BS 2 - Genesis 1 Chaos + Order

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object:BS 2 - Genesis 1 Chaos + Order
class:Biblical Series
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class:lecture link:https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-ii/

Keywords: Kant, Trust, Adam, Tiamat, Dante, Underworld, Speech, Mephistopheles, Moon, Jung, Hero, Solzhenitsyn, Archetypal, Narrative

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Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order by Dr. Jordan Peterson

I thought, this time, that I would actually cover some of the Biblical stories, hopefully a number of them. As I said last time, I'm going to go through this as fast as I am able to. I want to do as complete a job as possible. Of course, the probability that Ill get through the entire Bible is very low, but well get through a lot of the major stories and the beginning of it. Thats a good start. Assuming that this all goes well, maybe Ill try to do this same thing again in the fall, or next yearassuming that everything is still working out properly next year. Its a long ways away.

All right, I guess well start. Last week I talked to you about a line in the New Testament that was from John. It was a line that was designed to parallel the opening of Genesis. Its a really important line. I thought I would reemphasize it, because the Bible is a book thats been written forward and backwards in timelike most books, because if you write a book, of course, when you get to the end, if youre a writer, you can adjust the beginning, and so on. It has this odd appearance of linearity, but it isnt linear. Its like youre God, standing outside of time. Thats your book, and you can play with time anywhere along it. The people who put the book togetheror the books togethertook full advantage of that. It gives the story odd parallels in many, many places and this is one of the major parallelsat least from the perspective of the Christian interpretation of the Bible, which, of course, includes the New Testament.

So theres this strange idea that Christ was the same factor, or force, that God used at the beginning of time to speak habitable order into being. Thats a very, very strange idea. Its not something that can be just easily dismissed as superstition, partly because its so strange. It doesnt even fit the definition of a superstitious belief. Its a dream-like belief, and what I see in many of the ideas in the Bible is these dream-like ideas that underlie our normative cognition and that constitute the ground from which our more articulated and explicit ideas have emerged. This ideas so complicated that its still mostly embedded in dream-like form, but it seems to have something to do with the primacy of consciousness. This is one of the biggest issues regarding the structure of reality, as far as I can tell, because everyone from physicists to neurobiologists debate this. The stumbling block for a purely objective view of the world seems, to me, to be consciousness.

Consciousness has all sorts of strange properties. For example, it isnt obvious what constitutes time, or at least duration, in the absence of consciousness. It isnt also easy to understand what constituted being in the absence of consciousness, because it seems to be the casewell, if a movie is running and theres no one to watch it I know it sounds like the tree in the forest idea, but its not that idea at all. If a movie is running and no ones watching it, in what sense can you say that theres even a movie running? Because the movie seems to be the experience of the movie, not the objective elements of the movie. Theres something about the worldat least insofar as were in it as human beings that is dependent on conscious experience of the world. Now, of course, you can take consciousness out of the world and say, well, if none of us were here, if there was no such thing as consciousness, then the cosmos would continue running the way it is running. But it depends on what, exactly, you mean by the cosmos when you make a statement like that. Theres something about the subjective experience of reality that gives it reality, and since were all pretty enamoured at our own consciousnesses although theyre painful, because they define our beingits not unreasonable to give consciousness a kind of metaphysical primacy.

Its a deeper idea than that because theres physicistsand theyre not trivial physicistslike John Wheeler, who believes that consciousness plays a constitutive role in transforming the chaotic potential of being into the actuality of being. Hes not alive anymore, but he actually thought about it as playing a constitutive role. Then, from the neurobiological perspective, from the scientific perspective, consciousness is not something that we understand. I dont think we understand it at all. Its something we cant get a handle on with our fundamental, materialist philosophy, and I dont know why that is. Its quite frustrating, if youre a scientist, but it isnt clear to me that weve made any progress whatsoever in understanding consciousness, even though, well, weve been trying to understand it for hundreds of years, and even though psychologists and neurobiologists and so forth have really put a lot of effort into understanding consciousness from a scientific perspective in the last 50 years.

Anyways, what it seems to me is the idea that God used the word to extract habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time, which is roughly the right way of thinking about it. It seems to me deeply allied with the idea that what it is that we do as human beings is encounter something like the formless and potential chaos. I mean, were not omniscient and we cant just do whatever we want. Thats always what were grappling with, and somehow we use our consciousness to give that form. This is how people act. If you look at how they regard themselves, its how they act, because you say things to people like, you should live up to your potential, and you make a case that theres something about a person thats more than what is that yet could be if only theyd participate in the process properly. Everyone knows what that means, and no one acts like a mystery has been uttered when you say that.

You can see a situation in your own life thats full of potential. Youre often extremely excited when you encounter something thats full of potential, because what you see is something that could be. You see a future beckoning for you that could be if only you interacted with it properly, and it activates your nervous system in a very basic way. We even understand how that happens to the degree that we understand how the nervous system works. The systems that mediate positive emotion are governed, roughly, by neurochemical dopamine, which have their roots way down in the ancient hypothalamus, a very, very archaic and fundamental part of the brain that responds to potential, or the possibility of accruing something new and valuable. It responds to potential with active movement forward and engagement. And so were engaged in the world as potential, and it looks like consciousness does that.

This is the main idea that it think has been put forth in Genesis 1. From what I gather, theres always three causal elements that make up being at the bottom of world mythology. One is the formless potential that makes up being once its interacted with, and thats generally given a feminine nature. I think thats because its like the source from which all things emerge and rise. Its more complicated than that, but then theres some kind of interpretive structure that has to grapple with that formless potential. I think thats the sort of thing thats alluded to by Immanuel Kant when he was criticizing the notion that all of information comes from sense data, which would be the pure empirical perspective. When you encounter the world, you encounter it with a cognitive structure that already has shape. Its already in you, this structure. Without that a priori structure, you wouldnt be able to take the formless potential and give it structure. Its akin, in some way, to the idea of God the Father, and Ill try to develop that idea more. Its the notion that theres something in all of us that transcends all of us, thats deeply structural, thats part of this ancient evolutionary and cultural process, that enables us to grapple with the formless potential and bring forth reality, roughly speaking.

And then theres the final element, and that element seems to be something like consciousness that actually inheres in the individual. So its not only that you have the structure: its that the structure has the capacity for action in the world. Its like youre this spirit that gives the dead structure life. As far as I can tell, the Trinitarian notion that characterizes Christianity is something like formless potentialwhich is never given a status of a deity in Christianity and then the notion that theres an a priori interpretive structure thats a consequence of our ancient existence as beings. The notion of a structure goes back as far in time as you can go. Then there is the idea of a consciousness that is the tool of that structure. It interacts with the world and gives it reality. Thats the word, as far as I can tell.

The notion is that theres a Father, and thats the structure, and theres a Son thats transcendent and characterizes consciousness itself. Its the Son, the speaking of the Son, that is the active principle that turns chaos into order. Its such a sophisticated idea. Theres something about it thats, at least, phenomenologically accurate. You do have an interpretive structure and you couldnt understand anything without it. Your very body is an interpretive structure. Its been crafted over, lets say, three billion years of evolution. Without that, you wouldnt be able to perceive anything, and its taken a lot of death and struggle and tragedy to produce you, the thing thats capable of encountering this immense chaos that surrounds us and transforming it into habitable order.

Theres the idea, too, of course, thats deeply embedded in the first chapters of Genesis, which is a staggering idea and certainly not one thats likely, that human beings, both male and female, were made in the image of God. Thats a very difficult thing to understand, partly because the God thats referred to in those chapters has a polytheistic element, although its an element that's moving rapidly towards a unified monotheism. But its not also obvious to me why people would come up with that concept. I dont really think that, when we think about each other, we immediately think God-like. The notion that every single human being, regardless of their peculiarities, strangenesses, sins, crimes, and all of that, has something divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect, plays an integral role, at least an analogous role, in the creation of habitable order out of chaos. Thats a magnificent, remarkable, crazy idea. And yet we developed it, and I do firmly believe that it sits at the base of our legal system.

I think it is the cornerstone of our legal system. Thats the notion that everyone is equal before God, which is, of course, such a strange idea. Its very difficult to understand how anybody could have ever come up with that idea, because the manifold differences between people are so obvious and so evident that you could say that the natural way of viewing human being is in this extreme hierarchical manner, where some people are contemptible and easily brushed off as pointless and pathological and without value, and all the power accrues to a certain tiny aristocratic minority at the top. But if you look at the way that the idea of the individual sovereign developed, its clear that it unfolded over thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of years before it became something firmly fixed in the imagination. Each individual has something of transcendent value about them. Man, I tell you, we dispense with that idea at our serious peril. If youre gonna take that idea seriouslywhich you do because you act it out, because otherwise you wouldnt be law-abiding citizens then you act that idea out. Its firmly shared by everyone who acts in a civilized manner. The question is, why in the world do you believe it? Assuming that you believe what you act out, which I think is a really good way of fundamentally defining beliefs.

Thats the idea, that theres this God of tradition and structure. Thats God the Father, who uses the Son, which is more of an active force and, primarily, something thats verbal. I think thats extremely interesting, because its associated not with thought, precisely, but with speech. I think the reason for that is that theres something to speech thats more than mere thought. I think part of the reason for that is that speech is a public utterance and, at least in principle, speech is something that is shaped by the existence of everyone else across time. When you speak, your speech is put forward in the world as a causal element. Its also subject to criticism and cooperation and mutual shaping. So theres an idea here, too, that the cognitive processes that brings habitable reality out of uninhabitable chaos has this collective and public element, which is part of the reason, by the way, that I'm an advocate of free speech, lets say above all.

