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Nov. 28, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:32:03
Lecture: Biblical Series XIV: Jacob: Wrestling with God
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*Music* Alright, so the last time I was here, many of you were as well, we got halfway through the story of Jacob and I've been digging underneath the story,
sporadically since then to try to find out what other themes are being developed and I've got some things that sporadically since then to try to find out what other themes are being developed and I've got some So, we'll get right into it.
So I'm going to review a little bit first.
So we were talking about Jacob, and I'll re-update his biography a little bit so that we can place ourselves in the proper context before we go on.
So his mother, Rebecca, gave birth to twins, and the twins, even in her womb, were struggling for...
Well, they were struggling, and of course the story is that they were struggling for dominance.
The older...
Or the younger against the older, really, because Jacob.
Jacob means usurper.
And Rebecca had a...
What would you call?
A vision from God that said that Jacob would supplant Esau.
And so even before her twins were born, they were in a state of competition.
And that's a recapitulation of the motif of the hostile brothers, right?
It's a very, very, very common mythological motif.
And we already saw that really well developed in the story of Cain and Abel, right?
And Cain and Abel were essentially the first two human beings The first two natural-born human beings and they were instantly locked in a state of enmity which is symbolic of first the enmity that exists within people's psyche between the part of them you might say that's aiming at the light and the part of them that's aiming at the darkness and I think that's a reasonable way of portraying it.
Obviously it's a way that's sort of rife with symbolism but my experience of people especially when you get to know them seriously or when they're dealing with serious issues is that there is quite clearly a part of them that's striving to do well in the world or even to do good and another part that's deeply cynical and embittered that it says to hell with it and is self-destructive and lashes out and really aims at making things worse and
So that seems to be a natural part of the human psyche, and that's also reflected in the idea of the fall.
And so those ideas are not easily cast away.
They're associated with the rise of self-consciousness, right, in the story of the Garden of Eden.
And I think that's right, because I do think that our self-consciousness produces that division within us because more than any other creature we're intensely aware of our finitude and suffering and that tends to turn us at least to some degree against being itself.
You know, I was watching a bunch of protesters in the U.S. last week scream at the sky about Trump, you know?
And it was interesting.
Like, I thought it was an extraordinarily narcissistic display.
But despite that, there's something symbolically appropriate about it.
I also...
There's a movie I really like, sadly enough, called FUBAR. I don't know how many of you have seen that.
Yeah, you know that movie, I take it.
Yeah, it's about the people I grew up with.
So, yeah, that's true, man.
I'm telling you, that's true.
So the guy, the main actor in FUBAR, who's quite bright but completely uncivilized, Gets testicular cancer, and there's one great scene where he gets far too drunk, and he's stumbling around the street, you know, in a virtually comatose state.
And, of course, he's not very thrilled with what's happened to him, and he's shaking his fist at the sky.
It's pouring rain, and he's cursing God.
And, you know, it's like, well, you can kind of understand his position, so...
That kind of reminded me of these people who were yelling at the sky.
They were basically...
They were dramatizing the idea of...
They were enraged at...
Well, you could say God.
Of course, most of them wouldn't say that.
But they were the ones yelling at the damn sky.
I mean, you know.
So you've got to look at what they're doing rather than what they say.
And they were outraged that being was constructed such that Trump could have arisen as president.
And so...
Well, so this idea, you know, that we can be easily turned against being and work for its destruction is a really...
It's a really common, common, common theme.
It never goes away.
You see it echoed in stories like with the new Marvel series, for example.
You see the...
Enmity between Thor and Loki that's a good example of the same thing or between Batman and the Joker there's there's or Superman and Lex Luthor these there's these pairs of hero against villain that's a really dramatic and easily Everyone can understand that dynamic, right?
It's a basic plot.
And the reason it's a basic plot is because it's true of the battle within our spirits, our own individual spirits.
It's true within families because sibling rivalry can be unbelievably brutal.
It's true between human beings who are strangers.
It's true between groups of people.
It's true at every level of analysis.
And then, in some sense, it's archetypally true, at least with regards to deep religious symbolism, because you see that echoed in many stories as well.
So, I think the clearest representation is probably Christ and Satan.
That's the closest to a pure archetype.
Although...
There's, in the old Egyptian stories, there's Osiris and Seth, or Horus and Seth, and Seth is a precursor to Satan, etymologically.
So, it's a very, very common motif, and so that's what happens again in Rebekah's womb, is that this thing, this idea is played out right away, and the two twins are actually, what would you call it there, They have a superordinate destiny because one of them is destined to become the father of Israel and,
of course, that's a pinnacle moment in the Old Testament, obviously, and arguably a pinnacle moment in human history.
Now, you know, Degree to which the stories in the Old Testament actually constitute what we would consider empirical history is a matter of debate But it doesn't matter in some sense because as I mentioned I think before in this lecture series No, there are there are forms of fiction that are meta true which means that They're not necessarily about a specific individual, although I generally think they are based on the life of specific individuals.
It's the simplest theory, but who knows, right?
But they're more real than reality itself, because they abstract out the most relevant elements of reality and present them to you.
And that's why you watch fiction.
You want your fiction boiled down, right?
You want it boiled down to the essence.
That's what makes good fiction.
And that essence is something that's truer than plain old truth, if it's handled well.
And so, you know, if you watch a Shakespeare play, Half a lifetime of events can go by in a Shakespeare play, and it covers a wide range of scenes and so on.
And so it's cut and edited and compressed all at once, but because of that it blasts you with a kind of emotional and ethical force that just the mere videotaping of someone's daily life wouldn't even come close to approximating.
So, and this motif of the hostile brothers, that's a deep, deep archetypal truth.
And God says to Rachel, two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels, and one people shall be stronger than the other, and the elder shall serve the younger.
And so there's an inversion there, right?
Because, as we've discussed earlier, Historically speaking and traditionally speaking, it's the elder son to whom the disproportionate blessings flow.
There's some truth in that too, even more empirically, IQ tends to decrease as the number of children in the family increase.
The oldest is the smartest, generally speaking.
It isn't clear why that is, but it might be that they get more attention.
Who knows?
So, those of you who are younger can be very unhappy about that fact.
Now, Jacob...
Okay, so there's another plot line here, too, because Abraham and Rebekah...
Isaac and Rebekah are at odds about the children, right?
So there's an Oedipal twist to it too, because, well, Isaac is allied with Esau, who turns out to be the hunter type, so he's your basic rough-and-tumble character, you know, and he's kind of a wild-looking guy, hairy and He likes to be outside.
He lives in tents.
He likes to hunt.
He's a man's man.
That's one way of thinking about it.
Whereas Jacob dwells in tents.
You know, he doesn't go outside much.
He's more...
Well, maybe he's more introverted.
But he's certainly this sort of kid, adolescent, say, who hangs around home.
And there's some intimation that he's his mother...
Well, he's clearly his mother's favorite.
And with all the advantages, and I suppose disadvantages that go along with that.
And...
Isaac and Rebekah don't see eye to eye about who should have predominance among the sons.
And Rebekah is quite complicit with Jacob in inverting the social order.
So the first thing that happens that's crooked is that Esau comes in from hunting and he's, you know, maybe he's been out for a number of days and he's ravenous and He's kind of an impulsive guy, doesn't really seem to think about the long term very much.
And Jacob was cooking some lentil stew, and Esau wants some of it, and Jacob refuses, and then says that he'll trade his birthright for it.
And Esau agrees, which is a bad deal, right?
It's a bad deal.
And so you could say that Esau actually deserves what's coming to him.
Although, at minimum, you'd have to think of them both as being equally culpable.
It's a nasty trick.
And so, that's Jacob's first trick.
And then, the second trick is that, and it's later, and Isaac is old and blind, and, you know, close to death, and It's time for him to bestow a blessing on his sons which is a very important event apparently among these ancient people.
And Esau again is out hunting and Rachel dresses Jacob up in a hairy, puts a goat skin on his arm so he's kind of hairy like Esau and dresses him in Esau's clothes so he smells like Esau.
Isaac tells Esau to go out and hunt him up some venison, I think it is, which is a favorite of his.
And Rebecca has Jacob cook up a couple of goat kids and serve that to Isaac and play the role of Esau.
And so he does that.
It's pretty damn nasty, really, all things considered, you know, to play a trick like that, both on your brother and on your blind father and in collusion with your mother.
It's not the sort of thing that's really designed to promote a lot of familial harmony.
And so, especially because you've already screwed them over in a big way once, you know, you'd think that would be sufficient.
So, anyways, he's successful, and Esau loses his father's blessing, and so that Jacob ends up really in the position of the firstborn.
And it's quite interesting, because, you know, God tells Rachel that Jacob is going to be the dominant twin, and you'd think again with God's Blessing, or at least the prophecy, that Jacob would end up being a good guy.
But he's certainly not presented that way to begin with, which is also quite interesting, given that he's the eventual founder of Israel.
And it's another indication of the realism of these old stories.
It's quite amazing to me, it's always been quite amazing to me, how unprettified these stories have remained.
Because you'd think that...
If you're even the least bit cynical, especially if you had the kind of Marxist religion is the opiate of the masses kind of viewpoint, which is a credible viewpoint, you know, although it's wrong, but it's, well, I think it's a shallow interpretation.
And a part of the reason I think it's a shallow interpretation is because the stories would be a lot prettier if that was the case.
Characters wouldn't have this strange, realistic, moral ambiguity about them.
If you're going to feed people a fantasy, then you want it to be like a Harlequin novel or a greeting card or something like that.
You don't want it to be a story that's full of betrayal and deceit and murder and mayhem and genocide and all of that.
That just doesn't seem all that...
What would you say?
Calming, I guess, would be the right answer.
So anyways...
Jacob gets away with this, but Esau is not happy, and Jacob is quite convinced that he might kill him.
And I think that was a reasonable fear, because Esau was a tough guy, and he was used to being outside, and he knew how to hunt, and he knew how to kill, and he actually wasn't very happy about getting seriously screwed over by his stay-at-home younger brother twice, and so Jacob runs off.
and goes to visit his uncle and on the way and this is a very interesting part of the story he stops and to sleep and he takes a stone for a pillow and then he has this vision it's called a dream but the context makes it look like a vision of a ladder reaching up to heaven And with angels moving up and down the ladder, let's say.
And there's some representations of that.
Of that I showed you some of them the last time we met, but I'll read it to you first.
And he lighted upon a certain place and tired there all night because the sun was set.
And he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows and lay down in that place to sleep.
And he dreamed and beheld a ladder set up on the earth.
And the top of it reached to heaven and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
And behold the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father and the God of Isaac.
The land whereon thou liest, to thee I will give it and to thy seed.
And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth.
And thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and the south.
So that lays out the canonical directions, right?
So now there's a center...
with the canonical directions like the thing that you see you know that little symbol you see on maps it's the same thing that symbolically placed upon the earth so a center has been established with radiating well with what?
with directional lines radiating from it so it establishes it as a place And in the end, thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
So that's pretty good news for Jacob.
And it's not self-evident why God is rewarding him for running away after screwing over his brother.
But that seems to be what happens.
And so here's a couple of representations, classic representations.
The one on the right is William Blake.
It's one I particularly like.
You know, and Blake assimilates...
God with the sun and with light, right?
So that's quite a common mythological idea that God is associated with light and the day.
Behold, I am with thee and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest and will bring thee again into this land.
For I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, And that's a more important thing than you think.
And we'll go into that a little bit more deeply because up to this point in the story, there isn't anything really...
There isn't anything that's really emerged to mark a sacred space, right?
There's no cathedral.
There's no church.
There's nothing like that.
But here's this idea that emerges that you can mark the center of something...
And that's important.
And you mark it with a stone.
And a stone's a good way to mark things that are important because a stone is permanent, right?
And we mark things with stones now.
Like we mark graves with stones, for example.
Because we want to make a memory.
And to carve something into stone.
To carve a stone and then to carve something into stone is to make a memory.
And to use stone is to make a memory because stone is permanent.
And to set it upright is to indicate a center.
And so...
That's what happens.
He pours oil on the top of it, which is a kind of offering.
And he called the name of that place Bethel.
But the name of the city was called Luzzat the first.
And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, Then a tenth of what I earn, I will give him.
I missed that.
That's interesting too, because now there's a transformation of sacrifice, right?
Because until that point, sacrifices had been pretty concretized.
It was the burning of something.
Whereas here, all of a sudden, it's the offering of productive labor per se, like a tithe.
Because a tithe is a form of sacrifice.
And so there's an abstraction of the idea of sacrifice.
Now, sacrifice, it's really important that the idea of sacrifice gets abstracted.
Because it should be abstracted to the point where it's used the way that we use it today, which is, you know, we make sacrifices to get ahead, and everyone understands what that means, but the sacrifices are generally some combination of psychological and practical.
