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  • All right.

  • So the last time I was here, many of you were as well.

  • We got halfway through the story of Jacob and I've bean digging underneath this story sporadically.

  • Since then, try to find out whether they're themes are being developed.

  • I've got some things that I think you're really interesting to talk about.

  • So, um, so we'll get right into it, so I'm gonna review a little bit first.

  • So we were talking about Jacob and all re update his biography a little bit so that we can place ourselves in the proper context before we go on.

  • So his mother, Rebecca, gave birth to twins, and the twins, even in her womb, were struggling for what they were struggling.

  • And, of course, the story is that they were struggling for dominance.

  • The older are the younger against the older Really?

  • Because Jacob Jacob means usurper and Rebecca had a, uh what would you call a vision from God that said that Jacob would supplant He saw.

  • And so even before her twins were born, they were in a state of competition.

  • And that's a recapitulation of the motif of the hostile brothers, right?

  • It's a very very, very common mythological motif.

  • And we already saw that really well developed in the story of Cain and Abel.

  • Right?

  • And Cain and Abel were essentially the 1st 2 human beings, the 1st 2 natural born human beings, and they're instantly locked in the state of enmity, which is symbolic of first, the enmity that exists within people's psyche.

  • Between the part of them, you might say that's aiming at the light and the part of them that's aiming at the darkness, and I think that's a reasonable way of portraying it.

  • Obviously, it's a way that sort of rife with symbolism.

  • But my experience of people, especially when you get to know them seriously or when they're dealing with serious issues, is that there is quite clearly a part of them that's striving to do well in the world or even to do good and another part that's deeply cynical and embittered that it says to hell with it and is self destructive and lashes out and really aims at making things worse.

  • And so that seems to be a natural part of the human psyche.

  • And that's also reflected in the the idea of the fall and so those ideas are not easily cast away their associated with the rise of self consciousness, right in in the story of the Garden of Eden.

  • And I think that's right, because I do think that are self consciousness produces that division within its because more than any other creature were intensely aware of our Finn itude and suffering, and that tends to turn us at least to some degree against being itself.

  • You know, I was watching, um, a bunch of protesters in the U.

  • S last week scream out the sky.

  • How about Trump?

  • You know, and, uh, it was interesting.

  • Like I thought it was an extraordinarily narcissistic display, but but despite that, there's something symbolically appropriate about it.

  • I also there's a movie I really like, sadly enough called Fu Bar.

  • I don't know how many of you have seen that.

  • Yeah, you know that movie I take it, Yeah, it's about the people I grew up with.

  • So yeah, that's true, man.

  • I'm telling you, that's true.

  • So the guy, the main actor in food bar, who's quite bright but completely uncivilized, gets testicular cancer, and there's one great scene where he gets far too drunk and he's stumbling around the street, you know, in, you know, virtually comatose state and course.

  • He's not very thrilled with what's happened to him, and he's shaking his fist at the sky.

  • It's pouring rain in these cursing God and, you know, it's like, Well, you can kind of understand his position.

  • So that kind of reminded me of these people who were yelling at this guy, you know, they were basically they're out dramatizing the idea of in rate they were enraged at.

  • Well, you could say God, of course, most of them wouldn't say that, but they were the ones yelling at the damn sky.

  • I mean, you know, so you gotta you gotta look at what they're doing rather than what they say.

  • And they were outraged that being was constructed such that Trump could have arisen as president.

  • And so well, So this idea, you know, that we could be easily turned against being and work for its destruction is a really It's a really common, common, common theme.

  • It never goes away.

  • You see, it echoed in stories like with the new marvel Siri's, for example, you see the enmity between Thor and Loki.

  • That's a good example of the same thing.

  • Or between Batman and the Joker.

  • There's There's Superman and Lex Luthor these There's the's pairs off hero against Villain.

  • That's a really dramatic and easily what everyone can understand that dynamic rate.

  • It's a basic plot, and the reason it's a basic plot is because it's true of the battle within.

  • Our spirits are only individual spirits.

  • It's true within families, because sibling rivalry can be unbelievably brutal.

  • It's true between human beings who are strangers.

  • It's true between groups of people, like it's true at every level of analysis.

  • And then, in some sense, it's It's architecturally true, at least with regards to deep religious symbolism, because you see that echoed in many stories as well.

  • So I think the clearest representation is probably Christ and Satan.

  • That's the closest to appear archetype.

  • Although there's in the old Egyptian stories, there's Oh, Cyrus and Seth or Horace and Seth, and Seth is a precursor to Satan, Adama logically so.

  • It's a very, very common motif.

  • And so that's what happens again in Rebecca's womb.

  • Is that this thing?

  • This idea is played out right away, and the two two twins are actually what would you call it?

  • There they have, ah, super ordinate destiny because one of them is destined to become the father of Israel and course that's it.

  • Pinnacle moment in the Old Testament, obviously, and arguably Pinnacle moment in human history now, you know, degree to which the stories in the Old Testament actually constitute what we would consider empirical history is a matter of debate, but it doesn't matter in some sense, because, as I mentioned, I think before in this lecture series.

