Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Maps of Meaning | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson | Lecture One (Official)

Nov. 13, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:05:30

Maps of Meaning | Dr. Jordan B. Peterson | Lecture One (Official) | Peterson Academy

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	There are forces behind the scenes that are moving you.
	You have no idea what they are.
	The primary cry of our time is for a uniting narrative.
	Hero's narrative defines the foundation of things.
	So what's the story?
	One of the things that a great story does is that it reveals truths that have been known since the beginning of time.
	That's a map.
	Time to wake up and develop a vision of your own destiny.
	The right map represents a journey that you want to take.
	The bigger dragon you confront, the more potential will be released within you.
	Who knows who you could become?
	In this course, you're going to go through the chaos to the promised land.
	The meaning of the journey justifies the risk.
	You're going to take all the risks there are.
	Choose which ones to take.
	You're pursuing something of maximal value.
	That sense of meaning.
	It's a representation of a dynamic transformation.
	To believe something.
	Stake your life on it.
	The worst of all things will come your way.
	Face that and prevail.
	So it turns out that there are two fundamental ways of looking at the world.
	And in the modern Western world, we've decided that one of them is primary.
	And I think we picked the wrong one.
	So what are the two ways of looking at the world?
	You can think about what the world is made of.
	Say you can think about that from the perspective of experience or as a materialist, you can think about what the world is made of.
	Or you can think about how to act in the world.
	And since you're alive, figuring out what to act in the world is arguably of primary importance and perhaps of primary reality.
	Now, action is more than how you navigate in the world, moving, let's say, because your perception is also action predicated.
	So for example, when you look at the world to find out what it is, you have to direct your attention.
	And that happens many ways.
	It happens unconsciously.
	There's all sorts of mechanisms in your visual system from your eyes back into the neurological systems that control vision that are moving your eyes constantly.
	When you look at something, you're not a passive observer.
	You're an active observer.
	There's no perception without action.
	There's no primary sense data about what the world is without action.
	You're locked in a framework of action, even at the level of attention.
	Now, you know this to some degree if you're in a restaurant even, forget about vision.
	Well, if you're in a restaurant and you're sitting with your guests, you pay attention to them, perhaps the waiter and the waitress and not the rest of the people in the cafe.
	Generally speaking, unless something strange happens, there's many things you could look at, but you direct your attention to what, to what's of import.
	So you're focusing always on what's relevant and what commands center stage.
	And so the question is, what commands center stage and why?
	Now, in order to act in the world and to attend to the world, you have to frame your perception.
	And the reason you have to frame your perception is because there's an indefinite number of things to attend to.
	So if you were painting this wall, let's say if you, I don't know if that's a great choice.
	Perhaps it's not.
	This is a very featureless wall.
	Although if you attended to it very carefully, you'd see that there were gradations of shade and light and color.
	If you were going to be a photorealist who was attending to anything in this room, a photorealist painting, you'd find out that although it's easy to consider the curtains behind us black, for example, that there would be a very large number of color variations.
	There's an infinite amount of detail around you.
	There's an infinite amount of detail in a face, in an array of faces, in a crowd, in a place.
	You drown in detail.
	You have to focus.
	You focus your attention.
	The question is, or a question is, what structure do you use to focus your attention, to sequence the actions that underlie your perceptions in relationship to a goal?
	That's a good way of thinking about it.
	So what I've got here first is a simple frame of perception.
	And it consists of three parts.
	Wherever you are, you have a sense of where you are.
	You're situated somewhere because you're a navigating creature.
	You're headed somewhere as well.
	And then you have to strategize and organize your attention and your action in order to move you from the place you're at to the place that you're going.
	Now, the framework that you use to evaluate your attention and action has that structure.
	So who's figured that out?
	Cybernetic theorists, starting with Norbert Weiner back in the 1940s.
	He worked on missile control systems in World War II.
	He was a founder of computation.
	And if you're trying to shoot down a missile, you have a beginning place, you have a trajectory of the missile, you have a predicted trajectory, you have to organize the machinery so that it decreases the gap between the projectile and the target till the target is hit.
	That's a cybernetic viewpoint.
	Phenomenologists, phenomenologists, starting with Husserl and then Heidegger, two famous philosophers.
	Husserl, in particular, at least to begin with, was unhappy with the materialist, reductionist, atheist view of reality.
	And he hypothesized that our fundamental sense of what was most real had gone astray, especially after the dawn of the scientific revolution with its concentration on its insistence that the material substructure was the most real phenomena.
	Phenomena means to shine forth.
	It's from the Greek word phenes thai.
	So it means in a way what presents itself.
	The burning bush in the story of Exodus, that's a phenomena, something that grabs your attention, right, that captivates you or compels you to listen or watch or consider or follow or imitate.
	That's a phenomena.
	As you make your way through the world, things shout out to you, command your attention, and make themselves relevant in relationship to your aims.
	So if you're planning a pleasant interlude with a family member and they throw a curveball into the affair, then that phenomenon stands forth in your field of experience as relevant and negative.
