Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Personality and Its Transformations | Lecture One (Official)

Nov. 29, 2025 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:17:06

Personality and Its Transformations | Lecture One (Official) | Peterson Academy

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	Much of what you're doing as you journey through life is to continually expand your personality.
	Is there something small that you can do on a daily basis that would incrementally improve you, that would lead to an expanding transformation of your productive ability and your ability to function in the world across time?
	You have your own nature and it's best to work with it rather than against it.
	You don't want to just win, you want to get better while you play, right?
	So you want to find a partner who's as good as you or maybe even slightly better.
	And then that puts you on the edge, right?
	Edge of what?
	Edge of the development of your perceptions, your attention, and your action.
	So you become a more skilled player.
	If you're disagreeable and self-centered, you can learn to do well for others by practice.
	If you're too agreeable and you sacrifice others, you can dispense with your resentment and learn to stand up for yourself.
	These are things that everybody needs to know.
	And they're not only of abstract intellectual interest, they're extraordinarily practical.
	You need to know about personality to hire people properly and to place them and to promote them and to do the same with yourself.
	It helps you understand your children better.
	It helps you understand your wife better.
	We deal with personalities all the time.
	We are personalities.
	You'll walk through dream analysis with Freud and analysis of religious mythology with Carl Jung and analysis of the dark tetrad personality types.
	You'll learn about communicating with others, negotiating with others, and developing your own personality for better or for worse.
	So why personality and its transformations?
	Well, because people are something and they're also becoming something.
	And so if you want to understand personality, you have to understand it as a state and as a transformative process.
	And of those two, probably the transformative process is most relevant because the transformative process is essentially equivalent to consciousness.
	And there's nothing that's more emblematic of what a human being is than the process of consciousness.
	So personality and its transformations, state and process.
	Why a clinical introduction?
	Well, some people who teach personality are also social psychologists and a smaller minority are clinical psychologists.
	And I'm a clinical psychologist.
	And so I got interested in personality through clinical psychology rather than the reverse.
	So I'm interested in understanding personality as it pertains to mental health or even flourishing, you might say, as opposed to psychopathology and the hell that accompanies mental illness.
	And so that's the rationale for the clinical approach.
	So, and that means that what we'll cover in some ways is more theoretical than might be the case for people who are trained more purely empirically or from the social perspective.
	I'm very interested in the philosophical approaches to religious and philosophical approaches to personality, as well as the scientific approaches.
	And I think they're reconcilable.
	So one of the experiences you might have if you train as a clinical psychologist is going to be depending on the school that you attend is that the psychoanalytic types who are increasingly rare are set against the behaviorist and more physiological types or vice versa.
	The behaviorists are set against the psychoanalysts, but from my perspective, they're just viewing the same set of phenomena from different perspectives.
	And one of the things that I'm going to help you appreciate is the hierarchical nature of personality, the fact that it can be analyzed at multiple levels, that there's some apparent internal contradiction depending on where you start, depending at what level at which you approach the problem, but that those contradictions are more apparent than real.
	So I'll endeavor to provide you with something approximating a coherent and complete description of personality, lacking in detail as all forms of knowledge are, but one that will allow you to reconcile the findings of the more empirical biologists, let's say, and behaviorists, with the more abstract psychoanalytic thinkers and phenomenologists.
	I believe that they, all those levels of analysis, have their utility, and to the degree that they're correct, they're not going to be fundamentally disunited, assuming that there's something coherent about both personality and the approaches to personality.
	And there is something coherent.
	It took me a long time in teaching and thinking to start to understand not only how the theories differed, the multiple theories that we'll discuss, but what was the same about them, which is, I suppose, equivalent to something like the core of personality theory.
	And that's a very, very exciting thing to understand because everything that you'll learn in this course, I will endeavor to make directly personally relevant to you.
	It shouldn't ever devolve into a collection of dead facts.
	This is something you always want to do if you're lecturing in a manner that is actually compelling.
	The material has to be accurate, so let's say factually accurate, but it also has to be relevant to the people who are listening, because otherwise their attention will wander and they won't remember, and you'll bore yourself and your audience.
	And that's never a sign that you're on the right track, let's say.
	All right, so what are we going to cover?
	Seven different domains in an introductory manner, because this is an introductory course.
	We're going to talk first about religious and mythological conceptualizations of personality and its transformations.
	I like to set the more recent, let's say, psychoanalytic traditions and everything that stemmed forward from that, including the behavioral traditions, in a much more broad historical context.
	I think that's necessary, partly because you don't want to suffer from the delusion that everything about human beings that's relevant and accurate has been discovered in the last 150 years, which is most definitely and absolutely not the case.
	The scientific understanding of personality and the clinical understanding of personality have a deep affinity with markedly traditional understandings of the nature of human beings, stemming all the way back, as we'll see, to the shamanic conceptualizations, which are in all likelihood hundreds of thousands of years old.
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	Fun Joe.
	Modern human beings in our current genetic form emerged about 350,000 years ago.
	We can assume some continuity of conception and process over that entire period of time.
	And that's also something extremely interesting to know as setting yourself in a historical context that's that archaic gives you a much more fundamental sense of who you are and where you came from.
	And it's also the case that understanding those extremely archaic ideas, which also tend to be very fundamental and unchanging, sheds substantive light on many of the things that you'll experience in the modern world, most particularly the meaning of the narratives, the fictional representations, the movies and dramas that grip your imagination and entertain you.
	There's a reason that a fictional representation is entertaining when it's of high quality.
	And the reason is that it echoes in your soul, so to speak, at a very, very deep level.
	And one of the things that you'll come to understand more deeply, I hope, in consequence of this course, is why that echoing occurs.
	Then we'll talk about the psychoanalytic tradition.
	Now, the more strictly scientific types tend to be skeptical of the analytic tradition.
	And that's a big mistake.
	It's partly because the scientific enterprise actually has a number of stages, let's say.
