聖經系列九：對亞伯拉罕的呼喚 (Biblical Series IX: The Call to Abraham)

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So I've been thinking this week about doing this one thumb once a month on a continuing basis.
So So I think if I do that, I think it will be here.
Although it's harder to rent this theater during the academic year.
But if it isn't here, it'll be somewhere else.
And because I'd like to continue doing this, I'm learning a lot off from doing it.
And, uh, once a month would really be good, because then I could really do the background work.
And, uh and I could probably do that for a couple of years because obviously this is going very quickly.
But that's okay, you know?
I mean, it shouldn't go any faster than it can go, And that's how that's how it seems to me.
Anyways.
So, uh, this has Bean.
This has bean a very steep learning curve for me with regards to these stories, because I didn't understand them very well, and I've got better at using the resources on line to help me do my background investigation.
I have a lot of books, and some of you may have noticed that, um, online, I posted a conversation I had with Jonathan Paseo and his and his brother Matthew.
Um, I hope it's Matthew.
Names escape me so badly, but I believe that's right.
He just finished a book on the on the Bible.
And so I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking about these stories, trying to understand what they're about.
And and then there's all these commentaries.
There's a great psych.
I think it's called Bible Hub that has every single verse of the Bible is listed there, and then with each verse, there are like they've aggregated 10 commentaries from about 10 commentaries from over the last 400 years.
And so there's like a dense page on every line.
And that's one of the things that's really interesting about this book, too, is that it's It's aggregated so much commentary that it's that it's it's much bigger than looks.
The book is much bigger than it looks, and so is being very interesting to become familiar with those two.
And the fact that this site is set up with all the commentary split up by Versace means you can rapidly compare the commentaries and get a sense of you know, how people have interpreted this over while at least several 100 years.
But of course, much longer than that, because the people who wrote the commentaries were, of course, reading things that were older than that.
So that's being very, very interesting to last week.
We talked about a couple of things.
We talked about how you might understand the idea of a divine encounter, and then we also paralleled out with the idea that God disappears in the Old Testament.
He he bows out as the stories progress, and that seems to be a an emergent property of the sequencing of the stories.
Right cause all the books were written by independent people know different people, and then they were aggregated by other people.
And so the narrative continuity is this some kind of emergent property that's it's a consequence of this interaction between people, readers and writers over centuries.
And it's it's strange that, given that there are also multiple, coherent narratives that united, you know, it's really it's really not that easy to understand that.
But it does at least seem to be the case, and so and the third thing we talked about was that as God by was out so to speak the the the the individual personality seems of the characters that are involved in human characters that are involved seems to become more and more developed.
And it isn't exactly clear what that I mean.
What it means is that God steps away in man steps forward.
That's what it means.
But why it's arranged like that, or they or the say ultimate significance of that is by no means clear.
And so So Abraham, who we're going to concentrate on today, is quite a well developed character.
And I would say there are two there multiple endings and beginnings in the biblical stories.
The most important ending, I suppose, is the ending of the of the Garden of Paradise and and the the disenchantment of the world enough and the sending forth of Adam and Eve into history right into the future, into a into a motive.
Being that has a future as part of it and that has history as part of it and that has the necessity of sacrifice and toil is part of it.
That's obviously crucial.
And then that's that is replayed with the story of Noah because everything is destroyed and then the world has created a new and then sacrifices have to be made in order for the world to begin.
And then you see the same thing happen again after the Noah story in the Tower of Babel.
Because history, as we really understand, history seems to start with Abraham because this story's of Abraham sound like historical stories and no scholars debate about the historical accuracy of the Bible, and I suppose there's there's no way of ever determining once and for all the degree to which you might regard the accounts as equivalent to modern empirical history.
But this is a psychological interpretation of the biblical stories, not a historical interpretation.
And it certainly does seem to be the case that, from a psychological perspective, we enter something like the domain of the modern conceptualization, relatively modern conceptualization of history, with Abraham beyond the accounts of divine commands that Abraham carries out.
This is from Freedman Man I mentioned in the last lecture, who wrote the disappearance of God in a variety of other books that are well worth reading.
The narrative also includes a variety of stories in which Abraham acts on his own initiative.
He divides land with his nephew Law.
He battles kings.
He takes concubines, he argues with his wife, Sarah.
On to occasion, he tells Kings that Sarah is his sister out of fear that they will kill him to get his wife.
He arranges his son's marriage in the place of the single story of Noah's drunkenness.
There are, in the case of Abraham, the stories of a man's life, and one of the things I was really struck by reading this in depth and reading the commentary is how much like a story about a person it iss know.
