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  • so last week.

  • Okay, I told you I offered you an interpretation of two foundational stories, right for more than two, but roughly speaking to, um, the creation stories because there's two of them in Genesis and then also the story of the Buddha.

  • And I was presenting you with a proposition, and it's a multi layered proposition.

  • The first proposition is that the archetypal story structure that we've already been discussing is reflected in detail in those stories.

  • And the archetypal story structure is something like the existence of a pre existing state where things air roughly functional so that you might think of that as the state of things going well.

  • And that's a state where your perceptions and your plans are sufficiently developed so that when you act them out in the world, not only do you get what you desire, but the story itself validates itself through your actions, right, because what happens when you act something out and you get what you intend, just like when you use a map and get where you're going, Not only does that get you to where you're going, but it also validates the plan or the map and So that's that's That's a definition of truth.

  • That's a pragmatic definition of truth.

  • This is the sort of thing that I was trying to have a discussion with about Sam Harris, because the idea is that we have to orient ourselves in a world where our knowledge is always insufficient.

  • We never know everything about anything.

  • And so the question then is, How can you ever make a judgment about whether or not you're correct?

  • And the answer to that is something like, Well, you lay out a plan and you could think about it this way.

  • If this is actually an answer to the post modernist problem of how is it that you determine whether or not your interpretation of the world is?

  • We won't say correct, because that's not exactly right.

  • But you know, the postmodernist subjects say, with regards to the interpretation of the text, that there's a very large number of variations of ways in which that text can be interpreted and that's actually true.

  • And it's the same.

  • It's it's actually reflection of a deeper claim, which they always often sometimes also make, which is well, if that's true for a text which isn't as complex as everything, although it's complex that it's even more true for everything.

  • Which is to say, the world lays itself out in a very complex manner, and you can interpret that in a very large number of ways.

  • So who's to say which interpretation is correct?

  • Okay, fair enough.

  • It's a reasonable objection, and it's it's tied in with even a deeper problem, which is the problem of perception itself.

  • Because if the world is laid out in a manner that's exceptionally complex, then how is it that you can even perceive it?

  • Well, that's that's partly the question that we're trying to answer.

  • And the answer to that is what you have evolved perceptual structures, and they're actually oriented towards specific goals and your embodied.

  • So the Your Embodiment as a goal directed entity is part of the solution to the problem of perception.

  • But it's more complicated than that.

  • So we could say, Well, you come equipped and this was Kant Objection to pure reason.

  • Essentially, that the problem is, is the facts don't speak for themselves.

  • There's too many facts for them to speak for themselves, so you have to overlay on top of them an interpretive framework.

  • Well, where does the interpretive framework come from?

  • Well, the right answer to that is something like.

  • It evolves, right?

  • It's taken 3.5 1,000,000,000 years for your perceptual structure, your body perceptual structure to evolve.

  • And it's done that roughly in a trial and error process.

  • I don't think that exhausts what's happened over the course of evolution, but it's a good enough shorthand for the time being.

  • So so there's the constraints imposed on your perceptual structures by the necessity of survival and reproduction.

  • But there's other constraints imposed, too, that you might regard to subsets of that one.

  • Is that because you exist in a cooperative and competitive landscape, the perceptual structures and plans that you lay out will say the maps that you lay out have to be negotiated with other people, and so that puts stringent constraints on the number of interpretations that you're allowed to to apply.

  • So you can think about this in a p, a jetty and sense.

  • That is, if their Children in the playground and they're trying to organize themselves to play.

  • They have to agree on a game, and the game is of course, a perceptual structure and a goal directed structure and a structure that the dilemma.

  • It's action and interactions and so they at least have to settle on a game.

  • And so that constrains the set of possible actions and perceptions in the environment to those that are deemed socially acceptable.

  • And then you say, Well, what are their further constraints?

  • And the constraints might be, Well, let's play the game and see if it's any fun.

  • And that means that you have to take the plan that you've organized consensually and then lay it out in the actual world and see if when you lay it out in the world, it does what it's supposed to do.

  • In some sense, what you're doing is testing a tool.

  • So the idea that the range of interpretations is infinite and unconstrained turns out to be incorrect.

  • And now it's that, that is, that doesn't mean it's easy to figure out how they're constrained.

  • But the technical suggestion that while there's an infinite number of equally valid interpretations is just not correct.

  • It's not correct, and it's not correct on biological evolutionary grounds, and it's not.

  • It's also not correct on socio cultural grounds because it has to be negotiated.