	And one stage is scientific hypothesis testing and data analysis, careful experimental analysis.
	The behaviorist types who are pretty physically grounded were very good at that end of the scientific enterprise, as were the psychometricians who concentrated on the measurement of personality.
	But the psychoanalysts, the psychoanalysts, were exceptionally good at generating hypotheses.
	And that's a more unexamined part of the scientific tradition.
	Where do ideas come from?
	How do you generate an idea that's innovative and interesting?
	And the Freud and Jung, let's say, and their associates and followers were unbelievably innovative in their approach to conceptualizations of the human mind.
	And I would also say that recent developments, especially with regards to large language models and artificial intelligence, have demonstrated, I believe, conclusively, that the psychoanalysts were exactly on the right track in relationship to the structure of the human unconscious.
	And we'll go into that in some detail.
	And that's something very new.
	I've only been able to understand that relationship in the last two years, let's say, because the large language models have really only been on the scene for that length of time.
	So I think large language model cognition can help us understand what the psychoanalysts meant, technically meant by symbol.
	You know, one of the reasons the behaviorists, who are more down-to-earth, let's say, have criticized the psychoanalysts, literary critics for that matter, is their claim that the interpretations laid out by people like Freud and Jung were nothing but projections of the imagination.
	They bore no relationship to reality, no demonstrable relationship to reality.
	The large language model calculations are predicated on the idea in a way that every word or every idea is surrounded by a cloud of ideas that are highly likely to co-occur together statistically.
	Right?
	So you can imagine that the word witch, for example, is quite likely to be accompanied by words like cauldron or coven, and very unlikely to be surrounded by words like skyscraper or stainless steel.
	And so that a given concept exists within a cloud of associated conceptions.
	And the elaboration of that cloud of associated conceptualizations is something like the symbolic analysis, the free association, symbolic analysis of the psychoanalysts, and also of the symbolic investigation of the literary critics.
	I suspect we're on the cusp in the realm of artificial intelligence of mathematically systematizing our assessment of symbolic representations.
	I already have a large language model built that's predicated on my work that's very good at dream analysis.
	And so that means to me, and I think this will happen, that the analysis of dream images will become something that can be purely scientific and mathematically encapsulated.
	So, and I think I really believe the psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, were on the right track conceptually and practically with regards to the investigation of the symbolic meaning of dreams and literature for that matter, drama.
	So, that's extremely exciting.
	The idea that we can make not only a science, but even a mathematical model of the symbolic landscape that we inhabit.
	So, we'll delve into that in some detail.
	Carl Rogers and the humanists.
	The humanist tradition is, I think, a secularization of Christianity, essentially.
	Carl Rogers himself was a missionary before he lost his religious faith, and his representation of human personality in psychotherapy, because Rogers was very involved in the psychotherapeutic tradition, is a recasting of the Christian idea of redemption into the realm of secular mental health and psychopathology.
	Rogers believed that truth-seeking in the psychotherapeutic process was intrinsically redemptive, which is a restatement, you might say, of the gospel notion that the truth will set you free.
	We'll delve into Rogers, analyzing in particular his conception of dialogue as transformative and do our best to understand what that means practically, let's say, with regard to your relationship with yourself, but also with other people, and also what it means in relationship to the genesis of psychopathology and its cure.
	Existentialism and phenomenology.
	The existentialists, the Freudians, let's say, the Freudians made the essential presumption that trauma was the cause of much psychopathology.
	That the default human personality was healthy, but when it suffered damage, especially early in life, the healthy developmental path was circumvented and various forms of pathology emerged.
	The existentialists question that particular Freudian presumption, making the case instead, which is also a case grounded in deep religious tradition, that the vagaries of human existence are such that suffering capable of generating psychopathology is not necessarily a consequence of trauma,
	but built into the structure of human existence itself, not least because we're self-conscious, say, and aware of our own mortality, which is an existential problem of sufficient magnitude to give us all grounds for a certain degree of mental illness and perhaps even malevolence in the absence of any particular market trauma, which is not to say that some people don't have it worse than others or that you won't have it worse at some times in your life than others and you will.
	It's not to say as well that the consequences of having it worse might not have some additional influence, let's say, on the course of the development of your personality.
	I really like the existentialist approach because I think that the notion that the pro that, what would you say, mental health problem, so to speak, the problem of psychopathology is not a consequence of the deviation of the normative or ideal human pathway,
	but something that's baked into the structure of human existence itself, that we all have to grapple with the finitude of our existence, let's say, and our subjugation to suffering, and that understanding that how that warps and dements us, and also how that might be dealt with in a forthright manner, is of great utility.
	Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who's not precisely a personality theorist in the classical sense, although is definitely an existentialist, made the case that the lies attendant on the human proclivity to deny the existential reality of our own experience not only warped our souls in the most profound of ways,
	but also laid the groundwork for the development of the terrible atrocity-seeking totalitarian states that most particularly characterized the 20th century.
	And so the other great contribution of the existential theorists, as far as I'm concerned, is their ability to link the inadequacy of any given individual's approach to the existential problems of their own life with the emergence of something like state-sponsored hell on earth.
	And I think that that's something of absolutely crucial significance to understand.
	There's probably, you know, one of the clichés that emerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust in World War II or prior to World War II, prior to and during World War II, was the notion that we should never forget what happened, but you can't remember something you don't understand.
	And it's not particularly easy to derive the lesson from Auschwitz.
	Now, the existentialists, and again, I would say particularly Solzhenitsyn went further, and Viktor Frankl went further along that path than anyone else, trying to draw a relationship between your individual moral obligations, your failure to live up to them, and the genesis of the authoritarian catastrophes that characterized the secular 20th century.
	The phenomenologists, I find particularly interesting because they, following Heidegger, approach the problem of what constitutes reality in a very unique manner.
