Original subtitles

I started the beginning of the class three months ago

talking to you about what the problem was that I was trying to

address.

And the fundamental problem was the problem of belief systems and the issue

is was what precisely constitutes a belief system

and then a secondary question was why are people so

inclined to even engage in conflict to maintain and expand their belief

systems

then maybe a sub question of that and is there an alternative to conflict with

regards to belief systems and Then the last issue Was something like

well is there a way of judging the relative quality of belief systems?

And so those are all very very complicated questions I mean the first

one is something like How is it possible to understand the structures by which we

orient ourselves in the world?

The second one is something like what's the psychological significance

precisely of those systems? What role does it play in psychological health and

maybe also in social health?

The next one is can you make a non-relativistic case

when you assess an array of different value systems?

and then linked to that is, is it possible to hierarchically organize

value systems in a manner that's justifiable so that something can be

reasonably considered in a superior or subordinate position now the

last question drew my attention because of the implications of the first

set and the last question drew my attention because

I was trying to sort out the metaphysics, in some sense, of the Cold

War.

The question was, was this just a battleground between two

hypothetically equally appropriate belief systems, which could be a moral

relativistic perspective, right? Belief systems are arbitrary, and so combat

between them is, in some sense, inevitable, and even...

more to the point there isn't any other way around the discontinuity in some

sense other than combat or subordination because there's no way of adjudicating

a victor because there's no such thing as victory if there's no way of ranking

value systems it's arbitrary

It's a frightening prospect because it means that if you have a value system,

and I don't have a value system And they're different and they're different

I mean we can talk or you can subordinate yourself, or I could do the

same But there's also no reason why we shouldn't just engage in flat-out

conflict Now it's complicated in the modern world obviously by the fact that

conflict can become so

untrammeled that it risks destroying everything and that doesn't seem

necessarily to be in anyone's best interest unless Your interest has

happens to be in destroying everything and certainly there are no shortage of

people whose interests tilt in that direction All right, so the first

question was well, what does it mean to have a belief system and That's a very

complicated problem, and I think

It's a subset of the question of being.

Maybe you can break the question of being into two domains, which we've done

in this class, and you could say, well, you can assess being from the

perspective of what exists, and then you can assess being from the perspective of

how you ought to act.

So it's like you walk into a room, and you can describe the furniture.

Or you can determine how you're going to conduct yourself in the room.

Maybe it's the difference between a play and the stage setting for a play.

Now, the modernist perspective, roughly speaking, is that the fundamental

reality is to be found in the description of the furniture, so to

speak. In the description of what is.

That's the scientific process.

And the scientific process seems to involve...

the stripping off of the subjective from perception and to some degree from

action and the extraction of the commonalities across perception as a

means of Delineating the nature of reality now Obviously, that's a very

powerful process and it has many advantages But exactly what it is that

science is doing is not precisely clear one perspective might be is that we are

genuinely discovering the nature of objective reality and perhaps

even the nature of reality itself but there are some problems with that

perspective one of them being that the scientific process seems to

strip the subjective from the phenomena It does that technically, right? I mean,

you have a hypothesis about what something is, and you have a hypothesis

about what something is, and you have a hypothesis about what something is, and

we undertake a number of procedures to assess what the fundamental phenomena

is, and then we look across our perceptual sets, and we extract out the

commonalities, and we dispense with everything that is superfluous,

everything that's merely subjective. So what you feel about the chair is not

relevant to the objective existence of the chair.

And so it eradicates subjectivity, and that's a very useful process because it

does seem to enable us to grasp reality in a fundamental sense more profoundly,

but it leaves the subjective behind, and maybe that's a problem.

Okay.

Okay, thank you.

All right, appreciate it.

So...

So then the issue might be, well, is something irretrievably lost if you

dispense with this objective?

And also, how deep a hole do you dig when you dispense with this objective?

And I think that that's intrinsically associated with the problem of the

relationship between is and ought because that's an old philosophical

conundrum. I think first put forth by David Hume who made the claim that

no matter how much you know about something from an empirical perspective

you cannot use that as an unerring guide to action in relationship to that to

that empirical object or set of empirical objects and people it's a

tricky issue you know because obviously you can use empirical information to

inform your decisions but I think

But the problem is is that there's multiple pathways of action that are

implied by any set of data that seems to be the fundamental problem It's

something like that is that you can't draw one-to-one specification between

the empirical description description and what you should do about that and

like maybe an example is Well, you can gather a lot of information about AIDS

and you can gather a lot of information about cancer and you can gather a lot of

information about educational outcomes and Economic outcomes and so forth, but

it isn't obvious how you then use that empirical information For example how to

guide policy decisions because you might say well How much money should we spend

on education compared to cancer prevention and how much money should we

spend on cancer prevention?

compared to curing AIDS and or Addressing disease in a third world

country what happens is that the set of variables that you?

Encounter while trying to make your empirical calculation get to be so

massive so rapidly that there doesn't seem to be any Logical way of linking

them to a behavioral outcome that's kind of associated with the postmodern

conundrum as well Which is well if you have a set of data, and it could be a

literary work for that matter There's a very large number of interpretations

that you can derive from that set of data, and there's no simple way of

deciding which one is going to be canonical.

And so, it isn't... I think the reason that you can't derive an ought from an

is is because you run into something like combinatorial explosion.

It's like, you have an infinite number of facts at your disposal, roughly

speaking, and then another infinite number of ways that you can organize

those facts, and that massive array of facts and

recategorized facts...

doesn't tell you what to do in a given situation and so maybe the question of

what to do in a given situation is a different domain of question and I

believe that to be the case.

I think it was Stephen Jay Gould who talked about religion and science as two

I think he called them different magisterium two different fundamental

domains that and that each had their realm of operation and one was the

description of the objective world, obviously that's on the scientific end,

and the other was the realm of ethics, and so you could put religion,

mythology, narrative, the humanities, all of that, history, even for that

matter, to some degree into the ethics category.

And because I don't see a straightforward way of taking a set of

facts and then transforming them into a behavioral compulsion, then I do think

that these two things are reasonably regarded as overlapping and

intrinsically associated but but technically and philosophically

separable All right, so then then the next question emerges well if they're

separable if there has to be a domain of inquiry into the structure of values

What might that look like?

like how is it that you would understand the psychological and

sociological phenomena that are associated with a moral stance

and how would you understand the details of that and then

even more to the point is there any way of subjecting different sets of ethical

interpretation to Testing so that you can judge their comparative validity

because that's sort of the way out of moral relativism roughly speaking. It's

like First you make the proposition that there are value structures and that

they're independent from empirical investigation and then the next is that

you investigate the possibility that you can compare and contrast different

structures of ethics and Draw some sort of conclusion.

That's not merely arbitrary

Now it might be turtles all the way down. That's how the old joke goes,

right? But but maybe not and I was interested in that again because I

thought well are we fighting the Cold War?

Merely because we're having an argument or Is there some

manner in which one of these systems can be just determined to be wrong and of

course There was more weight behind that query

because the Soviet system and the Maoist system and the system that's in place in

North Korea were not only predicated on different assumptions than the Western

system but they were also extraordinarily murderous and so that

seemed to add additional weight to the sequence of questions

so I

was reading Jung at the time and Carl Jung was

fundamentally, I would say, a psychologist of narrative, of story and

he outlined this, he outlined the idea for me that

people inhabited stories, roughly speaking, he said actually they

inhabited myths and even more to the point, whether they knew it or not, they

inhabited archetypal myths or even that they were possessed by them, and so It

was the first time I'd really come into contact with the idea, directly put,

that there was a direct relationship between the structures that you use to

orient yourself in the world and stories.

And so then I started to assess the fundamental elements of stories. What

might a story look like? And while I was doing that, that was informed by a

number of other things that I was reading about, including a set of... I

read...

the neuroscience literature with regards to information processing fairly

extensively.

And that introduced me to a whole set of other ideas, including cybernetic ideas,

which have been incorporated into what I was describing to you. And this basic

cybernetic system is a system that has a starting point and a system that has an

end point, and a system that has a subsystem that monitors progress or

deviation from progress along the pathway to the end point. And I thought,

well, that looks a lot like a story.

Or map that's another way of thinking about it, and I thought okay well That's

where the overlap is and the fundamental story is something like it's very

straightforward. It's it's also the frame that you inhabit when you

conceptualize the world and narrow and Narrow and simplify the world which you

have to do because it's so complex because you have this infinite number of

facts that are laying around you Well, so what are you doing? Well? You're a

mobile creature a living creature not a static information processor and

you're targeted, you're a targeted creature, and otherwise you wouldn't

move, right? To move is to be a targeted creature, because you have to move

towards something, or away from something, so the targeting is built

right into the fact that you're a mobile creature, and then you might say, well,

what do you target?

And the answer to that is, well, you target, you target, you could say you

target what you aim for, but then you could say, well, you aim for what you

want, you target your desires, and then that leads you into a discussion of the

underlying neurobiology, essentially.

You bring to the table a set of inbuilt desires, and the targets

that you pick have to address the fact that those desires exist, and the

desires are actually grounded in necessity.

And this is a sidebar, but this is where I think Piaget's theory is weaker than

it should be, because Piaget, and you know I'm a great admirer of Piaget,

believed that the...

human infant came into the world with a fairly primordial set of reflexes,

mostly sensory motor reflexes, and then bootstrapped him or herself up on the

basis of those reflexes in the sociological, in the social surround,

and so it's a constructivist viewpoint.

The child comes in with a few basic elements that can get it going, elements

of exploration and memory, essentially, and then it builds itself as a

consequence of its exploration in the social community.

Now, I think that's true, except that it's too empty, because what it fails to

take into consideration is the fact that, and I think this is an

observation, in some sense, philosophically, that was first made by

Immanuel Kant when he criticized pure reason, is that you can't come into the

world structureless, you have to come into the world with an inbuilt

structure, and then it's the interaction of that structure with the world

that provides the information that you can use to build yourself.

But the structure has to be there, and I would say that's the same,

mythologically speaking, as the idea that the Great Father is always there.

There's the Great Mother is always there, that's chaos itself, the Great

Father is always there, that's order, that's the interpretive structure that

you use to interact with the chaos, and then, of course, the individual is

always there at the same time.

Piaget, in some sense, retold that story, except he didn't.

Give enough credence to the fact that the infant comes into the world far more

fully formed than his theory His theory presumes now the

prophecy that the problem with that is that Without that additional underlying

set of let's call them neurobiological constraints The interpretation universe

gets too large You need constraints to narrow the domain of phenomena that

you're contending with

and it's in the analysis of the constraints that the answer to how do

you stop drowning in an infinite number of potential interpretations emerges.

The interpretations are subject to constraints, and that's also the way out

of the moral relativist paradox, as far as I can tell. Now, one of the things I

really liked about Piaget was that he described some of the constraints.

One of the constraints was, well, if I'm going to exist in a social world, and

I'm going to because I won't exist at all if I don't exist in a social world

then there are constraints on the way that I have to interact with other

people and Piaget's essential point was I have to organize myself to play a

joint game with you but the joint game has constraints and one of them is you

have to want to play because you have other options and then there are other

constraints you and I have to be able to play in a way that other people don't

object to Or maybe even that you and I have to play in a way that other people

will support.

And then you can imagine another constraint, which is you and I have to

play a game in a way that other people would support that will last more than

the moment.

So it has to work today and tomorrow and next week. It has to work across a span

of times.

It has to work not only for you and I, but it has to work for our future

selves. And so the damn constraints are starting to pile up. That's just on the

sociocultural side. That's on the constructionist side only.

but the biological constraints are equally important because not only does

the game that you and I have to play have to satisfy those emergent

sociological constraints but the game also has to be organized so that the

internal polity that's composed of let's call them the fundamental motivational

and emotional systems that constitute us they have to all find satisfaction

because otherwise the system grounds to a halt.

And so this seems to me to be the beginnings of an answer to the

postmodern conundrum. It's like, okay, any set of facts is amenable to an

infinite number of interpretations.

Fine, got it.

That makes deriving an is from an ought a very difficult endeavor.

Right, no problem.

All right, but that doesn't mean that any old solution will work.

Why? Well, first of all, it's merely because we introduced work.

into the conversation to begin with the interpretation has to be functional and

again that's what it seems that's what seems to tie it back to the story this

is also what got me interested in pragmatism technically speaking and so

because if if your conundrum is here you are and there you have to be and and how

to get there then one of the constraints on the manner in which you interpret the

world is

When you apply your interpretation, do you end up moving from the point you're

at to the point you want to be? And if the answer to that is no, then the

solution is insufficient.

Now, you could call the solution untrue, but it's dangerous to introduce the

truth-falsity dilemma, because it's functionality more than

truth. Although I think you could say that in the final analysis, truth is

integrally linked to function. But I'm not going to touch that question for the

time being. The point is that your interpretation of the world carries

within it implicitly a theory about its own validity.

And the theory about its own validity is that if you enact it in the world, it

will produce the result that you desire.