  • No, there are the reforms of fiction that are meta true, which means that they're not necessarily about a specific individual.

  • Although I, I generally think they are based on the life of specific individuals.

  • It's the simplest theory, but who knows, right, But they're they're more real than reality itself because they abstract out the most relevant elements of reality and present them to you.

  • That's why you watch fiction, you know you know you want, you want your fiction boiled down, right?

  • You want to boil down to the essence.

  • That's what makes good fiction, and that essence is something that's truer than than plain old truth.

  • If it's handled well.

  • And so, you know, if you watch a Shakespeare play, half a lifetime of events can go by in a Shakespeare play, and it covers a wide range of scenes and so on.

  • And and so it's It's cut and edited and compressed all at once.

  • But because of that, it blasts you with with a kind of emotional and ethical force that just the mirror videotaping of someone's daily life you wouldn't even wouldn't even come close to approximating.

  • So then this motif of the hostile brothers That's a that's a deep, deep, archetypal truth and Rachel.

  • Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from my bowels, and one people shall be stronger than the other, and the elder shall serve the younger.

  • And so there's on inversion there, right?

  • Because, as we've discussed historically speaking and traditionally speaking, it's the elder son that to whom the disproportionate blessings flow.

  • Um, there's some truth in that to even more.

  • What would you say?

  • More empirically, I Q tends to decrease as the number of Children in the family increase.

  • The younger, the oldest, is the smartest.

  • Generally speaking, it isn't clear why that is.

  • But it might be that they get more attention and who knows?

  • So those of you, her younger can be very unhappy about that fact now, Jacob Okay, so there's another.

  • There's another plot line here, too, because, um, uh, Abraham and Rebecca are at odds.

  • It's sorry Isaac and Rebecca are at odds about the Children, right?

  • So there's a There's a need a pool twist to a two because, well, Isaac is allied with Esa, who turns out to be the hunter type.

  • So he's your basic rough and tumble character.

  • You know, he's kind of a wild looking guy, Harry, and he likes to be outside.

  • He lives intense.

  • He likes to hunt.

  • He's a man's man.

  • That's one way of thinking about it.

  • Where is Jacob?

  • Dwells intense.

  • You know he doesn't go outside much.

  • He's Maur.

  • Well, maybe he's more introverted, but he's certainly this sort of kid, adolescents say, who hangs around home, and there's some intimation that he's his money while he's clearly his mother's favorite and with all the advantages, and I was supposed disadvantage that go along with that, and Isaac and Rebecca don't see eye to eye about who should have predominance among the sons.

  • And Rebecca is quite complicity with Jacob in inverting the social order.

  • So the first thing that happens that's crooked is that he saw comes in from hunting.

  • And he's, you know, maybe he's been out for a number of days and he's ravenous and he's kind of an impulsive guy.

  • Doesn't really seem to think about the long term very much.

  • And Jacob was cooking some lentil stew and, uh, East.

  • I want some of it.

  • Jacob refuses, and and then says that he'll trade his his birthright for it.

  • And, ah, eso agrees, which is a bad deal, right?

  • It's a bad deal.

  • And so you you could say that S O actually deserves what's coming to him, although at minimum you'd have to think of them both as being equally culpable.

  • It's a nasty trick, and so that's Jacob's first trick.

  • And then the second trick is that it's later and Isaac is old and blind and, you know, close to death.

  • And it's time for him to be still a blessing on his sons, which is a very important event, apparently among these ancient people.

  • Um and he saw again is out hunting and Rachel dressed dresses.

  • Jacob up in a Harry, puts a goat skin on his arms, so he's kind of Harry, like Esso and dresses a Minnesota is closed, so he smells like he's so on, Isaac tells.

  • He sought to go out, hunt him up some venison, I think it is.

  • And ah, which is a favorite of his.

  • And Rebecca has Jacob cook up a couple of goat kids and serve that to Isaac and play the role of eso.

  • And so he does that.

  • It's pretty net damn nasty, really.

  • All things considered, you know, to play a trick like that both on your brother and on your blind father and the in collusion with your mother.

  • It's not the sort of thing that's really designed to promote lot of familial harmony, and so especially because you've already screwed him over in a big way.

  • Once, you know, you think you'd think that would be sufficient.

  • So anyways, he's successful, and Esau loses his father's blessing and so that Jacob ends up really in the position of the first born.

  • And it's quite interesting because God tells Rachel that Jacob is going to be the dominant twin, and you'd think again with gods a blessing or a least the prophecy that Jacob would end up being a good guy.

  • But he's certainly not presented that way to begin with, which is also quite interesting, given that he's the eventual founder of Israel.

  • And it's another indication of the realism of these old stories.

  • You know, it's it's quite amazing to me.

  • It's always been quite amazing to me how unprintable fied these stories have remained, you know, because you'd think that if you're even the least bit cynical, especially if you had the kind of Marxist religion is the opiate of the masses kind of viewpoint, which which is a credible viewpoint, you know, although it's wrong.

