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Jan. 25, 2014 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:14:47
2014 Personality Lecture 06: Carl Jung (Part 1)
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Psychoanalytic thought today.
It's depth psychology.
That's a better way to think about it.
The psychoanalysis technique is Freudian.
And Freud was not the only contributor to the corpus of psychoanalytic ideas.
Adler, who we won't talk much about, was certainly… Adler was smart, and he's underrated today.
He wasn't as charismatic as Freud and Jung.
And he didn't have the same flair for writing, I suppose.
But his ideas foreshadowed the development of later cybernetic ideas, which we will talk about by a good margin.
So Adler really had some smart things to say.
Jung is the person we're going to talk about today and next time.
I'm going to talk about him in some ways indirectly, because The best way to understand Jung is to show you what you do with his ideas, rather than really presenting the ideas themselves.
But I can give you a bit of an overview.
So, one of the things that differentiates the deaf psychologists from, say, behavior therapists, and even from cognitive scientists, is that you might say in one way they're more mystical, which means more from the romantic tradition.
Than the cognitive scientists and the behaviorists.
So there's a temperamental split there, eh?
Because people who are high in openness—and both Freud and Jung were very, very high in trade openness—are very interested in the domain of the imagination and the domain of fantasy, because they have very active imaginations, and they have very active fantasy lives, and they're good visualizers.
And so one of the things I've noticed in my clinical practice—there's always been a joke about Depth psychologist that if you go see a Freudian, you have Freudian dreams, and if you go see a Jungian, you have Jungian dreams.
And I suppose that means if you go to a behavior therapist that you don't have any dreams at all.
But I actually think there's some truth in that.
Because the more pragmatic people, the more practical people, are not going to be attracted to therapists who deal with issues that have to do, say, with the imagination or fantasy.
And so there's a natural parsing.
And one of the things I've noticed in my clinical practice Imaginative people, so those would be open and creative people, have a dream life that cries out to be interpreted in archetypal terms.
Like, I've had clients, a number of them now, I have one right now.
I mean, his dream life is so rich, it's remarkable.
He's a genius dreamer.
Every time he comes in, it's like he has two dreams or three dreams.
They're coherent, they're complexly plotted, they're interesting, and they chart What's going on in his life, and they tell him what he should do.
It's like, it's great.
But everyone isn't like that.
I also have clients who never dream at all.
And then, I've also seen when I've lectured to people, and I see this most particularly in medical students, because I've lectured a bit to medical students.
It's like, so maybe I'll do a seminar for the medical students and tell them a little bit about the symbols of transformation, really.
Because they're involved in, first of all, transforming, because they're medical students, and so you have to transform into a doctor, and also Of course, they're helping people through transformations all the time, often negative, but not always.
Sometimes positive, because sometimes you get better.
And so it's useful, possibly, for them to understand those processes more deeply.
Generally, with the medical school students, I do half lecture that's more on, like, trait psychology and more behavioral, and half of it on the more symbolic stuff, which is kind of like this class is.
And there's always about half the medical students on whom the more symbolic stuff just falls flat.
They just don't.
It's like talking about color to people who are colorblind.
And I've thought about this a lot, and I really do think it's faced in temperamental differences.
So, you know, if you have an active fantasy life, and you have an active imagination, and you're a good visualizer, and you dream a lot, then that's the sort of person you are.
And if you're on the other end of the scale, which would be that you're very conscientious, let's say, and very low in openness, which also tends to make you more conservative in your political presuppositions, by the way, then dream analysis is probably not for you, partly because you're just not going to come up with that many dreams, and even if you do, they won't necessarily be informative.
You know, there's been a very long battle in some ways in the psychological and psychiatric community between people who take different perspectives on how you might address psychological problems.
But I don't know if the issue of type has been thought about seriously enough in that regard, because we're really only starting to understand the dimensions, the actual dimensions of personality properly, and to figure out What it means to be on one end of, say, openness versus the other one.
Especially if you're intelligent.
You can be intelligent and not open.
Those are complicated people.
They've got very analytical minds.
They make good lawyers.
Like, lawyers are often—and this is something you might think about if you're planning to become a lawyer—if you're high in openness, it's a bad job for you.
You will not be happy.
You need to be really conscientious, like, off the scale.
And it helps to be disagreeable, too.
If you're too agreeable, well, you're supposed to win if you're a lawyer.
You're not supposed to, like, nicely let the other person win, you know.
You're supposed to fight to win.
And so you have to be kind of fighty to do that, and if you're high in agreeableness, then it's a job that's kind of grates against your temperament.
So, anyways.
So, you.
Jung, I think, the best way to think about Jung is that he was a student of two people.
He was a student of Friedrich Nietzsche, and he was a student of Freud.
And although the Freudians, when they write the history of psychoanalytic thought, they pretty much portray Jung as like a derivative thinker of Freud.
It's not the right way to think about his positioning, historically, because in some ways what Jung was trying to do was to answer The question that Nietzsche posed at the end of the 19th century, and the reason Jung was trying to answer it was because he believed it was the most important question that had been posed at the end of the 19th century, and that was, you know, there's a famous quote by Nietzsche, right?
I'm sure you've all heard it, and that's the quote that God is dead.
What Nietzsche said essentially was, God is dead and we have killed him.
That's a different idea, and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood.
And so, it wasn't like a triumphal statement on Nietzsche's part, even though when you hear it quoted, you always hear it quoted that way.
It's like it's a sort of victory, God is dead, you know, or something to celebrate.
It's not what Nietzsche thought at all.
In fact, he thought all hell was going to break loose because of it.
And he predicted as much, and like, In the, like, in the 1870s.
I mean, he predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century with ridiculous accuracy.
Like, it's uncanny.
And that's partly because, you know, Nietzsche was one of these people, like Jung, who are very grounded in their deep, deep, deep imaginations.
And so they get wind of the currents that are moving through society long before normal people do.
So, in some sense, you know, you can imagine that in any given population, even with you guys, there's some of you guys who were living like fifty years ago, and there's some of you living now, and there's some of you living fifty years in the future.
It depends on how intelligent, imaginative, versus how conservative you are.
Because it's not like everyone develops at exactly the same historical rate.
You get people like Nietzsche, for example, or Dostoevsky, they're like a hundred years ahead of everyone else, and so, you know, people don't even know what to do with them.
But Stendhal was like that too, the writer.
He wrote the 1830s, and he was convinced that he was a hundred years ahead of his time, and stylistically that was probably about right.
And the people who were prophets, regarded as prophets in, say, Old Testament tradition, they were the same sort of people.
It's like, they had their ear to the ground in a sense, and they could tell what was going on underneath everybody's facade.
It echoed in them.
Often, as the stories go, and I'm sure they have a mythological accuracy to them, the people who were picking up the underground currents indicating often catastrophe felt absolutely compelled, even at the risk of their own skin, to warn people.
So Jung was definitely one of these people.
And now, this question, God is dead and we have killed him.