	And it's negative because it deviates you from your intended goal.
	If you're out for a fight, you might be perfectly happy that something negative happened.
	So that's a foreshadowing of something we'll talk about more deeply later.
	Emotion is experienced in relationship to a goal.
	Positive emotion indicates you're moving towards the goal.
	Negative emotion indicates that something has gone astray.
	You can think about the cybernetic system that I described earlier.
	The anti-missile missile is unhappy as it deviates from the course.
	Your emotions are trajectory adjustment systems.
	Positive indicates forward movement and validates the frame of perception.
	And negative emotion indicates deviation from the path or failure of the frame.
	Okay, so keep that in mind.
	That's funny.
	Up your scroll moralists.
	We'll see who cancels who.
	Exactly.
	That's sort of funny.
	They're the best courses that have ever been offered publicly in terms of their quality of content.
	And also, the production values are unparalleled.
	We figure we can offer people a high-quality university level education for under $2,000.
	We might be able to change the education system.
	Now, cybernetics phenomenology.
	Perceptual psychologists began to sort this out in the 20th century as well, not least with the observation that there was no perception independent of action.
	Imagine that you're blind and you're using your fingers to put together a composite sensory picture of someone's face.
	That's exactly what you do with your eyes.
	Spot, spot, spot, spot, spot, composite.
	There's a foreground that's fovea dependent.
	The fovea is the center point of your eye.
	It's the high resolution part of your vision.
	It requires much more neurological processing than the periphery.
	If your entire retina was foveal, you'd need a cortex that was many times larger to process it.
	You maximize the use of available neurological resource by pinpointing the fovea and intensely concentrating on the particular point of interest around your fovea, which is very high resolution.
	The world becomes lower and lower and lower resolution until out here you're seeing in black and white and back here there's nothing, not even the sense of absence, right?
	So center point focus on what's relevant and important in relationship to a goal surrounded by a periphery that disappears into what?
	Into, you could say, the void, if you're using poetic terminology.
	That'll be relevant as we start to understand the structure of stories.
	That's a cybernetic frame.
	It's a phenomenological frame.
	Now the phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger redefined reality itself.
	And the reason they were doing that, there were two reasons.
	They were concerned that the divide between object and subject that had been set up as a consequence of the scientific and enlightenment revolution prioritized the objective and left the subjective in a, what would you say, in an abyss of uncertainty and meaninglessness, in part because it was defined away.
	The subjective became epiphenomenological on a more fundamental reality.
	Now, That's an existential problem because we can't live in a universe that's devoid of all meaning but suffering, let's say.
	And it's perverse because there's no perception without a subjective observer.
	And if you contemplate the situation scientifically, even, let's say, the basic sense data that the empiricists believe that the world is made of is dependent for its existence on perception.
	And perception is dependent on action, and action is dependent on goal, and goal is dependent on value.
	And so the notion that there's some objective substrat of existence in the absence of a perceiver who's embedded in a world of value and meaning is not tenable, even from the scientific perspective, partly because we know that perception is action predicated.
	Now, the phenomenologists tried to solve that subject-object divide problem and the nihilism or valuelessness that emerges in the scientific worldview by prioritizing not objective reality, but experience as such.
	So you're sitting in this lecture theater, you have a focus of attention, that's why it's a theater.
	It's built to hint to you when you make your entrance how you're supposed to conduct yourself.
	The chairs are all facing in a particular direction.
	They converge on a point.
	The point is the point of the lecture.
	The point is the point of your attention.
	The point is the goal of your attention.
	That all organizes your perceptions.
	It foregrounds some things, at least in principle, when you're not thinking or distracted, what I'm saying or the slides that I'm using.
	And that renders everything else increasingly irrelevant as it diverges from the central point.
	And so there's a foreground.
	Generally, when you're interacting with someone, the foreground of your attention is their face and even more specifically their eyes and even more specifically their pupils.
	And you do that so you can see what they're pointing to because you can tell what they're interested in.
	You can tell what they're compelled by.
	You can read emotions through the eyes.
	Our eyes are adapted.
	Evolution.
	Evolution has adapted our eyes to make them maximally visible, colored black against a white background, so that when we interact with people, we can see what their point is.
	Having seen their point, we can inhabit their frame of reference.
	We can infer what's meaningful to them.
	We can adopt their emotions.
	We can mimic those emotions on our own body.
	And that's how we understand them.
	Our face is a value display system, right?
	And when you're concentrating on someone, you almost always look at their eyes.
	We're very, very good at that.
	Even from a distance, you can detect small deviations in someone's eye-gaze direction because understanding the object of their intention and attention is the most important thing you can derive.
	You're focused here on what I'm saying.
	You're watching my face, you're watching my eyes, the world constructs itself around that.
	Husserl's fundamental point was that all perception is intentional.
	It's associated with a goal.
	It moves towards a point.
	And that point is related to the insistence that I put forward at the beginning that our perception is action-oriented, that our problem is navigation.