Abraham isn't a divine figure in any in any archetypal sense, precisely when he has archetypal elements, because he's also obviously the founder of a nation.
But fundamentally he's a human being and and he makes.
He has the adventures, and he makes the mistakes of a human being.
And that's it's the mistake part that really struck me, you know, because I did it.
I was talking with a friend of mine this week, Norman Deutsch, who's a very remarkable person in many ways, and he was taking me to task.
He was reading my book, which I'm going to publisher, which will be out in January.
And in the book in one section, I contrasted the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament, made the case sort of based on northward, fries ideas that the God of the Old Testament was really harsh and judgmental, you know, and that the God of the New Testament was more merciful and, you know, at least to some degree more sweetness and light.
And Norman took me to task about that, saying that that was overly Christianized interpretation, which would make sense because I derived it in part from Northrop Frye and I really have come to understand that more than that, he's right because that he's right about that, because the God in the Old Testament is actually far more merciful than he's generally made out to be.
And you really see this with a It's good news.
Fundamentally, if you regard the representation of God has somehow key to the description of being itself.
Abraham makes a lot of mistakes, you know, serious mistakes, and and yet he has a life, and he's and he's blessed by God, despite the fact that he's pretty deeply flawed and engages in deceptive practice.
I mean, he's a good man, but he's not a perfect man by any stretch of the imagination, and and things work out really well for him.
And he's the founder of the nation and all of that.
And that's good news for everyone, because perfect people are very, very hard to find.
And if the the the only pathway to having a rich and meaningful life was through perfection, then we would all be in deep trouble.
And so that's very satisfying to read that and, um, the other.
The other thing that I've been struck by is that, you know, Abraham and I think this is actually absolutely key to the interpretation of the story.
Abraham goes out and does things.
That's the thing.
And so one of the things that I've noticed in my life is that nothing I've ever done was wasted, and by done, I mean, put my heart and soul into, you know, like like attempted with with all of my effort that always worked.
Now it didn't always work the way I expected it to work.
That's a whole different issue, But the payoff from it was always positive I always something always something of value always accrued to me when I made the sacrifice is necessary to do something worthwhile.
And so I think part of the message in this in the story of it and the Abrahamic stories is Go do something and and I've thought about this in a variety of ways outside of the interpretation of this story.
Because I have this program some of you might be familiar with, which is called Future Authoring Program.
And it's it's designed to help people make a plan for 3 to 5 years into the future, you know?
And so what you do is you you answer some questions.
It's a writing program.
You answer some questions about how you would like your life to be what you would like your character to be 3 to 5 years down the road if you were taking care of yourself like you were taking care of someone that you actually cared about.
So you kind of have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself like you, like someone you have respect for and that you want the best.
For now, it's not easy because people don't necessarily have respect for themselves, and they don't necessarily want what's the best for themselves because they they have a lot of self contempt and a lot of self hatred, lot of guilt and a lot of existential angst and and a lot of self consciousness and all of that.
And and so people don't necessarily take care of themselves very well, And I think it's, I think it's I think you have an obligation.
It's one of the highest moral obligations to treat yourself as if you're a creature of value, and that is in some sense it's in some sense that's independent of your actions.
And you might think about that metaphorically as a recognition of your divine worth in the biblical sense, regardless of your of your sins, so to speak.
And I think that's that's that's powerful language as far as I'm concerned, once you understand it anyways with the self authoring program the future authoring program, you you ask the answer questions about what?
What, how you would like your friendships to be conducted because it's useful to surround yourself with people who are trying to move forward and and, more importantly, who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move back backwards, not when you fall.
That isn't what I mean.
But when you're doing self destructive things, your friends shouldn't be there to cheer you on.
And because then they're really not acting like friends.
Obviously, you know, I know it's obvious, but it still happens all the time and people allow it to happen.
It's not a good idea.
And now how would you like to sort your family out?
And I was thinking about this this week, too, because I was thinking about Noah's Ark, and there was a phrase in that story that I didn't understand, which was that Noah was perfect in his generations.
I thought, I don't know what that means, and you know, when you're when you're going through a book like the Bible.
If you don't understand the phrase that actually means you've missed something, it doesn't mean that that's just not, you know, that's not Germaine to the story.
It means you're stupid.
You didn't get it, man.
You didn't get it.
You didn't understand it.
And so the idea that Noah was perfect in his generations, and that's why he could build an ark that would sustain him and him and and humanity itself through the flood.
