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Jan. 13, 2014 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:19:59

2014 Personality Lecture 02: Mythological Representations

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	Today, we're going to talk a little bit about, I guess you could call them, the underlying structures of perception.
	I picked this image.
	It's a very old image.
	It's an image that portrays a man being cast up on the beach by a whale.
	It's Jonah.
	Biblical figure.
	And in this, in the story of Jonah, Jonah was out on a rough ocean storm, and he had been commanded by God to do something which he was ignoring, and the storm was sufficiently rough so that he got cast overboard.
	He was eaten by this giant, this is a whale as far as the medieval people were concerned.
	It's obviously not what we would think of as a whale, but they didn't know much about whales.
	Anyways, he was swallowed up by a whale and then Cast back up on shore a number of days later.
	It's a death and rebirth story.
	And the reason I use it as an image is because it represents something of psychological import that you're all familiar with, but that you might not know that you're familiar with.
	Symbols are often like that.
	A symbol often stands for something that you know, but that you don't know that you know.
	There's lots of things that you know that you don't know that you know.
	Almost everything is like that, in fact.
	And it's rather obvious, if you think about it, because if you were transparent to yourself, and you knew everything you knew, you wouldn't have to study anything about psychology, because you'd understand yourself completely.
	And we understand ourselves poorly.
	And so, we have to study ourselves as individuals, and then, you know, as phenomena in the world, as other people, and as mammals, and as animals, and as living things, As political actors and so on, just to get some minor notion of what's actually going on.
	And what that means in part is that you're more complicated than you can understand.
	And when you hear, say, psychoanalytic thinkers talking about ideas like the unconscious, the unconscious is actually a representation in some ways of the fact that there's far more to you than you know about.
	And what that means also is that there are different kinds of unconscious, and we certainly know that to be the case.
	There are different kinds of memory, for example.
	A lot of your procedural knowledge is unconscious, and so your procedural knowledge is what allows you to do things like ride a bike, or walk for that matter, because you don't really know how you walk.
	It's actually a controlled fall, so you lean forward and then you use your legs to stop you from falling on the ground.
	It's encoded in your architecture rather than something that's apprehensible to your conscious understanding.
	Now, there are lots of There are lots of phenomena that are procedural and unconscious, and then there are sort of borderline phenomena that you have some idea about that you can represent, but you still don't completely understand.
	So, those sorts of representations tend to be more imagistic, and those are the sorts of things maybe that pop up in your fantasies and your dreams, and those are also the sorts of unconscious Sources of knowledge that allow you to understand, say, complex works of literature or art that draw their meaning from multiple sources simultaneously and attempt to inform you at a deep level about how things are connected and how they're different.
	Now this particular image is a journey to the underworld image, and that's a very, very old idea, a journey to the underworld.
	It's one of the oldest mythological ideas, or one of the oldest archetypal ideas.
	And the underworld is a difficult phenomenon to grasp, although you can certainly encounter the concept, particularly in movies.
	So, for most of you, how many of you have seen all the Harry Potter movies?
	Right, so, right, of course.
	And so in the second movie, I believe it's the second movie where Potter encounters a basilisk underneath Hogwarts, is that right?
	The second one?
	Yeah, well, that story is a journey to the underworld story, and the architectural set-up of the movie By architectural setup I mean the relationship of Hogwarts, the castle, to the underground structures is a symbolic representation of the representation of consciousness embedded in culture, and so that would be Potter and his friends embedded in the realm of magical knowledge, so to speak, that's outside of them, and that's represented by the castle.
	It's a representation of knowledge cast in stone, so that's a form of memory, to cast something in stone.
	And so, Potter and his friends are being enculturated in this enclosed environment, in this safe enclosed environment.
	It's like a university.
	It's like the university more on the other side of the campus than on this side, for various reasons.
	Now, underneath the—well, in the background, of course, in the Potter series, there's a battle between good and evil going on, and that's also an extremely old archetypal idea.
	I mean, that's an idea that's probably as old as human beings, and that's partly because Human beings are very strange creatures, and they're capable of very, what would you call, profound acts of deception.
	And one of the things that separates human beings from most other animals is our capacity to use deception, and it's associated with our imaginativeness, right?
	Because we can imagine a variety of alternative potential realities and move towards them, that opens the door for us to deceive ourselves and others, because we can replace our accurate vision of the world in so far as it's accurate With whatever vision and representation we wish to choose.
	One of the things you find in childhood development, for example, is that the smarter the child, the earlier they learn to lie.
	And it's an offshoot of the ability to use fantasy.
	The idea of good versus evil comes out of that, to some degree, because if you're dealing with people, you're always dealing with phenomena that can trick you in some way.
	They can represent reality as other than it is, and that's a tremendous problem for human beings, because it makes other people extremely difficult to figure out.
	Now, if you're honest and straightforward, then you're easy to figure out, because you don't have to be figured out.
	I can just take you at your word, which means You'll tell me something, and it'll be relatively straightforward, I'll be able to understand it, and then you'll go do it, no problem.
	I don't have to know anything about you.
	On the other hand, if you don't do things according to what you say you'll do, then you're a bottomless pit of incomprehensibility, and God only knows what you're going to be up to.
	And so, that's an archetypal problem for human beings, and that's The problem of having to deal with the latent deceptive capacity of other people, and of course of ourselves.
	So that's all going on in the background of the Potter series.
	But underneath the castle, for example, there's—remember what's under the castle in the second film?
	What is it?
	It's a basilisk, right?
	Yeah, and what happens when you look at a basilisk?
	Right, and so what might that mean?
	If you're thinking about it intelligently, say, what phenomena might that What happens to prey animals when they encounter a predator?
	They freeze, exactly.
	So it's a representation of the fact that there are certain classes of phenomena that will freeze you on sight.
	And you freeze because there are parts of your brain that respond to phenomena in the external world as if you are prey.
	And the reason for that is, well, first you are, and second From an evolutionary perspective, your ancestry, going back say tens of millions of years, is an ancestry that was composed of predecessors that were continually preyed upon, and we have entire systems in our brain that react to The class of potentially predatory events.
	Now, for human beings, that system has differentiated cognitively so that many of the things that we would experience as predatory threats in the modern world don't come in the shape of, say, crocodiles and bears and, you know, giant cats and so forth, the sorts of things that would necessarily prey on you in the night, but they're analogous in that The outcome is the same.
	You can be preyed upon by many things.
	You can be preyed upon by, you know, a corrupt corporation, and so it's perfectly reasonable to symbolize the actions of a corrupt corporation as a form of predation, and also to categorize that even more deeply as a reflection of the underlying consequences of the fact that people can deceive each other.
	Those sorts of representations get deep very, very rapidly, but they're active and living representations in that they still represent something that's profoundly true, which is not so much what things are in and of themselves.
	Which is what science does, but what things are in relationship to you, which is more like what things mean.
	And things generally have a motivational or emotional meaning, and that meaning is generally quite tightly tied to the necessity that you have to survive and to thrive and to, you know, to find someone to be with and to reproduce and all the Darwinian things that you're supposed to be up to.
	So a lot of these more archaic categories are They're meaningful categories.
	They're categories of meaning.
	That's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it.
	Now, in the Potter situation, which is related to this image, the one that's up here, the idea is that everything that's stable rests on something that's unstable and dangerous, and that's underneath in the Potter series.
	And then the other thing that happens continually in the series, but particularly in the second episode, Particularly in the second episode is that Potter has to go down beneath things To encounter something that's terrifying and deadly, that's actually preying on his friends and on the community.
