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  • I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material partly because I was interested in why people were so inclined to to go to any lengths to protect their belief systems.

  • I wanted to understand, and I knew that those were systems of value, right, that that belief system is something that enables you to ascribe value to things so that so that you can act in the world towards things and away from things roughly speaking.

  • And I've already made a case to you that belief systems regulate people's emotions, but not not as a consequence of decreasing their death, anxiety or anything like that, or even directly decreasing there.

  • Their threats, sensitivity or uncertainty, but more specifically bye, helping them orient themselves in the world so that what they do match is what they want in the social environment.

  • And it's an important set of distinctions because the emotional control that belief systems allow is mediated by success in the social environment.

  • That's the crucial thing.

  • It's not.

  • It's not directly.

  • It's not as if you're holding a belief system, and that's directly inhibiting somehow your emotional, responsive ity.

  • It's more that you share.

  • You have ah, motive orienting yourself in the world so that other people can understand what you're up to so that you can cooperate and compete with them without conflict and the fact that you could do that without conflict and maybe even with cooperation.

  • That's what regulates your emotion.

  • So it's not only the fact of the police belief system, it's the fact that it's shared with everyone else.

  • And so people are willing to defend their belief systems because they're defending the territorial structure that enables them to make sense of the world and then to act out making sense of the world with everyone else around them.

  • Now, then, the question arises.

  • What if two different groups of people have different belief systems?

  • What do you do in a situation like that?

  • And one answer is, you capitulate.

  • Another answer is that you fight.

  • Another answer might be that you come to some consensus about how the difference between those different belief systems might be mediated so that you can inhabit the same territory without subordination or without conflict.

  • But if you're going to come together in agreement, you can't do that simply by abandoning the belief system because the belief system is what orients you in the world.

  • And so the negotiation is very tricky, and because of that, it often ends up in subordination or conflict.

  • Another question that might arise out of that rat's nest of questions is if you have belief, system may and you have belief system be and they're in conflict.

  • Is there any principles that you can use or any guidelines you can use to take the belief systems apart?

  • To understand, to try to understand what might be of central value in either of them are both so that if you do bring them together, or even if one supersedes the other, that there's some evidence that they're predicated on principles that are actually viable.

  • And, of course, that brings up the question of what constitutes viable principles.

  • I got interested in that more particular question because when the Cold War was raging, there were two ideological system set up in the world.

  • Roughly speaking, there were, of course more, but we can simplify it for the sake of argument down to two and one was predicated on the communitarian principles that were put forward by Marx and the other was a consequence of, you know, the I would say, Western, individualistic, free market capitalist democracies, roughly speaking.

  • And then you might ask yourself, What were those?

  • Only it was that only a difference of opinion, Right?

  • Cause that's the central question.

  • It is just a difference of opinion.

  • If what's underneath it is arbitrary, then, eh?

  • It doesn't matter which system wins, roughly speaking be There's no right and wrong in the discussion, right?

  • It's that that would be something that would be more akin to a postmodern claim.

  • It's just Groupe puts forward their claims to power and Group B puts form their claims power, and they're both equally valid and well have atter fundamentally because there's no way of of solving the problem.

  • But it struck me that that I didn't think that we should leap to that conclusion so rapidly.

  • And so I started to investigate.

  • I think I started to investigate the sub structure of Western thought.

  • Not so much communist thought because I thought of communism as an interloper on the scene.

  • It was a system that wasn't devised and formalized until the late 19 hundreds, late 18 hundreds and I didn't see it as part of what you might describe his organic development.

  • There's no mythology, so to speak, at the basis of the communist perspective.

  • And one of the things that's very interesting is that although those ideas were roundly defeated by the end of the 20th century, they're making a comeback so rapidly that it's almost unbelievable.

  • You know, I got Ah, email from a medical student yesterday at the University of Toronto and now their courses that they have to take the mandatory.

  • These air social justice courses include modules on equity and equity is equality of outcome.

  • It they're pushing.

  • People are having the equality of outcome.

  • Notion pushed on them in mandatory training, in universities everywhere again.

  • And equity isn't equality of opportunity.

  • It's equality of outcome.

  • No, that was the central dictum of the Communist states in the 20th century is like, What the hell?

  • How how did we get back to that again?

  • Already so?

  • And the idea of being is, if there isn't absolute equality of outcome within an organization, that the thing is corrupt and needs to be restructured from the bottom up, and then the question, of course, is who decides that outcomes are equal by what means and with what groups.

  • Because you can.

  • You can produce an infinite number of groups of people with equally validly in some sense.

  • And you're never gonna get equality of outcome across the infinite number of ways that you can parse up society into groups.

  • It's not even technically possible unless everyone has nothing.