  • But it's crazy.

  • Well, I think it's a shallow.

  • I think it's a shallow interpretation, and not part of the reason I think it's a shallow interpretation is because the stories would be a lot prettier.

  • If that was the case, these characters wouldn't have this strange, realistic moral ambiguity about them.

  • You know, if you're gonna feed people of fantasy, then you wanted to be like a Harlequin novel or are greeting card or something like that.

  • You don't want it to be a story that's full of betrayal and deceit and murder and mayhem and genocide and all of that.

  • If that just doesn't seem all that, what would you say?

  • Calming, I guess, would be the right right answer.

  • So anyways, Jacob gets away with this, but he saw is not happy.

  • And Jacob is quite convinced that he might kill him.

  • And I think that was a reasonable fear because he saw was a tough guy and he was used to being outside and he knew how to hunt and he knew how to kill.

  • And he actually wasn't very happy about getting seriously screwed over by his, you know, stay at home, younger brother twice.

  • And so Jacob runs off and goes to visit his uncle and on the way.

  • And this is a very interesting part of this story.

  • He stops and to sleep, and he takes a stone for a pillow.

  • And then he has this vision.

  • It's called a dream, but the context makes it look like a vision of a ladder reaching up to heaven.

  • And with angels moving up and down the ladder, let's say and there's some representations of that.

  • I showed you some of them the last time we met, but I'll read it to you first.

  • He delighted upon a certain place and tired.

  • They're all night because the sun was set and he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows and lay down in that place to sleep.

  • And he dreamed and beheld a ladder set upon the earth and the top of it reached heaven and behold the angels of God, ascending and descending on it.

  • And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, they father and the god of Isaac, the land where on the lioce toothy I will give it and to thy seed.

  • And I see chubby is the dust of the earth and now shalt spread abroad to the west, into the east, into the north and the south.

  • That lays out the economical directions.

  • Right?

  • So now there's a center with economical directions, like the thing that you see, you know, that little symbol you see on maps.

  • It's the same thing that symbolically placed upon the earth.

  • So a center has been established with radiating uh, well, with with what with with direction lines radiating from it.

  • So it establishes as as a place.

  • And in the a nice seed shell, all the families of the Earth be blessed.

  • So that's pretty good news for Jacob.

  • And it's not self evident why God is rewarding him for running away after screwing over his brother.

  • But that seems to be what happens.

  • And so here's a couple of representations.

  • Classic representations.

  • Um, the one on the right is William Blake.

  • It's when I particularly like you know, when Blake assimilates God with the sun when with light, right?

  • So that's quite a common mythological idea that goddess associated with light and the day behold I am with thee and will keep thee in all places.

  • Whither thou go ist and will bring the again into this land, for I will not leave the until I have done that, which I have spoken to the of and Jacob Awaked out of asleep.

  • And he said, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not, and he was afraid, which is exactly the right response and said, How dreadful is this place.

  • It is none other than the House of God and this is the Gate of Heaven.

  • And Jacob rose up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put for his pillows and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it.

  • And that's that's a more important thing than you think.

  • And we'll go into that a little bit more deeply because up to this point in this story, there isn't anything.

  • Really.

  • There isn't anything that's really emerged to mark a sacred space, right?

  • There's no, there's no cathedral, There's no church, there's nothing like that.

  • But here's this idea that emerges that you can mark the center of something that and that's important and you mark it with a stone and stones, a good way to mark things that are important because the stone is permanent, right, and we mark things with stones now, like we marked graves with stones, for example, because we want to make a memory and to carve something into stone.

  • To carve a stone and then to carve something into stone is to make a memory, and to use stone is to make a memory because Stone is permanent and to set it up right is to indicate a center.

  • And so that's what happens in pours oil on the top of it, which is kind of offering.

  • And he called the name of that place Bethel.

  • But the name of the city was called Love Is It the first?

  • And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and we'll give me bread to eat and Raymond to put on than 1/10 of what I urn I will give him.

  • I missed that.

  • Um, that's interesting, too, because now there's a transformation of sacrifice, right, because until that point, sacrifices have had been pretty con critized.

  • It was the burning of something.

  • Where is here all of a sudden?

  • It's the offering of, of of, of productive labor per se like a tithe because it tied is a form of sacrifice.

  • And so there's an abstraction of the idea of sacrifice, the sacrifice.

  • It's really important that the idea of sacrifice gets abstracted right, because it should be abstracted to the point where it's it's used.

  • The way that we use it today, which is, you know, we make sacrifices to get ahead, and everyone understands what that means.

  • But the sacrifices are generally some combination of psychological and and and practical.

  • So we're not acting them out where, precisely, We're not dramatizing them a rich, realizing that we actually act them out in our in the covenant that we make with the future.

  • And we do that well, unless we're extraordinarily impulsive and aimless in our lives and have really no conception whatsoever of the future and are likely to sacrifice the future for the present, which is it?

