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Jan. 26, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

02:37:24

2017 Personality 04/05: Heroic and Shamanic Initiations

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	Thank you.
	Alright, so I suggested to you last class that human beings have a world as a place of action through the lens of their social cognitive biological substructure.
	And I made that argument on the basis of the supposition that our primary environment was actually other people and I mentioned to you I believe that those other people are arranged in hierarchies of influence and authority or power or dominance which is often how it's construed and that the dominance hierarchy as a structure is at least 300 million years old which makes it older than
	trees and it's for that reason that you share The same neurobiology to govern your observations of your position in the hierarchy as lobsters do.
	Which is a remarkable fact.
	You know, it's remarkable that the lobster uses serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate its status position.
	And that modifying the serotonin function in the lobster can produce changes in its behavior, can help the lobster overcome defeat, for example, which is very much equivalent to what happens to a human being when they take Antidepressants, you know, it's a good example of the conservation of biological structure by evolution and another good illustration of the continuity of life on Earth.
	It's really amazing.
	But the other thing it is a testament to is the ancient nature of the social structure.
	Now, we tend to think of the social structure as something other than nature.
	Because society is, I suppose, mythologically opposed, it's opposed in a narrative way, culture is opposed to nature.
	It's the town in the forest.
	But the town has been around a long time, so to speak, and the structure of the town is also part of nature in that the dominance hierarchy is part of nature and because it's so ancient you have to consider it as part of the mechanism that has played the role of selection in the process of natural selection and so roughly what seems to happen is that there is a plethora of dominance hierarchies
	especially in complex human communities and many of them are masculine in structure in that there are dominance hierarchies that primarily men compete in or that has been the historical norm and that some men rise to the top based on whatever the dominance hierarchy is based on And they make their preferential mates and it's a good strategy for women to engage in because why and many sorts of female animals do
	precisely this is they let the males battle it out and then pick from the top and or often the dominant males There's no choice on the part of the females.
	It's the dominant males just chasing away the subordinate males.
	But with humans, it's usually the case that the females have the opportunity to do at least some choosing.
	And so, we have, if you think about that, what that implies is that we have evolved to climb up dominance hierarchies.
	And then I would say it's not exactly that even because there are many different dominance hierarchies.
	And so the skills that you might use to climb up one might not be necessarily the same skills that you would use to climb up another.
	And so then I would say what we have evolved for instead...
	And I'm still speaking mostly on the masculine edge of things, historically speaking, is the ability to climb up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies, right?
	And that's a whole different idea.
	It's like the average hierarchy across vast spans of time.
	And I think it's for that reason that We, among others, that we evolve general intelligence because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism and it seems to be situation-independent, so to speak.
	And, of course, there's been an arms race for the development of intelligence between men and women because each gender has to keep up with the other and women have their own dominance hierarchies.
	There's certainly no doubt about that.
	And, of course, now men and women more increasingly compete within the same hierarchies, and we don't exactly know how to sort that out yet, because it's an extraordinarily new phenomena.
	But in any case, because of the permanence of the dominance hierarchy, It has come to be represented in fundamental narratives because human beings, and this is something that we share everywhere,
	it's the thing the Wall Street banker shares with the Kalahari Kung Bushmen, who are among the, genetically speaking, they seem to be very close to what the original, most original human beings were like in Africa before the diaspora about 50,000 years ago.
	But, you know, both of those people, despite their vast differences, live in communities that have a hierarchical structure That are composed of individuals that are embedded in a natural world.
	You know, the world outside of the dominance hierarchy.
	And so that's the standard human environment, I would say.
	And so stories that rely on the representations of those environments and their interactions are what you might describe as universal stories.
	And that's why people can understand them.
	And I would say further, and this is drawing substantially on say, derivations of the work of Carl Jung because I think he delved into this more deeply than anyone else.
	So a lot of this stuff is quite Jungian in its origins.
	We...
	The commonality between human beings...
	So, you know, you have to have commonalities in order to communicate, right?
	Axiomatic commonalities, because otherwise you have to explain everything.
	And so, there's many things that human beings don't have to explain to one another.
	We don't have to explain anger.
	We don't have to explain jealousy.
	We don't have to explain fear.
	We don't have to explain pain.
	We don't have to explain joy.
	We don't have to explain love.
	Etc.
	Those are built into us and so there are predicates of being human and you could say that those human predicates and the standard human environment produce standard narratives and then you could say even further and this is more of a leap I would say is that Those who act out the role of the victor in those standard narratives are precisely the people who attain victory in life.
	And I would say biologically defined in that they make more attractive partners, but also I believe that there's an alignment between human well-being, which is a very weak word, And participation in these meta-narratives that drive success.
	Because, well, do you want to be a failure or a success?
	Well, you know, it's hard to be a success.
	You have to adopt a lot of responsibility.
	And so you might be willing to take your chances as a failure.
	But I can't exactly...
	I'm not going to make the presumption that that's going to put you in a situation Other than one where you experience a lot of frustration, anger, disappointment, depression, pain and anxiety at the bottom of the heap.
	And so, generally, that's not what people are aiming for.
	Although, under certain circumstances, if people don't like responsibility, And are willing to take their chances.
	They might take the irresponsibility and its apparent freedoms over the necessity of thinking things through the medium and long run.
	Anyways We stopped here.
	I suggested to you that one of the primary narrative representations was the known, or culture, or order, or the explored territory, or the dominance hierarchy.
	I think those things are basically interchangeable from a representational perspective.
	You know, in the movie The Lion King, that's represented by Pride Rock, which is the central place of orientation, founded on rock, which is the sort of thing that people embed their memories in.
	That's why we make sculptures and gravestones and that sort of thing.
	Rock stands for permanent, and to have rock under your feet is to be on a solid foundation, and that's a pyramid in some sense in that movie, and the pyramid is topped by You know, the king and queen and their offspring.
	So, that's the divine couple.
	That's one way of thinking about it.
	And Simba, of course, is the newborn hero.
	And, you know, you understand that even though it's lions.
	And drawings of lions at that, and animals are acting it out.
	It's completely irrelevant to you that those characters happen to be animated, and that what you're watching is a fiction.
	So, and I would say to you, with regards to fiction, you know, you might say, well, is fiction true or not?
	And the answer to that is yes and no.
	It's not true in that the events portrayed in fiction Occurred in the world, they didn't.
	But fiction is true the same way numbers are true, I would say.
	Like, you know, if you have one apple and one orange and one banana, The commonality between all of those three is one.
	And you might say, well, is one as real as one fruit?
	Is the abstraction one as real as one fruit?
	And I would say, it depends on what you mean by real, but representing things mathematically and abstractly gives you incredible power, and you could make the case that the abstraction is actually more real than the phenomena that it represents.
	And certainly mathematicians would make that case.
	They would say that mathematics is in some sense more real than the phenomenal world.
	And, you know, you don't have to believe that.
	Mostly it's a matter of choice in some sense, but you can't deny the fact that An abstraction has enough reality so that if you're proficient in using it, you can really...
	You can change the world in insanely powerful ways.
	You know, I mean, all the computational equipment you people are using are dependent on the abstractions one and zero, essentially.
	And I mean...
	Look at what emerges from that.
	And so I would say with regards to fiction, if you take someone like Dostoevsky, who I think is a favorite of mine, by the way, I would highly recommend that you read all five of his great novels because they are unparalleled in their psychological depth.
	And so if you're interested in psychology, Dostoevsky's the person for you.
	Tolstoy's more of a sociologist, but Dostoevsky, man, he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes around.
	Transformative reading.
	Anyways, Dostoevsky's characters, this character named Raskolnikov, is a character in Crime and Punishment.
	And Raskolnikov is a materialist, rationalist, I would say, which was a rather new type of person back in the 1880s.
	He was sort of taken by the idea that God was dead and convinced himself that the only reason that anyone acted in a moral way, in a traditional way, was because of cowardice.
	They were unable to Remove from them the restrictions of mere convention and act in the manner of someone who rose above the norm.
	And so he's tortured by these ideas.
	He's half starving.
	He's a law student.
	He doesn't have enough to eat.
	He doesn't have much money.
	You know, he's not thinking all that clearly either and he's got a lot of family problems.
	His mother's sick and she can't send him much money and his sister is planning to engage in a marriage that's loveless to someone who's rather tyrannical who she hopes will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law school.
	And they write him brave letters telling him that she's very much in love with this guy, but he is smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that his sister is just planning to prostitute herself, you know, in an altruistic manner.
	He's not very happy with that.
	And then, at the same time, as all this is happening, He becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he's, you know, pawning his last possessions to and she's a horrible person and not only by his estimation, she pawns a lot of things for the neighborhood and people really don't like her.
	She's grasping and cruel and deceitful and resentful and And she has this niece who's not very bright, intellectually impaired, whom she basically treats as a slave and beats all the time.
	And so Raskolnikov, involved in this mess and half-starved and a bit delirious, And possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the pawnbroker,
	take her wealth, which all she does is keep it in a chest, free the niece, so that seems like a good idea, so remove one Apparently horrible and useless person from the world free his sister from the necessity of this loveless marriage and allow him to go to law school where he can become educated and do some good for the world.
	You know, so one of the things that's lovely about Dostoevsky is that You know, sometimes when one person is arguing against another or when they're having an argument in their head, they make their opponent into a straw man, which is basically they take their opponent and caricature their perspective and try to make it as weak as possible and laugh about it.
	And then they come up with their argument and destroy the straw man and feel that they've obtained victory.
	It's a very pathetic way of thinking.
	It's not thinking at all.
	What thinking is is when you adopt the opposite position from your suppositions and you make that argument as strong as you can possibly make it and then you pit your perspective against that strong Iron man, not the straw man.
	And you argue it out.
	You battle it out.
	And that's what Dostoevsky does in his novels.
	I mean, he's the people who stand for the antithesis of what Dostoevsky actually believes are often the strongest, smartest, and sometimes most admirable people in the book.
	And so, he takes great moral courage to do that.
	And, you know, in Raskolnikov, What he wanted to do was set up a character who had every reason to commit murder.
	Every reasonable reason.
	Philosophically, practically, ethically even.
	Well, so Raskolnikov goes and he kills the old lady with an axe.
	And it doesn't go the way he expects it will, because what he finds out is that post-murder Raskolnikov and pre-murder Raskolnikov are not the same people at all.
	They're not even close to the same people.
	He's entered an entirely different universe.
	And Dostoevsky does a lovely job of describing that universe of horror and chaos and deception and suffering and terror and all of that.
	He doesn't even use the money.
	He just buries it in an alley as fast as he can and then doesn't want anything to do with it again.
	Anyways, the reason I'm telling you all this is potentially to entice you into reading the book because it is an amazing, amazing book.
	But also because you might say, well, is what happened to Raskolnikov true?
	Are the stories in that book true?
	And the answer to that is, well, From a factual perspective, clearly, they're untrue.
	But then if you think of Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a particular type of person who lived at that time, and the embodiment of a certain kind of ideology, which had swept across Europe and really invaded Russia, and which was actually a precursor, a philosophical precursor to the Russian Revolution, Then Raskolnikov is more real than any one person.
	He's like a composite person.
	He's like a person whose irrelevancies have been eliminated for the purpose of relating something about the structure of the world.
	And so I like to think of those things as sort of meta-real.
	Meta-real.
	They're more real than real.
	And, of course, that's what you expect people to do when they tell you about their own lives, about their own day.
	You don't want a factual description of every muscle twitch.
	You want them to distill their experiences down into the gist which is the significance of the experience and the significance of the experience is roughly what you can derive from listening to the experience that will change the way that you look at the world and act in the world so it's valuable information and they can tell you a terrible story and that can be valuable because that can tell you how not to look in the world Look
	at the world and act in it, or they can tell you a positive story.
	You can derive benefit either way, which is why we also like to go watch stories about horrible psychopathic thugs.
	You know, and hopefully we're learning not to be like them, although there are additional advantages in that You know, you might say that someone who is incapable of cruelty is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of cruelty and I would say, and this follows Jung as well, that that's incorrect and it's dangerously incorrect because if you are not capable of cruelty, you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is.
	And so, part of the reason that people go watch anti-heroes and villains is because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth.
	and if you grow teeth then you realize that you're somewhat dangerous or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing and so that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel what it means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naive And in the second
	case, you're dangerous, but you have it under control.
	And you know, a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training.
	It's like, we're not training you to fight.
	We're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights.
	But if you happen to have to get in one, And I guess the philosophy also is that if you're competent at fighting, that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight because when someone pushes you, you'll be able to respond with confidence and with any luck, and this is certainly the case with bullies, with any luck a reasonable show of confidence, which is very much equivalent to a show of dominance, is going to be enough to make the bully back off.
	And so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace.
	And that's partly why Jung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate their shadow.
	And he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt because the human shadow Which is all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize reaches all the way to hell.
	And what he meant by that was it's through an analysis of your own shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable, and you as well, of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterized, let's say, the 20th century.
	And without that understanding, there's no possibility of bringing it under control.
	When you study Nazi Germany, for example, or you study the Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, and you're asking yourself, well, what are these perpetrators like?
	Forget about the victims.
	Let's talk about the perpetrators.
	The answer is, they're just like you.
	And if you don't know that, that just means that you don't know anything about people, including yourself.
	And then it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you.
	And believe me, that's no picnic.
	So that's enough to traumatize people, and that's partly why they don't do it.
	And it's also partly why the path to enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom but it's not that at all.
	It's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face.
	And everyone has that old...
	There's this old story in King Arthur where the knights go off to look for the Holy Grail, which is either the cup that Christ drank out of it at the Last Supper, or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified.
	The stories vary, but it's basically a holy object, like the phoenix in some sense, that's a representation of transformation.
	So it's an ideal and so King Arthur's knights who sit at a round table because they're all roughly equal go off to find the most valuable thing and where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don't know where it is?
	Well, each of the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him.
	And that's a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of personality, which is exactly the same thing, is precisely through the portal that you do not want to climb through.
	And the reason for that is actually quite technical.
	This is a Jungian presupposition too, is that Well, there's a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped and a lot of those things are because there's things you've avoided looking at because you don't want to look at them and there's parts of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to develop those parts and so it's by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don't want to look because that's where you've kept it.
	And that's why there's an idiosyncratic element of it for everyone.
	Your particular place of enlightenment and terror is not going to be the same as yours, except that they're both places of enlightenment and terror.
	So they're equivalent at one level of analysis and different at another.
	So anyways, back to fiction and what it does.
	It distills Truth and it produces characters that are composites and the more they become composites the more they approximate a mythological character and so they become more and more universally true and more and more approximating religious deities but the problem with that is they become more and more distant from individual experience and so with literature there's this very tight Line,
	where you need to make the character more than merely human, but not so much of a god that...
	You know, one of the things that happened to Superman in the 1980s.
	Superman started out...
	He's got a heavenly set of parents, by the way, and an earthly set of parents, and he's an orphan like Harry Potter.