	The more scientifically oriented Enlightenment behaviorist types and the psychometricians make the assumption that the most appropriate way to conceptualize reality, the truest way of conceptualizing reality, is in relationship to its objective truth.
	Now, there's some problems with that presumption in that our experience of reality, which in some complex way is indistinguishable from reality itself, has an irreducibly subjective element, which the objective tradition has a very difficult time dealing with.
	The phenomenologists attempted to circumvent that subjective-objective dichotomy by describing reality itself as that which is experienced and adopting that approach, well, first of all, profoundly transforms the manner in which you think about what constitutes the real.
	If you assume consciously or implicitly that only objective, that only the objective is real, you cast your own emotions, motivational states, and dreams, fantasies, visions of the future, even the meaning of your life into something that constitutes some second-order reality or even a non-reality.
	And that has potentially devastating that contributes in a potentially devastating way to the development of a kind of life-devouring nihilism.
	If you're nothing but a brief flicker of flame, you know, composed of dust on a third-rate planet at the edge of a minor galaxy, It's very easy to become cynical and dismissive about the fact of existence itself and your own life and reconstituting your idea of what constitutes reality to,
	on the assumption that what you experience is the most foundational, is the fundament and the foundation, transfigures the manner in which you might conceptualize the dignity.
	and significance of your own existence.
	And that's a crucial that's crucial existentially because if you have contempt for yourself, you know, as a second-order reality, let's say, it's very easy for that to become contempt for other people and even contempt for existence itself.
	And that's a very dangerous road to walk down and one whose nature has been laid out quite comprehensively in the religious and mythological representations of man and woman that we already discussed and in the psychoanalytic and existential traditions.
	So the analysis of the phenomenological approach, which puts human experience at the center of things, or maybe even experience itself, or maybe even conscious experience itself, is a powerful antidote to that dehumanizing objectivism, let's say.
	And Heidegger himself Formulated his philosophy upon which the phenomenological approach was predicated in order to combat that dehumanization and then paradoxically fell prey to the Nazi ideology and say degenerated into a supporter of precisely the kind of psychopathological approach that he, in principle, was attempting to fight.
	So an ironic twist in 20th century history.
	The Piagetian tradition, Jean Piaget, developmental psychologist, not often regarded as a personality theorist, but that's generally because personality theorists don't know how to integrate his thinking into the personality tradition.
	And I think I know how to do that, and so that's not a problem.
	I like Piagetian thought a lot, not least because it points, and he knew this, to something approximating an emergent morality that has a certain grounding and objective in the objective.
	So Piaget noted, and we'll delve into this in some detail, that the games that children spontaneously play have a particular pattern.
	So part of that pattern would be: if I force you to play, that's not a game, and I'm not going to be a popular child.
	And you're going to be a bitter and resentful kid in consequence of the force and compulsion that's being applied to you.
	A game, a true game, has to be voluntary, has to have rules that both parties accept and are willing to abide by.
	There's only a set, there's a pattern, you might say, to games that have that quality and that can be played sustainably or that can be played in an improving manner.
	And you might say the essence of the set of all playable games that can be played in an improvable manner is the foundation of morality.
	It's a very important thing to understand.
	You see that importance of that make itself manifest in the stages of childhood where children start to become truly social, which starts to emerge around the age of three when they can begin to take the perspective of someone else, when they begin to have true friends, when they can engage in reciprocally altruistic behavior, when they can take turns and share, right?
	Which is to learn, to begin to learn how to treat another person as if they had the same status and importance as themselves or their own desires.
	That capability, well developed, makes them highly socialized, popular, and happy children, and also turns them into the kinds of adults who can engage in sustainable and improving patterns of cooperative and competitive behavior with other people, which is a good way, for example, of conceptualizing a friendship or a marriage.
	It's a game that can iterate, repeat, it has a certain pattern, and the iteration produces improvement as it progresses.
	Now, you can imagine that there's many ways of interacting with people that do not have that property.
	And a small subset, a straight and narrow path, you might say, that characterizes the set of interactions that do have that property.
	And if the goal is voluntarily sustained improvement of function, socially distributed, that's not much difference than the establishment of a transcendent ethic, the transcendent ethic upon which morality itself might be predicated.
	And so that's a very useful and interesting thing to understand.
	You know, it's a great antidote to the idiot moral relativism that proclaims that all approaches to social interaction are of equal, are diverse first in their essence and also of equivalent value because there's no transcendent ethic, no possibility of a transcendent ethic.
	I think that's mostly just an escape from fundamental responsibility rather than an intelligent approach.
	But I also think that the Piagetian analysis of the emergence of games in children, which you could dismiss if you were casual in your thinking as something relatively trivial, why be interested in the games that children play before they're mature?
	His analysis of what children are doing is so profound that it points the way to the reconciliation between the religious viewpoint and the scientific viewpoint, which was actually what Piaget was trying to do.
	That was his motivation.
	And so that's really something to understand as well.
	I also like the Piagetian tradition because it builds the, it allows for the comprehension of personality from the bottom up, so to speak.
	Piaget was interested, for example, in what he called the basic reflexes that children bring into that, that infants bring into the world when they're born, the micro-movements and preconceptions that they're capable of manifesting upon which the entire superstructure of socialized personality is erected.
	It's a bottom-up approach.
	And one of the things that's so lovely about that from a philosophical perspective is that it maps extremely well onto the neurobiology of the brain and the development maturation of those neurobiological structures in the course of human socialization.
	And so we'll move from the Piagetian tradition to the biological, talk about the physical foundations of the motivational and emotional systems in particular, although also the perceptions and patterns of action that characterize us as biological entities.
	And we'll do what we can to integrate that biological view with the religious tradition, the analytic tradition, the humanistic tradition, the existentialists and the phenomenologists, the Piagetian developmental constructivists.
	And then finally, we'll close with the psychometric approach, which concentrates on the science of measurement and the use primarily of statistics to lay out the domain of human personality.