Led Nietzsche to pose another question, which was, well, what are we going to do to replace him?
Because Nietzsche believed, and I think he was absolutely right about this, I can't see how it could be otherwise, he believed that the morality that had structured Western society was predicated on the fundamental axiom of divinity.
And so, as far as Nietzsche was concerned, the whole corpus of morality It was dependent on that axiom being true, or at least being accepted as true.
And when that axiom was knocked out by, say, the conflict between science and religion, because in some sense that's what did it, then the whole system no longer had anything to stand on and could become entirely questionable.
And so Nietzsche pointed that out, and then Dostoevsky, who was writing basically at the same time, said, well, if there's no god, then anything is permitted.
And what he meant by that was, Really, in some sense, what he meant by that was morality turns into what you can get away with.
Because there's nothing final about it.
There's nothing transcendent about it.
And, like, we've played this problem out intellectually.
You guys are still right in the middle of this battle, whether you know it or not.
I mean, so, what happened in the 20th century was that One of the consequences of that loss of a fundamental underpinning led Europe to swing radically to political extremes.
You know, the Nazis were—to think of the Nazis without thinking of that as a religious transformation is, like, that's just not right.
It was a religious transformation, and it wasn't a good one.
So, like, it was a regression, in some sense, to a morality that was way pre-Christian.
Like, it was not good.
And then, you know, you had the same— It was like the rise of the state as an alternative to God.
Well, we saw what that produced.
It produced hundreds of millions of painful deaths, and it just about destroyed the world.
So it was a bad problem.
And, you know, we sort of skirted our way through that miraculously, you know.
I don't really think World War II came to an end until 1989, you know, because there was the whole Cold War period after After the Germans and the Japanese had surrendered, but I mean, we just went from one war to another.
We just went to another one that everyone was too afraid to fight.
It was still a war, you know, and that didn't end until 1989.
And by some miracle, God only knows why, you know, it never degenerated into a thermonuclear exchange.
And it was close, man.
We just barely squeaked through that.
There were two crimes during that period.
One in 1964, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where they had those bloody ICBMs primed.
And so the way they worked was in the control panel, which kind of looked like a Star Trek, you know, the old Star Trek sets.
There'd be, like, a panel here, and there was a little place you could put a key, and about twenty feet over there there'd be another guy with a key, and if he turned his key and held it for ten seconds at the same time he turned his key and held it for ten seconds, then the missile launched.
And an intercontinental ballistic missile is a bullet, and I mean that technically.
It's not a guided missile.
Once you launch it, like, you shoot a bullet, it's gone.
You don't get to tell the bullet to come back once it's gone.
You could turn around like a cruise missile.
An intercontinental ballistic missile, it goes where you aimed it, and you don't get to bring it back.
And so during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the keys were in the locks.
So we were ten seconds away.
Man, I tell you, that was a tight keyhole.
We barely squeaked through that one.
And it looks like by about 1989 that the collective consciousness, or Jung would say the collective unconscious, of the human race had decided that, well, maybe having it all end in, like, apocalyptic annihilation wasn't necessarily for the best.
It's interesting because writers like Goethe, he wrote Faust, and Faust is this tale of a man who makes a bet with the devil so that he can acquire infinite knowledge, essentially.
And the devil in Faust is named Mephistopheles, and Goethe was trying to explain What human evil, or evil per se, what its motive was.
He did a lovely job, it's so smart what he said.
He said the devil's basic hypothesis, and of course Birthe expresses this in poetry, is that life is so unbearably cruel and random and tragic that it would be better if it had never existed at all.
And, you know, believe me, there'll be times in your life where you think that, you know, where something just knocks you off your feet in a completely unjust manner, you know?
And that thought, it'll rise up, and, like, it's a compelling thought, and I think that's the thought that human beings were wrestling with.
Well, we've been wrestling with it forever, but we didn't really vote on it until 1989.
You know, and life barely won.
And, you know, life is a troublesome business.
It's a tragedy.
And, you know, everyone asks themselves now and then if their consciousness is worth the pain.
Well, the answer to that is it depends on how you live.
That is the answer to that.
But, you know, that's a complicated answer, and just because you know that answer doesn't mean that you know how to live.
Anyways, what's happened since 1989, as far as I'm concerned, is that intellectuals, who are often possessed by the worst sorts of demons because they actually think that their intelligence can guide them properly in, like, the complex moral landscape, It's not the case, you see, most intellectuals—and this is certainly the case of most intellectuals in the universities, especially in the late 20th century—they were committed Marxists, like, way past when they should have been.
You know, George Orwell, by 1955, he was a left-winger, brilliant guy.
He'd already figured out that whatever was going on in the Soviet Union was not good.
So, you know, if you had your eyes open, You were done with that by, you know, ten years after World War II, but people like Jean-Paul Sartre were members of the Communist Party way longer than they had any ethical right whatsoever to be.
You know, it was an absolutely murderous philosophy.
But intellectuals toyed with that.
They still toy with it in universities, you know, except it's turned into postmodernism, which is Marxism under a new guise.
You know, and a lot of the postmodern thought is not only left-wing disguised, But it's also nihilistic, and that's actually the other problem that the death of God produces.
One is, okay, I don't have a religious foundation.
I don't have any foundation under my feet to buttress my moral claims, or even to sort of help me determine what life is worth in the face of tragedy.
So I need something to replace that, and then poof, that's the state, which is a really bad replacement.
Because if you think God's bad, like, you just try Stellan on for size for a while.
And Mao as well, you know.
And Hitler as well.
It's not like this was a phenomenon that was only linked to one, say, culture of people.
Everybody became susceptible to it, and the same murderous thing happened every time.
People tried that.
So it was China, Cambodia, Vietnam.
Like, wherever the communists got into power, man, people died by the hundreds of thousands.
So, Pol Pot, the guy who emptied the Cambodian cities that killed seven million Sorry, I think it was three million people.
He got his graduate degree at the Sorbonne in France, and he said what he was going to do when he went back to Cambodia.
You know, he didn't outline the whole murderousness element, but he certainly had all the theory laid down in his fine French academy.
So, you know, we mess with ideas in the universities, and if we don't do it properly, like people die, it's important to get your ideas right.
So, one answer to the death of God is you worship the state.
The other is you worship nothing.
It's nihilism.
There's no distinction between anything, and everything is pointless.
And there's a massive strain of that sort of underground theorizing in postmodernism.
And a psychoanalyst, especially a Jungian, would look at the postmodern response, which is nihilistic, and the Fascist response, which is sort of recourse to the state, as motivated by something even deeper than that.
And that's the sort of process that Nietzsche was describing.
Now for Jung, He wrote a book called Ion, for example, and if you want to have nightmares for the rest of your life, that's a really good book to read.
I mean, that book just terrified me, because Jung, what he did in that book basically was investigate the fantasy that he believed that all of Western civilization had been predicated on for the last 4,000 years.