  • And then, you know, PJ put a further constraint on that, essentially by saying, Well, not only does it have to be a game and a game that attains its hands, but it has to be a game that people want to play.

  • So it also has to satisfy some element of subjective desire as well.

  • So that's three levels of constraint, right?

  • It has to be a game you want to play.

  • It has to be a game that you can play with other people.

  • And it has to be a game that, if you play with other people, actually works in the world.

  • Okay, well, so much for an infinite array of of options.

  • It's a very constrained array of options now, and I think, and that the idea that I've been proposing to you is that what evolved mythology does These representations that we've been dealing with these archetypal representations is sketch out that landscape.

  • What what is the landscape of playable games?

  • That's a good way of thinking about it.

  • And so it's It sets out a landscape.

  • It sets out a description of the landscape in which the game is going to be played, as well as a description of the lens of the game itself.

  • And so the landscape is roughly the core.

  • The core archetypes seems to be something like It's It's something like the interplay between chaos and order and chaos is represented by the serpent tile predator because we use our predator detection circuits to conceptualize the unknown.

  • Because what else would we do that that seems, given that we're prey animals?

  • And given our evolutionary history, it's very difficult to understand what else we would possibly do, because the critical issue about venturing into the unknown is that you might die.

  • Or perhaps a slight variant of that is something might kill you.

  • But whatever those air close enough to the same thing, so chaos is what causes your deterioration and death.

  • There's lots of ways to conceptualize that, but but reptilian predator fire breathing reptilian predator isn't a bad way to start.

  • And so the question is, will.

  • What do you do in the face of that?

  • And one answer is, you build circumscribed enclosures.

  • That's order, and then also you act as the builder of circumscribed enclosure, so that's partly the hero.

  • Now the hero is also, though that's not good enough.

  • Because the circumscribed enclosure isn't impermeable, it could be invaded.

  • It will inevitably be invaded, either from outside or from within.

  • Right.

  • And so we've bean conceptualizing the predator, the malevolent predator at multiple levels of analysis, throat our evolutionary history, say, but also in our symbolic history, trying to understand the nature of that which invades the enclosure.

  • Right?

  • And we can say, Well, it's partly external threat.

  • It's partly social threat.

  • But it's also partly the threat that each individual brings to bear on the social structure because of our, let's say, our intrinsic malevolence.

  • And so that would be the snakes within.

  • And so that accounts for the analogy that the Christian analogy between the serpent in the Garden of Eden and Satan, which is a very, very strange analogy it's not obvious at all why those two things would stack on top of one another, especially given that when the creation story originally emerged in, the four might talk to you about last week.

  • The story of Adam and Eve, the idea that the serpent in the garden was also something that was associated with the adversary wasn't an implicit part of the story that got laid on afterwards like, Well, what's the worst possible snake?

  • Well, that's a reasonable question.

  • And then a better question is, what do you do about the worst possible snake?

  • And one answer is, you face it.

  • But there's other answers to like you make sacrifices right?

  • And that's how you stave off the dragon of temporal chaos.

  • Roughly speaking is that you learn to conceptualize the future.

  • You see the future as a realm of potential threat, and then you learn to give things up in the present, and somehow that satisfies the future now.

  • So maybe you're offering sacrifices to God.

  • And you think, Well, why does that?

  • Well, thank you.

  • Gotta think about that psychologically.

  • Why does that work?

  • Well, you could think about the spirit of God.

  • The father, as an imagistic representation of the collective spirit of the group, will call it the patriarchy if you want.

  • Doesn't matter.

  • It's the thing that's common across the group as a spirit, as a psychological force across time.

  • Why do you make sacrifices to that?

  • That is what you do all the time.

  • You're right now, you're sacrificing your time to the spirit of the great Father, because your assumption is is that if you do what's diligent, so you're not chasing impulsive pleasure at the moment.

  • Unless you're pathologically interested in this class or something like that, you're not chasing impulsive interest.

  • You're sacrificing your impulsive interest to satisfy the spirit of social requirement.

  • And so you're offering a sacrifice to that spirit in the hope that you could make a bargain with it so that it will reward you in the future.

  • And that reward will be parted partly the staving off of insecurity, which is no more than to say that part of the reason that you're getting your degree is because you believe that it will aid you and finding employment and status and all the other things that will stave off the dragon of Chaos.

  • So now those things were, as as we've being pains, Thio to point out is those things were acted out and then represented an image and story long before they could be fully articulated.

  • Because we're building our knowledge of ourselves and also our social structures and also the world from the bottom up as well as from the top doubt, there's an interplay between the two levels of analysis.

