sort of Blends into the image of the Great Mother, and it's positive on one hand and negative on the other.
I think it's a story not of habituation, but of exploration-generated adaptations.
Take another very archaic notion, and that's the notion of human sacrifice.
I think I talked to you a little bit about this before.
If you dig down into most cultures, if you get down to a sufficiently archaic layer, you can find a stratum in time during which that culture practiced human sacrifices.
That's a sufficiently peculiar practice so that Arthur Kessler, when he wrote a book called The Ghost in the Machine, it was quite famous back in the early 70s, he said, The fact that human beings practice sacrifice at virtually all levels of culture, in all cultures so far identified, was an indication that there was something really biologically wrong with us.
That was such an insane thing to do.
But what those cultures that were practicing ritualistic sacrifice, as far as I could tell, what they were doing was acting out the idea that the thing that was valued most had to be sacrificed to the unknown in order for constant adaptation to continue.
So it was either like the sacrificial victim was either you could view him as a hero because that was often the case.
So he was a hero who would be killed and then his body would be distributed among the crowd and they'd eat it.
That's one ritual.
It's just like the Christian mass, by the way.
It's exactly the same idea.
And the notion was that To move towards divinity, it was necessary to incorporate, because that's the most concrete way of putting it, incorporate the body or the essence of this thing that's constantly being offered up to the unknown.
That was the only way that you could continue ensuring that constant adaptation was going to take place.
So that's the sacrificial aspect of the hero.
And then there's also the sacrificial aspect of the king, and those two things get confused as well.
The king isn't the hero.
The king is the father of the hero, or he's the thing the hero generates.
You can look at it either way.
The king is also something that has to be sacrificed.
The king is the embodiment of behavioral patterns that had adaptive significance in the past, also schemas of representation.
And they're useful for guiding adaptation, but if the environment shifts suddenly, then they have to be changed.
And the only way they can be changed is if, well, from the mythological perspective, if they're sacrificed.
And that's what those rituals were trying to act out.
You can check around in the literature to satisfy your own curiosity.
As far as I can tell, I've never found an explanation of human sacrificial ritual that was comprehensible that doesn't fit along that theoretical line.
If you can accept the argument that people acted out ideas before they understood them, That's what I was trying to explain in part of that neuropsychological chapter.
Say, evolutionary pressures select our behavioral patterns.
We don't invent them all.
If we experiment a lot, some behavioral patterns last and some don't.
So I think we get behavioral patterns that are established as a consequence of evolutionary pressures.
They're established long before we can understand them.
So we get the behavioral pattern down, then we start watching what we're doing.
And when we're watching what we're doing, we tell stories, and the stories reflect They're like first-order representations of behavioral patterns that work.
So people that survive were able to give up the thing that was most important to them when it was necessary.
And over the course of, I would say, hundreds of thousands of years, we gathered enough observations about success to draw some general conclusions about what it meant.
We know already in Mesopotamia, by the Mesopotamian times, whatever it was that Marduk represented was already positive as necessarily occupying the highest position in the dominance hierarchy of gods.
So that's already established 5,000 years ago.
By the time people could write, we knew that story.
It's debatable whether or not we knew what it meant, but then you have to ask, When you say that, you know what something means.
What are you saying?
One thing you're saying is, if you know something, you can act it out.
And the fact that you can act it out does not necessarily mean you have an accurate representation of it, or that you can say anything about it in words that are...
or that it was constructed as a consequence of verbally-directed thinking, or that it was rational, or any of those things.
Knowing something is acting it out, and that's wisdom.
And it's images of wisdom that are collected in mythology, as far as I can tell.
Otherwise, you have to come up with a, well, I mean, you can try, try, try as you want, come up with an alternative explanation for things that on the face of them seem as insane as sacrificial rituals.
You have to realize, these things have lasted a long time.
When I made allusion to the Christian mass, That's a direct, like, when you eat the wafer that represents Christ, he's a sacrificial victim, and the incorporation of that wafer, it's made out of wheat, because wheat is a dying and resurrecting plant, by the way, so there's a lot of vegetation god symbolism that is assimilated into that wheat host.
When you eat that, the notion is that you're supposed to incorporate whatever is at the essence of Christ, but people still do that, It's a symbolic representation of a sacrificial ritual.
And it's supposed to produce an effect.
It's got more and more abstracted, as you can tell.
People don't actually engage in sacrificial rituals anymore.
Although we kind of do that, we still do that at New Year's.
You make your resolutions.
The notion there is the death of the old self and the birth of the new self.
You see there's still symbols that hang around in our culture from archaic times about the new year, too.
Kind of the old year who's hobbling along.
He's killed off to make room for the new year, and that's when you're supposed to formulate your resolutions because that's a time when you can scrap your past and burn it, so to speak, and give rise to a new self.
Those sorts of rituals, those sorts of ideas are very useful.
It's very difficult for people to escape often from the weight of their past.
That's sort of their cumulative habits or the way that they construe the world.
Like, there's a certain utility in that because it got you as far as you are now.
But there's a tremendous amount of weight.
I can remember, for example, I'm from a very small town.
And the thing about being from a small town, perhaps it's not so much different as a city.
It's that everyone knows you.
When everyone knows you, You're trapped by your social representations, so it's very difficult not to stay who you were because your behavior is always modified by those around you into a shape they can predict, even if you want to change.
If you leave a place like that, or in fact any time you leave anywhere, that's the changing of your world.
You have a chance to abandon your old personality and develop a new one.