  • So anyways, these are obviously very powerful ideas.

  • And the mere fact that they killed 100 million people already or more in the 20th century wasn't enough to put them to rest anyway.

  • So back to the main theme.

  • Is there something?

  • This is the main question.

  • Is there something?

  • Is there a set of ideas that Western civilization is predicated on that air?

  • More than just bloody opinion.

  • That's the question, because if there isn't, well, then what do you what do you do about that?

  • It's arbitrary.

  • You just holding it for no reason whatsoever.

  • It could be a different system.

  • There's no reason to stick with it.

  • All of those things, like it takes the it takes the core out of it.

  • When that was nature's claim, right, he said, You take the core metaphysical pre supposition out from underneath Western civilization or any civilization for that matter and the whole thing loosens, shake un's shakes and crumbles well for nature.

  • The metaphysical presupposition was God well, And then the question, of course.

  • Well, what even does that mean?

  • And on one hand it means, I suppose, adherence to a dogmatic set of beliefs.

  • But then you might ask yourself, Well, is there something else that it means?

  • It means at least the hypothesis of some transcendent value.

  • It means at least that.

  • So you know, Nietzsche announced the death of God.

  • And so one of the consequences of that no, Dostoyevsky was working on exactly the same set of ideas and in crime and punishment in particular, which is a book.

  • It's a necessary book.

  • That's the thing is there's a number of books that were written in the last 120 years that you really have to read, and crime and Punishment is one of them.

  • And I think the Gulag Archipelago is another and probably beyond good, and evil is another.

  • But you know, Dostoyevsky and meet You were writing in parallel.

  • It's remarkable how much their their lives intertwined, and Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than than is generally known.

  • There's been some recent scholarship indicating that, but in Dostoyevsky's book, Crime and Punishment, he has, ah, his main character.

  • Raskolnikov decides that he's gonna commit a murder, and he has very good justification for the murder.

  • And Dostoyevsky is very good at this.

  • He he puts his characters into very, very difficult moral situations and gives them full justification for pursuing the the, uh, pursuing the pathway that they're pursuing.

  • And so, Raskolnikov, he's broken, starving.

  • He wants to go to law school.

  • His sister's about to prostitute herself rough, roughly speaking, by marrying a guy that hates her that she hates, and that and he has contempt for at least acts in that manner.

  • He's trying to rescue his mother as well, who's also in dire financial straits.

  • He he goes to a pawnbroker to pawn his meager position so that he can continue to scrape by.

  • And she has this niece.

  • I believe it's your niece that's not very bright, who she basically treats as a slave and is horrible to and and so the carrot that the pawnbroker has this money.

  • Raskolnikov is in dire need.

  • He thinks.

  • Look, I'll just killer, because why the hell not?

  • I'll take her money.

  • She's not doing any good with it anyways.

  • Ah, free your niece, who's just working as a slave.

  • She's got all these other people tangled up in her pawnbroker schemes.

  • All that will happen is the world will be a better place.

  • And the only thing that's holding me back is conventional moral cowardice.

  • And, you know, Dostoyevsky has his character in crime and punishment.

  • Go through days, hours, hours and days and weeks of intense imagination about this rationalization about this trying to justify himself, placing him l outside, placing him self outside the law so that he can perpetrate this act and telling him self with all the best nihilistic arguments that the only possible thing that could be holding them back is an arbitrary sense of indoctrinated morality.

  • And so Dostoevsky explores that he does commit the murder.

  • And then, of course, all hell breaks loose because things don't necessarily turn out the way that you want.

  • He gets away with it, however, while he gets away with the technically because no one knows he did it.

  • But he doesn't get away with it in relationship to his own conscience and so that the rest of the book explores that, well, Dostoevsky.

  • I believe it was in crime and punishment.

  • Although he makes the same point in many of his books, he makes a very fundamental point.

  • And this is the kind of point that that I think that people who haven't investigated these matters down this particularly little particular literary and philosophical pathway never grapple with Dostoevsky, said straightforwardly.

  • If there's no God, so if there's no higher value, let's say if there's no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want.

  • And that's the question that he's investigating.

  • And you see, this is why I have such frustration, say, with people like Sam Harris, the sort of radical atheists, because they seem to think that once human beings abandoned their their grounding in the transcendent, that the plausible way forward is with a kind of purest rationality that automatically attributes to other people equivalent value.

  • It's like I just don't understand that they believe that that's the rational pathway.

  • What the hell is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you whenever I want it at every possible second.

  • Why is that irrational?

  • And how possibly is that Maur irrational than us cooperating, so we can both have a good time of it?

  • I don't understand that.

  • I mean, it's a Ziff.

  • The psychopathic tendency is irrational.

  • There's nothing irrational about it.