	So it's very much like, for example, the hobbit having to go off and steal treasure from smog, I think the dragon's name is, except that in the Potter sequence, the dragon, which is the basilisk, their equivalent, is the same thing as this.
	In the Hobbit, the dragon hoards gold, whereas in the Potter representation, what does the basilisk guard?
	What is it captured?
	It's the little red-headed girl.
	Right, Ginny.
	Ginny.
	Right, and that's a very old story.
	Now, Potter's kind of in love with her, right?
	I mean, they're young and sort of platonic, but you can see the relationship sort of burgeoning.
	Now, he has to confront this thing that's terrifying that exists underneath everything in order to free this virginal figure from the clutches of something terrible and reptilian.
	It's a very, very interesting story, that.
	It means a whole variety of things.
	What it means to some degree is that a male human being can't really become mature until he confronts the terrible things that lie underneath the civilized veneer of society.
	That's one thing it means.
	Another thing it means is that it's the capacity It's the capacity of the male in that situation to do that that makes him attractive enough to wake up the females that he might be associated with, so that's like a Sleeping Beauty motif.
	It has evolutionary echoes, because much of what we've battled with for the last sixty million years, say, because I think you could trace the development of our cognitive structures quite straightforwardly back sixty million years, there's been an endless battle between human beings and predators, and many of those predators were reptilian.
	And so, you know, we're the result of a very, very long battle between mammals and reptiles.
	And in our case, particularly, it appears that part of the reason we evolved our tool-using capacity and our great capacity for vision was because our ancestors were continually preyed upon by predatory snakes when they lived in trees.
	And that's a long time ago.
	And so these symbolic representations are unbelievably archaic.
	They're kind of as archaic as the underlying biological systems in your brain that provide you with motivation and emotion, and those are extremely old.
	You share those with… well, you share those with any animal that you have any hope whatsoever of understanding at all.
	And that even means lizards.
	You know, my daughter had these lizards that were called I can't remember, unfortunately.
	They're a desert kind of lizard, and they make a good initial pet.
	But they're very funny little creatures, because they, you know, they're very lizard-like, being that they're lizards, and they have points all over them.
	And if you put them in water, they puff themselves up, which is quite fun, and then they zoom around in the water.
	More importantly, they like to stack on top of each other.
	They're very, very social and they're friendly, which is not exactly something that you'd expect from a lizard.
	But my point is that even something that's as distant as that from you in the evolutionary hierarchy shares enough commonality of biological structure with you so that you can understand a fair bit of its motivation.
	So, for example, it's pretty easy to tell.
	When one of those lizards, even though they're basically friendly, gets angry, because it'll puff up and hiss, and you know, right away, you don't have to have a discussion with the rest of your family to figure out that that's an angry lizard, right?
	It maps onto your body immediately.
	And you know, the same thing applies to snakes, it even applies to insects.
	Lots of insects have developed the kind of warning behavior that will immediately signal to you that you're about to be bitten, or it's usually bitten with insects.
	So, this is all to say that there are levels of understanding that are underneath, say, your normative, mundane, day-to-day comprehension that inform everything that you do with deep levels of meaning, and a lot of the activities that you pursue that you might regard as entertaining actually draw on those representations, and you find them entertaining because they're actually deeply meaningful.
	Now, the idea that a man can be swallowed, or a human being, because there are myths like the myth of Persephone, where the protagonist is clearly female, where there's an underground journey and then a re-emergence.
	And that's the journey to the underworld, that's the journey that Harry Potter undertakes continually, by the way, throughout the Potter series.
	The underworld taking different forms as the series progress.
	Now, that's also a death and rebirth idea, and that's a very old and profound idea.
	It's actually one of the most profound ideas that human beings have.
	It's the idea that you will spend time in your life underground.
	Now, you might think, well, what does that mean?
	Well, it means what the Potter movie, the second Potter movie, was trying to represent, which is that there will be times in your life where you are faced with things that will terrify you into paralysis.
	And that will take you underneath your normal set of assumptions, because when your normal set of assumptions are functioning, you don't end up facing something that's terrifying enough to freeze you.
	When your normal set of assumptions are working, the world stays happily predictable around you.
	And most of the time that's where you are, and that's the normal world, but that's blown apart whenever something that you're attempting to do fails in a dramatic or less dramatic way.
	The more dramatic the way, the deeper you go into the underworld, and the underworld is in some sense the substructures of your presuppositions.
	Now, you know this already, because I don't suppose there's a single person in here who hasn't spent some time in the underworld, so to speak, because this is what happens when something terrible happens to you, unpredictable and terrible, and, you know, there's sort of classic categories Of events that send you to the underworld, you know.
	The death of someone you love, a serious illness of some sort, either for you or for someone you love.
	The death of a dream of some sort, you know, so you've got some goal that you think is really important and all of a sudden you find out for one reason or another that there's just no way you're going to be able to pursue it.
	Betrayal, that's a really good one.
	That's a really rough one and that'll throw you for a loop for sure.
	So, they're all elements of the part of the world that you can't control, that in some sense always remains beyond your control, that has in some sense a predatory relationship to you because it can devour you, at least metaphysically.
	And when that happens, you go somewhere, and the place that you go is very dangerous.
	It's underneath everything, and maybe you come back out.
	And if you come back out, what that means is that you've reconstructed your erroneous presupposition so that you can function once again in the world.
	But maybe you don't.
	Maybe you don't.
	So people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, they go into the underworld and they just stay there.
	You know, if you're chronically depressed, or if you can't get over your grief, or if you're in a state of continual anxiety and upset, or if you're nihilistic for that matter, you exist essentially in an underworld domain.
	Because you can't master the perceptual apparatus, the culturally informed perceptual apparatus, that would help you orient yourself in the world so that the things that you want to have happen, and that you need to have happen, actually happen.
	So that's what that picture means.
	It also means, at least in principle, that, you know, people have the capacity to die and be reborn at different levels of analysis.
	So, you know, there are minor disappointments that you encounter when you have to drop some presupposition that you have, and let it die, and then put a new one in its place, and that's painful.
	But it's nowhere near as painful as holding on to the things when they don't work, because then you just end up wandering around as sort of a clattering collection of dead Presuppositions and, you know, nothing that you ever want will happen under that circumstance because you're armed with tools that don't fit the world.
	And, you know, when you try to apply them, the world won't do what you want it to do, and then that's endlessly anxiety-provoking and frustrating.
	So, pain is part of the price that you pay in some ways for being updatable.
	You know, because the world transforms around you and as a consequence you have to be able to transform with it.
	Otherwise it runs ahead of you and you get left behind.
	You know, that happens to people to some degree anyways as they age.
	That's actually one of the evolutionary explanations for why people die.
	Because it's a mystery, right?
	There are elements of you that are immortal.
	You know, the cells that give rise to you are immortal.
	You know, the DNA that produced you is at least three and a half billion years old.
	It might be older than that.
	So structures can maintain themselves over unbelievably vast expanses of time.
	So it's not self-evident why human beings have to die, but we do, and we die at about After you're done being a grandparent is kind of when you're done.
	And the hypothesis is that at that point, in some sense, it's too costly to keep you updated and you have to be replaced by a younger version, which would of course be your grandchildren or whatever.
	You know, you've sort of exhausted your plasticity and flexibility, and then it's cheaper just to replace you than to update you.
	So, that's kind of a drag, but yeah.
	Alright, so here's a funny question for so here's a funny question for you.
	This is the question that scientists are always devoted towards answering.
	What's the world made of?
	Well, that's a complicated question.
	I mean, the simple answer is that it's made out of matter.
	And that matter is made out of atoms, and that theory was originally formulated by Democritus, but Democritus didn't exactly say that the world was made out of atoms.