And then the consequence of that is that if it doesn't produce the result that

you desire, then it isn't a good enough theory. Period.

And that's how you...

grapple with the fact that although you don't know everything, you still have to

orient yourself in the world.

You lay out partial theories that make partial predictions, and if they do a

good enough job, then you don't worry about it anymore and you go on to the

next thing.

Okay, so then you think, there's a lot of constraints piling up on your

interpretations. Number one.

They have to work for the creature that you are and so you know we can lay sort

of like Maslow's Hierarchy of needs something like that's not exactly the

same because I don't think that he got the hierarchy right for for very complex

reasons, but it's it's reasonably obvious to to observe that well you're

not going to work out very well if you don't have anything to eat and you know

you've got about a week in you if you don't have anything to drink and

obviously you need shelter and you know you need companionship and by need what

I mean is that if you don't have these things then you die the whole game comes

to a halt so we can ground that in self-evident reality without any real

problem and you might say well what's the list of human necessities and that's

a difficult thing to parameterize because you can argue about The degree

to which something is necessary, but there's some things that we know about

Well, we covered the basics temperature regulation elimination food intake

shelter, right? But then there's more subtle things like well Children for

example die without touch so there's there's something integral about Tactile

interaction with other people so we could call that love if you wanted to

that's it's not optional right play is the same thing

Children do not develop properly unless they play And I would say that adults

also can't maintain their mental health or physical health unless they play too

And so you can say well, there's a core set of necessities and then off of that.

There's a secondary set of like What would you call them? They're not

ultimate necessities, but they're pretty hot They're going to be pretty highly

valued by people and more or less universally Pain avoidance, for example,

under most circumstances.

Most people don't really like to be in terror.

Most people really don't like to be disgusted, you know? You can lay out the

basic emotions, you can lay out the basic motivations, and you can say,

well, the game that you're going to play has to operate within a space that's

defined by that set of a priori constraints.

Fine. Now, things are getting pretty constrained here, so the game you play

has to satisfy that set of biological demands.

Intrinsic biological demands and it has to be something that you can utilize

with other people Voluntarily and it has to be something that will be playable

across multiple iterations, and I would say there's a very limited number of

Interpretive interpretive structures that are going to satisfy all of those

preconditions simultaneously and to me that just blows out the the two things

it blows out the claims of moral relativism and it It also demolishes,

and this is the same thing in some sense, it demolishes ideas that the

manner in which people organize themselves in the world as individuals

and in societies is somehow arbitrary.

Doesn't look to me to be arbitrary at all.

And Piaget's genius, I think in some part, was observing that in children

spontaneously, in that when children pass the egocentric phase, which means

after they're about...

two years of old, maybe they're approaching three years old. They've

more or less got their internal mechanisms organized so that they're a

unitary being, roughly speaking.

At three, they start to develop the ability to use fictional frames of

reference. And that's an interesting thing, because I would say that the

fundamental biological systems come armed with their own frame of reference.

so if you're hungry, poof, up comes frame of reference and within that your

perceptions are shaped, the action proclivities are primed

and the world lays itself out around that particular biological necessity and

you can lay those out same if you're thirsty, same if you're too hot, same if

you want to play all those systems come built in but then the problem with that

is that They compete because it isn't obvious which one should take priority

and then it's not that easy to organize them in a social space And so what seems

to have happened to human beings is that we've been able to replace the frame

that's predicated on Motivational necessity with abstracted frames that

are more voluntary voluntarily constructed that incorporate multiple

motivational systems simultaneously And that's in some sense. That's also what

it's the same thing as we've learned how to think abstractly And so the frame

that you're going to lay out on the world, if it's a good frame, is one that

solves a whole set of problems at the same time.

And so that, and you can slot different frames, you can experiment with

different frames, and that's a precondition to being able to play,

because one of the things that Piaget pointed out, you can see this when

children pretend play, it's like, and even more clearly in games that have

rules, but let's say they're...

They're in pretend play, and they're going to say, well, we're going to lay

out a little fictional schema here. We're going to play house, and you can

be the cat, and I'll be the dad.

And then you negotiate a bit to see if those rules are acceptable, and then you

run it as a simulation, and that's what kids are doing when they're playing.

They're experimenting with different superordinate frames of reference that

are actable in the world, and they're learning how to develop those perceptual

schemes, and also how to interact in a manner that allows the scheme that

they're using.

to find its social acceptability and it's successful the child assumes that

the scheme is successful if both children have fun while they're doing it

and so that's the voluntarism and so Piaget made a very interesting point

about that that I think is absolutely brilliant he said that there's a

difference between a game that people will play voluntarily and one that has

to be enforced and so then you can imagine an environment where Game A is

played voluntarily, it has a certain end, and game B is played by force, but

both of them are moving towards the same end.

And Piaget's claim was, the game that's played voluntarily, or even more to the

point, the set of all games that are played voluntarily will out-compete the

set of all games that are played by force if they're put head-to-head in a

competitive environment.

I thought, God, that's such a brilliant observation, because there you have...

the basis for a pragmatic grounding for the evaluation of ethics.

It's like, you can pick the target, it doesn't matter, whatever target you

pick. If the game is voluntary and aimed at the target, it will defeat a game

that's imposed by tyranny. Now, it's a proposition, but it's a pretty good

proposition, and I would say there's a fair bit of evidence for this

proposition, and a fair bit of it is actually derived from observation of

animal behavior because I ran you guys through the emerging literature on the

stability say of chimpanzee hierarchies and the chimpanzee tyrant hierarchy

isn't very stable and the reason for that is that two subordinate chimps who

are three-quarters as strong as the dominant tyrant can take him out and

They do and so then the question might be well How do you have to conduct

yourself as a high dominance chimp if you're not going to be torn apart by?

those who are hypothetically your subordinates, and the answer to that is,

well, don't be too much of a tyrant.

Formulate some social connections, engage in some reciprocity with regards

to your social relationships.

Don't oppress the females, don't torment the children, et cetera, because that

makes you unpopular, and then you'll get torn to shreds. And so there are

practical limits on the expression of tyranny.

that are a consequence both of biological limitations, because people

are going to object if the system is set up so that their fundamental needs

aren't met, and they're also going to object if the game that's being played

isn't functioning socially.

And so this is a very, very tight set of constraints.

And then the question might be, okay, if you take that set of constraints, what

sort of systems can operate... what would you say?

Well... Just that what set of systems can operate within those sets of

constraints Then you might say if you take that the set of all systems that

might operate within those constraints And you look at what's common across

them, then you could extract out. What's essentially a universal morality It's

something like that and I don't see how that proposition is precisely

questionable It seems to me that all of that's built on rock.

It's like there's no doubt that infants bring biological necessity to the table

I think that's fully established, and it's established physiologically, it's

established behaviorally, it's established with regards to evolutionary

history, because we can take the motivational systems that are part and

parcel of our being, and we can trace their development back, in some cases,

half a billion years.

So, the idea that the infant is a blank slate when it's born, and thus

subject to infinite...

Sociological manipulation is a it's a it's dead in the water. That's just not

the case So okay so fine, so we've got that nailed down hard and then

the idea that Your identity is also shaped sociologically well I don't think

anybody disputes that it doesn't matter where they are on the interpretive

framework they might dispute the degree to which that occurs and the mechanisms

by which it occurs, but the fact that it occurs That's close enough to

self-evident, so we can just leave it there.

Well, then the question is, what are the consequences of

socialization?

And once you admit the existence of the realm of biological

necessity, you instantly put a set of constraints on how societies can

structure themselves so that they will not be

Torn down and overthrown Well then if you look at how kids are socialized, I

think that piaget's developmental observations are by and by correct The

first two years it's mostly interactions between the infant and the parents It's

it's bi-directional though because the infant has to come to terms with the

mother But the mother also has to come to terms with the infant so it's not

even top-down at the level of infant-maternal relationship, quite the

contrary and if you watch a new mother adapt to a baby you can see that the

mother is doing as much adaptation to the baby as the baby is to the mother

because the infant has this inbuilt character already and has to be charmed

into a relationship, love does that and attention, it's very little different

than establishing a relationship with someone who's older it's lower

resolution and

It's harder to make the observations because of course the infant is only

capable of behavioral display can't can't speak but nonetheless The

necessity for establishing the individual relationship is there to

begin with so even in the early stages of the infants Socialization the process

isn't state downward. It's not great father downward It's mutual and then of

course by the time the child is old enough to be launched out into the

social world then All the constraints that are associated with the playground

are immediately placed on that child, and that's a very unforgiving landscape,

right? Because the last thing a child wants, really, the last thing a child

wants is not to have any friends, or even, perhaps, equally seriously, not to

have a best friend.

I read something so idiotic the other day that I couldn't believe it, so, the

newest Prince, so...

Queen Elizabeth's, I guess, great-grandchild is off to daycare in

the UK.

And in this daycare, they don't let the kids have best friends, because that's

unfair. I thought, you know... Sometimes you see something that's so stupid, you

can't even believe it exists.

And that was one of those examples, because it's been known for quite a long

time that one of the developmental milestones that children...

attain somewhere between say the age of five and ten is they pick a best friend

and so they and and you know the hypothesis well that's unfair to all the

other children it's like well first of all you can't be the best friend to

everyone because you then maybe there's a billion children so each of them gets

one second it's like that's just not a very deep relationship so the idea that

you can be equally friendly with everyone is it's a preposterous but even

worse the thing is the thing that the child's doing is actually becoming

They're they're stepping out of their egocentricity because their best friends

becomes more important than they are and that's a precursor for Adult

relationships where you know if you're married Well your your partner should be

at least as important as you are and the relationship should be more important

But then when you have children, it's like They're more important than you.

That's that.

Unless there's something wrong with you, you come second and your children come

first. And they're way first.

They're not just a little. I mean, you're necessary because without you,

they're not going to manage. So you have to take care of yourself.

But you're not number one anymore once you have kids. Unless, seriously, unless

you didn't learn the lessons in the playground.

And when you have a best friend, you're not number one.

They are.

And so, well.

So anyways, there are these constraints that emerge in the social landscape.

You have to have friends.

and also you have to single someone out as particularly unique among those

friends and establish a genuinely reciprocal and caring relationship I

can't remember the psychiatrist who studied this so intently unfortunately

he was the first person to do a detailed analysis of the best friend

relationships that children established I'd like to give him credit for his

ideas but unfortunately I can't remember his name so

Okay, so what are the propositions so far?

You inhabit a structure that orients you in the world. It has something that's

akin to a narrative structure.

I'm here, I'm going there, and this is the way I did it. It's narrative if you

describe it.

It's based in biological necessity, but it's shaped by socialization, and the

fact of that base and that shaping means that the set of interpretive schema that

you can lay out in the world are bounded those would be functional,

hypothetically functional systems and maybe they compete over the evolutionary

time span but there's something in common across that set of functional

interpretations and if you extract that out you can get the initial images of

what you might describe as an archetypally universal morality that's

what archetypes are

fundamentally So and to say all that is no more than to say that people can

abstract across Instances and we can obviously do that.

So then the question is can you start to develop an articulated picture of what

that archetypal Structure of universal morality might be

and So my answer to that was basically well, let's look at old stories as many

old stories as we can collect and if their stories are stories that have

survived for a very long period of time, so much the better because that

indicates that they're peculiarly memorable and

peculiarly functional because if they weren't memorable then they'd have been

forgotten and if they weren't functional they wouldn't have managed to be the

foundation stories for cultures that lasted for thousands or even tens of

thousands of years So and then we could say well, let's collect a whole variety

of these stories and see if there's patterns across them now the danger of

that is Have you collected an unbiased set of stories danger number one?

How do you know that you're not just reading into the stories? That's the

postmodern problem reasonable reasonable objections and so that those objections

have been laid against people like

Wrote the golden bow Fraser who was the Fraser who was one of the first?

Anthropologists to collect stories from all over the world and to start to look

for commonalities the same Objection has been laid at the feet of people like

Mircea Eliade or Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell It's like how do you know you

just how do you know you're not just cherry-picking your damn interpretations

perfectly reasonable Perfectly reasonable objection, and I would say

that the reason I don't believe that I'm cherry-picking my interpretations is

because I used a method

and it's a method that's akin to the multi-trait, multi-method method of

construct validation that clinical psychology and other disciplines of

psychology rely upon, but that's also akin to a process put forward by E.O.

Wilson that he called consilience, and the process is something like, well,

pick your level of analysis, does the phenomena manifest itself at that level

of analysis?

Yes. pick another level of analysis, and another level of analysis, and another

level of analysis, and see if the same phenomena manifests itself at every

single level, and then assume that the probability that that will happen by

chance decreases with each additional level of analysis that fits where

there's concordance. And I thought, okay, that... That makes sense. So, it

isn't only that you can look for patterns in stories, because, you know,

what if you're a hyperactive pattern detector?

Which basically means, like, and there are people like that, people who tilt

towards paranoia, people who tilt towards conspiracy theories. You can see

it manifest itself in new age thinking all the time.