	How do we get from point A to point B, from what is currently to what should be?
	We're always somewhere, moving somewhere else.
	And then there's a gradient, which is why in this diagram there's a slant upward.
	What's the gradient?
	Well, if you're aiming up, the gradient is upward.
	The gradient is uphill.
	The gradient is from a lesser place to a greater place.
	Why would you move from what is to what should be if the place you're headed to wasn't better than the place you're at?
	Assuming that you're not engaged in some form of counterproductive self-destruction.
	So there's a value gradient in perception itself that sets up the landscape for emotion, right?
	If you're moving from point A to point B, the value of the movement is the distance between the two points in relationship to upward aim.
	Now, the longer the distance, the harder the journey.
	So that's an energy expenditure problem.
	You want to foreground a goal that's valuable in relationship to where you are, that doesn't require more energy than you have at hand.
	Now you can sequence goals and we'll get to that.
	Okay, what's this frame?
	It's a cybernetic frame.
	So cybernetic pioneers and many of the developers of computational systems, especially the robotics engineers who started to understand that you couldn't do robotics computation without embodiment.
	The phenomenologists, the psychologists of perception have all converged on a notion that we inhabit a frame of perception that organizes the world around us, that has a goal in mind.
	The last thing you need to know about that to begin with is that's the story.
	That's a story.
	So the postmodernists insisted that we inhabit a story.
	They dispensed with the notion that there was a central unifying story that was common to all places and all times, let's say, but they insisted, and correctly so, that even the scientific enterprise is nested inside a story.
	What's the scientific story?
	We're making things better.
	Otherwise, it's an evil scientist's story.
	And there's plenty of them too.
	And we might say that the true science is the science that serves what?
	Mankind, the good of mankind, and it's an upward journey, and that's not built into the scientific enterprise itself.
	It's the a priori frame that the scientist has to inhabit so that they aren't a threat, right?
	That's the case, you could say for everything that you do.
	If any of your actions are predicated on an ultimately downward aim, then you're an agent of chaos, right?
	At minimum.
	A story.
	What's the story?
	A story is a description of a frame of perception.
	Now, think about this when you go to a movie.
	Think about what you're doing.
	So you see a sequence of subplots.
	And in the subplots, you see the characters in motion.
	You see them directing their attention.
	You infer their goals from their speech and their patterns of action.
	You put that together as a pastiche across multiple instances and you draw your conclusions about the aim and direction of the character.
	Having done that, you can adopt that frame.
	Having adopted the frame, you see the world through the perspective of the protagonist and you experience his or her emotions.
	Right?
	You do that to experiment with a frame of perception with no risk, right?
	Some emotional risk.
	There's enough enthusiastic impetus in the imitation so that even if you're watching a horror movie that would expose you to phenomena that normally would be aversive, placing yourself in the fictional frame and experimenting with the exposure is sufficiently motivating in the positive direction so that you'll pay for the privilege.
	Right.
	Why is fiction so important?
	Why are we so compelled by stories?
	Because a story is a description of the manner in which we frame our perception, our attention, and our action.
	So there's a viewpoint that makes the story not secondary, not laid upon another more fundamental reality, but a priori.
	Now, there's obviously an interplay that has to occur between our understanding of how the world is constituted and how we should act in it.
	But the notion that there's a simple primacy of material being seems at minimum seems half true and rife with conceptual flaws.
	The simplest frame, the simplest story.
	You ask a toddler, a kindergartner, what did you do today?
	I went to school with mom.
	Started at home, I went to school.
	That was the sequence.
	I went to school with mom, and on the way, a scary dog jumped at the fence and barked, and I got afraid.
	And we thought about going home, but we decided not to, and we continued forward.
	That's a little hero story.
	That's a disruption of the frame by an unexpected event, and then it's reconfiguration, even at a higher level, because the kindergartner in that instance, in principle, discovers a courage to move forward into the unknown that he didn't know he had.
	Right, that's a micro-hero narrative.
	And that's a variation on the basic frame.
	The simplest story is: I was here, I went there, and this is how I did it.
	A more complex story is, I was here, I was going there, and the bottom fell out.
	And then I went somewhere else and put myself back together, and I got a new frame, and away I went.
	Right, and that's that's a story about how a story transforms.
	That's a meta-story, and most great, all great stories are meta-stories.
	Okay, so here's a more behaviorist version of the same idea of frame.
	What is subtitled, the unbearable present.
	Why?
	Because now isn't good enough.
	Because if it was, you wouldn't be doing anything.
	You're always, this is the phenomenological, that the philosophers, the phenomenological insistence that your experience of the world is pitched always towards the goal of your attention and action, that that imbues the frame of your experience with significance.
	You can imagine sitting, not doing anything, imagining, which is a form of action, running variant possibilities through your mind, experimenting with a sequence of different aims,
	evaluating the manner in which the emotional landscape shifts as you portray different fictional outcomes in an attempt to experiment with determining what course you should chart before you implement it in the real world.
	That's a dream.