  • OK, and so go.

  • So that's partly that's partly the archetypal underpinning.

  • And then, with regards to the stories themselves, you're you're in a map, so to speak you're using a map, and with any luck, it's detailed enough so that you can use it to get to the place that you want to go.

  • And sometimes you don't.

  • And that means that you have to recalibrate your your journey along the map.

  • Which, by the way, is exactly what GPS systems do.

  • When you go off the pathway right, they stop.

  • That's an anxiety response from the GPS system.

  • They stop, they re calibrate, and they re adjust the map now and then.

  • If you're unfortunate, this very rarely happens anymore, you'll be on a road that isn't mapped, and then the GPS system doesn't know what to do.

  • While that happens in real life, too, I mean those air I'm using GPS for a very specific reason.

  • Those air intelligence systems, as far as I'm concerned, those are the closest things we ever designed to intelligence systems because they can actually orient, right, they Orient in real time.

  • And they're unbelievably sophisticated systems because they rely on a huge satellite network and and so on and their cybernetic systems.

  • Technically speaking, they respond very much like the way that we respond.

  • So so anyways, you know you're in.

  • You inhabit a map.

  • You try to adjust the resolution of the map so that it's more no more complex than it needs to be to get you from point A to point B.

  • That's it.

  • You want minimal resolution because that enables efficient cognitive processing doesn't overload you too much like when I'm looking at this room.

  • If I look, say, I want to walk down this pathway, basically what my mind does my perceptual field and you can detect this if I look straight ahead, I could barely see you people on the periphery.

  • You're more like your kind of like blurs you, too.

  • I can tell that you have heads, but that's about it.

  • When you move, I can see your hand.

  • I can probably see your eyes, but barely so you're all very low resolution.

  • And even though I can't detect it at the very periphery of my vision, you guys were black and white.

  • So my color vision disappears at the periphery.

  • Even though I can't I can't actually perceive that.

  • So what happens is if I want to walk down here, this pathway becomes high resolution.

  • It becomes marked with positive emotion.

  • All of this turns into low resolution back here.

  • It's not even represented.

  • And then I find out what am I doing this properly?

  • And the answer is while I walk forward and if I get to the goal, then I've done it properly enough.

  • And if you know one of you stand up and get in my way, then I'm gonna focus on you and assume instantly that I haven't mapped you properly, right.

  • I put you in the category of irrelevant entity when in fact you happen to be in the category of strange object, the thing that object, and so well.

  • So then we inhabit those structures all the time.

  • We're in a structure like that of perceptual structure, and if it's working, then it's got the archetypal quality of paradise, so to speak, because it's axioms, air correct, and it's functional.

  • And then now and then something comes along, and that's what the snake is the eternal snake in the garden that pops up inside a structure, and it turns out that the things that you weren't attending to are the most important things rather than least important things and that what does that do?

  • It blows the map into pieces, and that can happen at different levels of severity.

  • But at the ultimate level of severity, it's apocalyptic, right?

  • Everything goes, and that's a that's a traumatic intrusion.

  • And essentially, that story of the Garden of Eden is the story of a traumatic intrusion.

  • That's exactly what it is.

  • And so what happens is that Adam and Eve were living in unconscious bless.

  • Roughly speaking, everything's fine there in their walled garden.

  • There, in a Paradise will state, they're not aware of their own vulnerability or nakedness, so they they're not suffering from negative emotion.

  • Something pops up that radically expands their vision, and all of a sudden, now there they can apprehend all sorts of things that exist as threats.

  • So that's their own nakedness and vulnerability and temporal ity itself, because they become aware of the future and bang that state of being in that paradise is forever gone.

  • That's the strange thing about human beings.

  • This is what what happened to us, I think, is that our perceptions developed to such a degree that we could no longer ignore what was irrelevant.

  • We couldn't do it because we discovered, roughly speaking, once we discovered our finite limitations in time and space, we discovered that we were surrounded by infinite threat.

  • Always.

  • And maybe that's why people are so hyper awake because threat wakes you up while we're in a constant state of existentially threat.

  • Now the advantage to that is that we take.

  • We take arms up against a sea of troubles constantly.

  • That's the advantage, right?

  • And we build enclosures and we take precautions for the future.

  • And we live a very long time, and we generally live quite safe lives compared to the lives we could live.

  • And so we've traded pain for anxiety.

  • That's another way of thinking about it now.

  • It's still a pretty rough trade, right, because who wants to be nervous all the time?

  • But you're alive and awake when you're nervous, and it is a form of consciousness elevating activation.