  • It's pure naked self interest.

  • How is that irrational?

  • I don't understand that.

  • Where's the pathway from rationality to to an egalitarian virtue?

  • Why the hell not every man for himself and the devil take the hind most.

  • It's a perfectly coherent philosophy, and it's actually one that you can institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it so I don't see to me.

  • I think that that the universe that people like darkens and Harris inhabit is so intensely conditioned by mythological presuppositions that they take for granted the ethic that emerges out of that as if it's just a given.

  • A rational given in this, of course, precisely Nietzsche's observation as well as Dostoevsky's Our Snitches observation.

  • You don't get it.

  • The ethic that you think is normative is a consequence of its of its of its nesting inside this tremendously lengthy history, much of which was expressed in mythological formulation.

  • You wipe that out, you don't get to keep all the pre suppositions and just assume that they're rationally axiomatic there, the rational.

  • To make a rational argument, you have to start within its initial proposition.

  • While the proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality now, you could say that's a transcendent morality.

  • And Stan, she aided in the figure of God.

  • That's fine.

  • You could even call that a personification of the morality if you wantto if you don't want to move into a metaphysical space.

  • I'm not arguing for the existence of God.

  • I'm arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God, and that you can't just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact Midair without any foundational support.

  • Now you don't have to buy that, But if you're interested in the idea, then you can read Nietzsche because that's what he was trying to sort out.

  • And it wasn't Onley Nature came to.

  • That conclusion was.

  • Many people have come to that conclusion, but I think the two who have outlined it most spectacularly, where Nature and Dostoyevsky And each is an unbelievably influential philosopher.

  • You know, I don't think there was anyone that was more influential during the entire course of the 20th century, accepting a very, very tiny handful of other people accepting the scientists.

  • We won't bother with their their discussion.

  • You could put marks in that category.

  • You could, but Freud in that category, partly.

  • But after that, the list starts to get a lot thinner, you know?

  • So maybe there's 10 people up in out level.

  • And Dostoyevsky, of course, I think.

  • I mean, if if you ever if anybody ever prepares a list of the top 10 greatest literary figures in the world, he would be in the Top 10 list now I think he's perhaps second to Shakespeare and maybe above Shakespeare, in my estimation.

  • So these aren't trivial people we're talking about, and they weren't dealing with trivial issues.

  • Well, so then the question might be what's at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value.

  • And I wantto wanted to approach that, staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as possible because you can claim anything you want from a metaphysical perspective, and that's a big problem.

  • And so people will say, Well, why come up with the hypothesis of God?

  • For example?

  • God could be anything.

  • There's a satire.

  • Ah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster Right is a classic satirical representation of a deity that the atheist types used to buttress their arguments.

  • And fair enough, you know, as a satirical idea.

  • It's pretty damn funny, but there's things about this that aren't the least bit of music, and the thing that's not amusing as well.

  • What, if anything, is our culture predicated on Okay, So what happened?

  • Well, Nietzschean, Dostoevsky put this forthis set of propositions and out of Dostoevsky's line of thinking to some degree Gru soldier Nitsa soldier knits and documented the absolute horrors of equity predicated Soviet society, you know, and we don't teach.

  • We don't learn about that right?

  • This I don't understand is that what happened in the 20th century on the radical left end of the spectrum is not well documented.

  • Students don't learn about it.

  • Why the hell is that?

  • We learn about World War Two.

  • We learn about what happened in the Holocaust, and fair enough we absolutely should, but nobody knows.

  • It's a mystery to everyone when when I talk about what happened in the Soviet Union, and that's absolutely appalling.

  • And that's to say nothing about what happened in China, which was equally horrible.

  • The system didn't work.

  • It was predicated on the wrong values.

  • Unless you think that that sort of thing means worked, you know, because you have to define that as well.

  • But it collapsed under its own weight after it killed tens of millions of people.

  • That doesn't really, and still it's not like Russia has recovered.

  • Doesn't seem to me like that's a very good definition of worked.

  • Now, whatever we're doing in the West seems to work for all of its flaws.

  • And the question is, Are we just deceiving ourselves?

  • Is it just arbitrary power politics, an opinion, or is there something at the bottom of it?

  • So when soldier Nixon wrote The Gulag Archipelago, he believed that the Russians would have to return to Orthodox Christianity to find their pathway forward.

  • And that's of course has made him into a reactionary in the eyes of many of his critics.

  • But that is perhaps what is happening in Russia, although it's very difficult to tell because Putin also seems to be using his affiliation with the Orthodox Christian Church as as a means to consolidate power.

  • So the situation in Russia is unclear but a religious revival if that's happening in Russia, and perhaps it isn't but if it is happening, is something that unfolds over decades and even centuries.