	That's what dreams do.
	The more radical and improbable and incomprehensible dreams shift the elements of your framework of perception so dramatically that you can't necessarily explicitly understand the transformation.
	We'll talk more about that.
	You start at what is with its insufficiency.
	You move towards what should be.
	That's the value proposition.
	Why expend energy if the goal doesn't have value?
	If you expend energy towards goals that have no value, you die.
	Right, right.
	Honeybees, when they go out and find a flowerbed, they come back and they signal to the other bees the navigation pathway to the flowerbed, indicating by their level of enthusiastic movement, the richness of the store of value.
	That's exactly what people do when they get excited when they tell you a story.
	They signal by their willingness to expend energy in the telling that the destination is worth the effort, right?
	That's a stable means of representing value, treasure, all the way from insects to human beings.
	Right?
	So if you see a speaker who's pouring out energy in the exposition of their story, then you understand that they believe that the destination is worth the investment of energy.
	And that's compelling to you because your proposition would be, how could he possibly continue to expend energy if the destination wasn't of sufficient value?
	Right.
	Right.
	So that's why enthusiasm, which is positive emotion and also the state of being possessed by the divine, and theos is enthusiastic, right?
	Which would imply that the ultimate goal is the goal that fills you with enthusiasm, right?
	Which is a way actually of determining within the confines of your own framework of experience what it is that has intrinsic meaning to you.
	Because if you posit a goal, you see a goal, a possible future, and you frame your perception in a manner that produces no forward-moving impulse, which is positive emotion, then you have no heart for the adventure.
	And so, one of the ways that you investigate the structure of your own psyche or your own unconscious or your own being or being itself is by evaluating frames that switch goals until your emotions signify to you that the pathway is worth walking down.
	Now, it's more complicated than mere acquisition.
	There's going to be some risk along the way, which you want.
	You want that risk because you want to pick a goal that no longer not only provides you with something that you recognize deeply as significant, but that transforms you as you pursue it, so that your capability to posit and pursue better goals increases.
	That's what you do when you play, right?
	You don't want it easy, you don't want it impossible, you want it challenging, you want it adventurous, you want it difficult.
	How difficult?
	That's what you're to determine.
	As difficult as possible, well, maintaining maximal enthusiasm.
	That's what children do when they play.
	That's what you do when you're playing, that's what you do when you engage in a game.
	If you're proficient at generating frames of play or story, then you maximize enthusiasm and developmental transformation simultaneously.
	Right, that's a good deal.
	That means that you're playing a game that's worthwhile, that gets better as you play it.
	Right, that's an upward, that's a Jacob's ladder, by the way.
	That's a stairway to heaven, right?
	Exactly.
	That's a stairway to heaven, a spiral upward that moves into the ineffable good that communicates with the earth, that lays out a pathway upward.
	And your nervous system itself is tuned.
	This is an indication of the fundamental reality of these frames.
	Your nervous system itself is tuned so that what you experience within that frame of reference when it's optimized is meaningful motivation.
	Right?
	Now, let's think about this scientifically.
	How would have you evolved the capacity to specify a pathway forward emotionally and motivationally, so biologically, if that wasn't real?
	Right?
	If reality is what selects from among the variations that compose life, and reality has selected us to have an experience of deep meaning when we encounter the pathway that leads us upward and transforms us, how is that not real?
	Right, simple story.
	I was here, I did this.
	What does it mean to do?
	It means fundamentally to move, right?
	That's where words, that's where the rubber hits the road.
	Words make their embodiment in action.
	And so you can set a frame abstractly, but you act it out.
	And when you're acting it out, it's not abstract anymore, right?
	Because this is a solution in part to the mind-body problem.
	You can formulate the frame and the goal abstractly, but when you implement it, you're moving.
	The movement, that's not abstract.
	So, consciousness, abstracted consciousness, grounds itself in embodied movement.
	That's the incarnation of the spirit in the corporeal world.
	That's a way to think about it poetically or religiously, right?
	You take your abstract conception of the good, or depending on what you're pursuing, and you bring that down.
	And what, that's the breath of the spirit by God into man.
	That's a symbolic representation of that, or the idea of incarnation.
	That's the same thing.
	Your goal, your frame, is an active agent.
	You could think about it as a spirit.
	You bring that spirit down to earth and embody it.
	And that's how consciousness transforms itself into action, right?
	You can infer the abstracted goal of a character by watching their action, right?
	What's he up to?
	I'll watch him and see.
	I'll see how he directs his attention.
	I'll see towards which, towards what he moves or what he avoids, and then I'll, or what he thinks is relevant and what he thinks is irrelevant.
	I'll infer the frame.
	You do this to yourself, by the way, and this is something to understand.
	You have proximal knowledge only of your frame of reference.
	You're here today, for example.
	So you deemed that valuable.
	You put in the time and effort to come here.
	But why?
	Why are you here?
	And then you could tell me, and I could ask, well, why is that important to you?
	And you could tell me that, and I could ask, why is that important to you?