  • That's another way of thinking about it.

  • So the story of Adam and Eve is the story of the eternal fall that that's what it is.

  • It says.

  • Look, you exist in these walled enclosures, but there's something that lurks that will always knock you off your feet.

  • And then the question is, what is that?

  • And the answer to that is being formulated over very long periods of time.

  • Partly, it's the probability of predation itself.

  • That's the snake, the thing that can come in suddenly and undermine you.

  • Okay, but then that's that's it.

  • What would you call it?

  • Expanded upward to include the abstract snake, which is that thing that can undermine your conceptual schemes.

  • So you have your actual territory, and then you have your abstract or territory.

  • And in your actual territory there are actual snakes.

  • And in your abstract territory there are abstract snakes, right, and then the worst snake of all is malevolence.

  • And that's I think that's technically correct, because one of the things that you view, for example, when you're looking at post traumatic stress disorder, is that it's almost always the case that someone who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, which you might think of as a riel riel, life re incarnation of the fall is that people encounter something malevolent and it breaks them because it's the worst thing to understand.

  • It's like suffering is one thing, man.

  • That's that's bad enough vulnerability and suffering that's bad enough.

  • But to encounter someone who wishes that upon you and will work to bring it about.

  • That's a whole different category of horrible, especially when it also reflects something back to you about yourself.

  • Because if someone else can do that to you and they're human, that means that you partake of the same essence.

  • Strangely enough, that's actually the cure to some degree to post traumatic stress disorder, Is it like if you've been victimized, you're naive and you've been victimized?

  • The way out of that is to no longer be naive and to no longer be victimized.

  • And that means that you see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea, for example, that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because he's got a piece of a parties being touched by it, and the way that you the way that you keep the psychopaths at bay, is to develop the inter psychopath so that you know when when you see what right and then, but that's a voluntary thing.

  • It sze.

  • So it's like a It's like a set of tools that you have at your disposal, which is full knowledge of evil, and that does, Nietzsche said.

  • If you look into an abyss for too long, you risk having the abyss gaze back into you, right?

  • The idea is that if you look at something monstrous, you have a tendency to turn into a monster, and people are often very afraid of looking at monsters thinks exactly for that reason, and then the question is, will should you turn into a monster?

  • And the answer to that is, yes, you should.

  • But you should do it voluntarily and not accidentally, and you should do it with the good in mind, rather than falling prey to it by possession.

  • Essentially, because that's the alternative.

  • How does it possess you?

  • That's easy.

  • You're suffering, makes you better.

  • You're better.

  • This makes you resentful.

  • Your resent footman mate means meat makes you vengeful, and once you're on that road, you go down that a little bit farther, man, while you end up it fantasizing in your basement about shooting up the local high school and then killing yourself, because that's sort of the ultimate end of that line of pathological reasoning.

  • Being should be eradicated because of its intrinsic evil, and I'm exactly the person to do it, and I'll cap it off with an indication of my own lack of worth.

  • Just a hammer.

  • The point home, right?

  • And if I can garner a little post post posthumous fame along the way, well, that'll satisfy my primordial primate dominance hierarchy imaginings to, at least in fantasy.

  • So you know it's the full package if you want to go down that route.

  • Of course, people don't like to think about that sort of thing, and it's no bloody wonder.

  • But without the capability for mayhem Europe, you're you're a potential victim to mayhem, so you need your sword.

  • It should be sheath, but you need to have it.

  • And it's very frequently the case.

  • If you treat someone with post traumatic stress disorder, there's two things you have to do.

  • You have to help them develop a very articulated philosophy of evil because otherwise their brain bothers him over and over and over.

  • What?

  • Why were you so do it?

  • Naive How did you become victimized?

  • Why were you such a sucker?

  • These are good questions.

  • You don't want to have that happen to you.

  • Get You don't want to be exploited twice.

  • Okay, so your eyes have to open up.

  • We know the price of that from the Egyptian myth.

  • Right?

  • You come into contact with Seth.

  • What happens?

  • Even if you're a god, you lose, and I It's no joke, man.

  • It's no joke.

  • And then the cure for that is the movement down into the underworld and the revitalisation of the father.

  • That's the identification with the force that created culture, right?

  • And that.

  • Then there's you and that together.

  • Then you can withstand malevolence.

  • Maybe you could wish down tragedy and malevolence.

  • And then that's the whole secret, right?

  • Because that's what you want in life.

  • You need to be able to withstand tragedy.

  • And you need bill to withstand malevolent, because those are the forces.

  • They're always working against you.