	He said the world was made out of atoms and space, and that actually happens to matter, because the way that atoms are arranged in space gives rise to another property, which is information.
	And so if you have atoms in space, you also have information.
	You can think of the world as being made of information just as easily as you can think of it as being made of matter.
	Now, in fact, I think that—and, you know, I'm not alone in this hypothesis—that it's actually more useful to conceive of the ground of reality as being something like information rather than being something like matter.
	But we don't have to discuss that at length, at the moment.
	What we'll say instead is that One way of looking at the world is the materialistic perspective, and the materialistic perspective is a very powerful perspective, and it's basically been dominant for about since the time of Galileo.
	That's about when that perspective got thoroughly going, and for many reasons Bacon and Descartes as well were major players in the establishment of the materialistic framework, and it came about because In many ways, because people were suffering from their inability to understand objective reality.
	So, you know, we still suffer from that, because there are all sorts of diseases we don't know what to do with, and we age, and, you know, things don't work out exactly like they're supposed to, and so we pay a big price for our ignorance, and so we're motivated to overcome it.
	And one way we have overcome it was by developing materialistic philosophy, and that The materialistic philosophy enabled us to specify the structure of certain elements of the world, and then to learn to predict and control it, at least to some degree.
	Now, you know, you learn to predict and control something, and sometimes you generate more monsters doing that, so that's problematic, but all things considered, I think it's a lot better to live now than to live three or four hundred years ago.
	Or maybe even thirty years ago, for that matter.
	So it looks like the whole materialistic thing has been doing a lot of good for us, but It also has some serious problems, and the problems have to do with another fundamental problem that human beings have to solve, which is what you should do about what is.
	Because human beings are dynamic and active creatures, and so we're not mere machines of representation.
	We don't just care what the world is.
	We care what you should do with the world, and the reason we care for that Well, the fundamental reason, if you're thinking about it from a scientific perspective, is essentially Darwinian.
	And I think that you can imagine the conflict between the moral worldview and the materialistic worldview as a battle, in some sense, between Newton and Darwin.
	So Newton was the author, the fundamental author, of the idea that the world was made out of material and that it operated like a machine.
	You know, which was a pretty powerful perspective.
	That- perspective came about during the time of clocks, you know, when Europeans in particular were starting to build things that would function in a very predictable manner once they were set in motion.
	So Newton, in some sense, was influenced by that and assumed that the entire cosmos could be understood as a deterministic machine, and that it would be ultimately predictable and controllable.
	And in a famous statement, and I don't think this was Newton, although I can't remember.
	It might have been Descartes.
	Anyways, the idea is that if you knew the position of every subatomic or every atomic particle in existence, if you knew the position and the momentum of those particles, that you could then predict the entire outcome of the future.
	It was strictly deterministic, and the only thing that stopped you from being able to describe everything in terms of machinery was your ignorance.
	There was nothing at the bottom of the cosmos, so to speak, that was fundamentally unknowable.
	Well, that turned out to be wrong.
	It wasn't really discovered to be wrong until, you know, the first couple of decades of the 20th century, but it definitely turned out to be wrong.
	We now know that Under no conceivable conditions could we gather enough information to predict the outcome of what appears to be a relatively unpredictable cosmos.
	There are levels of resolution that remain relatively constant and that you can manipulate, but our hope for total knowledge is gone, and that was mostly a consequence of the development of quantum mechanics.
	The quantum theories have never failed an experimental test.
	They're the most powerful theories that human beings have ever designed, so in some ways they seem, well, they're probably not final, but they're pretty final.
	Now, okay, so that's sort of the materialist end of things.
	Now there's a Darwinian end of things, and the reason I'm telling you about both of these things is because part of what we need to solve in order to progress properly with this course, we need to solve the problem of exactly what constitutes truth.
	Now the first thing that I might say is that truth, in some ways, whether or not something is true, is a question that's sort of like whether or not a tool that you have does the job that it has.
	It's not so much a question about the ultimate nature of reality, because you can't get a truth that completely informs you about the ultimate nature of reality.
	So you're sort of stuck with partial truths.
	And so then you might ask, well, how do you tell a useful partial truth from a non-useful partial truth, or maybe a partial truth from a lie or from fiction?
	It's very complicated to do that, but one way you can progress towards that is to start thinking about things in terms of their tool-like Capability.
	And that's a pragmatic approach, by the way, from a philosophical perspective.
	The pragmatists, who were very influenced by Charles Darwin, by the way, came to the conclusion at the beginning of the twentieth century that truth was bounded by claims of practicality.
	So if you're trying to determine whether a statement is truth, the implicit question that goes along with that is, true in relationship to what end?
	So, and the question then is, sort of like, is your tool that you're using to represent the world or to act on it good enough to do what you're trying to do with it?
	And then, if it's good enough, then your claim is true enough.
	Now, this is tightly tied to Darwinian philosophy, and the pragmatists recognized this right away.
	The pragmatists were an American group of philosophers here.
	Who worked on the East Coast, particularly in Boston.
	And they immediately took the Darwinian hypothesis to their heart, so to speak, because the Darwinian hypothesis is also pragmatic.
	The Darwinian hypothesis says, whatever reality is, It is, and also becomes.
	So it's something, but it's something that's changing too.
	And it changes in a way that's actually not predictable.
	Technically it's not predictable.
	It's like the stock market in that way.
	There are periods of time over which you can make predictions, but if you wait long enough, no matter what you think, you're going to end up wrong.
	Especially given what knowledge is for a human being, because your knowledge is bounded, you know.
	And so the way the Darwinian process solves that is by Death, essentially.
	Things that aren't good enough to solve the problem that currently presents them, presents itself to them, either die or fail to reproduce.
	And to the degree that organisms can come up with truth claims that are sufficient, then they live long enough to reproduce, and then the next generation faces the same problem.
	And that's always the way it is, is that truth chases a reality that's fundamentally unpredictable and that's transforming constantly.
	Now, the reason I want to tell you that, it's an important thing to understand, because I'm going to make a claim here that The ways of looking at the world that are more mythological than material are also real ways of looking at the world.
	And it's not what people generally think, because you think about fiction as not real, and underneath fiction is mythology and religious claims and that sort of thing.
	That's the domain of fiction and mythology.
	And we don't think about that as real.
	But that's because we think about what's real from a Newtonian perspective and not from a Darwinian perspective.
	From a Darwinian perspective, this is also a claim that Nietzsche made.
	Nietzsche said, truth serves life.
	But what Darwin would say is, You can't define truth in any other way than that which serves life.
	That's it.
	You're not going to get past that.
	There isn't a truth past that.
	The truth, as far as a bounded living organism is concerned, and that certainly means us, is the body of knowledge, conceptual and embodied, that best enables survival in the face of continual transformation.
	And that's that.
	There's nothing under it.
	Now, as soon as you know that, then what happens is that it turns out that the things that mean things to you are also real.
	Now, science is a funny business, right?
	Because what science attempted to do, and for very useful reasons, was to strip everything subjective and subjectively meaningful off the picture of the world, right?
	So if you're a scientist, you want to be objective.
	And part of the way you do that is by trying to suppress your own subjectivity In the search for the object of truth, but also you do that by relying on other people's observations.
	So we kind of make a deal, and the deal is, if I see it and can describe it, and you see it and can describe it, and then a bunch of other people do the same thing, and we come to the same conclusion, we're going to treat that as real.
	That's useful.
	It's useful, because it's useful to specify things precisely, and to put them in the appropriate categories.
	And in a sense, that's what science does, is that it continually strives to differentiate things and put them in identifiable categories.