	And that will make a chain up to where you don't know how to answer the question.
	And that's where your conscious knowledge of your own aims and motivational structure disappear, the psychoanalysts would say, into the unconscious.
	It's into the implicit, right?
	And we'll describe how that works as we progress.
	How is the frame framed?
	Well, psychologists study perception, attention, emotion, cognition, motivation.
	Psychologists had a proclivity to describe motivations as drives.
	And drive theory came from the behaviorists.
	The behaviorists believed that attempted to demonstrate that our actions and the actions of animals were deterministic chains of reflexes.
	If you put your hand on a hot stove, you'll jerk it back.
	There's a feedback loop from your sensory nerves to the spine to your motor nerves.
	It's very fast because it's short.
	And if you encounter a particular noxious stimuli, one that would damage the receptive surfaces, that's a good definition of noxious, then you'll withdraw, which is an action, obviously, in the absence of any conscious intent and extremely rapidly.
	The behaviorists tried to generate a model of motivation that chained reflexes together in increasingly complex manners to account for the kind of sophisticated behavior that animals were capable of, but ultimately failed.
	B.F. Skinner, who was an outstanding behaviorist, could train, he trained pigeons to direct guided missiles using photographs.
	And he essentially did that using a process that looked in a sense like reflex chaining.
	If he was going to train a rat to climb a little ladder and then maybe walk across like another ladder that was horizontal and then down, he'd make the rats hungry first.
	He starved his laboratory animals to 75% of their normal weight so that they were maximally motivated by food.
	Then he would watch them and when they moved around the cage and got close to the ladder, the base, he'd give them a food pellet.
	Then they'd start hanging around the bottom of the ladder.
	Now and then they'd put a paw up.
	Then he'd give them another food pallet and pretty soon they were doing this.
	And then he could get them to climb up the ladder and to dance on top and to go down the other side.
	Behaviorists trained rats to run down runways.
	Let's call that reflex chaining.
	But then some smart behaviorist, and I don't remember who it was, tied the back legs of a rat up and put it on a cart.
	And it managed to go down the maze runway with no problem, even though it had never encountered that particular problem before.
	Animals, human beings with sufficiently complex nervous systems, interact with the world in a manner that can't be accounted for by mere deterministic reflex chaining.
	Motivations are not drives.
	It's complicated.
	I'll see if I can unpack it.
	What a motivation, hunger is a motivation.
	Thirst is a motivation.
	You can think about a motivation as independent as an emotion from an emotion.
	There's overlap because emotion and motivation aren't exactly scientific categories, right?
	They're folk categories.
	But for the purposes of our discussion, we'll define a motivation as an instinctual goal.
	That's a better way of thinking about it.
	So you're hungry.
	Okay, you're working at home and you start to become hungry.
	You notice.
	How do you notice?
	Because a new story pops into your head.
	Well, what's the story?
	Would be a good idea to go into the kitchen and find something to eat in the fridge, right?
	And then that, as you become more hungry, that becomes more insistent.
	It attempts to take a grip of the perceptual structure within which you frame your attention, your action, and your emotions.
	You start thinking, it would be a good idea to go get something to eat.
	That's a tag of positive emotion.
	It's starting to become, my hunger is starting to become unpleasant, right?
	So you can see there's a competition between the frame of reference that you're using, let's say, to organize your work and this emergent motivational state.
	At some point, things switch.
	Are you in a deterministic state then?
	No, you're navigating under the influence of a biological system whose goal is to satiate your hunger.
	Okay.
	Is that deterministic?
	It has deterministic elements.
	You know, the more ancient a motivational system is, the more it's associated with behavioral patterns that are, if not instinctual, at least very easy to learn.
	Right, so you can imagine that the longer across evolutionary history a motivational state has existed, pain, for example, the more it comes equipped with a panoply of relatively at-hand behavioral and attentional mechanisms that it can put into play when it grips you.
	A toddler is a sequence of motivational states, an unintegrated sequence of motivational states.
	What are some motivational states?
	Hunger, thirst, sexual excitation, pain, play.
	Those are some of the basic motivational states.
	Exploration, defensive rage, although anger is also arguably an emotion because you can feel it in relationship to a goal, but it can also signify a target.
	That's why motivations and emotions aren't exactly a clean category.
	The older and more profound the motivation, the more ancient the neurological system that mediates it.
	Many of the fundamental motivational states that set goals are hypothalamic.
	The hypothalamus is a brain area that sits on top of the spinal cord and provides the first-order abstract integration of increasingly complex spinal reflexes.
	The hypothalamus mediates hunger, thirst, temperature, excretion, defensive aggression.
	That's one half of the other half mediates exploration.
	The hypothalamic system that mediates exploration is the root of the dopaminergic system.
	The dopaminergic system is the biochemical system that underlies positive emotion in relationship to a goal.
	That's how old it is.
	That's how old exploration is.
	Pain is in its own little world, as is anxiety.
	Those are also very primordial brain systems, but they're not hypothalamic.