  • And so it's just this is associated with the union idea of incorporation of the shadow.

  • Right?

  • You have to be.

  • We know this God, we know how predators work with regards to Children.

  • Even if you're a pedophilic predator and you're looking at a landscape of Children.

  • The child that you're gonna go after is the one that's timid and won't fight back.

  • You pick your victim and predatory people in general or exactly like that man there because they're predators.

  • They're not going to attack someone who's who's going to fight back.

  • In fact, the issue is likely not to even come up.

  • They're gonna be looking for someone one way or another that cannot conceptualize what they are.

  • And then perfect.

  • It's It's open season and it's open season.

  • And so if you're treating someone with post traumatic stress disorder first they need an introduction to the philosophy of malevolence.

  • And second, they have to learn to become dangerous because that's the only way out.

  • What's the alternative?

  • They get these recurrent thoughts about their vulnerability in the face of malevolence and their own naivety, because by definition, if someone psychopathic has exploited you, you're too naive.

  • It's a definitional issue.

  • You can say, Well, that's no fault of mine.

  • How the hell could I be prepared?

  • Fair enough, man.

  • Perfectly reasonable objection doesn't solve your problem because it's a it's an eternal problem, right?

  • The internal problem is how do you deal with tragedy and malevolence?

  • And you can say, Well, I'm not prepared.

  • It's like, Yeah, fair enough.

  • Unsurprising, especially if you were over protected as a child.

  • It's not a good idea to over protect your kids, because the snakes, they're going to come into the garden no matter what you do.

  • And so then you instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away.

  • What you do is you are a mere child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them.

  • So that trick for human, thriving in the face of suffering malevolence is strength, not protection.

  • It's a completely different idea.

  • We also know this clinically.

  • We know, for example, that if you treat people with exposure therapy for Agra phobia, which is roughly speaking the fear of chaos, I would say the fear of everything.

  • You don't make them less afraid.

  • You make them braver.

  • It's not the same thing, because with an Agra phobic see what happens to them is the fault.

  • They never conceptualize death and suffering their naive right.

  • It never enters there.

  • The theatre of their imaginations because they're protected from it.

  • But then something happens.

  • This this often happens to women in their forties because they're the people most likely to develop acrophobia.

  • Something happens there.

  • They've been protected from chaos by authority their entire life.

  • So maybe they had an overprotective father, and then they went to an overprotective boyfriend.

  • And then they went to an overprotective husband.

  • And maybe they were willing to be subject gated to all three of those because of the project protection, Right?

  • So So that's the bargain.

  • They stay weak, independent, and maybe they have to, because that's the only way they can appeal to the person who's hyper protective.

  • But the price they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent.

  • And then something happens in their life.

  • Often in their forties, they develop heart palpitations.

  • Maybe as a consequence of menopause.

  • Their heart starts to beat erratically, and they think, Oh, no death.

  • It's like, Well, who are you gonna talk to about that right?

  • There's no protection from authority for that.

  • Or maybe their friend gets divorced or maybe their sister dies, or something like that.

  • It brings up the specter of mortality and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality.

  • And it brings it up in a way that authority, recourse to authority, cannot solve.

  • And so then they have panic attacks.

  • What happens?

  • They go out, they get afraid.

  • They feel their heart beating.

  • Then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think, Oh, no, I'm going to die And they think, Oh, no, I'm going to die and I'm going to make a fool of myself.

  • Well, I'm doing it and attract a lot of attention.

  • So the two big fears come up mortality and social judgment.

  • Then they have a panic attack.

  • It's like fighter flights going out of control.

  • Very, very unpleasant.

  • Then they start to avoid the places they've had, a panic attack.

  • Then they end up not being able to go anywhere.

  • So then Tiamat has come back right?

  • A huge monster, a little victim.

  • And so what do you do with them?

  • Well, there's no saying no, there's no time out.

  • That's done right there.

  • Naivety is over.

  • They've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment.

  • They've met the terrible mother and they met the terrible Father and there's no going back.

  • There's no saying, Oh, the world is safe.

  • It's not safe, Not at all.

  • It's not safe.

  • The fact that you think it's safe means that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture.

  • It's a gift, and now that's been shattered.

  • And so now what do you do?

  • Well, the answer is, you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go.

  • You're the ultimate frozen rabbit, right?

  • And your life is hell because you can't function.

  • The alternative is let's take apart the things you're afraid of.

  • Let's expose you to them carefully and programmatically, and then you'll learn that you you're actually tougher than you think.