Anyways, let me show you.
Some of these representations.
The only way you can get a feel, I think, for this sort of thing is by thinking about it.
I want to show you.
Well, we'll start, I won't show you that one for a minute.
Do you have any idea why the, how the New Year got so far displaced for Easter, as it is?
Because Easter should be the beginning of the calendar year.
Yeah, yeah, well Christmas isn't very far displaced from the New Year.
And the thing is that the sun is born on the 21st of December.
That's why Christmas Day is so close to the 21st of December.
Because the days start getting longer again.
So I guess that's part of the answer, is that the Christian The ceremony of Christ's birth was assimilated to the rebirth of the sun, so it kind of occupied that space in the calendar.
Right, but that was the first birth, not the sun birth.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
No, I don't know the answer to that question.
But I do know that's why there are rabbits and eggs at Easter.
Easter is the first Sunday after the spring equinox, though.
It's always the first Sunday after the spring equinox, though.
It has to do with spring.
No, I'm not saying why isn't Easter in December.
I'm saying why isn't the first day of the year in Easter?
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
You could speculate that there's tension between the two dates.
What did you say about rabbits and eggs?
Oh, at Easter.
Well, they're symbols of rebirth too, eh?
Rabbits are symbols of fertility.
And, well, eggs.
Well, Easter Bunny, these things come from somewhere.
They don't just pop out of the vast unknown.
It's like, look, I just told you like five minutes ago that we do all sorts of things we don't understand.
We act out things we don't understand.
So I tell you what the Easter Bunny means and everyone laughs because everyone knows about the Easter Bunny and no one has a clue what it means.
So that's a perfect example of how these sort of archaic ideas can continue to exist.
People are absolutely, so to speak, unconscious of their meaning.
Which basically means you act them out, but you don't know what you're doing.
But is the Easter Bunny an example of something that represents rebirth because it's some sort of an archetype of rebirth or is it an example of something that represents rebirth because it's been passed along?
Well it's a fertility symbol and it was a pagan symbol of fertility and as far as I know it just got It just got assimilated to the Christian festival of Easter and hung around along with it, so to speak.
And the snakes and the serpents too, are they sort of re-chosen as symbols of chaos that preceded the division?
Or are they ancient symbols that have simply been passed along?
In other words, could it have been some different symbol that we have today?
That's a good question.
I'm going to show you a bunch of videos, and I don't know the answer to that.
I think, personally, I think That when people start thinking about those sorts of things, those symbols naturally come to mind, regardless of whether they're passed down, although they are also passed down.
Because I can't understand why they keep popping up everywhere otherwise.
The other thing is, this is an argument that Jung made, too.
He said, well, symbols won't last for a long time unless they're particularly apropos.
They happen to match Some a priori concept.
In psychology, academic psychology, we don't give much credence to the notion of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, for example.
People think that's absurd.
That is because we are unbelievably ignorant, historically, in psychology.
I'll give you an example.
I was reading Murcia Eliade the other day.
You know, when the Spaniards came to the New World, they were looking for gold, for El Dorado, the city of gold.
That's an analog of paradise.
They're also looking for the fountain of Part of the reason that they ended up going up north on their trips was because they met a band of wandering Indians who were looking for the same thing.
The Indians told them a whole set of stories about where this paradise might lay, and away they went.
Now that's pretty peculiar.
You know?
And I can give you the reference for that.
It's in Eliot's book, The Sacred and the Profane.
I mean, it's difficult to account for that.
You can't account for it by...
Well, you could say that both ideas came from a single source some tens of thousands of years previous.
It'd be like 17,000 years, because I think between 10 and 17,000 years, because I think that's when the Native Americans crossed the land ridge into North America.
But then you have to explain why those ideas hung around for At least 10,000 years.
I guess there's a difference between saying that somehow those ideas are innate in us or that there's something innate in us that determines the shape of our culture and those ideas are innate in us.
Yeah, well, I think what happens is that, well, let's take the notion of the snake, for example.
We know that novel phenomena have the capacity to grip your attention.
So then you could say that anything that has the capacity to grip your attention would be a useful symbol for novelty.
And it's certainly the case that snakes have the capacity to grip your attention.
So that might be the process by which the symbol is not only originally generated, but renewed when it has to be renewed.
I'll show you a picture of Kelly.
I put it in the manuscript anyways.
It is the case that innately the domain of the novel always appears to us as simultaneously threatening and promising, with threat having the initial upper edge if the phenomenon is of sufficient novelty.
And that's inborn, right?
I mean, that's part of the structure of our nervous system, our capacity to orient to the unpredictable.
It's also the case that we seem to be able to generate affect to things like snakes easier than we can to things like electric outlets, even though the environmental danger of them is perhaps being reversed.
So there's at least a kind of a tendency in our nervous system to acquire fear to spiders and to bared teeth and to snakes and to fire easier than other objects.
So perhaps you don't need much of an underlying biological nudge To ensure that a certain class of symbols constantly gets regenerated.
We know the novel, the domain of the novel has the same attributes that Rudolf Otto, who wrote a seminal book in the 1920s called The Nature of the Holy, said the holy phenomena is numinous.
That's a word he coined.
It has two aspects, a fascinating aspect and a terrifying aspect.
Again, I think he's relating to, he's describing the same sort of phenomena, is that we're innately compelled to orient and tend And to consider awe-inspiring, for that matter, any sufficiently dramatic manifestation of the novel,
it's also the case that it's perfectly reasonable to make the presumption that The world is generated as a consequence of our contact with anomalous information, because that is the place where we generate everything that we take for granted, including ourselves.