It is the case, for example in the Canadian Bill of Rights, that every single right has equal value. Thats the theory. Its an idiotic theory, because its absolutely impossible for a large set of rights to have absolutely equal stance. That cannot happen. Theres no way that can ever work, but that is the legal judgment. I think its a huge mistake. Free speech has this divine quality, lets say, that you cant escape from. Its the thing that manufactures everything else. I do think that the dream that you could think of as encapsulated in the stories in Genesisis the dream by which human beings dreamed up the idea that we would now consider consciousness. It took us a long time to figure out the word consciousness. Its not like its bloody obvious. Who knows how many thousands of years, or who knows what struggles we had to undertake, to abstract out something like consciousness, and how we had to represent that dramatically, or symbolically, or in a dream-like fashion, before we could actually formulate the term and localize that to some degree. Its very sophisticated.

John makes the case that theres an emanation of God, or an element of God, that the transcendent consciousness acts directly and in a sort of living way with the underlying potential of the world. I think that is phenomenologically accurate, and I do think thats the way we regard our lives. When you think about it, we tend to think that what you encounter when you are looking at the world is the material world, but that isnt how you act. You do act as if youre in a place of potential and also in a place of potential that you can actually transform, which is extraordinarily strange, because we do treat each other as if were capable of bringing new forms into the world in some permanent manner. We treat each other as if we have free choice and free will. Perhaps we dont, but its certainly the case that societies that are predicated on the idea that we dont, dont do very well, and societies that are predicated on the idea that we do, seem to do a lot better.

People tend to get very annoyed at you if you treat them like theyre automatons that lack free will. Theres something that people find very, I would say constraining, slave-like, about that: the demand that you dont have actual autonomy and, even worse, that youre not responsible for your choices. Its an insult to someone to suggest to them that theyre not responsible for their choices. To do that to someone from a legal perspective, you have to argue something like diminished capacity: youre mentally ill, or you dont have the intellectual capacity, or you were addled by some substance, or you had a brain injury, or something, and thats why youre not responsible for your actions. Otherwise, part of the respect that you give to another human being is the assumption that theyre responsible for their actions. If you do something bad, then youre responsible for it. But part of that, too, is that, if you do something good, youre also responsible for that. That also seems necessary because, I mean, its gotta be more annoying than anything else you can imagine to strive virtuously to produce something of extreme value and then to be treated as if that was a mere deterministic outcome, and that your actual choices had nothing to do with that. People find that sort of thing extraordinarily punishing. I know that there are debates about all of these things, and debates about free will, and debates about the nature consciousness, but I'm trying to take a clear look at how people act, how they want to be treated, and then to trace it back to these old ideas to see if theres some metaphysical connection.

Section II
TIMESTAMP
All right, so heres how the book opens: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." This is a hard narrative section to get a handle on because, in order to understand it properly, you have to actually look behind it. There are a lot of pieces of old stories in the Old Testament that flesh out the meaning of these lines. I can give you a quick overview of it. One of the ideas that lurks underneath these linesalthough you can't tell, because it's in English. You have to look at the original language, and, of course, I don't speak the original language. Ive had to use secondary sources, too bad for me. But the "without form and void," and the deep ideayou see, that's associated with this notion of endless, deep potential. For example, words that are used to represent "without form and void" are something like Im going to get this partly wrongtohu wa-bohu. Another one is tehom. Its important to know this, because those words are associated with an earlier Mesopotamian word, which is Tiamat.

Tiamat was a dragon-like creature who represented the salt water. Tiamat had a husb and named Apsu. Tiamat and Apsu were locked together in a kind of sexual embrace. I would say that's potential and order, or chaos and order. They were locked together, and it was that union of chaos and order that gave rise in the old Mesopotamian myth, the Enuma Elis, to being, to the old Gods first, and then, eventually, as creation progressed, to human beings themselves.

There's this idea lurking underneath these initial lines that God is akin to that which confronts the unknown, carves it into pieces, and makes the world out of its pieces. The thing that it confronts is something like a predatory reptile, a dragon, or a serpent. I think part of the reason for thatand this is a very deep and ancient ideais thatThis is where it gets so complicated to do the translation. Its partly how human beings created our world. We went out beyond the confines of our safe spaceslet's say our safe spaces defined by the tree or the fire and we actively voyaged outward to the places that we were afraid of and didn't understand. We conquered and encountered things out there: animals, mammoths, snakes, and predators of all sorts. It was as a consequence of that active, brave engagement with the terrifying domain of what we did not understand that the world, in fact, was generated. That idea lurks deeply inside the opening lines of Genesis.

Its a profound idea, in my estimation. I think, also, that the way our brains are structured and this is something that Im going to try to develop more todayis the ancient circuits that our ancestors used to deal with the space beyond the home territory which they had already explored. Unknown territory is characterized by promise, because there are new things out there, but also by intense danger. Were prey animals, especially millions of years ago when we were very young. We had to go out there and encounter things that were terribly dangerous. There was a kind of, let's say, paternal courage that went along with that. It was the spirit of paternal courage that enabled the conquering of the unknown, and theres no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order.

The thing is that, as our cognitive faculties have developed to the point where were capable of very high levels of abstraction, the underlying biological architecture has remained the same. For example, when youre having an argument about something fundamental with someone that you love, youre trying to structure the world around you, jointly, to create a habitable space that you can both exist within. Youre using the abstracted version of the same circuits. You're using the same circuits that our archaic ancestors would have used when they would have went out into the unknown itself to encounter beasts, predators, and geographical unknowns. It's the same circuit. It's just that we do it abstractly now instead of concretely. But, of course, it has to be the same circuit, because evolution is a very conservative force. What else would it be? This is also why I think its so easy for us to demonize those people who are our enemies. Our enemies confront us with what we don't want to see, and, because of that, our first response is to use snake detection circuitry on them. That accounts for our almost immediate capacity to demonize. Theres a reason for that. Its not a trivial thing. First of all, it's a very fast response. And second of all, it's a response that's worked for a very, very, very long time.

One of the variants of the hero and I would consider a variant of the hero like a fragment of the picture of Godis the heroic warrior who slays the enemy. Of course, that's not precisely a politically correct representation of a hero in modern times, and no wonder, but it's still something that you go watch in movies all the time and admire. Its one of the mosthow many plots are there? Romance and adventure, thats about it. Most of the adventure genre is, well, theres some enemy thats lurking in some formit could be human, it could be alien and someone rises up to go and confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story. If you don't have that in your own life, you play a video game where that's happening, or you watch a movie where that's happening, or you read a book where thats happening. It captures you, even if you're atheistic and your only religion is Star Wars. It still captures your imagination. You act like someone whos possessed by religious fervor when you line up for three days to be the first one into the theatre and all the while claiming that youre atheistic to the core.

Its hard to get a grip on what "without form and void" exactly means. I can give you another kind of example of how you would experience the formless chaos of potential in your own lives, and even how the order that you currently inhabit can dissolve into that. In Dante's Inferno, he outlined the levels of hell. Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constituted evil in this representation. It's a work of psychology, and hes thinking, well, there are various ways to behave reprehensibly, but there's a hierarchy of reprehensible behaviour, and there's something absolutely the worst at the bottom. Dante believed that it was betrayal. I think thats right, because one of the things that enables long-term, peaceful cooperation between people is trust. I would also say that trust is the fundamental natural resource.

There's been some very good books written on the economic utility of trust. Societies where the default economic presupposition between trading partners is trust tend to be rich, even if they don't have any natural resources. You can see that, for example, with what happened with eBay, which I think was kind of a miracle. What should have happened with eBay was that you sent me junk and I sent you a cheque that bounced, and that was the end of eBay. But that isn't what happened. The default transaction on eBay was so honest that the brokersyou could hire brokers, to begin with. I can't remember what they were called, exactly, but you could pay someone a fee so that they would guarantee the transaction. You wouldnt send me junk and Id actually send you a payment, and wed pay 10 percent for someone to guarantee that. The default trade was so honest that those things vanished right away. That meant that all this frozen capital, roughly speaking, which were all the junk that people had lying around that someone else might want, instantly became money. The only reason that worked is that people trusted one another. Trust is an unbelievably powerful economic force, maybe the most powerful economic force.

Anyways, part of the reason for having a relationship predicated on trust is that trust is what enables us to look at each other without running away screaming. What I mean by that is that, if I trust you, then I dont have to take into account how complicated you are, because youre horribly complicated. A chimpanzee full of snakes: thats what a human being is. As long as youll do what you say youll do, then I can take you at your word, and your word simplifies you. You can take my word, and my word simplifies you, and then we can act like we understand each other, even though we dont.

But then, if that trust is betrayed, then all the snakes come forth very, very rapidly. All of you, I suspect, have been betrayed in one way or another. If you're in a relationship with someone and you trust them, then you make certain assumptions about the past, and you make certain assumptions about the present, and you make certain assumptions about the future, and everythings stable. Youre standing on solid ground and the chaosit's like you're standing on thin ice. The chaos is hidden; the shark beneath the waves isn't there. Youre safe; youre in the lifeboat. But the instant the person betrays you If you're in a intimate relationship and the person has an affair, and you find out about it, one moment you're in one place where everything is secure, because you predicated your perception of the world on the axiom of trust, and the next secondreally, the next secondyoure in a completely different place. Not only is that place different right now, but the place you were years ago is different, and the place you're gonna be in the future years hence is different.