It meant that he not only did he walk with God, which is something that we talked about it in the context of the sermon on the Mount, but that he established proper relationships with his family with his Children.
And so what that meant was that his not only was he well integrated as a person, but his level of integration had reached the point where it stretched out beyond him and encompassed his family.
And so it was no and the family that was in the Ark.
And I can tell you, and I really understood this this year because I had a very tumultuous year.
You could think about it from a personal perspective.
I could think about it as a year that had no shortage of floods and and part of the reason that I was able to get through it.
I also had terrible health problems and well, one of the reasons I was able to get through it was because my family really came together around me, my kids, my wife, my parents and my friends as well and particularly a certain group of friends.
And that's partly all of that came together in my mind this week, and I thought, Oh, that's what it means to be perfect in his generation's meant that he hadn't just straightened himself out.
He'd also straightened out his relationships with his family.
And I can tell you that when crisis strikes you, which it will, it will.
The flood will come right.
That's why the apocalypse is always upon us.
The flood will definitely come in your life, and to the degree that you've organized yourself psychologically and also heal the relationships between you and your family.
That could be the critical element that that determines whether you live or die when the crisis comes, or or whether someone in your family lives or dies.
And so the idea of the the Ark containing the man who's who walks with God and whose generations are perfect and that that's what sustains humanity through the crisis.
It's like you couldn't be more psychologically accurate than that.
No.
The other thing I was thinking about this week, I was thinking about another line in the New Testament.
I think it's from the sermon on the Mount, but I'm not absolutely sure Christ compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed.
And so I was thinking about the mustard.
Seed is a very tiny seed, and it grows into quite a spectacular, complex plant.
And I was thinking about how you should operate in the world in order to make it a better place, assuming that that's what you should be doing, and that is what you should be doing.
And there's lots in the world to fix.
Everything that bothers you about the world and about yourself should be fixed and you can do that.
And my dawning realization.
I have a friend lives in Montreal.
His name is James Simon.
It's a great painter, and he's taught me a lot of things.
Help.
He's helped me design my house and beautify it, and I bought some paintings from him a couple of years ago, Um, and he did this series of paintings where he went around North America and stood in different places.
And then he painted the view from here down, and so it's his feet, planted in different places on roads in the desert, on the ocean.
I have one actually hanging over my toilet, which is him standing at a urinal?
Um, yeah, well, you know, he was trying to make a point, and the point was that wherever you are, it's worth paying attention.
And that's because, you know So all these places that he visited, he looked exactly where he was standing by the side of the road in the desert, sort of mundane in some sense.
But then maybe he put 40 hours into that painting.
You know, it's it's very, very realistic painting with really good light, and what he's telling you as a painter is everything is worth paying attention to an infinite amount.
But you don't have enough time, so the artist does that for you, right?
The artist looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and then gives you that vision.
And so then you can look at the painting and it reminds you that right where you are is there's every everything that there is is right where you are, and that's a hard thing to realize.
But it's actually true.
And so I've been telling people online in various ways in lectures that they should start fixing up the world by cleaning up the room, and I wanted to just elaborate on that a little bit before I get back to the lecture itself.
So because it's become this Internet weird Internet mean, you know, all right and and it's a joke and good, it's a jewel.
Great.
I'm really happy about the fact that so much of this has got, like, the leaving of humor, and it's really important, cause that's what stop things from degenerating into into conflict humor.
And I was thinking about this idea of cleaning up your room in relationship to the mustard seed idea, and you see the thing about cleaning up your room.
This is also something I learned from Carl Young and his studies on alchemy.
Because for Young, when the alchemist was attempting to make the philosopher's stone, he was not only engaged in the transformation of the material world, but he was engaged in the process of self transformation that occurred at the same time as the as the Chemical Trent as the chemical transformation.
It was a psychological work in some sense.
Let's say you want to sort out your room and beautify it because the beauty is also important.
And let's say that all you have is just a little room like you're not rich, you're poor and you don't have any power.
That's another thing.
But you've got your damn room and you've got this space right in front of you.
You know that that's a part of the cosmos that you can come to grips with.
And you might think, Well, what's there in front of you right in front of you?
And the answer to that is, it depends on how open your eyes are.
That's the proper answer, because you could say William Blake said this.
For example, eldest Huxley made comments that were very similar that in a transcendent state, you can see infinity in the finite.
You might say, Well, you can say you can see infinity and what you have within your grasp.
If you look and you could save, maybe that's the case with your room.
And so you want to clean up your room.
Well, okay, How do you do that exactly?