  • You never knew that, and maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because, you know people play a role in their own demise, so to speak, when you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid you chose to withdraw because you were afraid.

  • So it's not only that you were overprotected, often it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were overprotected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity, you know?

  • So maybe you're a kid in the playground, right?

  • And you're having some trouble with other kids and, you know, in the back of your mind I should deal this with deal with this myself.

  • But you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene, and you know that that's not right.

  • You know that you're breaking the social contract, but it's easier.

  • And so that's what you do.

  • You run off to an authority figure and hide behind the great father, right?

  • Roughly speaking, while the problem with that is, you don't learn how to do it yourself.

  • So then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40.

  • So then you take people out, you say, Well, what do you afraid of?

  • Rank it from 1 to 10.

  • So 10 is make a list of 10 things you're afraid of, the least the thing you're least afraid of.

  • We'll call number 10 so we'll start with that.

  • Okay, well, I'm afraid of elevators.

  • Okay, well, let's Let's look at a picture of an elevator.

  • Let's have you imagine being in an elevator.

  • Let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open because that's how you're responding to it symbolically, right?

  • And you're going to do that at it.

  • At the closest proximity you can manage, You find out you go do that.

  • It works.

  • You're nervous as hell, especially from an anticipatory perspective shaking you go out, you stop, you watch it happen and you actually calm down.

  • You do that 10 times and no longer bothers you.

  • Well, what you've learned that you didn't die.

  • But more importantly than that, you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death.

  • That's what you've learned.

  • And then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator.

  • From a symbolic perspective, it's a tomb, right?

  • It's it's It's a place of enclosure and isolation and you learn.

  • Turns out I can withstand that.

  • And then you're meant much more together, much more confident.

  • And that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that.

  • I've seen this multiple times is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and toughen them up.

  • They'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before, because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before because they weren't willing to undermine the protection.

  • See, if you're protecting me.

  • I can't bother you because I can't afford to forsake your protection.

  • So if I'm gonna play that game, I'm gonna be high hide behind you, then I can't challenge you.

  • So that's no good, because that's sometimes white people.

  • You see this with guys very frequently.

  • They're still deathly afraid of their father's judgment when they're in their thirties or forties.

  • It's like, Well, why?

  • Because they still want to believe that there's someone out there that knows.

  • And so they're willing to accept the subject, Gatien, because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows, because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge, right, because he knows what What if he doesn't?

  • What if no one knows any better than you?

  • Well, that's a rough thing.

  • You don't until you realize that you're not an adult.

  • That's really technically the point of realization of adulthood is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do.

  • I mean, it's a horrible realization, because what the hell do you know?

  • It's a terrible realization, and people will often pick slavery, permanent slavery to the spirit of the great father.

  • Let's say over that realization, and it's completely understandable.

  • But the problem with it is, is that there's more to you than you think.

  • And so if you continue to hide behind that figure, then you never have a chance to understand that there's more to you than you think farm or team than you think.

  • Maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat of mortality without collapsing, maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing.

  • Who knows?

  • It's certainly possible.

  • And it's not an abstract question.

  • It's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process.

  • It's always the question that you address, and the answer is often in the affirmative, because people can get unbelievably tough.

  • And you know that because people work in emergency wards in hospitals, right?

  • Are they working in palliative care awards or they work as mortuary assistance.

  • I mean, his people have bloody rough jobs, you know where they're on the front line of police investigation into, you know, Highness, child abuse crimes.

  • And so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis.

  • You know those air, very stressful jobs.

  • But people do them, and some people do them without even being damaged by them.

  • Although that's a harder thing, because you could see horrible things, you know, things you'll never forget.

  • So So I would say the story in the story of Adam and Eve is a meta story, and it's a meta story for two reasons.

  • One is it's about how stories transform because Adam and Eve were in this unconscious paradise.

  • And then it collapses.

  • And that happens to every potential story, right?

  • That's nature's realization, he said.

  • Look, imagine that you live within a belief system, and then something arises to challenge the belief system.

  • Not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens, your belief in belief systems collapses, and that's the road tonight.

  • Now it doesn't have to, because you can jump from one belief system to another.

  • But sometimes that doesn't work.

  • Is that you do a medic critique and you say, Oh, I was living in this protective structure and it turned out to be flawed.

  • Okay, one alternative is jumped to another protective structure.

  • Find another alternative is protective structures themselves are not to be trusted.

  • Bang, You're in chaos.

  • How the hell you gonna get out of that?

  • That's the pathway Denialism.

  • Well, you can.

  • You can.

  • You can work your way through that.

  • That's difficult.