So we're not acting them out, we're precisely, we're not dramatizing them or ritualizing them, we actually act them out in the covenant that we make with the future.
And we do that Well, unless we're extraordinarily impulsive and aimless in our lives, and have really no conception whatsoever of the future, and are likely to sacrifice the future for the present, which is what Esau does, right, then we make sacrifices.
And you've got to think, like, the idea of making sacrifices to make the future better is an extraordinarily difficult lesson to learn.
It took people, God only knows how long, to learn that.
You know, like, we have no idea.
It's not something that animals do easily.
Chimpanzees don't store leftover meat.
And neither do wolves.
A wolf can eat about 30 pounds of meat in one sitting.
And that's where the idea of wolfing it down comes from.
They're not hiding it, saving it for later.
They can't do that.
So they can't sacrifice the present for the future.
This is a big deal that this happens.
Now I want to tell you a little bit about the idea of the pillar.
Because it's an unbelievably deep idea and it orients us in ways that we still don't...
It still orients us in ways that we don't understand.
In fact, it's actually the mechanism by which we're oriented.
And if it's lacking, then we become disoriented.
And so I'll show you some pictures and describe them first.
Okay, so first of all, there's a walled city.
So let me tell you, you could think about that as an archetypal human habitation.
Maybe it's a reflection of something like a fire in the middle of the plain or the forest.
Or the jungle for that matter, although it's kind of hard to get a fire going there.
Imagine a fire ringed around with logs and perhaps ringed around with dwellings, right?
So the fire's in the center and the fire defines the center and then as you move away from the fire you move out into the darkness, right?
So the fire is light and communion and safety and as you move away from the fire you move out into the darkness and what's terrifying out beyond the perimeter.
So what's beyond the perimeter is terrifying.
You can feel that if you go camping somewhere that's wild.
You know, you're pretty damn happy, especially if the wolves are howling.
You're pretty damn happy to be sitting by the fire because you can see there.
The fire keeps the animals away.
And, you know, if you do wander into the bush, into the darkness, then you're on alert.
And, you know, your predator detection systems are on alert.
And so you could think about the classical human habitation as two places.
One where your predator detection system isn't on alert and another where your predator detection system is on alert.
And you could think about that roughly as the distinction between explored territory and unexplored territory.
And really the founding of a place is precisely...
This is a lot of this I got from reading Mircea Eliade.
The founding of a place is precisely the definition of an explored center Set against the unexplored periphery.
And you know, what's interesting about that, so you can kind of think about that with regards to the walled city, right?
Everything in the wall is cosmos, and everything outside the wall is chaos.
But it also extends to the conceptual realm.
Because imagine that you're the master of a field of study.
And so that's an interesting metaphor.
Because a field is a geographical metaphor, right?
And in the center of the field are those things that everyone knows really well.
The axioms that everyone...
Abides by in the field.
And then as you move towards the fringes, you get towards the unknown, towards the frontier of the discipline.
And as you become expert, you move from the center to the frontier.
And so then you're on the border when you're a scholar, a competent scholar.
You're on the border between the unexplored and unexplored.
And you're trying to further that border.
So even if you're just doing this abstractly, it's the same thing.
And it's a reflection of the fact that every human environment, concrete or abstract, it makes no difference, Recapitulates the cosmos-chaos dichotomy or the order-chaos dichotomy.
And that's why in Taoism, for example, it's the union of chaos and order that constitutes being itself.
And that you stand on the border between chaos and order because that's the proper place to be.
Too orderly, too much in the explored, you're not learning anything.
Too much out there where the predators lurk, Then you're frozen with terror.
And neither of those positions are desirable.
So, and that's what, you know, and so you think, and this is a concrete reality, obviously, as well as a psychological reality.
There were reasons for those walls.
Because inside the walls were all the people like us.
And so that begs the question, what does it mean for people to be like us?
And then outside the wall there was all those people, because they were the worst forms of predators, because people are actually the worst forms of predators, who aren't like us.
And the wall is there to draw a distinction between like us and not like us.
And so, and that was a matter of life and death.
You can tell that because, I mean, look at those walls.
They had to build those by hand.
And you know, you do see walled cities that have three rings of walls.
So, these people were terrified, but not so terrified as the people who built three walls.
They were really terrified.
And they had their reasons.
So, okay, so...
Now, there's an idea that's reflected in the Jacob's Ladder story that the center where you put the pillar is also the place where heaven and earth touch.
And so that's...
That's a complicated idea.
I think that you can...
You know, I'm trying to look at these stories from a psychological perspective.
And so then you could say that that's a symbolic place where the lowest and the highest come together.
And so it's a place where...
Earthly being stretches up to the highest possible ethical abstraction.
And that's the center, because one of the things that defines us, say, as opposed to them, is that we're all united within a certain ethic.
That's what makes us the same.
This is a complicated line of reasoning, but I'll go back to it after I show you some more pictures.
So that's the first idea is that the center is the place where the lowest and the highest touch simultaneously.
And so you could say that in some sense it specifies the aim of a group of people.
That's another way.
You know, if you get together with people to make a group, even at work, you group yourself around a project.
And that unites you.
And it unites you because you all have the same aim.
You're all pointing to the same thing.
And that makes you the same in some ways.
Because if you're after the same thing I am, then the same things are going to be important to you that are important to me.
And the same things are going to be negative to you that are negative to me.
Because our emotions work out that way.
And that means I can instantly predict you.
I know how you're going to behave.
And so our aim, which is basically our ethical aim, it's because we're aiming at something better, at least in principle, we're aiming at something better.
It's our ethical aim that unites our perceptions and that's what aligns our emotions.
And so that sort of begs the question, if you're going to build a community, around what aim should the community congregate?
Okay, so the idea here is that the center of the community is the pillar that unites heaven and earth.
So it unites the lowest with the highest.
So there's some intimation of the idea that it's the highest that unites the community.
Okay, and so keep that in mind.
And that's a very old idea as well.
That's the idea of the axis mundi, which is the center pole that unites heaven and earth.
It's an unbelievably old idea.
Tens of thousands of years old.
It might even stretch back to whatever our archaic memories, quasi-memories, I don't know what you would describe them, archetypal memories of our...
Excessively old ancestry and trees when the tree itself was in fact the center of the world and that it was ringed by snakes and chaos.
And so, well we have no idea how old these ideas are but they're very very old and evolution is a conservative business.
Once it builds a gadget then it builds new things on top of that gadget.
It's like a medieval town, right?
The center of the town is really old and new newer Areas of the town get built around it, but the center is still really old, and that's what we're like.
Our platforms, like our basic physiological structure, this skeletal body, is some tens of millions of years old, or older than that.
If you think about vertebrates, it's much older than that, and that's all conserved.
So, everything's built on top of everything else.
Alright, so there's a kind of a classic town, And there's the idea.
I showed you this, this Scandinavian world tree.
Same idea.
It unites heaven and earth and around the roots of that tree are snakes that eat this tree constantly.
So that's the idea that there's stability but there's constant transformation.
around that stability and at the same time the snakes are knowing in the roots there's streams that are nourishing it so it's sort of an echo of the idea that life depends on death and renewal constantly because your cells are dying and being renewed constantly, right?
if they are just proliferating then you have cancer if they're just dying then you die you have to get the balance between death and life exactly right so that you can actually live Which is also a very strange thing.
So, and that tree is something that reaches from the bottom layers of being, maybe the microcosm, all the way to the macrocosm.
That's the idea, anyways.
So, then there's...
Okay, so there's...
Jacob and his pillar.
He's got this idea that you can mark the center with this stone.
It sort of symbolizes what he was laying on when he dreamt.
But now he's got this idea.
You put something erect and it marks the center.
And it symbolizes his vision of the highest good.
Something like that.
And the promise that's been made to him.
And then this is an Egyptian obelisk.
The pyramid on top of it that's in Paris.
It was taken from Luxor and put in Paris.
So that's a much more sophisticated Instance of the same idea.
Okay, and there was a Stone Age cultures across Eurasia that put up these huge obelisks everywhere.
These huge, like the Stonehenge is a good example of that, although it's very sophisticated.
And they were also markers of places.
We don't know exactly what their function is, but they're very much akin to this.
Some permanent marker of place.
There's a good one, so...
That's in St.
Peter's and I really like this one because you can see the echoes of Jacob's vision for the establishment of a territory there, right?
You've got the obelisk in the middle and then you've got the directions radiating from the center and of course St.
Peter's, this is the St.
Peter's Basilica in Rome which is an absolutely unbelievable place.
It's just jaw-dropping and So there's the cathedral at the back of it and then there's this circle of pillars that surrounds it.
You can just see them a little bit on the middle left there.
That goes all the way around that entire enclosure.
And a very large number of people can gather there.
So that pillar marks the center and that would be the center of Catholicism, essentially.
That's what that represents, right?
The symbolic center of Catholicism.
Although you could make the case that the cathedral is the center.
It doesn't really matter.
They're very close together and it's half a dozen of one and six of the other.
And then here's another representation of the same idea, right, is that this is why people don't like the flag to be burned, you know, because conservative people see the flag as the sacred thing that binds people together, and so they're not happy when that sacred thing is destroyed, even if it's destroyed in the name of protest, whereas the people who burn flags think, well, there are times...
To dramatize the idea that the center has been corrupt.
And you can demonstrate that by putting it to the torch as a representation that the corrupt center now has to be burned and transformed.
And the thing is they're both right.
They're both right all the time because The center is absolutely necessary and is sacred and is almost always also corrupt and in need of reparation.
That's also an archetypal idea.
And that's a useful thing to know because, you know, it's easy for young people in particular to think that Well, the world's gone to hell in a handbasket and it's the fault of the last generation.
They've left us this terrible mess and, you know, we're feeling pretty betrayed about that and now we have to clean it up.
It's like, yeah, yeah, people have been thinking that for like 35,000 years.
It's not new.
And the reason it's not new is because it's always true.
You know, what you're handed is a sacred center with flaws.
Always, always.
And it's partly because it's the creation of the dead, right?
And the dead can't see and they can't communicate and so they're not in touch with the present and so what they've bequeathed to you apart from the fact that it might actually be corrupt which is a slightly different thing is at least blind and dead and so what the hell can you expect from something that's blind and dead you know you're lucky if it just doesn't stomp you out of existence so that's a lovely photograph obviously and that's the establishment of a new center then The centre can be a cathedral too,
and often is, of course, in classic towns, European towns in particular, although it's not only European towns that are like this.
There's a centre that's made out of stone, so that would be the cathedral, and it's got the highest tower, and on top of the tower there's often a cross, and that's the symbolic centre.
So people are drawn together around whatever the cross is, Now the cross obviously represents a center, because it's an X, right?
X marks the spot.
So the center of the cross is the center.
And then the cathedral is often in a cross shape, which also marks the center.
And then in the cathedral there's a dome often, and that's the sky, and that's that...
Ladder that reaches from earth to heaven.
So it's a recapitulation of the same idea.
And people are drawn to that center.
And the center is the symbol of what unites them.
And what unites them is the faith that the cathedral is the embodiment of.
And you think, well, what does the faith mean?
And again, we're approaching this psychologically.
And what it means is that Everyone who's a member of that group accepts the transcendent ideal of the group.
Now the thing is, if you're the member of a group, you accept the transcendent ideal of the group.
That's what it means to be a member of a group.
So if you're in a work team and you're all working on a project, what you've essentially done is decided that you're going to make the goal unquestionable, right?
I mean, you might argue about the details, but if you're tasked with something, you know, here's a job for you ten people, organize yourself around the job, you can argue about how you're going to do the job, but you can't argue about the job, then the group falls apart.
And so, there's an act of faith, in some sense, The reason that the act of faith is necessary is because it's very very difficult to specify without error what that central aim should be given that there's any number of aims, right?
And it's a very very difficult thing to figure out and this is something we're going to do a little bit tonight is like what should the aim be around which a group would congregate?
Especially if it's a large group, and it's a large group that has to stay together across very large swaths of time, and the group is incredibly diverse.
What possible kind of ideal could unite A large group of diverse people across a very large stretch of time.
That's a really, really hard question and I think part of the way that question has been answered is it's been answered symbolically and in images because it's so damn complicated that it's almost impossible to articulate.
So, but obviously you need to have a center around which everyone can unite, because if you don't, then everyone's at odds with one another.
Like, if I don't know what you're up to, and you don't know what he's up to, we're just strangers, and we don't know that our ethics match at all, then the probability that we're going to be able to exist harmoniously decreases rapidly to zero.
And that's obviously just no good.
That's a state of total chaos.
So we can't have that.
It's not possible.
To exist without a central ideal.
It's not possible.
And it's deeper than that.
It's deeper than that.
Partly because it's...
I'll try to get this right.
This is the sort of thing that I was arguing with Sam Harris about.
You see...
Your category system is a product of your aims.