	Very common theme.
	Is that when Superman first emerged, he could only jump over buildings, you know, and maybe he could stop a locomotive, but by the time the 1980s rolled around, like, he could juggle planets and, you know, swallow hydrogen bombs and, you know, he could do anything.
	Well, people stopped buying the Superman comics because how interesting is that?
	It's like something horrible happens and Superman deals with it.
	And something else horrible happens and Superman deals with it.
	And it's like, that's dull!
	He turned into such an archetype.
	He was basically the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God.
	And that's no fun.
	It's like, God wins.
	And then God wins again.
	And then again, God wins.
	And, you know...
	So then they had to weaken him in different ways with kryptonite, you know.
	So green kryptonite kind of made him sick.
	And red kryptonite, I think, kind of mutated him, if I remember correctly.
	And anyways, they had to introduce flaws into his character so that there could be some damn plot.
	And that's something to think about, you know.
	There's a deep existential lesson in that, in that your being is limited and flawed and fragile.
	You're like the genie, which is genius in the little tiny...
	In the little tiny lamp, you know, this immense potential, but constrained in this tiny little living space, as Robin Williams said when he played the genie in Aladdin.
	But the fact that you have limitations means that the plot of your life is the overcoming of those limitations, and that if you didn't have limitations, well, there wouldn't be a plot, and maybe there would be no life.
	And so that's part of the reason why perhaps you have to accept the fact that you're Flawed and insufficient and live with it and consider it a precondition for being.
	It's at least a reasonable It's a reasonable idea.
	So anyways, one of the main characters is the country, the known, the explored territory.
	We went over that a bit and it always has two elements.
	I mean, your country is your greatest friend and your worst enemy, you know, because it squashes you into conformity and demands that you act in a certain manner and reduces your individuality to that element that's tolerated by everyone else And it constrains your potential in a single direction and so it's really tyrannical but at the same time it provides you with a place to be and all of the benefits
	that have accrued as a result of the actions of your ancestors and all the other people that you're associated with, so...
	There's the good tyrant, or the bad tyrant, and the good king, and those are archetypal figures, and that's because they're always true.
	And they're always true simultaneously.
	You know, which is partly why I object to the notion of the patriarchy, because it's a mytholo...
	It's the...
	What do you call that?
	It's the...
	Apprehension of a mythological trope, which is that of the evil tyrant, without any appreciation for the fact that the archetype actually has two parts, and the other part is the wise king.
	And, you know, you can tell an evil tyrant story about culture, no problem, but...
	It's one-sided and that's very dangerous because you don't want to forget all the good things that you have while you're criticizing all the ways that things are in error.
	That's a lack of gratitude and it's a lack of wisdom and it's founded in resentment and it's very dangerous, both personally and socially.
	I told you that Captain Hook is a tyrant because he's got this crocodile chasing him and the crocodile has a clock in its stomach and that's death.
	It's like obviously, right?
	Tick, tick, tick, tick.
	And it's a crocodile and it's under the water and it's already got a taste of him so he's being chased around by death and that makes him terrified and resentful and cruel and bitter and so he's a tyrant.
	And he wants to wreak havoc everywhere and then Peter Pan, of course, looks at Captain Hook and thinks, why the hell should I grow up?
	to be a tyrant and sacrifice all the potential of childhood and the answer to that is the potential sacrifices itself if you don't utilize it as you mature and you just end up a 40 year old lost boy which is a horrifying thing to behold it's almost as if you're the corpse of a child the living corpse of a child because who the hell wants a 6 year old 40 year old you're a little on the stale side by that point Not the world's happiest individual.
	So, you know, your potential is going to disappear because you age anyways, and so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction and at least become something, no matter how limited, rather than nothing!
	So...
	You know, Peter Pan, that's a great story.
	It's a great mythological story.
	So...
	Well, so, let's talk about tyrants.
	Well, not only are they mythological figures, but they exist and they tend to be deified.
	I mean, Stalin was, for all intents and purposes, God the Father in Soviet Russia, although he was pretty much only the worst elements of Old Testament God who was, you know, constantly smiting people and wiping out populations and doing all sorts of things that seemed to be quite nasty,
	but Nonetheless, you know, people worshipped him in many ways and he's a representation of just exactly what goes wrong when things really go wrong, when people stop paying attention and when they all lie because one of the things that characterized the communist state was that no one ever got to say anything they actually believed, ever!
	And that was partly because One out of three people was an informer which meant if you had a family of six people two of them were informing on the government about you and that included your own children and if you were an informer you were often amply rewarded by the state so that if you lived in an overcrowded apartment building with three families in the same flat and you informed on You know, the woman down the hall that you didn't like, she got shipped off to the old concentration camp and you got her apartment.
	And so that was a lovely society and it only killed about 30 million people between 1919 and 1959.
	So that's what happens when the archetypal structure gets tilted badly when people Forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill as citizens, as awake citizens who are capable of stating the truth and the archetype shifts so there's nothing left of the great father except the tyrant and let's not have that happen.
	I mean the one on the right is really interesting because Consciously or unconsciously, you know, there's Stellan surrounded by what is for all intents and purposes fire.
	You know, he looks like Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty when she shows up at Aurora's christening.
	You know, she puts her arms up in the air and green fire surrounds her.
	It's like he's surrounded by fire and there's Lenin above him who's like king of the fiery realm and that's for sure.
	So, I mean, all the terrors that happened in the Soviet Union didn't start under Stalin, they started under Lenin and Lenin was, or Stalin was definitely Lenin's legitimate son, let's put it that way.
	So, You know, this is another example of the tyrannical element of the Great Father and the sorts of things that can happen.
	I mean, I kind of got an evil kick out of this ad that was quite old.
	You know, it's kitschy in some sense and, you know, it shows...
	I don't think that's something you'd ever see in a magazine today.
	Ten unusual stamps showing evil dictator.
	You know...
	Well, fair enough.
	I mean, that's what he was and that's the consequence and that's just a tiny bit of the consequence because the Nazis wiped out a very large number of people often using compassion as a justification so when they went after the mentally ill and the terminally ill and Those whose intelligence was compromised for biological reasons and those who
	were too old they basically justified it by saying that the enforced euthanasia was merciful and that you were actually being a good person by complying with the requirements.
	And so, something to think about.
	More mythological representations.
	I like these quite a bit.
	So there's their Hitler as, you know, knight of the faith, essentially, with, I suppose that's a recreation of the Christian holy spirit dove, you know, except it's an eagle, which is a bird of prey and a, what do you call those things, a scavenger, right?
	So that's kind of interesting.
	But that's Hitler as knight of the blood, roughly speaking, and There, this is an allied war poster, essentially, that assimilates the Nazis to poisonous snakes and,
	you know, we don't like poisonous snakes very much and it's probably because they've been preying on us for approximately 20 million years because snakes and primates, humans in particular, co-evolved And so, the snake is a representation of that which lies outside the comfortable domain and that can be,
	you know, a snake, obviously, or it can be an abstract snake and the abstract snake is your enemy or an even more abstract snake is the evil in your own heart and This is going to be a bit of a leap for you,
	but there's this ancient idea that developed in the West over thousands of years, far predating Christianity, that, at least its origins, that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, which is like a, what the hell?
	It's a very strange idea.
	But the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that You know, we have this circuitry that detects predators and a predator, a good representation of a predator is a snake or a monster that incorporates snake-like features like a dragon or something like that or a dinosaur with lots of teeth or a shark that lives under the water and will pull you down.
	You know, because I suspect a lot of our ancestors met a nasty death at the hands of Nile crocodiles while they were in the African Velt going down to get some nice water.
	So, you know, that's the thing that jumps up and pulls you under and, you know, that happens in your own life because things jump up and pull you under, you know, and use the same circuitry.
	We use the same circuitry to process unknown things that upset us as we once used to detect predators who were likely to invade our space.
	And so, and human beings are capable of abstraction.
	And so, you know, you could think about the real predator that might invade your space.
	And maybe that's a snake or a wolf or some kind of monster.
	You know, and that's pretty concrete and biological.
	Chimps have that.
	You know, chimps don't like snakes.
	And so if a chimp comes across a snake in the wild, then like a big, let's say, I don't know what live with chimps.
	I don't know if they're pythons, but they have constrictors there anyways.
	So, you know, maybe there's like a 20-foot constrictor and the chimp, like, stays a good distance away from it, but it won't leave.
	And then it has this particular cry that it utters that's called a snake-raa, W-R-A-A. And so it makes this noise, which means something like, holy shit, that's a big snake.
	And I actually mean that because the circuits that primates use to utter distress calls are the same circuits that we use to curse.
	Just so you know, that's why people with Tourette's Syndrome swear, because like, what's up with that?
	How can you have a neurological condition that makes you swear?
	Well, it turns out that guttural Affect-laden curses are mediated by a different speech circuit, and that's the speech circuit we share with the predator alarms of other primates.
	So that's pretty cool.
	So anyways, the chimp stands there and makes this snake noise, and then a bunch of other chimps come running, and you know, some of them stay a fair ways from the snake, and some of them get pretty close, but they'll stand there and watch that snake for like 24 hours.
	You know, so they're fascinated by it.
	And, you know, if you've handled snakes, you can understand that fascination because they're fascinating, you know, and they're numinous, I would say.
	That's the right way of putting it.
	A numinous is a word that means intrinsically meaningful, like a fire, you know.
	You can't look away from fire, you know, if you're sitting in front of a fireplace.
	It's like you're staring at it.
	And that's because you're all descended from the first mad chimpanzee who had some weird Genetic mutation that made it impossible for him to stay away from fire.
	It was like the first chimp arsonist, you know, and he figured it out, and well, hey, now he was a chimp with a stick with fire on it.
	Like, that's a mega chimp, man!
	And so, you know, we have that mutation in spades, and no wonder.
	So anyways, So they make this, you know, they have this reaction to snakes.
	And chimps that have never seen a snake, if they're in a cage and you throw a rubber snake in there, it's like, bang, they hit the roof.
	But then they look at the snake.
	You know, so it's like, it's terrifying and fascinating at the same time.
	And you should look at the snake because you want to know what it does, but you should stay away from it because it's a snake.
	So you're kind of screwed in terms of your motivations, right?
	One is get the hell away and the other is, well, don't...
	Don't let that thing do anything that you're not watching.
	And so, that's really the reaction we have to the unknown.
	It's terrifying, but we watch it.
	And then, you know, the meta-story is that not only do we watch it, but we go explore it.
	And so you might think, well, back in the Garden of Eden, so to speak, when we were living in trees, the snakes used to come and eat us, and our offspring, more likely, And, you know, we weren't very happy about that.
	And then we figured out how to maybe, maybe by accident, drop a stick on a snake.
	And that was a good thing because the snake didn't like that.
	And then maybe the next thing we learned a little later was to, like, actually take a stick and, like, whack the snake with it.
	And you can believe that the first...
	Primate who figured out that was just as popular as the guy who mastered fire, and so we're pretty good at whacking snakes with sticks, which is why Springfield has a snake-whacking day that's devoted to nothing but that.
	I don't know if you know that Simpsons episode, but it's quite comical.
	So, well, so then you think about the snake as a predator and it's the thing that invades the garden always because you just can't keep snakes out of the damn garden no matter how hard you try and then you think of snakes and maybe you think of metasnakes and like a metasnake would be Also a predator,
	but maybe that's the predator that represents the the destructive spirit of the other tribe because chimpanzees for example are quite tribal and they definitely go to war with one another and so you think you abstract out the idea of the predator to represent malevolence as such and then you take that one step further and you realize that the worst of all Evil predators is the human capacity for evil.
	And then at that point, you know, you're starting to, I would say, psychologize or spiritualize the idea of danger and making it into something that's conceptual and something that's psychological and something that you can face sort of en masse.
	I mean, one of the things people had to figure out was, how do you deal with danger?
	And so you figure out how you deal with a specific danger.
	But then, because human beings are so damn smart, they thought, well, what if we considered the class of all dangerous things?
	And then, what if we considered a mode of being that was the best mode of being in the face of the class of all dangerous things?
	Well, that's a lot better.
	You get, you know, you get to solve all the dangerous problems all at once instead of having to conjure up a different solution for every dangerous thing.
	And that's basically, as far as I can tell, where the hero story came from.
	And the hero story is basically, you know, there's a community.
	It's threatened by the emergence of some Old evil, often represented by a dragon.
	That's sort of typical, say, of the Lord of the Rings stories.
	There's a hero, often a humble guy, but not always.
	Sometimes a knight decides he'll go out there, you know, and...
	Chase down the snake, maybe even, or the serpent, or the dragon, maybe even in its lair, and he'll have a bunch of adventures on the way that transform him from, you know, useless, naive hobbit into, you know, sword-wielding hero, and he confronts the dragon and gets the gold and frees the people that it had enslaved, and then comes back transformed to share what he's learned with the community.
	It's like, well, that's the human story, fundamentally, and that's That's our basic instinctive pattern and it's represented in narratives constantly and that's partly what this...
	See, this has meaning.
	You know what this means.
	Why?
	Why do you know?
	Well, you know because it draws on symbolic representations that you already understand.
	You understand that a mess of toothed snakes is not a good thing and that maybe the sensible thing to do is stomp them and It's not like you need an instruction manual to figure out what the poster means.
	And so, you know, that's two different representations of Hitler.
	That's sort of the pro-Hitler representation.
	And I would say that's the anti-Hitler representation.
	And, you know, that's the real Hitler who at this point does not look like a very happy clam.
	So...
	So that's the known.
	That's culture.
	That's order.
	And what's eternally juxtaposed to culture and the known and the explored and order is the unknown.
	And the unknown is a strange place.
	The unknown is actually, it's a physical place.
	Like, the unknown is the place that when you're camping and you're around a fire, The unknown is everything outside the circle of the light.
	You remember in the Lion King, you may not remember, when Mufasa, that's the king, right?
	Goes and takes Simba up to show him his territory.
	He says, he is the king of everything that the light touches.
	And that's a very old idea, and you guys had no problem with, you know...
	That was fine.
	That made sense.
	And that out beyond the light was the darkness.
	And that was the elephant graveyard.
	That was death.
	That was the place of death and danger.
	That's where the hyenas hung out.
	And you weren't supposed to go there.
	And so, of course, Simba, because he's a rule-breaking hero, just like Harry Potter, immediately goes there.
	And so, you know, that's like the forbidden fruit.
	It's the same sort of idea.
	If you want someone To do something.
	The best thing to do is tell them that they shouldn't and not explain why.
	You know, so for example, if I said to you at the beginning of this class, look, I've got one rule here.
	Don't sit in that chair, no matter what.
	You'd be thinking the whole year, especially if I reminded you, Just what's up with that chair?
	Like, that chair is magical all of a sudden.
	Some of you might even...
	Well, you probably wouldn't because this is a ridiculous example.
	But maybe, you know, you come to class early and sit in that chair just to see what would happen.