  • So it's not an easy thing to evaluate when it first starts to happen.

  • But soldier knits and drew the same conclusions that Dostoyevsky did fundamentally not not in exactly the same way, but very, very close.

  • He he believed.

  • As far as I could tell, that unless people were willing to adhere to some sort of transcendent value, that they had no protection against pathological ideologies and no protection against the murderous impulses that came along with them.

  • And I found his working unbelievably, I found his right incredible, powerful, incredible.

  • I don't know how you can read that book and not draw that kind of conclusion.

  • I think people who criticize soldier nets and have never read the damn book because that book is like it's like going into the ring with Mohammed Ali and being pummeled to death for half an hour.

  • You know you don't recover from it that easily so than Young branched off of Nietzsche.

  • And so Nietzsche's idea was that people would have to create their own values, roughly speaking, and I think that's where nature's is.

  • We is his weakest, because it isn't obvious to me that people can create their own values.

  • And I think he fell into I don't want him be a casual critic of nature because that's always dangerous, given that he probably had an I q.

  • Of 260 you know?

  • I mean, he was way the hell out there in the stratosphere.

  • And just when you think you've understood what he was talking about, you can be bloody well sure that you didn't.

  • But it does seem to me, and he was running out of time.

  • He died young, you know, when he was trying to solve this problem in a rush, I would say, and he hypothesized that people would have to become Superman over men, roughly speaking in order to deal with the death of God.

  • And that idea sort of branched off into Nazi propaganda because that's in some sense with the Nazis were trying to do with their promotion of the of the perfect area, you know, now it's a mystery.

  • It's a misappropriation of Nietzsche, in my estimation.

  • And it was partly because his sister, who is a perverse creature, um ah, what would you say doctored his work in such a way so that it was more easily appropriated by the Nazis?

  • But there is some danger in what he said to, because the question is, well, if you're going to transform yourself into the into the giver of values, what stops you from inflating yourself into something like a Demi God and just pronouncing what the values air going to be?

  • So that's a problem.

  • You know you're gonna replace tradition with yourself.

  • Well, there's dangers in that because there's nothing to keep you humble.

  • That's that's the most appropriate objection.

  • There's nothing to keep you humble, and those things can spiral out of control very rapidly.

  • And then they did say, in the case of Hitler, it's easy to blame what happened in Germany on Hitler.

  • But that's a That's a big mistake because it was a dialogue between Hitler and the German people, right?

  • Hitler didn't create himself.

  • It was co creation.

  • He said things People listened, told him back what to say.

  • And then he said them and they listened and they told him back what to say, and it looped until he was the mouthpiece of their darkest desires.

  • Now that's a that's a game he was willing to play, But you can't think about that is it isn't like Hitler created Nazi Germany.

  • Hitler and the Germans co created Nazi Germany.

  • No.

  • One, Ah leader gives articulation to the imagination of the population.

  • That's what a leader does.

  • And you know, you could say that while Hitler, maybe Hitler filtered what the Germans were telling him through a particular lands because he had no shortage of resentment and desire for revenge in his own heart.

  • You know, um, it's not like his life was a spectacular success.

  • But before he became a political activist and he was brutalized very badly in World War, and he didn't get to pursue his primary dream, which was to be an art student in Vienna, and he had applied three times and got rejected all three times, and so he was bitter about that.

  • He was basically living on the streets after World War.

  • It wasn't the world's happiest person, and I'm sure he carried a fair bit of resentment in his heart when he was in the trenches in World War one at in one experience that he had, all of his friends were killed by a mortar when he had wandered off to go do something else.

  • So you know, it's hard to even imagine what something like that would do to you.

  • But I can tell you when you're the only survivor out of 20 people that's also going to give you a name enhanced sense of your own specialness because the alternative is just to think about how God damn arbitrary the universe really is so so young.

  • Studied nature in great detail, and he was particularly interested because Young had his finger on the central problems all the time, right, because he was a great psychologist and he was listening to what people said, and he was a staggering genius as well and so like nature, Dostoevsky, or so she knits.

  • And he was that kind of prophetic type, I would say, and he understood as well.

  • Perhaps what was wrong with nature's formulation, the idea that people could only create their new their own values, and that's what would replace the lacking, found the foundation that was now lacking under Western civilization itself.

  • And he came to his conclusion.

  • I would say, through Freud, because Freud started analyzing parts of the human cognitive process and content that people haven't attended to before in any in any great detail.

  • And that was primarily dreams.

  • You know, the idea of dream analysis, I suppose, is one of Freud's, perhaps Freud's major contribution to modern Western thought.

  • The idea was there was something to dreams, And I suppose what?

  • But for I did it said, Hey, look, isn't it strange?