	And that means that increasingly we're able to use what we categorize as knowledge to help us confront the world.
	So, you know, it's a great It's a great process, a brilliant process, and it's even more remarkable because relatively stupid people could do it.
	Because it's algorithmized.
	You know, the science is a method.
	And so, once you know the method, you don't even have to be that smart to make progress.
	You can just grind away at something with the method, and sooner or later you'll produce new information.
	And that's a great thing, you know.
	Science is like a factory that produces knowledge.
	So, well, so that's wonderful.
	What's not so wonderful about it, arguably, is that it's in some sense warped our concept of what constitutes reality.
	And it's never really solved, as far as I can tell, this conflict between a Newtonian perspective on what's real and a Darwinian perspective on what's real.
	And as far as I can tell, Darwin trumps Newton.
	And that's true if you're a biologist, for sure, because there isn't anything that's more true that sits underneath biology than the theory of natural selection.
	And that's partly a philosophical claim.
	And the claim is, because you can't represent all of external reality with ultimate accuracy, you're going to fail.
	And everything that's bounded, or even everything that's not as complex as the thing that's trying to be represented, is going to fail.
	So how do you deal with that?
	You generate variations.
	And it has to be somewhat random, because you don't know what's coming.
	You generate random variations, and then hopefully one of those variations will work in relationship to whatever is coming.
	And so it's also a kind of truth claim that's an embodied truth claim, right?
	You carry the fundamental truth of your existence in the shape of your physiology.
	Earlier claims of philosophical truth were mostly disembodied.
	You know, there was some implicit idea that the consciousness or the soul was more real than the body.
	Well, it's nice to think about that in some ways, because it opens the door to the idea of things like immortality, but it doesn't seem to be very… it's hard not to associate that with a dream.
	All right, so, category systems.
	When you encounter something that frightens you, your body categorizes it, and it categorizes it as something that presents a danger or a threat to you.
	And danger is the probability that something will damage you, like it'll be too loud or too hot or too cold, it'll damage your sensory systems, or it'll directly pose a threat to your physiological or psychological integrity.
	And so you're designed, so to speak, to protect yourself against that.
	You feel pain for that reason, and instead of pain you also feel anxiety, which alerts you to the fact that you might feel pain and should do something about that.
	You should freeze or you should run away.
	And so, for example, what emerges from that is the beginnings of a natural category system.
	So you could say, well here's one useful category.
	That is, the category of all things that you should freeze at or run away from.
	And that's a deep category.
	It's a biologically predicated category.
	And it's also a category that has meaning, right?
	Because the meaning is what you should do when something like that shows up.
	The meaning isn't stripped out of the category at all.
	It's actually fundamental.
	Now, it turns out that a lot of our perceptions—when people think about the way they perceive the world, they think, well, out there are a bunch of objects.
	And you look at them, and once you look at them you see them.
	And once you see them, you figure out what they are, and then you evaluate what you should do, and you progress on that basis, right?
	So object, perception, cognition, emotion, action.
	Well, the problem with that is it's wrong.
	And the first reason it's wrong is because things don't exist out in the world as self-evidently separable entities, partly because everything can be segregated into smaller entities, and every entity can be aggregated together with larger entities.
	And so the boundary that defines something as a self-evident entity is by no means clear.
	So, part of the way that your body deals with that is by categorizing things with regards to their immediate impact for you.
	And so, when you look at something, so let's say you're looking at this, and you say, well that's a bottle.
	And so you might ask, well what is your brain doing when you're looking at that?
	And the answer is, it's molding your body to prepare to pick that thing up, and that's how it understands it.
	So, your eyes Perceive a pattern that's constant across some duration.
	It's not made of smoke.
	It's made of something that lasts.
	So there's a pattern there, a bottle-shaped pattern, that lasts across time.
	You have some sense of what it is having interacted with these sorts of things before, but also its shape obviously indicates that it's a grippable thing.
	And so what that means is that when you look at it, your eyes activate your motor cortex directly, even before you see the object, like before you form an image of it in your imagination.
	Your retina, the pattern on your retina activates your grip, right-handed or left-handed, whichever hand you happen to be.
	And part of what you're seeing when you see that bottle is what you would do with it if you were interacting with it.
	So you see the manner in which you would interact with things.
	And that's the case for virtually everything that you see.
	So, for example, when you look at a chair, your body prepares to sit in the chair, or maybe to stand on the chair if you're going to change a light bulb.
	We know when you look at your computer, you see the keyboard because that's the thing you move your fingers up and down on, and so your perception is tightly tied to the implication of objects for action immediately.
	Now, you might say, well, that's not real.
	That's not the reality of it.
	The reality of it is the objective thing, but as I said already, it depends on how you define reality.
	You take a Newtonian tack on it, or a Darwinian tack on it, and from the Darwinian perspective, the implication of something for action is actually its primary meaning.
	Which is, don't stand around and contemplate a tiger while it's trying to eat you, because the fact that it's trying to eat you is more important than the fact that it's a tiger.
	And if you don't figure that out quick, then you're not around anymore, and so much for your claims to truth.
	You're just gone.
	That's an error, right?
	And whatever was in you that enabled you to make that error is not going to be transmitted to the next generation, or at least hopefully not.
	So there's a domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things.
	Now, most of what the psychologists have dealt with, who are clinical psychologists, is actually the domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things.
	And it's actually because, as far as you're concerned in your life as a human being, you live inside a network of meanings of things, right?
	So, for example, When you look at your mother, you're not looking at her as an object and then attributing all sorts of meanings to her.
	You see the meaning of your mother right away, and that meaning is multidimensional and has a very long history, and it affects you directly on a physiological level.
	Maybe you hate her, and so the sight of your mother makes your heart race and your brain produce cortisol because she's categorized as unpredictable and chronic threat.
	That's a standard Freudian situation.
	No one would laugh if there wasn't sometimes that was true.
	Those are Freudian slips, by the way, when you discuss something like that and people laugh, then that's an admission on their part, like a deeply unconscious admission on their part, that there is truth to the statement and it's also a truth that is somewhat painful to admit.
	So you can tell that when you're listening to comedians.
	They do that all the time, right?
	They tell you something that's absolutely brutally evident That no one will admit, and everyone laughs.
	That is a Freudian slip, technically, because Freud often listened to the sorts of things that would make his patients laugh, or make an audience that he was speaking to laugh, because that would give him some insights into what they were repressing, so to speak, and what they would allow to come to light.
	And jokes are often about things that are taboo, right?
	It's hard to make a joke about something that isn't taboo.
	All right, so I've kind of made a classification structure of these two different ways of looking at things.
	There's a meaning-centered way of looking at things, and the meaning is then the implication of the thing for action on your part, and it's a more materialistic-centered thing, which is sort of like the world as it exists if you weren't here, right?
	That's the fundamental hypothesis of science, is that there's something around that would be here, and look the way it does look now if none of you were around.
	And, you know, it's possible that that's true.
	It's also possible that it's It's possible that it's true, it's possible that it's not true, but most possible is the fact that it's true in a way that we really don't understand.
	Because the existence of things, the way we perceive them, is clearly dependent on our existence as a perceiver.
	And so, what the nature of the world would be, if there was no one around at all to perceive it, if there was no such thing as consciousness, that is a completely unsolved problem.
	So maybe it would be like a field of quantum potential or something like that.
	But it isn't even possible to really understand what that means.
	So, now, having established that, having established—I'll give you another example of it before we move on.
	So I said, for example, that when you interact with objects around you, you're not really interacting with objects, it's more like you're interacting with tools.