While the room is a room is a place to sleep, and so if you say your room ups properly, then you figure out how to sleep and when you should sleep and how you should sleep and then you figure out when you should wake up, and then you figure out what clothes you should wear because they have to be arranged properly in your dresser.
And then you have to have some place to put your clothes and you're gonna have some clothes.
You have to figure out what you're gonna wear those clothes to do, right?
And then that means you have to figure out what you're going to do.
And then your room has to serve that purpose because otherwise it doesn't set up properly.
And if it doesn't set up, if it doesn't serve your purposes, you will be unhappy and not happy in the room.
Because the way that we perceive the world is as a place to move from point A to point B in.
And then if the place that we're in facilitates that movement, then we're happy to be there.
And if the place that we're in serves as an obstacle to that movement, then we're unhappy to be there.
And so what it means to set up your room is that you have to have somewhere to go that's worthwhile, or you can't set up your room, and then your room has to be set up to facilitate that.
And then the next thing is, well, maybe you have to make it beautiful, but that's not easy, right?
That means you have to have some taste, and that doesn't mean you have to have money.
It doesn't because you could be garish with money and you could be tasteful with nothing.
All you need is taste and taste beats money when it comes to beautifying things, you know, I mean, not that money is trivial because it's not.
But taste is crucial, and people who are very artistically oriented can make beautiful things out of virtually nothing.
And not only that.
The literature suggests that if you're going to make beautiful things, putting real constraints on what you allow yourself to do facilitates creativity instead of interfering with it.
Because let's say you have to make something out of nothing, right, which I suppose would be a godly act right.
You have to make something out of nothing.
You have to be creative in order to do that.
And so then, too, to beautify your room means that you also have to develop your capacity to be creative, and so then you can make your room shine.
But then what will happen is that if your family isn't together, they will interfere with that.
You'll interfere with that because you won't have the discipline to do it properly.
But then when you start building this, this this little microcosm of perfection with what you have at hand.
Italy vocal the pathologies of everyone in your household.
The wonder what the hell you're up to in there.
And they won't necessarily be happy, because if you're if they're in a lonely place, let's say and so are you and you're trying to move out of that.
Then the higher you move out of that, the more the place they're in looks bad.
And you might say, Well, what they should do is celebrate your victory over chaos and evil.
But that isn't what will happen.
What will happen instead is that they will attempt to pull you back down.
They'll attempt to, and I mean, obviously all families don't do that.
But But all families do that to some degree, and some families do almost nothing but that.
And so what that means is that if you're going to organize your room, then you're going to have to confront the devils in your house.
And that's often That's often a terrifying thing, because some of those devils have have lineages that go back many, many, many generations, and God only knows what you have to struggle with in order to overcome that.
And so and then and so to sort yourself out and to fix up your room is a non trivial matter, you know, and you can do that.
You'll learn by doing that, and then maybe you'll learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little bit.
And then, having done that, you'll have enough characters so that when you try to operate in the world at your job, or maybe in the broader social spheres, that you'll be a force for good instead of harm, because you'll have learned some humility by noting just how difficult it was to put your damn room together well and yourself, for that matter.
And so you'll proceed cautiously with your eyes open towards the good and so well, those are some of the things I've seen thinking about this week and they're Germaine.
They're like they're Germaine to what we're going to discuss tonight because what happens at the beginning of the Abrahamic stories is basically God comes to Abraham and just says, Go get going, man, do something, Do something, get going And you might think, Well, where should I go?
And God, God is somewhat vague about that.
And where he sends Abraham, it's It's a real fixer upper man.
It's like there's starvation there and and there's tyranny and there's and there's marital dissolution.
And there's deceit like it's it's just like where you live, you know, it's exactly the same thing.
It's it's it's tyranny and catastrophe.
So that's, you know, the great the tyrannical, great father, because because Abraham ends up having to sojourn in Egypt and and there's a famine in.
So Mother Nature is on.
The rampage of Abraham lies about his wife has will see.
And so it's, It's the world.
It's the world, its tyranny and vulnerability and deceit.
And yet God says, go, because if you do go, then you'll become a father of nations.
And you think well again.
That's pretty good news, although it's strange because you'd expect that if God chose Abraham, then he'd send him immediately to the land of honey, land of milk and honey.
And that isn't what happens at all.
It doesn't happen at all, and Abraham never gets there.
But his mission is still regarded as divine.
And thank God for that, because that's what your mission will be, because that's what you will encounter in your life.
Those of the Ark archetypal things Everyone encounters the tyranny of the social structure and the and the rapaciousness of nature and the deceitful, the deceitful quality of the human psyche.