So it strikes me that this is a relatively mythological perspective.
It seems to me to be a completely coherent viewpoint.
Now, people say, well, the fact that something's coherent doesn't make it true, and that's certainly the case, because paranoid delusions are coherent, but theoretically they're not true.
Then you have to figure out what you need in addition to coherency.
Well, that's a tougher question.
If you act the story out and your emotions are arranged in a manner that you find better subjectively than they were before, would you say that that would be evidence for the efficiency of the story, the efficacy of the story, for its truth?
Could you just define truth as the empathy of the story?
Well, I'm just wondering.
One of the things I've wondered about constantly when I was teaching my personality class, for example, is these constant panoply of different personality theories.
They're all predicated.
They have certain elements in common, one of them being the necessity to face those bits of your experience that you really can't comprehend very well.
To face novelty, that's something that's really core to them.
But they vary a lot.
And in the clinical literature, there's a fair amount of evidence that there isn't much difference between one therapeutic approach and another in terms of their efficiency.
They're all pretty good.
The only thing that's kind of known for sure is that if you're an eclectic psychotherapist and you sort of pick and choose, you don't do as well as you do if you're committed to one particular model, even though it doesn't matter what the model is.
So then it struck me that, well, perhaps the reason for this is that if you go into therapy and you have an incoherent story, Which basically means you don't know what direction to go in.
Your goals aren't set very well.
You don't have a good definition of yourself.
That means your emotions are dysregulated.
If I give you a story that's coherent, that's an improvement.
Just the fact that it's coherent is an improvement over your incoherent story.
And maybe there's other, then the next thing to do would be to specify what else you need from a story other than coherence.
And again, that's what I'm trying to do in this course.
So, but I'm wondering, it's like, we would say that therapy is effective when the client says, I'm better.
Or when the therapist says, you're better.
Or when both do.
Or when some other people do.
But the point is, it's still based on Well, when a client says, I'm better, usually what they mean is, I'm not going to commit suicide now, so I'm not depressed.
I may be somewhat anxious, but I think I can handle it, and I'm nowhere near as anxious as I used to be.
So negative emotion has been brought under control.
I'm hopeful about the future, and I can see that life might be satisfied.
That means their emotions have been regulated, and that's what a coherent story does.
Since stories are about patterns of action that are adaptive, Well, that makes a certain amount of sense because when we're acting on the environment, what we're trying to do is to transform it into a place where our emotions are optimally balanced, where we're not subjected to pain or anxiety, where we have hope for the future and where we view life as satisfying.
So in addition to being coherent, a story should also be relatively stable?
Well, it has to have two aspects.
It has to be stable, but it also has to have the capacity to update itself with stability.
That's right, that's right.
So the best story is a story about how to update stories when that's necessary.
And that's the story of the hero.
I'm not suggesting that all our clients should reinvent themselves in the image of God.
No, I wouldn't suggest that.
No, I would say, actually, that to the degree that a therapy is effective, it acts that out.
Because, for example, one of the most effective behavior therapy techniques is exposure, so to speak.
And what exposure is supposed to do is produce habituation, which is wrong.
That isn't what exposure does.
If someone's afraid of getting into an elevator, What you do is teach them behavioral strategies to transform that elevator into something that's positive.
It looks like habituation because mostly what they do is model you, but that's still what you're doing.
You don't habituate to think.
You don't even habituate to the unknown.
What you do is explore and classify it.
It's just that our experimental procedures have been really poorly constrained, I think, so they're trivial.
If you're in the lab and I Play you a hundred tones that are the same and then an oddball tone, you'll orient to that.
And if I keep playing it over and over, your orienting response will go away.
And then I would say, well, you've habituated.
That's not true.
What you've done is classify that tone as meaningless through exploration of its properties.
And you happen to be sitting there so your exploration is really constrained.
That's still what you're doing.
So I would say, like in answer to your question, is to the degree that a therapeutic Doctrine is implicitly or explicitly modeled on this story.
It works.
To the degree that it isn't, it doesn't.
We know, like, one of the major factors in promoting therapeutic improvement is exposure to threatening or anomalous information.
So, Freud thought, said something terrible's happened to you in the past, that's trauma, right?
Say that's an event that you can't make sense of.
Freud, you know, it's hard to define trauma, but we'll just leave it at that for now.
Freud originally thought that all you had to do was bring that traumatic experience up into consciousness.
That was catharsis.
You'd be cured.
But he knew by the end of his life that that didn't work.
Behavior therapists have said, no, no, you have to do more than that.
You have to adjust someone's actions.
So, that's the thing.
What a therapeutic system does is expose you to anomalous or threatening information and make you readjust your behavior as a consequence.
To the degree that you do that, you're cured.
If you won't do it, you're not.
I don't understand how habituation isn't what you just described as exploring it and getting used to it.
Well habituation usually means something like getting used to.
But most of the time when you encounter, like, you don't just habituate to anomalous or threatening information.
If you're getting pounded flat every day you go to school saying you're a child, you do not habituate to that.
The only way that you can get used to it, so to speak, is to alter your behaviors or your scheme of representation so that that bully is no longer pounding on you.
So that means you might have to, I don't know what you'll have to do, take karate lessons, weight lift, get a new group of tougher friends, bring a knife to school, something.