  • Or you can do what Young would regard as a soul damaging move.

  • And you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re identify with something rigid and restricted, which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in your Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to to the current state of chaos.

  • It's like, I know that people need to identify with local groups.

  • I understand that, but they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate god.

  • And that's order.

  • But that's not a good replacement for chaos.

  • It's just another kind of catastrophe, right?

  • Too much order, too much chaos, both catastrophes.

  • You want to stand in the middle somehow and mediate between the two.

  • And that's where you have your real strength.

  • Because then it isn't that you've discovered a safe place because even the bloody right wingers air after a safe place, right?

  • They just want it to be the state.

  • Yeah, exactly.

  • Well, there's no safe places.

  • And the next issue is, Do you really want a safe place?

  • Is that what you want?

  • You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat?

  • What the hell kind of life is that?

  • You're a paralyzed rabbit in the hole.

  • That's no life for a human being.

  • You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence because And the reason for that, too, is this is the weird paradox this is.

  • And I believe this is the paradox.

  • First of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly at Christianity, which is that the solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.

  • Now.

  • Who the hell would ever guess that?

  • It's completely paradoxical.

  • It's have completely paradoxical suggestion.

  • Is that what?

  • Why does it work?

  • Well, because the more you confront the two of them, the more you grow and maybe you could grow so that you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself.

  • And you think, Well, what's the evidence for that?

  • And that's easy.

  • That's what people do.

  • That is how we learn.

  • Like every time you expose your child to something new, a playground, what air they exposed to chaos and malevolence.

  • Now there's more to it than Otto, obviously, because kids play and they, you know, they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that.

  • But in the playground itself, there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the bully.

  • It's right there and then you throw your kid in there and you say, adapt and they do okay so they could do it at a small scale.

  • It's not trivial.

  • The playground's a complicated place.

  • The kid can adapt.

  • Well, how much can you scale that up?

  • Can you scale that up to, from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself?

  • Well, that's the question.

  • Well, I don't think there's any reason to answer that in the negative, so because we don't know the full extent of a human being, and it is the problem that's worked out.

  • So in the Buddhist story, for example, what happens after so Buddhist world collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve's world collapses?

  • It's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death.

  • What happens to Buddha's?

  • He realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him, the walled garden.

  • It's exactly the same motif that's in this Adam and Eve story is, is it's It's what it's fatally flawed.

  • That kind of protection cannot exist.

  • And he discovers that in pieces, right?

  • Which is exactly what happens to Children is that they go out, they discover a limit, they run back and parents can help them with the limit.

  • They run out, they discover limit, they run back.

  • But some at some point they run out, they discover a limit, they run back.

  • And the parents have nothing to say to them because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit.

  • Just like what you gonna do with your life.

  • How are you going to How are you gonna operate in this archetypal universe while your parents can only say well, they can say you identify with the proper, archetypal figures they do that they at least act that out for you.

  • But at some point, it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker.

  • That's the thing, you know.

  • So it's an interesting thing that I've learned in therapy because one of the things you have to learn as a therapist is how do you not take your client's problems home with you?

  • It's very common existential problem that beginning therapists face because they're afraid.

  • It's like why you're dealing with people all the time.

  • You have serious problems.

  • Sometimes it's mental illness, although less frequently than you think.

  • And sometimes it's just that they're having a good catastrophe right there.

  • Their parents have cancer, something like that, or the father has Alzheimer's in their unemployed.

  • They have a drug problem or they have a schizophrenic son or, like these aren't mental illness problems, right?

  • Those air just catastrophes.

  • And so people are discussing those with you all the time.

  • How do you avoid being crushed by that or avoid taking it home and answer, that is, you don't steal the problem that that's the answer.

  • It's like you have some problems.

  • If you come and talk to me all help you figure out how to solve them.

  • I will not tell you how to solve.

  • I won't steal your problems because what we're trying to do in therapy is Number one.

  • Solve your problem number to turn you into a great solver of problems, and the 2nd 1 is way more important than the 1st 1 And so you never solve someone's problem by removing from them the opportunity to solve their problem.

  • That's theft.

  • That's the edible situation.

  • That's the edible situation.

  • That's the overprotective mother father can play that Rule two.

  • We're talking about archetypal representations.

  • It's like all protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself.

  • No wrong.

  • That's that.

  • That's a sin.

  • That's a good way of thinking about it.

  • That is not what you do with people, not with your Children, not with your partner, not with yourself.

  • You don't do that that destroys people's adaptive confidence and disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence.

