2017 Personality 07: Carl Jung and the Lion King (Part 1)

So I think the best way to continue to walk you through the thinkers that we're planning to cover is to do that with examples; they stick better, and they're more interesting. It's very difficult to understand you outside of a narrative context. So, I'm going to walk you through The Lion King today. How many of you have seen The Lion King? Yes? So how many of you haven't? Right.

Okay, so you obviously were raised in a box somewhere out in the middle of a field. So anyways, it's an amazingly popular animated movie. I think it was the highest-grossing animated movie ever made, until Frozen, which I actually absolutely detested. But The Lion King—The Lion King is actually consciously influenced by archetypes, as well as unconsciously influenced by them. So it's a bit of a cheat, I would say, in some sense. But for the purposes that we're using it for, I think it's just fine.

Partly what you might think about is that its relationship to archetypal themes made it so overwhelmingly popular. It's the same being the case with, say, books and movies like Harry Potter or the entire Marvel series. The Marvel series is quite interesting. I know somebody who wrote for Batman and for Wolverine. I know Batman—he's into Marvel comics.

One of the things that he told me that was quite interesting was that once these characters take off and establish a life of their own, they have a backstory, which becomes part of the mythology that's collectively held by the readers. You can invent an alternative universe where you can muck about with the backstory, but otherwise, you better stick with it, or the readers are gonna write you and tell you that you've got the story wrong.

There’s a bit of a collaboration between the writers and the readers after these things take on a life of their own. Of course, the comic books, in particular, tend to lean towards mythological themes very, very rapidly. So anyways, Carl Jung was a fascinating person. I think you can read his biography, autobiography/biography, which is called Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which in many ways I think is an unfortunate book because it's usually the only book that people read that is more or less by Jung.

It's more popularly accessible, which is probably a good thing. But it's also not as rigorous as his other books. The problem with someone like Jung is you kind of have to read him as much as you can in the original because interpreting him is not a very straightforward matter. He was a very visionary person, by which I mean he had an incredible visual imagination, and he used that a lot. He used it in his therapy practice.

I believe that most of his therapy clients were high in trait openness. I have a lot of clients who are high in trait openness; they kind of seek me out because I'm high in trait openness. You know, they watch my videos and that sort of thing, and they're interested in what I'm doing. Many of them are astute dreamers and prolific dreamers. Many open people, in my experience, have archetypal dreams, whereas people who are lower in openness either don't dream at all or they don't remember their dreams as much, or they're not interested in them, and they're not interested in the mythological underpinnings of them.

So, I've taught psychology, roughly speaking, to many different types of people, including lawyers and physicians, and they tend to be higher in trait conscientiousness than in openness. They're much more interested in the practical applications of psychology and maybe the big five theories than they are in the narrative underpinnings.

People say that when they went to Jung, they had Jungian dreams, but I don't; and then when they went to Freud, they had Freudian dreams. I don't really believe that's exactly true. I think it was a matter of selection bias—a priori selection bias on the part of the people who were likely to go see either of those two. But I've been struck by some clients, in particular, how unbelievably continually they can generate deep archetypal dreams with a really coherent narrative structure. It's really phenomenal, and how revealing those dreams are.

The problem with archetypal dreams is that they're not really personal, right? So if you're looking for a personal way out of a situation, an archetypal dream doesn't help you that much because it gives you the general pattern rather than a specific solution to your problem. But a good dream will do both at once.

Anyways, Jung was an astute student of Freud's. I will cover Freud next. Although generally in personality courses, the order is reversed—Freud first then Jung—because of the temporal order of their thought. But I think it's better to start with Jung because it's as if Freud excavated into the basement, and then Jung excavated into many, many floors underneath the basement of the mind.

If you're transitioning from an archaic understanding of archaic modes of thinking towards Freud, it's better to go through Jung because Jung is, I think, Freudian theory is a subset of Jungian Theory fundamentally, just like Newtonian physics is a subset of Einsteinian physics. I think Freud knew that, even to some degree, although he was very much opposed to any sort of religious thinking or mythological religious thinking, I would say. He was a real 19th-century materialist, and he didn't like the fact that Jung's work started to delve into religious themes in a manner that, in some sense, validated those themes.