	The most effective psychometric, psychometrically oriented psychologists have identified six, seven, it depends on how you break them up, fundamental human traits.
	One is general cognitive ability, which is likely the most, what would you say?
	It's the most powerful abstracted conceptualization of the entire corpus of social science and medicine.
	There's nothing that's more well documented, easier to measure, and more powerful and reliable as a conception and predictor than psychometric intelligence.
	And there's nothing more controversial and potentially cultural culture destroying.
	The culture war that besets us is in no small part an emergent consequence of the findings of the psychometricians, particularly on the intelligence side.
	It's a brutal, bloody business.
	One of the things you learn as a clinician, especially if you do IQ testing, is the absolute scope of the intellectual differences between people.
	They're stunning.
	And given that there's no better predictor of long-term life success than psychometric intelligence, there's no better predictor of climbing, let's say, the economic ladder.
	There's no better marker of future success at birth than intelligence, including wealth.
	The differences between people in intelligence are pervasive and marked and also very fundamentally biologically predicated, which is also an awful realization because we like to believe as, what would you say, compassionate people committed to the notion of equality that everyone can learn equally and that the field of opportunity,
	especially with regards to complex matters, is open to all.
	And there is very little evidence that that's true.
	So one of the most damning statistics, for example, which we will refer to further, is the fact that the U.S. Armed Forces, which has been using psychometric tests continually since World War I,
	when they were trying to determine how to organize people rapidly to fight off the threat that the war constituted, they turned to psychometric testing, which was developed by French psychologists and perfected to some degree by the English, especially the socialists, as it turns out.
	They turned to psychometric testing to identify potentially promising officers and continued their investigations into psychometric measurement for 60 years, concluding,
	I believe, by the 1980s, something like that, 1990s perhaps, that no one with an IQ of less than 83 could be trained under any circumstances whatsoever to do anything that wasn't positively counterproductive while they were members of the armed forces.
	And that is really something to understand, given that that's about 10% of the population.
	And that the armed forces is always desperate for manpower and committed Using a career in the armed forces as a stepping stone for people, let's say, in the underclass or in the working class to move themselves up the economic hierarchy.
	So they're highly, highly motivated to make use of everyone available and yet concluded after their 50-year investigation that 10% of the population cannot be utilized in any productive manner whatsoever for military enterprises.
	And so it doesn't take much thought about that to understand that something approximating the same thing applies in the general world, which means that the conservative idea that everyone can get ahead merely as a consequence of diligent effort and the liberal idea that everyone can be trained to do anything given enough resources are both seriously wrong and nobody knows what to do about that.
	So now the psychometricians also outlined the basic structure of personality considered from a statistical perspective, generating the now well-known so-called big five models: extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness.
	Honesty, humility is sometimes added to that, as is the dark tetrad, which is a constellation of malevolent and counterproductive personality traits.
	We'll analyze all the five traits, broken down each into their two aspects, make some reference to honesty, humility, and delve a bit into the patterns of the dark tetrad types, relating all of that back as we progress to the other psychological models that we're going to cover.
	So that's the plan.
	We'll start with religious and mythological conceptualizations to provide this historical context.
	So as I mentioned earlier, human beings of our type took our form something approximating 350,000 years ago.
	And so we've been around for quite a long time.
	One of the anthropological mysteries that bedevil us is: if we've been around for that long, why did it take us so long to get our act together, right?
	Because there's not a lot of evidence for rapid cultural progression till something approximating 20,000 years ago, something like that.
	And that means that we were occupied with God only knows what for about 320,000 years before that.
	And some of the darker speculation is predicated on the assumption that we couldn't get off the ground because we were too busy pulling anyone who was successful down and engaging in constant warfare with the other tribal groups in our, let's say, in our locale.
	And that whatever generated the unifying thrust of civilization, which was likely something like the pervasive spread of monotheistic religious systems, had to fight against both of those proclivities, envy, let's say, and the tendency to engage in continual low-level chronic destructive warfare.
	So I studied the most archaic personality conceptualizations, including conceptualizations of transformation, primarily by investigating the writings of Mircea Eliada, who was a Romanian historian of religions and a true genius.
	He was someone who basically operated in something approximating the psychoanalytic tradition.
	He was a compatriot of Jung, for example, of Carl Jung, whose school was influenced heavily by Freud.
	And Iliada was very interested in the universal patterning of religious ideation across cultures.
	He's a theorist who was cast aside by the postmodernists who now dominate the universities and certainly the field of inquiry into the history of religious ideas because the postmodernists claim, this is the fundamental postmodernist claim, that there is no fundamental uniting metanarrative.
	And so that's a critique, let's say an extended quasi-Nietzschean critique of the idea of God, a continuation of the death of God that Nietzsche so famously pronounced, but also the insistence that there is no fundamental unity that aggregates our personalities, let's say, within ourselves or across people.
	A very dismal and disenchanting view of human nature if you are not particularly amenable to conflict, because if there's no fundamental unity, then there's a fundamental disunity.
	And if there's nothing but a fundamental disunity, there's no integration of personality and there's no hope for peace.
	Now, the way the postmodernists dealt with that existential problem was by, what would you say, surreptitiously inserting a uniting meta-narrative derived from the Marxists, which is the narrative of power and the presumption that the only game in town is my attempt to attain dominance and status, likely or even inevitably at your expense,
	that there's no such thing as genuine dialogue, for example.
	There's no discussion between people of intrinsic worth and goodwill oriented towards establishing something like a maintainable peace, which would imply a kind of unity.
	There is only instead something like the Hobbesian war of everyone against everyone.
	That's a world predicated on power.
	And I believe, speaking psychoanalytically, that people who believe that are doing it primarily because they want a justification for using nothing but power.
	And I also not only believe, but think I know that a world that's predicated on nothing but power is indistinguishable from the atrocity committing totalitarian states of the 20th century.