But until you transform the source of the threat, Then, well, you're not going to habituate, because you don't get used to it.
You'd like to turn it into something positive, but you don't necessarily turn it into something positive.
You could turn it into something neutral.
And if you're bad, maybe it stays negative.
Yeah.
Neutral's not so bad, but it's not as good as positive.
So if you're really successful, if it's one thing to chase the dragon away, it's another thing to get the goal.
If you're really successful, you get the goal.
But chasing the dragon away is not so bad.
That's usually what we do.
So, when you're reading in with the question that his patients will dream that Jung was a god, and then therapy will, and the patient dreamed that Jung was dead.
Right.
So that would be the patient taking on Jung as the cave.
That was Jung's interpretation of transference.
He thought, in fact, that therapy was a ritual.
And the first, he thought that what therapy did was basically initiate a sequence of activities that were biologically predicated.
And that our capacity to hero worship was one of the things that led our adaptation.
So when you think about this, you know that children will hero worship.
They'll imitate.
They'll imitate their parents.
Or they'll pick a child who's slightly older and act them out.
Literally, follow them around and duplicate their actions.
Their capacity for awe drives their ability to move behavioral information from one place to another.
Jung just thought he reactivated that in therapy.
So that the person would regard the therapist as, well, for all intents and purposes, God.
That was alright, in a sense, because it provided some emotional dynamism to keep the therapy going forward in the face of a tremendous amount of threat.
You need something that you didn't already have to overcome the threats that you couldn't cope with before.
And then you presume that, well, once he died in the dream, that meant that the thing that the therapist thought he was had been reabsorbed, so to speak, into the person.
So the person knew that what they had put out there was actually an attribute of themselves.
Not them personally, but of humanity in general.
But insofar as the therapist provides a story, then the therapist would be the symbol of the story, and therefore the king.
And the hero process would result in the death of the king as being the crutch story, followed by the possibility of taking on the role of the king.
The crutch story, you mean, to get you through?
The story there just provides.
Yes.
So we usually line up everything.
Yeah, that's right.
So the dreams is a representation of the story of the consulting room being the belly of the whale.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
Speaking of which, I want to show you some images.
It's better to show this in images.
You guys can read the manuscript.
I'll answer your questions too.
I want to show you this one in particular, just so you can keep it in mind.
This is an image of the positive feminine, by the way.
Green Tara from Tibet.
This is a Mandela.
I'll take my word for it.
Seen from the side instead of from the top.
Usually, you know what a Mandela is?
It's a square that has a circle inscribed.
It's divided into four parts.
You see them in wallpaper and on rugs and all over the place.
Anyways, this is one that, if you look at this from the top, it would be a Mandela.
You can see the square here and the circle there.
Anyways, that's Tara.
She's a positive image of the feminine.
She's in this thing of fire again here.
I think actually that's trees.
It doesn't really matter.
Now look, the thing that's interesting about that is that There's a whole creation myth in this little statue.
That's a turtle.
That's the turtle on which the earth rests.
Out of that comes these two dragons.
You should know a little bit about, you should be able to see a little bit about how that relates to creation mythology.
But anyway, she pops out at the end.
She's an image of higher consciousness as well.
Anyways, the thing I want you to keep in mind is these two serpent-like things that have come here.
I want to show you some Disney animation right now.
And this is partly to answer, or to address your question in part.
I mean, you said, you know, I don't have a clue, but I'll show you some of them.
This is a really funny one.
This is from the rescuers.
This horrible female gets this little girl out of an orphanage, and she wants to lower her down a well, and in the well there's a diamond in a skull, which is an alchemical image, by the way.
She lives in a swamp.
In her own boat.
The swamp is a favorite place for creatures of the night in fairy tales of myths.
And that's because the swamp is a place where death is transformed into life.
The swamp is eerie because things are dying and rot in there all the time, but it's also a place where there's a lot of action.
So, anyways, she's in a swamp.
I'm going to show you a very short clip from this.
This is more comical than anything else, but I don't need any help, anybody!
Okay, all these little animals are going to the rescue.
Will you shut the door, because there's no problem.
Okay, this is where the horrible witch lives.
Well, sure, swindler!
Swindler!
Shut up, swindler!
And don't move!
If either of you try to follow me, you'll get blasted!
You give me my teddy bear.
You promised.
Teddy goes with me, my dear.
I've become quite attached to him.
My diamond!
Find Diamond Yeah, those are her consorts, those two alligators
*Loud music* Wow!
Now!
No!
Come on!
Look out!
Oh, please, Dad.
Pass the spot!
Not the horn, the spark lever.
I think I'll hold this.
Is that too irky on the steering wheel?
And you're in final fireworks!
Fire!
Would you die at your head?
We're not getting any gas!
Fill her up, Luke!
Hurry!
Oh my God!
Now this little girl's an orphan who wants to have a real life.
She ends up in an encounter with this creature.
Anyways.
Okay.
So she plays the role of the hero, so to speak, which basically means when a human being is in its infancy, his or her infancy, They're obviously very, very vulnerable to all sorts of external forces.
So that's basically all that's making reference to.
You see this pop up in all sorts of weird ways.
Superman, the comic, by the way, that became very, very popular during the Depression.
And Superman's birth was endangered.
His planet was going to blow up.
And he crashed Earth and had two sets of parents as well.
He has the Kents, who are his normal parents, and Jor-El and Kal-El, who are his celestial parents.
And he's a...
well, he's a hero, obviously.
What's that?
Orphan Annie?