It's like, That's the world now it's a negative.
That's a negative view in some sense, but it's positive in this story because what it basically says.
It's something that's akin to the sermon on the Mount, which is that if you're aligned with God and you pay attention to the divine injunction, then you can operate in the midst of chaos and tyranny and deception and flourish, and you could hardly hope to have a better piece of news than that, given that that's exactly where you are so and I didn't see any of that in the Abrahamic stories to begin with.
So it's been very interesting to have that sort of reveal itself.
Abraham Section thus develops the personality and character remand to immigrant new degree in biblical narrative, well picturing him in a new degree of responsibility in him, a new degree of responsibility.
So here's the other thing that's really struck me, and I think this is absolutely crucial importance, and I don't know how much importance.
But it's certainly important to me one of the things that has just blown me away in the last year because I've talked to lots of people.
Lots of people live, you know, but also lots of people in line.
But it's more obvious live, and it's obvious in this theatre as well is that I've I've gone around and spoken a large proportion of my audiences being young man, you know, under 30 something like that, and I've spoken to them a lot about responsibility.
And what's so odd about about this is that of all the things that I've spoken about, cause I can see the audience, and I can feel how the audience is reacting cause I'm always paying attention to all of you.
It's in so far as I can manage that.
So I get some sense of how what I'm saying is landing.
You know, which you have to do if you're going to speak effectively.
Two people And what what happens is if I talk about responsibilities.
Everyone be is silent, just like they are now silent and not moving right, focusing, attentive, Say pick up your responsibility, pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it and the room goes quiet and everybody's eyes open.
And I think that always makes me break up.
I was, I don't I don't know why I was speaking to on English Journalist Today was gonna write a an article in Spectator magazine.
I was talking about this and at the same point in the discussion.
The same.
I had the same emotional reaction.
I don't really understand it.
I think it's something.
There's something about it that's so crucial because, you know, we've been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms, and there's something about that, especially there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong, and people are starving for the antidote and the antidote is truth and responsibility, right?
And it it isn't.
It isn't because that's what you should do in some you know, some some I know better or someone knows better for you.
What you should do sense.
It's that it's that it's that it's that that's the secret to meaningful life and without the meaningful life, Then all you have is suffering and and nihilism and despair and all of that in self contempt.
And and that's not good.
And so the men, it's necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility, and they all know that and are starving for that message.
And the message is more that that's also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility because you're cursed so much now from from from from when you're young, with this notion that you're active, engaged with with the world is part of what is destroying and undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems, it's like how about not so much of that?
Hey, because it's it's it's just it's too soul deadening.
It's anti human, right to the core, and my sense, instead is that you know, if you if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world, that you would be an overwhelming force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works.
And that's the other thing that you see in the Abrahamic stories because Abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination.
He's a real person and he makes mistakes.
But it doesn't matter.
The overarching narrative is, you know, maintain your covenant with God, and despite your inadequacies, then not only will you prevail, but your descendants will prevail.
It's like, Great.
That's really good news, you know.
So it's being really something to see that in the in the stories.
It's not that so that's responsibility.
It's not just that Abraham is kinder, gentle arm or intrepid, ethical or a better debater than his ancestor Noah, rather both of Noah and Abraham stories or pieces of a development of an increasingly stronger stance of humans relative to the deity.
Before the story is over, humans will become a good deal stronger and bolder than Abraham.
And that's really something to say, because Abraham is pretty bold.
So well, let's read the stories.
The 1st 1 is about Abraham, Sarah and Lot.
Now these air the generations of Terra Terra begat Abram.
So his name is Abraham to begin with, and that actually turns out to be important.
Not Abraham.
Nay, Horan Heron.
Inherent began lot.
So Herring Nous Abrams, Brother and Heron died before his father, Terra, in the land of his Nativity in ER of the Shell D's and Abram and a whore took them wives.
The name of Abram's wife was Sarai and the name of nature's wife, Milkha, the daughter of Heron, the father of Milk and the father.
Viscous.
But Sir, I was barren.
She had no child.
Pantera took Abram, his son and lot, the son of hair on his son's son and Saraya as daughter in law, his son, Abram's wife, and they went forth with them from the ER of Chelsea's Frommer of the child is to go into the land of Canaan.
That's exile, and they came unto herring and dwelt there, and the days of terror where 205 years and terra died inherent.
And there's a reason that Cerise is introduced as barren, and it's to set the stage.
I think it was Anton Chekhov when he was talking about this stage setting for a play that if there was a rifle hanging on the wall, then it had better being used before.