That's the thing.
Like, if you have a set of facts at hand, the facts don't tell you how to categorize the facts.
Because there's too damn many facts.
There's a trillion facts.
And there's no way, without imposing some a priority order on them, of determining how it is that you should order them.
So how do you order them?
Well, that's easy.
You decide what you're aiming at.
Now, how do you do that?
Well, I'm not answering that question at the moment.
I'm just saying that in order to organize those facts, you need an aim.
And then the aim instantly organizes the facts into those things relevant to the aim, tools, let's say, those things that get in the way, and a very large number of things that you don't have to pay attention to at all.
It excludes, like if you're working on an engineering problem, you don't have to worry about practicing medicine in your neighborhood.
There's a bunch of, like if you're focusing on a particular, what would you say?
Any job, any set of skills implies that you're good at a small set of things and then not good at an incredibly large number of other skills.
It simplifies things, and so you can use your aim as the basis of a category structure.
And so you also have to keep that in mind because what it means is, as far as I can tell, what it means is that Your category system itself, which is what structures your perceptions, is actually dependent on the ethics of your aim.
It's directly, it's a moral thing.
It's directly dependent on your aim.
And that's a stunning idea, if it happens to be true.
It's not how people think about thinking.
We don't think that way.
Like, we think that we think deterministically, let's say, or that we think empirically, or that we think rationally.
And none of that appears to be the case.
What we do is we posit a valid aim And then we organize the world around the aim.
And there's plenty of evidence from that in psychological studies of perception, right?
That does look like how the perceptual systems work.
Mostly they ignore, because the world's too complicated.
They focus on a small set of Phenomena deemed relevant to whatever the aim is.
And then, of course, the aim is problematic.
Again, it's complex because the aim I have has to be an aim that some of you share or at least don't object to, because otherwise I'm not going to get anywhere with my damn aim.
It has to actually be implementable in the world.
It has to be sustainable across at least some amount of time.
It can't kill me.
It's really hedged in, this aim.
It isn't any old thing.
There's hardly any things that it can be.
So, you know, Jacob's aim, for example, in...
undermining Esau almost gets him killed.
And you can understand why.
That's the other thing.
You think, well, that was a nasty bit of work.
You can understand Esau's rage.
Even though we're separated from the people in these stories by, what, four thousand years, three thousand years, something like that, you know immediately why everyone feels the way they do, at least once you understand the context of the story.
None of that's mysterious in the least.
So, So there's the church, and the church is underneath the cross.
Right?
And so that's St.
Peter's Basilica.
And so there's the cross on the globe, on top of the basilica.
And then there's the cross on the obelisk as well.
And so, what that means is that, and this is where things get insanely complicated, is that the center is defined by whatever the cross represents.
Now the cross represents A crossing point geographically, it's certainly that.
The cross probably represents the body to some degree.
But then the cross also represents the place of suffering, obviously.
And more importantly, it represents the place of voluntary suffering transcended.
I'm speaking psychologically, right?
Not theologically.
That's what it represents.
And so you might say, so here's the idea behind putting down the obelisk with the cross and saying that that's the center.
So that's the thing that everyone's aiming at.
And so the idea would be, well if you're going to be a member of the group defined by this obelisk, then what you do is accept your position at the center of suffering voluntarily and therefore transcend it.
That's the idea.
And that is one hell of an idea.
It really is, man.
That is a killer idea.
Because it's actually a signal, it's a really clear signal of psychological health.
You know, because one of the things you do if you're a clinical psychologist and someone is paralyzed by fear, is what you do is you break their fears down into relatively manageable situations.
Bits.
And then you have them voluntarily confront their fears.
And it might also be things that they're disgusted by.
Say if they have obsessive compulsive disorder.
But it produces very strong negative emotion.
Whatever it is.
And then you have them voluntarily confront whatever it is that produces that overwhelming negative emotion.
And that makes them stronger.
That's what happens.
It doesn't make them less afraid.
It makes them more courageous and stronger.
And that is not the same thing.
It's seriously not...
It doesn't decrease the fear.
It increases the courage.
And so, that's a mind-boggling idea.
And it's deeper, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about these archetypal ideas is that, and maybe it's partly because of the hyperlinked nature of the Bible, that's part of it, but it's not the whole thing, is that no matter how deep you dig into them, you'll never get to the bottom.
You know, you hit a bottom, you think, God, that's so unbelievably profound, and then if you excavate a little underneath that, you find something else that's even more profound, and you think, wow, that's got to be the bottom, and then You dig under that, it's like there's no bottom.
You can just keep digging down.
Well, as far as I can tell, you can keep digging down layer after layer.
And we'll talk a little bit about more, a little more about what the cross signifies as the center.
Because, you see, what people were trying to figure out is what is it that we need to unite under, right?
What's the proper thing to unite under?
I can give you another example.
So, in the Mesopotamian societies, the emperor, You know, who was more or less an absolute monarch.
He lived inside what was essentially a walled city.
And the god of the Mesopotamians was Marduk.
And Marduk was the figure who had eyes all the way around his head and he spoke magic words.
He was very attentive and very articulate.
And it was Marduk who went out and confronted the goddess of chaos, the dragon of chaos, and cut her into pieces and made up the world.
Okay, so you can kind of understand what that means.
So Marduk goes beyond...
The frontier into the place of predatory chaos and encounters the thing that's terrifying and then makes something productive out of it.
So it's a hero myth and Marduk is elected to the position of preeminent God by all the other Mesopotamian gods because he manages that.
So the Marduk idea emerges up the holy Dominance hierarchy and hits the pinnacle.
And God only knows how long that took.
It would be the amalgamation of many tribes and then the distillation of all the tribal myths to produce this emergent story of what constitutes top god.
And then the job of the emperor was to act out Marduk.
That's what gave him sovereignty.
So the reason that he was the center around which people organized themselves wasn't because he was, when he was being a proper emperor, it wasn't because there was something super special about him.
Like the power didn't exactly reside in him, which is a really useful thing to separate, right?
You want the power, which is why it's kind of nice to have a...
Symbolic monarch.
You get the symbolic power separated from the personality power, right?
Because otherwise they get conflated.
That's what happened in Rome.
You can see it tending to happen now and then in the US, like with the Kennedy dynasties and that sort of thing.
So the idea was the Emperor had sovereignty as long as he was acting out Marduk properly and going out into the chaos and And cutting it into pieces and making order.
That was his job.
They used to take him outside the city on the New Year's festival and strip him of all his Emperor garments and humiliate him and then force him to To confess all the ways that year he hadn't been a good Marduk.
So he wasn't a good ruler.
And so that was supposed to clue him in and wake him up, right?
And then they would ritually reenact the battle of Marduk against...
Tiamat, the chaos monster, using statues.
And then if that all went well, then the emperor would go back in and the city would be renewed for another year.
We still have echoes of that in our New Year's celebration.
It's the same idea that's echoed down all those centuries, thousands of years.
So it's such a staggeringly brilliant idea.
So part of the idea is that The thing that's sovereign, so that's the pillar at the center that everyone gathers around, is, at least in part, the thing that courageously goes out into the unknown and makes something useful out of it for the community.
So, that's very, very smart.
It's very smart.
So this is another example of a center.
So this is the flag, this is the Union Jack, and so it's made up of a bunch of crosses.
And so the first cross, the English cross, that's the flag of St.
George, that's the flag of England.
What does St.
George do?
Slays the dragon, exactly.
Same idea, right?
So St.
George, patron saint of England, goes out and slays the dragon and frees the virgin from the grip of the dragon.
Same idea, right?
So that's the center.
And then the second cross is called a celtier, but it's another crucifix.
So it's the cross on which St.
Andrew was crucified.
So it's the same idea.
The center is the center of suffering and Voluntarily undertaken because St.
Andrew was a martyr.
And then St.
Patrick is the third cross.
What did St.
Patrick do in Ireland?
Chased out all the snakes.
Right, so it's the same thing, right?
And so the flag of Great Britain is the combination of all of these three crosses that defines the center.
And that's what the flag is.
So that symbolizes all of that.
So that's, you know, completely mind-boggling.
So, and there's more about St.
Patrick, too.
So, he banishes the snakes after a 40-day fast, and so that's an allusion to the 40 years that Moses spends in the desert, and also the 40 days that Christ fasts in the New Testament.
And his walking stick, when he plants it, grows into a tree.
So that echoes all of the ideas about the center that we just described.
And he also speaks with the ancient Irish ancestors, which, if you remember, is a characteristic of the shamanic rituals where, so in the typical shamanic ritual, which seems to be elicited by psychedelic use,
the shaman dissolve Down past their bones and then they go up into heaven and speak with the ancestors and then they're introduced into the heavenly kingdom and then the flesh is put back on their bones and they come back and tell everybody what happened.
And that's a repeatable experience, right?
The shamanic tradition is unbelievably widespread.
So all over Europe, ancient Europe and Asia And perhaps as far down as South America, right?
It's highly conserved.
And it's out of that tradition, in all likelihood, that our religious ideation emerged.
So, and you can see echoes of that here.
So...
So back to the story of Jacob and his ladder.
So that I can come again to my father's house in peace.
Then shall the Lord be my God.
And this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house.
And of all that that thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto thee.
So that's also an echo, I would say, of the obligation of those who climb the power hierarchy to attend to those who are at the bottom.
Because if you think about the tithing as a form of wealth distribution, which is essentially what it is, part of the ethic that defines the proper moral endeavor that's related to that center is Not to advance yourself at the expense of the entire community.
So if you're fortunate enough so that you can rise in authority and power and competence within the confines of a community, you still have an obligation to Maintain the structure.
Maintain and further the structure of the community within which you rose.
And that's obvious, right?
Because if people didn't do that after a couple of generations, the whole thing would fall apart.
So, you know, it's not reasonable to destroy the game that you're winning.
It's reasonable to strengthen the game that you're winning.
And so, that's another thing, because that also describes the ethic that should allow you to be an active member of the community around which that That gathers around that center.
So, one of the things I've learned about the hero mythology that I really, really like is...
So, you see this pretty clearly in the figure of Christ, because two things are conjoined in that story.
But Christ is also...
There's two kinds of heroes.
There's the hero that goes out into chaos and confronts the dragon of chaos and gathers the treasure as a consequence and then shares it with the community.
That's one.
The other form of hero is the hero who stands up against the corrupt state.
And rattles the foundation of the state, has it collapse and then reconstructs it.
Because the two great dangers to human beings are unprotected exposure to the catastrophes of the natural world and subjugation to tyranny.
Right?
Those are the two major dangers.
And so a hero is, their ultimate hero is the person who reconstructs the structure of the state by using the information that he gathered by going out into the unknown.
That unites them both.
And so what that means, here's the rub.
As far as I can tell, so a structure, a center, has two risks associated with it.
One is that it will degenerate into chaos and the other is it will rigidify into tyranny and it'll degenerate into chaos Even if it just stays doing what it's doing.
So if it just does exactly what it's doing and it doesn't change it will degenerate.
Because things change and if it doesn't change to keep up then it gets farther and farther away from the environment and it'll precipitously collapse.
And so and then if it just changes willy-nilly so that nobody can establish a stable centralizing aim then it degenerates into chaos immediately and no one can get along.
So, there's a rule for belonging to the community, and the rule has to be that you have to act in a manner that sustains the community and increases its competence.
That's the fundamental moral obligation for belonging.
Well, and obviously so, right?
Because why would you walk into a clubhouse that was on fire?
Like, that's just not smart, right?
If you're going to be part of the game, If you've decided that being part of the game is worthwhile, you've also taken on the moral...
You've also decided, even if you didn't notice it, that you have to work to support that game, because by deciding to play that game, you've said that it's valuable.
And if it's valuable, then obviously you should work to sustain and expand it, because that's the definition of having a relationship with something that's valuable.
And so, that's the criteria for membership in the community.
And that's partly why, if you regard the cross, say, as the symbol of voluntary suffering, you know, suffering accepted voluntarily, something like that...
Which means that there's another element of that too that's worth thinking about.
So, you know, the reason that Cain gets so out of hand is because he's suffering and he won't accept it.
He certainly won't accept responsibility for it.
He's angry and bitter about it.
And no wonder, right?
I mean, we have to be realistic about these sorts of things.
You guys, all of you people, are going to suffer at some point in your life.
To the point where you're angry and bitter about it.
I mean, there's just absolutely no doubt about that.
And you're even going to think, well, it's no bloody wonder that I'm angry and bitter about it.
Everyone would be.
And things are so God-awful that there's no excuse for them to even exist.
And, like, that's a powerful argument.
Although, I think it's ultimately self-defeating.
Well, that's kind of what the story of Cain and Abel...
That's kind of what the story of Cain and Abel...
What would you say?
That's the moral of the story of Cain and Abel essentially.