	You know, and people are very curious and that's exactly what we're like.
	And that's a very old story too, right?
	It's like opening Pandora's box.
	Don't open that box!
	You'll be sorry!
	It's like...
	You know, all the horrors of the world fly out.
	And believe me...
	You will open Pandora's box many times in your life because, you know, with your family or maybe your mate or maybe your children you'll have this idea that they have a box with things in it that you want to know about and you'll say, well, I'm kind of curious about This particular event, so why don't you tell me about it?
	And they say, well, no, we probably really shouldn't open that box.
	And you keep bugging them, and then they open it.
	And then all sorts of things fly out that you didn't expect.
	And then maybe you think, hey, it would have been better if I would have just left that damn box closed.
	But...
	And you can do the same thing to yourself.
	Believe me.
	And so the Pandora's box idea, the forbidden fruit idea, that's a major league idea.
	And part of the reason in the Judeo-Christian tradition why people are saddled with the notion of original sin is because hyper-cortically developed chimpanzees without much sense can't keep their hands off things.
	And so they keep exploring even when they know better and every time they do that they learn something that That destroys the paradise that they currently inhabit, right?
	Because there's plenty.
	You never learn anything in your life that's of importance without it having a pretty damn destabilizing effect on you at the moment of realization, right?
	You learn something happy, it's like, whatever.
	You know, all that means is that I was doing things right.
	Like, it's nice and everything, but it's not informative.
	You do something and all hell breaks loose.
	That'll make you think.
	That's for sure.
	You might never stop thinking for the rest of your life.
	So...
	Anyways, the unknown.
	The unknown is that which surrounds the known.
	It's unexplored territory.
	It's usually represented as female, I think, for a variety of reasons.
	And not as female exactly, it's not the right way to think about it, as feminine.
	And that's not the same thing, because feminine is a symbolic category, whereas female is like an actual female.
	And so you don't want to confuse the metaphor with the actuality.
	Because we had these social cognitive categories built in, you know, you might say masculine, feminine and offspring, something like that.
	We had to use what we could to represent what we were attempting to figure out and we kind of mapped them onto The external realities of being the best we could, using what we could.
	And so, you know, nature is benevolent and it's fruitful.
	All things come from nature and all things come from the unknown, right?
	The known is already there.
	It's the unknown that manifests the new, right?
	And so that's part of the reason for the characterization of the unknown as feminine.
	And then there's also the case that women play a massive role in sexual selection among human beings so that From an evolutionary perspective, you're twice as likely to be a failure if you're a man than you are if you're a woman, in that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.
	And you think, well, that's impossible, but it's not.
	All you have to do is imagine that every woman has one child.
	Half the men have two, and the other half have zero.
	And so...
	End of problem.
	And that's basically how it works out.
	So women are more choosy maters than men by a substantial margin.
	There was a funny study done by the guy who established one of the big dating sites and he looked at how women rated men and they rated the 50th percentile man at the 15th percentile.
	So 85% of men were below average according to women's ratings.
	Now, men had their same arbitrary choices because, of course, they preferred younger women to older women and they were more swayed, I would say, by attractiveness, but that didn't have nearly as big an effect on their actual rating of women.
	So, anyways, so, you know, from a Darwinian perspective, Nature is that which selects.
	That's all it is.
	And so, sexual selection plays a massive role in human evolution.
	You know, the fact that we have these massive brains is very likely a consequence of a positive feedback loop in sexual selection.
	You know, because otherwise that's the only time you can get really rapid changes in evolutionary space where, you know, you get a process going that reinforces itself.
	So there's a little preference for intelligence and then that produces more intelligent men and women and then there's a little more preference for intelligence and, you know, maybe then that turns into the ability to speak and or to master fire and then there's way more selection for intelligence and the brain just goes Like this,
	you know and women have paid a pretty big price for that because your hips are basically so wide that you can barely run and if they were any wider than you couldn't and of course the pelvic passageway through which the baby travels is too small so it's really painful and dangerous and the baby's head has to compress quite a lot I mean they come out cone-shaped often And then, they're born really young, so you have to take care of them forever.
	Like, what the hell, you know, a deer is born, a fawn is born, and it's like two seconds later, it's standing, and then it's running from a lion.
	It's like, you know, it's like 15 minutes later, and a baby, it's like, it just lies there and, you know, utters plaintive noises.
	That's all it can do.
	And it does that for like...
	10 months before it could skitter away from a sloth if it was predatory, you know.
	So you really got to take care of those creatures and so that's a big price to pay.
	That's a big price to pay for our cortical evolution.
	So anyways, here's some of the symbolic representatives of the unknown.
	The unconscious Dionysian force of the id.
	That's sort of Freud's representation of the unknown.
	The terrors of the darkness.
	That's the unknown.
	The monsters that lurk there.
	The source and the resting place of all things.
	The great mother, the queen, the matrix, which means matter, which means mother.
	The matriarch, matter, mother.
	The container, the cornucopia, the object to be fertilized, the source of all things, the fecund, the pregnant.
	The strange, the emotional, the foreigner, the place of return and rest, the deep, the valley, the cleft, the cave, hell, death and the grave, because it's beyond the moon, ruler of the night and the mysterious dark, and matter and the earth.
	And you know all this because when you watch a movie that's rife with symbolic representations, it draws on those underlying metaphors and they're natural.
	I mean, where does a witch live?
	Well, in a swamp, for God's sake.
	She doesn't live in the penthouse of a New York tower.
	She lives in a swamp and it's dark there.
	And if the moon's up, that's better.
	And maybe it could be a crescent moon or maybe it could be a full moon.
	But, you know, witches live in the right place if you're going to understand it.
	And you all, you understand all of that.
	And it's part of the structure of your imagination, you could say.
	And so, it's part of the unspoken, fantastical imagination that unites all of us and makes us specifically human.
	There's a good representation of the underworld and the place of transformation.
	So that's hell.
	Isis in Egypt was queen of the underworld and the underworld generally has a queen and she usually shows up when order falls apart.
	And so you go to the underworld when your life falls apart.
	That's what it means.
	And so when you see these stories of the hero You know, journeying to unknown lands of terror and danger, that's what happens to you.
	It happens to you all the time, you know.
	You're in this little safe space like the Hobbit in the Shire and then, you know, there's a great evil brewing somewhere and You can no longer ignore it, so off you go into the land of terror and uncertainty.
	And better to go on purpose than accidentally, that's for sure, because at least you can be prepared.
	And we also know that if you're going to face a threat, If you face it voluntarily, what happens is your body activates itself for exploration and mastery, but if you face it involuntarily, same size threat, then you revert to pray mode and you're frozen and that's way, way, way more stressful.
	It's way harder on your body and so it's better to keep your eye open And watch for emergent threats.
	Because you all know, you know, what you're not doing quite right and where your life is likely to unravel.
	You all have a sense of that.
	And the best thing to do is to not ignore that.
	To pay attention to it.
	To watch it.
	And to take corrective action early.
	And then, you know, you stay on top of things.
	And things...
	Your little trip to the underworld might be a few minutes long instead of a catastrophe that produces post-traumatic stress disorder and knocks you out for four or five years and maybe you never recover.
	And that's what these kind of symbolic representations mean.
	Those are states of being that indicate being devoured.
	And you can be devoured by your own unconscious.
	Jesus, that happens all the time.
	What does that mean?
	Well, you know...
	And it's an autonomous thing in some sense, you know, like if you get depressed or if you get really anxious, you don't have any control over that.
	It's like it sweeps up over you and pulls you down.
	Why down?
	Well, down is where you go when you're sad.
	You don't go up.
	Man, I'm up today.
	Oh, that's too bad.
	No, it's man, I'm down today.
	And while that's partly this, and it's partly because this is subordinate, and it's partly because down is...
	Closer to the ground and farther from the sky.
	Like, there's all sorts of reasons.
	You're feeling down rather than up.
	Up is where you're aiming, right?
	You aim up, you don't aim down.
	Well, the reason those phrases make sense is because they're locked deeply into this underlying structure of imagination.
	And, well, those are the archetypal structures, according to Jung.
	And I think that he's, as far as I can tell, He's dead accurate.
	And I think we understand the biology of such things much better than we did.
	So there's more representations.
	She's quite the friendly creature.
	That's Kelly.
	I like this representation better.
	Those are heads, by the way, and hands.
	So she sort of represents, well, very complex things.
	She represents death.
	She represents transformation.
	In this, I really like this representation.
	I think it's brilliant.
	So imagine that what the people were doing who formulated these representations, what they were trying to do was to make a representation of the domain of threat itself, right?
	So that they could deal with the idea that, because we can say threat, Well, what the hell does that mean?
	Well, threat is the category of all threatening things.
	And so then you can think about threat, and you can think about threat across all those individual instances, and maybe you can figure out how to deal with threat, right?
	What's the best way to be in the world so that you most effectively deal with threat?
	Well, that's sort of like, apart from how do you deal with pain, that's sort of like the ultimate question of human beings.
	Do you want to be terrified?
	No!
	So, you want to be in danger?
	No.
	So, like, you better figure out how to deal with threats.
	So, first of all, you have to conceptualize it.
	So, we'll take a look at this representation.
	So, that's Kelly.
	Her hair is on fire.
	Well, fire, you know, that's a numinous phenomena.
	Dangerous, but transformative.
	She's wearing a headdress of skulls.
	She has a weapon in this hand, and she has a tiger's tongue.
	She often has a snake around her waist.
	None of these do, but she often does.
	But in this case, then that's because, you know, it's a snake.
	We've already covered that.
	Well, these things that look like snakes here aren't.
	You notice how her belly is concave?
	Well, it's because she's just given birth to this unfortunate person that she happens to be standing on and she's eating him intestines first.
	And that's a fire ring which she is in and then it's got skulls on the inside of it.
	It's like, what's that supposed to do?
	Well, partly it's supposed to represent that which terrifies you.
	It's like, yeah, fair enough, man.
	Because I don't imagine you saw those things in there before I explained them, but someone who was familiar with that image would know what it meant.
	It's like some poor artist was sitting there thinking, well, how do I represent destruction?
	It's like, bang!
	Whoa!
	Okay, we'll put that down and then we won't look at it again.
	So, and then what do you do with this?
	You make sacrifices to it.
	And you think, well, that's kind of primitive.
	You know, first of all, well, that doesn't really exist.
	Well, it does if it's an amalgam of threat symbols, I can tell you that.
	It exists, that's for sure.
	So it exists as an abstraction, if nothing else.
	Do you offer it sacrifices?
	Well, what the hell do you think you do?
	What are you doing in class?
	Why aren't you, like, drinking vodka and snorting cocaine?
	You know, because you could be doing that.
	Instead, here you are, listening to me, you know, slaving away in university.
	You're young.
	It's like, really?
	You've got nothing better to do than sit there?
	You know, well, you're willing to forego today's pleasure for tomorrow's advantage.
	And that's what sacrifice is.
	And human beings discovered that dramatically.
	First, you know, like we were apes for God's sake.
	We didn't just leap up and think, oh, we better save for tomorrow.
	You know, it took thousands of years for that idea to emerge.
	And it emerged in dramatic form.
	And it was sort of like, well...
	Society is sort of like a God.
	No, they weren't thinking this through.
	It's like, if you're gonna represent society, well, it's like this masculine God that's always judging the hell out of you that's everywhere all at the same time.
	It's like, yeah, yeah, that's true, absolutely.
	And what do you have to do with it?
	Well, you have to give it what it wants.
	Why do you have to give it what it wants?
	Because it'll crush you if you don't.
	And that's exactly right.
	And if you're lucky and you give it the right sacrifice, then it'll smile on you and you get to have a good life.
	And that was like, that was the major discovery of mankind, man.
	That was a killer discovery.
	It was like the discovery of the future.
	You know, we discovered the future as a place.
	And it was a place that you could bargain with.
	You can bargain with the future.
	Wow, that's just, what an idea that is.
	You know, it's so unlikely.
	Well, how do you bargain with the future?
	Well, you give it what it wants!
	And, you know, some of that's you maintain your social relationship and, you know, you make yourself useful to other people and you shape yourself so that you can cooperate with people and you...
	you don't act impulsively and maybe you squirrel something away for the next harvest even if you're hungry and, you know, and then the future isn't hell!
	And you make the proper sacrifices.
	And so if you sacrifice to Kelly Then she turns into her opposite and showers benevolence on you.
	And that's Mother Nature, right?
	It's like, look out for Mother Nature, man.
	You know, two weeks out in the bush right now and you're dead.
	And it's not pleasant.
	And then if it's the spring, you last longer.
	But the bugs eat you.
	And so that's not very fun either.
	So, nature, you know...
	It's bent on your destruction.
	But if you treat it properly and carefully and make the right sacrifices, then maybe one of her trees will offer you some fruit.
	And that would be okay.
	And so, believe me, lots of people died trying to figure that out.
	So, here's another way of looking at it.
	So, I said, you know, order and chaos, known, unknown, explored territory, unexplored territory.
	I love this.
	This is the Daoist symbol.
	It's a symbol of being.
	And being isn't reality as you would conceptualize it as a scientist.
	It's more like reality as it manifests itself to you as a living thing, which is completely different.
	You know, science extracts out all the subjectivity All that is there is an array of objective facts of equivalent value.
	And that's part of its method.
	But that's not the world in which you live.
	The world in which you live is full of motivation and emotion.
	It's full of terror and pain and joy and frustration and other people, that's for sure.
	And so, that's the real world.
	And so, well, that's what this is.
	It's the real world.
	And what is it made out of?
	Well, it's made out of all those things you know.
	That can get out of hand, you know, because the explored territory and the known can get so damn tight that it's nothing but a tyrant.
	And then it's all those things you don't know and that's pretty exciting because, you know, you want to go find out some things you don't know and that adds a lot of spice to life.
	You want a little adventure.
	You don't want to go out with someone who's so predictable that you know everything about them in a week, you know, unless you're hyper-conservative.
	You want to go out with someone who's got They're a little erratic.
	Like, not too erratic, let's say.
	They're a little dangerous.
	Perhaps not too dangerous.
	But some of that, at least, you want predictability with a bit of unpredictability in there.
	Well, and that's exactly what this means.
	It's like, that's predictability with a little unpredictability in it.
	And what that also means is that what you know can be turned into what you don't know Just like that.
	And that's gonna happen to you lots of times in your life, man.
	When someone close to you dies suddenly, it's like, poof!
	Order turns into chaos, and now you're in chaos, and what the hell are you going to do there?
	And that's a good question, because you need to know what to do there, because you're going to be there.
	And it happens to you when your dreams fall apart, you know, I mean, your dreams for your life, or, you know, when you discover something awful about yourself that you didn't know, or, you know, it flips on you all the time, and in small ways, sometimes.
	You know, you have a fight with a friend or in big ways that wipe you out for, well, indefinitely sometimes, because you can fall into chaos and never get out.
	You know, that's the people who are trapped in the belly of the beast.