Now, because Jung really believed that what drove human beings was—and it's a Piagetian perspective in some weird ways—was the revelation of the successive unconscious revelation of fantasies were at the forefront of our movement into unknown territory.
So it's like there's unknown territory, and then There's known territory, but there's this weird intermediary space between them.
And that intermediary space where you kind of know but kind of don't know, that's where your imagination plays.
And of course that's the case, right?
Because when you encounter something and you really don't know much about it, you imagine what it might be.
And so it takes on the structures of your imagination.
And so in some sense what you're dealing with as you move through history and expand your domain of knowledge into the unknown is you encounter your own fantasy.
Anyways, if you want to know about that, you could read, like, volume 9-1 and 9-2 of Jung.
One's called Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and the other's called Ion.
But, like, it'll take you a while to crack them.
You have to beat your head against those books quite a bit, because what Jung is outlining in some sense is so shocking, it's almost impossible to Grasp.
Once you get the picture, all of a sudden things flip around because you understand what he's talking about.
But before then, man, it's tough going.
It's funny because Jung has been—there was a guy named Richard Knoll who wrote a biography of Jung, and he was a jealous guy, I think.
And he was crooked, too, because His book was called The Aryan Christ, and he used, like, Nazi imagery on the cover, and it was his publisher that talked him into doing that because he thought the book would sell more.
It's like, you don't do that.
Well, or if you do, that indicates really what you're up to, right?
Because of what you're willing to allow to happen to your work.
So anybody who would have thought about that wouldn't have used Nazi imagery To gain economic utility out of writing a criticism of Jung, because it's a crooked maneuver.
So then you have to think, okay, what's he up to?
Why is he doing this?
Now, Jung has been—so he accused Jung, for example, of basically starting a cult, and I can understand that.
But what I found so amusing about Noel's book is that what Jung was actually up to was so much more So much more terrifying than a mere cult, that it was sort of like accusing a serial killer of stealing a loaf of bread.
It's like, yeah, well maybe he stole a loaf of bread, but compared to what he was actually up to, it's really not relevant.
So Jung was trying to bring the primordial imagination back into the world, and to make people conscious of it.
It's like, whew, that's something, man.
Really.
That's really something.
So, that reading, I read everything you wrote, except the books that were, like, published after his collected works.
I read some of those.
It took me a long time, and it just tore me into bits.
Like, I didn't know what the hell, which way was halfway through those books.
I mean, Nietzsche's bad enough, because Nietzsche will set out to destroy your presuppositions.
In fact, I have a client right now who's being left, like, depressed for five years because he wasn't particularly educated and he, you know, started reading Nietzsche.
And he had been a Christian and he thought, well, I'm a Christian, I can take on Nietzsche.
It's like, no you can't.
No, no you can't.
Like, Nietzsche was so smart that it's just, it's mind-boggling.
He came up with the best Narcissistic statement, I think, that's ever been written.
And this is what he was like, because he was a very sick man and he could only write for very short periods of time, so he'd try to cram everything he could into a single sentence.
And so each sentence is like a little bomb.
Now and then he'd write, you know, something self-referential, so one phrase of his is, I write in a sentence what other people write in a book.
That's pretty good, eh?
That's a good brag.
But then he topped it right away after.
He said, what other people can't even write in a book?
Yeah, so that's pretty good.
Narcissism, and then he just punched through that.
But it's true.
Like, that's the thing.
It's true.
So, it wasn't narcissism.
I mean, for anyone else, it wouldn't be.
For him, it was just true.
So, yeah, yeah.
So, back to you.
Nietzsche sort of hypothesized that in order for people to overcome the psychological consequences of the destruction of their religious underpinnings, they would have to transform themselves into Virtually into the thing that they had killed.
So Nietzsche's, and this was, believe me, for Nietzsche, this was like a revelatory solution.
He came up with this in a book called Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Now everybody who reads Nietzsche starts to read Thus Spake Zarathustra because it's got such a cool title, you know, but you shouldn't read that book.
At least not until you've read, say, Beyond Good and Evil and other books that he wrote, because Thus Spake Zarathustra is a weird book.
It's like an Old Testament revelation.
And it really is.
It's a fantasy.
This man comes down from the mountain and he starts to spout off, like, poetic revelations.
Nietzsche's, the rest of Nietzsche's books are like very, very clear and cutting thought, whereas this one is like a—it's like a Shakespearean drama, almost, you know?
And the reason for that is because Nietzsche was reaching beyond the grip of his intellect to try to formulate answers to questions that he could not grasp, because what he was trying to figure out is, well, as human beings have developed cognitively in some sense, we've escaped from our culture and our instincts.
When we're embedded in our culture and our instincts, we're embedded unconsciously within a religious framework.
It's the framework of presuppositions from which we emerged.
Like, people didn't think up religions.
What are you—there's some little weird little, what do you call it, conspiracy going on for three thousand years?
It's like, no.
It's not about power.
Even though it can be twisted to be about power, everything can be, or twisted to be about economics.
It's about fantasy.
You know, you look inside a European cathedral, all you see is fantasy.
It's in brilliant lights, portrayed everywhere.
It's trying to say something to you.
Well, what's it trying to say?
Well, it turned out when people asked themselves that, instead of just acting it out, they hadn't got a clue what it said.
They had no idea what it said.
Any more than you guys know why you have Christmas trees.
So how many of you have Christmas trees?
Yeah, why?
Oh, I don't know, I never noticed we had Christmas trees, you know?
No, but my point is, my point is that in a culture, you can follow, you follow the customs because that's what you do.
But then when you wake up a bit, you think, well, you're just like a Piagetian child who is taken out of the game and forced to look at it.
It's like, well, why are you playing that game and what are the rules?
Well, I never thought about it before.
Well, as soon as people started to think about the games they were playing, it was often because they encountered other people who apparently thought differently, you know?
So if you're like a marauding Christian and you go into the East and all of a sudden you come up with a Buddhist and he's smart, it's like you two have big problems, right?
Because you're smart and he's smart and you don't think the same way, at least apparently, you don't think the same way at all.
So even if you say, well, those Buddhists, you know, we should just wipe them out, it doesn't matter.
Because their thoughts are already there, and they've been working on them for like a couple of thousand years, and whether you like it or not, they're going to make you think.
And once you start thinking about your religion, you're in trouble.
And so that's the situation we're in right now.
So, Jung took this problem that Nietzsche had posed seriously, because Jung was caught up quite dramatically in the events of Of Nazi Germany.
Now, you know, when we think about Nazi Germany, we think, of course, that it was perfectly obvious that the Nazis were the perpetrators and that, you know, everyone else was the victim, and if we were there we would have clearly seen that and we wouldn't have been Nazis, and it's like, that's not true.
That isn't how it worked, because these things happen slowly.
They sort of happen piece by piece.
You know, we started seeing a similar thing happen, I think, After the twin towers fell in New York, you know?
It's like people gave up five, ten percent of their civil liberties in like a month, you know?
It was okay.