That’s actually why they split. They split when Jung published a book called Symbols of Transformation. Jung was also a deep student of Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote a book called Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is kind of an Old Testament revelation poetry kind of book; it's a strange one, and I wouldn't recommend if you want to read Nietzsche that you start with that one, but most people do.

You get a seminar on Thus Spake Zarathustra, which is about—I've got this wrong—it's somewhere between 700 and 1100 pages long, and it only covers the first third of the book. Thus Spake Zarathustra is actually quite a short book. You can imagine how much you had to know about Nietzsche to derive that many words out of that few words. Nietzsche was an absolute genius, and Jung was actually trying to answer the question that Nietzsche posed fundamentally.

Part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a Freudian is he was so—I mean, Nietzsche basically stated, let's say explicitly, that scientific empiricism/rationalism had resulted in the death of the mythological tradition of the West. Roughly speaking, that's Nietzsche's comment on the death of God. In that comment, he also said that the fact that God was dead was going to produce tremendous ideological and social historical upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people.

He didn't say all that in one place. It's spread between part of its in Will to Power, and I can't remember the source of the other one; some of it's referenced in Thus Spake Zarathustra. But Nietzsche believed that in order to overcome the collapse of traditional values—with the idea, say, of God as its cornerstone—people would have to become creatures that could produce their own values as a replacement. We would have to become capable of generating autonomous values.

But that's easier said than done, because trying to impose a set of values on yourself is very difficult. You're just not very cooperative, and you know that if you try to get yourself to do something that you don't want to do or that's hard, you just won't do it. It’s not like you can just invent your own values and then go along with that—that just doesn't work.

What Jung and the Freudians did—Freud first, I would say—was to start looking into people's fantasies, autonomous fantasies, unconscious fantasies, to see if they could discover that values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies. You can imagine, for example, if you've become enamored of someone, that you might start fantasizing about them. If you read off the fantasy, then you can tell what you're after and what you're up to.

The motivational force composes the fantasy, and Freud was more interested not in a personal sense—insofar as your fantasies might reveal your personal history. For example, if you have a burst of negative emotion in a clinical session, there'll be a fantasy that goes along with it, an association of ideas that manifest themselves of their own accord, and they're not necessarily coherent and logical; they're linked by emotion. That's the free association technique in Freudian psychology.

They also might manifest themselves in dreams and fantasies. Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous—let's call them fantasies—and Jung linked that more. Freud did this first with the Oedipal complex, but then Jung linked up spontaneous fantasies and dreams with mythology and fantasy across history. Of course, Piaget did the same thing from a completely different standpoint.

A lot of that's embedded in this movie, so we might as well just walk through it. The first question might be, well, why is a lion a king, right? Because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king. Of course, a lion is an apex predator, which means it's at the top of the food chain, roughly speaking. It's sort of golden like the Sun, so that's also useful. It has that mane that makes it look majestic, and of course, it's very physically powerful; it's intimidating. It's something that you run away from, as well, right? Or you're awestruck by.

So, the fact that you know it's like "snail king" just doesn't make any sense, right? But "Lion King"—that works. You got to think about those things because it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king, but a snail wouldn't. But it fits in with your metaphorical understanding of the way the world works much better.

So, The Lion King makes sense. When things like that that aren't rationally self-evident make sense, you have to ask yourself, in what metaphorical context do they make sense? So you have The Lion King. Now, the movie opens with a sunrise, and the sunrise is equivalent to the dawn of consciousness. In many archaic stories, the Sun was a hero—like Horus, if I remember correctly, was a solar king—but Apollo in particular—the idea was that the Sun was this hero who illuminated the sky in the day.

Heroism, illumination, and enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically. At night, what would happen would be that Sun would fight with the dragon of darkness, basically, or with evil all night and then rise again victorious in the morning. It's a death and rebirth theme, and it's a very, very, very common mythological theme. The reason the Sun is associated with consciousness, as far as I can tell, is that we're not nocturnal creatures, right? We're awake during the day, and we're very, very visual. Half our brain is devoted to visual processing.