	It isn't necessary that when you descend into chaos that you learn something and you get back out.
	You could just be stuck there, suffering, until you die.
	And that's, you know, I wouldn't recommend that.
	You know, it's something to avoid.
	But it happens to people all the time.
	All the time.
	You see them wandering around, you know, shattered on the streets of Toronto.
	You know, they're done.
	They're in chaos.
	And there's so much chaos around them that you won't even go near them.
	The chaos spreads like eight feet around them.
	And so when you see someone like that, you're like, well, first we're not going to look too closely.
	And people like that often don't like you to look at them.
	Because that also helps them remember where they are and that's no pleasant thing.
	And you're going to just stay away from that.
	Maybe you'll cross the street.
	Maybe you'll keep your head down.
	Whatever.
	You're not going anywhere near that chaos and no bloody wonder, you know.
	And you don't think about it much after you pass it because it's a hell of a thing to think about and what are you going to do about it anyway?
	So you don't know what to do about it.
	You might just make it worse.
	Well, so chaos, you know, That's the other half of life, and it can turn into order, sometimes better order.
	That's actually what you do when you explore, right?
	You explore, you find out something new, not too new, not too pandora, boxy.
	You know, you bite off as much as you can chew, but no more.
	And so that rearranges the way you look at the world, but you're doing it voluntarily, so you can kind of tolerate the recalibration.
	And you strengthen the order, right?
	Because now you become more competent.
	And I would say that you're trying to live on the edge between order and chaos.
	And I mean, that's a real place.
	That's an actual, it's a meta place.
	But it's more real than places.
	Because it's so old.
	It's such an old place.
	It really exists and your nervous system knows that.
	It sees the world this way.
	In fact, the right hemisphere is roughly specialized for chaos and the left hemisphere is roughly specialized for order.
	Which is why the left hemisphere tends to have the linguistic elements and why people are right-handed.
	And the right hemisphere has a more diffuse structure.
	It's more associated with negative emotion and imagination and the two communicate between each other through the corpus callosum and the right hemisphere appears to update the left hemisphere kind of slowly, often in dreams.
	And so, if you are hurt, if your right hemisphere is hurt, for example, back here in the parietal lobe, then you lose the left part of your body.
	You can't move it anymore.
	But you also lose the idea that you have a left part of your body.
	So it's like blindness.
	It's a blindness to the left.
	And so, if someone comes along and says, you know, You're not moving your left arm.
	You're going to say, yeah, well, my arthritis is bothering me today.
	I haven't moved it for six months.
	Well, my arthritis is bothering today.
	Or, you know, you don't move in your left foot.
	It's like, well, you know...
	Ah, I'm too tired.
	Well, what's happened is the left hemisphere has a representation of the body, and it's not being updated because the part of the brain that would notice that the left is gone because of a stroke, it isn't there anymore!
	And so the left already has a model, and it's not going to change, it's just...
	It's hard to change your model of yourself, you know, have a tooth pulled.
	What happens?
	It's like your damn tongue is in that hole for the next six months, fiddling around constantly.
	And that's because you're rebuilding your neurological model of your body.
	It's like, try that with your whole left side and see how well you do.
	You know, so this guy named Ramachandran was experimenting with people like this.
	And one of the things he did was kind of, he was checking their balance and you can do that by irrigating the ear with cold water and that makes people go like this makes their eyes move back and forth because it upsets the vestibular system and what he found was that if he if he poured cold water in the left ear of someone with right parietal damage who had left neglect that they'd all of a sudden sort of wake up Catastrophically,
	they'd have a terrible reaction to the fact that they were paralyzed on the left and they would know that it had happened and cry and, you know, emit all sorts of distress and no wonder and then like 20 minutes later they'd snap back into their damaged mode of being and they would Not deny, because that isn't really what it is, is that they couldn't update the model.
	They just didn't have the neurology for it anymore, so they were back to not noticing that it was gone and coming up with stories about it.
	And so...
	Well, so that's a good example of how the right and left hemispheres work together and how they're kind of mapped onto this, weirdly enough.
	So, you know, we're mapped, we're adapted to the meta-reality and so what that would be is we're adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time.
	And that's not the same things that you see flitting around you day to day.
	Those are just, they're just like clouds.
	They're just evaporating, you know.
	There's things underneath that that are more fundamental, that are more fundamental realities, like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you and that you pose to yourself.
	Those are eternal realities.
	And we're adapted to those.
	That's our world.
	And that's why we express that in stories.
	And so then you might say, well, how do you adapt yourself to this world?
	And the answer to that is, and I believe this is a neurological answer.
	I believe this.
	That your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order.
	And the way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning.
	So let's say there's a place in the environment you should be.
	Okay, what should that place be?
	Well, you don't want to be terrified out of your skull.
	Like, what good is that?
	And, you know, you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep.
	You want to be somewhere where, you know, you're kind of on firm ground here.
	But over here...
	You're kind of testing out new territory and some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable you know, you're gonna go pretty far out into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself and other people are gonna just put a toe in the chaos And, you know, that's neuroticism, basically.
	That's your sensitivity to threat.
	That's calibrated differently in different people.
	And some people are more exploratory than others.
	That's kind of extroversion and openness working together.
	And intelligence.
	So, some people are going to tolerate a larger admixture of chaos in their order.
	Those are liberals, by the way.
	And I mean that technically.
	Liberals are more interested in Novel chaos and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist.
	And who's right?
	Well, it depends on the situation and that's why conservatives and liberals have to talk to each other because one of them isn't right and the other wrong.
	Sometimes the Conservatives are right and sometimes the Liberals are right because the environment's going like this.
	You can't predict the damn thing, so that's why you have to communicate.
	And that's what a democracy does.
	It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate their damn societies.
	So anyways, so let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order.
	So what does that mean?
	Well, you're stable enough But you're interested, right?
	Because a little novelty heightens your anxiety.
	That wakes you up a bit.
	That's the adventure part of it.
	But it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity.
	And that's actually associated with pleasure.
	That's the dopamine circuit.
	And so, if you're optimally balanced, and you know you're there when you're listening to an interesting conversation, or you're engaged in one.
	It's a real conversation.
	You know, you're saying some things you know, and the other person is saying some things they know, but...
	Both of what you know is changing.
	It's like, wow, that's so interesting.
	You'll have a conversation like that forever.
	Maybe you're reading a book like that.
	Or you're listening to a piece of music that models that.
	Because what music does is provide you with predictable forms, multi-level predictable forms, that transform just the right amount.
	And so music is a very representational art form.
	It says this is what the universe is like.
	You know, there's a dancing element to it.
	Repetitive.
	And then cute little variations that sort of surprise and delight you.
	And you think, wow, that's so cool.
	It doesn't matter how nihilistic you are.
	You know, music still infuses you with a sense of meaning.
	And that's because it models meaning.
	That's what it does.
	That's why we love it.
	And you know, you can dance to it.
	And that sort of symbolizes...
	You putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality and positioning yourself properly.
	And you like that too, you know?
	You'll pay for it.
	Oh boy, I get to go dancing, you know?
	Oh boy, I get to listen to music.
	It's like, what the hell are you doing listening to music?
	What good is that?
	Well, you think, that's a stupid question.
	I don't care about your dopey criticism.
	I'm going to listen to some music, right?
	There's no rational argument against music.
	It's like...
	You just don't even think about it.
	You just walk away from someone who's stupid enough to ask that question.
	It's like...
	Some things are obvious.
	Well...
	Why?
	Okay, so that's pretty fun.
	So...
	What mediates between these two domains?
	Well, that's what consciousness does, as far as I can tell.
	And that's sort of the individual, and that's the hero.
	That's another way of thinking about it.
	It's the logos.
	That's another way of thinking about it.
	It's the word that generates order out of chaos at the beginning of time.
	It's the consciousness that interacting with the matter of the world produces being.
	That's basically it.
	That's basically you, for all intents and purposes.
	How do you do that?
	Well, the unconscious does it to some degree, you know, because it's with our fantasy that we first meet the unknown.
	Right?
	Well, look, say you're going out with a new person.
	It's like, what do you do?
	You project a fantasy on them.
	And then you fall in love with the fantasy.
	And aren't you stupid?
	Because you're going to find out that the match between your damn fantasy and the actual person is tenuous at best.
	And so Jung would call that a...
	Projection of either the anima or the animus.
	You know, the anima is what a man projects onto a woman he finds desirable.
	It's like, oh, she's the perfect woman!
	It's like, well, how do you know that?
	You've, like, seen her for four seconds, you know, but it grips you.
	And the same thing happens in the opposite direction.
	And it's an action of instinct, you know, it's like you fall in love with the image.
	But interestingly enough, what you do in a relationship that works is that you actually I think that what you see, it's a rough approximation, when you project the ideal and fall in love with it, you see what could be It could be that, but it's going to take you a hell of a lot of work.
	Because, like, you got no shortage of flaws, and the other person has no shortage of flaws, and so you're bringing your flaws together, and that's going to produce a lot of friction, and you're going to have to engage in a lot of dialogue before you approach that level of perfection again, but maybe you can do it.
	Then you get to live happily ever after.
	Well, wouldn't that be nice?
	Well, so the unconscious meets the unknown and it meets it with imagination and fantasy and dream and art.
	That's how you take...
	See, you don't just go from what you don't know to fully articulated knowledge in one bloody leap.
	You can't do that.
	You have to extend pseudopods of fantasy and imagination into the unknown.
	That's kind of what theorizing is like, right?
	Even scientifically, you know, you don't know something scientifically, you generate a theory.
	Well, it's an imaginative representation that your unconscious is helping you generate.
	And so you meet the unknown with fantasy.
	That's what the unconscious is for.
	From the psychoanalytic perspective, that's what dreams do.
	And you can see why you dream about the future.
	You know, it's like, well, what's the future going to be like?
	Well, you have a little imaginative story going on, and it's like, you don't really create it, it's sort of, you watch it unfold.
	You know, maybe you can tweak it here and there, but it sort of comes to you from wherever the hell things like that come from.
	You know, the unconscious, that's the psychoanalytic answer.
	It's not really much of an answer, because it's more like a representation of a place that we don't understand.
	But...
	That's where creativity comes from.
	And I mean, some people are really creative, right down to the bloody core.
	So, in my clinical practice, I often see people who are high in openness because they're attracted to me because they watch my lectures.
	And you have to kind of be high in openness to like my lectures.
	So, because...
	Well, you do.
	Because they go everywhere, you know.
	And they're not necessarily very orderly.
	So...
	So anyways, lots of my clients are really high in openness, and they're funny people often, especially if they're smart, because sometimes they have the most nihilistic intelligence you can imagine.
	It's just self-critical and nihilistic and brutally, brutal, man, and smart.
	And so they just criticize themselves out of existence.
	And so often I have to just try to get them to...
	Quit listening to their chattering, self-critical rationality and go out and create something, you know, with their massive creativity.
	And as long as they're doing that, they're engaged in the world and happy as hell.
	But as soon as that self-critical rationality comes in and shuts down the creativity, they're just They're just like walking corpses, you know, and it's because if you're really open like that's you're a tree and it has some trunks and you know your your most prominent trait is the most lively trunk and if you're a creative person and you're not engaging in a creative enterprise You're just you're like a tree that that has been that has had its vitality Amputated and so this is not trivial
	this stuff is this is Deeply, deeply, deeply rooted in your biology.
	And those are people often who have, like, dream lives you just can't believe.
	I have one client, he has like four spectacular dreams a week, and most of the time we just spend discussing them.
	I mean, God!
	And I had another client...
	Who could be lucid in her dreams, which is more common among women.
	She could ask the damn characters what they represented and they would tell her.
	It was like, okay, that was pretty weird.
	And like a lot of the things they told her were really helpful and they were not things that she wanted to hear.
	She basically, one of them told her if she was going to live, She'd have to go visit a slaughterhouse.
	And the reason for that was because she was raised as a little princess and protected from horrible mother nature until she hit puberty, in which time she turned into an evil villain, because that's how the family worked.
	Perfect child, evil teenager, overnight.
	And then, well, that was hard on her and she wasn't prepared because she thought the world was princess world and, you know, she couldn't go through a butcher store without having a fit.
	And no wonder, you know, like really, Jesus, you know, it's no wonder, but you do it.
	But she couldn't, so we used to go to butcher stores, and that would make her cry.
	And she was a vegetarian, that would make her cry.
	And, you know, bemoan the cruelty of the world.
	And it's like, yeah, fair enough, man.
	Those are bloody slabs of meat.
	It's like, I don't know why everyone isn't screaming when they walk through the butcher store.
	But...
	But you gotta get used to it, man, because you can't live in the world otherwise.
	And so, the dream character, who was a gypsy, told her that she had to go visit a slaughterhouse, which seemed rather impractical.
	And so, I asked her if she could think of anything else to do, and she thought, well, why don't we go visit a funeral home and watch an embalming?
	And I thought, oh, good.
	That sounds like a fun way to spend a day.
	And so, I phoned up a funeral parlor.
	And I said I had a client who was terrified of death.
	And I was a therapist who was also a little shaky on the concept myself.
	And so they had no problem with that.
	They deal with death all the time, which is really something to think about, right?
	A human being can actually have an occupation where they do nothing but deal with death and they don't go stark raving mad.
	It's like, what the hell's up with that?
	It's like working in a palliative care ward where your clients that you, you know, have a relationship, all they're going to do is die.
	This week, next week, the week after.
	People do that.
	It's like, those people are tough, man.
	They're tough.
	So anyways, we went and watched this embalming, which was, I have a rather high level of disgust sensitivity, so it was a little on the rough side for me, but she sat there, and first, well, she was not, we were outside this little room, she was not looking at that, man, no way.
	And she'd kind of go like this, and, you know, that was pretty good, and then she'd go like this, and then she'd go like this, and then she watched it.
	And then she asked if she could go in and she put on a glove and she touched the body and she didn't have a fit.
	She didn't have a panic attack.
	And so she walked away from there learning that there was a hell of a lot more to her than she thought there was and that she could see things that she didn't think she could see and live.
	And after that she sort of had a touchstone.
	It's like...
	Well, I'm kind of afraid of this.
	Well, is it as bad as going to see the bombing?
	No, it's not that bad.
	Well, I guess I can do it.
	It's like an initiation, right?
	She had an initiation.
	And so did I, you know.
	And I learned a lot from doing that.
	I learned that one of the things you need to do if you're going to be a human being is to prepare yourself to be useful in the face of death.
	And so when you have a parent that dies, which, you know, shatters people's ideas, often they can't even think about it.
	If you can't even think about that, man, you've got some thinking to do.
	Because you need to be able to at least think about that.
	Because otherwise you're just going to be a wasteland when it happens.
	And you never know, you could even have a higher ambition.
	Maybe you could even be useful when it happens.
	Instead of being part of the heap of destroyed people who also have to be taken care of.
	You know, and that's brutal.
	You have to be brutal to be useful in the aftermath of your parents' death.