All of that certainty, that strange certainty that you inhabit, can collapse into incredible complexity. If someone betrays you, you think, well, ok, who were you? Because you aren't who I thought you were, and I thought I knew you. But I didn't know you at all, and I never knew you. All the things we did together, those werent the things that I thought were happening. Something else was happening, and you are someone else, and that means I'm someone else, because I thought I knew what was going on, and clearly I dont. Im some sort of blind sucker, or the victim of a psychopath, or someone whos so naive that they can barely live. I don't understand anything about human beings, and I don't understand anything about myself, and I have no idea where I am now. I thought I was at home, but Im not. Im in a house, and it's full of strangers. I don't know what Im going to do tomorrow, or next week, or next year. All of that certainty, that habitable certainty, collapses right back into the potential from which it emerged. That's a terrifying thing. That's a journey to the underworld, from a mythological perspective.

That is really something worth knowing, because journeys to the underworld are extraordinarily common in mythological storieslike the hobbit going out to find Smaug, the dragon, and get the gold, is the journey into the underworld. Journeys to the underworld happen all the time. Modern people don't understand what the underworld is, except that weve all been there and we go there all the time. We go there every time the solidity and stability of the world, that weve erected at least partly through our speech, is shattered because some sort of snake appears. That's another way of thinking about it. Its a really good way of thinking about it, because no matter how carefully constructed a little habitable area that surrounds you, there's always something you didn't take into account. Theres always something that can pop up its head and do you in, and make you aware of your mortality and age you, or even kill you.

That's the permanent situation of life, which is part of the reason why I think the story of Adam and Eve is archetypal: it's because we do inhabit walled gardens. A walled garden is half structure and society, and half nature. Thats what the walled garden is. A walled garden is a place of paradise, warmth, love, and sustenance, but it's also the place where something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it. I think part of the reason that story exists at the beginning of this collection of books is because it explains the eternal situation of human beings. Were always in that situation. Were in a walled gardenor we bloody well hope we are but there's always a snake. Its even worse because, if there is a snake, were exactly the sort of creatures that are going to do nothing but go and interact with that snake the second that we can manage it. Its definitely the case that, if you want a human being to muck around with something, the best thing to do is to tell them not to ever do it, not to have anything to do with it. This is, of course, something you know if you have teenagers, or even children, or if you know anything about yourself or your partner.

These stories are trying to express what you might describe as an unchanging, transcendent reality. It's something like whats common across all human experience, across all time. Thats what Jung essentially meant by an archetype. You can say, well, we tend to think what we see with our senses is real, and of course thats true. But what we see with our senses is whats real that works at the timeframe that we exist in. We see things that we can touch and pick up. We see tools, essentially, that are useful for our moment to moment activities. We don't see the structures of eternity, especially not the abstract structures of eternity. We have to imagine those with our imagination. That's partly what these stories are doing. Theyre saying, theres forms of stability that transcend our capacity to observe, which is hardly surprising. We know that if were scientists, because were always abstracting out things that we cant immediately observe. But there are metaphysical, or moral realities, or phenomenological realities, that you can't see in your life by observing them with your senses. You can imagine them with your imagination, and sometimes the things that you imagine are more real than the things that you see. Numbers are like that, for example.

Theres endless examples of that. I would sayand this is also a good way of thinking about fictiona good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. Its distilled reality, even though, in some sense, it never happened. Its like, well, it depends on what you mean by "happened." Its a pattern that repeats in many, many places with variation. You extract out the central pattern. The pattern purely never existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled the pattern out from all those examples means that you extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Evewhich we'll talk about in quite a bit of detail todayhas been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true.

I can give you another brief example. People have a lot of guilt. Theres a line in social psychology that claims that most people feel that they're better than other people. I just don't buy that. That isn't what Ive seen in my life. Maybe Im a bit biased because Im a clinical psychologist and I see more people who are overtly suffering, maybe, than people do in general. Although, I'm not so sure about that, because you don't have to scratch very far beneath the surface of most peoples lives before you find something truly tragic. And I don't mean the sort of tragedy that you whine about. I mean, your mother has Alzheimers, or your best friend committed suicide, or you have a close relative with cancer, or you have a sick child. Theres something wrong with you, because almost everyone has at least one really terrible thing wrong with them. If you dont, hey, you will.

That tragic sense of being is there with people all the time. Its also the case that, in my experience, I rarely meet someone who says, hey, Im doing everything I possibly can. Im a hell of a guy, and I can't see how I could possibly improve. You meet someone like that and you think theyre narcissistic, and youre right. Most people don't feel that way. They feel like they could do a hell of a lot better than they are. Theyre quite acutely aware of their faults, and they don't feel that they're what they should be. What happens in the story of Adam and Eve, as well, is that, when people become self-consciousat least that's how it looks to methey get thrown out of paradise. Then theyre in history, and history is a place where there's pain in child birth, where youre dominated by your mate, and where you have to toil like mad, like no other animal, because youre aware of the future. You have to work and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future, constantly, and you know youre going to die. You have all that weight on you, and to me, again, thats justHow can anything be more true than that? As far as I can tell, thats just how it is, unless you're naive beyond comprehension. There's something about your life that is echoed in that representation.

Section III
TIMESTAMP
Were such strange creatures. We don't seem to really fit into being, in some sense, and thats also what's expressed in the notion of the fall. The existentialists said that people feel like they have a debt that they have to pay off to existence for the crime of their being. Maybe it's because were acutely aware that we have to offer something of value to people around us, so that they can tolerate us while were going about our business. But it seems deeper than that. Its that human beings seem to exist in a post-cataclysmic world. Thats exactly what's represented in Genesis. It's very interesting because, in the Adam and Eve story, there's two catastrophes. Theres the catastrophe that occurs when Adam and Eve wake upwhich well talk about in detailbecome self-conscious, and know that they're naked. "Their eyes are opened." Thats the terminology that's used, and to have your eyes opened means to have an increment in consciousness, essentially, because eyes are associated with consciousness for human beings. Were intensely visual animals, and so the metaphor of having your eyes opened is the same as the metaphor of coming to consciousness.

As soon as Adam and Eve come to consciousness, they realize they're naked, and the classic interpretation of that is that it has something to do with sexual sin. I don't believe that. I dont believe that's what it means, although there are elements about that that are relevant. It's more like a dream that youre naked on a stage in front of people. Thats not a sexual dream, unless you're some kind of strange exhibitionist, right? You want to cover yourself up and get the hell off that stage as fast as possible. To be naked in front of a crowd is to have the judgement of the social world focused on your self-evident inadequacies. That makes people self-conscious, and that's a real human state. Its associated with neuroticism in the Big Five trait model.

People don't like that at all: they don't like having their fragility and vulnerability exposed to the group. It's one of the two major fears of people. One is social humiliation, and the other is something like mortality and death. Your typical agoraphobic, for example, gets to have both those fears at the same time, because sheit's usually a shetends to believe shes going to have a very spectacular and exhibitionistic heart attack in a public place and make a terrible fool of herself while shes dying. That's a good example of the two archetypal fears that characterize human beings.

I said that Id try to approach these stories as if I didn't know what they were about, because that seemed right to me. Everything about them is mysterious. Why we have them is mysterious, and what the hell youre all doing here is mysterious. Carl Jung was very, very helpful in this. He faced these stories with a beginners mind and presumed there was something to them that he didn't understand, given that they were at the very bloody bottom of our civilization, which is historically perfectly clear. They came out of the mists of time, and he wasnt satisfied with the Freudian idea that God was just the Father the Marxist idea that religion was the opiate of the masses. It's like, if religion was the opiate of the masses, then communism was the methamphetamine of the masses, I can tell you that.

Youve been betrayed by someone, and so you fall into that underworld of doubt about everything. It's a serious place, to be in that underworld, because not only do you not know where you came from, or who you are, or where youre goingThats bad enough. Thats the underworld itself, but there's a subdivision of the underworld, the worst suburb, which is what I think hell is, essentially, from the metaphysical perspective. If someone really cuts you off at the knees, especially if they do it in a malevolent way If you're gonna be betrayed, and you really want to be betrayed properly, you want to be betrayed by someone whos really out to hurt you. They werent just being stupid. They were after you, for whatever reason. You plunge into that underworld space, and thats also when you start to nurse feelings of resentment, aggrievement, murder, and homicide and even worse.

If people are betrayed enough, they start to obsess about the utility of being itself, and perhaps go to places that no one would ever want to go, if they were in their right mind. They develop and nurse fantasies of the ultimate revenge. That's a horrible place to be. Thats hell, as far as I can tell. Thats why hell has always been a suburb of the underworld: if you get plunged into a situation that you don't understand, and things are not good for you anymore, its one step from being completely confused to being completely outraged and resentful, and then it's only one step from there to be really looking for revenge. That can take you places that, merely to imagine properly, can be traumatic. Ive seen that happen with people many times. I think that anybody who uses their imagination on themselves can see how that happens. I don't imagine there's a single person in the room that hasnt nursed fairly intense fantasies of revenge, at least at one point in their life, and usually for what appear to be good reasons. Its no picnic to get betrayed, thats for sure. It can shake your faith in being. But, if it shakes it so badly that you turn against being itself, thats certainly no solution, that's for sure. All it does is make everything that's bad even worse.

"And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness." Thats another fundamental separation: light, and darkness. Those are, in some sense, two of the fundamental elements of our conscious being. When it's light, were awake and conscious, because were diurnal animals. When its night, well, then were asleep. Our existence is bounded by light and darkness. Were up and alert when it's light. That's partly because were highly visual animalsunlike most animals, because most animals use smell. We use vision. Were very strange that way, and vision is associated with enlightenment, illumination, the breaking of the dawn, the coming of the new day, and all of that. For light to be created is associated, in some sense, with the emergence of conscious being. Thats another echo of that notion. The particular phrasing of the story, also, is important because its, again, that God "said." Thats the use of the word, or the active element of the structure that gives order to chaos. It's like the spirit of the structure manifests itself and produces the fundamental divisions of experience. Thats whats being represented here.