  • We have this whole other form of thought that we engage in at night it, and it speaks in the language that we don't really understand.

  • And so what the hell is that?

  • And you can say and many modern people do.

  • Dreams are of no significance or even that they're random processes, which is an absurd proposition, obviously, because there, by thorough whatever they are, they're obviously not random.

  • So So Freud's idea was that there was some something in dreams that was informative.

  • So that's it's now.

  • He had a method for describe for extracting out from the dream what the dream purported to represent, and he outlined that great deal detail in the interpretation of dreams.

  • And if you want to read one book by Freud, I would highly recommend that when it's a very long book and it's very detailed.

  • But Freud does extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of the way that dreams work now.

  • He made the because because he had brought a theoretical framework to bear even on his investigation into dream structure, he concluded that dreams were essentially wish fulfillment CE, and that's where Young and Freud disagreed.

  • He also believed that the primary motivating factor of human beings was sexual.

  • And now that's a tougher one to toss aside.

  • Because even if you're a Darwinian rather than a Freudian, you're going to obviously support the proposition that sexual motivation among any living creature is going to be one of the highest order motivations because otherwise, creatures don't reproduce and and prevail over the long run.

  • So the question is, is that Is that the ultimate source of motivation?

  • And in some sense, the answer to that has to be Yes, Well, Freud wanted to make that in some ways the sole source of motivation.

  • And I'm oversimplifying.

  • And I hate to do that in relationship to Freud because he was not a simple minded character.

  • Young had a dream once, if I remember correctly that Freud and you were excavating a basement and so Freud it outlined in the Freud had already discovered the basement, Let's say so.

  • That would be the unconscious structure of the psyche, and Young broke through into another basement that was a multi chambered place.

  • So many, many, many rooms.

  • And I suppose what drove Young and Freud apart was Young's proposition that there was a hell of a lot more going down going on down there, then had already met the eye.

  • And they broke on the idea that the sexual impulse was primary.

  • Roughly speaking, they broke when you wrote a book called Symbols of Transformation, which is, actually, there's there's three books that I know of that are sort of like maps of meaning.

  • One is symbols of transformation.

  • One is a book by Eric Anointment called The Origins and History of Consciousness, and the third and the 3rd 1 well, his maps of meaning.

  • They're the same book.

  • They're just like they're trying to solve the same problem from three different directions.

  • They're all attempts to address the same problem.

  • And so symbols of transformation was a book that Young wrote about the fantasies of a schizophrenic American woman.

  • And he was.

  • He was trying to relate her fantasies to these old mythological ideas and Young's idea, essentially.

  • And this is an idea that was shared by people like PJ.

  • So we're not going to say that you and or Freud just pulled this idea out of the air was that the the birthplace of mythic mythology and literature, for that matter was the dream that that that they share structural, they they share, uh, they, they share what mode of information presentation, and it's a relatively radical hypothesis.

  • But but given that they both, they both represent dreams, dreams and mythological representation is share an essentially narrative structure and they use their literary like, you know, I mean, it's not so unreasonable to notice that a dream at night is like the movie that you play in your head, and it's not unreasonable to note as well that the dreams that you haven't night bear a relationship to the day dreams that you have during the day.

  • It's a form of cognition.

  • Seems like an involuntary form of cognition.

  • No, and that's a very strange thing.

  • So Young thought about the dream as nature, speaking of its own accord, roughly speaking.

  • And so his idea was, Well, when you when you sleep, you dream.

  • But the dream happens to you.

  • It's not something that you create the way that, and you don't even think about creating it, because I might say, Well, what are you thinking about?

  • And you'll say, I'm thinking about whatever it is and you'll take credit in some sense for thinking that because it seems like a voluntary activity.

  • But what happens at night is that you think, but you think in voluntarily.

  • And so what you would say is that means that something is thinking in you, and that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it.

  • And this is one of the things that's uncanny about the psychoanalysts is they were willing to take their observations to their logical conclusion.

  • There are things that think in you, what are those things and What are they thinking and why are they thinking it now?

  • If you do dream analysis and this is a tricky thing, because who's to say if you're damn analysis is correct, right?

  • It's very difficult to understand that if you if you do dream analysis with someone, you generally have them lay out their dream, and then you ask them when they're going through the dream a second time, they lay out their dream and you can kind of get a picture of it.

  • And then they lay out their dream a second time, and as they go through it every time they mention a detail or character, you ask them what that reminds them of.

  • And the hypothesis is that the dream is presenting an image or an idea that's associated with a network of ideas, and that if you can expand on the network of ideas as you go through the dream, you can elaborate on the dream.

  • You can expand it upwards, and you can start to see what it might be attempting to put forward now.