Because new age thinkers are very high in openness, but not very good at

critical thinking. And so they see phenomena A and B and C and D, and they

think pattern.

Then they think universal pattern.

But they don't attempt to...

Disconfirm their pattern prediction and so what I tried to do when I was

starting to see patterns emerge in the stories Informed by people like Jung and

Eliade and so forth was to see if what they were describing manifested itself

at any other levels of analysis That were independent intellectually from

that stream of thinking and I found it in two places I found it in cybernetics

and I found it in neuroscience and so and that That and the

neuroscience element that includes the physiology But also the behavioral

analysis that was done by by people most particularly like like like Jeffrey Gray

and and the animal experimentals who were brilliant brilliant scientists and

who've done a very good job of laying out the manner in which interpretive

frameworks exist within the realm of animal cognition and and and To

describe how they manifest themselves in the world, so I thought okay. That's not

too bad because we've got maybe four different levels of evidence all

pointing in the same direction and so that's why I walked you guys through the

neuropsychology it's like a story is, you're going somewhere, you're somewhere

and you're going somewhere and you're tracking your progress, okay, that's the

story well what happens when you look at how people lay out, they're called

cognitive maps well it's the same thing, you specify a Target an endpoint is you

specify a beginning point Which is just where you are and then there's a

mechanism a comparative mechanism that operates or multiple comparative

mechanisms that operate neuro Physiologically to orient yourself

towards that goal and the emotions basically Emerge as a as a consequence

of that positive emotions indicating that you're moving forward properly

Negative emotions indicating that you've encountered some kind of obstacle. It's

like well. That's the basic.

That's the basic

Structure of a narrative.

Okay, fine. So now we can see how it's instantiated neurophysiologically that

adds a fair bit of credence to the to the entire process so

Now

normally when you look at the basic cybernetic work

There's a hypothesis that the system is oriented towards a goal

and that it's comparing what is manifesting itself in the world to that

desired end state as the system moves but it's too simple because people don't

precisely have goals they have nested hierarchies of goals and so

the issue of emotional regulation becomes more

complex than are you proceeding happily towards your current goal because your

goal is composed of micro goals and it's a constituent element of a set of macro

goals and so that makes the problem of error far more complex than it would be

if you only had one frame of reference and you were only adjudicating your

error within that frame of reference the question starts to become what

does it mean when you make a mistake?

and the answer to that the behavioral answer to that was well you encounter a

stimuli That's a threat or maybe a punishment or an incentive reward or a

consummatory reward something like that It's very it's a it's a unidimensional

and oversimplified answer I'm not complaining about it has great utility,

but there's the problem there's a problem and the problem is it doesn't

take into account the nested structure of this of your goal hierarchy and What

that means is that it underestimates the difficulty of responding to an error

because The problem with an error is that you don't know what the error

signifies. And that's a huge problem.

And that's part of what I want to delve into even in more depth today.

And so this is like Ellis in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole.

It's exactly the same thing.

The rabbit hole is, you made a mistake, right? You made a mistake. You've got

your... oversimplified representation of the world laid upon it. It validates

itself in its execution if it executes properly.

If it executes improperly, then what does that signify? And the answer isn't

precisely that you've made a mistake.

The answer is it signifies that there's something in the world that you excluded

that shouldn't have been excluded.

And that's a big problem because when you've laid out a simplified schema on

the world, you've excluded virtually everything.

And so what that means is that as soon as you make an error, the search space

for the error immediately tends towards the infinite.

And you experience that.

It's part of human existential experience. And the way you experience

that is, especially if your mood is shaky, is you lay out a small plan, like

maybe you go out for coffee with someone that you're romantically interested in,

and they're not pleasant to you.

So that's an error. It means, well, what does it mean? Well, you've construed

yourself wrong, you've construed them wrong, you've construed the opposite sex

wrong, you've construed human beings wrong, you're a walking catastrophe, and

you might as well not even exist.

It's like, well, that's pretty extreme, but it's not that extreme, I'll tell

you. Like, it's not that uncommon for people to have exactly that set of

catastrophic responses to even a minor setback. Now, it's not good for them,

and I would say...

You know, just because you scraped your foot doesn't mean you should dig a grave

and jump into it, pull all the dirt on top of you, you know. So, you don't want

to start by taking yourself completely apart, but that doesn't mean people

won't do it. They do it all the time. In fact, to me, it's always a mystery that

they don't do it every single time.

Because the logical inference for why didn't you get someone interested in you

could easily be because you're a failure as a human being. And at some level,

that's actually true.

Now, it's true in a way that's not that helpful, right? Because it's just too

catastrophic. But it isn't obvious at all how people can defend themselves

against that cascade of catastrophizing. I mean, after all, if you were

everything you could be, then maybe everyone would be attracted to you. I

mean, perhaps not, but you get the point. And no easy rationalization is

going to let you just brush that away.

Especially if you actually happen to be interested in the person because that's

even worse because then not only are you rejected but you're rejected by someone

who's Who upon whom you've projected an ideal or perhaps on?

From whom you've actually observed an ideal so it's worse. You're you're

rejected by someone that you want to have Be attracted to you to validate

your own miserable existence.

It's not a trivial problem

So you're in this protected space that I... You know, I made an analogy between

that and the Garden of Eden.

Or the city that Buddha was raised in. It's all protected, and everything

inside it is beautiful and functional.

And that's by definition, because if your frame of reference is working

properly, then what's within it is things you control that are functional

and... And they're serving your purposes.

So...

When you're successful, you're in the Garden of Eden. That's one way of

thinking about it. When the things that you're laying out in the world are

delivering what they're supposed to deliver.

That's what you inhabit.

But the problem is that there's always a snake inside the garden.

And that's the story that's echoed in the story of Buddha. In that case, it's

Buddha's own curiosity that happens to be the snake. And you could actually say

the same thing about human beings. Maybe it wasn't the snake.

Maybe it was Eve's curiosity.

They're the same thing in some sense. And so it's Buddha's curiosity that...

drives him outside the city to find disease and death and to blow apart his

paradisal conceptualization of the world and so when we're looking at for

universality the first thing we might say is, well, you have a frame of

reference that you've laid on the world it's a story, you live inside a story

and the second thing we could say, and that's universally true the content of

the story can differ that's okay, I don't care about that it's the

structural equivalence that I'm interested in you live inside a story

and you have to because you have to live in something like that because you are

goal-directed and you have to be and you have to simplify the world because

you're just not enough of you to take into account everything at once in fact

you can hardly take into account anything at once so you have to narrow

things unbelievably and by narrowing and including only certain things you

exclude virtually everything else, so you're always in the situation where you

have this little bounded universe that you inhabit, but outside of it is chaos

itself and so that's the existential landscape order

surrounded by chaos right, it's like a tree, it's like the evolutionary

home of primates, the tree with the snakes on the ground that's our

landscape, or it's the fire Tribal people and the terrors of the forest

that are beyond the that are beyond the the light that the fire casts It's

explored territory versus unexplored territory And that's that's an archetype

as well that that you can't not be in a situation where that's the case Even if

you're among friends, you know You think that's explored territory. That's not

exactly right because what happens if you're among friends is that they

Carefully reveal new parts of themselves all the time.

So it's like they're blasting little elements of unexplored territory you

territory at you constantly and if they don't then what happens you get bored

and you look for new people and We know there's empirical data on that with

regards to intimate relationships because there was a nice study done a

while back showing that looking at the ratio of Positive to negative emotional

experiences that were most predictive of long-term relationship success and the

answer was now obviously it depends on how you would measure an Event and how

you would measure positive and negative emotion, but that aside the finding was

something like If you're in a relationship, and you only have five

positive Interactions to one negative interaction then the relationship will

end it's too negative, but if you have more than 11 positive

Interactions to one negative interaction then it also ends and you think well,

that's pretty bloody peculiar What why in the world would that be don't you

want like a hundred to one positive to negative?

Interactions and the answer to that is what makes you think that you want a

relationship so that you could be happy or At least happy moment to moment. What

why do you think that it's not it's certainly not the case is you know that

too because you I mean I bet you there's not a person in this room who hasn't

rejected someone because they were too nice to them.

Something like that. Person's no challenge. It's something like that.

You want someone who, you know, you can get along with them, but now and then

they bite you and you think, oh, that's interesting, you know, I didn't really

expect that. And then you go and puzzle over it for a while and you torture

yourself about it and that's one of the things that keeps you really linked into

the relationship.

And the reason for that is that part of the reason that you want the

relationship isn't so that you're happy right now.

It's so that you can live high quality life across multiple decades and so

you're looking for someone that you have to contend with who's going to push you

beyond what you already are and who's gonna judge you harshly often for your

limitations now that'll make you angry and all of that you you know and

resentful and maybe you'll take your revenge and and all of that but you

don't want someone who thinks you're perfect in your current form partly

because why would you want to go out with someone that deluded so

Okay So you've got this interpretive schema laid out on the world and It

excludes the entire world and because it excludes the world the world tends to

manifest itself inside that protected space on a in an uncontrollable manner

and That can take you down and it takes you down the rabbit hole and down the

rabbit hole is where everything is because When you make an error what that

is, is the manifestation of the excluded world and the problem with that is

that's too much right, because if you step out of the lifeboat into the ocean,

then you drown and that's not any good, you can't drown every time something

manifests itself that you didn't expect there has to be a mechanism for

orienting you in the face of error alright, so what exactly does that

imply?

the question is, what do you discover when you go down the rabbit hole?

I was thinking about that a lot today I showed you that diagram that

I thought was like a map of the phenomenological world the lowest

resolution category is something like the dragon of chaos and so you might

say, well what do you discover when you make an error? and the answer is First

it's a brief manifestation of the Dragon of Chaos and that's no more to say than

when you encounter the incursion of unexplored territory into explored

territory the circuitry you use is the same circuits that we use to to

respond instantaneously to the presence of predatory forces

we use that circuit, and that makes perfect sense, because the predator is

almost by definition the thing that lurks beyond the safe confines of the

community and I told you, I believe, a story about rats raised in naturalistic

environments the rats are, they've got their burrows on one end of the little

field their little rat hierarchy, they're doing their little rat social

things, they're playing and they're laughing and they're tickling each other

and they're You know raising the rat families and that's all working out just

fine Rats in that situation by the way are very difficult to get addicted to

cocaine If you want to dick the rat to cocaine you have to put it in a cage and

isolate it It's not really a rat anymore than any more than you're a person if

you're in solitary confinement, right? I mean you're sort you're mostly you're

just misery Anyways in solitary confinement you'd be after cocaine non

-stop and maybe under other circumstances, but like a normal rat

It's not that interested in cocaine

so that's just a side note anyways the rats are doing their thing and then

they've learned that they can go out to the other side of the field and they can

get food and so one day the experimenters instead of putting food

out there put a cat out there the rat goes out and gets a whiff of the cat

which they do not like and then the rat runs home and Pokes his beak out of the

burrow and screams for like two days Ultrasonically and all the other rats

are like frozen stiff because of that they're not going anywhere and so a two

-day rat screaming fit is no Trivial thing that would be I calculated that be

the equivalent of use screaming for two weeks So you have to be pretty upset to

scream for two weeks, right? So this is hard on the rat But the reason I'm

telling you this is the rat doesn't expect the cat to be there The rat goes

out and there is a cat and what it uses is its predator Detection and alert

systems to signify the presence of the cat and what we've done with the dragon

imagery roughly speaking is make an amalgam of predatory monsters and State

that's a symbol for what lurks beyond safety because we're you know, we're

observing our own responses in some sense and and it's not only that we're

observing our own responses, but that we also have a categorical set of responses

to predator and again, there's no speculation about this we already know

this, like if you go study monkeys, for example they have distinct sets of

vocalization that are associated with predator detection that have distinct

circuits we know that there are predator detection circuits and it's not

unreasonable to also presuppose that they underlie the phenomena, for

example, that human beings are very good at learning fear to snakes.

Snake fear might be innate, like, that's pushing the argument.

But at minimum, psychologists have already concluded that even if snake

fear isn't innate, and it probably is, that it can be learned like that.

So you can condition people to be afraid of pictures of snakes way faster than

you can condition them to be afraid of pictures of electrical outlets or

handguns. So...

And that's well documented. I don't think anybody disputes that at all. So,

the first assumption is when something unexpected emerges, so we'll call that

the snake in the garden, that you're prey and that's a predator and that the

monster has come to get you. It's something like that.

Now, the representation of the dragon is more complex than mere monster because

the dragon, the mythological dragon, also is the thing that hoards treasure.

I really like that symbol. I think it's I think that's also why it will never go

away It's such a great symbol because it says well the unknown can take you down

it can it can bite you with its fiery breath like a poisonous snake and it can

burn things like fire and it's a Aerial predator that can take you from the air

and it's a carnivorous predator that can take you from the ground and it's

reptilian It's the sort of thing that can pull you down into the water and

it's easy to see that as an amalgam of of the threats that have been Laid forth

for human beings since the beginning of time and and monster is an amalgam of

predator And you might say well, there's no such thing as a dragon. It's like

yes, there is it's just a loose category What's common across all predators

equals dragon?