So what that means instead is that even under those conditions of relatively intense suffering you have to accept it voluntarily because otherwise it turns you against being and then you start to act in this terrible manner that makes everything worse.
And it seems to me that there's a contradiction in that.
If the reason you're complaining is that things are bad Then it isn't reasonable for you to act in a manner that makes them worse.
Right?
I mean, it's no wonder that people do that, but it's a degenerating game.
And so that's...
So, the idea, part of the idea of the cross and the suffering that it represents is that if you can accept that voluntarily, regardless of its intensity, then you won't become embittered and resentful and vengeful to the point Where you pose a danger to the stability of the community.
Or to your own stability, for that matter.
Because it's, you know, it might be your own stability, the stability of your family, the stability of the community, and the stability of the world.
It might be all of that.
And increasingly, I think it is all of that.
So...
Okay, so...
Now, Jacob, we get the second part of Jacob's story.
He goes to meet his uncle, Laban, and he meets Rachel there again by a well.
He falls in love and goes to live with Laban.
There are two daughters there, Leah as well as Rachel.
Leah is not a particularly attractive person.
It isn't exactly clear why but the story makes it quite clear.
She's definitely the least desirable of the two daughters and the story makes reference to her eyes and it isn't clear if there's something wrong with her physiologically or if there's something wrong with her attitude.
It's not obvious but doesn't really matter.
The point is she's the older daughter but she's the less desirable one.
Jacob stays a month Which is the limit of hospitality in that time.
If you stayed for a month, you were welcome, but you had to work for your keep, I think after about three days, something like that, which seems rather reasonable.
And so, he stays a month, and then he has a chat with LeBan, and he says, he's fallen in love with Rachel by this time, and he says...
I'll stay with you and work for seven years and then I'll wed Rachel and Laban says that's a fine deal and then the seven years passes and there's a wedding ceremony it's quite a long thing and the bride is veiled and the bride goes into the tent with Jacob and if I remember the story correctly I haven't looked at it for a month or so Rachel
is outside the tent speaking but Leah is inside the tent and so Jacob thinks he's getting married to Rachel but he's actually getting married to Leah and this is it's an inversion because he's in the dark like Isaac was when he fooled Isaac so now it's Jacob's turn to be in the dark and he gets betrayed by his uncle and his bride-to-be Rachel and her sister in a manner that's Broadly parallel to the trick that he pulled
on Esau.
And so there's a karma notion there, which I like.
I mean, you might think of karma as a superstitious idea.
And there are ways of interpreting it that might make it the case.
But I don't think that's what it is.
It's that no bad deed goes unpunished.
It's something like that.
It's like, You know, maybe you've done something bad to someone, and therefore, there's part of you that feels quite guilty about that, hopefully, and that part is looking for punishment to set the stage right.
And you might think, well, no, but things are...
Yes, unless you're a psychopath, that's how things work.
If you're interested in that kind of thing, you should read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, because it's the definitive study of that sort of phenomena, right?
Because in that book, The main protagonist, Raskolnikov, gets away with murder.
He does it successfully.
No one suspects him.
And he drives himself so crazy with guilt that he basically falls into the hands of the police.
He drives himself into the hands of the police because he can't tolerate what he did.
It's amazing.
It's an amazing book.
But anyways, the point is here, Jacob falls prey to the same sort of crookedness that he used to ratchet himself up the ladder.
And that happens far more often in life than people think.
And it's really not like he can complain about it, right?
Not if he has any sense.
It's like he does.
He brings Leah out to see Laban and he says, What's with this sister?
And Laban basically says to him...
In our culture, it's the custom to marry the eldest daughter first, which is exactly right.
And he said, well, it would bring...
You know, he's rationalizing, obviously, because he's just screwed over Jacob in a major way.
But it's a little late to take it back.
The marriage has been consummated, and the ceremony has been complete, and all hell would break out if there was any attempt to sever the relationship.
So...
That's how it is.
So Leah's married, and Jacob has the wrong wife.
So this is Jacob there.
You see on the left, he's got the little flowery hat, and he's pointing to Leah, and he's saying, like, what's up here?
And...
And Laban, you know, Laban is a tough old goat and he's not really all that sad about it.
In fact, you can imagine that he's kind of going...
So, okay, then he has to work another seven years.
And he gains Rachel.
But, because God is a tricky character, there's another twist in this story.
Rachel turns out not to be very good at having children.
Or Rachel and Jacob turn out not to be very good at having children.
But Leah, she's really good at having kids.
So, she provides Jacob with Reuben, Simeon, Levi, or it's Levi, I believe, and Judah.
And And the names of those, the meanings of those names are there.
Reuben means see a son.
Simeon means hearing.
I think that was the Lord heard my prayer.
I think that's what that was.
Levi means joined.
Judah means praise to Yahweh.
And it's Judah from whose tribe Christ arises.
Judah is essentially promoted to the status of firstborn later in the story.
This is important because Reuben, Simeon, and Levi all do something reprehensible.
And so Judah gets promoted to firstborn.
And that's partly why in the logic of this narrative that it's from the tribe of Judah that Christ arises.
So...
So, now, while this is going on, Rachel is, like, suicidally desperate for children.
She's jealous of her older sister, who's rather ill-favored, as we pointed out, but who seems to be damn good at producing sons.
And she's really not happy with Jacob, and so she chews him out.
And Jacob basically says, like, what do you want me to do about it?
I'm not God.
Which is a reasonable response, I would say.
And so...
In her desperation, she gives Jacob Bila, who's her maidservant.
We've seen that sort of thing happen before.
And Bila produces two children, Dan and Naphtali.
The reason I'm detailing out all these sons, it's important because Jacob is the founder of Israel.
And his sons are the founder of the Twelve Tribes.
So, it's a pivotal moment in the story, right?
It's because he's the fundamental patriarch of those who wrestle with God.
Because, as we'll see, that's what the name Israel means.
He gets the name Israel.
You'll see why in a while.
But you need to know these genealogies in this situation because they play an important role in everything that happens afterwards.
So...
Naphtali is the second, and his name means, with great wrestlings I have wrestled with my sister, contended with her, and have prevailed.
So, that gives you some indication of the tension in the household.
Now, Leah is now past bearing children.
She gives Jacob her Maidservant too, Zilpah, to keep up with her sister, I guess.
And now, Zilpah bears two children for Jacob.
So he's piling up the kids, left, right, and center here.
One of them is named Gad, good fortune, and the other is named Asher, happy or blessed.
So...
There's more rivalry going on between the sisters.
This is quite an interesting little story.
So Reuben, who's Leah's daughter, goes out and looks for mandrakes.
Now, mandrakes have aphrodisiac properties, so that's a little odd to begin with.
But it doesn't matter.
That's what happens.
And Rachel is...
Rachel wants the mandrakes because she's still interested in having some children and so she bargains with Leah to give her a night with Jacob in exchange for the mandrakes.
And more sons emerge as a consequence of that.
And Rachel finally gives birth.
Joseph.
And Joseph plays a key role in the last story in Genesis, which I hope we'll get to in the next lecture, and then we can close off Genesis.
That's the plan, anyways.
So, now, Jacob isn't really very happy about the whole arrangement, because he's been there 14 years, and he's got two wives.
It's not too bad, but, you know, the bargain wasn't exactly clean.
He doesn't really trust Laban, and there's no reason for him to do so.
Laban was poor before Jacob came.
Jacob turns out to be a very useful person to have around.
And so, he tells Laban he wants to leave and go back to his home country.
And that he'll take the speckled and spotted cattle, the brown sheep, and the spotted and speckled goats from the flock.
And they're in the minority, so that's the idea.
And so Laban...
Or Laban takes all those animals out of his flock.
So there was an idea that the speckled goats and the brown sheep would breed true.
So if you have a male goat and a female goat and they're both speckled, they'll have speckled kids.
That's the theory and the same with brown sheep.
And so what Laban does is he takes all the speckled Animals out of the flocks, gives them to his son, and they go three days away with him.
So that Jacob is left with the flock, but with none of these animals.
Now the idea was that all the newborns were going to be his.
And so what Laban has basically done is set it up so that in principle, Jacob is going to get nothing for his work.
So that's another time when Jacob experiences Betrayal.
You know, it's almost as if God isn't done with reminding him of the magnitude of what he did in the past.
That's the moral of the story in some sense.
Now, there's a weird little twist in the story here.
So what Jacob does is some sympathetic magic.
And so when the animals are rutting, he puts speckled objects in front of them.
Speckled branches and so forth.
I guess to remind them about what they're supposed to be producing.
Something like that.
And it works.
And so all these animals that Laban left are producing spotted animals like mad.
And so I guess God's changed his mind and let Jacob off the hook slightly here.
Soon he was very wealthy.
Much cattle, maidservants, menservants, camels and asses.
Laban's sons become jealous and Laban is outraged.
Well, you know, obviously there's some competition there between Jacob and the sons, which is hardly surprising.
And Laban played this trick to strip Jacob of all his property and instead he got far more than he was going to get to begin with.
So you can imagine that's been a bit annoying.
So Jacob thinks he better get out of there.
So he tells Rachel and Leah...
And said unto them, I see your father's countenance that is not toward me as before.
But the God of my father has been with me.
And you know with all my power I've served your father.
And your father has deceived me and changed my wages ten times.
But God so far has suffered him not to hurt me.
And they decide to sneak away.
And they're unhappy with the lack of inheritance from Laban.
So as they sneak away, Rachel steals the idols that her father has in his house.
And it's not exactly obvious why.
There's a lot of contention about why she's doing that.
Some of them is to punish him.
To bring with her the images of her ancestors.
You know, maybe she's lonesome moving away from home.
Just out of spite.
To show him that the idols were actually powerless.
For protection.
To stop her father from divining the route of their escape.
That last one is the strangest one because the idea would be that Laban would have used some sort of ritual with the idols that would help him infer their escape route and then could chase them.
So anyways, that's the range of speculation about that.
I think it sounds to me mostly like a little act of revenge.
Maybe with a bit of loneliness mixed in.
Laban pursues them.
But God comes in a dream to tell him to leave Jacob unharmed.
Laban catches up with him and reproaches Jacob saying that he would have thrown a great party if he would have known that they were going to leave.
You know, he didn't want them to sneak away in the night.
You can't tell from the story whether that's true or not.
You know, these people were pretty rough and impulsive, I would say, and maybe there was a 50% chance of a slaughter and a 50% chance of a party.
Who knows?
I've been to parties like that, actually.
So, Laban complains that his gods are gone, and Jacob says that whoever has them, he will have them killed.
And Rachel, who's really quite a sneaky character, all things considered, basically claims that she's having her period, and she's sitting on the a carpet with all the idols underneath and she can't move and so they search everywhere and can't find them and she's like laughing away behind her hand about that sneaky little maneuver but she doesn't die so that's probably a good thing so Laban checks everything out checks the camp out and he can't
find anything so they reconcile and so that's the first reconciliation that Jacob engages in it's sort of like the What would you say?
The karmic debt is being paid.
That's one way of thinking about it.
That's...
So...
He got punished for his wrongdoing.
He's learned his lesson, perhaps.
And it's...
It's...
That's good enough as far as he's concerned.
You know?
He got away good enough.
And they make peace.
So...
Then the next thing that happens...
As they're traveling is that Jacob was left alone.
And there wrestled a man...
Man, angel, God.
It's not clear.
We'll go with angel.
With him until the breaking of the day.
Or God.
And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh.
And the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him.
And he said, let me go for the day breaks.
And Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.
And the angel said unto him, what is thy name?
And Jacob said, Jacob.
And the angel said, Thy name shall no more be called Jacob.
So the supplanter, right?
The overthrower with that kind of intonation of or implication of crookedness.
But Israel, which means he who wrestles or strives successfully with God.
For as a prince hast thou power with God and with men and hast prevailed.
That's quite a story.
I don't know exactly what to make of it.
There's obviously a symbolic level of meaning which is that that is what human beings do in some sense is they wrestle, I would say, they wrestle with the divine even with the concept of the divine for that matter and But the question is, do they prevail?
Like, it's an odd thing that Jacob actually seems to win this battle, right?
Or at least he wins it enough so that whoever he's wrestling, this divine figure that he's wrestling, is willing to bestow a blessing on him.
I guess maybe that's a testament to his courage.
It's something like that.
Maybe it's an indication that He has paid for his sins sufficiently so that he's sort of back on the moral high ground but I think it's really telling that the transformation of the name from Jacob to Israel and that what Israel means is he who wrestles with God or who struggles with God and perhaps successfully But it's also so interesting that he actually emerges victorious.
You know, you wouldn't necessarily think that that would be a possibility, especially given God's rather hot-headed nature in the Old Testament.
You don't want to mess with him too much.
But Jacob does it successfully.
But even more importantly is the idea that whatever Israel constitutes, which would be, say, the land that Jacob founds, is actually composed of those who wrestle with God.