To be lightened and illuminated means to develop, to move towards a higher state of consciousness, and we naturally use light symbolism to represent that. You know, like the light bulb on the top of someone's head. You don't say, "I was in darkness" when you learn something new.

Again, that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that I think is deeply biologically grounded but also socially grounded. So, it's a new day; it's the start of a new day, and a day—actually means like French jour—means day, the day trek, in some sense. How to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question. The day is the canonical unit of time, and so you have to know how to comport yourself during the day.

Part of that is the journey from consciousness into unconsciousness, and that return—like Apollo—you descend into unconsciousness and then re-emerge. Of course, that's not metaphorical at all; that's exactly what you do. You descend into the underworld of darkness, and dreams, and strange things happen down there. If you're fortunate or unfortunate, depending on your state of mind, you awake in the morning, and it's a new day, right?

The dream world seems to help you sort out your thoughts. By the way, if you keep people awake for an extended period of time, then they lose their minds, essentially. The dream, the unconsciousness, and the dream state seem absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health, although people don't exactly understand why. It looks like dreams might help you forget because forgetting is really important. You just can't remember everything that happened to you.

If you get too cluttered, you'd fall apart. So, you reduce things to the gist, and when you're doing that, you pack them in. It's like you compress them in some sense; you pack them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant. The dream seems to be part of that. It also seems to be a place where you deeply encode learning that might have been done that day, which is something that Freud actually noted in his Interpretation of Dreams, which is a great book.

If you're ever going to read a book that Freud wrote, The Interpretation of Dreams is the proper one to read, in my estimation. It’s a brilliant book and it laid the groundwork for a lot of what Jung did.

So anyways, that's how the movie starts. The animals come out into the light, and that’s a metaphor for the dawning of consciousness—to come out into the light where you can see. So this is a baby giraffe, and babies emerge into the light, roughly speaking. That's a representation of the emergence or expansion of consciousness.

This is how the movie starts. It starts with very expansive music, as well—celebratory music—and that's to indicate to you, to set the tone for the movie, but also to indicate to you that you're about to watch something of import. The opening scene is actually a real scene of genius, in my estimation; the animators did a great job, and it goes along very nicely with the music.

So you see this little sand, then you see this rock—Pride Rock, I believe it's called—in the middle of it, and it's the center. It's like the spot that's marked by a cathedral, which is an X or a cross, and you're right in the middle of that. So it's the center of the light; that's another way of thinking about it. Or it's the center of the territory, or it's the home, or it's the fire in the wilderness, or it's the tree in the center where you live. It's all of those things at once. It's inhabited territory with you at the center, and the rock represents tradition, because people tend to inscribe their traditions on rock, or to build them into rock, like the pyramids.

You could think about that as an Egyptian pyramid. It's the right way to think about it. You could also think about it as a dominance hierarchy with the apex predator at the top, and that's the lion. So it makes sense that the lion would be in the light on the rock—that's a pyramid—in the middle of the territory, right? That makes sense to people psychologically.

Because that's what the state is; the state is a hierarchy with something at the top that occupies a space that has been illuminated and made safe by consciousness. That's what the state is, and that's all represented right away in this movie. All the animals come to observe what's happening in the pyramid, and at the top, because they need to know what happens at the top, partly to organize their world—that's the pyramid—but also to see how the organizational principle works.

That's why they're all gathering, and so they're gathering in the light in the morning to observe something new that's going to be born, that's of significant importance, and that's the birth of the hero. This little bird here, Zazu—right, the Zazu—is like Horus, the Egyptian god, who was a falcon and an eye at the same time. He is the king's eye—in this king's eyes in this movie, right? He flies up above, outside of the pyramid, so he can see everything that goes on and reports to the king.

Partly what that indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be an eye. That's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill; it's exactly the same idea. Or if you look at the Washington Monument, which is a pyramid at the top, you see that it's capped with aluminum. You think, “Well, why aluminum?”