  • Freud's idea was that the dream knew what it's was doing, but that its content was being suppressed and oppressed by an internal sensor.

  • So the dream had to be sneaky about what it was saying, because it was going to deliver a message that the person didn't want to hear and that that was tied up with his idea of repression.

  • But that's not Young's idea.

  • See, Young's idea was different, he said.

  • No, no.

  • The dream is trying to tell you what it's trying to tell you, as clear as it can.

  • That's just the best it can do.

  • And so you could think of the dream, And this is, I believe, the right way to think about it.

  • The dream is the birthplace of thought, the same way that artists are the birthplace of culture.

  • It's exactly the same process.

  • It's that your mind is groping outward to try to comprehend what it has not yet comprehended.

  • And it does that first by trying to map it onto image.

  • And it's doing that in the dream, and it's somewhat incoherent and and and well, let's stick with incoherent because it's not yet a full fledged thought.

  • It's the birthplace of thought.

  • It's a fantasy about what might be, and then if you can grab the fantasy and share it with other people.

  • Then maybe they can elaborate upon it and bring it into being with more clarity than it would be if it merely existed as the precursor of a thought in your imagination.

  • Now, because Young's idea to was okay, you think you think in words, Where the hell did those starts come from?

  • While they just spring into my head?

  • Well, that's not much of an answer.

  • They just what pop out of the void.

  • Is there some sort of precursor to the development of the ideas?

  • Is there a developmental pathway?

  • So here's an image.

  • This is the Buddha.

  • There's calm water.

  • There's a lotus that roots go all the way down to the bottom of the lake.

  • It's dark down there.

  • The roots are embedded in the dark substrate ita.

  • At the bottom of the lake.

  • The plant moves upwards towards the light that the water gets lighter and lighter as you move upward with the route, the flower manifests itself on the surface and the Buddhist sits in the middle.

  • That's an image about how ideas developed.

  • They come out from the bottom of reality, and they push themselves up towards the light and they blast forward and something emerges as a consequence.

  • That's what that image means.

  • And it's an image, the Gold Buddha, that sitting in the middle of the lotus is an image of the perfect person you could think about the gold Buddha, who sits in a triangle as exactly the same thing.

  • That's the eye on the top of the pyramid is they're all the same ideas there's.

  • And what's the idea that's trying to burst forward?

  • How to be in the world?

  • Well, what other idea would burst forward?

  • Cause it's the only problem that you really have, right?

  • How should you manifest yourself properly in the world?

  • It's everyone's question.

  • It's the ultimate question.

  • It's Bean the ultimate question since the beginning of time, and we've been working out that idea forever, first of all, merely by acting it out and then by representing the actions and then by representing the representation and spiraling all that together.

  • So I started looking developmentally, I thought, Okay, maybe these idea have roots, and this was partly predicated on the observation from Dostoevsky and niches and and so forth that there did seem to be a necessary pattern in moral in morality, there seemed to be a necessary pattern.

  • It wasn't arbitrary.

  • It was.

  • It was a representation of the specific mode of human being.

  • And it isn't something that's just imposed on you by your culture is not something that's just learned.

  • It's intrinsic in you, and it's manifest in the culture at the same time.

  • And there's a dial.

  • Admit.

  • And and there's a dialogue between those two things culture and nature.

  • We're both where the ideas embedded trying to make make make the proper articulation of that spring forward in each individual.

  • And that's only to say, these aren't These aren't radical propositions.

  • Your nature strives so that you could manifest yourself properly in the world.

  • Culture strives to aid you in that endeavor.

  • Is that Is there something about that that's that's that's of dubious validity?

  • What else would it be doing working for your death, hardly working for your destruction?

  • While you could see that maybe when culture becomes pathologize, but to the degree that it's able to maintain itself across long periods of time, it obviously has to be striving in some way for the man, for your individual manifestation.

  • So that you can survive and flourish.

  • So there's a there's a There's a co creation of the human being going on through nature and through culture, and while and then perhaps with your own, with your own voluntary will participate in whatever the hell that is something.

  • We don't understand it all and are prone to dismiss because of that.

  • So then I learned about PJ and PJ had some very interesting ideas, and I think I've told you already what PJ was up to.

  • He wasn't a developmental psychologist.

  • He didn't even regard himself as a psychologist.

  • He wanted to reconcile science and religion.

  • That's what he was doing through his entire bloody life, because it would drove him crazy when he was an adolescent, and he didn't think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together.

  • So he's working on the same problem.

  • And so one of the things that PJ, who was very prone to observation he was an ethnologist of human beings.

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

  • Ist is a scientist who studies animals by watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions and he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of Children that was so smart to this so smart, that idea that you know, when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal.

  • So in play that a morality emerges out of that and that that morality and I've mentioned this before.