I think that's an amazing idea because it also seems to me to shed some light on perhaps what was meant by belief in those days, you know?
Like I've often thought of marriage as a wrestling match, right?
If you're lucky, the person that you marry is someone you contend with.
It's not exactly, I don't think it's exactly, it's not tranquil precisely.
You know, you might have noticed that, some of you.
But the thing is, if you have something to contend against, then that strengthens you.
And that's actually better than having nothing to contend against.
And so, Jacob...
Is the person who's also strengthened by the necessity of this contending.
And that seems to be the proper relationship with God or the angel.
Is that contending.
The battling, right?
Rather than some sort of kind of loose, weak statement of belief.
I mean, I'm not trying to denigrate that to any great degree.
It just doesn't seem like the right mode of conceptualization, right?
Because human beings aren't like that.
We're...
Contentious creatures.
And that actually seems to be something that meets with God's favor in this situation.
So, especially given that that's actually what he names the, well, the whole kingdom of the chosen people is, the idea is that that's composed of those who contend with God.
So that's a hell of an idea, that.
That's for sure.
And Jacob asks, Now, Jacob does walk away injured from this.
Right?
So he has a permanent limp after that.
And so that's also an indication of just how dangerous that contention actually is.
Like he gets blessed, he wins, but he doesn't get away scot-free.
And so...
Now, so Jacob goes back to Esau.
And he's terrified, even though it's been 14 years.
He thinks maybe his hot-headed brother hasn't calmed down yet.
And he has good reason to think that, I would say.
So he sends messengers to Esau who then sets out with 400 men.
And so Jacob is not very happy with this whole idea.
And he breaks his people into two bands so that maybe half of them cannot be killed.
And then he takes from his large flocks a bunch of animals.
And a bunch of servants and he sends them out to meet Esau basically to say, look, I'm a jerk and sorry about the whole birthright thing.
And here's some animals and maybe that's the beginnings of an apology.
It's something like that.
But he's not very convinced that that's actually going to work.
But Esau, who actually turns out to perhaps have matured in the interim, perhaps that's one way of thinking about it, He meets Jacob and says that just seeing him is enough.
But Jacob insists that he takes the gift, and Esau accepts.
Which is probably a wise thing, because even if Esau is 95% convinced that just seeing his brother is enough, there's probably 5% of him that's still really not all that happy.
So you have to be careful when you say that you forgive someone, because There might be a part of you that really doesn't, that really needs something else before you can actually say, okay, look, fight.
You know, and you don't want to fool yourself about that because that 5% that hasn't been completely convinced will find its voice at some point and then maybe undermine the whole reconciliation process.
You don't want to think that you're any better than you are or any nicer than you are.
It's not helpful.
And so, Esau is smart, I think.
So, while Jacob's smart to say, no, no, like, thanks a lot, but take the damn goats.
And Jacob and Esau is smart enough to accept that.
And he might do that maybe to, you know...
To please Jacob, but also I think so that there really is the possibility of establishing peace.
Because hypothetically the gift that's being offered is of sufficient magnitude to erase the debt of the loss of the birthright.
It's something like that, right?
It's the payment of the real debt.
Esau said, What meanest thou by all this drove which I met?
And Jacob said, These are to find grace in the sight of my Lord.
And Esau says, I have enough, brother.
keep that that thou hast unto thyself.
And Jacob said, and this is an interesting statement, I think, No, I pray you, if I have now found grace in thy sight, take the present at my hand.
For therefore I have seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me.
And so he's taking the...
Honorable judgment of his brother, because it is honorable, because Esau did get betrayed.
So he has a right to be standing in judgment.
And he equates that judgment with, what would you say, with the highest of virtues.
It's appropriate judgment.
And so he wants to make complete amends to Esau, as if Esau is a representative of the divine element of justice.
And...
I guess that's convincing to Esau.
It's quite a thing to say, you know, that I need to be reconciled to you because that would simultaneously reconcile me with God.
It's crucial.
This is between us, but there's a higher principle at stake that's vital.
And I think that is the case with betrayal.
That's very frequently the case because if you betray someone, you really have violated...
You've deeply violated what can only be called a sacred trust.
It's the right terminology for that.
Take it, I pray, my blessing that is brought to thee because God has dealt graciously with me and because I have enough.
And he urged him and he took it.
So, you know, the story seems to be something like, well, Jacob was...
Kind of an arrogant, crooked, deceitful character.
Maybe over-impressed with his own ability.
He thought it was pretty amusing to pull a fast trick or two on his brother.
Then he ran off, which is not all that brave.
And then he got walloped a lot and perhaps learned something.
And then when he came back, you know, he was a different person.
And so that's a...
That's a reasonable story and, you know, he has to repent completely about what he did before he can rectify the situation properly and he's willing to do that.
So that's an interesting idea too, because it's an early reflection of the idea that it is, if you do something wrong in the past, A that you can learn from it, right, so that you're actually capable of learning, and B that you can set the balance right in the present.
Those are very optimistic ideas, you know, because you might say, well, once you've committed some sort of crime, That's it.
There's no hope for you.
But that's pretty rough because the probability that you've done unethical things at some point in your life is a hundred percent.
And so if there was no way of setting the balance right after that, then everybody would be doomed.
So...
So then the story gets rough again.
Jacob settles in Shalem.
Dinah, his daughter, goes looking around for friends.
Shechem, the son of Hamor, lays with her and then wants her for his wife.
He actually has the order reversed there.
That turns out to be a problem.
Jacob hears of this.
The fathers talk and so they make an agreement.
The agreement is that if all of Hamer's men, including Hamer and his son, are circumcised, so that's the proper offering, I guess that brings them into the familial fold and indicates that they're willing to make a sacrifice to do so, especially after Shechem put the cart before the horse, let's say.
The men of Hammer are circumcised.
They agree to do so.
That turns out to be a big mistake.
So while they're laying around the next day suffering madly from the circumcision, Simeon and Levi come in.
They sneak in and kill all of them.
And take their wealth and their women and children.
That's rough.
It's rough.
Yeah, I guess you guys noticed that, eh?
So...
So they're honor societies, right?
And there's still lots of honor societies in the world.
And so they don't take kindly to what happened to their sister.
Although they don't kill her.
So...
Now it turns out that, yeah, it says, And
Jacob actually turns out not to be very happy about that because he'd met with Hamor and they'd like hammered out a deal and that's where they were living and so he figured, well, that he was making the best of a bad lot, let's say, and his sons went behind his back and Jacob says to Simeon and Levi, "You have troubled me to make me stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites, and I being few in number.
They shall gather themselves now together against me and slay me, and I shall be destroyed, I and my house." And they said, "Should he deal with our sister as with a harlot?" And God said unto Jacob, and this is where we get back to the idea of the center, God says to Jacob, Arise, go to Bethel and dwell there.
So Bethel was where Jacob had originally put that pillar.
So now it's back.
So it's a real hero's journey, right?
There's the place that he has a set place.
He goes out and has these adventures and undergoes a moral transformation, reconciles.
And then he comes back to the same place, right, as a transformed person.
So that's a full hero cycle.
Arise, go to Bethel, and dwell there, and make there an altar unto God that appeared to thee when thou fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother.
And Jacob said to his household and to all that were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments, and let us arise and go up to Bethel.
And I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my distress, and was with me in the way which I went.
And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their hand, and all their earrings which were in their ears.
And Jacob hid them under the oak which was by Shechem.
And they journeyed.
And the terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob.
So Jacob came to Luz, which is in the land of Canaan.
That is Bethel, so that's the place where he put up the pillar to begin with.
He and all the people that were there with him.
And he built there an altar and called the place El-Bethel, because there God appeared to him when he fled from the face of his brother.
And God appeared to Jacob again when he came out of Paddan Aram and blessed him.
And God sent unto him, Thy name is Jacob.
Thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, which you remember means usurper, but Israel shall be thy name, he who wrestles with God.
And he called his name Israel.
And God said to him, And God went up from him in the place where he talked with him.
And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he talked with him.
A pillar of stone.
And he poured a drink offering thereon.
And he poured oil thereon.
And Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him.
Bethel.
So he's returned to the central place which had been given to him as his territory.
Rachel dies in labor.
In the process, giving birth to Benoni, son of Mysoro, whose name was then changed to Benjamin, son of the right hand.
Now Reuben...
So Simeon and Levi have already...
Done something unforgivable.
Now Reuben, it's Reuben's term.
He sleeps with Bilhah, who's Jacob, Israel's concubine.
So he's the third of the sons to make an unforgivable error.
And Jacob, slash Israel, gets wind of it.
So Reuben is no longer...
He would have been the premier son, given that the two older sons were put out of the running, so to speak, because of their disobedience and impulsive...
Vengeful cruelty.
And then Reuben can't keep his...
What do they say?
Well, you get the idea.
Yeah, yeah.
Seems to be something that's still quite surprisingly common.
So then we have this story that basically ends with this establishment of the 12 tribes of Israel.
From Leah, there's Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun.
From Zilpah, there's Gad and Asher.
From Bila, there's Dan and Naphtali.
And from Rachel, there's Joseph, who figures extraordinarily importantly in the next story that we're going to cover, which hopefully will wrap up Genesis and Benjamin.
And so now, Israel itself is established.
And so then we turn to...
I'm actually going to end this early tonight.
That's quite a bloody miracle.
So, the story then turns to Joseph and the story begins essentially.
Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children because he was the son of his old age and he made him a coat of many colors.
And so what that seems to me to indicate, you know, coats in dreams very often seems to be particularly true of women's dreams.
That's been my clinical observation.
Clothing, footwear in particular, symbolizes a role.
And that makes sense, right?
Because you dress for the roles.
It's not that big a mystery.
But, so then you might say, well, what does a coat of many colors indicate?
And, you know, if you think of the multiplicity there, It's something like the mastery of multiple domains, right?
Or maybe something like plural potentiality.
And so Jacob is Israel's, or Joseph is Israel's favorite.
And because he sees in him this excess possibility, and he basically tells his other sons that Jacob is going to be The head son, which they are not happy with, right?
Because he's just this young punk, fundamentally.
And he's clearly his father's favorite, and he gets this coat that's sort of indicative of this higher status.
And so, Israel inadvertently sets up a tremendous amount of sibling rivalry in the household again, and that That's the understructure of the last story in Genesis.
And so, in the last of this lecture series for 2017, we'll cover the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors and what happens as a consequence of the favoritism shown to him by his father.
We'll track what happens as a consequence of that.
And so, I'm going to stop there because I'm finished.
So...
Hello, Dr.
Peterson.
This is an idea I've been wrestling with for quite some time now.
This idea of...
A lot of, like, the greatest sources of wisdom that we've received...
Through human history either through text experiences or scriptures seems to always come from people going to isolation and then coming back.
So I've had a hard time trying to figure out from a scientific point of view or evolutionary point of view what would compel an organism It's behavior centered around surviving, especially for humans in social groups as well as reproducing, to want to go into isolation.
And then, not only that, but obtain some level of information that actually helps the group in coming back.
That's a really good question.
There's this neuroscientist, neuropsychologist named L. Conan Goldberg.
And Goldberg was a student of Alexander Luria.
And Alexander Luria was a Russian neuropsychologist Perhaps the foremost neuropsychologist of the mid to late 20th century.
And he had students, Sokolov and Vinogradova, who discovered the orienting reflex, for example.
The orienting reflex is the reflex that orients you when something anomalous interferes with your goal-directed behavior.
It's a major discovery.
One of the four or five most important discoveries that have ever been made in psychology, I would say, certainly in neuroscience.
So Luria was a big deal.
And he was the first person who really established the functional role of the prefrontal cortex as well.
And had a very nice...
Overall view of how the brain functioned.
His book was written in 1980 and it's still...
There's still lots in it that's really useful, which is pretty strange for a science that's advanced that quickly.
Anyways, so Goldberg came from a great pedigree.
I believe Luria's teacher was Pavlov, if I remember correctly.
So, anyways, Goldberg, you know, you hear, some of you may have heard the idea that the left hemisphere is more linguistic than the right hemisphere is.
The left hemisphere is specialized for language and the right hemisphere is specialized for non-verbal, imagistic communication.
The left hemisphere has a pretty well-organized microstructure and the right hemisphere is more diffuse as well.
And That's true in left-handed males in particular.
So the circuitry can be switched around a bit, but it's okay.
The modules are basically the same, although they can be moved a little bit.
But Goldberg thought that it isn't language versus non-language.
It's routine versus novelty.
And so the left hemisphere, and there's a neuropsychologist physician named Ramachandran who's done some very interesting work.
That's pertinent to this.
Maybe I'll tell you a story about him.
Anyways, Goldberg believed that the right hemisphere So you have very old systems underneath both cortical hemispheres that do things like respond to anomaly, to the thing that doesn't fit, to the predator in the distance.