	Because your primary concern is, well, what's the world in relationship to me?
	What do I have to avoid, you know, if I want to get to where I'm going?
	And what can I use to further my pursuits?
	And so, you're like that deeply.
	That's why human beings are tool-using creatures, right?
	We have hands.
	They manipulate the world.
	And those hands are—they're built into our cognitive architecture.
	Like, it's not like our brain is separate from our hands.
	It's very opposite to that.
	We wouldn't have the brains we have if we didn't have the hands we have.
	That's why things like octopuses, by the way, or octopi, are very intelligent.
	They are, even though they're invertebrates.
	They only live a couple of years, so they can't learn that much.
	But they're extraordinarily intelligent, and it's partly because they're tentacled, and because they're tentacled, they can grab things and manipulate them.
	And so, you know, they've developed an intelligence that's identifiable to us, because we have little tentacles on the ends of our hands, and, you know, we're using them to fiddle around with the world all the time.
	So, now, there's the perceptual Reality, which is that we know about already, that when you look at something and we track the way that you're interacting with, we know that one of the first things that happens is the relationship between the perceived object and your body is established very rapidly, okay?
	Because you want to map the object onto your body so you know what the hell to do, how to orient yourself, so that you're safe and productive at the same time.
	There's a guy named J.J. Gibson, who was a psychologist of perception who operated in the late 70s.
	People thought his theories were They weren't behavioral, that's for sure.
	They were of a different classification or category.
	And Gibson also made the first sort of claim that what you saw in the world were things like tools.
	He called them affordances.
	And so, for example, when you approach what you would call from an objective perspective a cliff, Gibson would say, you don't see a cliff.
	You see a falling off place.
	And you might infer a cliff, but you see Falling off place.
	And if you think about it, again, from a Darwinian perspective, of course you see falling off place.
	That's why, you know, you might shrink from a precipice, as your whole being perceives that as a place that would instantly make you extinct.
	It's not a secondary derivation from your analysis of a set of objective facts.
	It's a primary perception.
	And it has to be, because you better move quick if you're too near a cliff.
	You don't have any time to think.
	The same thing Occurs when maybe you're being, you know, potentially struck by a snake.
	You have circuits in your brain that will see that snake and make you jump way before you know it's a snake.
	Because sitting around, standing around waiting for the image of snake to form in your consciousness means that you've been bitten five or six times already, because you're just not fast enough to see and then move.
	You see, move, and then perceive.
	And that's what keeps you safe.
	And so a lot of what you perceive in the world are the meanings that you map onto your body.
	So then you can think what human beings have done in response to this bifurcated way of perceiving reality is we've developed two different systems of classification to deal with it.
	Now, for most of human history we only had one, and the one we had was basically the meaningful system.
	It wasn't the scientific system, right?
	We didn't get around to figuring that out.
	Even the ancient Greeks and the Romans, the Greeks in particular, who were unbelievably intelligent We really never got around to positing something like an objective reality, and certainly the Romans didn't.
	There was no science.
	Science only evolved in Europe and only in, you know, the late 1500s.
	Very strange, and it's very difficult to understand.
	So, we've been elaborating out this materialistic viewpoint for only about 500 years.
	It's not very long.
	The other viewpoint, that's the natural habitat of humanity, and that's the viewpoint that's made up of all the stories that people have told about themselves and the world since the dawn of human consciousness.
	Those are the knowledge forms, the stories, that actually constitute the base of culture.
	Because culture is not so much about what the world is and how to perceive it, As it is about how you should act in relationship to the world.
	And so when you read fiction, and when you talk to each other endlessly about what your friends are up to, and what their friends are up to, and what they're doing on Facebook, and when you go to movies and you watch actors act out roles, and, you know, when you do everything you do to examine other people around you, you're embedding yourself in this ancient culture that's there to tell you how you should Operate yourself in the world.
	What you should do, because that's a primary question.
	You need to know what to do.
	Human beings need to know what to do, because if you don't know what to do, Well, that's a very unpleasant emotional state, and that's partly because it indicates that you're not well adapted to your current circumstances.
	You know, if you just stand around long enough, not knowing what to do, you'll age and you'll die.
	It's not an effective way of dealing with the world.
	You have to be oriented towards something, and the job of culture, in part, is to tell you to what you should be oriented, and that's where the Rubber hits the road with regards to psychology, because especially in its clinical variants, personality theory has to be a sub-element of clinical theory.
	What psychology has to contend with, as I mentioned in the first lecture, is not only what you are, but what you should be.
	And the reason for that is, when you're talking about a human being, you can't separate out The bare facts that present you about the person from the ideal.
	We do this all the time.
	What's mental health?
	Well, you could say, well, it's the absence of mental illness.
	Well, you know, really, if someone tells you that, you should just stop the conversation, because all they've done is Solve one problem with an equally large problem.
	There's no progress there.
	It's kind of a smart-alecky thing to do.
	You know, it sort of means go away and don't bother me with your stupid questions.
	Mental health, if you want to understand what mental health is, it's because it's very difficult for people to define it.
	You have to watch how they act when they're talking about such things as mental health.
	Because then you can derive some sense of what they actually understand about it or presume about it instead of what they just say about it, right?
	So if you look at how societies use the idea of mental health, they partly do use it normatively.
	And if it's used normatively, then describing it as the absence of mental illness actually works.
	You can say, well, you're healthy to the degree that you're normal.
	And so extremes outside of normality start to border on pathology.
	But there's obvious limitations and problems with that approach, right?
	Because we don't think the average person is the best-looking person, and we've assumed that attractiveness is an ideal towards which we might all at least aspire.
	And it turns out there's deep biological reasons for that, because most of the things that men and women find attractive about each other are—they find attractive for deep biological reasons, like symmetry, for example, which is an indication of sort of optimal biological development.
	For men, for women looking at men, it's shoulder to waist ratio, and for men looking at women, it's waist to hip ratio, which should be about.68, which is pretty damn precise.
	And you know, men are always computing that when they're looking around.
	You can't talk about what constitutes health by merely making a normative claim.
	You also have to take into account something like deviation from an ideal.
	And that's a weird thing because, of course, the ideal doesn't really exist.
	That's what makes it ideal.
	But you can't get away from that problem if you're going to do anything serious about psychology, because implicit in the idea not only of mental health But of health itself is the question, what constitutes an ideal human being?
	And you might think, well, that's not so relevant.
	You know, why would that be relevant in a scientific pursuit?
	And I would say, well, As people, we're not only ever engaged in a scientific pursuit, right?
	We're engaged in the business of living, and we might be scientists sort of as a subset of that.
	And then I would also say that if we're dealing in the realm of health and mental health, we're not being scientists anyways.
	It's like philosophical engineers, because what we're doing is we're attempting to take our knowledge, however it's been gathered, including scientifically, and to make things better, not worse.
	And when you're trying to make things better, you're not being a scientist.
	What a scientist is trying to do is to describe what things are.
	As soon as that's transformed into, like, engineering, say, it instantly becomes a variation of applied—it's like applied philosophy.
	It's a different domain.
	And I think it's not right to just skip over that and pretend that what we're studying, say, in a personality class, is something that can only be studied scientifically, because it's not.
	Maybe you can study people's conceptions of what constitutes ideal, scientifically.
	But you're still faced with the problem that the question of what is the ideal lingers underneath all the phenomena that you're trying to understand and explain.
	So beauty, that's a good example.
	Intelligence, we tend to assume that more is better, right?
	We don't think the average is the right place to stop.
	And in fact, that's, you know, all of you people, there's not a single person in here, I suspect, who has an average IQ. You're probably minimally at the 85th percentile, and most of you are at the 95th percentile.