It wasn't okay.
It wasn't okay.
And it just shows you how easy that sort of thing can start.
You know, the Germans were under tremendous stress in the 1930s.
Their whole economy blew out.
They had to, like, take wheelbarrels full of billions of marks to buy a piece of bread.
Their currency fell to zero.
Unemployment was staggeringly high.
They were paying off debts like mad because of the First World War.
And there was a real threat that the communists were going to start a revolution.
It's like, you don't have problems like that.
So, the Germans had no idea what to do, you know, and Hitler was a canny, canny person with a brilliant, brilliant sense of drama.
I mean, he was a real, he was a master of dark fire, that guy.
And I think his unconscious fantasy was, let's see how much we can destroy before we die in the, what, purifying flames.
That was Hitler.
So, and he was… He was a compelling person, and the fantasy that he had in the back of his mind, I'll tell you how that developed at one point.
It was a very hard thing to escape from.
That's why the Germans became Nazis.
This was like magic that had emerged, and it was black magic.
So, Jung was very interested in this, because he was in the Germanic-speaking areas of the world when this happened, and he felt himself pulled very strongly by what the Nazis were doing, especially in the early stages of the development of the political platform, because things did stabilize.
You know, and then they stabilized before they went completely out of control, and of course looking in retrospect you could see the seeds of what eventually transpired to become such a catastrophe.
But at the time it was by no means self-evident that such a thing was going to occur, especially given all the other horrible things that were likely to occur.
So, Jung had a vision at one point on a train I think it was in Switzerland that Europe had become so covered with blood that the blood was starting to flow over the mountains into Switzerland.
Because, of course, Switzerland is neutral.
And he said it was one of the most horrifying nightmares of his life.
And this was in, I think, 1930—it was late 1930s anyway.
So it was a premonition of war.
And he spent a lot of time trying to understand, well, if you weren't going to become a fascist and worship the state, and you weren't going to become a nihilist, And worship nothing, what in the world were you going to do, exactly, to orient yourself?
And how would you protect yourself against the attractions of blind state identification, for example, or the attractions of nihilism?
You know, you might say, well, nihilism has no attraction at all because it says to you, everything is irrelevant, nothing you do has any importance, because that's nihilistic, basically.
Well, what's the—the psychoanalyst would say—what's the secondary gain from that?
Like, yeah, you say that's what you believe, and maybe you even act it out.
And you also say, well, you've come to that conclusion through, you know, a rational process of deliberation.
But the psychoanalyst would say, it's kind of convenient that that also alleviates you of all responsibility, isn't it?
And it kind of sheds a little dampness on your claim to pristine cognition as the driving force behind your adoption of that theory.
You know, it's like the patriot who claims that the reason that he's kicking someone in the head is because he's patriotic.
It's like, no, no, no.
You're patriotic so that you can kick someone in the head and still look at yourself in the mirror in the morning.
It has nothing to do with rational deliberation.
And so the psychoanalysts—and Jung was like this in particular—you know, they're always extremely skeptical about people's rational claims about their commitments to ideology, and rightly so.
One of the things Jung said that I love—he said some things that were so brilliant—was that people didn't have ideas.
Ideas had people.
And when you think that I—see, it's like—I think this is so funny—it's like Dawkins' idea of the meme.
You know, some of you—how many of you read Dawkins?
He's, you know—yeah, okay.
So Dawkins has this idea of meme.
It's so funny to read Dawkins, because he's like twenty percent of the weight of being in Jungian, without even knowing it.
And so he's produced this idea called meme, which is—they're ideas.
A meme is an idea that sort of has an independent existence, in a sense, because it can infect different minds or move from mind to mind.
And he kind of thinks of it more like a fad.
Well, the archetypes are memes, except they're no fads.
They're memes that have lasted for like twenty thousand years, or maybe twenty million years.
We have no idea how old they are.
And Jung got where Dawkins was going like, you know, fifty years before and two hundred stories deeper.
So, it's so funny to read Dawkins because what he is searching for has already been figured out by Jung, but he's so prejudiced against any kind of religious thinking that there's no way he'll ever find it.
So, one of the things Jung did was he deeply, deeply studied the substructures of thought.
So for Jung—like, Jung, we talked about Piaget a bit, and we said, for Piaget you kind of built your brain from your body upward.
Brilliant idea, so smart.
But Jung has a lot of Piaget in him.
It's more implicit.
But for Jung, not only was your Some structures of your thought are biological, and so therefore based in your body.
But your body was also cultural and historical.
You know, so partly because you're an evolved creature, so God only knows what's in there.
3.5 billion years worth of weirdness that you can draw on, or that can move you where it wants to move you.
But also, you're being shaped by cultural dynamics all the time, and human beings in particular.
Like, we're just watching each other like mad all the time to see what we're up to, what people think of us, how we should be behaving, are we being boring, are people attracted to us?
It's like we're social right to the core, and that's another way that you can understand an archetype.
It's like part of the archetype is that we are social to the core.
So we're interested in other people, and more if you're extroverted and less if you're introverted, but it doesn't matter.
By the standards of, say, solitary animals, we're so social it's just unbelievable.
And so that's built in.
It's built in.
What's built in is that you find that interesting.
That's the archetype.
The archetype is whatever it is that makes you find that interesting.
It's beyond your control.
Like, if you're extroverted, you're interested in people.
You didn't decide that.
It decided it for you.
The question is, what is it?
Well, it's your brain, your limbic system, whatever the hell that means.
Like, we don't know what that means.
You know, we have no idea how your brain produces consciousness.
Like, I'm dead serious.
We haven't got a clue.
And what that indicates to me, since we've been hacking away at it for, say, 400 years, is that the way we think about consciousness is wrong.
Because we're not getting anywhere.
Like, we go a long ways with lots of things.
We're not getting anywhere with consciousness.
Okay, so back to the archetype.
Because I can tell you how these things arise to some degree.
So, you're interested in other people, say.
And so, you're interested in them because they're unbelievably useful resources, right, because they know things, they have resources, that you want, plus you want even subtle things from them.
You want their attention, you want to play with them, you know.
There's all sorts of things that you need and want from other people.
So these social interactions are incredibly valuable and informative.
But the information is interesting because part of what every single person is constantly broadcasting to every other person is how to behave.
So now, if you meet someone and let's say you find them interesting.
Well, I can tell you that the more ideal they are—assuming you're not too warped—the more ideal they are, The more you're going to be interested in them.
Because that actually is what defines ideal.
Like, as you become ideal, you could say that is also the same as becoming high status.
As you become ideal, then you're interesting to people.
So that's interesting, because what that means is that you can read off people's interest to find out when you're deviating from the ideal.
And they don't even know what the ideal is.
The ideal is that to which their attention is inexorably drawn.
And they're always telling you when you fall short of the ideal.
Always.
It's being broadcast at you all the time.
And then your imagination back there is to try and figure out, just what is this ideal?