I don't know the story of Orphan Annie very well.
I think she's an orphan, but then she has a daddy who wore back.
Oh yes, that's right.
That's very typical.
That's very typical.
And that's making reference to the divine parents, by the way, and the divine parents from the mythological perspective.
Our culture, that's the masculine domain, and nature, that's the feminine domain, or you could say, the predictable and the unknown.
Those are the two things that give birth to the hero, and the hero is the symbol of, well, is one of the symbols of the individual human being.
The fight over the teddy bear seemed like, with the diamond inside, seemed like the sun lover.
You know, with, that Newman talks of that in here.
Is that, am I just getting too far gone?
No, no, no.
I didn't pay much attention to the jewel.
The jewel plays a big role in here.
Because the jewel is in the little teddy bear.
It's hers.
It's a fight over that.
Yeah, well, it's funny because, you see, the girl wins...
Let me see if I can remember the story properly.
Like I said, the girl has to go into a dark well to get this diamond, and it's inside the skull.
So she has to overcome her fears to get it.
And she's getting it for this horrible woman.
Now the woman has the diamond confused with what it represents, and that's why she's after it.
So this is a parable about materialism, by the way.
That's when you get the diamond confused with what it represents.
The little girl actually wins the diamond, so to speak, because she overcomes the great mother.
And at the end, of course, the story ends happily because she's a hero.
She does end up with a family.
She's turned into a real person.
That's basically the moral of the story.
And on that note, let me show you this one.
Okay, this is Pinocchio.
And Pinocchio is a hero myth.
I mean, it has all the elements of the hero myth.
Pinocchio is not real at the beginning of the story.
It's made out of wood.
When Blue Fairy comes down and says, if you're good, if you're good, you can become a real boy.
And so then he goes on a series of adventures.
And the adventures culminate in this scene.
And he's accompanied by this cricket named Jiminy.
Jiminy Cricket, who's a...
That's his conscience.
He plays the same role.
You know those little cartoon scenes you see where there's an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other?
Well, Jiminy Cricket is the angelic aspect of the conscience.
And I've always...
I don't know.
Like, I don't know this.
This is just something that popped into my imagination.
But his initials are JC. And I don't think that's a fluke.
Okay, so, uh, he's following with bad company, okay, on his adventures.
He's out in the world.
He sure is.
He's just checking out the world.
You smell like his grandmother.
Come on, take a big brag.
Okay, well you get the picture there.
That story is almost identical to the story of Horus and Asiris.
And why that's the case I don't exactly know of, because I don't know the history of this particular story.
I want to show you just a couple of overheads here.
This is the first piece.
It kind of reminds me of the Fisher King.
Right.
Something that's great and great.
Right.
Right.
Just one other comment.
This is the edited version, the 1980s version, and the original Disney version.
When they were inside the belly of the beast, they decided they were going to eat the fish, the little fish, Cleo, to stay alive.
And that was edited out.
That might have some sacrificial...
Oh, I don't know.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
Okay, that's an interesting image that's obviously relevant.
That's Souls in the Jaws of Hell.
That's a detail of a wooden choir stall in France.
So that's kind of an interesting, relevant image.
Let me show you some of these.
There's a baptismal image from the 6th century.
Cauldron of transformation.
By the way, The blue angel there at the end, she's a symbol of the positive aspect of the feminine, the positive aspect of novelty, basically, that was released as a consequence of his voluntary encounter with the thing that represents the dragon.
Remember, Marduk carves the world out of Tiamat.
Tiamat's this dragon that lives at the bottom of the ocean.
The same thing happens in the Hebrew Bible, too.
Although it's buried, it refers to a much more arcane tradition.
It makes the world as a consequence of a battle with a monster that's variously known as Rahab or Leviathan.
Oh, I have the sections written down but my computer crashed today and I couldn't bring them in.
So I can get you the references if you want.
There's about four references in various places.
In the Old Testament.
Well, there's some mostly in the Old Testament.
It's also the case, this is interesting too, is when Jehovah threatens to lay various territories waste, which he does with a certain amount of regularity, he always describes the territory that will remain after everything's devastated as fit habitation for serpents.
So, again, that's the story of the reduction of the ordered place to chaos.
And chaos is the place that's fit habitation for serpents.
And anything that lives there is assimilated to a serpent.
So, I'll get you the quotes.
I collected them all the last two weeks ago.
Actually, I have the King James Bible on CD-ROM, which is really useful, because you just put in whatever your word is, and it gives you every single reference to it, the whole text.
So, but there's...
Well, Iliadi collected a whole sequence of references of that sort from various cultures, and I'll bring them in and show you.
This is an interesting one.
revivication of the sacrificed ram.
Again, that's baptism imagery.
That was what Pinocchio just underwent.
In fact, you could say, well, the baptism rituals we have now, which are pretty trivial, the Christian ones anyways, are pretty trivial, but in some sects in the southern U.S. in particular, dip people completely into a river, signifying their second birth.
Generally, you're just sprinkled with water.
But what that is, is a very, it's a remnant of a ritual that was much more Much more dramatic of the sort that this figure went through in the Disney cartoon.
My two-year-old son watched that, by the way.
He was quite impressed with that whale.
He talked about that whale for a good long time.
He saw that about a month and a half ago, and he still talks about that whale all the time.
Lives at the bottom of the ocean.
It was pretty impressive.
I can remember, too, from my early childhood, the image Of the inside of the whale.
It's almost like a cathedral.