	Now, I had a discussion at one point with Camille Pallia, who's a very well-known literary critic, and she said something very interesting that's relevant to this course, something I'd never heard any other psychologically oriented thinker state, which was that if the academy, the universities, particularly the departments of English and their literary critics had turned to the school that Eliada was part of, that included Eric Neumann and Carl Jung, for example,
	many other thinkers, particularly of the Bollogen school, the history of the last 30 years, particularly with regards to the culture war, would have been entirely different.
	Mirce Eliada and his group, Jung, etc., massively influenced, for example, Joseph Campbell and the filmmakers who made Star Wars and who concentrated on the representation of the hero myth.
	The analysts of the hero myth assumed that that myth in particular was one form of the uniting narrative superstructures that did point to an overarching unity of human psychological and social conception.
	I Eliada delved deeply, for example, into the shamanic tradition, which is what I was originally making reference to as the most primordial form of philosophical/slash religious enterprise that we have any record of.
	The shamanic tradition likely extended from the dawn of modern human beings, let's say approximately 350,000 years ago, until the present day.
	There are still societies that are essentially shamanic in their traditions extant on the earth, especially in places like the Amazonian jungle, although they're becoming more rare.
	There's a pattern to the shamanic rituals, which is, if properly understood, in my understanding, equivalent to analysis of the potentially creative breakdown of the individual human personality and its reconstitution on more solid grounds.
	So it's an early variant of the notion of death and rebirth as the pathway to progression upward, both psychologically and socially.
	And I think, and I'll show you in the course of this course, the existence of that pattern at every level of psychological analysis that we're going to engage in.
	I think it constitutes the core, which I referred to earlier, that unites all of the schools of personality theory and investigations into psychopathology that we'll cover.
	You can decide for yourself as you walk through this whether or not you find the evidence compelling.
	I think that one of the reasons that it's compelling, and this is actually a technical description of what makes a fact compelling, is that it occurs in multiple contexts that are independent from one another, right?
	So one of the ways that you judge the reality of something is whether it makes itself manifest to various modes of various independent modes of measurement.
	So that's why you have five senses, right?
	You can see something that isn't there.
	It's less likely that you will see and hear something that isn't there.
	It's less likely still that you'll see, hear, and touch something that isn't there.
	But that's enough.
	Not enough.
	You have two other senses just to nail things down.
	And even more than that, we're still skeptical, which is why if I believe something is real, I might ask you and you and you and look for consensus across all three of you to help me adjust the potential error of my perceptions.
	That's what you do when you use multiple methods of measurement, which is something, by the way, formally recommended by the psychometric psychologists who've been endeavoring to determine when a psychological measurement is real as a measurement, but also reflective of something real in the world.
	It's real if it can be detected in a variety of distinguishable and separate manners.
	And so the pattern that I'm going to lay out for you that characterizes the shamanic pattern of transformation does make itself manifest at multiple levels of analysis.
	And we'll use it as a uniting structure as we progress through the various theories.
	Now, I also think and hope, know for that matter, that you'll find this personally relevant because understanding the pattern of personality transformation can help you maintain your faith when things fall apart.
	Knowing, as you hopefully will come to, that having things fall apart at different levels of depth is actually a precursor to transformation such that things come together more reliably and productively.
	And understanding as well, and this is something absolutely fundamental, that to the degree that you could engage in the process of personality dissolution and its reconstitution voluntarily, your chances of success and your freedom from anxiety and your ability to maintain hope will be much, much improved.
	And so, all of that's locked into the shamanic practices.
	And so, we'll do an overview of that now, as well as a relatively deep dive into the abstract structure of the processes of transformation that the shamanic rituals both constitute and refer to.
	We'll start with the shamanic foundation and then we'll close this first lecture with an analysis of the relationship between the Judeo-Christian conceptualization of personality and its transformations, which is determinative for all the psychological theories that we're going to consider.
	All protestations of the practitioners of those schools of thought to the contrary.
	I'll show you the relationship between these Judeo-Christian ideas, which are ancient in their own right, and the underlying shamanic substrate, let's say, that's far more archaic even than those traditions.
	We'll talk about descent into the underworld and reconstitution, because that's the essential nature of the shamanic endeavor, upward striving, descent into the underworld and reconstitution.
	You know how it is in your life.
	You have periods of time where you encounter something initially incomprehensible and profoundly difficult, and things fall apart around you and within you.
	And maybe there you are for some indeterminate period of time in the underworld, right?
	Suffering the torments of hell, but you emerge stronger and wiser, now able to deal with and to understand things that were beyond you to begin with.
	Well, that's the characteristic pattern of human adaptation.
	As such, there's no learning without at least a small death, which is part of the reason that we're eternally resistant, even to the learning that might transform us.
	Now, if you understand that, and you'll come to understand that more deeply in consequence of this class, you may be able to see not that every treasure has a dragon, let's say, but that every dragon has a treasure, which is an unbelievably useful thing to know as you encounter the difficulties that will beset you as you make your way through life.
	There's an insistence beginning with the shamanic practitioners themselves that the manner in which we encounter the unknown elements of life tears us into pieces before reconstituting us.
	And if we can understand that process and accept it and even welcome it and even worship it, you might say, then we're best positioned to transform ourselves when necessity makes either doing that or dying necessary.
	So what will we examine in the Judeo-Christian tradition today, somewhat briefly?
	The notions of pride, self-consciousness, sin, and the fall of man that characterize the opening chapters of Genesis, the notion that personality can transform, but that that's a consequence of humility.
	First, you're wrong, you admit it, you would like to change and you're willing to, which Carl Rogers identified as the precondition for any successful psychotherapeutic endeavor, right?
	You have to come to the agent of change, let's say the therapist, knowing or hoping that you have something to learn in some manner to change in a beneficial way, even if that's going to be painful to you, as a precondition for the transformative process to even begin.