	So that's also—remember I told you last class that scientists are like, you know, Albino elephants, they're very rare, and you guys are like that too.
	You're not normal human beings.
	So, it's true, you know, and as you progress up the ladder of success, you'll be in increasing contact with stranger and stranger variants of humanity.
	Because the successful people who are smart and highly conscientious, say, are smart and highly creative, are a tiny minority of the human population.
	And that's unfortunate.
	Seriously unfortunate.
	But you're the beneficiaries of the lottery that determined in part the genetic structure of your intelligence.
	I've done some testing of U of T students and the average comes out at around 126 to 130.
	That's two standard deviations above the mean.
	So, and, you know, it's probably actually higher than that, because a lot of you have English as a second language, and so that tends to suppress your, you know, your performance on IQ tests if they're assessing verbal knowledge in English.
	So, all right.
	So part of what I'm going to talk to you today about is the sorts of things that Carl Jung would have called archetypes.
	And archetype is an ill-defined term.
	That's partly why it's very difficult to understand Jung.
	It's also very difficult to transform the sorts of things that he had to say into very precise scientific formulations.
	But that doesn't change the fact that it's extraordinarily useful from the perspective of general understanding, which is a useful thing to pursue, and also from the perspective of practical utility to understand something about these archetypal and also from the perspective of practical utility to understand something And the reason for that is you're in their grip.
	Now, one of the things that Jung said, this is a brilliant thing, it's terrifying.
	Psychoanalysts are terrifying people.
	Freud's bad enough, you know, because Freud dug around in this pathology of the family.
	And, like, families can be great, but if you want real pathology, a family's a good place to look.
	So, because a pathological family is so pathological that it's unbelievable, and that's actually what Freud was interested in.
	It's, again, it's hard for Normal sort of healthy people to appreciate that because if you're normal and healthy and your family's kind of, you know, not half bad, you don't have all those Freudian problems.
	But if you do have them, that's all you have.
	You never get out of it.
	You're trapped in there like a fly in a spider's web.
	In fact, the fly in a spider's web is a common symbolic representation of the classic Freudian situation.
	Okay, so I showed you this picture because I want to talk to you about a category system that will be useful in understanding what we're going to go through during this course.
	So what I would like to do with all of you is to start from the bottom of things, and that's what we're doing today when we're talking about definitions of truth.
	So I asked you to consider for a moment that there's two ways of looking at truth.
	One is your objective sort of Newtonian way, which, by the way, is outdated.
	We still hold it because it's practically useful.
	And the other is the Darwinian perspective, which is the world is meaningful in relationship to you, and those meanings are real insofar as they have a bearing on whether or not you actually survive.
	And then you make the claim that there isn't anything more real than whether or not you survive.
	You can't get under that.
	That's where you start.
	So you could say, I could say, for example, If the pursuit of the Newtonian theory of reality culminated in the extinction of human beings, say, because our technological power got so great, that would be perfect evidence for its lack of truth.
	Because there are things it just wasn't taking into account.
	Right?
	Because something that's true should take things into account.
	And one of the things it should take into account is that we're living things, that we can only exist under certain You know, within certain parameters, and that we're also oriented towards an ideal.
	And if your theory doesn't take that into account, well, maybe not only is it incomplete, it might be pathologically and genocidally incomplete.
	All right.
	This is a representation from ancient Egypt.
	I'm going to tell you a little bit about what the representations mean.
	So, this person here is Horace.
	This person here is Osiris, and that person there is Isis.
	And Osiris is the god of tradition, and that's why he's sort of standing there on that pillar.
	And so the Egyptians thought of these three—there's one other, there's Seth.
	And Seth is a bad guy.
	So Seth is the evil villain that's always whispering in the king's ear.
	You see that story repeated in all sorts of different forms.
	So Seth is It's a negative figure, and he's not included in these particular images, but we'll get to him.
	Seth is also, by the way, Osiris' brother.
	And that's because the Egyptians had figured out, and this is like 3,000 years BC, the Egyptians had already figured out that if you put a state together, so the state would be represented by Osiris, and Osiris is sort of like the abstraction of the patriarchal force that stands behind a tradition.
	So, if you imagine that a tradition is a way of behaving, because that's what a tradition is, to the degree that you share a tradition, you're all manifesting the same pattern.
	And the Egyptians would say, the pattern that you're imitating, that's a deity.
	I mean, they didn't think of it that way because they didn't think the way we think.
	But for all intents and purposes, the phenomena that they described as a god was the pattern that everyone was unconsciously imitating.
	Now, you have to unconsciously imitate the same pattern, or you can't get along.
	Right?
	So, in our society, for example, we have a body of laws.
	Most of it's derived from English common law, and English common law emerged as a consequence of the necessity to solve disputes between people so that All hell didn't break loose.
	So, English common law was produced when one person took another person to court to say, we've got a serious problem, we don't know how to organize our behavior in the same space, you have to make a ruling.
	So then the judge would assess the situation and state who had the right to do what, and then that became part of the law.
	Now, insofar as you are law-abiding citizens, And so you abide by the body of law.
	You actually manifest the body of law in your behavior.
	And to the degree that you do that, other people like you.
	To the degree that you don't do that, you're either poorly trained, poorly socialized, antisocial, or downright dangerous, in which case other people will put you somewhere where you're of less harm than you might be.
	So, like it or not, you're a mimicker.
	And what you mimic is the central pattern of cultural behavior that has evolved over who knows how long.
	Forever.
	Forever.
	Insofar as some of it's associated, say, with dominance hierarchy behavior, which is unbelievably old.
	That's Osiris.
	That's Osiris.
	That's God the Father, so to speak.
	And it's part of the category of culture.
	Now, the Egyptians also knew that culture was not only necessarily a good thing, as of course all of you know, because no doubt sometimes you know that you're the beneficiary of your culture, but sometimes no doubt you also feel that you're like crushed and mistreated and molded and bent out of shape by the culture, because The culture says, you better act like everybody else expects you to.
	And of course that's necessary, but you're not exactly like everybody else so you kind of get mangled and crunched and, you know, malformed as you're socialized even though you also learn to speak and you learn to read and you learn all those things that culture can provide with you.
	The Egyptians knew, even three thousand years ago, that although culture was necessary, it was an element of existence that human beings were always embedded in.
	That's why it's a permanent category.
	There's no non-cultural people.
	You can't be a human being without a culture.
	It's not possible.
	We're evolved Our physiological form presumes that we're going to emerge into the world in a culture, and that will inform us as we develop.
	That's why we have such a long developmental period, right?
	We're born unformed, and the only reason that works is because the lack of form has been consistently manifested in an environment that would form it.
	So, culture isn't just culture, it's the environment that we inhabit, because culture has been around for so long.
	And I'll give you one example of that.
	So, a big part of every culture is dominance hierarchy.
	And a dominance hierarchy says who has what access to what at what given time.
	Pretty much every creature is in a dominance hierarchy.
	Chickens are in dominance hierarchies.
	That's the pecking order.
	Members of wolves packs are in dominance hierarchies.
	Members of chimpanzee troops are in dominance hierarchies.
	Songbirds are in dominance hierarchies.
	You know, when you hear them sing in the spring, it's all pretty.
	It's not!
	A little bird is sitting out there saying, I'm healthy and loud, and if you come over here, I'll peck you to death, because this is my tree.
	And so the songbirds distribute themselves around the neighborhood by dominance.
	And the more dominant birds get the better nesting spaces.
	And better means they don't get rained on, or at least not as much.
	Their nests don't get blown out of trees.