It's not like it's a not they're not real. They're hyper real They're more

real than the phenomena themselves just like an abstraction can be more real

than the phenomena themselves And then the canonical dragon for human beings

isn't just a predator. We're not rabbits

You can imagine that the dragon for a rabbit is just a dragon. There's no damn

treasure there at all. But for human beings, it's ambivalent.

Because the thing that you don't know about is also the thing that holds the

greatest gift. And why is that? It's because the unrealized world manifests

itself when you make an error.

And the unrealized world is something that can take you down, obviously, but

it's also the source of all new information.

it's an infinite source of information and that's a really useful thing to know

error is an infinite source of information and that's one of the things

that can help you recalibrate the way that you interact with the world you

think well we're interacting let's say we're having a conversation and it's

Flowing melodically and all of a sudden I say something and there's a

disjunction right you're offended by it There's some negative emotion that comes

up or or or or you know Maybe I've said something to impress you or to be

arrogant and you respond badly It's like we've got this melodic thing going on

It's a consensual frame and something pokes itself up to put a disjunction in

the conversation It's like well. That's where the information is

It's like something went wrong, something didn't work out, I'm not

looking at the world properly, or I don't know you well enough, or as well

as I thought. There's something there, and if I have any sense, I'm going to

focus my attention on that.

Not obsessively or anything like that, but that's where all the information is.

Because as long as what we're doing is working, then we both know enough

already.

As soon as what we're doing together isn't working, then that's instant

evidence that there's something about us that needs to be updated.

and you might think well that's a terrible thing and the answer is yes of

course it is it's a terrible thing but it's also the thing and this is the next

stage of the development of this let's call it universal morality it's like the

universal morality might be found in the answer to the question what should you

do when you make a mistake now one answer is catastrophic dissolution

that's that's a collapse into chaos well that's

No one is going to pick that voluntarily.

Let's put it that way. It's unbelievably unpleasant terribly anxiety-provoking

shameful and painful all at the same time

Worse it can mean the absence of positive emotion because if you really

collapse into chaos Not only are you overwhelmed by negative emotion, but the

positive emotion system shut off and that's what happens to someone who's

Extraordinarily depressed and also hyper anxious at the same time not only are

they suffering from an excess of negative emotion But they've got no

incentive movement forward whatsoever.

Okay, so that's not an optimal solution because it takes you out The other

possible and so I would call that a nihilistic solution or a chaotic

solution It's not a solution It's a dissolution and you can think about it

as a precursor to a potential solution But it's very easy to get stuck there

and that's why Jonah could have stayed in the belly of the whale, along with

all the other people that were eaten by the whale, and never got back out. And

you see people like that all the time. Their error has come along, blown out

their frames of reference, they've collapsed into the underworld, into the

chaotic underworld, and they don't know how to get out. They have post-traumatic

stress disorder, or they're depressed, or they're hyper-anxious, or they're

resentful and aggressive and destructive, like, there's any number of

states of being that can...

overwhelm you when the bottom has fallen out of your life, so it isn't something

that people are going to It's not an optimal solution.

Let's put it that way well that the other That's a nihilistic solution is a

collapse the other solution is We're talking and I don't get what I want

from you, and so I say you better not do that again I don't want to see that from

you again And that's a tyrannical attitude, right? What I'm going to do is

I'm going to take my universe of order and its predictions, and I'm going to

say, you go along with this, or I'm going to punish you.

And that's a... Now, there is an element in society, like society is made up of

threats like that to some degree.

It's an ineradicable part of society. That would be the tyrannical aspect of

the great king, let's say.

Now, we've organized a set of punishments and threats that keep each

of us in alignment.

However, generally speaking, in a society that's functional, we've decided

to adopt agreement with that set of principles more or less voluntarily.

And we say, well, you have rights and responsibilities, and I have rights and

responsibilities, and I'm willing to pay a price for yours, including the

acceptance of punishment if I transgress, but you're going to do the

same for me.

So, there are... there are intelligent ways that punishment and threat can be

used and bounded so but that can easily degenerate into tyranny and one of the

methods that I can choose to use if I don't want to encounter error is just to

enforce my will on everyone else and I think when that happens personally and

in the family and in the community and in the state all at the same time then

you get the emergence of a tyranny and

So I would consider those two counterproductive reactions to the

emergence of the unrealized world.

It's like, you say something I don't like, I collapse completely.

Children don't like other children who do that, by the way, right?

It's something that's very interesting to observe.

So let's say, kids have organized themselves to play a little game of

baseball with a plastic bat and a ball, and, you know, one child pitches, and

the other child hits the ball, and the child catches it and puts the puts the

batter out, and the batter bursts into tears.

Well, what happens?

The other kids, you know, the first time that happens, they'll be sympathetic.

The third time that happens, they won't invite that kid out to play baseball

anymore.

So the answer to, we're not getting along, is not, you get to burst into

tears and manifest extraordinary emotional distress, because if you do

that, no one's going to want to play with you.

And that's a lesson that many people could stand learning again. One of the

things I think that's really destabilizing our society right now

maybe is that I'm not sure that kids have been encouraged or allowed to play

enough in the last 25, 30 years.

And I think a lot of this identity stuff is actually fantasy play.

It's delayed fantasy play.

because it's sort of what you do when you're seven years old, it's like, well,

I'm gonna be this identity, that's what you're doing when you pretend you're

gonna go along with that, because we're gonna play this out, it's like, that's

fine you don't impose that, though, right, not if you're a kid that has a

clue, you invite people to play, you don't insist on your identity and their

compliance with it it's not a playable game and you don't burst into tears and

run off when someone won't play your game, because then they won't play with

you and then you have to turn to force, and that's...

That's fine if that's what you want to do, but you better look out, because you

better be ready to use it.

Does creating a universal morality come with the responsibility of making sure

it's applied universally?

And what I mean by this is, if we can say leaf structure A is better than leaf

structure B from a pragmatic perspective, does it come with the

responsibility of making sure that people who are trapped, perhaps in a

radical leaf structure,

somewhere else, do we have a responsibility against them?

Because one of the criticisms

current feminists are getting is for not protesting about the situation of women

in, say, Saudi Arabia.

you know, I think that's, I think that criticism is more emerging because of,

because it's apparently, it's apparently paradoxical and they've laid out a set

of principles to which, in principle, they, they adhere and one of those

principles is to reduce the destructive power of the patriarchy it's like, okay,

there is some destructive patriarchy for you, radio silence, it's like, hmm

Now, what am I supposed to do about that? Am I supposed to question your

adherence to those principles? Which is exactly what should be done. So I think

it's a criticism of performative contradiction.

You say you're for this, but when it comes to act it out, you don't,

selectively, in this situation.

So there's something wrong, there's something about your game that you're

not being straight about.

That's the criticism.

And maybe there's rejoinders to that.

Well, okay. Okay. Well responsibility.

Well, you know, then you'd have to look at it different levels of Analysis with

regards to interactions. You definitely have a responsibility to your partner

and your children Okay, so your responsibility to your children as far

as I'm concerned is Don't it's twofold one. Don't let your children do anything

that makes you dislike them and There's a corollary to that which is don't be an

idiot You know, so that's partly why you need a partner, because your partner has

to tell you when your demands on your children are excessive.

Because you're kind of, you know, you're not 100% oriented properly.

But still, you're their target adult.

And so it's up to you to help them choose a path that makes you want them

to be around.

Right? And that's your critical responsibility. And hopefully, you're

enough of an analog of the broader community.

So that if they can figure out how to get along with you it radically

increases the probability that they'll be able to get along with everyone So

for example if you're playing with your children two years old you you help them

you encourage them to play in a manner that's fun and If you get that down then

you know when you introduce them to another child don't know how to play in

a manner That's fun, and so great You've solved the problem the problem is to get

your child to enter into the collaborative social world So yes, you

have a primary responsibility for that and then with regards to your partner

Here's something to think about with regards to role So my wife and I have

had this discussion many times and one of the discussions is well How are we to

treat each other in public?

And it isn't her name is Tammy the discussion isn't how should Jordan treat

Tammy in public or how should Tammy treat Jordan? That's not the discussion.

This isn't personal. It's how should a wife treat her husband?

And how should a husband treat his wife? It's impersonal. And it's partly, you

don't put your partner down in public.

Why? Well, it's not because you're hurting that person's feelings. That's

not why.

It's that you're denigrating the relationship that you are in

voluntarily. You know, some of the most painful days I've ever spent, one in

particular I spent with a group of men who had been in therapy for their

marriage. And who bloody well needed it, I can tell you that.

And they spent their whole day complaining about their wives.

Like, it just made me sweat the whole day. I thought, I can't believe I'm here

with you guys. I can't tell you why I was. It's just, you know, it was just

happenstance more than anything.

And I thought, how can you be so damn dumb?

It's like, it's certainly possible that you married barbarian witches.

Fine. But you don't have, you're so lacking in sense that you would discuss

that in public.

not noticing that you picked them.

So basically all you're doing is holding up a sign and waving it constantly that

says, I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot, right? And so, well, back to responsibility.

You have a responsibility to those whom you love and are obligated to

to ensure that they manifest themselves in a manner that's most beneficial to

them over the long run.

Now you have the same responsibility I would say to yourself, but you'll have

blind spots other people have to help you with that But so the rule is you

know you don't let you don't You help your wife figure out how not to make a

fool of herself in public and she extends to you the same courtesy and

it's partly Maintenance of the sacred nature of the relationship has nothing

to do with you or her Precisely it's broader and wider than that Okay, so

then that's two levels of responsibility child partner next level of

responsibility You're asked at your workplace to go uncut to undergo

unconscious bias retraining You say yes, it's like okay You've just admitted that

you're a bigot Right because you're acting it out. It's like I'm a racist

bigot obviously I need to be retrained and so you might say well I'm not going

to make a fuss about it right or I've been told to do it Or maybe you agree

with it. Fine.

And if you agree with it, no problem. You can make a case for it. I think it's

a weak and appalling case, personally.

But you can make a case for it. You could say, well, you know, I am

interested in my biases and how to rectify them. And, like, fair enough,

you know, people are biased.

But if you object to it, and you don't say anything, then you're complicit.

And then it's on you.

And you know, like,

A causes B and C and B causes C and D and so forth the thing tends doesn't

always but it has this tendency to expand and you'll come home angry and

Upset and you'll go to the training program and you'll think this is

ridiculous because that is what you'll think in all likelihood And you won't

say anything But it eats at you Well, you've abrogated your responsibility and

so and then you might say well So then that's how the community becomes

corrupt. That's how the community starts to be corrupt, is that people turn a

blind eye to emergent pathology when they know it's pathological. That's

exactly what the Egyptian story says.

Osiris is overcome by Seth because he's willfully blind.

Willfully blind, which means he knows, but refuses to. He knows, quote,

his predator detection systems have gone off.

Monster well, then you're supposed to look okay exactly.

What sort of monster is this well. It doesn't have wings It doesn't have a

tail you know you cut it down into the you cut it from the monster that it

could be into the monster that it is that's the first step and then you take

the appropriate steps and Then you also notice the other monsters because here's

something to think about You're gonna pay a price for speaking up, but you're

gonna pay a price for not speaking up, so it's like Monsters on the right,

monsters on the left. Pick the ones you want to battle with. If you decide not

to make your stand, you weaken yourself.

If you do it a hundred times, then even if the monster was only this big, now

you're this big. It's going to eat you. You know, when it was this big, you

probably could have kicked it across the room. It's too late for that.

You've capitulated and capitulated.

You know, and so what you've done...

And this is a way to think about it from a Jungian perspective This is what Jung

was trying to get at when he was talking about alchemy.

It's like the thing that pops up to Object to you is

this incredibly complex Entity it's it's the entire world encapsulated in the

event If you interact with it you unpack it you differentiate your sense of the

world and you and you you gather new skills So, for example, let's say

there's something going on at your workplace and you need to object to it

because it's driving you crazy. And you talk it over with your wife so that

you've got your head screwed on straight. Say, oh, I've got to say

something. And you go there and you say something and, you know, you're

stumbling and awkward and all of that. But you watch the response and maybe you

get what you're aiming at and maybe you don't. But you've learned a bunch.

You've learned, well, I'm not as coherent as I could be. I'm not as good

at putting my arguments together.

My boss is more of a son of a bitch than he thought he was. This is a worse

problem than I knew about.

It's like... Differentiate it, differentiate it.

So now the landscape is higher resolution and so are you Well, so good.

So maybe you're a little bit next better prepared the next time you have to do

that and so the issue here to some degree is Don't lose an opportunity to

grapple with something that objects to you, especially when the object

Objection is rather small Because that's something you can you say well I can put

up with it. It's like Fair enough, like you don't want to make everything into a

war. I usually use a rule of three. If we're interacting and you do something

that I find disruptive, I'll note it. It's like, potential dragon, go on.