	So this frame of perception is susceptible to grip by motivational forces.
	And it's useful.
	The frame, it's a cybernetic frame, it's a phenomenological frame, it's a perceptual frame, it's a story.
	It's also a spirit or personality.
	Okay, it's all of those things at the same time.
	Think about what you're like when you're angry, right?
	It's a complex system.
	It's simplified compared to what you're like in a state where you're not dominated by a singular motivation, but you have many options at hand when you're angry, right?
	And the world takes on a particular kind of phenomenological reality when you're angry.
	Things tilt very much in the negative direction.
	For example, if you're arguing with someone that you hypothetically love, almost everything that will come to mind when you're angry is negative, right?
	And all the things that you might hope to enjoy in a playful manner with them disappear in favor of dominance and defeat.
	The motivational state that grips your goal makes everything that interferes with it irrelevant, including your memories.
	And maybe you'll snap out of that, hopefully, and you'll think, what the hell possessed me?
	And that's a useful question.
	Nietzsche, after he announced that God had died in the 1850s, suggested that the consequence of that high-order disintegration would be roughly threefold.
	Descent into nihilism.
	It's a kind of fragmentation.
	Proclivity to move to alternate totalizing belief systems, ideology.
	He was particularly concerned with potentially the rise of nationalism, but also with what eventually became communism, right?
	Or he thought we could create our own values.
	The psychoanalyst came along and said, What makes you so sure you can create your own values?
	You're not even the master in your own house, right?
	So, you can think about yourself cycling through a sequence of possessions, right?
	And that's very useful to ask yourself, just what is the nature of this spirit that possesses me?
	And you can reduce it to a biological drive, but motivations aren't drives, they're sub-personalities, and they have not only a viewpoint in terms of goal, in terms of how the world lays itself out, the whole phenomenological field, the story, they also have a history, social and biological, and they have a what would you say?
	They have a mythic nature.
	Many archaic gods, Aries, Eros, are personifications of motivational states, Aries being, for example, the god of war.
	And so, just like real-world mobsters are said to act like Hollywood mobsters, you, when you're angry, imitate the culturally patterned personality of anger that has called out to you to imitate in the course of your life, and that's what possesses you.
	A constellation of possession by negative motivational states, you could think of something that's approximating the demonic.
	Right, right.
	It's very useful to know that these things are alive with will.
	Every drive attempts to philosophize in its spirit.
	That's Nietzsche, right?
	Very smart.
	So, it's not, I'm not angry in a driven way, I'm angry in an entire world-constructing manner, right?
	It transforms my perceptions, it transforms my goals, transforms my patterns of attention, it changes my memories, it brings different words to the forefront, it brings different fantasies to the forefront, it lays out an entirely different world of options in front of me, and God only knows what it is at its base, right?
	So, the psychoanalysts came along, especially Jung, but Freud to begin with, who noted our id.
	He was the formulator of the concept of id, right?
	That panoply of biological drives, drives.
	Freud concentrated most on sex and aggression that had their proclivity to have their way with us rather than the reverse, right?
	And so, can we create our own values?
	Try it and see.
	So, that was Eve's temptation, which is a story we'll get back to, right?
	In the Garden of Eden, God tells man and woman that they have full freedom to explore and use, except they're forbidden to incorporate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, right?
	The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is the essence of the world of value.
	Eve falls prey to the temptation to make herself like God by creating the world of value that surrounds her.
	And as that story was elaborated across the centuries, the spirit that tempted Eve to rebel against the intrinsic moral order and to establish her own was associated with Lucifer, who's the spirit of the overweening and prideful intellect, whose fundamental motivation is to usurp.
	Right.
	Follow.
	the moral order.
	Find the moral order.
	Abide by the moral order.
	Do not create the moral order.
	Right?
	That's the fall.
	Pride goes before a fall.
	The fall.
	Garden.
	Chaos.
	Reintegration.
	That's the biblical story.
	That's a meta-narrative.
	That's a hero story.
	That's a story about how a frame collapses and transforms.
	Right?
	Those are the stories that compel us most particularly as we not only encounter obstacles to our goal-directed pursuit, we encounter obstacles that are so profound that they force us to transform our pursuit.
	Right.
	So, and out of that failure, you might say, which is not only a failure of strategy, but a failure of frame, growth can make itself manifest.
	Death can make itself manifest, but so can growth.
	Then the question is, how do you avoid the transformations that culminate in death and invite the transformations that culminate in growth?
	And how do you conceptualize your meta-strategy so that that's your highest value?
	That's a good way of thinking about it.
	What should you pursue?
	How about a pathway that improves the probability that you will properly specify what you pursue?
	That's wisdom, right?
	There's a way of doing things, right?
	So no matter what you attempt in your life, you know, if you push yourself while you're doing it so that you're challenged in an adventurous way, then you put yourself on the edge of development and you facilitate your vision and you increase the capacity of your intent, right?
	And that's signified, once again, that's signified, as you would expect, by a sense of deep intrinsic meaning.
