I'm in the dressing room at the Palace Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky on June 14th

2018 and

I thought I'd read you an excerpt from maps of meaning the architecture of belief which is a book I published

in 99 with Routledge and

It's been the basis of my YouTube lectures and I would say also

Twelve rules for life a lot of the ideas and twelve rules for life were first worked out with maps of meaning

I just recorded an audio version of the book was released two days ago

June 12 2008 een and

It's available from Penguin Books on audible. I'll put the links in the description of the video

I'm hoping that the audio version with its

Careful intonation will be easier to understand maps of meaning is a rather difficult book

in any case I'm going to read you an excerpt from it today and

That'll serve as a bit of an introduction to the book

I'll make some more excerpts over the next coming weeks I think as well, but we'll start with this one. I

Was reading

Jeffrey Burton Russell's mephistopheles the devil in the modern world when I came across his discussion of

Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

Russell discusses Ivan's argument for atheism, which is one of the most powerful ever mounted

Ivan is one of the brothers in The Brothers Karamazov

Ivan's examples of evil all taken from the daily newspapers of 1876 are unforgettable

The nobleman who orders his hounds to tear the peasant boy to pieces in front of his mother

The man who whips his struggling horse on its gentle eyes

The parents who locked their tiny daughter all night in the freezing privy while she knocks on the walls pleading for mercy

The Turk who entertains a baby with a shiny pistol before blowing its brains out

Ivan knows that such horrors of kur daily and can be multiplied without end

I took the case of children Ivan explains to make case clearer

Of the other tears with which the earth is soaked. I will say nothing

Burton Russell states

the relation of evil to God has in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima once again become center of

philosophical and theological discussion

The problem of evil can be stated simply

God is omnipotent

God is perfectly good

Such a God would not permit evil to exist

But we observe that evil exists. Therefore. God does not exist

Variations on this theme are nearly infinite

The problem is not only abstract and philosophical. Of course. It is also personal and immediate

Believers tend to forget that their God takes away everything that one cares about possessions comforts success

professional craft knowledge

friends family and life

What kind of God is this any?

Decent religion must face this question squarely and no answer is credible that cannot be given in the face of dying children

It seems to me that we use the horrors of the world to justify our own inadequacies

We make the presumption that human vulnerability is a sufficient cause of human cruelty

we blame God and God's creation for twisting and perverting our souls and claim all the time to be innocent victims of

circumstance

What do you say to a dying child

you say

You can do it. There is something in you that is strong enough to do it and

you don't use the terrible vulnerability of children as an excuse for the rejection of existence and the perpetration of

conscious evil

When I wrote maps of meaning I did not have much experience as a clinical psychologist

Two of my patients however stayed in my mind

The first was a woman about 35 years old

She looked 50 she reminded me of a medieval peasant

Of my conception of a medieval peasant. She was dirty clothes hair teeth

dirty with the kind of Filth that takes months to develop

She was unbearably shy

She approached anyone who she thought was superior in status to her, which was virtually everyone hunched over

With her eyes shaded by her hands both hands as if she could not tolerate the light emanating from her target

She had been in behavioral treatment in a Montreal

Hospital before as an outpatient and was in fact a sight known to the permanent staff at the clinic

Others had tried to help her overcome her unfortunate manner of self presentation which made people on the streets shy away from her

Made them regard her as crazy and unpredictable

She could learn to stand or sit up temporarily with eyes on garden

But she reverted to her old habits as soon as she left the clinic

She may have been intellectually impaired in consequence of some biological fault

It was difficult to tell because her environment was so appalling. It may have caused her ignorant

She was illiterate as well

She lived with her mother whose character. I knew nothing about and with an elderly desperately ill bedridden aunt

Her boyfriend was a violent alcoholic

schizophrenic who mistreated her

Psychologically and physically who was always muddling her simple mind with tirades about the devil and the worship of Satan

She had nothing going for her. No beauty. No intelligence. No loving family. No skills

No employment

Nothing

She didn't come to therapy to resolve her problems

However, nor to unburden her soul nor to describe her mistreatment and victimization at the hands of others

she came she

Came because she wanted to do something for someone who was worse off than her

Of the clinic where I was interning was associated with a large

psychiatric hospital all of the patients that still remained after the shift to community CAIR in the aftermath of the 60s were so

incapacitated that they could not survive on the streets

she had done some volunteer work of some limited type in that hospital and

Decided if she could maybe befriend a patient take him or her outside for a walk. I

Think she got this idea because she had a dog which he walked regularly and what she liked to take care of

All she wanted from me was help arranging this helped finding someone who she could take outside

Help finding someone in the hospital bureaucracy who would allow this to happen. I

Was not very successful in aiding her, but she didn't seem to hold that against me

it is said that one piece of evidence that runs contrary to a theory is sufficient to disprove that theory of

Course people do not think this way and perhaps should not in

General a theory is too useful to give up easily

Too difficult to regenerate and the evidence against should be consistent and believable before it is accepted

but the existence of this woman made me think she

Was destined for a psychopathological end from the viewpoint of biological and environmental determinism

fated as surely as anyone I had ever met

And maybe she beat her dog sometimes and was rude to her sick aunt

Maybe I never saw her vindictive or unpleasant even when her simple wishes were thwarted

I don't want to say that she was a saint because I didn't know her well enough to tell

But the fact was that in her misery and simplicity, she remained without self pity and able to see outside of herself

Why wasn't she a criminal cruel?

unbalanced and miserable

She had every reason to be

And yet she wasn't in her simple way. She had made the proper choices

She remained bloody but unbowed and she seemed to me rightly or wrongly to be a symbol of suffering humanity

sorely afflicted

Yet capable of cur and love

God justifies his creation in Milton's Paradise Lost

Such I created all the ethereal powers and spirits both them who stood and them who failed

Not free what proof? Could they have given sincere of true allegiance?

constant faith or love where only what they needs must do appeared not what they would

What praise could they receive what pleasure I from such obedience?