  • What he saw does right then we make sacrifices, and you got to think like the idea of making sacrifices to make the future better is an extraordinarily difficult lesson to learn.

  • It took people.

  • God only knows how long to learn that.

  • You know, like we have no idea.

  • It's not something that animals do easily.

  • Chimpanzees don't store leftover meat, you know.

  • They just needed to wolves.

  • They just wolf can eat about £30 of meat in one sitting, and that's that's where the idea of wolfing it down comes from.

  • They're not hiding it, saving it for later.

  • You know they can't do that so they can't sacrifice the present for the future.

  • This is a big deal that this that this happens now.

  • I want to tell you a little bit about the idea of the pillar, because it's it's unbelievably deep idea, and it orients us in ways that we still don't.

  • It's still orienting us in ways that we don't understand.

  • In fact, it's actually the mechanism by which were oriented or and if it's lacking, then we become disoriented.

  • And so I'll show you some pictures and describe them first.

  • Okay, so first of all, there's a walled city, So let me tell you that you could think about that as an archetypal human habitation.

  • Maybe it's a reflection of something like a fire in the middle of the plane or the forest or the jungle, for that matter.

  • Although it's kind of hard to get a fire going there, imagine a fire ringed around with logs and perhaps ringed around with dwellings, right.

  • So the fires in the center and the fire defines the center, and then as you move away from the fire, you move out into the darkness.

  • Right.

  • So the fire is light and communion and safety.

  • And as you move away from the fire, you move out into the darkness and what's terrifying out beyond the perimeter.

  • So what's beyond the perimeters?

  • Terrified.

  • You can feel that if you go camping somewhere, that's wild.

  • You know, you're pretty damn happy, especially if the wolves are howling.

  • You're pretty damn happy to be sitting by the fire because you can see there.

  • The fire keeps the animals away.

  • And you know, if you do wander into the bush into the darkness, then you're on alert.

  • And you know, your predator detection systems are on alert.

  • And so you could think about the classical human habitation as two places.

  • One where your predator detection system isn't on alert and another where your predator text detection system is alert on alert.

  • And you could think about that roughly as the distinction between explored territory and unexplored territory.

  • And really, the the founding of a place is precisely.

  • This is a lot of this I got from reading Vercelli.

  • Eliana.

  • The founding of a place is precisely the definition of ah explored center set against the unexplored periphery.

  • and you know what's interesting about that?

  • So you can kind of think about that with regards to the walled city, right?

  • Everything in the wall is cosmos, and everything outside the wall is chaos and, you know, but it also extends to the conceptual realm.

  • Because imagine that you're the master of a field of study.

  • And so that's an interesting metaphor, cause a field is at a geographical metaphor.

  • Right?

  • And if in the center of the field, are those things that everyone knows really well, the axiom is that everyone abides by in the field.

  • And then as you move towards the fringes, you get toe work towards the unknown towards the frontier of the discipline.

  • And as you become expert, you move from the center to the frontier.

  • And so then you're on the border.

  • When you're when you're when you're a scholar, a competent school, you're on the border between the unexplored or the explored and unexplored, and you're trying to further that border.

  • So even if you're just doing this abstract lee, it's the same thing.

  • And it's a reflection of the fact that every human environment, concrete or abstract, it makes no difference.

  • recapitulates the cosmos, chaos, dichotomy or the order chaos dichotomy.

  • And that's why in Dow isn't, for example, it's the union of chaos and order that constitutes being itself, and that you stand on the border between chaos and order because that's the proper place to be too orderly, too much in the explored.

  • You're not learning anything too much out there where the predators lurk, then you're frozen with terror, and neither of those positions are desirable.

  • So and that's what you know.

  • And so you think this is a concrete reality, obviously, as well as a psychological reality.

  • There were reasons for those walls, right?

  • Because inside the walls were all the people like us.

  • And so that begs the question.

  • What does it mean for people to be like us?

  • And then outside the Wall of the Rose, all those people, because they were the worst forms of predators?

  • Because people are actually the worst forms of predators who aren't like us, and the wall is there to draw a distinction between like us and not like us.

  • And so and that was a matter of life and death.

  • You can tell that because I mean look at those walls.

  • They had to build those by hand.

  • And, you know, you do see walled cities that have three rings of walls.

  • So these people were terrified but not so terrified as the people who built three walls.

  • They were really terrified, and they had their reasons.

  • So okay, so now there's an idea that's that's reflected in the Jacob's Ladder story that the center where you put the pillar is also the place where heaven and earth touch.

  • And so that's That's a complicated idea.

  • I think that you can, you know, I'm trying to look at these stories from a psychological perspective.

  • And so then you could say that that's a symbolic place where the lowest and the highest come together.

  • And so it's a place where earthly being stretches up to the highest possible ethical abstraction.

  • And that's the center, because one of the things that defines us say as opposed to them, is that we're all united within a certain ethic.

  • That's what makes us the same.

  • This is a complicated line of reasoning, and but I'll go back to it after I show you some more pictures.