	That's identical to the proclamation that religious humility, which is the opposite of the greatest sin, which is that of pride, is the precondition for atonement at one meant, the pulling of yourself back together and the uniting of that integrated self with, you might say, the world and the spirit of the world, the pulling together of that and redemption,
	which is your ascent out of Dante's inferno and the abyss back into something approximating the light.
	We'll also assess the role of prayer, so to speak, in revelation, mostly in secular terms, because I want to draw your attention to the correspondence between those fundamentally religious ideas and our secular notions of thought itself.
	Here's a way of beginning that.
	How is it that you go about thinking?
	Well, first of all, you have to have something to think about.
	And so what does that mean?
	Well, you have to have a problem or something that you're interested in.
	That's conscience, the problem, or calling the thing that you're interested in.
	Then you have to understand that you don't know, right?
	Because why think if you know?
	And so that's the admission of insufficiency, let's say in ignorance.
	Then you have to believe that if you're ignorant and you want to know, that something will respond to that.
	And modern people, when they think, they say, well, something occurred to me or let's say something revealed itself to me in consequence of my questioning without understanding that they're making a case right then and there in their words and their experience for something like the revelation that's always hypothetically attendant on questioning, right?
	Knock and the door will open.
	Well, that presumes that you knock.
	And so one of the things that's worth understanding is what are the psychological preconditions for knocking and asking and seeking.
	And certainly one of them is the realization that if you're not living in paradise now, maybe you still have something to learn.
	So prayer, what's that?
	The practice of upward aim in relationship to personality transformation.
	That's a very good way of thinking about it.
	Revelation, that's what you learn if you're lucky and fortunate, let's say.
	And if your aim is true, when you admit to your own insufficiency and something descends upon you that makes you more than you were.
	Carl Friston has made the case that anxiety emerges as a consequence of the manifestation of entropy, disorder, chaos, anomaly, the unknown, right?
	And that you become anxious when a conceptualization that you hold that structures the world and makes it predictable disappears.
	That happens when someone betrays you, right?
	You have a model of someone.
	That model enables you to predict your interactions with them.
	They violate a presumption of the model.
	That's the betrayal, and all hell breaks loose.
	Why?
	Because that person is a lot more complicated than you thought they were, right?
	And that's not just an encounter with their unrevealed complexity, but also with yours insofar as you're capable of betraying and also with the malevolence and unpredictability of human beings as such.
	Because if your loved one can betray you and you can do the same, then everyone can do the same thing.
	And so that encounter with unpredictability and malevolence, right?
	The willful violation of agreed upon social rules, that's the revelation of entropy, right?
	Friston also made the case, which was something I hadn't conceptualized, that negative emotion is a marker for the emergence of entropy.
	He also made a case that positive emotion signified a decrease in entropy insofar as if you have a goal in mind, which frames your conceptions and your apprehension and structures your world, and you see yourself progressing towards that goal, which is something that makes you happy and enthusiastic.
	The reason that positive emotion emerges is because it marks a decrease in the distance between you and the goal, which is equivalent to a decrease in entropy.
	So Friston, we did work on this idea in my lab as well, has associated the notions of positive and negative emotion with one of the most fundamental concepts of the world of physics.
	And so why am I telling you that?
	Because the descent into the underworld is the dissolution into entropy, right?
	It's what happens to you when the ground under your feet dissolves and down you fall.
	Why down?
	Well, it's a metaphor, you know, it's the metaphor of hell.
	It's the metaphor of below.
	Why is down metaphorically negative for human beings?
	Well, up is positive, right?
	We climb upward.
	We look up.
	When we're confident, we stand straight and we look forward.
	We look up, we gaze into the distance.
	We let the stars guide us.
	We let the sun and the moon be our markers.
	We're oriented by the North Star.
	Up is where we look for inspiration and illumination.
	Down is where we collapse when things go terribly wrong, right?
	Down is where your face falls when you're miserable or depressed.
	Down is the more unconscious realm of the body.
	Up is towards vision, which is associated with illumination and enlightenment.
	Down is dust and dirt and decay and death and the grave.
	And up is heavenward and skyward and towards the light.
	And so the dissolution and descent into the underworld is the collapse of unifying structure into its constituent parts.
	Confusion, confusion.
	It's what you experience, for example, when you're when the rickety old car that you can afford because you're really not a very hard and reliable worker breaks down on the way to the job that you hate to go to.
	And so what happens when the car breaks down?
	Well, first of all, whatever you're in is immediately not a car.
	And you think, well, of course it is because it hasn't changed in its important material aspects.
	It still has four wheels, for example, and two doors, some of which might even be functional depending on the cataclysmic state of your finances.
	But you're under a misapprehension with regards to your understanding of objects because a car isn't something with four wheels and, let's say, two doors.
	It's a conveyance from one point to another.
	And when it stops conveying you, it's not a car.
	And when it collapses on the freeway, let's say it's now a nest of snakes and you're in it.
	And what's the nest of snakes?
	Well, how stupid are you that you're 35 years old, let's say, and that's the best bloody car you can afford?
	It's no wonder your wife or your husband can't stand having you around.
	And is the fact that you're driving this old clunker a consequence of your own fundamental inadequacy?
	Or is it a reflection of the sorry state of the cosmos itself and what?
	The cursed nature of man at the hand of God.
	And is it going to be that now you're going to lose the third job this year because you didn't get to work yet again?
	And are you perversely happy about that?
	Because you actually hate the damn job and your boss.
	And what does that say about the entire substructure of the capitalist world, let's say, and poor, oppressed, and enslaved you struggling mightily to get your clunker off to your hateful job?
	Well, that's what the car is turned into, right?
	All that confusion and chaos, all that noise and doubt, right?
	That's a descent into the underworld.
	That one happens to be involuntary.
	And that means it'll be signified by negative emotion, anxiety first, that indicates the multiplying of the pathways in your life, which had been reduced to get in the car, drive to work, do your job, and expand it into whatever the hell mess you're in now, especially given that you can't afford the repair bill.