I believe the second act, or it shouldn't be hanging there at all right?
And so this is stage setting.
And part of the reason that the biblical writers are pointing out that Abram's wife is barren is because it's a real catastrophe for Abraham on for Sarah as well that she's barren.
And so it's It's showing the trouble that Abraham's in at the beginning of the story.
And it's also, it's also see what happens as the story progresses is that Abraham, Abraham and Sarah are eventually granted a son.
But it's way late in the story, and they're very, very old by the time it happens.
And, of course, you're not going to be a father of nations without having a child.
And so the writers are attempting to make the case that if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue, let's say that all things are possible, that's that's the idea and the narrative.
You know, you might say that naive and you know it's not.
You think it when you're naive, right?
And then you dispense with that idea, and then when you stop being the sort of person who dispenses with ideas, then you come to another place, and that's the place where you think you have no idea what might be possible for you if you if you got things together and pursued what you should pursue, you don't know how much what's impossible to you right now would become possible under those conditions.
It's an unknown phenomena, and like I've watched people who've put themselves together across time, you know, incrementally and continually, and they become capable of things that air jaw not only jaw droppingly amazing, but also sometimes metaphysically impossible to understand.
And so we don't know the limits of human endeavor.
We truly don't, and it's it's premature to put a cap on what it is that we are, what what it is that we're capable of.
And so you know, you're already something, and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration.
But you may wonder if you did nothing for the next 30 years.
Except put yourself together.
Just exactly what would you be able to do?
And you might think, Well, that's worth finding out.
But of course, that's That's the adoption of responsibility.
And one thing I've also learned over the years because I've been curious about this battle between meaning and nihilism, you know?
And I mean, I mean, I could see for a long while the rational in nihilism and the power of the nihilistic argument.
But it occurred to me across time that despite that, the power of the nihilistic argument is more powerful than naive optimism.
But it's not more powerful than the optimism that is not naive, because the optimism that is not naive says it's self evident that the world is a place of suffering and that there are things to be done about that.
And it's self evident that people are flawed and that there's things to be done about that.
And then the non naive optimist says the suffering could be reduced and the insufficient C could be overcome if people oriented themselves properly and did what they were capable of doing.
And I do not believe that that's deniable.
I do I think that human potential is virtually limitless and that there's nothing.
Perhaps that's beyond our grasp before careful as individuals and as a society.
And so I think that there's no reason for nihilism and there's no reason for hopelessness.
And and there's no reason to bow down before evil because were capable of so much more.
And I think that you can easily you know that first, because you're not happy with who you are and you're ashamed and embarrassed about it as you should be.
And you know it.
Because if you look out there, you see people who are capable of doing great things, and you know that we're not giving it our all.
And still, we're not doing so badly, you know.
So you might wonder if if if we devoted 90% of our effort putting things right instead of 55% of our effort, or maybe even less than that, you might wonder just how well could things be put together?
And I think that you can figure that out by starting with your room, by the way, and the Lord said unto Abram, and this is this is this is the opening of the story Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from my father's house unto a land that I will show thee.
And this is one of those phrases where every clause is significant.
Go somewhere you don't understand.
That's the first thing.
Get the out of my country, you know, Back in the 19 twenties, there was a whole slew of American writers who ended up as ex patriots in Paris, Hemingway among them and and who wrote The Great Gatsby?
Fitzgerald, Yes, and then a variety of others.
It was very inexpensive in Paris at the time, and part of their transformation into great literary figures was the fact that they were out of their country, and now they could see what their country was, because you can't see what your country is until you leave it.
So you have to go into the unknown, and that's that's God's first command.
Go into the unknown because you already know what you know.
And so and that's not enough unless you think your enough.
And if you're not enough and you don't think you're enough, then you have to go where you haven't bean And so that's the first commandment to Abraham.
It's like Okay, that that's a good one that makes perfect sense.
Goto where you don't know?
Yes, and from my kindred well, that Does that mean It means grow up, right?
That's what it means.
It means get away from your family enough so that you can establish your independence.
And that isn't because there's something wrong with your family.
All the perhaps there is.
You know that as there is perhaps wrong with you, but it means get away.
You know, I talked to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection, and they know it themselves.
And that means they're deprived of necessity.
You know, one of the things that you see in the United States, for example, is that and the Children of first generation immigrants often do better than the Children that then their Children.
And the reason for that is that the Children are first generation immigrants, have necessity driving them, and you don't know how much you need necessity to drive you, because maybe you're not very disciplined, and if and a catastrophe doesn't immediately befall you, if you don't act forthrightly today than maybe you never act forthrightly right, because the gap between your foolishness and the punishment is is lengthened by your unearned wealth.