You know, because your imagination is watching you in a Piagetian sense, noticing what you do, and then trying to figure out what that is.
So, you'll have fantasies about the ideal.
That often happens in a romantic relationship, especially at the beginning of it.
Because, you know, you project your idealization onto the person that you're romantically attracted to.
That's the projection of an archetype.
So Jung would say the woman will project an animus onto the man.
The animus is her conceptualization of what the ideal man is.
It's unconscious because it's rooted in fantasy.
And the man will be in concordance with that projection in some areas—those are the areas where she likes him, by the way—and will be discordant in other areas.
And that's the areas where she constantly disappoints him as the relationship develops.
So, the projection is there in part to help the person understand who it is that they're dealing with, because when you meet someone you have to assume something about them.
It's the same as projection.
You have to assume something about them, and if you find them fascinating, which is what happens if you fall in love, maybe it's because they smell good or they're symmetrical or something, You immediately assume that, well, those things really matter.
You immediately assume that they embody the ideal.
It's an oversimplification.
But the oversimplification has a basis, and the basis is, if it's interesting to me, it must be close to the ideal.
Well, yeah, except the person that you're going out with.
Attracted to is warped and bent and flawed and twisted in, you know, 300 ways, and you'll find that out soon enough, just as they will about you.
And that often just blows the relationship into bits, because the person will say, well, she wasn't who I thought she was.
It's like, well, whoever said she was who you thought she was?
It's like, where did you get the misapprehension that she was going to be who you thought she was?
God, what do you know?
You're led around by your sense of smell and your ability to detect symmetry.
That's not very sophisticated.
So the anima and animus are two primary Jungian archetypes.
And they're very complex, but that kind of gets at the surface.
The ideal that I was describing… People are broadcasting information to each other which is, be ideal, be ideal, be ideal.
It's like, be my ideal, obviously.
But let's say if I took a thousand ideals and then averaged them, or extracted out the ideal that was common to all of them, that would be a savior figure.
That's what a savior figure is!
And then now and then someone comes along who acts quite a bit like that.
And poof!
You've got yourself a religion.
So do not be thinking that these images that people fall around like, you know, like bloodhounds on a trail, do not be thinking that those things are like conscious cognitive constructs, like conscious cognitive constructs, like Marxism.
They last like fifty years and they kill a hundred million people and then that's the end of that.
A good religious system, man, that would keep a culture going for like three thousand years.
And even at the end of it, it doesn't disappear.
We know that the story of Horus and Osiris, for example, drove Egypt, like Catholicism drove Europe, for like three thousand years.
That's a long time.
And then it turned into Christianity.
So it's not like it disappeared.
Actually it sort of transmuted into Judaism and then turned into Christianity.
So it's not like the ideas disappeared.
They didn't disappear at all.
And believe me, you're just as possessed by them as any ancient Egyptian.
It's just that you're more fragmented and conflicted, because what your unconscious assumes and what your conscious mind assumes aren't the same thing, and so you're all at war with yourself.
And that's partly what makes you attracted to, like, moronic ideologies, by which I mean any ideology, because they're all false idols and false gods, and they're shallow.
They're shallow and deadly.
And they ruin your life.
They destroy your soul.
So that's just a catastrophic response.
And that's why it's so terrible to have that discordance between your instinctual being, your deep instinctual being, and your little fragile, you know, half-witted conscious mind that sort of thinks it's in control.
It's like, you're not in control of anything.
Believe me.
The best you can do is follow what's right.
That's the best you can do.
I mean, we even know this neurologically, to some degree.
Like, if you look at the hypothalamus, it's a little part of the brain.
We'll talk about it quite a bit.
It's sort of where the Freudian id resides, to the degree that it resides anywhere.
It's this collection of nuclei that do things like make you hungry or make you thirsty or make you, you know, sexually desirous or make you defensively aggressive.
It'll make you terrified of an intruder who threatens your dominant status.
It's this little tiny part of your brain.
It's hardly even there at all.
It has massive projections coming up into the cortex.
And then there's little tendrils going down to regulate it.
And so basically, as long as everything is pretty much perfect, you're Conscious mind is in control, but as soon as things deviate from the path to any degree whatsoever, the really smart parts of your brain take over, and then you do what they tell you to do, or you suffer the consequences.
So you see this with people who binge eat, for example.
Or sometimes people develop a condition called polydipsia, which is often a consequence of hypothalamic damage attendant on a stroke, and they'll drink water until they die.
You cannot stop them.
Because they're ragingly thirsty, like someone who's starving.
And, like, you can say, well, you've had enough water.
It's like, no, that is not going to cut it.
It's not going to cut it.
You're not getting anywhere with that.
And you see the same thing with people who have, like, obsessive-compulsive disorder, something like that.
When they're not in the grip of the disorder, They're perfectly normal.
You get those people to touch something they don't want to touch.
It's like they're not the same person the second they do that.
And whatever they thought of themselves, you know, the themself that was supposed to be in control, that bloody thing is like—it's like a wagon with a child and it being towed behind an elephant.
There's just—it's got no control at all.
So you have to—one of the things that's terrifying about Jung is that there's no escaping the realization Of the nature of the forces that are behind the puppets that we are.
You know, in Pinocchio, that's why Pinocchio is a puppet, right?
Something's pulling his strings.
He's a marionette.
And the things that are pulling his strings, well, they might have his best interests in mind, but they might not, too.
And so that's what Pinocchio is about, actually.
It's also about how not to be a mannequin.
Turns out that you have to go to the bottom of the ocean and find your father in a whale and then drown.
That's how you start from being a puppet.
It's like, and you think, well you don't believe that, and I would say, well yes you do, you went and watched the movie, and you enjoyed it.
Not only that, you understood it, even though you don't have any idea what it's about.
And also, on the face of it, it's absolutely absurd.
It's like, it's not a puppet first, it's a drawing of a puppet, so that's weird, like, that's two levels of weird, and then, like, what the hell's with the cricket?
Where'd he come from?
You know, and what's his role, and why is he the conscience, and why does he get, like, activated by a fairy, and why is the fairy a star?
It's like you're in there, you know, like Cletus the slack-jawed yokel, watching the screen, captivated by it, and, you know, you walk out and you don't even notice that You're so peculiar that it's just beyond belief.
You don't even notice that that's so peculiar.
It's like, what the hell are you doing in that theatre?
Watching this marionette follow a bug around to a whale.
It's like you walk out, oh, that was so touching.
Really.
Like, really.
People are really crazy.
You know, and weird.
Like, we're like rhinoceroses or platypuses or ostriches or penguins.
We're right to the core.
And when you start to, the weirdness is so deep and so ancient that even starting to touch consciousness of that just rocks your boat.
But one thing or another will rock your boat, so sometimes it's nice to choose what thing it is.
It prepares you for things, too.
I'll tell you part of what Pinocchio means.
Pinocchio's a marionette.
Anybody can pull his strings.
I mean he's got a good heart, but what's that word?
Nothing.