	So how are you going to get anywhere?
	And you're the sort of clueless character too daft about your own belongings to not be constantly taken advantage of, let's say, by malevolent mechanics who look upon you as a deserving object of exploitation, right?
	In no small part because of your own stupidity, right?
	So all that mess, that's what the car turns into.
	That's a very interesting way of looking at it and a very interesting way of looking at the collapse of your conceptions in your life as such.
	It happens all the time.
	That's associated with the pattern of shamanic initiation.
	So I'm going to read you some material from Eliada and we'll analyze it as we read it.
	Eliada in his studies of shamanism, which was a pattern of practice and conception that was very widely distributed, especially in Neolithic times.
	So let's say 40,000 years and previously.
	And as I said, and is what mirrored in diverse places as far-flung as Australia among the Aboriginal inhabitants and in the Amazon as well as across the Siberian plane, right?
	So it's the, you could think about it as the default religious system of Homo sapiens.
	Descent into the underworld, the collapse of the cosmos into the underlying chaos from which it was originally generated.
	Something that happens psychologically when you descend into a state of confusion and socially when your family or your community or your tribe or your nation descends into, say, chaotic fractionation and nothing is certain, right?
	Three routes to the shamanic vocation, as far as Elietha could document.
	Spontaneous vocation.
	So what does that mean?
	It's likely a hallmark of people who are high in trait openness, right?
	People to high in trade openness are creative and interested in ideas.
	What does creativity mean technically?
	Well, imagine that I throw you an idea.
	Okay, now imagine that the neural systems that apprehend that idea are surrounded by other neural systems which contain or represent associated ideas, okay?
	And that there's some probability that when you hear a given idea or encounter a given idea, that associated ideas will be simultaneously activated.
	Now, if you were manic or schizophrenic or under the influence of a hallucinogen, then any given fact might trigger a plethora of associated facts virtually without end.
	Now, that's useful creatively, but overwhelming and exhausting.
	And so for the purposes of normal adaptation, there needs to be some limit on how much ideation is triggered by your receipt of any given idea.
	And there's individual variation in that constraining.
	Some people are an inexhaustible well of new ideas, which, as I said, can degenerate into something approximating mania.
	Some people stick with what they've heard and that's it.
	You can actually assess something like this quite straightforwardly.
	So for example, I could get all of you to spend three minutes writing down all the words you can think of that are four letters long and begin with the letter S.
	And what we'd find is that, first of all, there's a Pareto distribution of your production.
	Some of you will produce 90 words, the exceptional, exceptionally fluent people among you, and some of you will produce five, and far more of you, perhaps not five, ten, far more of you will produce the lower numbers than the higher numbers.
	That's an ineradicable law of creative production.
	A small minority of the people do all the creative work.
	It's actually the square root of the number of people who are involved in the enterprise do half the work.
	That's Price's law, right?
	A brutal, another brutal psychometric/slash economic finding.
	How many words you produce in three minutes is a decent predictor of your lifetime creativity.
	So especially in combination with general cognitive ability or intelligence.
	Intelligence is probably something like the rate at which you can produce ideas, whereas creativity is something like the breadth of ideational scope and the probability that relatively distant ideas will be co-activated.
	So, you know, someone particularly creative makes a big leap.
	So imagine there's an idea.
	There's a core of close concepts around it.
	There's a secondary penumbra of more distal ideas.
	Outside of that, more distal ideas yet.
	More creative people have more ideas in general, but also leap farther out, which can make them wrong because they jump to the wrong conclusion and also difficult to understand because they're so creative and also make it hard for them to explain how they got there because that process occurs to them as something like a revelation rather than as the consequence of, say, algorithmic cognitive processing.
	You know, something will occur to you rather than having you think it up.
	And if you're creative, something distant occurs, right?
	And so spontaneous vocation with regards to shamanism, more creative people.
	The more creative people are likely to be more dynamic in their personality transformations.
	So, a conservative person, low in openness, is likely to find a pathway and bloody well stick to it.
	And that's a good idea if you're not very smart.
	And if times are uncertain, and if everybody knows what's going on and the pathway has been well specified, stay the hell on it.
	But in times of change, right, or if you're trying to gain an edge, a creative approach is useful.
	High risk, but high return, right?
	And so, whereas the conservative approach is low risk and moderate return and characterized by a relative lack of entropy.
	Now, I suspect as well that the shamanic types are not only high in trait openness, which makes them dynamic and flexible in their personality restructuring, but also high in trait neuroticism, right?
	Because you can fall apart, so to speak, or transcend yourself because you're creative, but you can also fall apart because you're very sensitive to negative emotion.
	And it's a rather dreadful combination of traits to be very high in openness and very high in negative emotionality, because you keep sawing off the branch that you sit on and then suffering because of it.
	But that's also a pathway to transformation.
	It's often the case that people who are tormented by ideas solve problems.
	That was certainly the case, for example, of people like Darwin, who was obsessed with the idea that immediately eventually made itself manifest as the theory of natural selection, despite his faithful and staunch Christianity.
	And that conflict also threw him into the underworld and tortured him.
	We'll talk about the creative illness with the close of this section on the shamanic transformation because there is a pattern of dissent and ascent that characterizes creative revelation, even among secular people, even among atheistic scientists.
	They still, their discoveries still follow the ancient religious pathway, so to speak.
	Spontaneous vocation, so that would be temperamentally determined, let's say.
	Maybe even a slight tilt towards various forms of mental illness, manic depressive disorder, for example, or possibly even psychosis, would also increase the probability that someone would undergo something approximating a spontaneous, deep personality transformation.
	Many of the earlier investigators into the shamanic process made the presumption that it was emblematic of psychopathology.
	But the important consideration here, and you want to really keep this in mind, is that whether or not a radical transformation of personality is psychopathological or redemptive depends to a large degree on whether it's undertaken voluntarily or thrust upon you, right?