And I leave it be.

And then if you do it again, I think, oh yeah, that probably wasn't merely

situational. But I'll leave it be, because that's still not enough

evidence. But if you do it a third time, then I'll say, hey, I just noticed this.

And you'll say, no, that didn't happen. And I'll say, yeah.

not only did it happen but it happened here and it happened here and I'm not

making this up so there's something going on here like I'm not ignoring it

and we can get to the bottom of it and then they'll come up with a bunch of

objections about why that isn't necessary and you push those aside and

they'll come up with a few more objections and they'll push those aside

and then usually they'll get mad or burst into tears and if you push that

aside then you get to have a conversation right and then you can

solve the problem but man it's you gotta be monster because first of all you need

six arguments about why their objections aren't gonna stop you and Then you have

to not be intimidated by the anger and you have to not be swamped by compassion

about the tears and Then you can have a conversation and people don't do that

They won't do that and so they don't solve the problems and so then the

problems accrue Right and if they accrue over 15 years of a relationship then

that then they end up fat, ugly, and in divorce court so, and that's, you know,

that's not a that's not a great outcome, it's divorce court and cancer are

similar in their in their seriousness, not always, but but sufficiently

often so when that error emerges, it's a it's a glimmering

now you know, we talked a lot about the hierarchical structure of goals, you

know and so Here's something to think about. So, the thing that

announces itself as error has a two-fold nature.

That's because it's chaos and order at the same time.

Or it's because it's all the archetypal structures at the same time. It's the

dragon of chaos, it's the great mother, positive and negative, it's the great

father, positive and negative, it's the individual, hero and adversary.

All of that manifests itself in the moment of error.

Right? The archetypes come forward.

Did you make an error because you're a bad person?

Could be.

Now, so one of the things to think about with regards to that is, you know, in

the Mesopotamian creation story, when Tiamat comes flooding back, it's so

interesting, that story.

You think about what she does.

So she's the archetype of error, let's say, the error that can take you out,

that can dissolve you in salt water.

Tears.

Well, she's irritated because Apsu was destroyed, so the structure is gone.

Carelessness has destroyed the structure. Up comes Tiamat. She's not

happy. What does she do?

She prepares a phalanx of monsters.

It's exactly what the story says. She produces a whole horde of monsters to

come at you.

And she puts Kingu at their head.

And Kingu is the king of the monsters.

And later...

So he's the ultimate bad guy. He's Satan, for all intents and purposes, in

the Mesopotamian version.

It's out of him that Marduk makes human beings. It's out of his blood that

Marduk makes human beings.

That's a critical issue, man.

The Mesopotamians said, imagine the worst monster you can possibly imagine.

The king of all the monsters.

That's the blood of human beings.

Wow. So what does that mean?

Well, it means that one of the terrible things that lurks Let's say that you've

been in a long-term Relationship and it collapses.

Let's say you were You know, he had a tendency towards alcoholism.

You weren't so great with regards to your drug use You know how that

conscientious and you had like four or five kind of low rent affairs and you

know it Your marriage collapses bang well Who do you first meet when you fall

into chaos?

You meet King of the Monsters, and he's you.

It's like, why did my marriage fall apart? What did I do wrong? Bang, bang,

bang, bang, bang. I did all these things wrong. Why?

Because that thing inhabits me.

What is it? Well, that's the most horrifying question, right?

Well, that's why... So down there in the archetypal space, all these things lurk.

The hero and the adversary.

You've just met the adversary.

Well, maybe you were a tyrant.

That's certainly possible.

Maybe everything around you was chaotic.

So what do you encounter when things fall apart?

You encounter the adversary. You encounter the tyrant. You encounter the

catastrophe of nature. And you encounter the dragon of the chaos.

And they're all intermingled.

You have to sort that out. That's what happens to Ellis when she goes down the

rabbit hole, right? She meets the Red Queen.

And the Red Queen is always running around.

Off with their heads off with their heads and she says in my kingdom You

have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place right down the

rabbit hole you meet the archetypes and so Okay, so back to responsibility well

one of the things Solzhenitsyn detailed we said well, how does societies go

corrupt said it's easy One little sin at a time You go to

work someone's lording it over you. You know that they're tyrannical

You don't have the wherewithal to stand up.

It's like okay You're a slave And so if you continue to agree

to be a slave you will continue to generate tyrants Right and the only

thing that can stop you from doing that I think is the right kind of terror It's

like be careful what you give up Because that's this logos. Okay, so so alright,

so that's this logos the logos is the thing that enables you to mediate

between a between order and chaos and maybe you have to have some faith in

that it's like well what should you do if someone is harassing you well you

should fight back okay what is that what's the most effective way to fight

back well sometimes it's physical but that's not necessarily for the best

maybe it's through articulation maybe it's through analysis right you want to

be sharp You want to be able to decompose a problem. You want to be able

to formulate an argument and a counter response.

And maybe you want to be so good at that that people don't mess with you to begin

with. And then you're a perfectly articulate counter monster and you never

have to take your sword out.

That's the place that you want to be.

It's like people should know after three seconds of interacting with you that

harassing you will be a seriously bad idea. And then you'll have a perfectly

fine time with them.

So and that's part of you know, so there's some utility in meeting the

devil in the underworld Right because maybe he's got something to teach you

that's certainly possible and that and one of the things that you can be taught

is that your Normative morality which is basically your harmlessness and your

naivety masquerading as virtue is Completely insufficient to protect you

in the world especially against the sorts of things that you're talking

about which are tyrant tyranny

Tyrants will push until you push back.

It's in their nature.

They don't have internal controls So they just push and push and push and

push and push and push even kids do that like little kids do that all the time

They'll just push you until they hit a wall They're actually quite happy when

they hit a wall because the last thing a child wants is a universe without walls

It terrifies them right they want to see well. I'm in a swimming pool.

There's an edge They don't want to see oh oh oh this isn't a swimming pool.

This is an ocean I'm in the middle of an ocean, I'm gonna drown that's a terrible

thing for children, that's why they need discipline and structure because it's

consistency and predictability and routine and all the things that are

extraordinarily helpful to them okay, so, now, think about that hierarchy that

we talked about so, you're not in a story, you're in nested stories and the

nested stories ground themselves in action, in actual embodied action so, if

you're gonna sit if you're going to be a good partner, maybe you help prepare the

meals and to help prepare the meals means you pick up a plate with your hand

and you move it physically through space and you put it on the table that's where

it stops being an abstraction so at the bottom of an ethical hierarchy of value

are actions not things, that's the scientific world but actions

and then you can

label the actions with abstractions as you move up the hierarchy so you're good

at setting the table so that means you're good at making dinner so that

means that you've got one element of being a good partner in place and being

a good partner is one element of being a good person and so you you're not so

good at setting the table and you say, well I'm not a good person it's like,

well, no, you should go down to the higher resolution levels of the

hierarchy and start there and that's what you do when you're arguing with

people but there's another thing that's really useful about conceptualizing the

hierarchy in this manner so so I think what we'll do is we'll stop now

for 10 minutes and I'll because I want to bring up this diagram because what I

want to do next is it's a bleak story at the moment because the story is

something like

You're going to lay out oversimplifications in the world and

they're going to be prone to catastrophic error And then you have to

encounter what's terrifying in order to progress and so what that means is the

progression is always dependent on terror Something like that and there's

some truth in that and that's why people don't progress But it's not a sufficient

truth, and I want to unpack that when we come back So let's come back in ten

minutes, and then I'll do I can unpack that There's this parable in the New

Testament that just came to mind

I'm going to mangle it a bit, because it's not one that I have well memorized,

but... and I'm probably going to conflate two or three stories together,

but I think I've got it right.

Christ is walking down the road, and someone picks him up, and the person is

rich, and wealthy, and he has a talk, they have a

talk, and the wealthy man basically tells him all the things that are wrong

with his life, and...

then he asks him what he should do about it and Chris says to him you have to

give up everything you own and follow me and that's often be read as a criticism

of wealth and that's actually not what the story means what the story means is

this this guy has a lot of wealth but he's still miserable and so that means

that what he has is the obstacle to what he could be and so that's the message of

the story is that if you're miserable with what you have then you have to let

go of what you have so that maybe you could have something else and and so and

then there's some commentary on that story I think other people are listening

and they say well if that's the price to be paid then no one is ever

going to pay it and I think that's where the Statement it is easier for a man to

go through the eye of a needle for a camel to go through and I have The eye

of a needle then for a rich man to enter paradise I believe that's the derivation

of that story and like I said that's been read as a critique of wealth But it

isn't it's a critique of attachment now, you know in the Buddhist doctrine One

of the Impediments to enlightenment is attachment

And people read that as saying, well, you shouldn't care for anything in the

world. And that's, there's a nihilism that's associated with that. And there

is a strong nihilistic tendency in Buddhism that has to do with abandonment

of the world. And you see that in Christianity to some degree, with people

going off to lead ascetic lives and to, you know, it's part of multiple

religious trends.

traditions that idea of asceticism and there's some utility in it if it is your

attachment say to material things or status or whatever that's interfering

with your Psychological progression now the idea is that you should let go of

whatever it is that's interfering with your psychological progression because

no matter how valuable What it is that's interfering is it's not as valuable as

what you're giving up Okay, however

the criticism still stands, and the criticism was, well if the task is that

difficult, then no one's going to do it and so in the brothers

Karamazov, there's a famous story called the Grand Inquisitor and it's a

story told by Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha,

and Ivan is a very high status intelligent, attractive,

tough-minded soldier.

And Alyosha is his younger brother, and he's kind of softer, and less rational,

more spiritual, and also training to be a novitiate at the local monastery. And

Ivan likes to tear strips off him, because he's a cynic and an atheist, and

in Dostoevsky's normal...

brilliant manner, he makes Ivan an incredibly powerful, articulate, and

admirable character.

So when Dostoevsky wants to take someone on in his literary investigations, he

doesn't take his enemy and turn him into some sort of weak puppet.

He takes his enemy and turns him into the strongest possible enemy he can

imagine, and then goes to battle against that. It's a hallmark of great

literature. It's what distinguishes Dostoevsky, for example, from Ayn Rand.

because what Ayn Rand does is she takes her, she's a darling of the, I would

say, libertarian slash right, she takes her enemies, and they're all the same,

first of all, every single one of her negative characters is exactly the same

as every other one, and they're all bad, you know, there's no redeeming qualities

whatsoever in them, and they also, I would say, make, they're weak characters

who make weak arguments, that's not the way to progress, the way to progress is

to take your enemy seriously, and to...

even inflate them into something beyond their capacity to inflate themselves and

then see if you can hammer out a solution to the genuine problem that's

being posed anyway, so Dostoevsky does that brilliantly, always and that's what

makes him so absolutely remarkable but anyways, Ivan tells Alyosha this story

he calls it the Grand Inquisitor and in the story, Christ comes back to Earth in

the Spanish Inquisition and he's...

He's out by a fountain, and people sort of notice him, and he starts performing

miracles, and a big crowd gathers around, and it's like happy days, you

know.

But then the Inquisitor shows up, this old, you know, harsh, tyrannical guy,

and he has his guards arrest him, and throws him in prison.

And so now Christ is in prison, and the Inquisitor comes down and says,

to him, well, you're probably wondering why we threw you in prison, you know,

especially given that we're the members of the, you know, we're the

representatives of the church that you hypothetically founded.

And Christ remains silent through this entire episode.

And the Inquisitor basically says, look, you know, you laid down this ethic

that's wonderful, but it's superhuman. No one can do it. It's asking way too

much.

So you're you put the burden you put on people was just far too great And so

what we've done in the Catholic Church in the centuries since the church was

founded is we've lightened the load We said well, I would take ordinary people

and say well there Here's some things you can do to be a little bit better And

you know we've instituted confession and repentance and all that we've kind of

toned it down So that the average person has some hope of progress And we're

making headway and the last bloody thing we need around here is you coming back

and like screwing up all our all our good efforts, it's like, it was nice to

have you around once, but once was plenty, man, we don't need you around

anymore and so, Christ listens to this, doesn't say anything, and then the

inquisitor turns to leave and Christ grabs him and kisses him on the lips and

the inquisitor turns white, and then leaves, and when he leaves the door, he

leaves the door open and that's the end of the story, and it's an amazing story,

it's an absolutely remarkable story, in every possible way, and, you know

Dostoevsky was objecting to some degree to the tyranny of the Catholic Church or

even of the Christian Church for that matter But the thing that he did that

was so damn brilliant is that he even made the Inquisitor leave the door open

No, and as a balanced critique of Catholicism even during the Inquisition.

It's so brilliant It's so emblematic of Dostoevsky's take on the world that he

criticized the inquisitorial Aspect of Christianity and of course it's the

tyrannical aspect of any belief system But noted that they bloody well left the

door open right so it's brilliant. It's brilliant It's it's yet. It's remarkable

so anyways the whole point that I'm making here is that there are terrible

impediments to enlightenment and the light the impediments are the necessity

of sacrifice and the necessity of the voluntary acceptance of suffering. I

mean, you see that in Buddhism, you know, because one of the fundamental

principles of Buddhism is that life is suffering and that attachment makes it

worse. Well, it isn't precisely attachment.