And so you never grow up and learn.
And you have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity to drive you forward.
And that's to become independent and to become mature.
And I think part of what's happening in our culture is that the the force that's attacking the forthright movement forward of young men in particular is afraid of the power of men because it's confused about the distinction between power and authority and competence, Like on a man who's who has authority.
Incompetence has power as a byproduct.
But the authority incompetence is everything.
And and and people who can't understand that failed to make the distinction between power and authority of confidence.
And they're afraid of power.
And so they destroy authority and competence.
And that's a terrible thing because we need authority incompetence.
What else is going to what else is going to allow us to prevail in the long run and so you get away from your country and you get away from your kin?
and from your father's house, right, and you go out there and you establish yourself in the world.
It's a cold to adventure, that's what this is the first lines.
And the Abrahamic story is a cold to adventure, so great unto a land that I will show you.
Well, you know, what does that mean?
You know, one of the things that I've been struck very hard by a number of writers.
Carl Young, obviously among them.
I mean, he he wrote things like nature that if you understand them, they just break you into pieces, you know, and and one of the things that young understood in the psychoanalysts understand.
It's one of the most terrifying elements of psychoanalytic.
Thinking is very tightly allied with religious thinking, which is that you are not the master of your own house.
There are spirits that dwell in you within you, meaning you have a will, and you can exercise a certain amount of conscious control over your being.
But there are all sorts of things that occur within you that seem to be beyond your capacity to control your dreams, for example, that that's a really good example, or your impulses.
For example, you, you might think of those as so foreign from you that they're not even you don't even want them to be part of you.
But but more subtly even.
How about what you're interested in?
What compels you?
Where does that come from exactly?
Because you can't You can't conjure it up of your own accord, you know?
So if you're a student and you're taking difficult course, you might say to yourself, while I need to sit down and study for three hours, But then you sit down and that is what happens.
Your attention goes everywhere and you might say, Well, whose attention is it then?
If it goes everywhere because you say it's your attentions like, Well, if it's your attention, maybe you would be able to control it, but you can't.
And so then you might think, Well, Jen, and just exactly what the hell is controlling it?
And you might say, Well, it's random, it's well, it better not be random, I can tell you that that's that happens to some degree in schizophrenia.
There's an element of randomness and that it's not random.
It's driven by the action of phenomena that I think our best considered as something like sub personalities, although even that's only a partial description.
You can't make yourself interested in something.
Interest manifests itself and grips you.
That's a whole different thing.
And so what is it that's gripping you, and how do you conceptualize that?
Is that a divine power?
Well, it's divine as far as you're concerned, because it grips you and you can't do anything about it.
And so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by, and what you're interested in is sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not.
But you're compelled forward by your interest.
And so and so.
The idea that what moves you away from your country and your father's house and the comforts of your child at home is, is something that's beyond you and that you listen to in Harken to.
That's exactly right.
And you can say, Well, I don't want to call that God.
It's like it doesn't matter what you call it exactly.
It doesn't matter to what it is, what it's called.
It still is.
And if you don't listen to it, that's the other thing.
If you don't listen to it, and I have been a clinician and talk to enough people now as old as I am to know this, absolutely.
If you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward, you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine.
You'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good and worse.
You'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had.
So this is not only a calling forth, but a warning unto a land that I will show thee.
And that's it that I will show thee that.
And you don't want to be too concrete about this.
You know, there's all sorts of new territories that you can inhabit if you there's this abstract and conceptual territories of guilty university, new study, biology or study physics or any discipline.
You're in a territory, right.
You're in the territory that all the scholars have established, and then as you master the discipline, you move out beyond the established territory into the unknown.
And that's a new land, right?
Maybe it's even a land of your enemies, for that matter.
But It's a new land, the frontier is always in front of you.
And so you know, when the Earth was less inhabited than it is now.
The frontier was the psychological frontier in the geographical frontier was the same thing, and now they've separated to some degree because there's not so much geographical frontier.
But there's the frontier is a place that never disappears.
And the land that's beyond the land that you know is always there.
And it's always where you should go.
And all of that's packed into these, what four phrases so well.
So when I've been thinking about narrative, you look at the world through a story you can't you can't help it.
This in the story is what gives value to the world or or the stories what you extract from the value of the world.
You could look at it.
Either way, you're somewhere and it's not good enough, right?
That's the eternal human predicament.
Wherever you are isn't good enough, and to some degree that's actually a good thing, because if it was good enough, well, there's nothing for you to do.