	And so, one of the reasons to be courageous and forthright in your approach to life is so that you can encounter the snakes at a time of your choosing and on ground that you prepare rather than waiting for them to get you in your, what would you say, as you cower under your bed.
	That's not a good strategy.
	It's also not the human strategy, not the fundamental human strategy, and it's associated with far greater levels of stress.
	This is a good thing to know.
	Imagine that I submit you and you to the same stressor, but you involuntarily and you voluntarily, and I measure your psychophysiological responses.
	Let's say from the neuron level upward, what I'll find is that if you're in the condition where you're encountering the stressor voluntarily, an entirely different pattern of psychophysiological preparedness, including attentional focus, characterizes you than would characterize you doing it involuntarily.
	If you do it voluntarily, you're in challenge mode and you confront the stressor as if it's an opportunity.
	And that primarily produces motivation on your part in consequence of the positive emotion that marks progress towards a goal.
	If, by contrast, it's thrust upon you, kicking and screaming, then you're going to go into defensive prey animal mode, produce an overwhelming amount of cortisol, shrink, fail to pay attention, refuse to learn, petrify.
	That's why the basilisk in Harry Potter turns people to stone, by the way, petrify like a rabbit being gazed at by a wolf, and forego the advantages of voluntary exploration, right?
	Okay, hereditary transmission.
	Well, like hereditary priesthoods, the vocation of shaman can be transmitted from generation to generation.
	That can be explicitly taught.
	So amongst relatively preliterate tribal groups, the shaman and their apprentices often have a vocabulary that's three or four times greater than the typical vocabulary of the typical group member because they're the storehouse of cultural tradition.
	Part of the cultural tradition is a description of the shamanic transformation process, the means by which it might be brought about, and the conceptualizations that allow it to be bounded and understood so it's not terrifying.
	Now, Eliada believed that most shamanic practitioners who weren't pathological engaged in their enterprise in a state of comparative sobriety.
	He believed that those practitioners who turned, let's say, to the use of psychedelics were an aberration from the fundamental stream.
	But I think he was probably wrong in that matter, given more recent investigations into the historic use of psychedelic substances.
	It's the case that psychedelics produce a physiochemical state that's quite analogous to what happens to you when you're highly stressed.
	That produces a neuroplasticity that facilitates learning.
	It disinhibits the effects of memory on perception because most of what you see is what you presume rather than what's there, which is why the world is not as magical for you as an adult as it was when you were a child.
	That's reversed by psychedelic agents, which also produce this stress state, which can degenerate into an experience of hell, but that also facilitate learning.
	And so part of the technology of psychological transformation in the shamanic tradition is actually the usage and handling of psychologically active, hyper-powerful psychological active, psychologically active substances, psilocybin mushrooms, for example, or ergot, which is a fungus on rye, which contains LSD, or ammonita muscaria mushrooms, the fairytale mushroom, red with white dots,
	which is also a powerful psychoactive chemical, although different chemically than the classic hallucinogens that was used particularly by the Siberian shaman.
	There are ongoing investigations now into the use of psilocybin, for example, for addiction cessation for the treatment of the fear of death, which it appears to be successful at managing, which is the understatement of the century, if it's true.
	How can a physiochemical reaction produce cessation of death anxiety?
	This is among people who are terminally ill.
	It produces a spiritual transformation that reconciles people to their mortality.
	God only knows how, but that's part of what we're going to investigate.
	Most of that work was done at Johns Hopkins by Roland Griffith, who's a very solid, wise scientist who unfortunately recently perished of cancer.
	Hereditary transmission.
	That's what we're doing in this course, is the hereditary transmission of the shamanic vocation, just so you know.
	And personal quest.
	Well, what's a quest?
	A quest is the adventure of your life, right?
	Whatever you're doing, wherever you're going, you're after something, right?
	It might be something proximal.
	You're after something sitting here.
	You're after whatever it was that made you interested in coming here.
	And that's associated with whatever it is that you're interested in general.
	And that's associated with what?
	Are you here for good or for ill, let's say?
	Let's assume you're here for good.
	Well, then the specific manifestation of your interest in the topic at hand is a specific instance of the manifestation of your tilt in general towards the upward voyage, let's say, or the good.
	If you're not sophisticated, particularly if you're immature, that orientation towards the good will be proximal and very time-bound.
	You'll be only interested and compelled by what might happen in the very short term.
	That's how a child reacts, right?
	As you become increasingly mature, you're able to take a longer and longer view of what is motivationally significant, concentrating more and more, more and more on what's not only good for you right now, let's say from an emotional perspective, but on what might even be difficult for you right now from an emotional perspective, but highly beneficial in the medium to long run,
	or not specifically beneficial to you here right now, but beneficial in the long run for everyone that you love around you and for the broader community.
	And so you can think of that orientation upward toward the transcendent good as a manifestation of the maturation that makes you able to increasingly apprehend longer spans of time and include more people in your conception of appropriate action.
	Right now, the way that's marked instinctively, this is such a cool thing to understand, the way that's marked instinctively, that proclivity to mature and develop across time is by the grip of your interest by forces that are beyond your control.
	So this is easy to understand.
	You know that if you're studying, for example, for a course that you spontaneously find rather dull, you have to beat yourself with a stick in order to concentrate, even though you know, hypothetically, that you need to learn the material, that you have to pass the course, that it's necessary for your future.
	The spark just isn't there.
	And yet there are other circumstances under which you can learn things equally difficult much, much more easily because why?
	Because the subject matter calls to you.
	Well, that call has a pattern.
	This is something unbelievably important to understand because your ultimate aim, known or unknown to yourself, is what calls to you.
	And so one of the reasons that you follow the Socratic dictum, which is know yourself, is because you want to bloody well make sure that you're following something that isn't leading you to the worst possible place in a permanent way.
	Calling.

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