	You know, you don't get to crumble and fall apart.
	And you have every reason to.
	So you've got to be kind of some tough monster to manage that.
	But do you want to be useful in the face of tragedy or do you want to be pathetic?
	Well...
	You make your choice.
	So, out of the unconscious, you get ritual, you get dreams, you get drama, you get stories, you get art, you get music.
	And that sort of buffers us.
	We have our little domain of competence and we're buffered by the domain of fantasy and culture.
	And that's really what you learn about when you come to university, if you're lucky and And the professors are smart enough to actually teach you something about culture instead of constantly telling you that it's completely reprehensible and should be destroyed.
	It's like, why you would prefer chaos to order is beyond me.
	And the only possible reason is that you haven't read enough history to understand Exactly what chaos means.
	And believe me, if you understood what it means, you'd be pretty goddamn careful about tearing down the temple that you live in.
	Unless you want to be a denizen of chaos.
	And some people do.
	You know, because that's when the impulses that you harbor can really come out and shine.
	And so a little gratitude is in order.
	And that makes you...
	Appreciative of the wise king while being smart enough to know that he's also an evil tyrant.
	It's like, that's a total conception of the world.
	It's balanced.
	It's like, yeah, we should preserve nature, but good God, it is trying to kill us.
	And, you know, yes, our culture is tyrannical and oppresses people, but it is protecting us from dying.
	That's helpful.
	You know, and yes, we're reasonably good people, but, like, don't take that theory too far until you've tested yourself.
	And you know, that's wisdom at least in part and that's what these stories try to teach you.
	There's a nice mythological representation.
	I love this one.
	It's like the dome of the known and the seeker looking outside.
	You know, that's a metaphysical representation.
	You know, and that is the world as it looks to us, right?
	You go out in a field and it looks like there's a dome covering it.
	It's a circle, a big circle, with a dome over it.
	And you know, what's outside the dome?
	Well, the unknown, right?
	That's where heaven is, theoretically.
	You know, it's a projection, obviously.
	Heaven is in the unknown.
	Well, it was localized in space.
	I suppose that's partly because when people looked up in the sky, they were overwhelmed with awe.
	So, it's a reasonable conclusion, you know.
	It's a projection of an unconscious presupposition.
	It's a projection of fantasy.
	You know, heaven is a fantasy.
	And I'm not denigrating fantasy, by the way.
	It's projected imaginatively onto the sky.
	And that's part of the way you discover what's in your fantasy.
	Well, this is us, man.
	We mediate between chaos and order.
	And, you know, those are the two archetypal representations, fundamentally, you know.
	And I think they apply to both genders, you know.
	Like, women can act as the individual who holds the world on his or her shoulders, and men can play a maternal role, you know.
	Female human beings are quite masculine and male human beings are quite feminine.
	And so, you know, maybe this archetype dominates among men and that archetype dominates among women, which I would say is that is the case as far as I'm concerned, although there are individual conceptions.
	Of course, those two things have to work in conjunction, but that's you, the eternal mediator between chaos and order, which also has its enemy.
	So that's Horus there.
	And that's Seth, who eventually turns into Satan as the West progresses, so to speak, and that's represented there as well.
	The temptations of, I would say, resentment and hatred, which everyone has to fight with all the time, Alright, initiations.
	So this is cool.
	This is a standard hero story and initiatory rites are a part of human heritage and so let's take a look.
	This is from Eliade.
	I would like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane.
	It does not belong to ordinary symptomatology.
	It's not mental illness.
	It has an initiatory structure and signification.
	In short, it reproduces a traditional mystical pattern.
	The total crisis of the future shaman, sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the personality and to madness, can be evaluated not only as an initiatory death Well,
	what he means by that is that I suppose the mythological view of the emergence of order, that's a cosmogony Is that there's a state of potential and chaos out of which order emerges.
	You know, here's how it is that you think that way, because you do think that way.
	So, you know, imagine what you're facing when you're facing the future, right?
	Well, you might say, well, the future is full of potential, right?
	It's full of potential.
	What the hell does that mean?
	You know, you act as if that potential is really a real thing.
	And you're confronting it all the time.
	I'm confronting the potential of the future.
	Well, it doesn't exist yet.
	So what you're confronting doesn't even really exist.
	What you're conceptualizing doesn't really exist.
	And in some sense, you bring it into being by plotting your path through it.
	Well, the pre-cosmogonic chaos is the same as the potential of the future.
	It's exactly the same idea.
	It's the realm of possibility from which actuality emerges.
	And you participate in turning that possibility into actuality.
	That's what you're doing all the time.
	Now, Can I explain that?
	Well, no.
	I have no idea how consciousness and the substrate of the world interact.
	I can only say that that's how it looks.
	That's how it feels, you know.
	That's how people act.
	And they'll get into trouble if they don't manifest their potential, whatever that is.
	That's all those things you could be that you're not.
	Well, where are those?
	It's just potential.
	Well, that's the chaos.
	This is a That's the...
	I would say that's the cosmos.
	That's the cosmos that you live in all the time.
	It's a little story.
	It's the thing that you extract out of the chaos.
	It sort of consists of your conception of where you are now.
	And your conception of where you want to be at some point could be ten minutes, could be three years.
	You can slide it.
	And then you have a little plan about how you should move your body to transform one into the other.
	That's your action pattern.
	That's a little story.
	And when you ask someone to say what they were up to, they'll tell you a little story like that.
	You know, I was at some place and I went somewhere else and here's how I did it.
	And then they might tell you a more interesting story, which is I was someplace And something happened that I really didn't expect.
	And it knocked me for a loop, you know.
	And that's a good divorce story.
	I came home one night and my wife was gone.
	It's like...
	Yeah, chaos, and probably a bit of willful blindness preceding it, we might suspect.
	Anyways, down into chaos, and then, well, maybe you learn something down there, and maybe you don't, but hopefully you do, and you put yourself together if you're lucky.
	And then, bang, you pop up into another little structure of order.
	And that's an initiatory process.
	It's like...
	You're somewhere stable, falls apart, or maybe you break it apart on purpose.
	You do it voluntarily, you know.
	People do that all the time.
	You know, they do that, for example, when they experiment with drugs and they do that when they go on wild adventures and, you know, when they break themselves out of their normal routine and throw themselves somewhere they don't understand and hope that that's going to produce a transformation of personality.
	That's the basic story.
	That's the initiatory story.
	Now, this is William James, who was one of the establishers of modern psychology and a kind of an odd guy.
	He was an early experimenter with psychedelics.
	Of course, they'll never tell you that, but he was.
	And his drug of choice was nitrous oxide, which is an inhalant gas, which seems to be inert.
	No one really knows why it works, but it produces quite intense hallucinogenic experience, mystical experience.
	Although if you breathe too much of it, then you die, because it doesn't have any oxygen in it, so don't do that.
	And he wrote some really bad hippy poetry back in the 1880s while he was, you know, experimenting with nitrous oxide.
	I'll read a little bit of that to you.
	Pure experience is the name which I give to the original flux of life before reflection has categorized it.
	Only newborn babes and persons in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows can have an experience, pure in the literal sense, of a that, which is not yet any definite what, though ready to be any sorts of what's, full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear, changing throughout, yet so confusedly, that its phases interpenetrate, and no points either of distinction or of identity can be caught.
	1905, William James, Journal of Philosophy.
	You know, a lot of these old guys that established what we regard as, you know, fairly stable bodies of knowledge, were just as crazy as you can possibly imagine.
	They're just the most peculiar damn people.
	And they get sanitized, you know, as they are represented in history.
	And that's no fun, you know.
	I mean, it's much more interesting to know what they were like.
	They were just so...
	Bloody, peculiar, and strange, and involved in all sorts of weird things.
	It's a lot more fun to know that.
	Here's his poem.
	Wow.
	It's like right from 1968.
	No verbiage can give it because the verbiage is other, incoherent, coherent, same, and it fades, and it's infinite, and it's infinite.
	Don't you see the difference?
	Don't you see the identity?
	Constantly opposites united.
	The same me telling you to write and not to write.
	Extreme, extreme, extreme.
	Something and other than that thing.
	Intoxication and otherness than intoxication.
	Every attempt at betterment, every attempt at otherment is a...
	It fades forever and forever as we move.
	It's like, it's just about as incoherent as post-modernist philosophy.
	So we know for archaic and traditional cultures that a symbolic return to chaos is equivalent to preparing a new creation.
	It follows that we may interpret the psychic chaos of the future shaman as a sign that the profane man is being dissolved and a new personality being prepared for birth.
	Transformation.
	Here's a way of thinking about it.
	Paradise.
	Paradise lost.
	Redemption.
	Classic story of mankind.
	Always.
	There was a great past.
	We're in a state of chaos.
	We're heading towards a better future.
	Everyone thinks that way.
	The stories are based on that.
	Well, that's that.
	Now, Ellen Berger, who wrote a lot about the psychoanalysts, believed that Freud and Jung, in particular, had a creative illness, which he regarded as a sort of spontaneous, shamanic transformation.
	And he said, a creative illness has these elements.
	It succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search for certain truth.
	It's a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of depression, neurosis, psychosomatic ailments, or even psychosis.
	Jung was in that state when he wrote this book called The Red Book, which was just released last year, which is full of visionary illustrations and very strange poetry.
	It contains the communications he had with imaginative beings that he conjured up when practicing doing exactly that.
	He practiced that for years and he had these autonomous beings manifest themselves in his fantasy and had long conversations with them.
	You know, while he was working as a doctor and having a sane, normal life, and, well, it's kind of...
	well, it's really something.
	Whatever the symptoms there felt as painful, well, he thought maybe he was going mad, and some people think he did, if not agonizing by the subject with alternating periods of alleviation and worsening.
	Throughout the illness, the subject never loses the thread of his dominating preoccupation.
	It's often compatible with normal professional activity and family life, but even if he keeps to his social activities, He's almost entirely absorbed with himself.
	He suffers from feelings of utter isolation even when he has a mentor who guides him through the ordeal like the shaman apprentice with his master.
	The termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration.
	The subject emerges from his ordeal with a permanent transformation in his personality and a conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world.
	Many of the 19th and 20th century figures regarded universally as great, Nietzsche, Darwin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Freud, Jung, were all additionally characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty.
	Well, you don't generate a new theory without some birth pangs, right?
	Because your old theory has to bite the dust first, and when your old theory bites the dust, it's like, where are you?
	You don't know.
	Do you know if you're going to come up with a new one?
	No.
	Here's a cool thing.
	This is my daughter.
	She was five years at this point.
	She was playing prince and princess with Julian, her three-year-old.
	She said, Dad, if we killed a dragon, we could use his skin as armor.
	Wouldn't that be a good idea?
	I thought, hey, yeah, that's a hell of an idea, kid.
	You know, you go right after the thing that frightens you the most, and you develop something that protects you from doing that.
	It's like, where did she get that idea?
	Well, good work, kiddo.
	She had plenty of dragons in her life.
	So...
	The following dream was described by my daughter Michaela, three years, nine months old, about my son, Julian, one year Julian was in the process of toilet training and rapid speech development, was having some trouble controlling his emotions Michaela liked to call him baby, we had several discussions about the fact that he wasn't really a baby anymore She told me this story while I was at the computer, so I was able to get it verbatim She wasn't very happy with the idea that he wasn't a baby anymore, because she kind of liked the baby
	She took care of that baby a lot, and her little brain was having a hard time with the notion that Whatever that thing is now, it isn't a baby.
	It's like, well, where's my baby?
	And believe me, plenty of mothers go through the same thing.
	Then they attempt to keep their children babies for the rest of their lives.
	So this is what Michaela said, the dream.
	Julian's eyes fell out and then he fall into pieces.
	I said, what sort of pieces?
	She said, Julian pieces.
	And the bones fall out too.
	Then a hole got him and there was water in it and when he came out he was big.
	Mom, Julian isn't a baby anymore?
	No!
	He's a big boy.
	And a bug with legs got him out, because bugs can swim.
	And the hole was in the park.
	And it moved into the backyard, and he fell into it.
	A tree burned and left the hole.
	I thought, wow, that's so amazing!
	It's like, it was a shamanic transformation dream.
	It was like...
	The tree, that's the tree of life.
	It burnt and left a hole.
	The kid fell into it.
	It dissolved him right down to his bones.
	This little bug, which would be a Jungian representation of the self, like Jiminy Cricket, by the way, in Pinocchio.
	The bug was the thing that was alive that helped him through the transformation.
	He stepped out and now he was big.
	It's like that was her little brain conjuring up the notion of radical transformation.
	So this is cool.
	I hope this works.
	This is a dream that my nephew had that someone animated.
	Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist from the University of Toronto.
	Now I do disagree with some of his fundamental ideas, but his thoughts on facing problems merge with my stoic values.
	Within one of his Maps of Meaning lectures, he tells a true story about a four-year-old boy, his nephew, who for months was suffering from terrible night terrors, terrors that were waking him up screaming.
	This boy, by the way, did have some areas of instability in his family life.
	Jordan visited the young boy's house and the boy was running around dressed as a knight with a sword, a shield and a helmet.
	At night time he would take his sword and shield to bed.
	So Jordan got speaking to him and the boy described his dream.
	In the dream he is standing surrounded by knee high dwarfs.
	These dwarfs had beaks and every time he would try to move the dwarfs would jump up and bite him.
	A very fretting scenario for a young boy.
	And if you look behind all the dwarves, away in the background there was a dragon.
	And every time this dragon would puff out fire and smoke, more dwarves would be created.
	So there's no point fighting off the dwarves because more would just be made.
	So Jordan tapped him and asked, what could you do about that?
	So the kid says he could jump up on the dragon's head.
	He could poke out his eyes with a sword so he couldn't see.
	Then he could go down the throat to the box where the fire came from, carve a piece out of that box, thereby destroying it, and use that piece as a shield.
	The child, before Jordan arrived, was already acting out in life what he knew he had to do, and after that conversation he had no more night terrors.
	This is what Marcus Aurelius meant when he said, the impediment to action advances action.
	What stands in the way becomes the way.
	He was telling us that we must not shy away from problems or shun our personal responsibility.
	We must be willing to sacrifice our comfort, go to the source of our problems to solve them and then take something away.
	Well, there you go.
	So, yeah, he was waking up screaming at night for weeks.
	That's night terrors.
	He couldn't really remember what the hell was going on.
	And there was instability in his family.
	His parents got divorced soon after.
	And he was off to kindergarten and that was kind of destabilizing him too.
	And so, it was fun to watch him zip around as a knight.
	It's like, you know, where'd he get that idea?
	Well, you know, he watched TV, he watched movies.
	His little imagination was aggregating the picture of the hero, and then he was trying to act it out.
	That's what he was doing.
	Pretending, right?
	I'm pretending to be the thing that takes on the unknown.
	And then he has this amazing dream.
	It's like, it's mind-boggling.
	It's so sophisticated.
	It's like, well, here I am, and there's troubles.