Some of that's extraordinarily fast.
So that would be like a snake reflex that can move you away from a snake in less time than it takes the snake to bite.
And it's really a reflex.
It doesn't even hit your brain.
It's really super fast.
And then there's a defensive crouch that's instantiated higher up in the nervous system but that's still remarkably fast.
And then there's fear as an emotion and the orientation of attention.
And then there's the cognitive processing and that all streams out across a time span, right?
And maybe that time span is half a second.
And that's really a long time if something is attacking you.
So those initial responses are quite primitive but they're extraordinarily fast.
Alright, so there's sub-cortical structures that orient you towards novelty and prepare you for freezing or for attending.
And the right hemisphere seems to be dominated by those systems.
So imagine that what happens is that Something threatens you.
You orient towards it.
The right hemisphere produces a bunch of images about what it might be.
So imagine that's what happens when a child is afraid of the dark.
The child's on the bed.
They're afraid of the dark.
They're crouched because they're frozen like a prey animal.
And their right hemisphere is producing monsters to inhabit the darkness.
That are the child's hypotheses about what might be out there.
Okay.
Because that's what you want to know, right?
You want to know what's out there.
And then you want to know what to do about it.
I can tell you two kids' dreams that are sort of relevant to that.
So, when my daughter was about three, she came into the bedroom that my wife and I had and she was crying.
She'd had a nightmare.
And she said that she saw a stream And there was garbage all over the stream.
And she didn't like that.
And so I sat her down and I said, okay, so imagine the stream with the garbage in it.
Now imagine that you're taking the garbage out and throwing it in a garbage bin.
And so she, and I got her to like visualize that because that kind of puts her back in the semi-dream state.
And then she cleaned up the mess and then she could go off to sleep.
You could tell the child, don't worry about it, the dream isn't real.
That's true because it's not real like other daytime things are, but it's not like it's not real.
It's a dream.
Like, a dream is real, it's just not the same kind of real.
And so, what I did with her was to Indicate to her, practically, that if she saw something anomalous, something that was out of place, right, something that was a mess, that it was within her capacity to set it right.
Okay, and so, okay, so, now, your right hemisphere tells you what monsters might inhabit the darkness.
Now, what you have to do is figure out, there's two things you have to figure out.
One is, what to do about a given monster, Another is to figure out what to do about the class of all possible monsters.
Right.
That's a whole different thing.
That's something that only human beings are capable of, that level of abstraction.
Right, and so what you might do about a particular monster is hide or go out and get rid of it.
If it was just an actual animal, right?
But that doesn't help because there's all the other potential predators that are still there.
And so maybe you can go hunt all them down, but that doesn't help either because you can't hunt them all down.
It's not very likely, anyways.
So instead, what you have to do is figure out how to configure yourself so that you're in the best possible position to fight off the monsters when they come.
That's your best bet.
Alright, so now people are trying to figure this out forever.
They're trying to figure out What's the answer to the problem of the class of all possible monsters?
Part of that's sacrifice.
So there are routines, for example, in Hinduism, with the goddess Kelly, you make offerings to Kelly, who's this devouring goddess, and then she turns into her benevolent counterpart.
And so sacrifice is actually one way that you can tame the monsters.
If you think about the monster as the set of all negative future potentialities, you make the proper sacrifices, those monsters stay at bay.
But then there's heroism as an alternative too, which means the active confrontation of the class of all possible monsters and the building of yourself up into the sort of courageous person that can do that.
It took a tremendous amount of meditation To transform those images, say, of the monsters into, or to solve the problem of the class of those monsters.
So now I'll tell you another child's dream.
So, some of you have probably heard this before, but it's such a great dream that it's worth telling.
So, I was at my sister-in-law's house once and her son was running around.
He's about four.
Very precocious, very verbal, very intelligent.
Running around with a night hat on and a sword.
So he's engaged in this pretty intense play world.
And when he goes to sleep, he puts the night hat on his pillow and the sword by his pillow.
And at the same time, he's having night terror.
So he's waking up, and it had been for a number of weeks, waking up screaming.
But he doesn't know why.
There's some things that aren't going so well in the household, and the parents get divorced shortly afterwards.
Okay, so that's what's going on underneath, right?
And he's also going to go to kindergarten, and so he's about to go into the world.
And so he's coping with this, you know?
So...
I'm watching him zoom around as this knight and thinking that's pretty cool.
And that night he woke up and was screaming.
And so we were all at breakfast the next morning.
And I said, did you dream anything?
And he got really intense.
And he said, yes, I had a dream.
And I said, well, what was the dream?
And he said, well, I was out on this field and all these...
Like, dwarfs came up to me.
They were only about as high as my knees.
And they didn't have any arms.
They had powerful legs.
And they were covered with, like, hairy feathers and grease.
And there was cross carved in the top of their head.
And they had beaks.
And whenever he moved anywhere, they would jump at him with their beaks.
And there were lots of them.
And everyone, like, just said nothing at breakfast.
It was like...
And he was right into this story, eh?
And so we were all like, yeah, well, that accounts for all the screaming.
And then he said, yeah, and then in the background there was a dragon.
And every time the dragon puffed out smoke, it would turn into these dwarves.
It's like, oh man, kid, you really got a problem there.
You got beat things that are biting you and you can kill them and that's fine.
But then there's the dragon just puffing out new ones.
So it's like a hydra problem, right?
The old hydra is the serpent.
You cut off one head, seven more grow.
It's not a good thing.
And it's such a cool dream because it really portrayed this class of all possible monsters problem.
So you've got the specific monsters and that's a problem.
So you've got to get rid of them.
But that's not the problem.
The problem is that there's something in the background that's just generating monsters like mad.
And so I said to him, what do you think you could do about that?
And that's a loaded question, right?
That's like leading the witness in a trial.
You don't get to ask a question like that because it implies the answer.
What could you do about that is not any different than saying you could do something about that.
Right, so I hinted at that as a possibility and his eyes lit up.
Now you remember, he's already running around as a knight, eh?
So he kind of already knew what to do because he had the whole sword and the hat and with that you know that you can go after the dragon.
He kind of got that and he said, I'd get my dad and then I'd jump up on top of the dragon And I'd poke out both of its eyes with my sword and then it'd go right down its throat to the firebox where the fire comes out and I'd carve out a piece of the firebox and then I'd use that as a shield.
And I thought, yes!
Right!
Right!
Man!
It's so smart, eh?
Because he got the thing instantly.
He knew that...
He knew...
So, imagine.
First of all, he thought, okay, I have to go to the heart of the problem.
Right?
And really to the heart.
Not to the dragon.
But right down the damn thing's gullet...
Right to the place where the fire was actually being created.
Because it was there you could find the shield.
And that he'd take this thing that was fireproof and make a shield out of it.
And so that was just...
Dead, bloody, perfect.
It was so cool.
And you think, well, how could a kid come up with that?
And there's a bunch of answers.
I mean, one is, we know snake fear is innate.
We know that now.
There's been recent research that has demonstrated that.
And we've been preyed on and been predators for a very long period of time.
So the idea that And I found something else interesting about the brain out, out about the brain recently too, in a book I was reading by Ray Kurzweil called How to Build a Mind.
I think that's what it was called.
It was quite a good book.
So, I think it was in that book, or it was in a neuroscience paper I was reading.
Doesn't matter, but it was in one of those two places.
So you know that scanning technology has got more and more high resolution over the last few years, right?
It just gets more and more high resolution all the time.
And so people are now able to look at the microstructures of the brain in a way that hasn't been possible before.
And so the old idea with the cortex basically was that the cortex was full of a bunch of neurons and then when one neuron and another fired at the same time, they would wire together.
And that's kind of how your brain learned to make connections.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but that will do.
And then it was found that it wasn't quite that simple because What your cortex is made out of are these columns of neurons that are duplicated, sort of like a centipede's legs.
You know, it's a very simple genetic code to add another leg, set of legs to a centipede.
It's sort of like that with your brain.
It's made out of all these columns.
And the columns are basically already quite wired up.
And then, as you learn, the columns wire together.
Okay, so there's some pre-existent structure there, but there's more pre-existent structure than that was thought.
So, it's basically that there are already tracts that link columns together that are in different parts of the brain, and the columns themselves can send out dendrites to these superhighways, Which are already there, and then the superhighway is there, and then it can generate connections to the columns at the end of the superhighway.
So what that means is that there's a tremendous amount of cortical structure already in place, but there's plasticity around that.
And when I read that, I thought, well, that's part of the source of the archetypes.
There's already an archetypal structure there.
That as well as the subcortical structures.
So you could say that, like, the kid already had within him not only the capacity to represent Not only the monster, but the class of all possible monsters and the fact that the problem wasn't monsters, the problem was that monsters could continually be generated.
Which is a way worse problem.
And then the answer to that isn't to kill an individual monster.
The answer to that is go to the source of the monstrous itself and defeat it.
So it's absolutely staggering and you can imagine that it would take a tremendous amount of meditative effort for people to have come up with that solution over a very long period of time.
So, now, the point of the representation is to formulate a picture of what it is that's the threat, so that you can then formulate a general purpose solution.
And so, there's this image of Kelly, which I really like, because Kelly is sort of the goddess of the darkness, let's say, and destruction.
And so, Kelly is...
She has a headdress of fire.
Her hair is on fire, and she has a headdress of skulls, and she has hands cut off all around her neck.
And she has a belt that's often snakes but is sometimes, she's sometimes eating the intestines of this guy that she's just given birth to and that she's sitting on.
She has eight legs like a spider and she's in a web of fire.
And so she's a monster in some sense that represents everything that might terrify and devour you.
And the question is, so you come up with that representation as an image to represent the class of all terrifying things And then you have to generate a solution in the face of that class.
And sacrifice is one of the solutions.
But that heroic encounter is another one of the solutions.
And that's the one that he catalyzed.
Now, he'd been read lots of books.
He'd watched lots of Disney movies.
You know, and he'd seen the heroic pattern portrayed many, many places.
And his little brain was working like mad to extract out the essence of that and to embody it.
And when I asked him that question, it just went snap!
And all those things lined up, and his night terrors went away.
That was it.
And I followed up with his mum, because it was really quite remarkable, the whole set of occurrences.
You know, and he didn't have night terrors that night, even though he'd been having them nightly, and that was the end of them.
Because he'd solved his problem.
Like, he needed to be the courageous knight that went after the dragon.
And so, that is what people need to be.
So, I think when we go into solitude we shut off the external stimulation.
And we let the dreaming part of our mind emerge.
And that's this non-verbal pattern detector that thinks in images.
And it's the thing that mediates between what we don't understand and what we do understand.
Like, if you understand it completely, you can say it and you can act it out.
If you don't understand it, you represent it in images.
It's the emotion, fear...
Withdrawal, paralysis, and then that manifests itself in an image of what that might be.
And that image is the basis for the story and it's the basis for further development of the idea.
And to go into isolation is to let those images emerge and to dream a little bit.
And then that moves you ahead into the future.
So to use your language that you used before, it's not enough just to map out The danger that is imminent in front of you, but all the potential dangers that you could come up with in abstract form.
Yeah, well, remember what happens when God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise.
They become aware that they're going to die, right?
The future becomes a problem.
Because you could say the future is the place of all potential monsters, right?
And so just the monster that you have right in front of you, it's like, yeah, well, you get rid of that, but that doesn't solve your problem, does it?
The problem is, how do you exist in a world full of monsters?
And part of that answer is, well, you become a monster yourself.
That's a big part of the answer.
But it's an incomplete answer, because if you're just a monster, then you're just as bad as the monsters.
So you have to be monstrous enough to contend with the monsters, but then you have to be civilized enough so that you're not a monster yourself.
And that's more or less equivalent to the Jungian integration of the shadow.
So...
Yep, yep.
Hi, Dr.
Peterson.
I've been wanting to ask you this for a while now since I started watching your lectures.
After I started reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, I came upon a paragraph in his chapter on scholars that really bothered me.
It actually bothers me to this day.
He talked about this kind of person like they were just a mirror.
Like they stretched, he said, every part of their skin basically to allow every new piece of information that they took on and that all they ever were was just an instrument.
They were just a mirror reflecting what they had learned, never actually having generated anything on their own.
And it's bothered me because I feel like in a way it sort of Like, it's impacted my identity a lot.
Because I don't know, how are you supposed to create something, you know?
Okay, well, that's okay.
That's a really good question.
I mean, Nietzsche is often classed with the existentialists, right?
And so, one of the tenets of existentialism...
There's two real tenets of existentialism.
There's more, but obviously we're oversimplifying.
But one is that life is a problem.
It isn't because there's something wrong with you.
It's that life is a problem.
And so that's often contrasted with the Freudian view, which is that if you have a problem, it's because something went wrong during your development.