That stuck with me.
I can remember that when I watched this movie again.
So that's the second rebirth that's voluntary.
That's the reason that Pinocchio was turned into a boy when he was well on his way to becoming a jackass was because he decided voluntarily, first of all, to jump into the ocean.
And the ocean, that's another symbol of the chaos that sort of precedes creation.
It's a great symbol.
I mean, that is where life came from, after all.
Here's one from Peru.
The dragon fight.
The heroes there.
There's the dragons.
It's got fish-like features here as well.
fish and human-like creatures.
Professor?
In the rescue rangers, why were there two alligators and also the the I think the reference to two is a reference, I think it's a reference to the world parents.
The serpent separates into two things, order and chaos.
I don't exactly, that's about the best I can do for that.
The negative mother often appears Associated with a serpentine form.
And that's because, as I said, as far as I can tell, I've been trying to puzzle this out for a long time.
It's because it's not that easy to distinguish the chaos that exists in opposition from order to the chaos that precedes order, the division of order and chaos.
So they get mixed together.
Okay.
Oh yeah, that's a great picture.
Hercules.
On the night sea journey.
So he's assimilated to the sun because it's the sun that goes through the night sea journey.
As Sisyphus, by the way, the myth of Sisyphus is often assimilated to the sun.
And you remember the diagram I showed you of things descending into chaos and then being reborn?
Well, that's a solar imagery as well.
Anyways, this is a great image to see.
Okay, so he's out there in the night in this cauldron.
He's wearing the skin of a lion.
A lion's a solar beast for obvious reasons.
It's yellow.
It's in Africa.
Or it's sunny.
It's sort of got stereotypical masculine characteristics even though It turns out that it's female lions.
They actually do most of the hunting in reality.
He's carrying a club, right?
That's his weapon.
His eyes are very wide open.
He's conscious, fully conscious.
He knows what he's doing.
See the club.
These things on the club.
Those are eyes.
So there's more symbolism of consciousness there.
So he's out to defeat the monster that inhabits unexplored territory.
Territory before it's been transformed into The place where real human beings can live.
Okay, let me show you some others.
So we looked at the rescuers, right?
Yes.
Pinocchio jumps off the, into the, into the, into the ocean, but then he, it's voluntarily, but then he runs from what he sees the most.
He runs from on the strollers.
Yeah, well, you know, he gets kind of scared, so by that time it's more or less inevitable.
So, yeah, he tries to get away.
So it's funny, so I don't know what to make of that exactly, except that by that time it's too late to turn back.
It's funny, too, because His conscience is more or less warning him against, as Jim D. Kirk is warning him against doing it, but it helps him tie the rock onto his tail, which I thought was a real cute touch.
Well, maybe we have time.
I'll do this one.
Some of you have seen the Sleeping Beauty clip.
I used it in my first belly class, so we'll be the Little Mermaid instead.
So you can see the assimilation of the phantom here.
Okay, now, Ariel wants to become a real human being.
Same sort of idea.
She's also accompanied by two serpents.
They're not hers, they're Ursulis.
Eels.
Now look at the structure she goes into.
This is very interesting.
It's a portal.
Portal imagery defines the border between chaos and order.
That's another reason why the feminine is often used to symbolize chaos.
Because the female is the border between the place that creation takes place and the real world.
That's the most fundamental reason.
And heroes often climb into the body, into the belly of feminine beasts.
Okay, so those are souls that the negative mother has got.
Come in, come in, my child.
We mustn't work in your place.
It's a new one.
One might question your upbringing. - I mean, Would those be any social personalities?
The souls?
The same thing happened to them as happened to the boys that were turned into donkeys in the previous.
No kidding.
They've made errors in choices.
The solution to your problem is simple.
The only way to get what you want is to come.
I'm just going to start just for a minute.
One of my students last year asked me some questions about these negative feminine images and why they were often sexual Especially in Disney movies, that occurs.
They're very concerned with beauty, for example.
Now, she's kind of grotesque, but the figure of Snow White's mother and the witch and Sleeping Beauty.
They're usually older, childless women, and I read that as a symbol of the sacrifice of the child to the maintenance of youthful beauty.
That's what childlessness represents in these In these stories.
So, for example, Snow White's mother is very concerned that she's the most beautiful.
She's the stepmother.
She's never had children.
And the way the myth reads that, basically, as far as I can tell, is that that's equivalent to the devouring of children, the sacrifice of children, to beauty.
And that's what makes these figures sort of both beautiful and horrifying at the same time.
They're attempting to hold on to a domain that's I guess not rightly theirs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's clearly assimilated to the serpent now.
That becomes even more clear later.
So she's offering Ariel a bargain.
Can you do that?
My dear sweet child, that's what I do.
It's what I live for.
To help unfortunate merfolk like yourself.
Poor souls with no one else to turn to.
I admit that in the past I've been a nasty, They weren't kidding when they called me, well, a witch.
But you'll find that nowadays I've mended all my ways.
Repentance in the fight and made a switch.
Oh, yes.
And I fortunately know a little magic.
It's a talent that I always have possessed.
And to you later, please don't laugh.
I use it on behalf of the miserable, lonely, and depressed.
Pathetic.
Poor unfortunate souls, in pain, in need.
This one longing to be thinner, that one wants to get the girl, and do I help them?
Yes indeed.
Those poor unfortunate souls, so sad, so true.
They come bopping to my cove and drying spills, Ursula, please, and I help them.
Yes, I do.