It's attachment to things such that you cannot release the things when it's time

to let them go.

Right? So, like, you're a phoenix.

You're a hundred years old. Your feathers, they're not working anymore,

right? You're all wrinkly. You're done.

It's time to burst into flames and be reborn. But you don't want to burn off

your feathers.

You want to cling to them.

And that's not good, because you have to be willing to undergo that

transformation process.

And that involves, like, you know, if you take yourself apart because you've

made a mistake, and you find out what it is about you that's not set up properly,

and that's why the mistake occurred.

That's really going to happen for example when an intimate relationship

breaks down Then you have to be in a position where you're willing to let The

errors that are part of your character that define you right they might even be

part of your identity You have to let you have to be willing to let them go

you have to be willing to let them burn off And that's a hell of a thing to ask

and so then the question might be well Is there a less radical solution to the

problem then then?

Then crucifixion and resurrection or the total immolation and regeneration

because that's the archetypal What's that? That's the archetypal end point

that if you want to put yourself together you have to die and be reborn I

mean that and that motif comes up all the time in in in popular popular

stories and in mythology and so they here's here's how I think that

problem can be resolved so

Let's go back to the Pinocchio story momentarily So what happens and the

Pinocchio story to me is analogous in its structure to the Sermon on the Mount

and so I'm going to make a parallel between those two things so basically

what the Sermon on the Mount suggests is that you should conceptualize the

highest good that you're capable of conceptualizing and orient yourself

towards that and That having done that you should live in the moment So it's

not like you should live in the moment

It doesn't say that because that's often Christ the hippie you know so the the

hippies who have adopted that's or the That sort of that that element of

Christianity say well you live for the moment You know and and and and in

meditation and other practices some of the attempt is to get you to live in the

moment But you know just to tell people to live in the moment It's like what

what the hell kind of advice is that what about the future you know that it's

not helpful advice Somebody comes to you and they're suffering dreadfully because

you know their mother has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed well live in the

moment It's like that's just not helpful.

It's it's and because it's even worse than that. It's judgmental you say well

The only reason you're suffering is because you haven't oriented yourself

properly to live in the moment It's like no you're suffering because your mother

has Alzheimer's and you don't have a job It's like it's not because you aren't

living in the moment so living in the moment isn't the right answer

The right answer is something more like orient yourself towards the highest good

that you can imagine and then act in the moment That's a whole different story.

Now. That's what happens in the Pinocchio story. Basically what happens

is that Geppetto Sees the star beckoning in the distance and he orients himself

towards the highest good he can imagine he wants to take this creation of his

and so this is Manifesting itself conceptually at multiple levels

simultaneously because there's a There's a story about the destiny of humanity in

relationship to God nested in the story.

It's like, take your fallible creation, your puppet, and

set up the conditions such that it's capable

of taking on full functional independence.

It's something like that. So that's what you do if you're a good parent with your

children. You don't protect them, you don't offer them safety, you don't do

any of that, except insofar as it's necessary.

to facilitate their development as fully competent and courageous beings

the purpose of the protection is only to allow that developmental process to

continue so you orient, Geppetto orients himself and so the father orients

himself, and then the son undertakes the voyage and so, alright, so let's say

that that's the case you orient yourself first, then you can start to rely on

your

Then you can start to concentrate more on your orientation to the moment now

I'm gonna tell you another story, so you know I was just watching Harry Potter

the other day the first one and I was watching the Quidditch game And the

Quidditch game is very interesting because there's a game and a metagame

going on at the same time so The game is just the standard Quidditch game, it's

kind of like basketball played on brooms, right? You have to throw balls

through hoops, and if you get enough points, you win.

But at the same time, so there's the normal players, and then there's two

seekers, one from each team, and the seekers aren't playing the same game.

The game is nested inside the seeker game, actually, because if you're a

seeker and you perform your task, then everyone wins, right? You win, but

everyone wins.

And so you're not even playing the normal game.

You're playing the seeker game and the thing that that that Harry Potter chases

is this thing called the snitch and the snitch This is one of the things that I

can't I don't know how the hell JK Rowling figured this out I cannot figure

it out because that snitch is a winged ball, right? And there's there's

actually a symbol of that winged ball called the round chaos Which Jung

describes in his works on alchemy and his works on how to be are really really

difficult It's not easy to figure out what he's talking about at all But the

round chaos, which is a winged ball, it's a manifestation of the spirit

Mercury, and Mercury is an emissary of the god. So you can think about Mercury

as the unconscious manifesting itself in your field of experience, something like

that. In any case, the round chaos is the container of the

primordial material from which the world is made.

And I think about it like this.

It's this thing.

There. It's that.

So when you encounter an anomaly, an error, it's a container.

That's a way of conceptualizing it. And what does it contain?

Well, it contains, in some sense, it contains the whole world. But here's an

example. Like, look, let's say... God.

Let's say that you've had repeated fights with your wife about how...

domestic duties are going to be arranged around mealtime and believe me, you're

gonna have those fights and so what's happening is that mealtimes are

unpleasant because there's a war for power going on in the kitchen, right?

and so then you think one day, well you're gonna note that and you're going

to do an archaeological investigation and find out just what the hell is going

on and so you start

unpacking the fact that mealtimes are not pleasant and so what's in that

little thing that you're unpacking, that package, well the entire power dynamic

between men and women in the modern world is inside that dispute and you

might find that part of the reason that your wife is upset about the way that

mealtimes are arranged is because her grandmother was beat by her grandfather

and that's playing a role in it played a role in determining her unconscious

expectations, and that's pathologizing one of the day-to-day rituals in the

house and if you're gonna unpack that, you're gonna have to unpack all of that

into... you take a little monster and you decompose it and you find out it's a

hydra, it's got 50 heads and then you have to work through every single one of

those, it's really, really difficult, and so...

It's a container that contains everything, but the thing is if you

unpack it successfully Let's say and you deal with it you negotiate a consensus

Then all of a sudden you get you get peace say around your mealtimes Which is

a major accomplishment man because you have to eat three times a day And it's

the center of the household and all of that so but the thing is is that?

Often eat when you're especially in the context of an intimate relationship

Things will emerge that produce discontinuities. And the question is,

what should your attitude towards that discontinuity be?

Well, you can punish the person for manifesting the discontinuity. That's

the tyrannical aspect. Or you can let it take the whole thing apart, and that

will happen. I mean, that's often how relationships end, is that a

discontinuity emerges, and people get into it, and things go sideways so badly

that the whole relationship descends into chaos, and people bail out of it.

So it's no wonder that people want to ignore it.

And it's also no wonder that they want to tyrannize it. It's like, quit

bothering me with that.

Well, possibly, but probably not. And also, if my

attitude towards you is quit bothering me with that, your attitude towards me,

when I have the same sort of problem in reverse, is going to be exactly the

same. And so, we're not going to get anywhere with it.

Alright.

But that still is painful.

Now, let's go back to the Quidditch issue. Now, here's what happens, is that

Harry Potter is picked to be the Seeker.

So that means he is the Seeker. Whatever he represents is the Seeker.

And he's an interesting character, because he's touched by evil, and he's a

rule-breaker.

And he's also kind of a normal kid. He's not a hyper-intellect or anything like

that. That's Hermione's role, right?

So he's normal but super normal at the same time, and he gets picked to be the

seeker, and then you think about what is it he seeks, and he seeks this thing

that glimmers, right?

It flashes in front of him, it's made out of gold, and it has wings, and if he

grabs it, then he wins.

And so the question is, what does that represent?

Now, it's interesting that when people watch that movie, they actually find

that, you know, they think that that's kind of cool, that it's a cool game.

and it is a cool game, she laid it out very nicely, and the idea is that well,

there's a game, and if you play it normally, you win the game but in that

game is a metagame, and if you play that properly, then not only do you win, but

everybody wins so, and then the next rule is the metagame supersedes the game

and that's the same idea that I'm chasing here with you today about this

metamorality it's the morality that emerges as a consequence of the analysis

of a set of moralities or it's the morality

It's the morality to which all other moralities should be subjugated. That's

another way of thinking about it.

And I said, well, that's a terrible thing because it involves painful

sacrifice, or maybe it involves confronting the thing you least want to

confront. That's the Jungian dictum, right?

If your life isn't all that it should be, then you should find out the thing

that you least want to confront that you're avoiding and confront that. And

that's easy to say.

But it's a terrible thing, because it means you're going to have to turn your

gaze to the place where you are weakest and most vulnerable. And that is asking

a lot of people.

So then you might say, well, is there an alternative?

And I think there is an alternative. So this is the anomaly, right? This is the

ball that contains everything.

I think there is an alternative. I think it's associated with this idea.

So imagine we have a...

We could have a conflict if we were in a relationship. We could have a conflict

that would blow the relationship apart.

All right, so we don't want to have that conflict.

And then we could have no conflict whatsoever, which means that you would

never get to say what you wanted, and I would never get to say what I wanted,

because we're either identical, which is just not happening, or we're going to

have conflict, because you're going to want some things that I don't want, and

vice versa. So if there's no conflict, we are not in a relationship.

Alright, so zero conflict is the wrong amount, and conflict that destroys the

relationship is the wrong amount.

And then you might say, well, okay, what's the optimal amount of conflict?

Well, so then we can think about how people respond emotionally.

So let's say, if you go after the person that you're arguing with, and you say,

you're a bad person.

And you really make that case. You bloody well hammer it home. You remember

50 things they've done that were bad, and you lay them out. It's like, I'm

going to stomp you. You're a bad person. You really need to change.

Okay, well, first of all, you're going to meet tremendous resistance, and

that's like you've got the hydrogen. You're bringing the hydrogen bomb to the

war, right? And maybe, unless you want to destroy everything, maybe that's not

the most logical solution.

But then by the same token, everything's all right, and we never have any

conflict. That's not helpful either, and you're going to get bored of that, and

you're not going to develop.

So then the question is well, maybe there's some happy medium here Maybe you

want to be repairing this structure You know the structure that goes from micro

actions up to higher-order conceptualizations maybe you want to be

updating that on a constant basis and you want to update it in a manner that

doesn't Drop you into chaos or place you in too much stasis and then that answer

is well how then the then the question is How is it that you can calibrate your

approach to error so that you get the benefits of doing it without the

disadvantage of collapsing into chaos?

And then the answer to that is something like...

It's something like... Once you have decided

to adopt responsibility for being, and we'll say that what that means is that

you have...

conceptualized a Good that you're willing to devote yourself to and I

think you you're perfectly welcome to do that on an individual basis I think you

should do it on an individual basis. You should consult with your ancestors while

you're doing that because generally speaking the route to optimal the route

to to quality of life and productivity Has been laid out by other people we

kind of know what the parameters are You need to do something that other people

find is useful.

And you have to regard it as useful as well.

Or at least you have to be entertaining. There has to be something about you of

value to other people that you have to pursue with a fair bit of diligence.

So you have to play a productive social role.

Probably need friends.

Probably need an intimate relationship.

And if it could be...

Medium to long-term infant intimate relationship perhaps all the better.

That's what most societies hold up as ideal could assume Well, there's

probably a reason for that I think one of the reasons is is that your life gets

fragmented otherwise badly fragmented You know it's because every time you

have a long-term relationship, and it fragments It's like your identity is

blown into pieces you get fragmented across time. It's it's not it's not good

It breaks you into pieces, and you don't necessarily recover that well

It makes everything much more impermanent and unreliable. All of those

things. So it introduces a tremendous amount of uncertainty into your life.

And it also means that you don't have anyone around that you can really trust.

And that's bad.

Because if you have someone around you can really trust, then you have two

brains instead of one.

You probably need two brains to manage your way through life. It's pretty

complicated.

So you orient yourself towards some good.

The highest good that you can conceptualize, and it has to be through

a consultation with your ancestors, because you need to do the things that

people have always done, and you need to do them properly, and you need to assume

that that's the way that you should live, unless you have a very good reason

to change it dramatically, and maybe you do, but you've got to start with some

axiomatic set of presuppositions, because otherwise you have to invent

everything on your own, and you don't have enough time to do that, so you have

to use normative guidelines.

And if you don't, then people won't know what to do with you. That's another big

problem, if you live completely outside the norm. I mean, you know, remarkable

artists manage that to some degree.

But, of course, they pay for the privilege by being remarkable artists.

So, if there's something truly remarkable about you, perhaps you could

justify deviating from the normative path.

But if there isn't... First of all, there's nothing remarkable enough about

you to justify deviating in every way from the normative path, no matter how

remarkable you are.

So...