  • But so that's That's the first idea is that the center is the place where the lowest and the highest touch simultaneously.

  • And so you could say that in some sense it specifies the aim of a group of people.

  • That's another way, you know, if you get together with people to make a group, even at work, you group yourself around a project and that unites you, and it unites you because you all have the same a mural pointing to the same thing.

  • And that makes you the same in some ways.

  • Because if you're after the same thing I am, then the same things are gonna be important to you that are important to me and the same things.

  • They're going to be negative to that air negative to me because our emotions work out that way.

  • And that means I can instantly predict you.

  • I know how you're going to behave.

  • And so our aim, which is basically our ethical limits, because we're aiming at something better, at least in principle, we're aiming at something better.

  • It's our ethical aim that unites our perceptions, and that's what the lines are emotions.

  • And so that sort of begs the question.

  • If you're gonna build a community around.

  • What aim should the community congregate?

  • Okay, so the idea here is that the the center of the community is the pillar that unites heaven and earth so unites the lowest with the highest.

  • So there's some intimation of the idea that it's the highest that unites the community.

  • Okay, And so keep that in mind.

  • And that's a very old ideas.

  • Well, that's the idea of the Axis Mundi, which is the center pole that unites heaven and Earth.

  • It's an unbelievably old idea, tens of thousands of years old.

  • It might even stretch back to whatever are archaic memories, quasi memories.

  • I don't know how what you would describe them archetypal memories of our excessively old ancestry in trees, when the tree itself was in fact the center of the world, and that it was ringed by snakes and chaos.

  • And so, while we have no idea, hold, these ideas are, but they're very, very old, and evolution is a conservative business.

  • Once it builds a gadget, then it builds new things on top of that gadgets, like a medieval town, right, the center of the town is really old and new.

  • Newer areas of the town get built around it.

  • But the center is still really old.

  • And that's what we're like, you know, are platforms like our our basic physiological structure.

  • This skeletal body is some tens of millions of years old or older than that.

  • If you think about vertebrates, it's much older than that, and that's all conserved.

  • So everything's built on top of everything else.

  • All right, so there there's a kind of a classic town, and there's the idea I showed you.

  • This is Scandinavian World Tree.

  • Same idea unites heaven and Earth, and around the roots of that tree are snakes that eat this tree constantly.

  • So that's the idea that there's stability.

  • But there's constant transformation around that stability and at the same time, the snakes there, knowing in the roots there's streams that are nourishing it.

  • So it's sort of it's sort of an echo of the idea that life depends on death and renewal constantly because your cells are dying and being renewed constantly right.

  • If they're just proliferating, then you have cancer.

  • If they're just dying, then you die.

  • You have to get the balance between death and life exactly right, so that you can actually live, which is also a very strange thing.

  • So and that tree is something that reaches from the bottom layers of being maybe the microcosm all the way to the macrocosm.

  • That's the idea anyways, so then there's okay, so there's there's Ah, Jacob and his and his pillar.

  • He's got this idea that you could mark the center with this stone like it's sort of symbolizes what he was laying on when he dreamt.

  • But now he's got this idea.

  • You put something erect and it marks the centre, and it symbolizes his vision of the highest good something like that and the promise that's being made to him.

  • And then this is an Egyptian obelisk pyramid.

  • On top of it, Um, that's in Paris.

  • It was taken from Luxor and put in Paris, and so that's Ah, much more sophisticated instance of the same idea.

  • Okay, there was a Stone Age cultures across Eurasia that put up these huge obelisks everywhere.

  • These huge like the stone hand.

  • She is a good example of that, although it's it's very sophisticated and they're also markers of places.

  • We don't know exactly what their function is, but they're very much akin to this some permanent marker of place.

  • There's a good one.

  • So that's in ST Peter's.

  • And I really like this one because you can see the echoes of Jacob's vision for the establishment of a territory there, right?

  • You've got the obelisk in the middle, and then you've got the directions radiating from the center and, of course, save Peter's.

  • This is the ST Peter's Basilica in Rome, which is an absolutely unbelievable place.

  • It's just jaw dropping, and so there's the cathedral at the back of it.

  • And then there's this circle of pillars that surrounds it.

  • You can just see them a little bit on the on the middle, left there that goes all the way around that entire enclosure.

  • And, ah, you know, very large number of people could gather there and then so that pillar marks the centre, and that'd be the center of Catholicism's.

  • Essentially, that's what that represents, right, the symbolic centre of Catholicism's.

  • Although you could make the case that the cathedral is the center doesn't really matter.

  • They're very close together, and it's it's half a dozen of one and six of the other.

  • And then here's another representation of the same idea right is that this is why people don't like the flag to be burned, you know, because conservative people see the flag as the sacred thing that binds people together.

  • And so they're not happy when that sacred thing is destroyed, even if it's destroyed in the name of protest.

  • Where is the people who burned flags?

  • Think while there are times to dramatize the idea that the center has bean corrupt and you can demonstrate that by putting it to the torch into as a representation that that this that the corrupt center now has to be burned and transformed.