"And God separated the light from the darkness. God call the light day, and the darkness he called night." And, again, the fact that things are named is also very important. You see this later with Adam, because God gives Adam the job of naming all the animals. Its sort of like the animals don't actually exist until theyre named. That's another indication of the authors of the Bible attempting to come to terms with the fact that our cognitive faculties and our ability to speak have something to do with the way that we cast chaotic potential into actuality. We can't really get a grip on something before we have a name for it, which is why, for example, you all have names. Everything that you encounter has to have a name, because before it has a name, it's just part of the blurry background. You could say it exists before it has a name, and that's true, but it's also true that it doesn't exist before it has a name. As soon as you give something a name, its nature changes. Youve transformed it into something that's not so much mere potential anymore. Its, at least, on its way to being actuality, and to being a tool. And so the act of naming is repeated continually in the first chapters of the Bible. The reason for that is this continued emphasis on the importance of consciousness, conscious articulation, and speech.

Speech is really something that does separate us in an important way from animals. We havent got very far teaching animals how to speak. The best weve managed, so far, is with grey African parrots. There's one of them that got up to a four-year-old level. Thats mind-boggling, because how big is the brain of a parrot? Its like that big, and that bloody thing could talk, so that shows you how much we know about brains. We tried to teach chimpanzees to talk. They could kind of get somewhere with sign language, especially if you started when they were young, but they don't have the capacity for language like we do. They were never able to really pass it on to the next generation, which is, obviously, a critical element of really having that ability.

As human beings, weve used our linguistic capacity to parse up the world in a new way, and to conceptualize it in a new way. You can say that were just like ants, on this little, trivial planet out on the edge of one of a hundred million galaxies, and that whats happening here has no cosmic significance, but thats an arbitrary proposition. Were very complicated things, and whatevers going on, on this planet, has to do with conscious reality. The transformations of consciousness, for all we know, might be the most important things that happen everywhere.

Theres no reason to consider consciousness a trivial phenomena. Its taken 3.5 billion years for you to develop the brain that youve developed. Human beings are amazing creatures. Just a casual walk through YouTube, and all those crazy kids that climb cranes and do that..whats that calledYea, parkour. Man, that stuffs unbelievable. Human beings are crazy, crazy animals. There's almost nothing we can't do. Im very loa the to assume that the transformations of consciousness that are described in the early stories in the Biblical accounts are somehow cosmically trivial. It doesn't strike me that way, and it's certainly not self-evident. Even if they are cosmically trivial, and the rocks don't care what you think, well, who cares what the rocks think? First, they don't think, so I don't see why that's exactly relevant. Even if its all the same to the cosmoswhich is something that I doubtits certainly not just all the same to you, because your consciousness has a quality, and it matters.

Heidegger is a philosopher whose writing influenced me post hoc. I recreated some of the things that he had talked about in the 30s before I knew much about him. But one of the things that Heidegger said was that the fundamental element of human being, of human phenomenology, was care. He said that's the basic essence of your being, that you care about things, either negatively or positively. To not care about something, or to hate it, is still to be involved in care. Even if the cosmos itself is neutral with regards to our existence, were not. And were the only things that we know of that are conscious, and so, well, we might as well go with that. Theres no reasonsee, I can't help but think that the constant attempts by people to trivialize the nature of their own consciousness has a dark side. I'm a psychoanalyst, so I always think that way.

First of all, if you as a being don't matter, then you don't have to do anything. It's a great justification for total lack of responsibility, and that really twigs something for me. People who are bent, lets say, or vengeful, or angry, are always looking for a reason why they don't have to be responsible for anything. Plus, its a lot easier. The notion that consciousness is trivial immediately allows you to wander down that path, and so Im skeptical of those claims. I also think there's a deep hatred of humanity that underlies those claims, as well.

Ive heard that radically clueless environmentalists say things like, "the planet would be better off without people on it," which is something thatYou just cannot say that. If you say that and listen to yourself, you should go to a monastery for like three years and never say a word, and have a shower every 10 minutes until youve learned your lesson properly. You can't utter a more genocidal phrase than that. And, of course, you always do it in a display of your care for the world. Its like, well, if we just didn't have any peopleWell, well just line them all up and shoot them with machine guns. Its really sickening. Its appalling, and there's a hatred for humanity that's at the bottom of it. You can kind of understand why, because were messy, we don't clean up after ourselves, were like raping the rainforests and that sort of thing. But I do have some sympathy for people, because were hell on mother nature, but she certainly returns the favor.

That's a good thing to remember. A lot of what were doing is just bloody well trying to exist with a relative minimum of pain. Were doing our best to get as good at doing that as fast as we can. Thats not an easy thing. There are lots of us, and life is bloody complicated. Again, if you scratch just beneath the surface of people and this is something thats always, to me, been kind of a miracleyou find they're out doing their job, and maybe theyre doing a good job at it, like some emergency room nurse. God, there's a job for you. Or maybe they work in palliative care. You talk with them and you find out that theyve got like four serious problems in their family, and maybe theyre diabetic, and yet they haul themselves out of bed in the morning and go take care of dying people. Its like, good God! People deserve a bit of respect for struggling forward and not always trying to make the planet a worse place when theyre beset on all sides, constantly, by an unending series of tragedy. Youd think we could have a little bit of sympathy for ourselves as a consequence of that. Were not all rapacious, greedy monsters who are bent on just devouring everything in our path. It's a little bit more complicated than that.

Lets go to the next part of this. "And God said, let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the expanse, and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day." That doesn't make any sense at all, really. I think I told you a little about this before. The world thats being created, in this particular account, is a phenomenological world. Theres a disc of land, because if you go out in a field and you look around, you're on a disc of land. Thats pretty obvious. And then there's a dome on top thats more or less held up by the mountains. Rain comes down, so there's water above the dome. Where else would the rain come from? Underneath the ground, theres fresh water. You can drill down and find that. And then, around that, theres salt water. Thats the world. It's kind of an empirical world, because if youre a child and you just go out in a field and look at the world, thats sort of what it would be like. And so thats the world thats been created.

One of the things that is worth thinking aboutthis is something Carl Jung was very interested inis that these old descriptions are half geographical and empiricalbased on observation and half psychological. One of the things Jung was interested in, for example, was astrology, but mostly for psychological reasons. There are stars up in the dome, and then, when you look at the stars, you can imagine the shapes of the stars. That helps you orient yourself, because as soon as you can see shapes in the the stars, you can recognize the constellations, and you can orient yourself at night. But then the constellations become Gods, say, and then the Gods turn into a drama. The drama comes from within. Its the projection of imagination. When Jung was analyzing astrology, he was analyzing psychology. He saw the astrological narrative as the projection of the human imagination onto the cosmos. The same thing is the case with these stories. The world they describe is not the natural world, like a scientist would describe it, because these people werent scientists. They didn't have the technology and the tools. For them, it was the world. For us, its the way they saw the world.

We share that psychology, to a large degree, with those people. It's interesting to know what the geographical substrate is, so that you kind of understand the stories. I like this picture. From a psychological perspective, it's a very famous picture. Basically, what you have here is the world as we know it. Theres the dome with the sun and the moon on it, and the stars. If you look outside what you know, then youre out into this cosmic space. Those are like the wheels of the planets and the music of the spheres. Thats the ever-present explorer whos gone beyond the domain that he can understand and is peering out into the unknown. It's a psychological picture, because you do know some things, and then outside of that there are things you don't know. When youre feeling brave, you put a foot or two out where you don't understand. Theres frontier everywhere. If youre feeling heroic and you want to do something for the world, and you want to expand what you understand, you poke your head through what you know and you take a look at whatever structure is out there.

Hes pretty smart, because most of him is still where its safe. I would say thats a good thing, because if you jump right out there, well, then maybe you fall off the edge of the earth, and I wouldnt precisely recommend that, especially if you do it accidentally. To me, this is a recreation of the Daoist yin and yang symbolserpents, reallywith the white paisley, here. Thats what you know. The dark paisley, there, is the unknown. The right place to be is right on the line between them, because youve sort of got one foot where you understand. That gives you security, but it's kind of dull because, hey, you know everything that's going on. That isn't what people are like. They don't want just security.

I love what Dostoevsky said in Notes from the Underground. Its a great, great book. It was an early criticism of the notion of a political utopia. He said, look, if you gave people everything that they wanted they had nothing to eat but cake and nothing to do but sit in warm pools and busy themselves with the continuation of the species the first thing they would do was go half insane and smash everything up, just so that something they didn't expect would happen, so that theyd have something interesting to do. It's so right. The utopian notion that if you just had all the material stuff you wanted that youd beWell, what would you be? What would you do? Youd just sit on the couch and watch TV? I mean, youd be I dont know what youd be. Youd be cutting yourself just for entertainment in no time flat, and that's the sort of thing that people do.

Were not adapted for security and utopia. Were adapted for a certain amount of security, because we are vulnerable, but mostly we want to have one foot out where we don't know what the hell is going on. Thats where youre alert and alive and tense, and with it. I believe that it actually has something to do with the hemispheric structure of the psychology of your brain, because the right hemisphere looks roughly adapted to what you dont know and the left hemispherethis is an oversimplification, but a useful oneis adapted to the world that you do know. The right place for you to be is halfway between them, and you can tell that.

You know that sense of active engagement you have in the world when things are working well for you? Youre alert and on top of things and engaged, and you dont have much of a sense of time. The sense of the tragedy of life sort of recedes. Thats when youve got one foot where its secure and one foot out in the unknown. Your brain signals to you that you're in the right place by making what youre doing meaningful. That sense of meaning is actually a neurophysiological signal that youve got the forces of the cosmos properly balanced in your being at that moment. Thats why it feels so good. What else could it possibly be? Our brain is capable of looking beyond our vision. Thats what its for. There's no reason to assume that that sense of engagement is anything but a real signal. You can reduce it. You could say, well, the problem with being where you knowonlyis that you dont know everything, and that's going to be a problem in the future.