Now it's happened once or twice.
Someone couldn't pay the price, and I'm afraid I have to rake and roast the coves.
Yes, I've had the old complaint, but on the whole, I've been a saint to those poor unfortunate souls.
Now, here's the deal.
I will make you a potion that will turn you into a human for three days.
Got that?
Three days.
Now, listen.
This is important.
Before the sun sets on the third day, you've got to get dear old Princey to fall in love with him.
That is, he's got to kiss you.
Not just any kiss.
The kiss of true love.
If he does kiss you before the sun sets on the third day, You'll remain human permanently.
But if he doesn't, you'll turn back into a mermaid.
You belong to me.
Have we got a deal?
If I become human, I'll never be with my father or sisters again.
That's right.
But you'll have your man.
Life's full of tough choices in it.
Oh, and there is one more thing.
We haven't discussed the subject of payment.
You can't get something for nothing, you know.
But I don't have, you know.
I'm not asking much.
Just a token, really a trifle.
You'll never even miss it.
What I want from you is your voice.
My voice?
You got it, sweetcakes.
No more talking.
Singing zero.
But without my voice, how can I... You have your looks!
You pretty face!
And don't underestimate the importance of the body language.
Ha!
The men up there don't like a lot of flabber.
They think a girl who gossips is a bird.
Yes, on land it's much preferred for ladies not to stay a word, and after all, dear, what is idle, idle, poor?
Come on, then, knuckles and impress the conversation.
Two gentlemen avoid it when they can.
But they don't intend for.
I'm a lady who's withdrawn.
It's she who holds her tongue, who gets her back.
Come on, you poor unfortunate soul!
Go ahead!
Make your choice!
I'm a very busy woman, and I haven't had all day.
It won't cost much.
Just your voice, your poor unfortunate soul.
It's sad, but true.
If you want to cross a bridge like me, you've got to pay the toll.
Take a cup and take a breath and go ahead and sign the scroll.
Drop some jets and now I've got her, boys.
The boss is on a call.
This poor, unfortunate soul And I want to show you the end of this.
There's one other section that's relevant.
So she's...
The funny thing about this movie is that, you know, she's a pretty horrible character, but it is because of her in the final analysis that Ariel does get what she wants.
What is Ariel seeking?
What does Ariel speak?
She wants to marry a prince.
She wants to be human.
What does that mean?
She's not really real.
She's a subterranean creature.
She's not subterranean, but whatever the equivalent is for being in the ocean.
She's not real.
So she wants to be transformed into actuality.
I guess just like Pinocchio.
Why does it seem like she has to sacrifice something to get what she wants?
Well, because you have to sacrifice something to get what you want.
That's a sacrificial motif in part.
I mean, that's the thing she values most, right?
Is her voice.
That's how it goes in this particular scene.
One of the original versions of a fairy tale spends the rest of her life walking, but the price for her walking on land and having legs is that That's Kristen Anderson until she died.
Did she get her voice back in the end?
Yeah.
Her voice is also her identity.
It's hard for me to tell exactly where to start this because this machine doesn't have any readout of the plays.
You have to start out as a person because it has a consequence of getting some of the pieces in society and getting some of the social and how to adapt.
Let's try.
Yeah, this is just, this is basically...
Okay, now.
Alright, good.
The prince here is about to marry the wrong woman.
He's entranced by her.
Because she has Ariel's voice.
I want you to just watch what happens too long.
There's the sun now.
That's the sunset, remember?
That's her domain, right?
She's the creature that eats the sun.
She's the creature that eats the sun.
She's the creature that eats the sun.
She's the creature that eats the sun.
You can talk.
Eric, get away from her!
It was you all the time.
Oh, Eric, I wanted to tell you.
Eric, no!
Oh, you're too late.
You're too late.
How long, lion boy?
Ariel!
Poor little princess, it's not you I'm after.
I've a much bigger history.
Why did you so drive to him?
How are you?
Let her go.
Not a chance, Triton.
She's mine now.
We made a deal.
Daddy, I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to.
I didn't know.
You see?
The contract's legal, binding, and completely unbreakable, even for you.
Of course.
I always was a girl with an eye for a bargain.
The daughter of the Great Sea King is a very precious commodity.
I might be going to make an exchange for someone from this air.
Hey, what are you doing?
Where am I lost for once?
I'm not going to lose her again.
Now, we have to eat.
Ha!
It's done then!
Ha ha!
Oh, stop!
Your back is deep.
Daddy?
At last.
It's mine!
I don't know.
You...
You monster!
Pull at me, you little cat!
Contractor, no upgrade!
I dare him!
I dare him!
Look out!
After him!
Come on!
Say goodbye to your sweetheart.
*Mario Screams* Eric, you've got to get away from here!
No, I won't leave you.
You miserable, insignificant insignificant fool.
It's the glory of the glory of all the oceans!
The waves are made by the prince's wings!
and all its poils now to my power now to
my power now
to my power
now to my power
Now, the king is released again here.
This is typical.
When the herald goes into the Valley of the Beast, he frees those people who are there.
And basically what that means is that he's established a new pattern of behavior or adaptation or a new frame of reference that enables people of being defeated by the unknown By threatening an unknown to start their life again.
Because you have to remember that the nature of the unknown, which is to say the nature of your experience, is absolutely dependent on how you act.
Okay, well, I'll leave it at that, I guess, since it's three, just about three o'clock.