The answer to that was it was the most expensive metal at that time. The notion is that at the top of the pyramid, there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid—it's something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything. You could think about it this way: you're going to be in a lot of pyramids in your life—dominance hierarchies, and different states, and families, and all of that. They'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy, and there'll be something at the top.

The top is the thing that can do well across hierarchies, so it's not stuck in any one pyramid. It's partly associated with vision and the ability to see a long, long distance, also to see what you don't want to see, and to report that back to the king. The king, fundamentally, as far as you guys are concerned from a psychological perspective, that's your super-ego—that's the Freudian perspective.

Or it might be the moral system by which you comport yourself, but your eye and your capacity to pay attention, especially to what you don't want to pay attention to, is the thing that continually updates that model exactly as Piaget laid out with children. All of that's packed into the imagery in the first, you know, a few minutes of this movie, and that's actually why it relies on imagery—why this isn't just a lecture by a psychologist.

You know, when you go to see the movie, it's because the images—they say a picture is worth a thousand words. But there are thousands of pictures in this movie, obviously. But maybe a picture is worth more words than you can actually use to describe it if the picture is profound enough. We have many, many pictures like that; any deeply symbolic picture is virtually inexhaustible in terms of its semantic explanation.

Images are very, very dense.

So anyways, the animals all gather. Now, the animals are also representations from the Freudian perspective, and it is part of your psyche from the Freudian perspective that’s animalistic and full of implicit drives—sexual and aggressive, in particular, as far as Freud was concerned. That's because those two drives, say unlike thirst or hunger, are much more difficult to integrate into proper social being, and tend to be excluded and left unconscious.

A lot of Freudian psychology, and I would say psychology in general, is focused on the integration of sexual impulses and aggressive impulses into the psyche. I would also add to that anxiety, because anxiety is also a major problem. Anxiety and negative emotion—that's pain—are also a major problem for people.

The animals represent those drives—it’s like impulses that have to be organized hierarchically before you can become an integrated being, and precisely in the Piagetian manner, right? Because Piaget would say, well, the child comes into the world with reflexes, and maybe a more modern psychologist would also concentrate on the implicit motivations, and those have to be organized inside the child into some kind of hierarchy of unity before the child can organize him or herself into the broader unity of the state. That's basically what's being represented here.

So Zazu, the eyes of the king, comes to check out the king, and that's, uh, what's his name? What's the king's name? Mufasa, yeah! And he's a very regal-looking person—a lion—and he stands up straight and tall. That means that he's high in serotonin because serotonin governs posterior flexion.

If you're dominant and near the top of hierarchies, you tend to expand so that you look bigger than you could if you shrunk down. If you're a low-dominant person, you wander around like this so that you look small and weak, and you don't pose a threat to anybody. But if you're at the top, you expand yourself so that you can command the space. That's why he has that particular kind of regal posture.

If you look at his facial expression, you see that it's quite severe; he's capable of kindness, but he's also harsh and judgmental. That's what society is like. That's what the super-ego is like. What that means is that he's integrated his aggression. I've seen this happen in my clinical clients when they come in and they're too agreeable; they look like Simba looks later in the movie when he's an adolescent, and he's sort of like a deer in headlights. Everything is coming in, and nothing is coming out.

When the person integrates their shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality, their face hardens. If you look at people, you can tell because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and innocent, and the people who, well, a hyper-aggressive person will look, you know, mean and cruel.

But let’s see if that’s still working. So, I've seen people's face change—for men and women. What happens is they start to look more mature. It's more like they're judging the world as well as interacting with it properly. Once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them, it's very, very necessary. That's part of the incorporation of the Jungian shadow or the incorporation of the unconscious from a Freudian perspective.

But old Mufasa—he's already got that covered, so he’s capable of, obviously, he can smile and he’s full capable of the full range of expressions, but he's a tough-looking character. Now, this baboon here, who’s supposed to be basically just a fool, when the story was first written, he turned into what's essentially a shaman across time.