	There's not so many cats around.
	And they're close to a good food source.
	And so that makes them attractive to potential mating partners, but it also increases the probability that their chicks will survive.
	And here's the nasty bit of truth that goes along with that.
	So let's say there's a bunch of birds in the neighborhood, and some kind of bird flu that's specific to birds comes wafting through, and it's killing birds.
	Well, the birds die from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy up.
	And the reason for that is the botting birds are all stressed out because their life is hard.
	And when they're stressed their immune system gets suppressed and, you know, they're all frazzled from, you know, being chased by cats and so on, and then they die.
	And so the top birds live.
	And the same thing happens in human populations.
	When a plague sweeps through, people die from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy up.
	And so dominance hierarchies matter.
	And so birds have them and lizards have them.
	And fish have them.
	So in a school of fish, the dominant fish, when the fish ball up—they do that to make it hard for predators to eat them—the big dominant fish are in the middle of that ball.
	The little sucker, useless fish are on the outside, and that's who gets eaten up when the predators come along.
	And we know that dominance hierarchies stretch back a very long time.
	So we know, for example, that lobsters live in dominance hierarchies.
	I told you a little bit about that.
	And they're about 300 million years old.
	So what that means is that we've been existing inside a cultural structure, because the culture is predicated on a dominance hierarchy, right?
	That's the patriarchy, if you want to use, you know, a politically correct term.
	That's been around for 300 million years.
	So to think about it as a permanent constituent element of reality is extremely Useful!
	Because, again, here's another question for you.
	Even if you don't buy the sort of meaning argument with regards to categorization, there's another way you can look at it.
	You might say to yourself, what's most real?
	That's a tough one, because, you know, we kind of accept gradations of real.
	Like, rocks seem pretty real, trees seem pretty real.
	The environment, is that real?
	That's a harder one, right, because it's an abstraction.
	How about numbers?
	Are they real?
	You can certainly do real things with them once you get numbers.
	Especially zero, which seems not to exist at all.
	As soon as you get zero, there's all sorts of magical things you can do.
	So, anyways, my point is it's not all that obvious to figure out what constitutes real.
	But here's a hint.
	The longer something has been around, the more real it is.
	Okay, dominance hierarchies have been around longer than trees.
	They're real.
	They're really, really real.
	And you live in one.
	And not only do you live in one, You're really motivated to get to the top of that one, or to create one that you can be at the top of.
	Because human beings are sneaky.
	Because if we're not doing so well in the dominance hierarchy, we might think, well to hell with this dominance hierarchy, we'll just make a new one.
	And that's what creativity is.
	So if you're really creative, you can make your own dominance hierarchy and you can sit right at the top of it.
	And so that's worked out very well for human beings.
	In fact, one of the fundamental traits of human beings is openness.
	And openness is actually a trait that basically assesses the degree to which you're capable of playing around with the rules so you can come up with your own dominance heart.
	And that's what you do if you're creative, because you make a new set of rules.
	That's what a creative person does.
	It's very sneaky.
	So, it's very important to be up near the top of the dominance hierarchy because it means you live, that's good, you live without so much stress, that's also good, and your probability of successfully reproducing or, say, of having many mating opportunities goes up, especially in the case of men.
	It's like an exponential improvement.
	So, if you ever wonder why men are so competitive, that's the reason.
	It's because the loser men get nothing.
	Really, that's exactly how it works.
	And the winner men, they get everything.
	And there's actually a law that goes behind that, an economic law.
	You can look it up.
	It's called the Pareto distribution.
	You look up the Pareto distribution.
	It's the law that describes income inequality.
	It'll tell you something important about how the world works.
	And Pareto distribution, which is almost everyone gets nothing and almost no one gets everything, that's a Pareto distribution.
	It covers the production of everything that's created.
	Money, inventions, art, like music, paintings, you name it.
	If people creatively produce it, Hardly anyone does all of it, and almost everyone does none of it.
	So it's a really winner-take-all situation, and the dominance hierarchy is set up really as a reflection of that fact.
	We also know, for example, just to hammer the point home, is that if you make dominance hierarchy steep—like a steep one is hard to climb, and there's a lot of difference between top and bottom—the steeper the dominance hierarchy in any given geographical locale, the higher the murder rate among men.
	Because they start to kill each other.
	And the reason they start to kill each other is because that's a good way of attaining dominance if you haven't got any other roots.
	And so that's the relationship between income inequality and the destabilization of society.
	That's an extraordinarily powerful relationship.
	So, for example, you can describe the steepness of a dominance hierarchy using a statistic called the Gini coefficient, and the correlation between the Gini coefficient and the male homicide rate in North America is about.8.
	And point eight is like, okay, you're done.
	You don't have to figure anything else out.
	You know why it happened.
	It just covers it.
	You never see it.
	You never see an explanation that complete in psychology.
	It's like the most powerful effect ever discovered.
	So, dominance harpies.
	This person, he's king of the dominance harpies.
	So you can think about him as the person who created it.
	That's one way of looking at it.
	And you can sort of think of him as the embodiment of it.
	So, and he's a symbol.
	That's another way of looking at it because this king, because he's a king, Osiris, he's also a god.
	He was also the Egyptian pharaoh because the Egyptians presumed that their pharaoh was Osiris.
	And he had to take on the being of Osiris when he became king, when he was coronated.
	It's like, you're not a person anymore.
	You're the embodiment of the state.
	And that happens to people when they turn into the president of the United States, for example.
	They're not whoever they were.
	They're hardly them at all.
	They're now this.
	And that's the thing that's at the top of the dominance herd.
	And it's the thing that represents culture.
	Now, the Egyptians knew that it could go astray.
	It could become tyrannical and rigid.
	And that's why Osiris had an evil brother, Seth.
	But we won't talk about him for a moment.
	Now, he's the upper world.
	This is Isis.
	Isis is his wife, and Isis is queen of the underworld.
	And the reason she's feminine, as far as we can tell, is because from a symbolic perspective, femininity represents more like possibility rather than actuality.
	And the reason for that is that the defining characteristic of the feminine is the capacity to bring forth new forms.
	And so if you're going to use the feminine as a symbolic representation, you're going to use it to represent the domain from which new forms come Emerge.
	The domain from which new forms emerge.
	And that's sort of the domain of the unknown, or the domain of nature, which is why it's mother nature.
	And Isis is mother nature, but she's also queen of the underworld.
	And Isis had an immense following in the ancient world, and variants of Isis.
	Like her, as a goddess of worship, her span of existence was thousands and thousands of years.
	I mean even a lot of the attention that's paid towards Mary in Catholicism is a variation of the veneration that was shown to Isis.
	That's often on top of her head there, that's usually a variant of the present moon, although I think in this particular situation that's actually, those are actually cow horns.
	Okay, so Osiris and Isis, and they are a team, so they're wedded together.
	Order and chaos, they're wedded together.
	And order, that's culture, and chaos, that's nature.
	Those are the two most fundamental constituent elements of the world, from the mythological or symbolic perspective.
	And what that means is, there's always been culture, at least always dispersed.
	Any of us need to bother with it.
	There's always been an interpretive framework through which conscious creatures viewed the world.
	You can't be without having a structure, and that structure is inculcated inside you, and a lot of it's culturally transmitted.
	Not all of it, a lot of it.
	So it's a precondition for existence that you're a structured thing, and that structure is order.
	And then the other element of existence is that there are things that are outside of that order, always, that you can't cope with because you're a finite thing, and your culture is a finite and bounded thing, and outside of that There's mystery.
	There's mystery.