Virtually nothing.
Because he's naïve.
You know, it's the fox and the, what is it, that stupid cat, that manipulate him, right?
And basically, behind them you'll see the devil, because that devil pops out quite quickly in Pinocchio.
And he's the thing that's behind all the local manifestations of evil that are trying to Pull Pinocchio's strings.
He gets blown off the right path pretty badly.
Almost turns into an unconsciously braying donkey who ends up working in the slave mines, which is exactly what happens, by the way.
You know, that's what happened to devout communists who found themselves swallowed up by Stalin's nightmare in the 1940s and the 1950s.
It's like, well, we were so good.
We did everything you wanted.
It's like, yeah, well, it turned out what we wanted is for you to die painfully.
So, you know, congratulations.
So, you know, and that's brilliantly laid out in Pinocchio, which in fact was written in the 1930s.
Brilliantly laid out.
It's a way more intelligent analysis of the 1930s than anything you'll ever find that was written.
So, Pinocchio, you know, he's trying to… Cue the proper path, and he learns that he shouldn't lie.
That's a, what do you call, archetypal idea.
I'll tell you why that is later.
And it turns out that in order to get out of the horrible mess that he's put himself in, partly by being a slavish adherent to, like, momentary pleasure and nihilism, you know, he ends up half a jackass who can't speak properly without braying, so that makes him an ideologue.
And the only way that he can get out of that is to go down to the bottom of the ocean, as deep as he could possibly go, deeper than anything is willing to go, to find his father.
What's his father?
His father is the culture that he lost touch with.
You know, and to the degree that you guys are lost, like all human beings are lost, the reason you're lost is because you've never rescued your father from the bottom of the ocean.
You haven't gone deep enough.
You won't have even known it was necessary.
It's necessary.
You're a social, historical, cultural creature, right down to where you become a biological creature.
And if that isn't part of you, and if that part isn't functioning properly, then you can just be blown off course by the wind.
There's nothing to you.
You're not grounded in anything.
That's partly why the shaman, when they go down, Communicate with their ancestors.
That's what they're trying to do.
They're trying to pull up the cultural understructure of their societies up into consciousness to make use of it.
And you constantly have to have a dialogue with that, because, you know, Say your background, just for the sake of argument, is Jewish.
A lot of the lines of, you know, the culture that you're embedded in was written down by people several thousand years ago.
It's like, it's not easy to figure out what the hell those people were talking about, or why it's relevant to you.
So there has to be a dialogue continually going on between the present and the past, so that you can bring the wisdom forward without losing what's in it.
Because if you lose what's in it, it's like, you're just nowhere.
You know, I see this all the time in my Practice, you know, often it happens to people who get divorced, or who are living together and not married, which you think, well, you're free.
It's like, you don't want to be that free.
You know, you want to argue with your partner about every single thing for the rest of your life?
Well, that's what you have to do if you don't let your culture guide you.
It's like, there's no rules.
Go ahead, make up all the rules.
See how easy that is?
Christ, that'll kill the average person in ten years.
It's just such a weight, and you only have one life, you know?
You might as well let some tradition guide you so you have some peace some of the time.
Or you'll end up divorced and with children.
It's like, heh, you—you—that's cancer for lots of people.
They get divorced, they have children, they get locked into a custody battle, and they're done.
That's the end of their life.
They're ruined by it.
So, you step outside of the guidelines of your culture at your own peril.
And modern people, because they're so coddled, think, oh yeah, well we can handle it.
It's like, sure, you can.
You wait till you get there.
You'll find out that you can't handle it, and it'll be too late.
What'll have happened is that, you know, the whale that you were supposed to go confront And rescue your father from has risen out of the water and taken you down, and you're done.
That's chaos.
So, these are serious issues.
Like Jung, I would say, was the most serious thinker of the 20th century.
He was so serious that pseudo-serious people who read him just bounce off him.
They don't even know what the hell he's up to.
So when Jung was one of those thinkers who was addressing questions that most people don't know exist, like at the bottom of reality, and who was also answering them?
So he's a two-fold blow to the intellect.
First, he tells you that you're so stupid you don't even know what's wrong.
You can't even ask the right questions.
And then he answers them.
It's like, oh boy, yeah, that'll do in your intellectual pretensions.
And the contrast between Dawkins, I think, and Neil is exactly the right contrast.
It's the contrast between the intelligent modern Dawkins and the sort of historically centered wise man.
And it's sort of painful for me to watch, because I've kind of watched Dawkins.
You know, he's not a happy man, and he's got a tremendous resentment against the church.
church.
I'm sure something terrible must have happened to him when he was a child.
But, anyways, let me show you some of this stuff because it's such fun.
It's It's such fun.
Didn't it sound fun?
Not really.
Okay, so I'm going to show you the opening of the Rot-Lion King.
Oh, God.
Yeah, yeah, good idea.
Thanks.
Like, why not use a media player that works?
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, so what I'm going to play for you is the opening scene.
The opening scene is very nicely designed.
The music I find a little bit manipulative.
It's a little poppy.
It's an interesting example of how art can go wrong, because it's sort of art designed for a purpose, and art cannot be designed for a purpose.
The purpose of art is art's purpose, not your purpose.
And so if you're trying to bend the art to your purpose, it's like you're You're, like, you're painting a picture of a stick man on a stained-glass window.
Like, you just don't have—you just haven't got the right orientation.
Art is an exploratory process, and it's supposed to take you beyond what you know.
If you take art and try to force it into your preconceptions, then you're a propagandist and an ideologue, and, like, you're bending the greater to the lesser.
So, and that makes it feel cheap and It doesn't fit well.
And, like, The Lion King's a pretty good movie.
I mean, from a psychological perspective, it devolves into propaganda from time to time.
That happens now in any Disney films, but, you know, it's still a work of genius, which is why you all know it.
This is where you get your religion.
Okay so that's an archetypal image.
And they open with it, right?
So it's the dawn of consciousness.
So it's the new day, but it's also the dawn of consciousness.
It's the dawn of consciousness because you're a visual creature.
And it's also the dawn of consciousness because you wake up in the morning.
So it's like sun, rise, light, dawn of consciousness.
And then the music is a celebration of that.
And you can feel it.
It grips you right away.
I mean, that part of the music is really, really nice.
I think that's the, is that the gospel singers from South Africa?
I think it is.
The guys that played with Paul Simon, I think so.
They're great.
Okay, so what are all the animals doing all of a sudden?
And?
They're waking up and?
They're paying attention to a call.
Right?
And the call is musical, so then the question is, well what's music?
Well music is a representation of like the dynamic patterns of things.
And so you get all this complex information that's going on right off the bat.
Consciousness dawns, and now there's a call.
And everything that's sentient is to pay attention to the call.
That's pretty good for like five seconds of film.
So now there's the filmmaker.
The filmmakers hit you with a whole succession of very beautiful images, and you know they do that with the very beautiful music that's underneath, and that's to put you like in a state of harmony with, well, not only with nature but with your own conceptions of nature and your sense of aesthetics.