  • And the thing is, they're both right.

  • They're both right all the time because the center is absolutely necessary and is sacred and is almost always also corrupt and in need of reparation.

  • That's also an archetypal idea, and that's a useful thing to know because, you know, it's easy for young people in particular to think that well, the world's going to hell in a handbasket, and it's the fault of the last generation.

  • They've left us this terrible mess and, you know, we feeling pretty betrayed about that.

  • Now we have to clean it up.

  • It's like, yeah, yeah, People have been thinking that for, like, 35,000 years, it's not new.

  • And the reason it's not new, it's because it's always true.

  • You know what you're handed is a sacred center with flaws always, always as partly because it's the creation of the dead right in the dead can't see and they can't communicate.

  • And so they're not in touch with the present.

  • And so what they've bequeathed to you, apart from the fact that it might actually be corrupt, which is a slightly different thing, is at least blind and dead.

  • And so what the hell can you expect from something that's blind and dead?

  • You know, you're lucky if it just doesn't stomp you out of existence.

  • So So that's, Ah, lovely photograph, obviously, and that's the establishment of a new center, then that the center could be a cathedral to and often is, of course, in classic towns, European towns in particular.

  • Although it's not only European towns that are like this that there's a center that's made out of stone, so that would be the cathedral, and it's got the highest tower on on top of the tower.

  • There's often a cross, and that's the symbolic centre.

  • So people are are drawn together around whatever the cross represents.

  • Now that the cross obviously represents a center because it's an ex right, X marks the spot, so the center of the cross is the center, and then the cathedral's often in a cross shaped, which also marks the centre.

  • And then in the cathedral there's a dome often, and that's the sky.

  • And that's that ladder that reaches from earth to heaven.

  • So it's a recapitulation of the same idea.

  • So and people are are drawn to that center, and the center is the symbol of what unites them.

  • And what unites them is the faith that the cathedral is the embodiment off.

  • And you think what?

  • What does the faith mean?

  • And again, we're approaching this psychologically.

  • And what it means is that, well, everyone who's a member of that group accepts the transcendent ideal of the group.

  • Now the thing is, if you're the member of a group, you accept the transcendent ideal of the group.

  • That's what it means to be a member of a group.

  • So if you're in a work team and you're all working on a project.

  • What you've essentially done is decided that you're going to make the goal unquestionable, right?

  • I mean, you might argue about the details, but if you're tasked with something, you know, here's a job for you.

  • 10 people organize yourself for on the job.

  • You can argue about how you're going to do the job, but you can't argue about the job.

  • Then the group falls apart.

  • And so there's an act of faith.

  • In some sense, the reason that the act of faith is necessary is because it's very, very difficult to specify without error what that central aim should be, given that there's any number of aims, right, and it's a very, very difficult thing to figure out.

  • This is something we're gonna do a little bit tonight is like What should the aim be around which a group would congregate?

  • You know that so so, especially if it's a large group and it's a large group that has to stay together across very large swaths of time.

  • And the group is an incredibly diverse, you know.

  • What possible kind of ideal could unite Ah, large group of diverse people across a very large stretch of time.

  • That's a really, really hard question, and I think part of the way that question has been answered is it's been answered symbolically and and in images, because it's so damn complicated that it's almost impossible to articulate.

  • So But obviously, you need to have a centre around which everyone can unite, because if you don't, then everyone's at odds with one another.

  • Like if I don't know what you're up to and you don't know what he's up to, we have no, we're just strangers and we don't know that our ethics match at all, then the probability that we're going to be able to exist harmoniously decreases rapidly to zero, and and that's obviously just no good.

  • That's a state of total chaos, so we can't have that.

  • It's It's not possible to exist without a central ideal.

  • It's not possible, and it's deeper than that.

  • It's deeper than that, partly because it's, uh, I'll try to get this right.

  • This is the sort of thing that I was arguing with Sam Harris about, Um, you see, your category system is a product of your aims.

  • That's the thing.

  • Like if you have a set of facts at hand.

  • The facts don't tell you how to categorize the facts because there's too damn many facts.

  • There's a trillion fact, and there's no way without imposing some a priority order on them, of determining how it is that you should order them.

  • So how do you order them?

  • Well, that's easy.

  • You decide what you're aiming at now?

  • How do you do that?

  • Well, I'm not answering that question at the moment.

  • I'm just saying that in order to organize those facts, you need a name.

  • And then the aim instantly organizes the facts into those things relevant to the aim tools.

  • Let's say those things that get in the way and a very large number of things that you don't have to pay attention to at all, right.

  • It excludes vert like if you're working on an engineering problem, you don't have to worry about, uh ah, practicing medicine in your neighborhood.

  • You know, there's a bunch of like, if you're focusing on a particular, uh, what would you say?

  • Any any job, any any set of skills implies that you're good at a small set of things and then not good at incredibly large number of other skills.

  • It simplifies things, and so you can use your aim as the basis of a category structure.