	Everywhere.
	And they're biting me.
	They're jumping up on me.
	And it's like a hydra.
	You know, in the hydra, you cut off a hydra's head and seven more heads grow.
	It's like, that's life, man.
	Solve one problem, seven more appear.
	Right?
	So, well, so that was the dragon at the background.
	Chaos itself.
	And chaos kept breeding.
	These evil little dwarfs, which is what it does.
	It's like, it's one damn trouble after another.
	Fight this one off, fight this one off.
	It's like, who cares?
	The dragon, the dwarf generating machine is still working in the background.
	So I asked him, and that was purposeful.
	What could you do?
	See, that's a leading question.
	That implies that there's something that he could do.
	He said, well, I'd take my dad, that was missing in the animation, and we'd go, well, poke the dragon's eyes out, go right down to the source of the problem, extinguish it, make a shield, right?
	So that meant that he would have strengthened his character by the encounter.
	So...
	Brilliant.
	And I talked to his mom for months afterwards.
	Done.
	No more night terrors.
	What had happened?
	He identified with the mythological hero.
	He identified with St.
	George and the Dragon.
	He identified with that little bloody tree-dwelling primate who, 20 million years ago, was the first one to drop a stick on a snake.
	He adopted the classic human mode of being in the face of uncertainty and construed himself as that which could prevail.
	End of terrors.
	Well...
	I guess we're done, eh?
	So, we're going to do something a little different than the syllabus today, because, you know, we've got this one hour, two hour problem, and I really can't cover constructionism reasonably in two hours, or one hour.
	That was supposed to be today.
	So what I'm going to do instead is continue on the line that I've been pursuing, but I'm going to expand it up more into Jungian psychology, which is the...
	What we're going after, after constructivism anyways.
	And so, I can weave the constructivism and the depth psychology together.
	And it's nice to do that, because it gives you a kind of a coherent view.
	So, just so you know, we're one lecture ahead at the moment, roughly speaking.
	And I'll do constructivism on Tuesday for two hours.
	So, alright.
	So, I showed you that animation.
	I told you about...
	My nephew's dream, which is a remarkable dream, you know, really.
	It's just amazing, amazing dream.
	And it's got this archetypal pattern, you know, and the pattern is that there's a threat.
	And worse than that, that there are threats.
	And at the back of it, there is the fact of threat itself.
	You see, so human beings, we're so smart, eh?
	So, this is so amazing that we figured this out.
	So you imagine, well, Human beings are the only creatures that can really conceive of the class of all threatening things, right?
	And that's kind of why we can be permanently anxious.
	So it's sort of annoying.
	So, you know, here you are, and it's safe, there's no lions here, or anything that might prey on you.
	But you can think of something to be anxious about, no problem.
	I'm certain you've got some little skeleton rattling around in your closet somewhere that's eating away at you.
	I think part of the reason we're so damn awake human beings is because we're always anxious.
	You have to be awake when you're anxious.
	The anxiety system actually activates your reticular activating system and that actually produces It's the substrate for consciousness.
	If you snap a few fibers in the back of your brain that are part of the reticular activating system in a car accident or something, you'll go into a coma.
	And that'll be that.
	You're not getting out of it.
	Doesn't take much of an injury either in the right place.
	So anyways, so human beings have been struggling with this problem of threat.
	Forever.
	Really.
	For as long as there's been life.
	Or at least as long as there's been life with the nervous system.
	You know, that's several hundred million years.
	It's a long time.
	And of course, It's easy to, you know, to respond to a particular threat Think about zebras, they're out there on the veld And there's lions everywhere, right?
	But the zebras are like, they're calm Because their lions are sleeping And so, the zebras don't think Apparently Oh my god, what was going to happen when those lions wake up?
	Because they don't think that way They're not going to be happy if the lion goes into a hunting crouch and starts its hunting approach, obviously, but it's not like the zebras are freaking out non-stop because there are lions around.
	They can react to specific threats, but human beings, partly because we discovered the future, which was a big mistake, because the future is an uncertain place, We realize that, well, there isn't any threat right now, but there might well be some tomorrow.
	And if there isn't some tomorrow, well, maybe next week, or next month, or next year.
	Like, it's coming!
	And so, there's danger.
	So it's the category of danger, you know?
	And out of the category of danger emerge specific threats.
	And the dragon seems to be a symbol of, it is a symbol, I believe, of The ever-present fact of predatory, slightly, predatory threat, but our nervous systems, as they've become capable of abstraction,
	have used that underlying architecture to represent more abstract categories, so it's not a predator, like a dragon is not a predator, because there are no dragons, but maybe a dragon is a snake, and a crocodile, and maybe a leopard, and maybe a A predatory bird all mangled into one monster.
	Because a monster is actually, technically, something that's made out of disparate parts.
	And so it's a good symbolic representation for the unknown as such.
	That which lies beyond the campfire, let's say.
	And what lurks out there.
	And so the eternal problem is, what the hell do you do with the dragon?
	And that also explains why the dragon typically is a treasure garter, right?
	Because it's even more...
	The problem is even worse.
	Out there in no man's land, out there in potential, there's threat, and like, mortal threat.
	But there's also endless opportunity, and riches, and wealth, and the possibility of attracting someone, and all of that.
	And so, well, the dragon, you can't just be afraid of it, you just stay in your burrow the whole time.
	Lots of animals more or less do that, you know, especially the nocturnal ones, they just hide away.
	But that isn't what human beings are like, because we're not only prey animals, right?
	We're also predators.
	Then, of course, we're crazy.
	We're absolutely insane chimpanzees, right?
	We're crazy.
	And so we're always out there mucking about with things and with our, you know, fingers and our thumbs and taking the world apart and putting it back together.
	And we're crazily exploratory and troublemaking.
	And so we don't just run from dragons.
	We go hunt them down.
	And so...
	And so there's a story here, the oldest story that mankind knows, and literally it is the oldest story that we know, is this story.
	And the story basically is, there's a bounded space, a walled garden, a walled city, you know, and all the original cities were walled, because if they weren't, barbarians would swoop in, and they'd just steal all your stuff.
	And so, you know, that was kind of pointless.
	You know, you wanted to have some major league walls surrounding your territory and so that's inhabited space and inside that is your little dominance hierarchy and so all you primates knew exactly who was who inside that space so you didn't have to fight with each other and you could predict each other's behavior because you believed the same things and saw the world roughly the same way and acted the same way and so you were sort of secure but then the problem is is that that can always be breached there's always something outside of it that's a danger and so that's signified by this This
	little creature here, this dragon.
	And that twirl in its tail is very common among dragons.
	It's actually a symbol, because imagistic languages, imagistic symbols have an ancient language.
	It's referring to something that's basically eternal.
	And see, it lives down here in this cave, because it's an underground thing.
	It's an underground thing, and you can kind of imagine what that's like, and sometimes this happens in initiation rituals among archaic people.
	When they're going to initiate, usually the young men, because nature initiates women all by itself, usually the young men, maybe they'll put them in a cave and leave them there, you know, for like...
	Well, who knows how long?
	So you've got to think, what's in a cave?
	Caves are dark, man.
	I don't know if you've ever been in one, but they're dark, and they're really dark.
	And so, not only is there whatever there is in the cave, and you don't know what the hell's in the cave, there's whatever you imagine might be in the cave.
	And so, when you're in that cave, and you're alone, You're confronting the devils and demons and monsters of your own imagination, you know, and so then you have a chance to perhaps deal with that and overcome it and that's perhaps part of the initiation ceremony, you know, and that's part of growing up because you have to learn how to face the things that terrify and upset you and recast them and put them back together.
	We talked a little bit about this idea of the pre-cosmogonic chaos that Iliade refers to, and it's the stuff out of which order is produced at the beginning of time, and it's also the stuff out of which you constantly reproduce order.
	And the Jungians, the psychoanalysts, especially the really deep psychoanalysts like Jung, Freud was a more surface psychoanalyst, and that's not an insult.
	There's some things that Freud figured out that are absolutely amazing.
	He was a precursor to Jung for sure.
	For Jung, the hero's journey was the journey inside the unconscious, and that would be, perhaps in some sense, the willingness to face everything terrible that's happened to you, and to think it through, and to articulate it, and to come to grips, perhaps with your own capacity for malevolence.
	That was a really important part of Jungian ideas, that the first step towards individuation, which is the manifestation of your full self, let's say, was the discovery of your shadow, and your shadow is the part of you that We'll do terrible things under the right circumstances, and maybe even without that much provocation.
	And it's a terrifying part of you to come into contact with, because it's sort of the way that you're specifically attached to the archetype of evil.
	That's a good way of thinking about it.
	And modern people, they don't really think much about the idea of good and evil, but that's because most of them are so damn naive, you can just barely even...
	Comprehend it.
	If you read any history, if you really read it, and you don't come away with the idea that evil exists, you're just reading the wrong kind of history.
	It's just unbelievable what people can do to each other.
	And we're so imaginative.
	And one of the things I figured out about people, the reason that we're We have the knowledge of good and evil, let's say, is that because we're self-conscious, and we know about ourselves, we know about our own vulnerability, right?
	You know what hurts you.
	You really know what hurts you.
	Way more than an animal knows.
	And so, and you're also creative, and so once you know what hurts you, Man, you can really hurt someone else.
	And you can do it in such a creative way.
	You can draw it out.
	You can make it excruciating.
	You can take people apart physically and psychologically.
	And you can keep them, say, even right on the edge of death.
	So that you can keep doing that endlessly.
	And, you know, that happens.
	A hell of a lot more than you think it happens.
	It happens a lot.
	And so...
	Well, and you think, well, you know, that doesn't involve me.
	It's like, oh yes, it does, man.
	That's the problem.
	Because, you know, you're human, and that's the sort of things that human beings are capable of.
	I'm not saying you're all...
	It's all probable that you do that ever, or that...
	But I'm saying that, you know, you've got to take that into account.
	When you're looking at the world, and you think about all the perpetrators out there, it's like...
	It's not like there's perpetrators and there's victims.
	That isn't how it works.
	It doesn't work that way at all.
	And so, the horrors of humanity, as well as the noble elements of humanity, are all elements of your central being.
	And for Jung, and this is the terrible thing, for Jung, the pathway to higher wisdom was through the terrible portal of, well, you could say hell, for that matter.
	Really?
	And so, who wants to do that, man?
	It's like...
	No.
	You know, like, maybe you're resentful about something.
	Well, you probably are because, like, everybody's resentful about something, you know?
	And resentment is just a vicious emotion.
	It's really useful.
	It's really useful because if you're resentful about something, it either means that you should grow the hell up and accept the responsibility and quit sniveling around and whining, or it means that someone actually is oppressing you and pushing on you too hard and bullying you and demeaning you, and you have something to say.
	Or do, that you're not saying or doing.
	And no wonder you're not saying or doing it, because, you know, it can be really dangerous to say things or do them to free yourself from being oppressed.
	You can get in a lot of trouble in the short term for doing it, so it's easier just to not say anything, sort of day after day.
	In the short term, you protect yourself, but it just crushes you.
	And then the resentment comes up, and resentment, man, that can just get so out of hand, you know.
	It starts with resentment, and then it starts, it goes to the desire for revenge, you know, because you'll play nasty little tricks on the person that's oppressing you.
	At any chance, you'll talk about them behind their back, and if they want you to do something, you'll do it badly, or you'll do it grudgingly, or you'll do a half-rate job, and you'll set up little traps, and You know, so, it puts you in a poisonous space and then, if you really start to dwell on that,
	say, in your basement for three or four years about just exactly how terrible the world is and how that's focused on you and how everyone's rejected you and how you get to this point where you're thinking that, you know, existence itself is a kind of poisonous endeavor and that the best thing for you to do is go out there and do as much, you know, create as much mayhem as you possibly can And if you really get to a dark place, you think, I'm going to create as much mayhem as I possibly can by targeting the most innocent thing I can possibly imagine.
	And then you end up shooting kids in Connecticut.
	And that's how you get there.
	And so, that's a bad road, man.
	There's dark things down there.
	But you can go there.
	And people do.
	And they go through the hole of resentment.
	And so, resentment can tell you, you've got something to say, you bloody well better say it.
	You've gotta free yourself from what's oppressing you.
	You have to stand up for that, because otherwise, you become oppressed.
	And then once you're oppressed, that's just not so good.
	And so, like in your marriage, in your relationships, You've got to tell people what you're thinking.
	You don't have to assume you're right.
	That's a whole different story, because you're not, because you're, you know, ignorant, and you're biased, and, you know, so you're not right, but you can stumble towards the expression of yourself, and then you can listen to the other person, and hope that they tell you some way that you're stupid that's useful, so you can be a little less stupid in the future, because wouldn't that be good?
	And so, you know, you go after the unknown, You don't protect what you know.
	You already know what you know.
	You go after what you don't know.
	That's why you have to talk to people you don't agree with.
	That's why you have to talk to your enemies.
	Because they're going to tell you things you don't know.
	You could even listen to them.
	It's possible they know a thing or two you don't know.
	But people don't like that.
	They just talk to people who think the same way.
	And then they just stay stupid.
	And that's not good, because if you're not wise, the world will wallop you, it'll flatten you, and far more than it has to, and then you'll be bitter and resentful, and you'll be part of that force that wallops instead of the force that fights against that.
	So, you go after the dragon, and that's what this guy is doing.
	He's going after the dragon.
	It's threatening the society, because it always does.
	Chaos, what's outside of order, always threatens order.
	Always.
	Always.
	And so, you have to step forward, you know, in this manner, voluntarily.
	And go after that when it's still manageable, right?
	And that's the case in your own life, too.
	So, you know, if you've had a proclivity to be bullied in the past, you know, And you want to get out of that.
	What you have to do is you have to make yourself awake to the...
	What would you say?
	To the initial stages of that sort of bullying emerging in your life again, that sort of domination, and you have to step forward against it, when it's still in its developing stages, because maybe you can just not have it happen.
	That would be better.
	And so you have to be ready to speak what you have to say, more or less on a moment's notice.
	You can't be impulsive about it.
	You know, like, if you and I are talking and you make a mistake, or I make a mistake, Even if it bothers one or the other of us, we should just write it off.
	Because it's like one encounter.
	What the hell?
	You know, maybe you had a bad night's sleep or something, you know?
	So you've got to be a little forgiving.
	But if it happens twice, then, you know, you should be a little awake.
	And you should remember both times.
	And then if it happens a third time, it's like, that's when you act.
	And you say, look.
	We talked, and this happened, and I thought, yeah, whatever.
	But then you did it again.
	And then you just did it again.
	Well, then the person is basically like, what are they going to do?
	You know?
	No?
	Well, maybe.
	They might argue with you, but you kind of got them.
	And generally, if you just point that out to people, just like that, just that you noticed and are willing to say something about it, they'll back the hell off.
	They'll often apologize.
	And sometimes you even make them a little more conscious, which is like, hey, that's not such a bad...