So that's part of the the rescuing of the father from the from the depths is

to to Reunite yourself with the traditional structures of your

community. You can do that in a way that you feel Suits your own needs best, but

I don't think you can not do it because it makes you weak and then you'll drown

All right, so let's say you have oriented yourself But not perfectly

because you're full of mistakes and errors

So then what do you do because you have to fix those errors, but you still have

to be oriented And this is why I started get interest to get interested in the

phenomena of meaning As a phenomenological experience to

experience something as meaningful It's not exactly obvious what that means to

experience something as meaningful.

I think that you can you can approach it obliquely, you know, like if I said

watch yourself for two weeks and notice when you're doing something that you

regard as meaningful I could say, well here's some markers you lose a sense of

time, you lose a sense of vulnerability, you're deeply engaged in it it seems

worth the effort, right? you forget yourself while you're doing it maybe you

forget your existential concerns while you're doing it, you're not...

ruminating or obsessing about the meaning of your life right so so there's

markers for it's like the flow states that Csikszentmihalyi described and

then you can experience it you experience it under certain sort of

ritualistic conditions you might experience it when you go see a great

movie you might experience it when you listen to music I think music is a very

very standard pathway for people to have that kind of experience because

Virtually everyone gets intimations of meaning from music. And I think music is

hierarchically structured patterns that are representative of being laying

itself out properly. It's something like that. So it's an abstract representation

of proper being.

And so we can grapple with the phenomena of music, or phenomena of meaning. We

can box it in a little bit and start to conceptualize it.

We can start to conceptualize it perhaps as the manifestation of a deep instinct

and so I would say well Meaning is what manifests itself?

when you are when you've oriented yourself properly and when

you've optimized the flow of information

between you and you between you and chaos that might be the right way of

thinking about it because You think about a piece of music is you want it to

be predictable?

But you don't want it to be perfectly predictable you want to be it to be

predictable with some interesting variations and Predictable with some

variations that make sense and maybe you can conceptualize that as something like

this. It's like It's predictable at this order of Stability, but it's it's

varying down here from time to time and so you've got stable stability there,

but variability there, and you can handle that so you want an overarching

structure of stability with some internal variability and maybe that's

the way that you update yourself without falling apart and then I would say you

can find the pathway to the optimal rate of update by relying on your sense of

meaning that's what it's for what it tells you is that you're you're

wandering your way through the world between the Catastrophes of chaos and

the catastrophes of order and now and then you swing into the proper locale

you're you're where you should be and What happens is you get engaged by that

you get meaningfully engaged by that and it's fragile It'll move on you right

because it's very difficult to exist at that point Constantly your bad habits

Sorts of things your situation.

There's all sorts of things that are going to interfere with that, but that

doesn't mean That that isn't where you should be and so then you might say well

That's where you should strive to be all the time and then the question might be

well What would it be like if you were there all the time and I think that's

where intimations of paradise?

come from Mean when words think it was Wordsworth talked about intimations of

immortality and childhood people tend to romanticize their childhood because of

the sense of Intense engagement that goes along with being a child and it's

one of the wonderful things about being around children actually it's it's it's

one of they pay you for their care and The way that children pay you for their

care is that they turn Normal things into magic again when you're around them

because you've seen it a hundred times before And so when you see it, you don't

see it. You see what you already know.

But when a child sees it, they don't, because they don't know. They see it,

and then when you watch them see it, you see it too. And so it's just, it's

tremendous fun leading a small child around to do things that you've done

before, because they're so, you know, they're like this. They're like, all the

time, and you know, maybe that's too much, and they cry, and they get upset,

and all of that. But a good part of the time, it's just wild-eyed wonder, and

then you can see the world through their eyes, and it's payment.

And so that's that sense of being engaged like that is something that

people love about children and rightly so but it's also a marker to The proper

way of being you know there's a dictum in This is a union idea that there's no

difference between the archetype of the wise old man and the archetype of the

child They're the same thing because the wise old man is the person who found

what he had in childhood, but lost

Right it's a that's a very powerful motif is that the purpose of maturation

is to return to the state of childhood as a mature being Not to stay in the

state of childhood. That's Peter Pan, but to make the sacrifices necessary for

maturation and then return So well, how do you do that? Well you do that in part

by noting what it is That's meaningful you for you to engage in I would say

it's your nervous system reporting to you right hemisphere and left hemisphere

balanced The balance between chaos and order produces an output that says you

are in the right place It's a perception the meaning is a perception of being in

the right place. It's the genuine thing however Because it can be pathologized

That's the thing and that's why I think there's a call to virtue in most great

religious traditions If you're going to rely on your sense of meaning to orient

you you have to play a straight game Because otherwise you warp and twist the

inputs, and then the mechanism won't function properly.

You know, it's like if you were only... If you've blinded yourself to half the

world, you can't use your perceptions to orient yourself properly, because the

half of the world that you're ignoring is going to pop up at you unexpectedly

and take you down.

And so if your relationship with the world isn't pristine, honest...

Primarily then you can't rely on your own internal orienting mechanisms And

then you either fall into chaos which is an absolute catastrophe or you have to

rely on some kind of external authority and that makes you prone to Possession

by tyrannical ideologies for example which give you that sense of meaning

that you should in fact have as a consequence of your own action

But

okay, so If all relationships are

predicated on this balance

between no conflict and conflict that destructs, then

if we were to look at this at a more macro level, we see this manifest

in in history, in our world, like, with conflict in between countries, in

between systems, ideology, etc.

But wouldn't this sort of navigation between the exact line of no

conflict versus conflict, how does that not imply that some people are

inherently doomed to chaos?

It might imply that. You know, one of the things, so look, so,

sometimes,

Sometimes you don't have an answer that works you have an answer that produces

the highest probability of success and like I could view the archetypal world

from a religious perspective and say that There's such a thing as ultimate

and final redemption.

That's a metaphysical claim. I don't I don't want to do that I think it's

independent of what I'm talking about What I'm saying is that there's an

archetypal path that's laid out in in the mythology of the hero and it's your

best bet That's all It's your best bet. It doesn't mean that if you apply it,

that everything is going to turn out the way you might want it to turn out. But I

would say this, there's an interesting twist on that, too. This is one of the

things that I came to understand about trying to speak the truth, is that you

can make an assumption, you can make a fundamental assumption, based on your

ignorance, let's say, and the ineradicable quality of your ignorance.

That you can't compute the best possible outcome What you can do instead is make

a decision and one decision is well I'm gonna say what I think and see what

happens and Then you can define that as the best possible outcome now you might

say well now and then that's gonna lead you into chaos It's like yeah, it is It

is it's a strange. It's a strange inversion But regardless of all that I

would still say Human beings are finite and limited and mortal you know And

death is final. Let's say I'm not saying that but we could easily say that

Doesn't matter. This is still the best pathway forward It isn't certainty.

There's no certainty and It's very frequently in life. You have poison a or

poison B like you get to pick your poison You don't get to pick the elixir

of life But I would but I would say I would also say I don't think there's any

reason to be particularly pessimistic because We don't know what would happen

if people really tried hard to get their acts together Like, if they understood

the necessity of that and really put it forward. I mean, I've had lots of

experience with my clinical clients now. You know, I've seen dozens and dozens of

people, and we have tried jointly to get their lives straighter, and it works,

almost inevitably.

Now, that doesn't mean... I've had clients who died.

You know, we were three quarters through a wonderful process of psychological

renovation, and they got cancer and died.

So there's... there's no certainty associated with this but it's the best

solution available and it's also possible that it's a good enough

solution you know, I was talking to my class yesterday about this, you know, so

you if you pursue the things in your life that are meaningful once you've

oriented yourself, and that means accepting the challenges that come along

with that because one of the things that you'll find, you even find this in music

If you know a piece of music completely, then you tend not to want to listen to

it anymore.

There still has to be some challenge in it, you still have to track it, and

sometimes music is so complex, you just can't... it just sounds like noise.

Modern music is often like that, because it's so... well, it tends towards the

chaotic, and so it's... I find it difficult to listen to, because I can't

get a handle on it.

But then, you know, so it's too challenging, and then there's other

music... Pop music is often like this. It's catchy the first two times you hear

it, and then you never want to hear it again. It's too much, there's too much

predictability and not enough chaos. And hopefully you find a piece of music

that's somewhere in the middle. You can listen to it 50 or 100 times, and each

time you listen to it, there's still some new nuance in it that you didn't,

that you didn't expect before.

And so, well, you kind of want to set up your life like that.

So that, and I think you see that the phenomena of meaning manifests itself at

the... area at the locale of optimal challenge so if the thing so one of the

things for example i might say well let's say you want to set some goals for

yourself we say well they're remarkable goals but they're all they're too

unattainable you're just going to find it frustrating to pursue them it's going

to be too punishing and then we might say well here's a goal and you think

well i could do that you know standing on my head there's nothing no challenge

in it well both of those two extremes are going to leave you In a state that

isn't characterized by the optimization of engagement and meaning. One is too

difficult, it's too punishing, it's the judge and nothing else, and the other is

the ultimate and merciful mothers, it's like, you win no matter how you play.

So then you calibrate it, you say, well, you know, I need, I'm up for a challenge

at this level.

I wouldn't recommend that, because that's just a bit, like, people do that,

you might want to...

Investigate your character in detail and decide you know what's going on at this

level of analysis That's pretty harsh, but you can certainly continually retool

yourself at more micro levels and that and I think what you do is you pick the

level of retooling that optimizes your willingness to be engaged in it and Then

what's so interesting about that is that I think is that you get the benefits of

perfection so to speak while still being imperfect.

Your actual imperfection has nothing to do with it.

What's relevant is the journey that you're undertaking to rectify the

imperfection. So instead of aiming to be the entity without flaws, you're aiming

to be the entity that continues to realize its flaws and overcome them.

Well, that's a game you can play forever.

And that's maybe the ultimate in being an unflawed entity.

It's something like that.

So I want to show you some pictures that I think are associated with that.

So this one, to begin with.

This is an absolutely amazing picture, I think.

So this is Berthold Furtmeyer, Tree of Life, flanked by Eve and Mary Ecclesia.

And in some sense, this picture summarizes the biblical stories in one

picture, which is... That's pretty amazing that a picture can do that.

And so, let me explain the picture a little bit. So the first thing you see

here is that this is the tree of life.

And so it echoes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

But this is post-fall. So we interpreted the story of Adam and Eve already. It's

that human beings became self-conscious. They discovered death. They discovered

morality. It was all a consequence of interacting with... The fruit and the

snake, something like that. And you can read that as an evolutionary tale.

You can at least read it as a representation of the emergence of self

-consciousness in human beings. And so what does that mean?

Well, it means that the apple, in some sense, was equivalent to death. And

that's what you see here. You see Eve is picking fruit from the tree here.

But the fruit is on the skull side of the tree.

And so Eve, it's the vulnerability of Eve.

She's naked there.

and displayed to the world. It's the vulnerability of Eve.

That's one way of thinking about it. It was the vulnerability of Eve that was

the catalyst to the development of human self-consciousness.

And I think that that's true. It seems to be a reasonable proposition.

And so Eve's relationship with the fruit and the snake doomed human

beings to the realization of mortality.

That's what this side of the picture represents.

And so it's a catastrophe and it's associated with here with the snake and

the fruit It's human beings attempts to understand how it is that they emerged

into a self-conscious world Okay, so fine. So that's on this is on the the

fall end of the story and this is on the Solution end of the story now what you

see here There's a skull there and there's a crucifix here and you see

there's all these little fruits on this tree So it's the apple of death that Eve

is handing out on this side and it's the host that plays a role in the

cannibalistic rite that's at the center of Christian ritual, that Mary, as the

church, is handing out as a medication for this.

So she's handing out the antidote.

Well, what's the antidote? Well, it's a strange thing. It's associated with this

crucifix, and that's translated into this wheaten host, so you're supposed to

eat that, and that is the incorporation of whatever this represents.

Well, the question then is, What does that represent? It's a symbol of

suffering, obviously. It's a symbol of the ultimate in suffering. It's the

weirdest thing, because the picture proposes that to ingest the ultimate in

suffering is to simultaneously ingest the antidote to the catastrophe

of the knowledge of death.

It's a very strange paradox, but...

But it's the proper paradox that's at the center of the great drama that's

represented by this picture.

A little knowledge of death destroys you.

Full voluntary acceptance of it is the cure.

That's the idea.

Well, that's a hell of an idea.

It's not only to... and to accept it.

Is simultaneously in some sense to take responsibility for it Because

you don't take responsibility for things that you don't accept You only take

responsibility for things that you do accept say well the world is

fundamentally flawed because its fundamental nature is Vulnerability

intolerable vulnerability.

I'm not going to take any responsibility for that that that's really Kane's

attitude in the story of of Cain and Abel he externalizes responsibility

for the catastrophe of his life and therefore he doesn't make the right

sacrifices and so the paradoxical injunction here is accept responsibility

for the catastrophe of your life and that way you transcend it simultaneously

and there's an unbelievably hopeful message in there and the message is

you're actually strong enough to do that you just don't know it And you won't

find out till you do it. You can't find out till you do it.

But if you did it, you'd find out that it was true.