  • And so you also have to keep that in mind because what it means is, as far as I can tell that what it means is that your category system itself, which is what structures your perceptions, is actually dependent on the ethics of your aim.

  • It's directly, it's a moral thing.

  • It's directly dependent on your aim, and that's a stunning idea.

  • If it happens to be true, it's not how people think about thinking.

  • We don't think that way.

  • We like.

  • We think that we think deterministic Lee, let's say or that we think empirically or that we think rationally and none of that appears to be the case.

  • What we do is we pause it a valid aim, and then we organize the world around the aim, and there's plenty of evidence from that in in psychological studies of perception, right that that does look like how the perceptual systems work.

  • Mostly, they ignore because the world's too complicated.

  • They focus on a small set of phenomena deemed relevant to whatever the aim is And then, of course, the aim is problematic again.

  • It's complex because the aim I have has to be a name that some of you at share, or at least don't object to.

  • Because otherwise I'm not going to get anywhere with my damn aim.

  • It has to actually be implementable in the world.

  • It has to be sustainable across at least some amount of time.

  • It can't kill me like it's really hedged in this same.

  • It's it isn't any old thing.

  • There's hardly any things that it can be.

  • So you know, Jacob's aim, for example, in undermining it saw almost gets him killed.

  • And you can understand why.

  • That's the other thing you think?

  • Well, that that was a nasty bit of work.

  • You can understand the SOS rage.

  • It's even though we're separated from the people in these stories by what, 4000 years?

  • 3000 years.

  • Something like that.

  • You know in immediately why everyone feels the way they do at least once.

  • You understand the context of the story that none of that mysterious in the least so So there is the church and the church is underneath the cross, right?

  • So that's ST Peter's Basilica.

  • And so there's the cross on the globe on top of the basilica.

  • And then there's the cross on the obelisk as well.

  • And so what that means is that.

  • And this is where things get insanely complicated is that the center is defined by whatever the Cross represents.

  • Now the cross represents a crossing point.

  • Geographically, it's it's certainly that the cross probably represents the body to some degree.

  • But then the cross also represents the place of suffering, obviously, and more importantly, it represents the place of voluntary suffering.

  • Transcended.

  • I'm speaking psychologically, right?

  • Not theologically.

  • That's what it represents.

  • And so you might say.

  • So here's the idea behind putting down the obelisk with the cross and saying that that's the center.

  • So that's the thing that everyone's aiming at.

  • And so the the idea would be, well, if you're going to be a member of the group defined by this obelisk than what you do is except your position at the center of suffering voluntarily and therefore transcendent.

  • That's the idea, and that is one hell of an idea.

  • It really is, man, that is a killer idea because it's actually a signal.

  • It's a really clear signal of psychological health, you know, because one of the things you do if you're a clinical psychologist and someone is paralyzed by fear, is what you do is you break their fears down into relatively manageable bits, and then you have them voluntarily confront their fears.

  • And it might also be things that they're disgusted by it say, if they have obsessive compulsive disorder.

  • But it produces very strong, negative emotion, whatever it is, and then you have them voluntarily confront whatever it is that produces that overwhelming, negative emotion, and that makes them stronger.

  • That's what happens.

  • It doesn't make them less afraid.

  • It makes them more courageous and stronger.

  • And that is not the same thing.

  • It's seriously not, doesn't decrease the fear.

  • It increases the courage.

  • And so that's a mind boggling idea.

  • And it's deeper.

  • You know, One of the things that's really interesting about these archetypal ideas is that maybe it's partly because of the hyperlink nature of the Bible.

  • That's part of it.

  • But it's not.

  • The whole thing is that no matter how deep you dig into them, you'll never get to the bottom.

  • You know, you hit a bottom.

  • You think, God, that's so unbelievably profound.

  • And then if you excavate a little underneath that, you find something else that's even more profound.

  • And you think, Wow, that's got to be the bottom And then you dig under.

  • That's like there's no bottom.

  • You can just keep digging down.

  • While as far as I can tell, you can keep digging down layer after layer and we'll talk a little bit about more, a little more about what the Cross signifies as the center.

  • Because you see what people were trying to figure out is, what is it that we need to unite under, right?

  • What's the proper thing to unite under?

  • I can give you another example.

  • So in the mess of potato me in societies, the Emperor, um, you know who was more or less in an absolute monarch he lit, lived inside what was essentially a walled city, and the god of the mess of Damien's was Martic.

  • And Martic was thief figure who had eyes all the way around his head, and he spoke magic words, who is very attentive and very articulate.

  • And it was Martin who went out and confronted the goddess of chaos the dragon of chaos and cut her into pieces and made up the world.

  • Okay, so you can kind of understand what that means.

  • So Marty goes beyond the frontier into the place of predatory chaos and encounters the thing that's terrifying and then make something productive out of it.

  • So it's a hero myth.

  • And and Martic is elected to the position of pre eminent god by all the other Mesopotamian guards because he manages that.

  • So the Martic idea emerges up the holy doorman and Turkey and hits the pinnacle so that and God only knows how long that took.