	Like, an outside is a funny place, because it's not outside in the way that you think about being outside a building, although it is that, insofar as it's cold and dangerous out there.
	But there's outsides everywhere.
	So, for example, if you know someone, maybe you're in a relationship with them, And, you know, you're kind of comfortable with them, and then one day you're having a conversation with them, and they tell you something shocking, like maybe you're in an intimate relationship with them, and they tell you that—maybe it's the day they tell you that they are having an affair, or maybe that they had five, and that they're still going on.
	Who knows?
	And then all of a sudden One second you're inside a close and isolated and comfortable cultural space, and the next second you're outside.
	And that's because no matter where you are, the boundaries of your knowledge only extend so far.
	And the fact that you're very limited in what you apprehend can be made manifest to you at any moment.
	Any of your presuppositions can fail, especially in relationship to other people, or yourself.
	You know, because if you're all of a sudden informed by a long-term partner that they have been having an affair, like that certainly says something about them.
	But it certainly also says something about you.
	It's like, how dumb can you get?
	Right?
	How did you not notice?
	How are you so naive?
	Now, you might think it's cruel to blame the victim, and no doubt it is.
	But it's irrelevant in this case, because that's what you're going to think in any case.
	Right?
	You know, because you're wandering around thinking you're a reasonably perceptive and well-adapted creature, and all of a sudden, poof, someone pulls the rug out from underneath you.
	It's like, you might doubt them, and certainly you will, and maybe relationships for a long time, but you can also be sure you're going to doubt yourself, and your past, which is weird, because you'd think it was already done with, and your present, and your future.
	It's like all of a sudden, bang!
	You're not in culture anymore.
	Poof!
	You're in the underworld.
	Order and chaos.
	Now, order and chaos, masculine and feminine, that's yin and yang as well.
	They can unite to produce some third thing, and that's often the sun.
	It can be the sun as in the thing that shines, but also in terms of the biological sun.
	There are complicated reasons that those two things are interrelated.
	This is Horus, and he's the offspring, the child of Isis and Osiris.
	And I won't tell you the entire story, but I'll tell you a couple of things about Horus that are worth knowing.
	You've all seen the Egyptian eye, right?
	The eye with the way the eyebrow?
	Everyone's seen that.
	It's kind of weird because it's really old, but you all know it.
	Okay, that's Horus.
	And if you look at the Egyptian eye, the eye is really open.
	So that's an element of what Horus is.
	Horus is, in fact, the open eye.
	So Horus you could think of as the god of attention.
	It's not the god of intellect.
	There's a very important difference.
	Horus is the god of attention.
	And that's also why in this representation you see he's got the head of a bird.
	It's not any old bird, it's a falcon.
	And the reason the Egyptians put the head of a falcon on Horus is because falcons can really see They're like super observant, so they fly above everything so they can see everywhere.
	They're above everything.
	They're even above the dominance hierarchies.
	They're way up there in the sky.
	And from that position in the sky, they can see everything.
	And that makes them powerful.
	And so, the Egyptian idea was that the proper balance between order and chaos made you alert with your eyes open And that was what made you—that was an element of human divinity, so to speak.
	That was the deepest expression of your soul.
	Here's a way of thinking about that.
	So, what happens to you if you're somewhere where everything is entirely predictable and comfortable?
	What do you do?
	You get lazy, you get bored.
	What else happens?
	Well, you certainly—you don't have to pay attention, right?
	So what happens when you really stop paying attention?
	You fall asleep.
	Right?
	Because, you know, you're by the fire, you just have a nice meal, you know that, like, nothing's going to come rampaging through your front door, and so what the hell do you have to be awake for?
	Poof!
	Asleep.
	So, now that's good, you know, sometimes you have to sleep, but as a lifestyle, it's somewhat limiting, so if you're just sitting around hyper-comfortable all the time, it's like you get all doughy and useless, and it's not helpful.
	That's the sort It's not helpful, because if anything does come along, you're in trouble.
	And plus, you're nothing like you could be.
	And so you might think, well, the more order the better, which is exactly what fascists think, by the way.
	But the problem with too much order is that there's no utility in you even being there, because everything's perfect and it's already done.
	You might as well just be asleep.
	There's no need for consciousness.
	So you want to have a little chaos around you.
	And then you might ask, well, how much chaos?
	And the answer would be, well, how about not enough to paralyze you?
	Because that's too much.
	Then you're just praying.
	And you might be awake, but it's like… Terror is a form of consciousness, I suppose, but we might as well not presume that it's the optimal form.
	It's also rather self-limiting, because if you're terrified long enough, you'll just die.
	So it's not an optimal state.
	It's also one you'll strive generally to avoid.
	So let's say, well, how much chaos should you have around?
	How much of what's unpredictable should you have around?
	And we could say, just enough to make you optimally awake.
	Right?
	So you should be pushing yourself hard enough at each point You want to have one foot in order, yes, so you're secure and stable, and you have one foot in chaos so that you're not exactly sure what's going to happen next, so that you're pushed to transform and change and grow and develop.
	And you can tell when you're there because then you're alert and you're paying attention.
	And so at that point the Egyptians would say, well, then you're optimally embodying Horus, who's the third element of experience.
	One, order.
	Two, chaos.
	Three, the thing that mediates between order and chaos.
	And if you're doing that optimally, then you know the yin and yang symbol?
	I think I've got it here, actually.
	Maybe.
	Yes.
	Those are two serpents, by the way.
	The black circuit, that's chaos.
	And it's an interesting symbol, because there's a white circle in the middle of it, right?
	And that means that things might be pretty gloomy and dark, because it's all chaotic, but at any point, order can arise out of that.
	And you know how that is.
	You know, you go through a terrible period of transformation, and everything's unsteady and shaky, and, like, it passes, and maybe you're even better off than you were before it.
	Maybe not, but at least sometimes it happens.
	And then the white serpent has a black eye, and that's because, well, you know, just when you think you're safe, The rug gets pulled out from underneath you.
	And so there's a dynamic.
	This is what the Taoists believe and what they state explicitly.
	The world is a dynamic between chaos and order.
	The world of experience, the world that human beings exist in, is a dynamic between chaos and order.
	And the function of a human being is to juggle those and keep them balanced.
	And you can tell when you're doing that because you're awake and you're paying attention and not only are you Healthy in who and what you are, but you're moving towards something better.
	And when that happens to you, then you're possessed by a deep intimation of meaning.
	Because meaning signifies something, and what it signifies is That you're in the right place at the right time.
	And so you can learn to stay there by paying attention to the balance of chaos and order in your life.
	And the better you get at staying there—and this is the kickoff from the Egyptian perspective—the better you get at staying there, the more impermeable you are to chaos and order, because you can learn to handle it.
	So you might say, well, Life presents you with a challenge with regards to its ultimate significance, right?
	You might say, well, what's the use of human striving in the face of everything that's terrible in the world, including our own vulnerability?
	Well, you're not going to eliminate that, but it's possible that if you balance things properly that you can learn to live with it.
	And maybe you can even learn to understand that those two—the dynamism between those two things is actually a precondition for being, and that without it there wouldn't be any being.
	Because part of you is limited and part of you isn't, and if that wasn't the case there wouldn't be you.
	So the question arises—it's an existential question—what do you do with that set of facts?
	And it looks like your nervous system, in a sense, is already set up to answer that.
	Pay attention.
	Put yourself in a situation where you're paying attention.
	If you pay enough attention, you're right in the place that you should be, and that will be at least sufficient.
	And maybe it will be more than that.
	Maybe you'll say, it's okay.
	The terrible preconditions of existence are justified by the manner in which it manifests itself.
	And that's a definition of mental health.

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