It's a massive risk. It's the ultimate in risks, right? You have to be willing

to lose your life in order to find it.

It's like, exactly right.

So that picture, when I started to understand that picture, well, every

time I look at it, it just blows me away.

It's unbelievably, it's an unbelievably sophisticated set of ideas.

But I don't think it's much different, really.

Than this idea.

I mean, Buddha finds his enlightenment under a tree.

It's not fluke that that's the case. That's his natural environment. And he's

sitting in the lotus here. The lotus opens up.

It's this thing that springs up from the depths.

And he sits there illuminated the same way. He's got a halo that's the sun that

stands for higher consciousness.

And he's transcended by accepting the fact that life is suffering.

He's transcended.

The limitations that are part of mortality You see that symbol there

That swastika you see it there. It's reversed the Nazis reversed it

Well think about that I mean they weren't stupid their symbolism their

symbols had meaning is what the swastika were represented was what this

represents reversed Well, that's a very bad idea

This is the thing that this this idea is what enables people to transcend their

suffering and Buddha said well Don't don't be too attached to things And what

does that mean it doesn't mean deny the world it might mean deny the world if

you're too in love with the material like with material well-being let's say

then your pathway to transcendence and meaning might be to abandon that because

it's It's constraining you, it's making you less than you could be.

But the fundamental lesson, the more fundamental lesson that's underneath

that is don't let what you are stop you from being what you could be.

Right. And so then the question is, well, what do you identify with?

Do you identify with what you are?

Then you're a tyrant.

Do you identify with chaos?

Because that's the opposite of order, say.

Then you're nihilistic.

you don't identify with either of those. You know that they're both necessary,

you know that you have to live with both of them, but you identify with the

capacity to continually transcend what you are.

And then you seek out error.

That's what humility is. It's like, I'm error-ridden.

So I want to see, I want to put myself in a situation where I can discover one

of my errors, hopefully not in a way that's going to knock me completely out

of the game, right?

I want to seek out a challenge. I want to find out where my limits are. I want

to find out where there's not enough of me yet. And I want to do that in a way

that's engaging, because you can wear yourself out fighting dragons,

obviously. You can exhaust yourself completely, and that's not helpful.

One of the things I learned, for example, when I was coaching...

When I was coaching lawyers who these were people who had very high-end

careers? And so they had an infinite workload no matter how much they worked

flat out there was always way more work that they should do it's very difficult

thing to learn to manage and So they were exhausting themselves, and I said

well. You know you have to work less per day It's like well. No, that's not

happening. I can't do that and so

What I learned over time was, okay, so this is what you have to do. Every three

months you have to block off four days and go have a vacation.

And you have to plan that in advance so it's in your calendar so that your

secretary doesn't book your time.

And then you need that because you have to recuperate enough so that you can

work as hard as you're going to work. And of course they were nervous about

that. And I said, well look, we can calibrate this.

Let's keep track of your billable hours over the next year and see if they

increase or decrease. Because I bet you if you take more time off, you'll

actually... have more billable hours. You'll actually have your cake and eat

it too. You'll get to have a vacation, and you'll be more productive.

And that, inevitably, that was what happened. And so that's a matter of

calibrating the game properly, right? You want to play a game that you can

play today, but also one that you can play next week and next month. We're not

talking about, you know, you're...

Your career this week. We're talking about you having a career that lasts 30

years that doesn't kill you That doesn't make you hate yourself or the job that

doesn't make you better that doesn't wear you to a frazzle So we it has to be

optimized and so I think that you can in fact decide to take on the load That's

optimally meaningful if you want and then you get to have your cake and eat

it, too You're on the pathway to continual incremental improvement You

only have to burn off a feather at a time instead of having the whole bloody

thing burst into flames But it's a constant It's a constant source of

renewal and there's an idea that to be renewed you have to drink the water of

life, right? That that's an old mythological idea And what's the water

the water of life chaos is water water water is chaos water is what washes

away? Too much order and to stay continually.

Let's say

Refreshed by the water of life is to take on exactly the right amount of

chaos to make sure that your garden is properly nourished and I think meaning

is actually the marker of that and And as I said, you know that I'm not I

wouldn't consider myself either naive or particularly optimistic person I don't

think I'm either of those but this isn't actually an idea This is one of the only

ideas that I've ever found that I really believe to be rock solid. I actually

think that it's true.

And it's very optimistic, because it says, you can use your sense of meaning

to calibrate your progress through life.

But there's rules.

You have to aim at the highest possible good that you can conceive.

Now, and that's subject update, because what the hell do you know? But you start

by aiming at the star you can see, rather than the dimmer one that you

can't yet perceive.

Then you decide that you're going to do that. Honestly, right? There's that

that's a big decision So the first decision I think in some sense is a

decision of love You're going to decide that being is worthwhile and that you're

going to work for its betterment And that's a decision that's based on love

and the second decision is based on truth having made that decision You're

going to play a straight game having made those two decisions I think that

you can allow your sense of meaning to calibrate your pathway and then, what's

so interesting is that you hit a state that's as close to paradisal as you're

gonna hit right away, because being engaged like that... it's better to be

engaged in the solution of a complex problem than not to have a problem at

all and that's no different than saying it's better for there to be being than

non-being, because being is a problem and so, if you wanna have no problems,

then you have no being, and...

you could say well being is so miserable that maybe that's the route we should

take and fair enough but maybe you can have your cake and eat it too you can

have the damn problem it can be a problem worth solving and you can be so

engaged in solving the problem that it justifies the fact that the problem

exists and then you get then you get to have

You get to have the problem and the solution at the same time and maybe

that's better than not having the problem at all And I believe that

because one of the things I have seen and I've seen this so interesting Being

so interesting when I've been lecturing to people especially more recently and

and this is also manifested on you myself on YouTube

I'm talking to people a lot about responsibility, and it's young men in

particular that seem to be responding to that, and I think that's partly because

I think that young women, in some sense, have their responsibility map already

laid out for them.

It's also less voluntary in some sense for women, because they have more

complicated problems to solve in the first part of their life, right? Because

they have to get the family problem solved. But whatever.

I've been talking very...

in a very delineated matter, about responsibility, which is a strange thing

to sell to people, but responsibility is what gives your life meaning.

And so then you might say, well, then take on ultimate responsibility.

And what happens?

You have an ultimately meaningful life. And then you might say, well, if your

life is ultimately meaningful, it doesn't matter if it's punctuated by

tragedy, or even predicated on tragedy.

It's worth it!

And I think that's true. And everything I've seen indicates to me that's true.

Every time I get my clients to take on more responsibility, you know, and it

isn't an injunction. You're a bad person. You should take on

responsibility. It has nothing to do with that. You can define the damn

responsibility. It isn't something that someone else should impose on you. It's

not a matter of doing what you should do in some abstract manner.

It's not that.

It's the choice of what game you're going to play.

And, you know, you can play the game of the seeker, I would say, and if you play

that game, then everyone wins.

And it's the best game you can play.

And so, the answer, in some sense, to the tragedy of life, to the catastrophe

of life, to the fall, is to adopt the responsibility of mortality that goes

along with that, and to play that game maximally. And, paradoxically, it's in

the willingness to do that that the solution emerges.

And I don't, you know, I have done my best with every single thing I've talked

to you guys about. I have done my best to do what Dostoevsky does in his

novels. Which is, I make a proposition and then I spend months or years trying

to figure out if I can take the bloody thing apart. If there's something wrong

with it. Because I want to find out. I want to hit it with a hammer and see if

it breaks.

And what I've been trying to do is to tell you all the things that I've...

Gathered let's say or or laid out or articulated or discovered over the last

30 years that I have not been able to break with the biggest hammer that I

could take to them and I guess that's the fundamental one is that I believe

that the the The idea that lurks in these images

Derived from very different cultures

It's the same idea

Life is suffering right indisputable What

do you do about that?

You you voluntarily accept it and then strive to overcome the suffering that's

a consequence of that and you do that for you and you do that in a way that

makes it better for other people and then that works and One question might

be well. How well does it work and the answer is?

You the only way that you can find out is by trying it That's it. That's the

existential element of it. The proof is to be derived by the Incarnation of the

attitude in your own life.

No one can tell you how it will work for you it's the thing that your destiny is

to discover that and You have to make you have to make the decisions to begin

with it's like because you can't do this without commitment, you have to commit

to it first, that's the act of faith that Kierkegaard was so insistent upon

you have to say, I'm going to act as if being is good, I'm going to act as if

truth is the pathway to enlightenment I'm going to act as if I should pursue

the deepest meaning possible in my life and there's reasons to do none of those

they're real reasons, so it's really a decision But you can't find out what the

consequence of the decision is unless you make the decision.

I think the same thing happens when you get married, by the way. If you think

you might leave, you're not married.

And then you think, well, the marriage didn't succeed. It's like, well, maybe

you were never married.

Because the rule is, you don't get to leave.

And there's a reason for that rule.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't situations where there should be

exceptions made for that. That's not the point.

The point is that there's some games you don't get to play unless you're all in.

And the other thing that's so interesting about being alive is that

you're all in.

No matter what you do, you're all in. This is going to kill you.

So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while

you're waiting.

Because do you have anything better to do?

Really?

Why not pick the best thing possible that you could do?

Why not do that? Maybe you could justify your wretched existence to yourself that

way. Think you could that's what it looks like you know people find such

meaning in the responsibilities They adopt it stops making them ask questions

about what life is for if you have a newborn child for example Like unless

you're really in a bad way Psychotically depressed or maybe your personality

really needs some retooling you stop thinking about Anything but ensuring

that that baby is doing well

And if someone comes along and asks you an existential question about your

commitment to that, the right response is, why are you asking me such stupid

questions when this is manifesting itself right in front of your eyes?

Like, how blind can you be? That isn't a time for questions about the meaning of

life. The answer is right in front of you.

And if you can't see it, it's not because life has no meaning. It's

because you're blind.

I mean, that's what the image of

of the virgin mother and the child is all about it's like what's the answer to

the meaning of life here's an answer it's like well i'm going to criticize

that well go right ahead you know it's like it's like what what you're like a

you're like a what do you call that a termite gnawing on a temple there's no

there's no utility in that sort of criticism you're it's blindness and

it's the same thing with regards to the path of the hero. It's like, it glistens

in front of you, and you can criticize it. It's like, fine.

Put the cart before the horse, and see how far you get.

So I thought, to bring full closure to the class, I was trying to solve this

terrible puzzle that confronted me for, and many other people, about how it was

that human beings got themselves in such a tangle about what they believed.

Such a tangle that we were pointing the ultimate weapons of destruction at one

another, which, by the way, we are still doing.

And I thought, okay, well, I understand that. We need our belief systems.

They orient us.

And that means there will be conflict between belief systems, and that can be

a catastrophe.

And that's being played out everywhere, again, in very many ways.

What's the solution to that?

Well... One possibility is there's no solution.

It's just mayhem all the way around. Could be the case.

But it seemed to me, as I delved into it, that the proper solution to that was

to live properly.

As an individual.

Because you're more powerful than you think.

Way more powerful than you think. I mean, God only knows what you are in the

final analysis.

You're blind to your own weaknesses, but you're also blind to your own strengths.

And so then I think, well, if you got your act together, it'd be better for

you, and instantly it would be better for your family, assuming they wanted

you to get your act together, and not everyone does.

And then it would be better for the community.

It's like, how far could you take that? If you stopped wasting time, and if you

stopped lying, and if you oriented yourself to the highest possible good

that you could conceive of, and you committed to that, how much good could

you do?

Well, I would say, why don't you find out?

So that's what I think you should do You should find out you don't have anything

better to do and there's nothing in it as far as I've been able to tell There's

nothing in it, but good So Maybe you could

sort yourself out so that you wanted nothing but the good and and then maybe

you could help make that manifest in the world and Maybe we wouldn't have all

these terrible problems then At least we'd have fewer of them, and that would

be a start.

So the answer to the problem of humanity is the

integrity of the individual.

That's the answer.

And states that are predicated on that realization are healthy.

And states that aren't are doomed to stagnation and catastrophic collapse.

And personalities that are predicated on self-tyranny and the tyranny of others

are doomed to collapse.

And then you think, well, what's the barrier? And the barrier is, are you

willing to accept the responsibility?

And part of the answer to that is, reduce the damn responsibility until

it's tolerable.

You don't have to fix everything at once.

You could just start by fixing the things that you could fix.

Or you could even do it more.

You could do it with even less self-sacrifice. You could start by

fixing only the things that you want to fix.

God, you can get a massive way that way.

So, do it. See what happens.

That's what you should have been taught in university, right from the beginning.

It's like, aim at the highest good.

Tool yourself into something that can attain it.

And go out there and manifest it in the world.

And everything that comes your way will be...

everything that comes your way will be a blessing.

And so, all you have to do is give up your resentment and your hatred.

I know that's a hard thing to give up, because you have plenty of reason for

it.

That's probably a good place to stop.

So, it was a pleasure.