  • It would be the amalgamation of many tribes and then that the what?

  • The the distillation of all the tribal myths to produce this emergence story of what constitutes Top God.

  • And then the job of Emperor was to act out.

  • Martic.

  • That's what gave him sovereignty.

  • So the reason that he was the centre around which people organized themselves wasn't because he was when he was being a proper emperor wasn't because there was something super special about him.

  • Like the power didn't exactly reside in him, which is a really useful thing to separate right you want the power, which is why it's kind of nice to have Ah, symbolic monarch.

  • You get the symbolic power separated from the personality power, right, because otherwise they get conflated.

  • That's what happened in Rome.

  • It's a very in it you can see attending to happen now and then in the US, like with the Kennedy dynasties and that sort of thing.

  • So the idea was, the emperor had sovereignty as long as he was acting out Martic properly and going out into the chaos and cutting it into pieces and making order.

  • That was his jobs.

  • They used to take about side the city on the New Year's festival and strip him of all his emperor garments and humiliate him and then force him to to confess all the ways that year.

  • He hadn't been a good Martic, so he wasn't a good ruler, and so that was supposed to clue him in and wake him up, right, and then they would ritually re enact the Battle of Marduk against timeout, the chaos monster using statues.

  • And then if that all went well, then the emperor would go back in and the city would be renewed for another year, and we still have echoes of that in our New Year's celebration, writes the same idea that's echoed down all those all those centuries, thousands of years.

  • So it says such a staggeringly brilliant idea, right?

  • Because so part of the idea is that the thing that sovereign so that's the pillar at the center that everyone gathers around is at least in part, the thing that courageously goes out into the unknown and make something useful out out of it for the community.

  • So that's very, very smart.

  • It's very smart.

  • So this is another example of a center.

  • So these this is the flag.

  • This is the union Jack.

  • And so it's made up of a bunch of crosses, right?

  • And so the first cross, the English cross That's the flag of ST George.

  • That's the flag of England and say, What is ST George?

  • Do?

  • Slays the dragon?

  • Exactly.

  • Same idea, Right?

  • So safe.

  • George, patron saint of England, goes out and slays the dragon and freeze the Virgin from the grip of the dragon.

  • Same idea, right?

  • So that's the center.

  • And then the second cross is called Ah, saltier, but it's another crucifix So it's the cross on which state Andrew was crucified, says.

  • So it's the same idea is that the center is the center of suffering.

  • Voluntarily undertaken.

  • Costain Andrew was a martyr, and then ST Patrick is the third cross.

  • What did ST Patrick do in Ireland?

  • Chased out all the snakes?

  • Right?

  • So it's the same thing, right?

  • And so the flag of Great Britain is the combination of all of these three crosses that defines the center.

  • And that's what the flag is, so that symbolizes all of that.

  • So that's, you know, completely mind boggling.

  • So, and there's more about ST Patrick to, So he banishes the snakes after a 40 day fast.

  • And so that's a no illusion to the 40 years that Moses spends in the desert and also the 40 days that Christ fasts in the New Testament and his walking stick.

  • When he plants, it grows into a tree.

  • So that echoes all of the ideas about the center that we just described.

  • And he also speaks with the ancient Irish ancestors, which, if you remember, is a characteristic of the show gnomic rituals where where so in the typical Chamonix ritual, which seems to be elicited by psychedelic use.

  • The shaman dissolved down past their bones, and then they go up into heaven and speak with the ancestors.

  • And then they're introduced into the Heavenly Kingdom.

  • And then the flesh is put back on their bones and they come back and tell everybody what happened.

  • And that's a repeatable experience, right?

  • The shamanic tradition is unbelievably widespread.

  • So all over Europe, ancient Europe and Asia, and perhaps as far down in South America, right?

  • It's highly conserved.

  • And it's out of that tradition, you know, likelihood that our religious aviation emerged so and you can see echoes of that here.

  • So so back to this story of Jacob and his ladder so that I can come again to my father's house in peace.

  • Then shall the Lord be my God in this stone, which I have set for a pillar, she'll be God's house.

  • And of all that that thou shall give me, I will surely give the 10th unto thee.

  • So that's That's also an echo, I would say, of the obligation of those who climbed the power heart hierarchy to attend to those who are at the bottom right, because if you think about the tithing as a form of wealth distribution, which is essentially what it is, the part of the ethic that defines the proper moral endeavor that's related to that center is not to advance yourself at the expense of the entire community.

  • So if you're if you're fortunate enough so that you can rise in in authority and power and competence within the confines of a community, you still have ah, obligation to maintained the structure, maintain and further the structure of the community within which you rose and that that's obvious, right?

  • Because if people didn't do that after a couple of generations, the whole thing would fall apart.

  • So you know, you, you it's not reasonable to destroy the game that you're winning.

  • It's reasonable to strengthen the game that you're winning.

  • And so that's

All right.

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聖經系列十四:雅各。與神搏鬥 (Biblical Series XIV: Jacob: Wrestling with God)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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