It works quite nicely.
it pops into a dream very quickly.
It's so cool.
It's too much to take in here.
What to find then can ever be found.
At the sun rolling cloud.
At the sapphire sky.
Beats great and small.
On the endless ground.
so there's a lot going on there.
So the lyrics are quite interesting because the lyrics are making representation to the to that state of being that I talked to you about that William James had experienced say with his nitrous oxide visions, but that also that Piaget And the constructivists sort of think about it as the ground of being.
So, you know, the lyricist made a case that what surrounds you is informative to a degree that you will never be able to comprehend it.
And the implication under that is that, you know, at least one of the ways of construing the ground of experiential being is as an information-rich matrix.
And the music is pushing you in that direction, too, because the music is a representation of what that information-rich matrix is like.
It's patterned and complex, but understandable, and it also evokes emotion.
So, that's reality.
And there's a lot of paradise imagery in here too, eh?
Because it's sort of like, all these animals are, they're all doing the same thing, and they're sort of existing in harmony.
It's like, this elephant's covered with birds, and so it's, in a way, it's a childish view of the world, because, you know, those elephants are covered with ticks, and, you know, the lions are half-starved because it's been a drought, and, you know, it's not so good out there on the African plains.
It's not all, you know.
That'll teach me.
Okay, so But they're getting you in the mood.
Now, the lyricist also made reference to the fact that There's a paradise—there's an element of genesis in Lyricism, because she talks about our arrival on the earth, so to speak, and then the dawning of consciousness, which is this step into the sun.
And so that's an archetypal motif.
We're placed on earth—well, here we are, after all—and poof!
We woke up.
And the reason that's an archetypal idea is because that's what happens to everybody.
You're placed on the earth.
Bang!
One day you wake up.
It's like the eternal experience of human beings, and there's something that's deeply real about it.
Now that was that was cool.
You better watch that again.
It's the circle of night.
So that's a revelation, right?
So that's a very sneaky bit of the camera work.
So, you know, first of all, your vision is obscured, but then it's directed by the motion to this, like, place.
What's that?
Well, that's a good question.
It's what?
Pride Rock.
And just what exactly is Pride Rock?
That's right, the rock is where the king is, that's right, that's the top of the That's the top of the pyramid.
Now remember those trees I showed you from the shaman?
It's so cool, I just figured this out the other day.
Inside that tree, there was a mountain, and the mountain was surrounded by a snake.
You remember that?
There's a circle with a snake around it.
That's exactly the structure of this lion king set up.
You remember, so you've got the mountain in the middle there.
What's on the outside?
Hmm?
Hyenas, that's right.
The chaos is out there, where the light won't touch.
Right?
It's a perfect representation of the Scandinavian World Tree.
So cool.
So, okay, now, obviously, you and other animals are supposed to lift up your eyes, which is what the filmmaker made you do, and focus on this thing.
It's a rock.
What is a rock?
What does a rock stand for?
Yes, exactly.
Why?
Balanced structure.
Why?
Why isn't rock a good metaphor for that?
That's right.
Rocks.
They're strong.
Even in an earthquake, if you're lucky, they won't liquefy.
So you want to stand on a rock.
Right.
The question is, what kind of rock do you want to stand on?
And that's exactly.
Is it a physical rock?
That's one way of looking at it.
Or is there a metaphysical rock that's even a better rock?
Well, that's partly what this film investigates.
But at the moment, there's a rock.
It's been there forever.
That thing at the top of the dominance hierarchy, which is why you lift up your eyes to it.
And the king here is a lion.
Why does that make sense?
Lions aren't kings, after all.
But it makes sense.
Why?
They're at the top of the food chain.
Okay, so that's a good one.
good one.
Any other possible reasons?
Yes?
Maybe the main sort of represents a legal authority?
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah, definitely.
And the animators capitalize on that all the time.
And they're kind of noble-looking, you know, because they're muscular, and plus they could eat you.
Right, so that sort of indicates that there are certain circumstances under which you are at the bottom of the hierarchy, and the lion is, in fact, at the top.
So, because a lion is also an awe-inspiring beast.
Like, you know, the shepherds in the Old Testament, around that time, you know, a shepherd, you think, well, a shepherd, he's dressed this little frilly hat, and, you know, he's not much of a powerhouse at all.
But those guys used to fight off lions.
It's like, you've got to be really tough to fight off a lion with a stick, you know?
So, yeah.
So anyways, okay, so there's the rock, and the sun is shining on it, and what are the animals doing?
Gathering around the rock.
Now, we accept that as a narrative Possibility.
Right?
You're not sitting there thinking in the theatre, what the hell are those animals doing gathering around the rock?
And the fact that you're not sitting there thinking that is an indication that you're following the archetypal trail of the story.
It makes sense to you that a diverse bunch of drawings of animals would, you know, come together around a rock.
That makes sense.
Why?
Well, it has something to do with our dominance hierarchy proclivity, and the fact that we can recognize an authority structure, and we know how to interact with it.
And so, these aren't animals, after all.
They're people.
Well, they're not, because they're drawings, but they're certainly not animals.
They're not acting like animals.
Or they're acting like half-human, half-animals.
All right, now, who's that little guy?
Okay, what's he good for?
Information.
Yes.
Why?
Why is he good for information?
And so what?
Why is that relevant?
He can get up there, way the hell up there, where the king can't even see, and he can see everything.
It's Horus's eye.
That's exactly right.
That's the Egyptian eye that says, pay attention.
And so the bird is attention, fundamentally.
And the king, by the same for the bird, he's a little ratty bird, and he's kind of funny.
I think he's that English comedian.
So he's a bit of a comical character, but the king will listen to him.
And so that shows that this king is a properly humble king, because it's just a stupid bird and you could like bite it in half in one bite, which is kind of what Scar threatens to do, because Scar doesn't want to pay attention, because then he'd figure out who he was.
So, but the king, he'll pay attention to even, you know, this is also why in fairy tales it's often The youngest son, the oldest son is usually the one who everyone likes and admires, and he's like the football quarterback of the fairy tale.
And the younger son is like, well, he's kind of a little weaselly, useless guy.
And the older son always fails, and then usually the second son fails too, and it's usually because they're arrogant.
And then the third son, he's so clueless he doesn't even know what to do!
But they kick him out because they just as soon get rid of him.
And, you know, why not let him go?
You don't want him around anyways, and so he wanders out in the bush and, you know, he comes across a gnome or something that, you know, it's like you just ignore it.
The other brothers did.
But he doesn't know what the hell he's doing, so the gnome talks to him and he thinks, well, I might as well talk to this gnome, and, you know, then the gnome tells him what to do.
And then the youngest son wins, and that's an archetypal story too.
It's like, if you don't know what you're doing, don't be so sure that you know who to ignore.
Now that's a very, very useful piece of advice.
But then you might ask yourself, how do you know when you don't know what you're doing?