	How could it be that the meaning that orients us could be anything but aligned with the process that compels us or invites us to develop?
	What sort of creatures would we be if our deepest instinct for enthusiastic orientation wasn't in line with the pattern that made us more than we are?
	We just fail.
	So one of the advantages of the phenomenological view, the cybernetic view, the narrative view, is that it makes what matters rather than matter primary.
	Right, right.
	Husserl, the world you inhabit is constituted by your goal.
	The world you inhabit, the world of experience that you inhabit, that's now Heidegger, after Husserl, Heidegger decided that if the world of experience was intentional And there was nothing more primary than the world of experience as it makes itself manifest in consciousness, so that's your experience, then there was no difference between experience and being itself.
	And that was Heidegger's transformation of Husserl's thought.
	So being in the manner that we're going to use it is being necessarily being towards an aim.
	The question then arises: what's the proper aim?
	The word sin, which is Hamarti in Greek, means to miss the target, to miss the aim.
	It's misaligned aim.
	If the world is making itself manifest to you in a manner that's unacceptable with regards to the reality of the meaning that you're experiencing, then perhaps your aim is misaligned, right?
	Then you confess that.
	You repent and you atone.
	Atone at one.
	You replace the misaligned aim with something higher.
	That's the developmental pathway.
	I slipped off.
	Where did I make it?
	I made a mistake.
	Where'd I make it?
	How can I rectify it?
	How can I use what I learned when I investigated my error to reconstitute my aim so that the misalignment vanishes?
	Implying that there is an aim that's not misaligned, right?
	That's partly what we're going to investigate.
	Is how might you define an aim that's not misaligned?
	How would you put aims in sequence?
	How would you hierarchically arrange them?
	How would you construct a set of frames that extend optimally upward in a manner that improves as you implement them?
	More to that.
	That incorporates the future, your future, that incorporates other people, right, in some harmony, right?
	So that you're not at odds with your future self or with the other people that you're cursed and fortunate to spend time with.
	The psychophysiologists of motivation broke fundamental motivations into two rough categories: self-maintenance, thermal regulation, thirst, hunger elimination, and self-propagation, affiliative desire, because we're social beings, sexual desire.
	It's just a way of categorizing these underlying, what would you say?
	It's like a society of subordinate, sometimes superordinate, personalities that have to be organized into a wise council and put in their proper place so that you can move forward in a manner that's upward, sustainable, and social, right?
	Very tight set of constraints, very tight, nothing arbitrary about it, nothing relativistic about it.
	There's very few parameters that, there are very few solutions that fit that set of parameters, right?
	Has to work for you so that you thrive.
	It has to work for you so that you thrive now and in the medium run and in the long run.
	It has to work for you now so that it works with the other people around you so they thrive in the medium to long run.
	So you all do that together, so that it improves, so that you're enthusiastic, so that your negative emotions are properly regulated, right?
	A very tight set of constraints.
	Children attain that according to Jean-Piaget when they're playing.
	Right?
	So that's a good thing to know with regard to your life.
	If you're doing something right, you're playing.
	Right, right.
	Fragile motivational state, an integrated motivational state, but one that signals the proper element of integration.
	And I already defined proper for people who are thinking relativistically.
	It has to sustain itself in the medium to long run.
	That's life eternal, by the way.
	It has to improve as you play it.
	It has to incorporate other people.
	That's a hard set of constraints to manage.
	That's what I think music models, by the way, that harmonious interplay of multiple patterns, right?
	You think about people dancing to music.
	You have the patterns that are laying themselves out.
	They're all harmoniously integrated.
	They're all moving towards an end.
	Everybody is aligning themselves with the harmony of multiplicity that the music represents.
	And that's a play.
	That's why we play music.
	Okay, back to the basic frame, the basic story, the ground of experience, the phenomenological reality, the cybernetic frame, and the manner in which we structure our perception.
	I'm going to elaborate on the nature of the frame, okay, so that you can see what the constituent elements of the world are.
	And we'll start on the surface.
	We're doing the same thing in the domain of experience that the materialists did in the material world when they took things apart to find out what they were made of at their micro levels.
	Well, your experience has layers, right?
	It has depths and it has elements.
	And one of the things that the phenomenologists did, the psychologists of perception, was to attempt to define the affordances, the relevant objects, rather than merely the objects, the relevant objects of your experiential world.
	That's the basic frame.
	Point A, point B, the strategy for movement forward.
	It grounds out in action, right?
	So it's not an infinite regress, right?
	So that's a good thing to know.
	It stops being abstract when you act.
	So then your action is the indication of what you believe.
	That's the basic frame.
	What is, what should be.
	That's the basic story when you describe it.
	The frame isn't a story.
	The story is the description of a frame.
	Right, right.
	Okay, so what do you see when you're moving from point A to point B?
	We know this, by the way.
	Almost, I'm doing my best to tell you things that I know are valid from a narrative and a mythological perspective and from a scientific perspective simultaneously.