He represents the self from the Jungian perspective. Now, the self is everything you could be across time. You imagine that there’s you, and there’s the potential inside you, whatever that is. Potential is an interesting idea because it represents something that isn't yet real, yet we act like it's real. People will say to you, “You should live up to your potential,” and that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information, right?

Because you build yourself out of the information in the Piagetian sense. But it's deeper than that, too, because we know that if you take yourself and put yourself in a new environment, new genes turn on in your nervous system; they encode for new proteins. So, you're full of biological potential that won't be realized unless you move yourself around in the world in two different challenging circumstances, and that’ll turn on different circuits.

So, it’s not merely that you're incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense; it’s that by exposing yourself to different environments, you put different physiological demands on yourself, all the way down to the genetic level, and that manifests new elements of you.

One of the things that happens to people—and this is a very common cultural notion—is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central, and that would be, say, like the rock in Pride Rock and The Lion King. Because you take yourself out of your dopey little village, and that’s just a little bounded you that everyone knows and that isn’t very expanded.

Then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place, and while you do that, you have adventures, and they toughen you and pull more out of you—partly because you're becoming informed, which means in-formation; it means you're becoming more organized at every level of analysis.

But there's also more of you, too, and that’s a very classic idea. In cathedrals in Europe, especially at Chartres, there's a big maze on the floor—a circular maze—which is a symbolic representation of the pilgrimage for people who couldn't do it. It's a huge circle divided into quadrants, which is a Jungian mandala. You enter the maze at one point, and then you have to walk through the entire maze, north, east, west, and south, before you get to the center.

The center is symbolized by a flower that's carved in stone—it looks like this; it’s big. This maze is large so that you can walk it, and that's a symbolic pilgrimage. It takes you to the center. That's the center of the cross because it's in a cathedral, and that's the point of the acceptance of voluntary suffering. That's what that means.

So, you walk through—you can call that a circumambulation—you go to all the corners of the world to find yourself. Well, the self is the baboon in this particular piece—of mandrill, actually—in this particular representation. He lives in the tree; he lives in the tree of life. It’s a baobab tree in this particular.

So, he’s the spirit that inhabits the tree of life, and he’s the eternal wise man—that’s a way of thinking. So is the king, but he’s sort of a superordinate king or an outside king in some sense. He’s the repository of ancient wisdom, and the king is the manner in which that wisdom is currently being acted out in the world, and so they’re friends.

That means that the king is a good king because if the king was a bad king, he would be alienated from himself, and that would make him shallow and one-dimensional, and that would make him a bad ruler. No union with the traditions of the past—to be a good ruler, you have to rescue your father from the underworld and integrate that. Of course, that's a main theme in this entire movie.

So hey, a new mystery to solve! Okay, so the hero is born, and that's what the rising sun represents, and everybody goes, “Oh, isn’t that cute?” The reason for that is because you’re biologically wired, especially if you’re agreeable, to respond with caretaking activity—to "cute." Cuteness: button nose, big eyes, small mouths, round head, symmetry, and helpless movements. You’ll respond to that across the entire class of mammalian creatures, even maybe down to lizards.

So, that’s an archetype as well—that's the archetype of the vulnerable hero at birth, the vulnerable hero newly born, and that should invoke a desire, mostly on the part of males, to encourage, and mostly on the part of females, to nurture. But males and females are quite cross-wired among human beings, and so there’s encouragement from the women, and there’s also nurturing from the men. Of course, those curves, in some sense, overlap, so there are more nurturing males and more encouraging females, but that’s roughly the archetype.

He looks cute, and everybody goes, "Awww," and that’s because the animators nailed that—they caught the essential features of cuteness. He’s also in the light, right? So then, the shaman mandrill basically baptizes him; that's essentially what he’s doing, and he uses something that is symbolic of the Sun, which is this ripe fruit.

Fruits are symbolic of the Sun because, of course, they need the Sun to ripen, and they're round like the Sun. People know that they need light—so anyways, the animators make a relationship between the fruit that the shaman is going to break and the Sun, and so he’s also being baptized into the Sun. That means that he’s being baptized into the light, or that he’s being transformed into a hero.