The problem with being where you know nothing is that its just too much. You go into panic mode because anything can happen there, and you cant handle it. Youve got to mediate between those two things. You want to be secure enough so that your physiology isnt revving out of control, and you want to be out there in the unknown enough so that you keep updating yourself constantly, constantly, constantly. Thats the place where information flows maximized. You know that because thats where you are when you're having a really interesting conversation with someone, or youre gripped by a book, or youre really into a movieor maybe something that you do apart from your work, or maybe even in your work. You're into it, and thats because you are in the right place at the right time, and your whole nervous system is signally that to you. I would say thats the sort of place that you should be all the time. Of course, you can't be, because no ones perfect. But thats the recreation of paradise on earth, something like it. You are in the right place at the right time, when that is happeningsubject to certain restrictions that we can talk about later. Well, that's what this guys doing. That's what I would say is akin to the action that God is taking when hes transforming the chaos of potential into habitable being. Its the sort of thing that human beings are supposed to act out.

Section IV
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"And God said, let the waters under heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called the seas. And God saw that it was good." Well, that's an interesting thing, too. Theres a play written by a German named Goethe. I can never say that properly. Its Johann von Goethe. I can't say it, but he wrote this play called Faust. He wrote one part of it when he was quite young, and he wrote Faust II when he was quite old. He has a character in there, Mephistopheles, and Mephistopheles is the devil. He actually has the devil explain himself, twice, basically using the same words, which I really like. It was very profound, and, basically, Goethes Mephistopheles says hes the adversary of the word. Thats a good way of putting it, because thats how it works out mythologically. Hes the figure behind the snake in the Garden of Edenwhich is something well talk about more but he has a sophisticated philosophy. Hes not just some random troublemaker. Hes got a deep philosophy, and his philosophy is quite straightforward and compelling. Its compelling, and people are gripped by it quite oftenfar more often than they think.

His philosophy is, well, look around at the world. Its like Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov, when hes trying to disabuse his younger brother of being a Christian monk. Mephistopheles says, look at the world. I mean, you look around the world, it's nothing but a blood bath. Its suffering everywhere. Everything eats everything and people die terribly. Theyre cruel to one another, and the whole mess is nothing but a constant hall of terrible carnage and ruin and wreck. He says, youd be better if it never existed at all. That's a very interesting idea, and Ive seen that in people many times. Thats something that comes to mind when someone is in the depths of despair. Theyve been betrayed, and they wander into the wrong division of the underworld. If you have a very sick child, for example, or maybe your whole family is suffering, as whole families do sometimes, an ideas going to come to you: good God, who put this mess together? Is it really worth it? Is it really worth the suffering? Suicidal people say, no, enough of this.

You have to be pushed a long way, generally speaking, before youll actually commit suicide. You have to be in very, very desperate straits. Your answer under those conditions is that being is such that it would be better if it had never been. It's a very terrible philosophy, I believe, because I think what happens, if you act it out, is that you make the very things that led you to despair far worse. If it's reasonable to draw logical conclusions that suffering should justify your desire to make being end, the answer to that can't be to produce more suffering. That just doesn't make sense. My observation has been that people who act out the Mephistophelian philosophy inevitably make suffering far worse. That raises the other spectre of, well, do they want being just to cease? Or are they just out for bloody revenge, at any cost? My conclusion has always been that the true motivation is, Im going to make everyone suffer as much as I possibly can before I say goodbye to this place. If you read the writings of the kids who shot up the Columbine High School, theyll tell you exactly that. Thats precisely and exactly what they concluded, and then acted out.

But, in this, God says that it was good. Ive thought about that a lot, because the question is, well, is something better than nothing? That's a really good question. Ive thought about two things in relationship to that. One is, maybe it depends on how it is that you are, right? It could be that there are ways of being in the world that justify the world, and there are ways of being in the world that make the world unbearable. I believe that the narrative that runs through the Biblical stories is precisely a dialog between those two types of being. The optimistic part of the story is that being requires limitation and suffering there's no escape from that but there are modes of being that allow that to be, perhaps, even more than tolerable. Perhaps there are modes of being that allow that to be good.

It's a straight and narrow road; its a very difficult road to tread. I think that's possible. Im not an optimist by nature, but that's one of the things that Ive conceptualized and read about that I actually find plausible. Its certainly the caseeveryone knows this that there are ways that you can act to make things worse. Everyone knows that. And so, if that's the case, there has to be the opposite, right? There has to be ways you can act that can make things better. Obviously, you can act in ways that make things way worse. The question is, are there ways that you can act that make things really much better? I think thats the question: can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we have the being that requires limitation and suffering and also simultaneously transcend that by our mode of being? I believe that the Biblical stories are one of the human imaginations best attempts to address and answer that question. Thats what the entire story is about. The first of it is the catastrophe of the collapse of self-consciousness, and the entrance of humanity into history. The rest of it is, ok, now were in history; now we know that were going to die, we know about our mortality, and were conscious of our own being. Is there a mode of acting in the world that allows that to be justifiable? Or, maybe even more, that allows that to be triumphant? Maybe its worth finding out.

Thats the other thing that's so interesting: youve got this short time on earth, and there's lots of things that are very, very difficult to contend with. You have the problem of tolerating yourself, even, and all your insufficiency. One of the things that seems to be the case is that, if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being, if you attempt to do that, then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that youre insufficient and mortal, and bound by tragedy. I believe that, and I believe people believe that.

If you watch how people act, they look for people they admire and they do admire people. Its a natural phenomena, and you see it starting with children. Children admire, and then they imitate. We look to people who seem to be able to bear the burden of being in a heroic manner. Theres something inside of us that calls to that, makes us want to mimic that and to follow it. I think thats the deepest and most profound of instincts. I think its right, and even if youre not so convinced on the positive endbecause it's more difficult to be convinced of the positiveyou can certainly be convinced on the negative end. There are ways of being that are so brutal and so reprehensible that merely to read about that is enough to traumatize you. I think that, if youre a person who hasnt lost their soul completely, you can't help but shudder away from stories like that.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the person who did the most to unmask the absolute horrors of communist totalitarianism. He believed that Nuremberg's judgements were the most important event of the 20th century. That was the judgement at the end of World War II that there were certain actions that no one was to undertake, no matter what their cultural background was. They were, let's say, crimes against humanity that there was such a thing as universal evil. You can debate thatand people certainly have but the problem is, if you debate that, then you have to say that there are conditions under which the sorts of things that happened, say, in the concentration campswhich would be the gassing of children after their torture, and their forcible removal from their parents, and all the terrible things that went along with thatis just ok; its just an opinion; it's just something that happened, and there are circumstances under which that's justifiable. Theres no transcendent good and evil underneath that argument; its only a matter of practicality. It seems to me that thats not the right conclusion to draw. Thats how it seems to me, and thats what Solzhenitsyn concluded when he looked at the Nuremberg trials.

The notion that it was goodWell, even if you don't believe thatbecause it's not as good as it could be I would say its incumbent on you, as someone who participates in the process of furthering creation, to act as if it could be good, at least, and to further that with all of your efforts. Partly because, what the hell else do you have to do that could possibly be better than that? What could possibly justify your existence more than that? And you know perfectly well that, if you have any sense at all, if you think clearly about it at all, that thats what you want to see in everyone else. Youre desperate, and maybe you're cynical, and now and then someone appears that acts, at least momentarily, like a light in the darkness. That lifts your spirit up and gives you a little bit of hope, and maybe helps you continue on. That's obviously a call to being. Its a statement from your own soul that says, thats how you should be. Maybe, then, we get a chance to participate in what is good.

"And God said, let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to it's kind, on the earth. And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to it's kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day." I like that. These old pictures are interesting, because if you look, here, you got this halo around Gods head, and youve got this split, again, between day and darkness. Gods right on the border between the two. Thats the sun. A halo is the sunor the moon, sometimes. Its like a coin: you have the queens head on the coin, and thats the queen on the moon. Its silver, and it's a symbol of value because the queen is sovereign and the moon is the sovereign of the night sky. Gold, of course, is the sun. Gold is pure because it doesn't mix with other metals. It shines like the sun, so it partakes of the sun. God partakes of the sun, because theres something about whatever he represents that's associated with consciousness, illumination, and enlightenment. It's that force of illumination and enlightenment that's right on the border between these two sets of phenomena, and thats kind of what that pictures trying to represent. Its a metaphor thats one way of thinking about it but it does, again, allude to the underlying idea that theres something about consciousness thats integral to being itself.

"And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years." Thats a remarkable bit of writing, too. You just think about how bloody long it took our cavemen ancestors to look at the night sky and start to figure out that there are repeating patterns, across years, that enable them to mark the seasons. I just can't imagine how they figured that out the degree of careful observation that it took I mean, we know people figured that out a long time ago because those great megalithic monuments, like Stonehenge, seem to be astronomical observatories. You see the same thing with the pyramids. People were looking at the damned sky, trying to figure outlooking at God, because, you know, thats kind of what youre doing when youre looking at the night sky: trying to figure out the regularity, order in the universe. Thats all compacted into this little line.