I wanted to show you all those things so that when you go through the next couple of chapters, you're sort of building up a storehouse of images, because the only way you can understand this stuff is to get the images down, basically.
So you're also reading The Great Mother, right, at the moment now.
You see, Jung, this is a Jungian book, fundamentally.
Eric Newman was one of the Jung students.
Both Jung and Norman believe that the Great Mother was a representation of the collective unconscious.
I think they're wrong in a sense.
The Great Mother is a representation of novelty.
It just so happens that the phenomena that Jung subsumed under the rubric of the collective unconscious are the, you could say, are the first is the first line of defense that people erect against the unknown, which is basically to say that if something unexpected happens, you start imagining what it might be.
So the imagination, what we would normally refer to as the imagination, its constituent elements, that's what Jung identified as the collective unconscious.
So all I'm saying basically is that if something unexpected happens to you, it always occurs in some form of representation And it's that form of representation that Jung identified as the collective unconscious.
So he would say novelty as such would adopt the aspect of, well, of Kelly, for example.
Anyways, I think the book makes more sense and the theory makes more sense in general if you understand that.
The Great Mother's the archetype of of novelty, of unknown territory.
Behind her sits the dragon.
I was looking at the book the other day and I saw the Euriburus Describe as a representation of consciousness.
Do you think that is because consciousness comes out of the thing that...
Well, the thing is, the Erboros is the source of the subject and of the objects, but it's not a symbol for consciousness, per se.
It's a symbol for the origins of consciousness, the place that it comes from.
I was just looking through this book, it was called The Self-Aware Universe.
Well, people take liberties with these symbols.
That's the problem.
They do tend to meld across categories because they have fuzzy borders.
They do tend to blend into one another.
But not knowing anything else about the book, I would say that the statement that the Euriburus is the symbol for consciousness is wrong.
It's, it's, so I don't know.
What's?
It seems as if the father representing consciousness, like at least in Pinocchio, The father represents...
There's two domains of masculine symbolism in mythology.
One's the hero, and one's the father.
The father gives rise to the hero, which is to say that you're a product of your culture.
But the hero also gives rise to the father, which is to say that culture is a product of the activity of the individual.
In Pinocchio, I would still say that Japano was a symbol, symbolized more what we would consider the domain of the state or culture.
And Pinocchio was the force that revivified him.
Right, but Jiminy Cricket refers to Pinocchio as son.
Yeah.
Yeah, and he says, so it's kind of like father consciousness.
You know, like, he's referring to him as son.
no he was so he he's not know I see No, he's not saving his consciousness.
See, Geppetto in The Ocean tells him to save himself.
So, but Pinocchio takes the more difficult route, which is the simultaneous, I would say, from a mythological perspective, it's the simultaneous regeneration of culture.
So, one of the things that Jung pointed out was that Any personal problem that's taken far enough becomes a cultural problem.
And then if you do a thorough job of solving your personal problem, because many people share that problem with you, I mean it's very rare that you'll have a problem that's so unique to you that doesn't also affect a whole sequence of people Who live at the same time as you do.
If you really solve that problem, simultaneously update your culture.
And that's what that story was referring to.
That was a sufficiently heroic endeavor so that Pinocchio got awarded by becoming real.
He didn't just do the thing that was best for himself in the narrow sense.
He also did the thing that revivified Because he was made out of wood by Geppetto.
He was a master craftsman.
So, Geppetto stands for accumulated wisdom, basically, that can become stultifying, It's nonetheless necessary to sort of drag along, so to speak.
So Geppetto is the positive aspect of the known.
Yeah, in that particular, that's right.
He's a positive aspect of the known.
I can't remember his name, but the one who ran the Pleasure Island where the boys attended.
Right.
He's the negative aspect.
That's right, that's right.
See, the boys who misbehaved, who didn't follow their conscience, who were abandoned by their conscience, no longer spoke to them.
They were transformed into jack houses and became slaves.
That's right.
He was the negative aspect of culture.
So the hero is transformed by reunifying the father.
I mean, they're both transformed.
Right.
That's right.
It's a mutual transformation.
Exactly.
It's a process of mutual transformation.
You see in the Osiris-Horus myth, which is the myth that the Egyptian pharaonic state was predicated on, is the pharaoh is both Osiris and Horus simultaneously, and that's because The dead pharaoh, the pharaoh who just died, is instantly assimilated to Osiris.
But the live pharaoh, that's Horus, he's both Horus and Osiris simultaneously.
And I think, well, that's confusing.
If the dead pharaoh is Osiris, how can the live pharaoh be Osiris and Horus?
But Osiris is the wisdom of the past.
And Horus is the process that faces the unknown and constantly updates the wisdom of the past.
And both of those together make the pharaoh.
And that's right.
I mean, the Egyptians had it right.
The state is an active process.
Plus the accumulation of knowledge.
And the process is adaptation in the face of the unknown.
Adaptation to the unknown.
And that was, well, symbolized by these monsters that keep...
Necessary monsters that keep popping up on these stories that we looked at today.
Who is the nicest Egyptian myth?
You mean who?
What?
Does she...
Yeah, I can't remember who she is.
No, I just don't remember what figure she is.
Oh, well, she's the one who reassembles Osiris once he's cut apart I think, if I remember correctly, Seth Katsumabana.
There was conflict with Seth Katsumabana.
I'll have to look that up again.
But Isis gathers up his pieces.
So she's an image of the positive feminine.
I don't remember her developmental history.
I don't remember who she's assimilated to.
She's an aspect of the positive feminine.
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