The existentialist said, no, no.
It's like, life is a problem.
Make no mistake about it.
And that...
The purpose of...
The purpose of scholarship is in some sense to solve that problem.
And so for Nietzsche, like he said, all truths are bloody truths to me.
And what he meant by that was that if an idea didn't incarnate itself in you and transform your perceptions and your actions, then you were merely possessed by the idea.
You're merely a spokesperson for the idea.
Or you could say that the idea possessed you.
You're a puppet for the idea.
It's not you.
It's the idea is in you and it has you.
You haven't taken the idea and incorporated it with you and made it part of your life.
And so, there's a romanticism that's associated with that, right?
That's the passionate scholar, the person for whom ideas are not merely...
They're not merely, what would you call, abstracted representations that can be tossed about as if they're commodities.
They're...
They're more like personalities.
That might be another way of thinking about it.
And so, if those ideas are compelling, then you don't...
Like one thing I learned a long time ago, and I think this is probably relevant.
You know, when I was a kid, I liked to argue.
And I liked to win arguments or lose them, although I liked winning them a lot better.
But I didn't really mind so much what the content of the argument was.
You know, I could engage in it like a sparring match and it was in some sense to establish dominance, right?
To establish intellectual dominance.
I quit doing that when I was in my mid-twenties because I thought that that was too shallow an approach to the ideas.
They're not commodities of that sort.
They have tendrils that reach down into the living.
That's the right way to think about it.
And so Nietzsche's criticism of scholars, and he did this a lot, was that they were bloodless.
They were full of performative contradictions.
That's another way of thinking about it.
They'd say one thing and do another.
Their intellect was completely dissociated from their actions.
And he thought that was a very bad idea.
And I think that that's a good criticism.
I think it is a bad idea.
I also think it makes for an extraordinarily boring lecturer.
You know, because you can tell if you're listening to someone whether the ideas that you're hearing are merely being passed through the person as if they're being memorized, say, or whether they're part of the dynamic core of the person.
And if they're part of the dynamic core of the person, then they're almost always engaging and gripping.
And so, he wasn't a fan of bloodless scholars.
And I think that's correct, because one of the things that I see, it's not a good idea to have ideas possess you.
Unless you know what the ideas are up to.
And lots of people are possessed by ideas rather than possessing them.
And what that means is they haven't taken the ideas and integrated them into their own being.
It's like an incarnation in a sense.
They haven't incarnated the ideas in embodied form.
And so they're incomplete.
You know, Nietzsche also, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, when Zarathustra comes down the mountain, he sees a bunch of people gathered around a famous individual.
I think maybe a scholar, but it doesn't really matter.
And when Zarathustra goes and looks at the person, all he sees is a little tiny midget with a gigantic ear.
And so he's a hyper-specialist, right?
And so he has a pretty impressive ear, but he's only this big.
And that was Nietzsche's imagistic commentary on the danger of hyper-specialization.
And also on the danger of adulation for hyper-specialization.
Because he thought about it as a kind of deformity.
Now, Nietzsche was a pretty harsh guy, but...
But he did address the issue of the relationship between intellectual knowledge and action.
Because for Nietzsche, those things are not to be separated, in some sense.
Yeah, so maybe, I don't know why, maybe it bothered you.
Like, it's hard to say why it bothered you.
It might have bothered you because it sort of undermined the idea of scholar.
But the other possibility, and this isn't an accusation, because obviously I don't know anything about you, but it might also be that it struck a chord, you know, and that maybe you were doubtful or questioning how tightly associated you're Intellectual endeavor was with your actual character and your practice.
So that's another possibility.
I mean, that's a really good thing to think about because generally speaking, that integration is very much lacking.
People are a lot smarter and fluid with their ideas than they are ethical and consistent and characterized by integrity.
So, yep.
Hey, so last week you talked about how you hated people asking you if you believe in God, or do you believe in miracles, or you dislike those questions at least.
But you also talked about how, and I won't put words in your mouth, but I think you said something about the idea of an empirical evidence for religious experiences or spiritual experiences, and I wonder how those two ideas, like can a spiritual existence, or can a spiritual experience exist without God, or how did, I had trouble reconciling.
Who knows?
Who knows?
I don't know what to make of that.
It depends on what you're willing to accept as proof, I suppose.
That's where things get tricky.
If you have to demonstrate the existence of God objectively, then subjective experiences of the transcendent are irrelevant.
And that's a perfectly reasonable standpoint if your initial presupposition is the only thing that has actual existence is those things that can be demonstrated objectively.
And I'm not putting that down.
That's a powerful methodology.
Our technology is basically dependent on The acceptance, at least the partial acceptance of those axioms.
But I also think that it's difficult for me to deny the existence of these patterns of thinking that seem to exist cross-culturally.
Like the existence of the representation of the dragon, for example.
Especially given that I can see an evolutionary rationale for the emergence of these representations.
So, and then there's also the indisputable fact that religious experiences are accessible to people through a number of different avenues.
Now, and one of the things I mentioned when I discussed this before is, well, you could say, well, those are no different than experiences of psychopathology.
But they are different because the experiences of psychopathology damage people.
Whereas the evidence is that the transcendent experiences actually help people.
So unless you're willing to say, well, there are some forms of psychopathological experience that actually facilitate health, which is a possibility, but, you know, I think you're pushing your hypothesis at that point.
Would it hurt to define what a religious experience is in this case, then?
Because I feel like the semantics...
Like, I'm not sure if what you're saying about a religious experience is what I'm understanding...
Well, generally a religious experience is something like an experience of the renewal of the world, that might be one way of thinking about it, so that everything sort of leaps forward as crystalline and perfect, as if you had been viewing it from behind a mask before.
Another would be a sense of the union of everything.
And so you're a singular being and you're isolated in religious experiences.
So, for example, there's a book written recently by a neuroscientist, My Stroke of...
What's it called?
My Stroke.
My stroke of insight.
Yeah, that's right.
And I believe she had a left hemisphere stroke, if I remember correctly.
And she was a sufficiently well-developed neuroscientist to understand what was happening as she had the stroke.
And she had a...
Intense religious experience as a consequence of that.
And she experienced it as a dissolution of the ego into this state of union with everything and this transcendent experience of awe and the...
Well, I don't remember the rest of it.
I mean, there are other elements of religious experience that are quite common.
The idea of the opening of the heavens.
That's one, the communion with the ancestors.
That's another, the reduction of the body to a skeleton.
That's another, the movement up into heaven.
These are well documented phenomena and a lot of them are associated with Well, a fair number of them are associated with psychedelic use, but that's not the only avenue to experiences like that.
And epilepsy can produce experiences like that too.
And people usually report near-death experiences as well.
You know, people usually report that those experiences have life-altering significance.
Now, that in and of itself Only proves that people are capable of having subjective religious experiences, right?
It doesn't definitively prove that there's anything outside of that.
So Jung, Carl Jung for example, most of the time he didn't talk about God.
He talked about the God image.
Which is not the same thing, because you could have a God image that was even evolutionarily instantiated without that necessarily being related to any transcendent being beyond the image, right?
So, who knows?
Who knows?
Again, I think it depends on what you're willing to accept as proof.
Now, the proof...
It's beyond question that people can have life-changing religious experiences.
Another example of that is that the best treatment for alcoholism is religious conversion.
It's well documented in the literature and I studied alcoholism for a long time.
So, one of the cures that sticks is religious conversion.
And the 12-step programs essentially attempt to instantiate religious conversion.
It's hard to document their success because they succeed for the people who stick with it.
But that's not a very good measure, right?
It's sort of self-evident that they work for the people who stick with it.
I'm not cynical about Alcoholics Anonymous or anything, but we don't have good data on outcome.
There is good data showing that religious transformation is a good cure for alcoholism.
So, and that's an interesting phenomena too.
It's too complicated.
I probably can't...
Okay, I'll try this for a second.
So here's how I think a religious conversion might work.
So imagine you've got the left hemisphere, and it's the place where your habitual interpretations reside.
So, I can give you a quick example of this.
So, this guy Ramachandran, who's a neurophysiologist, or I think that's his field of study.
I think he's at UCLA. He studied people who had neglect, and neglects...
It's a very, very bizarre phenomenon.
So if you have a stroke that damages your right parietal lobe, you'll lose the left part of your being.
Not just your body, it's really weird.
It's like, so for example, if you have a right parietal stroke and you look at a clock, you only see, you only, only half the clock exists for you.
It's not like you only see half the clock.
It's weirder than that.
It's that there's only the right side of the clock.
There's only the right side of you.
There's only the right side of my body.
I don't know that this exists.
And so sometimes people with right parietal damage will wake up after the stroke and grab their left arm and throw it out of bed or their leg and throw it out of bed because it's not theirs.
And then of course they fall out of bed which is quite a shock to them.
So, and so, they'll only eat half the food on the plate.
Nobody can really understand this phenomenologically, right?
Because we can't imagine what that must be like.
I think it must be like, you know how, you know there's things behind you, but you don't not see them.
They're just not there.
It's not like it's black or anything, or there's a space.
It's just not there.
And so I think what happens is the not there extends to three-quarters of the field instead of half the field.
That's a guess.
Anyway, so...
Now, the funny thing about people with neglect is that if you tell them, if you point it out, you say, well, I noticed that you're not moving your left foot today, they'll say, well, it's arthritic and I can't move it.
And say, well, why don't you just try to move?
I say, no, look, doctor, I already told you, it's in too much pain to move.
It was working fine this morning.
That can be months after the accident.
So it's a denial and people thought actually that that was trauma induced denial for a long time before they figured it out was actually a consequence of the neurophysiological damage.
Now Ramachandran found that if you irrigated the contralateral ear say, now if you pour cold water in someone's ear It upsets their vestibular system and their eyes will move back and forth like this.
You can try that at a party if you want.
Anyways, Ramachandran was testing vestibular function on these patients and he irrigated the right ear with cold water and they woke up.
And maybe what happened was that that was shocking enough.
So imagine the networks in the right hemisphere were degraded but not completely gone.
And they needed a really high threshold of activation to snap into function.
So here's an example of that.
If you have Parkinson's disease, imagine you're frozen there, okay?
And I throw a ball at you, you'll go like this and catch it.
But you can't throw it back.
So you can, the stimulus is enough, that's enough to push you past threshold, but you can't do it voluntarily.
Now if you have Parkinson's like right to the nth degree, you won't even be able to catch it.
But there's a stage where you can still do that.
There's a great case study where this grandpa was in a wheelchair, he had Parkinson's and his young grandson was playing out on the dock And fell in the water and started to drown.
And he got out of his wheelchair, went into the ocean, rescued him, brought him onto the beach, sat back down in his wheelchair, and was paralyzed again.
So that was enough.
So you can imagine, there was enough network left, so if the emotional...
Tension became high enough that the degraded circuits could still function.
So, okay, so back to Ramachandran.
So you irrigate the ear, all of a sudden the right hemisphere connections flash, the remainders manage to connect, and the person goes, oh my god, I've had a terrible stroke, I've lost the left side of my body there.
Crying.
They're like completely catastrophically overwhelmed by it.
And then 20 minutes later the effects wear off and they snap back in and now they've lost their left side again.
They don't remember it.
And so what seems to happen is that the right hemisphere It's collecting anomalous information.
That's what it does.
That's what it does when you're dreaming.
It's representing that anomalous information in image form and sort of slowly passing it to the left hemisphere so it doesn't overwhelm it.
And maybe if it gets overwhelming, you wake up and you're afraid and you tell someone about the dream.
That helps you figure out what it was.
But anyways, so that the right hemisphere is always trying to tap the left hemisphere into transformation, right?
So now imagine that that can happen a little bit or a lot.
So maybe you're just ignoring a little bit of anomalous information, you just have some mildly frightening dreams, or maybe you've just stacked up a whole bunch of things that you're ignoring and there's some major league monsters that you haven't contended with.
Maybe there's situations where the right hemisphere is stored up enough Counter, enough of a counter-hypothesis, let's say, about how the world works.
Making sense out of all those things that you've ignored, that one day it just goes, snap!
And you're a new personality.
And maybe the new personality isn't addicted.
So, it's something like that.
I think.
So, yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Joke.
Good morning, citizen Peterson.
How are you doing?
I've prepared a real doozy for you here today.
Oh good, oh good.
It's a good thing you've got extra time to handle this one.
I'd even say it's rehearsed a little bit, so it's going to be ultra ineffective, you know?
Okay, okay.
Now, I understand that a lecture on the psychological significance of anything really is going to indubitably wander off into an anthropocentric world view.
But as a practitioner of the hard sciences, I wanted to dig a little bit deeper.
So I sought out, I guess, a religious interpretation of both creative freedom and I guess the very nature of time itself.
And I found it, obviously.
That's why I'm here.
And if you think you have an anthropocentric worldview, it's nothing compared to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's.