Everyone's happy, and that’s basically, you know, the divine father, the divine mother, and the divine son, and the self who's taking care of that. There’s a union between the baby and the wise old man because the baby is all the potential that's realized in the self. There’s an old idea that the way to full maturity is to find what you lost as a child and regain it.

It’s a brilliant idea, and that echoes through myths all over the world, and that means you have to regain your capacity once you’re disciplined and you know how to do something. You have to regain your capacity for play and sort of for wide-eyed wonder. That might be the childlike part of your spirit, and the reintegration of that childlike part with the adult, grown-up part revitalizes the adult, grown-up part, and allows the child to manifest itself in a disciplined way in the world.

That’s all being hinted at there. Then they show the shaman shows the baby, the newborn hero, to the crowd. It’s very cool what happens in the movie. All the animals spontaneously kneel, and I can give you an example of that kind of spontaneous action in a crowd.

Imagine you're watching a gymnastics performance, right? It’s like at a high level, world-class performance, and someone comes out there and they do this routine that’s just dead letter-perfect, you know, and they stop, and everybody claps like mad, right? It’s perfect.

Then the next contestant comes out, and they're basically in real trouble because, you know, this person just got a 9.7 out of 10, and it was perfect, so how do you beat perfect? They come out there, and then you watch them, and you're right on the edge of your seat because what you see them do is something extraordinarily disciplined, just like the last person did, but they push themselves into that zone that’s just beyond their discipline capacity. You can tell every second you're watching it that they're that close to disaster.

When they finally land triumphantly, you all stand up and clap spontaneously. It’s because you’ve just witnessed someone who’s a master at playing a game, who’s also a master at improving how to play that game at the same time. People love that more than anything; to see that is just absolutely overwhelming because it's a testament to the human spirit, and you'll respond automatically and unconsciously to that.

That’s why that’s an analogy to why the animals all spontaneously bow when what happens is they show the Lion King, and the Sun breaks and shines on the hero at the same time. There’s this concordance between an earthly event and a so-called heavenly event, and you would call that synchronous. That’s his idea of synchronicity, where something important subjectively is also signified by something that appears in narrative keeping with that in the outside world.

That's one of the most controversial elements of his theory, but I've experienced a variety of synchronous events, and they often happen in therapy, especially around dreams. They’re very hard to communicate because they’re so specific to the context in which it occurs; they're very difficult to explain. So anyways, it’s the synchronous event that makes all the animals drop to their knees.

There’s the Sun coming out, and it’s shining on them, and all the primates go mad for that. That’s, of course, exactly what we do when we applaud. Then we switch to Scar. Now, Scar is Mufasa's brother—evil brother. The king always has an evil brother, and so does the hero. The hero always has an adversary, and the reason for that is the king always has an evil brother.

That means that the state always has a tyrannical element, and the tyrannical element exists for two reasons: one is the state deteriorates of its own accord, and that's an entropy observation. What that means is that the state is a construction of the past, right? But the present isn't the same as the past, and to the degree that the past is mismatched with the demands of the present, then it's tyrannical—it's malfunctioning.

It's a continual problem with the state; it's always two steps behind the environment. That means that the awareness of living people has to update the state. Eliot and Maria Eliot, who’s a great historian of religions, looked at flood stories from all over the world because there are flood stories from all over the world, partly because there are floods all over the world, but there's a psychological reason, too.

Imagine that New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane, right? A flood—didn’t you say, "Well, that was an act of God?" But then you think, "Wait a second, wait a second. They knew those dam dikes weren't gonna hold. They knew they weren't built strong enough. They took the money that was allocated to the dikes and spent it badly, and that was willful blindness."

You could say that it was God who caused the flood, so to speak, metaphorically, but you could also say that it was the degeneration of the state and the willful blindness of the politicians that caused the flood. In Holland, they built the dikes to withstand the worst storm in 10,000 years. In the southern US, they built them to withstand the worst storm in 100 years, and they knew that that was insufficient.