	That's what all this means.
	So this chaos idea.
	So for Jung, it was the unconscious.
	It was the contents of your unconscious.
	And so that might be the unknown past.
	The threatening past that you have never dealt with.
	Might be the threatening future.
	It might be the threatening present.
	But Jung realized, as he got older, that the unconscious was also the world.
	And you think, and so the chaos is not only your unconscious mind, which meets the unknown, but it's actually the unknown itself, mingled together.
	And you think, what the hell does that part...
	That's why the dragon is...
	A land creature and an air creature.
	It's matter and spirit at the same time.
	And this sort of gets us into constructivism.
	Because the constructivists think that basically what happens is that you encounter those elements of the world that don't fit into your theory and out of those new elements you make the world through your perceptions and you make yourself by incorporating the information and transforming yourself.
	And that's how Piaget explains the development of a child.
	The child starts out with some reflexes, basic reflexes, and manifesting the reflexes produces results in the world and then the child has to reorganize its perceptions to take into account the transformations and so then it gets a little more sophisticated and then it can do a few more things and then it can manifest more changes in the world and then it It tracks them and modifies its perceptions and actions to account for them, and it just keeps doing that, and that's how the child boots itself up, like a computer does.
	It's a very cool idea.
	And so, from the Piagetian stance, so it's a constructivist stance, you could think of the world as a latent pool of information, it's something like that, with a structure, obviously, that you can interact with, with your little fingers and your body and your mind and your eyes and your mouth,
	and You make changes happen, and you track them, and you model them, and you build your skills, and as you continue to do that, in the safety of your house, initially under the care of your parents who fill in where you're ignorant, you just emerge more and more competent and confident and ready to move ahead.
	So that's how the constructivist idea works.
	So there's kind of a chaos idea at the bottom of that, which is that out of which you emerge and the world emerges at the same time.
	Because, you know, you don't see reality.
	Not at all.
	You see, almost like an animated version of reality, you know?
	Like when I look at you, I just see the front of you.
	I just see the outside of you.
	I see you at this height.
	I don't see any of your internal structure.
	I don't see the back part of you at all.
	I don't see your family.
	I don't see your history.
	I don't see your future.
	You know?
	I just see this slice of you.
	You're so complicated.
	I just see this little...
	Like, oversimplified slice of you right now, and I think that's the reality.
	It's sort of the reality, the way that a Simpsons character is you.
	It's sort of like you, and it's enough so that you can watch the story, but the real you, man.
	God only knows what that is.
	And that's a Jungian idea, you know, that the real you is something that radically transcends your perception of yourself or your conception of yourself.
	And that you get to that higher you, at least in part, by going into the darkest place.
	And so, it's a hell of an idea, man.
	It's really...
	But it's the old idea of initiation.
	It's as old as time, that idea.
	And there's something to it.
	And we definitely recreate it in psychotherapy.
	Like, this isn't an airy theory.
	It's quite the contrary.
	Because what you do as a psychologist, always, always, a behaviorist, say, the most logical, clinical type of psychologist, a behaviorist is an initiatory shaman, even though he or she doesn't know it.
	They say, okay, well, let's take a look at your life.
	Like, okay, you've got a bunch of problems, and they're like massive dragons, and you're just like, you're not going anywhere with those problems.
	You're just cowering in the corner.
	And what the behavior therapist does is cut them, cut that dragon into those little dwarfs.
	Until the dwarfs are small enough so that you can really kick the hell out of them.
	And so, by the way they do that is they take the problem and they decompose it into elements that are small enough that you have a reasonable probability of mastering them.
	So you take the problem apart into its micro-problems.
	Careful, careful analytic process.
	And then you think, okay, well, how could we progress a little bit this week?
	And some of that is to face to practice facing things you're afraid of so like if you're agoraphobic and you can't get on an elevator you can't get on a taxi and you can't stand up to your husband and I'm saying husband because most agoraphobics are women most of them are middle-aged women and most of them were too dependent for most of their life so that's a monster it's like Society, husband, elevator, taxi, subway, it's a monster, and it's that place you will not go.
	And that's because you feel this high, and everything else looks this big.
	And so, and partly that's because you've run away, and when you run away from something, it grows and chases you, which is, well, it's exactly what happens to a prey animal, man.
	If you go in the woods, and you find a bear, especially a grizzly, Well, you're in real trouble if it's a grizzly.
	But if it's a black bear, you know, generally speaking, if you stand your ground and make a hell of a lot of noise, that thing will leave you alone.
	But if you run, well, what's it supposed to think?
	It eats things that run from it.
	So that's exactly where that idea came from.
	You turn tail and run, and then the thing that you're afraid of is really a monster, and it's gonna, like, get you and eat you.
	It's like, well, that's true psychologically as well.
	And the same circuits that we used to, when we were, you know, out in the forest, even in trees, the same circuits that we used to parse up the world then into Safe territory and place where the predators loom is the way we parse up the world now, which is safe territory and the place where the predators loom.
	It's just become abstracted.
	Way up.
	Abstracted way up.
	But it's the same damn circuits.
	We know this.
	The same circuits you use to forage for information, which is a dopaminergic circuit, is the circuit that squirrels use to forage for nuts.
	And you think, well, why?
	Well, it's because there's no difference between information and food.
	Like, you trade information for food all the time.
	That's what you're doing when you're working, especially if you're working on a computer.
	So, the idea that there's an equation between information and food, it's like, well obviously!
	Obviously there's an equation between them.
	So of course you'd use the same circuits.
	And I mean, the damn squirrel has to remember where the nuts are.
	And so for him, information is food even.
	So what happened to human beings is that we started thinking, hey, maybe it's better to go after information than it is to go after food.
	Because going after information produces more food than just going after food.
	And so that was a pretty damn smart idea.
	So we're still doing that.
	So anyways, this is what you're supposed to be doing.
	And so...
	And this is what behavior therapists do.
	They decompose your problems.
	What are you afraid of?
	Well...
	Okay, you're afraid of everything.
	Well, let's get something specific you're afraid of.
	Well, I'm afraid of an elevator.
	Okay, an elevator.
	So I have a client.
	She's afraid of elevators.
	The elevator door opens.
	She goes, that's a tomb.
	And I thought, oh, wow, I thought it was an elevator.
	But for you, it's not a bloody elevator.
	It's death.
	And so that's what you're afraid of.
	It's worse than that.
	You're afraid of being trapped inside there in the dark alone.
	Alone.
	Not knowing if anyone is going to rescue you.
	Stuck there with your damn imagination.
	Freaking out.
	It's like, and if that's not...
	And then maybe you have a heart attack because you're so terrified and you die.
	It's like, you know...
	So, that's the elevator.
	Well, it's no bloody wonder no one's going to get into something like that.
	And then maybe underneath that is your distrust in the mechanisms of society.
	Right?
	Because, you know...
	A normal person, those weird creatures, they'll get an elevator, what the hell, they don't care.
	And partly it's because they have an implicit belief, even if the thing stops, somebody will come along and rescue them.
	And usually you don't even think about it, right?
	It's like, what the hell, it's an elevator.
	It's like, the danger is invisible to you.
	And it's partly because you implicitly trust the structure, and so maybe you go into the unconscious presuppositions of the person who is terrified of the elevator and the subways, and you find out they have a real problem with trusting authority, and that's partly why they don't get along with their husband, and why they've never been able to stand up for themselves.
	So then, you say, okay, well you're afraid of the damn elevator, but it's not an elevator, it's a tomb, and the tomb is partly you and partly It's partly the elevator and partly your unconscious mind.
	And so, well, what can you handle?
	Can you go and look at an elevator from ten feet away?
	It's like, yes.
	Okay.
	How about nine feet away?
	Yes.
	Five feet?
	Yes.
	Four feet?
	No.
	Okay.
	No problem.
	Four and a half feet.
	We're going to go from that elevator and we're going to look at the damn thing until you're bored of it.
	Because that's what we're trying to...
	You should be bored of the elevator.
	Because then you're not afraid of it, obviously.
	It's like, it's an elevator.
	You just don't notice it, right?
	All these things around here that you don't notice, I take you out of here and ask you what color the walls are.
	You haven't got any idea.
	You know, I suspect for most of you, there's not a chance you'd be able to identify the gender of the person who's sitting next to you, unless you know them.
	It's like, you just don't remember anything.
	And why should you?
	Everything works.
	Like, you don't have to pay attention to it.
	It's like, Is that staying up?
	Yeah, it's still up.
	Yeah, it's still up.
	Still up.
	It's like, really?
	No.
	No, you get bored of that real quick, and so then you just ignore it.
	But the agoraphobic has had that veil of ignorance torn away, and what they see behind it is mortal threat, and so that's really what you're helping them deal with.
	This week, they're four and a half feet from the elevator.
	Next week, they're a foot from the elevator.
	And the week after that, the horrible gates of hell open and they look inside and they don't run.
	And so, hey, they're tougher than they thought they were.
	And that's what you're teaching them actually.
	You're not teaching them that the world isn't dangerous.
	Because that's a stupid thing to teach someone.
	Bloody right, the world is dangerous.
	It's terrifying.
	And sometimes people under, they realize that.
	And the veil lifts.
	And they see horror everywhere.
	They see that.
	And then they think, well, I'm just a little rabbit.
	I'm over here in the corner.
	I can't move.
	I'm petrified.
	And then they can't move.
	They hide at home.
	They cower at home.
	Because everything has become a predatory domain.
	And so what you teach them is you're not as much of a rabbit as you think.
	And part of that is that you help them grow some teeth so that they can go home and have that fight with their husband that they should have had 25 years ago.
	And it happens very frequently with agoraphobic clients that you get them so They can go on the damn elevator, and they can go on the subway, and they can take a taxi.
	Maybe they learn to drive.
	Wow!
	They get some autonomy, and then they're a little tougher, and so then they can stand up for themselves, and they go back, and, like, their husband might not be very happy with any of this.
	Really, it depends on what sort of guy he is, you know?
	If he's a real tyrant, he might be just perfectly happy that he's married to someone who, you know, is afraid of her own shadow, because then she won't ever leave.
	And so that's a nasty little story, and believe me, it's not uncommon.
	So she gets tougher by facing what she fears.
	And what she finds out is there's a hell of a lot more to her than she thought.
	And that's really what happens when you do behavior therapy with someone who's agoraphobic.
	It isn't really that they get less afraid.
	It's that they get braver.
	That's way different.
	It's because brave is alert and able to cope.
	Naive is there's no danger.
	It's like, oh yeah, right.
	There's no danger.
	Jesus, what a stupid theory that is.
	So anyways, that's what all this is.
	That's the story, man.
	And it's a major story.
	It's the story of human transformation and growth.
	It's the evolution of mankind.
	It's like it's a major story.
	And we've been working on the damn thing for like...
	God only knows how long.
	Snakes and primates co-evolved and our vision, our sharp, sharp, sharp vision seems to have been an evolutionary adaptation forced on us by the presence of predatory snakes.
	And we're talking tens of millions of years ago.
	And human beings have unbelievably sharp eyesight.
	The only thing that can outsee us is birds of prey.
	And they have, like an eagle, a bald eagle, has eyes as big as ours.
	And it has two foveas.
	That fovea is the central part of the vision.
	So an eagle is all eyes, man.
	And so, but human beings, we're kind of like that too.
	And like half our brain is devoted to visual processing.
	We have acute vision.
	In Madagascar, where there are primates with no predatory snakes, they're lemurs, they can't see worth a damn.
	An anthropologist named Lynn Isbell did a comprehensive study worldwide, trying to account for the acuity of primate vision, and what she found was that the more predatory snakes in the vicinity, the sharper the eyesight of the primates.
	And so, we have a really sharp eyesight.
	So that means a lot of us were eaten by snakes.
	And none of your ancestors, fortunately, because otherwise you wouldn't be here, but a lot of those who fell by the wayside were snake snack.
	And, you know, when you're little and living in a tree, A snake is no damn joke, and even now, lots of people get bitten by snakes, and people are phobic of snakes at quite a rate.
	And some of that actually seems innate.
	There's arguments between psychologists about this, but even the ones who don't accept the fact that it's innate, accept the fact that you can make someone afraid of a snake by conditioning just like that, where trying to make them afraid of a flower by conditioning is really, really hard.
	So we're at least, at minimum, prepared to be afraid of snakes.
	Minimum.
	And I believe it's...
	I believe the fear is actually innate, although you can learn to control it.
	So...
	Anyways, so that's that story.
	And like, what a story, man.
	It's an amazing, amazing story.
	You see the den of the dragon here is littered with skulls and bones.
	That's what that is.
	So the thing is no joke.
	It's like, look the hell out.
	And that's this, you know.
	And look it up in the top right-hand corner there.
	You know, that's from Peter Pan, right?
	Well, you remember Captain Hook.
	We talked about him already.
	He's a tyrant.
	And he's a tyrant because he's afraid of death.
	And that's all he sees in life.
	And so it makes him cruel and bitter.
	And death has already taken part of him, right?
	That's why he has a hook.
	And that damn crocodile is chasing him.
	Tick, tick, tick, tick all the time.
	And of course...
	That's the same situation you're all in, man.
	There's a crocodile with a clock in its stomach chasing you.
	And it could easily turn you into a tyrant.
	It can turn you into a tyrant or a cowering victim or a hero.
	Those are the options, fundamentally.
	So, and that's the Gorgon looking at her own, the Medusa, looking at her own reflection.
	You know, Mother Nature with the head full of snakes.
	You know, a terrifying vision.
	And that's actually, to some degree, an archetype that men get confused with women.
	And, you know, that's the witchy part of women, and that's the part that's attractive, attractive, attractive, but rejecting, rejecting, rejecting.
	And so, many men are petrified by women.
	They won't approach them at all.
	They have no idea how to talk to them.
	They're just petrified into immobility.
	And that's way more common than you think.
	And so that breeds resentment like you wouldn't believe, you know.
	You hear, the guy who shot up, like, um, um, Dawson College.
	It's like, what the hell do you think motivated him?
	It's like, that's what he saw!
	And it was because, well, he was, my opinion is, he was too goddamn useless to be attractive to anyone, and so, that's a hell of a place to be in, you know?
	And that's the problem, too, if you're chronically rejected by people, it's often because of your own insufficiencies.
	You know, whether that's cowardice or lack of social skills or whatever it is.
	It's like, you can't just brush it off as, oh well, you know, no one likes me, but really I'm okay.
	It's like, no, no, wrong.
	If everyone rejects you, there's probably something wrong.
	And it's probably deep and difficult, and it's going to be horrible to fix.
	And so, this isn't a trivial problem.
	It's not a trivial problem.
	At all.
	And so, you know, that's mother nature for men too, because from the sexual selection point of view, if they're not selected as a mate, nature has taken them out of the game, right?
	And so, you know, people don't really like that.
	They're not that happy with that.
	And so, but getting all whiny about it and then getting violent is like, that's just not all, not really very helpful, although it's very common.