"And let them be for signs and for seasonsbe oriented by the stars." Amazing. "And let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth. And it was so. And God made the two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the nightand the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night." So theres an idea of sovereignty there: that theres an analogy between the ruler and the heavenly bodies that light up the darkness. Thats a really interesting idea, too, because it took us a long time to come to terms withas I mentioned last week the idea of sovereignty itself, and to decide what constituted valid power. It's not power: it's authority and competence, and not power. Its not dominance, either. Its more sophisticated than that, because the people that you want to rule aren't people who have power. Power just means I can hurt you, and you can't hurt me back. That's not what you need from a ruler, even though it devolves into that from time to time. What you want is the kind of wisdom that illuminates the darkness. To associate the sovereign with the heavenly kings of the light is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, from a metaphoric perspective. Thats an ancient, ancient idea, and another example of how were grounded in a dream.

"And God set them in the expanse of heaven to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that is was good." Another emphasis on the fact that something is better than nothing. Maybe you could consider that the declaration of the cosmos is something like, well, its better that there's something than nothing. How do you know that? I guess the answer to that is there's something instead of nothing. I know thats not proof, but its still a remarkable fact that it happens to be the case, and no one does know why that is. Maybe we should go along with it, see what we can do with it, and see how we could make it better. We certainly could make it better if we were really committed to it, and we shook our resentment, and our anger, and our hatred. I know theres reason for all of that, because people do suffer terribly, but God only knows what being could be like if we all contri buted to it to the best of our ability. God only knows what we could conquer, and what sort of magnificent cities we could produce, and what things we could eradicate from the suffering of the world.

Theres this guy I read aboutthis is amazing. I don't remember his name, but he found out about this worm that was called the Guinea-worm. The Guinea-worm is a really horrible thing. You can look it up, if you want, but Ill tell you a little bit about it, even though it's very distasteful. A Guinea-worm is a parasite that lives in Africa. It burrows under your skin, and it's quite long. It's about that long, and its about that wide. Itll burrow underneath your leg, and then it's in there. Maybe it pokes its little head out a hole, which is one of its delightful tendencies. If you want to pull it out, it breaks, because otherwise youd just pull it out and it would be dead. It doesn't like that, and so it just breaks off. Many, many people had this horrible disease. Well, you can't imagine what that would be like. Youre part of the one percent and you live in North American, and thank God for that. You don't even want to think about it, let alone have it. He went to Africa and wiped the damn thing out. Its like, wow, great. It seems to me the planets a lot better off without any Guinea-worms on iteven though thats Guinea-worm genocide talk. Im still pretty happy about it.

That was one guy who thought, well, we don't need these things. Yea, fair enough. Good for him. He can die thinking that the worlds a better place than when he first popped out, so good for that. I think thats a good aim: to think that, when youre on your death bed, you can look back and think, theres a little less suffering from here on out than there would be if I never existed. That's a lot better than the opposite, because it's certainly possiblesay, if you're Stalinto ensure that there's a hell of a lot more suffering than there would have been if you hadnt lived. We perfectly well know that people can manage that, and that many, many people try to do nothing but manage precisely that. It's hard for me not to think about that as some sort of metaphysical evil. I think it's the right way to look at it.

You have the sun, here, and the moon, here, as far as I can tell. Hah. Actually, I think this is the moon, over here. Hah. Thats part of the Sistine Chapel, which is an absolutely remarkable. Part of the reason why Im teaching about the Biblical stories is because the humanities have been decimated so badly. Again, I think that has to do with resentment and hatred, more than anything else. But I don't really think you can get a grip on the humanities and what they have to offer without knowing the Biblical stories, because theyre the dream out of which the humanities emerged. Unless you have that background knowledge, that dream, then theres all sorts of things that are utterly profound that don't open themselves up to you. Dantes Inferno would be one of thoseMiltons Paradise Lost, which is an absolutely amazing piece of work. Milton wrote it because he wanted to justify the ways of God to man. What an ambition that is. I mean, he was serious about that. He took the problem seriously. It's the Mephistophelean problem: well, this is rough business that were involved in, and maybe we should just give it up. I think the world the whole worldwas deciding that in the 1980s, when we were deciding if we were going to engage in the ultimate nuclear catastrophe.

We were very, very close to that, a number of times. I think it was a collective decision, in some sense, on the part of humanity, that we might as well keep the whole awful game going, rather than just demolish it. Again, it's a dream, and trying to explain the nature of being and the nature of evilYou cant crack the damn thing without knowing the underlying stories. Thats really too bad, because its utterly profound. As far as I can tell, you need profound knowledge, because life is actually a profound problem for everyone. I mean, you can shelter back and live a very conservative existence, and, look, more power to you. I understand why you would do that, but it doesn't stop you from having to face the ultimate questions of life. They're right there, in everyones face, at least in some point in your life. It would be better if you could confront them full on, and to deal with them properly, and to be a beacon of strength as a consequence of that.

The humanities is supposed to teach wisdom. Wisdom is what enables you to deal honourably with the tragedy of life. I can't see how you could think that was a bad idea. Theres gonna be times when youre in an emergency room and prone to panic, and to cry, and to break down and to collapseto be of no use to anyone around and that's not the right way to be. The right way to be, in a situation like that, is to be strong and reliable, and I don't think you can do that without being wise. You can't be wise without putting yourself together, without knowing something about where you came from and what you're like. Thats history and the humanities.

This isn't optional. "Man doesnt live by bread alone," and thats exactly the issue here. You see these magnificent works, its not like Michelangelo thought of this literally. He was a genius, for Gods sake, and hes trying to get at that profundity of human culture. I suppose that's why you have this patriarchal figure, here, and the cosmic role that consciousness and tradition plays in being itself. Its ennobling. Religious or not, hundreds of millions of people come from all over the world, to Rome, and go through this tiny chapel to look at this. There's something in it that everyone needs to see. It's not just beautiful. Its more than beauty. Its that which feeds the soul. Everyone feels that, even if they can't explain it.

"And God said, let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens. So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. And God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kindslivestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind."

Kind means kin. To be kind is to treat others as if theyre your kin, and so "according to it's kind. And God saw that it was good." Thats continually represented over and over. "God said." Thats the thing that calls being into existence. "And God said it was good." Thats the fundamental judgement about the nature of reality. One of the things that happens in the translationin the movement, let's say, from the Old Testament to the New Testamentis God is obviously blessing creation in the beginning of this story, and then you have Old Testament God, and don't mess around with him, right, because hell give you a good smiting if you get out of line, theres no doubt about that. Hes kind of an arbitrary character, and lots of modern people think, well, how could you believe in a God like that? When I read that, I think, well, that isnt how the Old Testament people thought. They thought, youd better look the hell out. Life is really difficult, and if you step out of line, youre gonna get flattened. God doesn't care, in some sense, whether you approve of him. Like, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Obviously, you dont approve. Youd better pay attention, though, because otherwise youre gonna be in real trouble. Theres real wisdom in that.

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Nietzsche really admired the Old Testament as a work of literature. He thought that the representation of the divine, as a representation of the essential nature of being, was extraordinarily accurate in its arbitrary and often cruel nature. It wasnt following a morality that human beings could really understand as moral. He thought that was very realistic, and I like that interpretation. But what happens in the New Testament is quite interesting, because there's an insistence, all of a sudden, that youre supposed to act towards God as if hes nothing but good. Thats such a strange thing, because you look at the world and you think, yea, really? Just good, eh? Well, the cancer and the earthquakes is kind of hard to fit into that picture, and the terrible things that happen to children, and all of that, is very difficult to square with the notion of a good God. But then, the underlying idea is that, if you act in that manner, it makes it more likely to be true. Its something like that.

I would consider that, in some sense, an act of both courage and faith. Its like youre going to make the caselike God makes at the beginning of the Bible that being is, in fact, good. You can't see it because, well, you get to see all the things about it that aren't so good. That's not the point. It's a metaphysical presupposition. Its a decision to act that way: Im going to act as if being is good, and to further that. The implicit idea is, well, there isn't any way that you can make things work out better than to do that.

Theres a courageous element to it, which I think is also expressed, to some degree, in the idea of Christs voluntary sacrifice of his own life. His presupposition was something like, Im going to act as if God is good, and Im going to play that out right to the end. That becomes something like a divine pattern. I believe there's wisdom in that because, again, most of the time that Ive been wrestling with this sort of thing, Ive always been looking at the opposite. I havent been studying good: Ive been studying evil, because evil is easier to believe, especially after the 20th century. I think you have to be blind not to think about the things that happened in the 20th century as evil. Some of the things that happened were so brutal that its just absolutely unimaginablewell, unless you imagine itand its right there; its part of the historical record.

I think, well, if theres something thats that terrible, it indicates, as clearly as anything, that theres also something thats its opposite. Thats whatever it is thats the farthest away possible from that outcome. That doesnt mean we can exactly say what it is, because it's easier to grip, in some sense, what it means to torture and break and hurt, and not to be able to conceptualize so clearly how you would have to act if you were acting in the exact opposite manner. But, at least, it implies that it exists.

I see that pattern being laid out in this dream-like manner in the New Testament. It has something to doand this is for surewith the voluntary acceptance of mortality. Thats the poisoned apple, right? The fact that everybody looks forward into the future to know that youre finite, and so is everything that you love. Its very difficult for that not to poison your existence. Well, theres no getting out of it, as far as we can tell, but there might be something like switching your attitude to it. You could say that's the price you paid for being, and the heroic thing to do is to accept that, and to not even accept it grudginglyto say, all right, Im going to go along with that. Im going to accept that, and Im going to act, nonetheless, as if being is good. Then, Im going to see how things turn out. "God saw that it was good." It's an act of courage. Theres an act of courage that's associated with that transformation of attitude. Even with regards to the notion that the world is good, it's a courageous attitude, especially given that theres so much evidence that makes that conclusion difficult to continually draw. But the alternative seems, to me, to be far worse.