  • And that's a terrible thing I'm going to send someone owed are unarmed in a world like that it's a terrible thing to do so.

  • And if people aren't strong enough to manage it, then they get resentful.

  • And then you know where you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that.

  • Okay, so the meta story is partly you're in a mat, you're you have a map, but it's insufficient, and things will come up to disrupt it.

  • And sometimes the disruption is catastrophic.

  • Everything falls apart.

  • That's what happens to the Buddha.

  • And that's what happens to Adam and Eve.

  • And the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together now that that's being assembled.

  • As I said, it's been assembled over centuries, right?

  • Okay, we've got the problem.

  • The problem is the apocalypse, the ever present reality of the apocalyptic fall.

  • That's the problem.

  • And so you could say, Well, what is that?

  • It's the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes, right?

  • Your conceptual schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world.

  • It's a permanent problem.

  • So what do you d'oh You stop relying on your conceptual schemes.

  • That's part of the answer.

  • You start relying on your instead on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos and malevolence.

  • And so that makes you someone that identifies with your creative capacity, your creative, courageous capacity for articulation and action in the face of the unknown rather than some formulaic approach to the territory.

  • And that and that.

  • The idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt, and that provides a permanent solution to the problem.

  • Well, then, you might say cynically, What's your evidence that that's a permanent solution?

  • An answer, that is, while the evidence isn't all in yet, first of all, because people only live that way partially.

  • And so we haven't put the hypothesis to the full test, and second, we don't know what our limitations are.

  • We have no idea what our limitations are, and they're they're both greater and lesser than we imagine.

  • Because you you know, you have to ask yourself like if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world and devoted themselves to setting things straight, setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight.

  • What would happen?

  • And the answer to that is, well, there'd be a hell of a lot less unnecessary misery in the world, so that might not be a bad place to start.

  • But apart from that, there's very little that we can say.

  • Could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality?

  • Why not?

  • You think that's beyond our capacity?

  • Could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist?

  • Well, possibly because we don't know the limitations of our capacity, we're only running it 40%.

  • If that I would say we don't make full use of all the people that are in the world.

  • We don't have our situation set up so that the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized.

  • We haven't set the system's up for that yet, so we waste people like mad, and then we waste ourselves like mad.

  • And so I would say this is something also, that's one of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament Jews.

  • This is I think one of the reasons that there book has become so central is because what happens in the Old Testament after the fall is that Israel produces a series of states, right rise of state and then a fall, and then a rise of another state and then a false.

  • So it's the same thing, except it's happening at a political level.

  • The political state rises, it gets corrupt, it falls, it rises out of the ashes again, gets corrupt and falls.

  • I think that happened six times in the Old Testament, and one of the things that's very interesting is the reaction of the Jews.

  • They always say it was our folk instead of taking the Cain and Abel route.

  • So I'm going to tell you the Cain and Abel story right away.

  • Instead of taking the cane enable route, they always say, If the state collapsed, it was because we did something wrong.

  • That's very different than saying, You know, it's arbitrary fate.

  • It's the nature of arbitrary fate or the structure of reality that we're doomed to collapse into chaos.

  • And that's an indication of the corruption of being well, you can take that route if you want.

  • It's the corruption of being well, good luck with that.

  • So what you gonna do about that?

  • That's easy.

  • Start.

  • You'll start to work for the destruction of being.

  • That's what you will do.

  • The alternative is to say this terrible thing happened and somehow it's my fault.

  • Well, at least that Lee opens you up the pathway to doing something about it.

  • And maybe it's actually the case.

  • May be terrible.

  • Things happen because you're just not who you should be.

  • At least it's a night.

  • You know, that's true to some degree right?

  • You know it because things happen to you all the time and you think, Well, you know, I just would have played that game straight.

  • If I would have put this thing in order that wouldn't have happened.

  • It's like, Okay, fine.

  • What's the ultimate extent of that?

  • Dostoevsky said at one point that every human being was not only responsible for everything that happened to him or her, but also simultaneously responsible for everything that happened to everyone else.

  • It's a very stiff.

  • I would say it's almost a hallucinogenic idea, right?

  • It's a it's a transcendent idea and it can go very wrong.

  • Sometimes depressed people, for example, get hyper responsible for what's happened and just crushes them.

  • And so it's a it's a it's a mode of thinking that can produce its attendant pathologies.

  • But there's something about it that's there's something about it that's metaphysically true.

  • So all right, so I'm gonna tell you the story of Cain and Abel

so last week.

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2017年地圖的意義11:洪水與鐵塔 (2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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