Now, I like to think that this microphone here, the one that you keep muting out on me, this microphone is an object which exists outside of our individual perceptions.
That's just the way I like to look at it.
But then I think about the concept beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And certainly, I mean, when you're talking about art, the appreciation of art, there has to be some sort of subjective element integrated into that.
But there also must be a limit as well.
I mean, certain works of art that we appreciate as absolute masterpieces, like Michelangelo's Pieta, for example, which you bring up Frequently, because it really is that good.
But there's other things which are just, by comparison, they're like vandalism, you know?
Now, there's always a temptation, alright, to invoke the principle of non-overlapping magisteria.
But that seems like sort of a cop-out, right?
So I formulated, I guess, for myself...
Four standards of measure which help me separate what's the difference between art and mediocrity.
And here's the four.
Number one, education.
Number two, time commitment.
You've got to put in the time.
If you're an artist, it's probably going to become your full-time occupation.
You have to be that passionate about it.
Number three, public display.
Art isn't something that you own for yourself, you hide it in your basement, then it's not art.
It's something which you have to express, you know?
Something which you've got to share.
And number four, and I think this is the most important one, efficacy of vision.
If you're an artist, you've got to have a vision.
And we talk about the dream state here a lot.
You go into the dream state, you have inspiration, but it's not enough to just have the inspiration because that's totally subjective for you.
The art part about it is having...
The techniques and the skill and the intent and I guess the capacity to turn that into something real.
You know, that you can then express or share.
So can you read Cardinal Ratzinger's explanation for the nature of time and then address the concept of beauty in the eye of the beholder with specific reference to the body positivity movement?
How...
Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.
Jesus.
Thank you.
I don't think I can.
I think...
I think...
I think that's...
I think that you tangled together so many things, and this is also...
A tangle of things.
Not that that's a criticism.
That I can't pull them all together with sufficient rapidity not to bore the audience to death.
So, I'm gonna wait.
I'm gonna wait.
Okay.
Dr.
Peterson.
I'm fascinated by the idea of faith.
What faith means.
Jacob listens to a voice and believes it.
He probably heard other voices.
Why did he believe this one?
There must have been an a priori sort of functional necessity for him to believe the voice that told him one thing or another.
And I think that's a string that runs through the Bible and then through the New Testament.
We are expected as, well, I confess I'm a Christian.
I act like I believe God is real.
And so there is this call of faith.
And also in every hero's story we see now, there is always a moment in that story where the hero must believe something beyond the evidence that is before them, which is to say they must take a leap of faith.
So I'm wondering if you could just kind of unpack that experience of faith and the understanding of how a human being makes the choice to believe one thing or another.
God, that's a great question.
I mean, is this still on?
Is this still working?
Okay, good.
I don't precisely know the answer to that.
It's a very peculiar thing because we think many things, or you could say many voices appear in our minds.
Because when Nietzsche took Descartes' I think, therefore I am a part, he said, well it isn't so obvious that there's an I, first of all, that it's a unity, like a unity transparent unto itself, which of course the psychoanalysts picked up in a big way.
And then he wasn't sure that it was the I who thought in some causal manner.
He said, well, no, it's more like thoughts, it's something like thoughts appear in the phenomenal field and maybe you choose between them or maybe they possess you.
Like, there's lots of other ways of thinking about it.
It isn't exactly obvious to me why we choose to take one pathway rather than another when so many of them Offer themselves to us, you know?
People tend to talk about that as something like conscience, right?
And now, maybe it's that...
It's got to have something to do, I think...
It's an endless regress, because you can always ask why any assumption became primary.
But I'll put that aside for a moment.
It seems to me to have something to do with your aims.
You know, that you're more likely to listen to a voice that is in keeping with your most fundamental aims.
And then the question is, where do your most fundamental aims come from?
And from what I've been able to determine, and I'll speak psychologically again, is that To begin with, you're a concatenation of rather primitive sub-personalities.
Hungry ones, tired ones, upset ones, laughing ones.
You can see that in babies, you know, they cycle through those states very rapidly.
There's a infantile unity above all that, but it doesn't have control, right?
And so, then the developing individual has to figure out how to integrate those primitive sub-personalities into a unified personality.
At the same time, they integrate the unified personality into a social unity.
So, it's partly individual integration, but it's fed by social forces.
I mean, even when you watch an infant breastfeed, it's established a relationship with its mother and there's a reciprocity that's already at play there.
So then, that underlying multiplicity starts to form itself into a unity And then the question, and I would say that's something like the emergence of the individual out of the titans.
That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.
Like a sovereign out of the titans.
It's something like that.
But then there's another division which seems to me to parallel the Cain and Abel division.
It's that that integration can be oriented towards something that's positive, but it can also be oriented towards something that's negative.
And that's the split of the world into good and evil, I think.
And then it looks like you're navigating between those.
And I can only account for that with something like choice.
Like, I think the free choice, even though I don't understand it, I'm unwilling to deny the existence of free choice merely because I don't understand it.
Because it looks to me like that's how people act, that's how they expect to be treated, and that societies that structure themselves in accordance with the idea that people have free choice actually work.
Now that doesn't prove that there's free choice, but people have been arguing about that forever, so...
But it looks to me, so those are two possible means of integration and then I think what you're doing is feeding one or the other, constantly.
And I think you probably choose which one to feed.
I think.
It feels that way to me as well.
Like when I look at my own...
Maybe you're really aggravated with something.
Maybe you're aggravated with your wife.
Or your child or something like that.
And you're feeling kind of nasty.
And maybe you even know that you're in the wrong.
And an idea comes into your head.
You think, I could say that.
And you know you could say it.
And you know what it would do.
But then you pause and you think...
Would that make it better or worse?
And then maybe you go to hell with it.
Which is quite the thing to say.
I've got a little story about that in a minute.
And then you say it.
But you knew...
You knew that you took the low road, right?
And you know it.
And then you're guilty about that and defensive and that makes the fight way worse because then there's no damn way you're going to admit that you actually did that.
And so things do go to hell.
And so here's an ugly little idea that's relevant to the question.
So imagine you're playing around with cocaine.
Now, I'm using cocaine because it's very addictive.
But it's a very interesting chemical because it's a dopaminergic agonist.
And what dopamine does is two things.
It makes you feel like what you're doing is worthwhile.
But it also...
Imagine that there's a bunch of neural circuits that are active and then they get a hit of dopamine.
Or you do.
Then those neural circuits get a little bit more powerful.
Okay, so it has a rewarding...
property which is that it makes you feel like what you're doing is important and it has a reinforcing property which is it makes neural circuits grow so now what that means is that whatever you were doing just before you took cocaine grows Okay,
so now imagine there's a bunch of different things that you do just before you take cocaine, but there's a string of decisions, and at one decision point is the same for all of those different occurrences, and that decision point is, because you know you're in trouble, and that decision point is, well to hell with it.
Okay, so then you think that each of the 200 times that you take cocaine, even though you do it in different places, but that one thought is there all the time and that thing grows because you're reinforcing it and it grows and it grows and it grows and so now that's in you, that's part of you and it's the thing that says to hell with it.
Okay, so now, and maybe that's not such a good thing to grow inside your brain.
So then, you're addicted, and they take you to a cocaine treatment center, and after a week, you're no longer physiologically addicted.
You're not craving.
You don't have a problem, as long as you're there.
But then they take you back to your normal environment, and you see, like, Cocaine Joe, your friend, and as soon as you see him, up that thing comes, and bang, you're back on the...
On the to hell with it track.
And that's where you will end up too.
If you reinforce that particular perspective long enough.
So that's akin in a sense to this decision making process, you know?
If you take the low road, then that wins and it gets a little stronger.
Because everything that wins...
Neurologically gets a little stronger.
It's like a Darwinian competition.
So one rule is don't practice what you don't want to become.
Because you really do become that.
It builds itself right into your neural architecture.
And that's one of the terrifying things about addiction.
You know, because you think, well, it's kind of psychological.
It's like, yeah, kind of.
It's also kind of neurophysiological.
And you build a one-eyed...
Cocaine monster in your head if you hit yourself enough with something that reinforcing.
Last question, I guess.
Just a really simple question then about...
Long suffering.
One of the things that I was noticing from the stories of Jacob and a lot of these biblical narratives is you do have this all-powerful God who's able to kind of essentially be the hidden protagonist in the narrative.
But then the funny thing is that he's kind of revealing some of his qualities throughout the course of the story.
So you were talking about the weird paradox of the fact that God somehow allows Jacob, Israel, to win the fight.
Yeah, and he does that with Abraham too, right?
Yeah.
So my question is relating to Pancep's thing about the rats that you told like three or four times on a number of occasions.
I saw one of your recent videos, you talked about it, where the bigger rat lets the smaller rat win because then the smaller rat won't engage in the game.
So the question is two-fold for me.
One, is God allowing humanity to win periodically So that's to allow us to actually engage in the dialogue through these stories.
And two, is it a much more primitive version of the virtue of humility, which you wouldn't normally characterize of an omnipotent deity?
Well, those are excellent questions.
I really like the second one in particular, that God's decision to allow...
Human victory from time to time is actually a manifestation of something approximating humility.
Or at least mercy.
But humility is an interesting take on it.
Well it's also connected to Paul's image of how Christ hands himself over and allows himself to be defeated by men and therefore conquers sin which is man's enemy.
It's a weird...
It's the same paradox where God enters into that dynamic with people and willingly loses.
Yeah, well, that's a...
Okay, so the first thing I would say is that that's a really interesting analogy.
I can't...
It's a complicated enough question so that I can't go beyond...
I don't think I can go beyond the question, actually, because it's so complicated that I don't think I can formulate it any better than you already did.
Like, it's an interesting string of ideas.
I'd have to play with it a while to see...
It does shed an interesting light on why God is amenable to negotiation in the Old Testament, which is really a strange, as you pointed out, it's really a strange thing.
It's like, this is omnipotent God who obviously can do whatever he wants, and yet he can be bargained with.
And that also opens up the question of why.
Like, your hypothesis is, well, if you don't let the little rat win now and then, then they get dejected and quit playing.
And that's, I mean, that's a pretty good observation.
If people don't get to win now and then, you know, that's kind of what happens to Cain.
God says, well, you're not playing a straight game.
That's why you're not winning.
But...
I don't know.
It could all...
There's an intimation in the Old Testament, and I think it's more developed in the New Testament, maybe not, that the straighter the game you play, the more likely you are to win.
And so, maybe part of the reason that God lets Abraham bargain and even Jacob is because they've started to play very straight games.
And so maybe you do win in your wrestling with God if you play a straight game.
I mean, I think that's...
I actually think that's...
I think the reason that's true is because that's actually why we would define it as a straight game.
Now, then we could speak psychologically again.
I think that what we've come to recognize as a straight game is the game that in the broadest number of situations across the widest range of time spans is most likely to produce a positive outcome.
And that's actually the grounds for our sense of ethics.
That it's really practical.
Not to belabor it too much because there was an interesting insight from Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday where God sets himself up as the benevolent antagonist so as to accelerate the game.
Yeah, well, I think that's a really interesting idea.
I mean, there is hints, I would say, throughout the biblical stories that the reason that God tolerates Satan, let's say, is because without an adversary you're soft.
And that's tied in with the notion that life is something like a moral struggle.
You know, that that's the fundamental essence of being, a moral struggle.
Now, I think that that's phenomenologically a reasonable observation.
Maybe other people don't experience it that way.
It seems to me, like within my own experience, that that's accurate.
Now I don't know what, again, I don't know what that says about the fundamental nature of reality.
But I had a vision at one point that I was in a ring with Satan, actually, believe it or not.
And it was like a Roman Colosseum.
And, you know, I was rather upset to find myself there, but I won.
And I asked God afterwards why he would do such a thing, and his answer was, he knew I could win.
That's interesting, you know, because, like, I don't know what to make of that, believe me, I have no idea what to make of that.
But the idea was that if you're trying to encourage someone, Rather than protect them, because those are really different things, right?
To protect someone isn't to make them strong.
To encourage them is to make them strong.
Then you set them a series of challenges right at the point where they may win.
And maybe you could make a case that that's what you do if you really care for someone.
Now, I know that that's a...
I'm not saying that that interpretation is correct.
I'm not...
But there's something...
I mean, you definitely with your children, you know, when you're wrestling with them, say, when you're playing with them, you use...
You push them to the limit of their ability.
Because otherwise they don't transcend their current abilities.
So, we'll see some of you, we'll see some of you, perhaps most of you, in December, you, perhaps most of you, in December, and I think we'll finish off Genesis at
And then in the new year, probably not till the spring, I'll start with Exodus, which I'm really looking forward to because I really like the Exodus story.
It's an amazing story and unbelievably deep.
Well, the ones we've covered so far have been, you know, pretty good as well.
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