If there's a flood, you can say, "Well, that’s an act of nature," but you can also say, "Just wait a second—maybe if there was a flood because we looked the other way, and because our systems were out of date." That's why, in flood stories, there's a continual theme. The people get wiped out by the flood because God judges them harshly for their senility and their willful blindness.

It's a story that’s very much— you’ll have a flood in your life, right? It'll be a flood of chaos, and you'll find, in one form or another, when you investigate the causes of the flood, that some of it will be—and sometimes this is the case—it’s just random. You just got singled out. You got a terrible disease, and that's the end of you, or something like that. But there’ll be other situations where the flood comes and you're surrounded by chaos, and you'll look into it and you'll think, "I knew this was coming. I knew I wasn’t paying attention. I knew I hadn't sorted things out."

The consequences of that would have cascaded and wiped you out. Then you're in real trouble because not only did you get wiped out, but you also know it’s your fault, and that is not a good thing. That makes you bitter and resentful and murderous when that happens.

So anyways, Scar is scarred, right? So what that implies is he’s had a pretty rough life, and he’s kind of skinny. He was born in the low end of the gene pool, and so he has reasons to be resentful. He’s also hyper intelligent and rational, and it's one of the things you see very commonly about the evil adversary of the state or of the individual—often intelligent and hyper rational.

The best commentator on that was probably John Milton in Paradise Lost because that’s how he represents Lucifer or Satan, who's the spirit of rationality and enlightenment, strangely enough. Hence, Lucifer—the bringer of light. The reason for that, as far as I can tell—and this is something Milton figured out when he compiled all these ancient stories about evil and tried to make them coherent—was that the problem with irrationality with rationality is that it tends to fall in love with its own product.

Then it comes up with a theory that makes that a totality, and then it won't let go. The rational mind has a totalitarian element, and we know that to some degree because that kind of rationality seems more left hemisphere focused, and the left hemisphere tends to impose structured order on the world.

It can be updated by the right hemisphere, and the right hemisphere generally updates it with negative information and with fantasy. The left hemisphere will impose a coherent structure on the world, which is really necessary for you to live in it, but the problem is there’s a tension between coherence and completeness, and that’s partly why you need two hemispheres. You need one to represent the world, and you need one to keep track of the exceptions and to feed those slowly into the representational system so that it can stay updated without collapsing into complete chaos.

So anyways, Scar—he's got this droopy mouth and this whiny, arrogant voice. He feels hard done by, and he's resentful. In classic hero stories, and stories of the state as well, this is an Egyptian take on it—Osiris was the god of the state, and Set, who later became Satan—that name became Satan as it transformed through Coptic Christianity—Osiris had a brother named Set, and Set didn’t get enough attention, and Set was always scheming to overthrow the kingdom, just like Scar is.

The Egyptians said straightforwardly that the reason Osiris got overthrown by Set was that he got chopped into pieces, and his pieces were distributed throughout the state, in the mythological representation. Those pieces were actually the provinces of Egypt, technically speaking, and that's what the Egyptians thought. That’s quite cool. But the Egyptians said explicitly that the reason Osiris got overthrown by Set was that he was willfully blind, old, senile, and willfully blind—the same idea as the flood myth.

You don’t see that quite here because Mufasa is sort of onto Set or Scar, but Scar is more treacherous than Mufasa believes, and he gets at Mufasa by going through his son, by playing on the impulsivity and juvenile qualities of his son. There’s some antagonism between these two, as you can see by their facial expressions.

There’s a good example of Scar. He’s got that droopy, kind of whiny, malevolent face and that malevolent voice that Jeremy Irons pulls off so incredibly well, and he’s always skulking. He’s a creature of the night; he always skulks around—he's not a creature of the day in any sense of the word. Mufasa is golden like the Sun, and Scar is dark like the night. That's another hint, another clue.

There’s the Tree—that’s the Tree of Life—we already talked about that. I think that represents the multiple levels at which you exist simultaneously, from the subatomic all the way up to the cosmic, so to speak. That’s a different kind of dimension, and that’s the place that the self inhabits, and it can kind of move up and down those dimensions.