So do you have any thoughts on that?
How is it that you would know if you didn't know what you were doing?
You're consistently failing?
Yes, but that's very good.
That's very good.
But there's one more thing that goes along with that, and I'll just add it, because it's a bit of a trick in some sense.
And it's bothering you.
Right?
So there's failure plus suffering.
Now, one of the inferences that you can draw from failure plus suffering is that nature is your enemy, and you're a victim of the Great Father.
It's like a very standard presupposition, especially of young people, because of course you're failing, you're young.
It's like, what the hell do you know?
You know, you've got a whole bunch of things to learn yet before you can be successful.
But, you know, that's an archetypal situation in large part.
Okay, so.
Great.
So now we see the king.
So what do we notice about the king?
He's kind of a tough-looking guy.
He's not one of these defeated lobster types of lion kings.
He's like an upstanding sort of confidant.
So he was also in the sun, right?
So the sun shines on the king, and that's because the king is awake, and the sun also illuminates him.
You may not know this, but you've seen coins, of course.
Silver coin, that's the moon.
The head of the queen is the head of the queen on the moon.
And gold coins are the sun, and so are halos.
And the idea is that the thing that's at the top is like the sun.
And why is it like the sun?
Well, because the sun is consciousness.
And why is the sun consciousness?
Because you're awake during the day.
Now, there's a bunch of other reasons as well.
The sun is also the thing that defeats darkness, and that's what the king should be.
And that's right in her coins.
And they're symbols of value.
Oh, and the wind is blowing on her.
It's not bothering you, by the way, but that's a divine wind.
That's pneuma.
Pneuma.
That's spirit, because spirit is often wind, as in inspiration and respiration.
That's all spirit.
So, the spirit came.
Here comes the bird.
It's not lunch.
It's his friend.
...and hope Through faith and love Now, who in the world is that?
That's Carl Jung.
Yeah.
The circle of love Who's that?
Well, that's the Virgin Mary and Christ.
That's the Virgin and the Son.
It's a way older idea than the Christian idea.
It's been around forever.
Why?
Because any culture that doesn't worship the mother and child dies.
Obviously.
So it's an archetypal image of value.
Clearly!
Obviously!
You don't have to think about that much.
Oh yeah, that's it.
It always happens, eh?
Two things always happen when I show this, always, because it evokes archetypal emotions.
So, you're all going and making, oh, isn't that cute noises, right?
What kind of noises are those?
Yeah, yeah.
So, babies like that noise.
That's why you're making that noise.
It's like, the baby will like that noise.
They'll smile at you, and then you'll think that the baby likes you.
Even though it's just a survival mechanism.
It is, but the baby actually likes you.
So, why is that cute?
First of all, it's not real.
You might notice that.
It's a drawing.
Why is it cute?
What makes it cute?
Big eyes, yeah, that's a good one, yeah, that's part of it.
Aliens have big eyes, too, though.
What else?
It's cuddly.
It's cuddly, yeah, yeah, so it's mammalian.
It's not a lizard, you know, so that's helpful.
It's got fur so you can pet it.
It sort of invites being petted.
And it moves like this.
It's like, that's so cute!
You know, that little polar bear.
I've been watching a little bit of that.
That's like pathologically cute, that thing.
And it's, you know, part of it is it's sort of wobbling around, and it's like the poor thing, it's trying to walk, it's having a rough time, and everybody thinks, oh, that's so cute!
If that was happening to you, you wouldn't think it was cute.
But, you know, animals across a diverse range of mammalian species know cute, you know, and they tend to respond to, like, big-eyed, symmetrical, small-nosed, flat-faced, Helpless movement, cuddly, and not eat it.
Right?
So it's an inhibitory—it's a set of inhibitory perceptual mechanisms in large part.
But since we're also mammals, you better think that thing's cute, because you're going to be taking care of it for a long time.
So, you know, there has to be a deep, deep, deep biological connection that's forged almost immediately, and of course that's mediated in women in particular by oxytocin, which is released In tremendous quantities after birth and during breastfeeding, so.
And it's necessary, you know.
It turns on new circuits, and they're circuits you need, because like, one day you're not a mother and then the next day you are.
That's not—you are not the same creature at that point.
And you don't want to even be the same creature.
You're pretty happy about the whole issue, hopefully.
So that's a very interesting image.
Because, first of all, he was playing with the little Lion King with those balls, and so there's this sort of globe thing that's attracting him.
So, like, representations of the sun, and you might think, well, you're just reading that into it, but then, of course, this happens.
It's like he's breaking open the sun to release the essence of the sun onto the Little Lion King.
And he is, because the sun represents gold.
Gold is pure, right?
Gold won't mix with any other metal, so that's partly why it's a symbol of value.
It's a noble metal.
The sun is made out of gold, so to speak, except it's like metagold from a symbolic perspective, because it's like the gold of higher consciousness.
And it's being dumped on the little lion king, because for the tribe's sake, and then maybe even for the sake of the whole ecosystem around the tribe, that king better be awake.
So that's what this like little Carl Jung baboon here is trying to get going.
Okay, so now you notice two so now you notice two things.
Lovely.
This is a lovely, very well put together scene.
It's very thoughtful.
So the animals are starting to lift up their heads, so you get the sense of heightened interest.
And the music is starting to rise a little bit and speed up the tempo a little bit.
You know something's going to happen here that's associated with the little pinnacle of the rock there.
*music*
Who's despair and cold?
It's so, so well edited.
You know, so this little thing that now represents what will become the guiding consciousness of the land is revealed.
And the automatic response of all the animals is first to bow so they're in awe, as they should be, and then to celebrate.
And then that's, you know, that's pretty good.
It's pretty impressive.
But then, you know, God himself gets in the act, because just at the opportune time the sun breaks and shines on the little lion.
At the same time, they move the music up, like they change the key of the music, and so it causes an upswelling of emotion.
And that's what Jung would call that, if and when that happened, that's what he would call a synchronous event.
So that's a demonstration of a synchronous event.
It's where, they're very rare, these things.
They're, from a Jungian perspective, they occur In very emotionally intense situations where the context, the external context of the occurrence seems to match the meaning of the occurrence.
So, anyways, whether or not you believe such things are possible, that is exactly what this little film clip is trying to demonstrate.
Yep, pretty decent, all right.
So, you've got the animals, you've got the stone hierarchy that's a pyramid, you've got the thing that's at the top of it.
Just like the little pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill with the I on top.
Exactly the same idea.
Part of the idea is that the thing that's at the very top of the pyramid isn't part of the pyramid.
So it's not stone.
The Little Lion King, he isn't stone.
He's the thing that produces stone as he moves through time, right?
Because he's the culture-producing force.
And so this is set up to demonstrate visually that at the center of being is culture.
At the top of culture is the culture-producing process or force.
And that's the illuminated savior.
And that's what all the animals worship.
Instinctively.
It's like, yes, that's right.
That's how it goes.
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