Paid when will and reason reason also his choice?

Useless and vain of freedom both de spoiled made passive both had served necessity not me

They therefore as to right belonged

so were created nor can justly accuse their maker or their making or their fate as if

Predestination overruled their will disposed by absolute decree or high foreknowledge

they themselves decreed their own revolt not I

If I for new foreknowledge have no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain unfair known

So without least impulse or shadow of fate or ought by me immutably foreseen they trespass

authors to themselves in all

Both what they judge and what they choose

For so, I formed them free and free. They must remain till they enthralled themselves. I

Else must change their nature and revoke the high decree

unchangeable eternal

Which ordained their freedom they themselves?

ordained their fall

The other patient I wish to describe was the schizophrenic in a small inpatient ward at a different Hospital

He was about 29 when I met him a few

Years older than I was at the time and had been in and out of confinement for seven years

He was of course on antipsychotic medication and participated in occupational therapy Act

He's on the ward making coasters and pencil holders and so on but he could not maintain

Attention for any amount of time. It was not even much good at crafts

My supervisor asked me to administer an intelligence test to him

The standard ways are more for the sake of my experience than for any possible diagnostic. Good. I

Gave my patients some of the red and white blocks that made up the block design sub tests

He was supposed to arrange the blocks so they matched a pattern printed on some cards

He picked them up and started to rearrange them on the desk in front of him while I timed him stupidly with a stopwatch

The task was impossible for him. Even at the simplest of stages. He looked

Constantly distracted and frustrated. I

Asked what's wrong?

He said the battle between good and evil in heaven is going on in my head. I

Stopped the testing at that point. I didn't know exactly what to make of his comment

He was obviously suffering and the testing seemed to make it worse

What was he experiencing?

He wasn't lying. That's for sure in the face of such a statement. It seemed ridiculous to continue. I

spent some time with him that summer I

never met someone who was so blatantly mentally ill we talked on the ward and

Occasionally I would take him for a walk through the hospital grounds outside

He was the third son of first generation immigrants his firstborn brother was a lawyer the other a physician

His parents were obviously ambitious for their children

hard-working and disciplined

He had been a graduate student

working towards a degree in

Immunology, I don't precisely remember his brothers had sent him a daunting example, and he felt pressured to succeed

His experimental work had not turned out as he had expected. However, and he apparently came to believe that he might not graduate

not at least when he had hoped to

so

He faked his experimental results and wrote up his thesis anyway

He told me that the night he finished writing he woke up and saw the devil standing over him at the foot of his bed

This event triggered the onset of his mental illness from which he had never recovered

It might be said that the satanic apparition merely accompanied the expression of some pathological

stress induced neural development whose appearance was

biologically predetermined or that the devil was merely

Personification of his cultures conception of moral evil manifesting itself in imagination as a consequence of his guilt

Both of these levels of description have their merits

But the fact remains that he saw the devil and at the vision accompanied or even was the event that destroyed him

He was afraid to tell me much of his fantasy and it was only after I had paid careful attention to him that he opened

up

He was not

Bragging or trying to impress me. He was terrified about what he believed

Terrified as a consequence of the fantasies that impressed themselves upon him

he told me that he could not leave the hospital because someone was waiting to shoot him a

typical paranoid delusion

Why did someone want to kill him?

Well, he was hospitalized during the Cold War

Not at its height perhaps but still during a time when the threat of purposeful nuclear annihilation

Seemed more plausible more likely than it does now

many of the people I knew used the existence of this threat to justify to

Themselves their failure to participate fully in life a life

Which they thought of romantically as doomed and therefore as pointless

but there was some real terror in the pose and

The thought of the countless missiles pointed here and there around the world sapped the energy and faith of everyone

hypocritical or not

My schizophrenic patient believed that he was in fact the incarnation of the world annihilating force

That he was destined is released from the hospital to make his way south to a nuclear missile silo on American territory

That he was fated to make the decision that would launch the final war

The people outside the hospital knew this and that is why they were waiting to shoot him

He did not want to tell me this story in consequence

Although he did because he thought that I might then want to kill him too

My friends in graduate school thought of ironic that I had contact with a patient of this type

My peculiar interest in young and Young's ideas regarding the collective unconscious were well known to them and it seemed absurdly

Fitting that I would end up talking to someone with delusions of this title

But I didn't know what to do with his ideas

Of course, they were crazy and they had done in my patient

But it still seemed to me that they were true from the metaphorical viewpoint

His story in totality linked his individual choice between good and evil with the cumulative horror then facing the world

His story implied that because he had given in to temptation at a critical juncture

He was in fact responsible for the horror of the potential of nuclear war

But how could this be?

And seemed insane to me to even consider that the act of one powerless

Individual could be linked in some manner to the outcome of history as a whole

But I have no longer so sure

I've read much about evil and its manner of perpetration and growth and I'm no longer convinced that each of us are so innocent

so harmless

It is of course a logical to presume that one person one speck of dust among six billion motes is any sense

responsible for the horrible course of human events

But that course in itself is not logical far from it and it seems likely that it depends on

processes that we do not understand

The most powerful arguments for the non-existence of God

At least a good God are predicated on the idea that such a being would not allow for the resistance of evil in its classical

natural

diseases disasters or moral war

pogroms forms

Such arguments can be taken further even than atheism can be used to dispute the justice of the existent world itself

Dostoyevsky states, perhaps the entire cosmos is not worth a single innocent child's suffering