  • There's a morality.

  • In Game one, there's a morality.

  • In Game two, there's a morality in Game three.

  • What's common across all those moralities is a matter morality.

  • And so the matter.

  • Morality emerges from the particular morality.

  • Is that air embedded in particular cooperative situations?

  • We could say cooperative and competitive situations.

  • You can expand that out to thy.

  • You could expand that old biologically, to some degree, to the idea of the dominance hierarchy, right?

  • Every social animal and even many animals who aren't social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy.

  • The dominant turkey has a structure we couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy, dominance hierarchy A, B, C, D.

  • E e.

  • Thousands of them across thousands of years.

  • You extract out from all of them.

  • What central to all of them That's the pyramid of value.

  • What's the what's the quest.

  • What question do you need answered about the pyramid of value?

  • What's at the top?

  • Because that's the ideal.

  • That's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the Golden Buddha in the In the Lotus.

  • It's the same thing.

  • It's the same thing as the crucifix, paradoxically enough, and that has to do.

  • It has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and therefore transcendence of suffering.

  • It's something like that.

  • These air, not arbitrary ideas.

  • They're deeply.

  • That's my case.

  • Anyways.

  • They're deeply, deeply, deeply rooted in biology and culture there.

  • There is deeply rooted in biology, as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology, and I already know the answer to that.

  • The dominance hierarchies being around for 350 million years.

  • It's a long time.

  • You don't get to just brush that off and say, Well, morality, some sort of second order cognitive problem.

  • It's like, No, it's not.

  • I can tell you something about it.

  • Substantiation In your nervous system, you have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status, and it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions.

  • So if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy barely clinging onto the world, everything overwhelms you.

  • And that's because you're damn near dead.

  • And so everything should overwhelm you.

  • You've got no extra resources anymore.

  • Threat.

  • You're sunk.

  • So you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive so that you grab while the grabbing is good.

  • And if you're near the top in the dominance hierarchy and your counter tells you that, then your serotonin levels go up.

  • You're less sensitive to negative emotion.

  • You're less impulsive.

  • You live longer like everything works in your favor.

  • You immune system functions better, and you're oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long term future.

  • And you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time.

  • And so then the question is, is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're gonna move up?

  • Dominance, Hierarchies?

  • Well, that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random, and that you can think that if you want.

  • But I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever.

  • I mean, we certainly have, even for sexual selection.

  • We impose criteria.

  • They're not Ram random and arbitrary.

  • So Okay, so back to young.

  • So what was young trying to do?

  • Well, he was trying to see.

  • See Young believed that once we had stopped populating the cosmos with gods that they went inside.

  • That's a good way of thinking.

  • Well, think.

  • Think about it this way, you know?

  • Oh, archaic person looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate this guy.

  • What's the sky?

  • Well, it's the constellations.

  • It's the don't domain of the gods will.

  • Why?

  • Because the guards air what are beat are out there beyond your understanding.

  • Well, that's what you see when you look up at this guy.

  • So you populate the night sky with figures of your imagination.

  • So the gods air the things that you broadcast out of your imagination and see spread over the world.

  • It's like the contents of your unconscious are manifesting themselves.

  • When you encounter the unknown, it's exactly what it is.

  • That's exactly how.

  • How else could it be right?

  • You're projecting your fantasy onto what you don't understand.

  • That's how you start to cope with what you don't understand.

  • You populate the unknown with deities.

  • Where did they come from?

  • They came from your imagination.

  • Well, what happens when you take them out of the world?

  • Do they disappear?

  • No, they just go back into your imagination.

  • So that's where young dug down to find them.

  • That's the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the from or rescuing your father from the belly of the whale.

  • It's the same idea is that the corpses of the gods inhabit your imagination.

  • So where do you go if you need to revivify them?

  • You go into your imagination, and that's exactly what you did, and I mean it.

  • This is no secret.

  • If you read young, he tells you that's what he did, he tells you.

  • That's why he did it.

  • It's not an interpretation on my part.

  • Well, so then, then the question is, what's down there?

  • Is it just mass and catastrophe, or is there something in it that's patterned?

  • While Young's proposition was that you read it, you rediscover the great archetypes that guide human being by investigating the structure of your imagination when you thought about the imagination.

  • In some sense, at least in part as a manifestation of your of your biology.

  • Well, yes.

  • What else would it be?

  • You know, when I told you that story about my nephew, I believe right about him running around as a night and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the dragons.

  • It's like, Where did that come from?

  • Well, partly it came from his culture, right, because he was a knight, and and so obviously that's a cultural construct.

  • But the thing is, is that his imagination is it's this structure that's looking for things to fill it self with, just like your predisposition to language.