Theres God, again, with the sun behind him. Hes associated with the solar consciousness. Hes creating all these strange, wonderful creatures. People say, well, you know, the idea of God as an old man in the sky is primitive. Its much more better to think about it as a"Much more better?" Jesus. Hah. Anyways, its more sophisticated to think of the divine essence as a disembodied spirit, or something like that. But, you know, that's not so obvious either, becauseas I already pointed outthere isn't anything that's more complicated than a human being.

The idea that the divine is something thats at least as complicated as a human being strikes me as something thats actually quite reasonable. I know its a metaphor. Although, I don't know to what degree it is a metaphor, and it's also something that's embodied. Thats also a very interesting notion, because it's become increasingly obvious, as we try to do such things as produce artificial intelligence, that it's very difficult to produce an intelligenceor, perhaps, a consciousness that isn't embodied in some manner. It can't be just a spirit without form. I think thats part of the reason, too, why Christianity put so much emphasis, at the end of time, on the resurrection of the body. Theres a drive to ennoble the idea of the bodynot just the spirit, the consciousness that floats abstractly above the body. You can't just shed that part of you thats heavy and material, so to speak, and leave it behind as if its of no value; you have to ennoble that, as well. That idea is also linked to the representation of God as a human being, and as a wise human being, and as something thats embodied. And so, at least from the metaphorical perspective, I dont think its reasonable just to brush your hands across and say, well, thats primitive. I dont think its primitive, at all.

"And then God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness." And its "our," because this is part of the Priestly story. As I said, theres a number of sources for the Old Testament. In the Priestly versions, if I remember correctly, its Elohim. That may be wrong, doesn't matter, but, precisely it doesn't matter because the notion is that the God whos in the background of this story has a kind of plurality of being. It looks like the idea of monotheism arose with great difficulty, across time, because there are lots of powers. The idea that theres a power of powers was something that wasnt easy for people to figure out. Whats constant across sources of power? Well, some kind of meta-power, but it's hard to figure out what that is. Thats what's being represented by the movement, as far as I can tell, from polytheism to monotheism. Its, first, the observation that there are powers that determine the destiny of people, at least in part, that youre subject to. Then, the idea that there's something common across all those powers that you can represent, partly, with the idea of the sun rising in the morning and fighting it's way out of the darkness at night. Thats associated with consciousness and sovereignty.

One of the things that bothers me about simple-minded atheism and I would say that simple-minded atheism is of the sort that regards these stories as nothing but simple superstitionsis that it's very, very poorly informed. Whatever these stories are, they are not merely simple superstitions. They werent conjured up by some cabal of priests to bamboozle the masseseven though they were used for that purpose, from time to time. It's much, much more complicated than that. They have a very ancient lineage, and theyre tied together with all sorts of other stories. Theres an emergent wisdom in them, and I think the right way to view them is as the birthplace of sophisticated philosophical ideas. You have to wrestle with these stories. I said, already, that Im going to be as rational as I possibly can in my discussion of these stories, and not refer to anything metaphysical except when that's absolutely necessary. Although, I don't want to eliminate the possibility of metaphysical reality, because I think thats premature. But you have to take the stories seriously. If youre going to approach the problem properly, you cant just casually dismiss them. It's not appropriate.

"Let us make man in our image." That's a very interesting idea and, like I said, it's not easy to understand how it was that human beings came up with the idea that us, lowly creatures, were God-like. With the Mesopotamians, for example and the Greeks were like this, toohuman beings werent God-like; they were playthings of the Gods. The Gods just tortured us for their amusement. Love, hatred, anger, and all those powerful forcesWe were just playthings to the Gods; there wasnt anything particularly divine about us. The notion that, in some sense, we partake of the divine is a staggering idea. I don't want to underestimate the difficultly that there was in abstracting that, or the utility of that idea for our current mode of being.

"Let them have domain over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Its interesting that there is more than one creation story in Genesis. In this story, males and females are basically created at the same time. Later, Eve is extracted out of Adamand well talk about that but not here. The two sexes are generated simultaneously, and they both carry within them the divine stamp, which is very egalitarian, very appropriate, and, I think, unbelievably advanced. That's what it looks like to me.

"And God blessed them." Well, that's a good thing. "And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Theres God creating Adam and Eve. Theyre looking pretty happy about the whole thing. Thats Michelangelos famous Sistine Chapel representation. Theres some cool things about this. I mean, you gotta wonderthis is an aside, and I don't know if its a credible aside, but it's an interesting asidewhat the hell is God doing in this thing? I mean, what is this, exactly? Theres been some interesting answers to that, and this is one of them: There was a group of scientists about 20 years ago that remarked on the precise analogy between this structure and the brain bisected down the middle. Of course, Michelangelo was one of the first people who did detailed dissections, and so they felt that Michelangelo had put God inside the brain, for some reason. That seems, to me, to be associated with the notion that theres an analogy or metaphorical identity between the notion of whatever God is and the structures that give rise to consciousness.

Section VI
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I think we really underestimate the degree to which consciousness is both miraculous and not understood. You have what appears to be an entirely material substrate, yet here you are, aware and self-aware, and able to generate the world merely, in some sense, by looking at it. It really is remarkable that consciousness is dependent on something that wells up from deep within that material substrate that we don't understand at all. Its really a crazily remarkable thing. You hear a lot about scientific reductionism, but Ill tell you something that's kind of interesting: the guy that discovered DNAI think it was Watson. It was Watson and Crick, but I dont remember who wrote this book. One of them believed that DNA was so complicated that it had to come from space. He didn't believe it could have possibly evolved on earth. A lot of these people who are used as examples of scientific reductionism aren't like that, at all, when you actually read what they had to say. They were very aware of the limits of their own knowledge.

DNA is something really quite spectacularly remarkable. Its an eternal substance. It's been around for a very long time, and the idea that we understand it is a very stupid idea. I would say that the same thing applies to the brain. Were scratching away at the surface of something we dont understand at all, so its quite interesting. Maybe Michelangelo had enough gall to do that. It's certainly possible. He had enough gall to do dissections when the cost of that was death. He had to rob corpses, essentially, to go and do it. I would say he was not particularly politically correct. So thats kind of interesting, and there's another representation of the same thing, and thats a funny one. I had to throw that in. I dont know how many of you know this, but theres this joke in the atheist community I think it might have been started by Richard Dawkins, but it was just as reasonable to believe in a flying spaghetti monster as it was to believe in God. Thats a flying spaghetti monster, by the way. Thats called Touched by his Noodly Appendage. Its not very sophisticated, but it is funny.

"And God blessed them. And God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in it's fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation."

I like that. I did a lot of coaching work with people who were fairly spectacularly successful. They were usually workaholics: the sort of people who would work 80 hours a week, just nonstop. That's just what they were like. One of the things that we were always trying to figure out was, how much should you work? One answer is, you just work until you die. You just exhaust yourself, and that's not a good idea. And then you have to figure out why that isn't a good idea. Its gotta be something like, you don't want to do so much work that the amount of work you do interferes with the amount of work that you could still do, right? If you work like mad for two weeks and then you have to lie in a hospital bed for a month, that, obviously, isn't very productive. You have to figure out how much you can work diligently, and then how much you have to recuperate so that you can get back up and work again. People have basically settled on something like this, and given it the divine imprimatur that's one way of thinking about itwhich is, well, you can toil away for six daysand no wonder, because you have to work but you should rest at least one day out of seven, because otherwise you dont appreciate life. That might be part of it. Plus, I think it's more a matter of iterability.

One of the things that defines morality is a capacity to repeat something. If something is properly structured in a moral manner, then you can do it over and over and over again without any degeneration. Thats kind of like a relationship. If your relationship is negotiated, you can continue to negotiate it, and then you can have a relationship that lasts a long time. You can do it today, next week, next month, and next year. You can maintain it across time, and this, I would say, is the wisdom thats been garnered over God only knows what period of timeto say, look, even God needed to take a break and appreciate what was going on. Its not such a bad thing for people to follow that pattern. Its a good thing for modern people to know. Even though were very wealthy by historical standards, our capacity to relax isn't exactly what it could be. I think that's really hard on people.

I'm going to go over, again, the idea of the attributes of God. I talked about that a little bit last week, but I want to return to it. I think its worth dwelling on, a little, because were trying to figure out what it is people were trying to formulate when they were formulating these representations. Weve come to the conclusion that there is an attempt to abstract out the nature of power from specific aspects of power, and theres some attempt to associate that with consciousnessas that which gives rise to being itself and theres some attempt to associate that consciousness with something that has a cosmic quality, whatever that might mean. Its a statement that it has a cosmic quality, rather than a discovery. Its a mere statement that theres something about consciousness that has world-generating significance, and also the implication that its associated with human beings, as well. Its a very interesting idea of propositions, and I don't believe that they are simply refutable. Its a perfectly coherent argument, even though it's primarily made metaphorically. Once again, I want to build up the framework of associations around the idea of God.

This is one of the things that Freud did when he was interpreting dreams, and it is quite useful. If someone comes to me with a dream, then I have them tell me the whole dream, and then I get them to repeat it, line by line. Whenever they say a line and theres an object in it, or a person, or something like that, I ask them what that makes them remember, or what that thing means to them, or what comes to mind. Thats the associational technique, and its predicated on the idea that your memory works by associationif youre daydreaming, you go from one thing to another like a conversation does that you can take an idea thats at the centre of a web of associations and, by attracting the associations, you can zero in on what the idea might mean. Jung expanded that by amplifying the dream, by thinking about the narrative, or literary, or mythological similarities that might be associated with the narrative structure of the dream. I think that can be unbelievable useful.