	So, This is Lynn Isabel.
	An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brain in primates, a radical new theory suggests.
	These are old representations.
	I really like this one.
	This is...
	I don't remember.
	I think it's Greek.
	But it doesn't exactly look Greek.
	It might be older.
	It doesn't matter, anyways.
	You see, it's the same idea as Graham's dream, right?
	It's like, there's this thing that exists, this multi-headed snake, and it's got this infinity problem.
	It's everywhere.
	That's that little circle down there.
	And the problem is, well, what do you do with it?
	You cut off one head, seven more, grow.
	That's the eternal problem of life.
	And the problem is, There is the category of problems in life and it ain't going anywhere.
	And so the question is, can you deal with the whole category at the same time?
	That's the thing, that's how to be in the world, is to deal with that category all at the same time.
	And so how did human beings, what did they come up with as a solution?
	And that's so cool too, because the solution they come up with, not only was the heroism that allows you to approach what you're terrified by and what you find offensive, and to learn from it, but also the idea of sacrifice, and that was played out by cultures everywhere, including human sacrifice.
	And you think, what the hell was up with those crazy bastards so long ago?
	They were sacrificing to gods all the time.
	What kind of clueless behavior was that?
	Burn something and please God.
	Burn something valuable and please God.
	It's like, what was with them?
	What were they thinking?
	Well, they weren't stupid, those people.
	If they were stupid, we wouldn't be here.
	They were not stupid.
	And believe me, they lived under a lot harsher conditions than we do.
	So, those were some tough people, man.
	You know, back then, you'd last about 15 minutes.
	And so, you don't want to be thinking of your ancestors as stupid.
	Like, there's no real evidence that we're much different cognitively than we were 150,000 years ago.
	So, anyways...
	Sacrifice.
	What does that mean, sacrifice?
	Well, it's a discovery, man.
	It's the discovery of the future.
	It's like, the future is actually the place where there is threat.
	And it's always going to be there.
	So what do you do?
	You make sacrifices in the present so that the future is better.
	Right!
	Everyone does that.
	That's what you're doing right now.
	That's what you're doing here.
	That's what your parents are doing when they pay money to send you to university.
	They think, you can bargain with reality.
	It's amazing.
	You can bargain with reality.
	You can forestall gratification now.
	And it'll pay off at a place and time that doesn't even exist yet.
	It's like, who would have believed that?
	It's like, that's a miracle that that occurs.
	And it's not like people just figured that out overnight.
	You know, we were chimps for Christ's sake.
	Like, how are we going to come up with an idea like that?
	Well, it's like, well, we thought about it for seven million years.
	And, you know, we got to the point where we could kind of act it out.
	But we didn't know what we were doing.
	But it emerged like a dream.
	So the terror of the future is a dream.
	And the solution to the terror, the dream of the terror of the future, is another dream.
	And it comes out in mythology and in fantasy and in drama.
	Where you act out the sacrifice.
	And then it's a step on the way to full understanding.
	So we can say sacrifice now instead of doing it.
	You know, although we still do it.
	It's just not concretized like it used to be.
	We do it abstractly.
	And we all have faith that it will work.
	You know, and we also set up our society so that it'll work.
	And one thing about, you know, I'm not a fan of moral relativism for a variety of reasons.
	Partly because I think it's an extreme form of cowardice.
	But anyways, apart from that, no, no, no, no.
	There's minimal ways that you can set up a society that will work.
	And so one of them is that the society has to be set up so that your sacrifices will pay off or you won't work and then the society will die.
	And so it has to make promises.
	People have to make promises to one another.
	And that's what money is.
	Money is a promise that your sacrifice will pay off in the future.
	That's what money is.
	and so if the society is stable you can store up your work right now you can sacrifice your impulses and you can work and you can store up credit for the future and then you can make the future a better place but society has to be stable enough to allow for that Hyperinflation will do you in.
	So, the promise that's implicit in the currency is the promise that what you're doing now will pay off in the future.
	And if people don't have that promise, then, well, we know what they do.
	Because in gangs, for example, say, gangs in North America, The time horizon of the gang members shrinks rapidly because they don't really expect to be alive much past 21, and so they get really impulsive and violent, and like, why the hell not?
	That's what you do when the future doesn't matter, when it's not real.
	You default back to living in the moment, and you take what you can get right now, and no wonder, because you don't know if you're going to be around In a year.
	And you get whatever you can.
	Well, you can bloody well get it.
	And that's like anarchy, that state.
	And so you don't want to live in...
	Some people like to live in that state because they're really wired for that, you know?
	And so they're much more comfortable in those conditions.
	They're kind of like warrior types, I would say, in some sense.
	But, you know, for most people, that's just...
	Well, that stress will just do you in.
	You know, the stress of a life like that.
	So...
	That's a pretty horrible picture, the one on the right, I think.
	You know, it's a creepy picture.
	Don't you think?
	It seems like a creepy picture to me.
	Yeah, and so, that's Quetzalcoatl, if I remember correctly, who was an Aztec dragon god.
	And that's the eye of Horus, by the way, this little thing here.
	See, the Egyptians, they worshipped the eye.
	Yeah, well that's cool because, well, why did they worship the eye?
	Well, wake the hell up and look at the world.
	That's your salvation to do that.
	Pay bloody attention.
	Especially to the things you don't want to pay attention to.
	And use your vision.
	Have some vision.
	And you can use your vision to see into the future.
	And that is your...
	That's your redemption.
	And the Egyptians, they didn't know how to say that.
	But they knew how to represent it.
	And that's how they represented it.
	Like, the pupil on that is completely open.
	Completely dilated.
	And that's a god as far as the Egyptians were concerned.
	It's Horus.
	And I'll tell you Horus' story at some point.
	So, early primates developed a better eye for color, detail, and movement, and the ability to see in three dimensions.
	Traits that are important for detecting threats at close range.
	Humans are descended from these same primates.
	Alright.
	So, now, the initiation.
	When you go into psychotherapy, or when you make any supreme moral effort, which is roughly the same thing, you have to confront that which you do not know.
	Now, I mentioned the pre-cosmogonic chaos and the idea that at the end of Jung's life, he sort of thought of the unconscious and the world as the same.
	And you think, what the hell does that mean?
	But here's what it means.
	So let's say you're in a long-term intimate relationship and you get betrayed.
	Okay, so what is it that you see when you see your partner at the moment you know of the betrayal?
	Well, you see the pre-cosmogonic chaos, and here's why.
	Well, it rattles your unconscious up, because you don't know anything anymore.
	You don't know what the past was.
	Right?
	You don't know what it was.
	And it's supposed to be real, and all of a sudden you don't know what it was.
	And so you come up with wild ideas about what it might have been, and what it represented, and then you don't know what the future is going to be anymore.
	So then your fantasy fills that space, and you don't know who the hell you're looking at, that's for sure, and you don't know much about human beings, and you certainly don't know anything about yourself.
	And so all of a sudden, not only is everything in chaos inside your mind, but everything is in chaos in your world.
	And it actually is, and there's no telling the difference between those two things.
	You know, and so then, you're just shattered.
	And so then you go talk to a therapist for like two years, and you think, what happened?
	What was the reality?
	And the reality is, because who knows what the reality was, like, but as far as you're concerned, the reality is, I better represent this properly.
	In my head.
	I better figure out who I was, who that person was, what we did together, and what it meant.
	Because I do not want this to happen again.
	And so you're healed when you get to the point where you've grasped the bloody moral of the story.
	What went wrong?
	And how can I not have that happen again?
	Because that's the purpose of learning, right?
	That's the purpose of memory.
	It's to prepare you for the future.
	And so, you have to pull out of that massive chaos a functional representation that increases your wisdom so that you're not this naive target the next time you enter into a relationship.
	So at least you can have another relationship without being so traumatized that, you know, you're done.
	And you know, it can take people years to talk that through because this landscape of potential opens up when they're betrayed.
	It's like, well, anything could have been the truth.
	Well, to sort through that, you have to wander through all that mess, and it's really painful and emotional as well.
	You have to sort through all that mess to come out with the new you, right?
	The renewed you.
	And so, while this is a representation of it, this is how people act this out.
	But whatever method he may have been designated, the shaman is recognized as such as only after having received two methods of instruction.
	The first is ecstatic, dreams, trances and visions.
	The second is traditional, shamanic techniques, names and functions of the spirit, mythology and genealogy of the clan.
	And a secret language.
	Well, one of the things that happens...
	This happens to you even if you encounter something terrible, like a betrayal.
	What happens is that you have to take a journey into the domain of morality, essentially.
	Which is, well, how did I act?
	And how did that person act?
	And how should have they acted?
	And how should have I acted?
	And so...
	And that's part of your cultural structure.
	And so that's the idea of rescuing the dead father from the depths, right?
	And that's...
	Well, we'll show you some examples of that.
	So...
	This is a critical issue with regards to the shamanic transformation, is that people go through these terrible experiences, often drug-induced, by the way, with regards to the shaman.
	They usually use psychedelic chemicals of one form or another, often mushrooms, but they've come up with some very strange concoctions like ayahuasca, Down in the Amazon, and ayahuasca is an amazing substance.
	It's made out of the bark of one thing, and another plant whose name I don't remember, that hardly even grow in the same place, and that have to be cooked together in a special way, and no one has any idea how the damn Amazonians figured that out.
	It looks impossible, and if you ask them, they say, well, the plants told us how to do it, which, you know, Western people don't find very helpful, but the shamans are perfectly happy with that that description and ayahuasca takes them apart and it does that in part because it affects the serotonergic system very very powerfully like all psychedelics do and it transports them to another world and that's how they interpret it and And what we know about psychedelics,
	you could put in a thimble and then throw the thimble away.
	We know nothing about psychedelics.
	There's new experiments going on at Johns Hopkins, for example, with psilocybin, which is part of this active chemical in magic mushrooms.
	Same structure, basically, as LSD and mescaline.
	All the real psychedelics have basically the same structure, except the one that's derived from Amanita muscaria, which is called muscarinic acid, and it's its own weird thing that no one knows anything about.
	Anyways, they have profound neurochemical effects in very small doses and the research group at Johns Hopkins has given psilocybin to research subjects you know, purified psilocybin because they started the new experimentation with psychedelics and that's been banned for like 40 years Because psychedelics were so terrifying to our culture that we just put them away.
	It's like, whoa, no, we're not going there.
	And so, even from a research perspective, and even though some of the psychedelics look very promising for the treatment of disorders like alcoholism, they recently used psilocybin to help people stop smoking down at Johns Hopkins.
	And I think they had an 80% success rate, which is just, like, that's just absolutely mind-boggling.
	And so, but if you give people psilocybin and they have a mystical experience, which is very common among people who take these sorts of chemicals then their personality transforms permanently such that one year later their one standard deviation higher in openness and openness is the creativity dimension and that seems to be a permanent transformation so that's really remarkable and about 80% of the people who undergo the Johns Hopkins experiments report that the experience is like one of the two or three most important
	things that's ever happened to them.
	And so, well, that's something, you know.
	And then there's this guy named Rick Strassman down at, I think he was at the University of Texas, and he did experimentation with DMT. And DMT, dimethyltryptamine, if I remember correctly, is the active ingredient in ayahuasca and you produce it in your brain and it's in plants,
	it's like a very common chemical but DMT is a weird hallucinogen because it has an extraordinarily short mechanism of action and people who take it report that they're blasted out of their body like out of a cannon and then they go out somewhere and encounter beings of various sorts and then Ten minutes later they're back,
	and virtually everyone reports that, which is really strange, and so Strassmann was giving people DMT intravenously so that the trip would last longer.
	This was all, you know, NIH-funded experimentation, all cleared with the relevant ethics boards, all conducted within the last ten years, and he basically quit doing it because he was a pretty straight scientist, you know, he was measuring heart rate and pulse and all that sort of thing, trying to look at the physiology, and then The people he was giving these chemicals to kept coming back and telling them these crazy stories.
	Well, it just, it was too much for him, you know, and no wonder, you know, because they all said the same thing, and he'd say, well, that was a dream, and they'd say, no, and it was the most real thing that ever happened to me, and he'd say, well, you know, it's an archetypal experience, and they'd say, no, no, no, that was no archetypal experience, I went somewhere else, and I saw things, and I'm back, and, like, I don't care what you think, and, like, who the hell knows, right, because it's all subjective, But the weird thing about it is that everyone's reporting the same thing.
	How the hell do you account for that?
	And then the shaman, you know, when they take these psychedelic chemicals, they basically say the same thing.
	They say, well, first of all, it more or less killed me.
	That's this.
	You know, I dissolved to the skeleton, and then I climbed the tree that unites heaven and earth, and I went into the realm of the gods, and they gave me some information, and I'm back.
	It's like, okay, well, you know, we don't really know what to make of that.
	And certainly that's what Eliad describes when he describes the shamanic procession, not the shamanic initiation.
	You know, there's dissolution to a skeleton first, and then like a death, a symbolic death, or experienced as an actual death, and then bang, up into the realm of the gods, and then they come back.
	It's a very old idea, and that's a medieval representation of the tunnel that people travel through at the end of their life to, you know, to find the light, which is a very common near-death experience report, and people don't have any idea what the hell to do with those reports, except say, well, it's the paroxysms of the dying brain, which you'd expect to be a hell of a lot more random, in my opinion.
	And the idea is there's a rebirth after that.
	And you know, here, this is the Scandinavian representation of that tree that unites Earth with Heaven.
	And so there's the Scandinavian representation.
	It has a snake, snakes down here eating it.
	And then, that's the Amazonian representation.
	It's like, how the hell do you account for that?
	I mean, those pictures are so similar that it's just, it's beyond belief.
	Well, you know, we lived in trees for a long time.
	A long, long, long, long time.
	Millions of years.
	And there were lots of snakes around them.
	And so the idea that reality is a tree that's surrounded by a snake is...
	That's in us, man.
	It's down there.
	It's deep.
	And there's something about it that's true.
	And not true like we normally think of truth.
	But true in an entirely different manner.
	So...
	And all that's pretty damn strange.
	We'll stop with this.
	My son drew this when he was seven years old.
	It blew me away, man.
	I thought it was so cool, so I had it laminated.
	And so, here is what it is.
	On the right-hand side, that's order.
	It's like the yin-yang thing.
	That's order.
	Left side, chaos.
	Right?
	And those are all mushroom houses, which I thought was amazing.
	And then...
	There's this river that runs right down the middle, like the line for order and chaos, and then there's this tree that goes up to heaven, and that's heaven up there.
	It's like, there's St.
	Peter, there's the pearly gates, there's the clouds.
	It's like, he never went to church, you know?
	It's like, what the hell?
	And then there's a little bug there that goes up and down from heaven to earth, and that was him.
	And I thought, He had a very organized psyche, that kid.
	He was a very, very stable kid and still is.
	He drew that and I thought, Jesus, that's just bloody well unbelievable.
	And I still think that when I look at it.
	And that's a great example of an archetype.

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