  • You have a predisposition to language.

  • What is that?

  • We don't know.

  • What does it do?

  • It looks for things in the world to fill itself with right?

  • And if you're if for you first of all, wouldn't you start to learn how to speak?

  • You babble every phone name.

  • Did you know that there's there's large?

  • There's If I was learning to speak on Asian language, there would be phone aims I couldn't pronounce and vice versa.

  • An infant, all of them.

  • They babble all the phony names and then as they start to learn the language, they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retained the ones that are relevant to that language.

  • So a baby babbles all laying all possible languages.

  • That's a way of thinking about it and then loses the ability.

  • So that's a man.

  • If that's you can see there so you could say, Well, you manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes.

  • It's built into your biology.

  • And then, as you're in cultural ated in your own culture, the set of archetypes that manifest its benefits themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use.

  • So my my nephew is running around like a night.

  • Well, you know, if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon, he would be running around with a bow and, you know, a poisoned arrow in a bowl.

  • It's the same thing.

  • It's the same idea.

  • It's just trapped out in different cultural dress, and he his little imagination was trying to solve the problem.

  • How do you deal with the unknown?

  • Well, what's the unknown?

  • It's these little devils that keep biting, jumping up on you and biting you, and they come out without end.

  • So just killing them, it's like cutting the head off the hydra right?

  • Seven more grow.

  • Well, what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there's just a bunch more problems, that air come gonna come after you?

  • And that's everyone's question.

  • That's the ultimate question of nihilism, right?

  • Why bother solving a problem if all that's gonna happen is that 20 more problems, they're going to come your way.

  • Why not just give up and die while right?

  • It's a good question.

  • It's that it's a good question, right?

  • Is the suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end?

  • That's another fundamental question of existence, and people who've become truly malevolent answer that question in the affirmative.

  • They say it's too much.

  • We should destroy it now.

  • I wouldn't say they're precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons, but you have to understand and appreciate the logic.

  • It's not irrational.

  • That's the other thing.

  • It's not irrational toe work for the destruction of being.

  • It's not irrational.

  • In fact, it might be the most rational thing you could come up with depends on your Nestle initial set of pre suppositions so young down into the belly of the beast.

  • So to speak, to, to to to to see what lurks in the imagination.

  • He sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas.

  • Well, what are archetypal ideas?

  • Their their patterns of it.

  • You could think about them as as representation of patterns of adaptive behavior.

  • And so then you might ask, Well, where did they come from?

  • Well, that's part of what I've been trying to to to teach you about.

  • They evolved as far as I could tell.

  • Right?

  • They evolved collectively.

  • Is that our society?

  • And this is the dominance hierarchy idea.

  • Dominus.

  • Harkey set themselves up as a matter of course.

  • They're the standard way that animals organize themselves in the territory.

  • Well, okay, human beings air watching those dominance hierarchies.

  • Since we became self aware thinking, What the hell are we up to?

  • What the hell are we up to?

  • What's and and there's a question that lurks in there.

  • What constitutes acceptable power?

  • What constitutes acceptable sovereignty?

  • Who should lead?

  • Who should rule?

  • What should be a TTE the top what we talked about that the Mesopotamians figured that out.

  • Speech and vision.

  • That's Marduk speech vision and the willingness to confront the terrible unknown.

  • That's what should rule while.

  • What's that, an arbitrary idea?

  • Or is that a great idea?

  • How could it be any other way?

  • Well, that's what human beings are like.

  • And I don't think that you can read the message but Amy in story and understand the reference, which isn't uneasy thing to do and failed to draw that conclusion.

  • Martock has eyes all the way around his head.

  • He speaks magic words.

  • He goes off to fight Tiamat, the Dragon of Chaos.

  • Well, what's that?

  • That's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown.

  • Well, is any of that?

  • Is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you were proof would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective, where prey animals were predators would be threatened by reptiles forever.

  • Why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forest or the water?

  • As a representative of the unknown?

  • Why wouldn't we harness that circuitry?

  • We already have it at hand and even more to the point, how could we do anything else?

  • It's It makes perfect sense.

  • Well, so then what?

  • You might say.

  • Well, what would you want to be king, You could say, King of the world or king of your own soul.

  • What do you want to subordinate yourself to?

  • How about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulated and share that with people?

  • There is no nobler vision than that, and I don't see that it's merely arbitrary.

  • And so.

  • And it's not merely arbitrary, too, because if you do that to the degree that you do that assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt you will be succ

I told you at the beginning of the class that I started working on this material partly because I was interested in why people were so inclined to to go to any lengths to protect their belief systems.

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2017年の意味の地図10:創世記とブッダ (2017 Maps of Meaning 10: Genesis and the Buddha)

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    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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