	Okay, so part of what I'm drawing on here with this particular image is work done by a man named J.J. Gibson who wrote a book called A Visual Approach to an Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
	Okay, he never defined himself as a phenomenologist or a cyberneticist, but it doesn't matter because the thinking is isomorphic.
	And his insights, especially with relationship to emotion, were elaborated by a neuropsychologist named Jeffrey Gray, another one named Jak Panksep, who were the greatest neuropsychologists of the last half of the 20th century by a lot.
	Gray integrated 1800 scientific papers into his book.
	It's about a six-month read, this book, because you have to master psychopharmacology, brain anatomy, behavioral literature, and cybernetics to understand it.
	That's a hell of a task for one book, but it's deadly.
	It's a deadly book.
	And Jak Panksep, both of these men knew a lot about animal experimentation, and the animal experimentalists who were behaviorists had an oversimplified, higher-order framework of interpretation.
	But man, they were good at nailing down the details of behavior and perception and aligning that with what we know about neurochemistry.
	That's all being quite nicely integrated.
	And so what I'm going to provide you with in the next few slides is all informed by that massive corpus of work.
	Okay, when you see, when you perceive, you do that in relationship to your aim, however momentary.
	That's, let's say, point B. How do you get from point A to point B?
	How did I get from point A to point B?
	The story, the framework of my perception.
	Okay, if I want to walk to the chairs that are behind you, you people are now obstacles, right?
	You've switched your reality.
	And if I'm impelled by emergency to beeline to a destination immediately behind you, you're in my way, right?
	You're an obstacle.
	You're targeted with negative emotion.
	You know that when you curse someone, when you drive, right?
	Everyone does that.
	And why?
	Because you experience emotion in relationship to a goal.
	And so, and you do that in a pretty simple and heuristic manner.
	If you're busily going somewhere and an old lady with a walker crosses the street, that's annoying.
	And you might think, well, what the hell is wrong with you?
	Which is a good question.
	But the brute reality of the situation is that if it's in your way, it causes negative emotion, right?
	If you can use it to move yourself forward, then it produces positive emotion.
	So your emotions are calibrating systems like the error detection mechanisms on a cybernetic system that tell you when you're on track and moving towards the goal and when you're deviating.
	That's a good way of thinking about how emotions work.
	And that also describes to some degree the danger of them because if you're operating in a narrow frame of reference, something immediate, you can subordinate higher.
	I shouldn't treat you like an obstacle no matter what.
	Well, no matter what.
	If I'm rushing to the hospital to save my child, are you an obstacle?
	Well, that's a moral question, isn't it?
	How do you balance the realization of someone else as valuable in relationship to a higher order goal when you're pursuing a lower order goal where they're an impediment?
	To understand that, we have to understand how stories are nested, which is something we haven't yet discussed.
	What do you see in the world?
	This is so cool.
	What do you see in the world?
	So, how does the world make itself manifest phenomenologically?
	Aim first, target, destination, right?
	Remember, we're hunting animals.
	We exist on a throwing platform, right?
	And that's age-old.
	That's been the case since we were bipedal.
	And so, we're great at targeting.
	We're great at cybernetic minimization of distance between the present reality and the goal.
	And our emotions arrange themselves around that, right?
	And so, what do you see phenomenologically?
	Pathways.
	That's the first thing.
	That's the storytale.
	That's the golden road.
	That's the Wizard of Oz.
	That's the adventure.
	That's the journey of the troop of the Lord of the Rings, right?
	That's the pathway forward.
	So, this is a good thing to think about: is like what do you have to aim at so that the pathway forward beckons?
	So, this is how you consort with your soul.
	You ask yourself, what do I have to aim at?
	So, the pathway forward beckons, right?
	This is a negotiation, a dialectical negotiation.
	Remember in the Pinocchio movie when Pinocchio's conscience first shows up, right?
	Jiminy Cricket, JC, Jesus Christ, right?
	Jiminy Cricket was southern U.S. slang for Jesus Christ, JC.
	Why would JC be a bug?
	Because some things bug you, they get under your skin, right?
	They irritate in a direction, and you can ignore that and you can suppress it, which is what Jonah did before he ended up in the belly of the whale, like Geppetto, by the way.
	You can suppress that, or you can engage in a dialectic.
	In the Pinocchio movie, Pinocchio engages in a dialectic with Jiminy Cricket.
	He starts out the cricket as a tramp with no home.
	And the first advice he gives is cliched and sloganeering slogan from the Welsh: Sluag Gerum, battle cry of the dead.
	When Jiminy Cricket shows up, he's generic.
	He's like an overbearing superego.
	He's not attuned to the specific realities of the time and place that the puppet who wishes to be free inhabits.
	He brings a collection of tried and true homilies that are shallow in consequence of their overuse to the initial dialogue.
	But the puppet persona possessed, pulled by strings that aren't under his control and not real, engages in a dialogue with the conscience, and both transform.
	At the end of the movie, Pinocchio realizes himself, and The cricket ends up in a tuxedo replacing his tramp clothing,

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