So it's actually may be a good thing that it's insufficient And that might be why.
Sometimes having less is is better than having Maur, and I don't want to be a Pollyanna about that.
I mean, I know that there's deprivation that can reach to the point where it's no, where it's completely counterproductive.
But it isn't always the case that starting with little is if you start with little, you start with more possibility.
It's something like that.
So you move from always from what's unbearable about the present to some better future, right?
And if you don't have that, then you have no.
You have nothing but threat and negative emotion have no positive emotion because the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the better future, and then the evidence that you generate yourself that you're moving towards it.
That's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes.
So you want to set up this structure properly.
It's very, very important.
And so what it means is that you want to be going somewhere.
That's good enough so that the going is worth the while and you can ask yourself that.
And that's partly what we tried to build into the future authoring program, which is well, we know what's wrong with life.
It's rife with suffering and insufficiency and deception and evil.
It's all of that, obviously.
Okay, what would make the journey worthwhile?
Well, you can ask yourself that it's like, right in order to bear up 100 this load.
What is it that I would need to be striving to attain?
And if you ask yourself that, that's to knock and the door will open, that's what that means.
If you ask yourself that, then you will find an answer and you'll think you'll shrink away from it.
You'll think, Well, there's no way I could do that.
It's like, Well, you don't know what you could do.
You don't know what's possible and you're not as much as you could be.
And so God only knows what you could, what you could do and have and give if you sacrificed everything to it.
And that's the reason Abraham is constantly making sacrifices, and it's archaic, right?
He's burning up like baby lambs, but like, well, they're alive, You know, that's something, and they're valuable, and that's something it's you have to admit, even if you think about it as a modern person that the act of sacrificing something might have some dramatic compulsion to it.
You know, to go out into a flock and to take something that's new born and to cut its throat and to bleed it and to burn it might be a way of indicating to yourself that you're actually serious about something, and it isn't so obvious that we have rituals of seriousness like that now, and so it's not so obvious that we're actually serious about anything, and so maybe that's not such a good thing.
And so maybe we shouldn't be thinking that these people were so archaic and primitive and superstitious.
It's possible that they knew something that we don't, and certainly in the Abrahamic story is one of the things that maintains Abraham's covenant with God is his continual willingness to sacrifice.
It's so that sacrificial issue is so important because you are not committed to something unless you're willing to sacrifice for it.
Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing, and I think its borders on miraculous that those concepts are embedded into this narrative at the level of dramatic action.
You know, instead of abstract explanation, people are acting this out, and then the The fundamental conception is so profound that it's really quite it's quite are inspiring it.
It's it's breathtaking, really.
When you understand what message is trying to be conveyed, you have to make sacrifices.
And what do you have to sacrifice?
You have to sacrifice that which is most valuable to you.
Currently, that's stopping you, and God only knows what that is.
It's certainly the worst of you.
It's certainly that and God only knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of you so well.
So you move from the unbearable present to the ideal future, and and you can't help that you have to live in a structure like that.
That's your house.
That's another way of thinking about it.
And if you want to get your house in order and if you want it to be a place that you can live properly, then you have to plan the future that is perfect.
And then I think, well, what does that mean?
And it means it's good for you, right?
And one of the things that I'm do all the time with my clinical and consulting clients is try to figure out what would be good for them.
But we do more than that.
We try to think.
Okay, well, what?
How can we set this up?
So it's really good for you and that all the side consequences of that are things that are good for other people.
And so because people are often also timid about trying to get something that's good for themselves, because they feel that it's selfish or that they don't deserve it.
So we set it up so that, well, look, we're going to set it up so that it's plainly obvious that this will not harm the structure of the universe.
For youto have what you need and to do it in a way that's a benefit to other people.
There's no downside to that.
And so it's okay.
It's okay if you reach out and take that.
One of the things that's interesting about the biblical stories, Abrahamic stories as well is that God doesn't really seem to be opposed to this success of the people that he has chosen.
You know what happens to them is as they progressed through their journey is they get larger flocks and they get more authority and they get, they get more, they get life more abundant.
That's what happens is God isn't doesn't seem to be a miser in the Old Testament.
It's like if you put in the effort and you and you accept the covenant and you make the sacrifices, then you get to be successful and maybe successful beyond your wildest dreams, and that that's actually seems to be okay with God.
And that's pretty cool, given that you know that the general notion of Old Testament God is that all he's doing is casting out curses and death, you know, wherever he happens to wander, and I mean, there's certainly no shortage of that.
But B