The dream is an idea thats trying to come to birth. Its partly formulated and, if you discuss it and amplify it, you could speed along its transformation into a more articulated idea. With one foot in the unknown, your brain is trying to formulate whats out there in the unknown, and to make it concrete, but it doesn't do that in one fell swoop; it doesn't just take potential and turn it into articulated ideas. It has to dream up whats out there first, project its imagination out there, get a handle on what it might be. Thats represented in the dream, and if you analyze the dream, you can make it more articulate. Thats what were going to do with the attributes of God, to build up the representational structure.

The hypothesis is that God is an abstracted ideal, formulated, in large part, to dissociate the ideal from any particular incarnations, or man, or ruler. The underlying idea is that, when the ruler becomes the ideal, the state turns into Biblical Egypt. The Biblical Egypt is a tyranny. Theres a very, very solid idea in the Old Testament that, I think, took people God only knows how long to figure out: if you confuse the notion of sovereignty with the current sovereign, then your culture immediately degenerates into a totalitarian state and turns to stone. That was deadly, and then you were slaves. The thing was going to collapse, as well. No matter how big and grandiose, as soon as the ruler became the concrete incarnation of the ideal, there was no distinction between the man and the divine notion of the ideal. Then the society was doomed. I think thats true; its as simple as that. I think we saw more than enough evidence of that in the 20th century, and were certainly seeing the same thing repeating itself now. When the ruler becomes the ideal, the state turns into Biblical Egypt, and Biblical Egypt is the archetypal tyranny.

What is God like? From the Christian perspective, theres three elements. One seems to have something to do with tradition, and so thats God the Father. Thats partly the embodiment, I would say, of the human being. That's an ancient, ancient thing. Its also, partly, the embodiment of the tradition of human beings, which is also a very ancient thing, and that's the structure. As I said, it's the structure that consciousness emerges from that enables us to grapple with the unknown as such. And then theres the intermediary between that and Christ thats the Holy Spirit, the bird. That's the spirit in a more abstracted sense. I would say thats probably as close Christianity ever got to the notion of disembodied consciousness, something like that. And then theres the notion of the suffering individual. Thats a very complicated idea. Theres this ideaan old idea, and I believe this was originally a Jewish idea that something with the attributes of Godomniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotencelacks something. It's like a Zen koan. Its a really interesting idea, because what in the world can something like that lack? The idea is limitation. Something thats everything lacks limitation. When I first encountered that, it just blew me away. It was such a brilliant, brilliant realization that there are advantages to not being able to do thingspartly because it gives you something to do. I suppose that's a big part of it.

If you had everything you wanted at every moment at your fingertips, well, theres no story. Its funny because that happened to superman, the cartoon character. By the 1980s, he could juggle planets. He could bounce hydrogen bombs off him and be fine. Everyone got bored because, well, what are you going to do to superman? You lob a hydrogen bomb at him and he brushes it off and combs his hair, and that's the end of that. The whole cartoon series basically died because he didn't have any flaws. Theres no story without the limitation. I think thats an absolutely remarkable idea. Part of the notion of Christand this is something that Ive puzzled over for a long time, and I learned a lot of this from Jungis that there's an idea in Christianity that theres consciousness, which, in some sense, is eternal. It stretches from the beginning of time to the end of time. Its this abstracted notion, but it lacks a certain kind of reality because its not instantiated in a specific time and place in history. And so the idea of the Son, the third part of the Trinityor one of the three parts of the Trinityis the notion that tradition and consciousness also has to be embedded in history, in a particular time and place.

Theres the archetypal embeddedness, and that would be the incarnation. Thats the perfect man who accepts his mortality and acts in a virtuous manner. Its the archetypal story of every individual, as well. Theres a very strong strain in Christianity I would say this is more pronounced in orthodox Christianity that the proper path of life is to take the tradition and the spirit that's associated with consciousness and to act it out in your life, in your own personal life, in a manner that's analogous to the manner in which Christ acted it out in his life. What that means, in part, is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. Thats partly betrayalby friends, by family, and by the state and its partly punishment for sins that you did not commit, as well as the ones you did commit. What the notion is, is that your duty, let's say, and the way to set things right in the cosmos, is to accept that as a necessary precondition for being, and to act virtuously despite that. That's a very, very powerful idea, as far as Im concerned.

The worlds a weird a place, and Ive seen some very strange things in my life. Ive dealt with some people who werent on a good path. One of the things that was really interesting about being around people like that was that it was like they were surrounded by a gravitational field, of sorts Im speaking metaphorically, obviously. Their world view was so warped and twisted that, if you came within contact of them, all of a sudden you started to play a part in their drama. It was almost inevitable: they would manoeuvre and manipulate and interpret in a way that made you into the villain in their story, no matter what it was that you wanted to do. Unless youve encountered something like thatand many of you probably haveyou don't know how powerful a pull that is. Its certainly possible that someone can act in like a gravitational object and bend things around them to fit their unhappy and tragic narrative. Ive seen the opposite, too, where people were aiming upward with the best of their ability and, because of that, they had a positive effect on the people around them. That ordered things around them in profound ways.

The degree to which the cosmos would order itself around you properly if you got yourself together, as much as you could get yourself together, is an open question. I mean, we know that things can go very, very badly wrong if you do things very badly wrong. Theres no doubt about that. But the converse is also true. If you start to sort yourself out properly, you have a beneficial effect on your family. First off, that's going to echo down the generations, but it also spreads out into the community, and we are networked together. Were not associated linearly; we all affect each other. The degree to which acting out the notion that being is good, and the notion that you can accept its limitation, and that you should still strive for virtueit's an open question how profound an effect that would have on the structure of reality if you really chose to act it out. Ive seen things in my life that indicate that I do believe theres a metaphysical aspect to life, as well as the rational, practical element. I think there are times when those two things come together, and Ive seen that happen. I dont think we know the limits of virtue. I dont think we know what true virtue could bring about if we aimed at it carefully and practically. The notion that theres something divine about the individual who accepts the conditions of existence and still strives for the good I think thats an idea thats very much worth paying attention to. I think the fact that people have considered that idea for at least two thousand years quite seriously is also an indication that theres, at least, something to be thought about in relationship to that. Thats kind of the Trinitarian idea.

This is interesting, because you have, here, God the Father, whos coming out of the this strangethis isn't the sky, exactly. You see this very often in these old pictures. Its not exactly the sky. Whatever the heaven was that people believed in, its something that. Its like the sky opens, and theres a dimension beyond the sky. I wanted to show you this, too, just to show you that this isn't only a Western conception. It has something to do with mystical experience. Theres a Bodhisattva. It kinda looks like he has a hat, but that's not a hat: that's a whole bunch of Bodhisattvas, going back to eternity. This hole in the sky, here, is like a hole into time, and these things are recurring across time. Its the eternal recurrence of this redemptive archetype. The sky opens up, and you can see that thing recurring, and recurring, and recurring. Thats the same idea, basically. Thats the Blue Buddha, whos a healing entity, sitting in a mandala, which is like a representation of paradise. Its the same idea: reality opens up and reveals this image of perfection. Its a universal conception and, well, I think its a representation of the possibility of the metaphysical and the physical coming together in some sort of communication. Its something like that, anyways.

You have to remember that theres absolutely no doubt that people have metaphysical and religious experiences. Thats an absolute fact. You can induce them chemically, and you can induce them electrochemically. Lots of people who have epilepsy have epileptic prodromos that are associated with divine enlightenment. Dostoevsky, for example, had epilepsy. That was really, I think, one of the things that made him a great author. Dostoevsky would have this feeling that he was going to have an epileptic seizure. He said that the feeling, for him, was that the world was opening up, and he was becoming more, and more, and more enlightened. He was just on the verge of grasping the essence of existence, and then hed have an epileptic seizure. The subjective feeling was that that much knowledge was just too much for him to bear. You can say, well, that was a neurological abnormality, and fine. But, God, he was Dostoevsky, so you cant just brush that off.

Thats the Trinitarian idea, fundamentally. This notion, here, is the notion that the cross is a funny thing. The cross marks the centre. Its an X, and the X is the centre of the worldlike the X that the cathedral is at the centre of the world. Its where you are. As a consciousness, youre the center of the world. That centre of the world is a place of betrayal and suffering and limitation. Thats exactly what it is, and the question is, given that, and given the fact that you know it, what the hell are you supposed to do about it? I believe thats Goya. What that representation implies is that youre supposed to voluntarily accept that, and then move forward in good faith and with courage. Thats the notion, that youre supported by your tradition, and that's why you need your tradition, too. Thats why you need to be embedded in your tradition, because without that, without the support of your father and I mean that both practically and metaphoricallywithout that behind you, without the knowledge of you as both a biological and a cultural creature, without that depth of knowledge, you don't have the courage to do it, because you don't know what you are or what you could be. Youre a historical creature.

Students ask me, sometimes, why study history? Its like, because history is about you, thats why. History tells you who you are. You can't tell who you are because you live a little while. How the hell can you figure out who you are? You need all this collective wisdom, all this dream-like information, all this mythology, and all this narrative, to inform you about what you are, beyond what you see of yourself. Youre pummelled down, and people pick on you, and there's 50 things about you that are horrible. Youve got a self-esteem problem, and you're sort of hunched over. Youve got all these problems, and so its not easy to see, let's say, the divinity that lurks behind that. Unless youre aware of the heroic stories of the past and the metaphysics of consciousness, I don't think you can have the courage to regard yourself as the sort of creature that can stand up underneath that intense, existential burden and move forward in courage and grace. Of course, thats part of the reason that Im talking about these Biblical stories. Its 9:30, so were going to have to stop.

see also :::

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Biblical_Series

lecture_link:https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/transcripts/biblical-series-ii/

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BS 2 - Genesis 1 Chaos + Order

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*** WISDOM TROVE ***

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