But anyways, Mufasa has taken Simba up to the top of the pyramid, right? So that’s the aluminum place, let’s say, or the place of the eye where you can really see a long way. He’s explaining to him what his kingdom is going to be. You see the Sun, of course, appears to begin with, and that’s another hint about being at the top—that’s the illuminated part of the pyramid.

They’re up there talking, and what Mufasa tells Simba is that his kingdom is every place the light has touched. That’s so brilliant! One of the things you’ll notice if you move into a new apartment—you're like a cat. Cats don’t like changing houses, and they have to zoom around in every corner to see exactly what the hell's going on there before they calm down. They need to know where they can hide and where the potential dangers are.

What you’ll find if you move into a new place is that you will not be comfortable there until you've investigated, potentially cleaned, and repaired every single square inch of it. The more attention you pay to it, the more it'll become yours, and that’s far more than mere material ownership, which is also relevant. But in order to feel comfortable somewhere and to dominate that place—to be enmeshed in that place—you have to attend to it.

You have to shine light on every corner, and you have to do that with yourself and with your relationships as well. So, anyways, Mufasa tells Simba that his kingdom is everything that the light shines on, and that’s exactly right.

Then there's a metaphor there too, which is that what you've shown light on—which is what you've come to understand and master—is surrounded by an Otherworld of all the things that you don't understand, and some of those would be natural things, and some of them would be tyrannical things, and some of those would be things you don't want to know about yourself, but they're outside of where you've managed to shine the light.

That’s exactly what Mufasa tells Simba: says, "We live in this pyramid; we’re at the top; there’s a domain of light around it. That’s explored territory." Outside of that, there’s unexplored territory, and that's partly the unconscious because you fill it with fantasy, and it’s partly what you just don’t know.

Then Mufasa tells Simba—and it's sort of like God telling Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden not to eat the apple—Mufasa tells Simba there's that outside place that's dark, that's not part of your kingdom, and you should not go there. And that’s really interesting because Simba doesn't even know about that place yet. Mufasa is doing something very contradictory there; it’s like telling him that it exists and heightening his curiosity, but also saying that he should go there—almost ensuring that that's exactly what Simba is going to do.

You see this in the Pinocchio movie, too, where Pinocchio is planning to jump into the ocean to go get Geppetto from the underworld, and he's following his conscience, along with him, Jiminy Cricket. The cricket is warning him about all the dangers that he'll face down there and telling him that he will be fish food personally. While he's doing that, Pinocchio ties a knot around his donkey tail around a rock so he can sink, and the little cricket helps him tie the knot.

So while he’s warning him about the adventure he’s going to undertake, he’s encouraging him to do it at the same time. There’s that paradoxical thing, which is that if you go outside what you know, it will cause a fall because it'll damage your knowledge structures, and you’ll go down into chaos, and that can really destroy you.

You should do it, but by the same token, if you do do it and you do it successfully, then the new you that arises can be stronger and more complete than the previous you. So you should do it, and you shouldn’t do it, and that’s when anyone sensible says, "Look, don’t bother," right? But sensible isn’t enough; that’s the thing. You have to also be not sensible enough in order to live.

Your typical hero, and Harry Potter is a really good example, is always a rule breaker. Always! But—the rules he breaks are like—there's judiciousness enough—speaking—the hero breaks a rule in the service of a higher good, but he's still breaking the rules. That’s what puts them outside the boundary of the social establishment.

Now at this point, Simba also gets introduced to Scar, and that has two meanings. One is that Scar is the tyrannical element of the state. As a child, when you're being socialized, you encounter the tyranny of the state. One of the best examples of that is that children are always running around having fun, and they're really bubbly and impulsive and joyous and playful.

That causes a lot of trouble because positive emotion is very disruptive. They'll run around and break things, they'll hurt themselves, and they'll get into trouble. You’re always saying, "Calm down, sit down, behave, don't do that," and it’s not because they're crying or angry; it’s because they’re too happy and impulsive that no one can stand them.

The state puts pressure on you to regulate your emotions, both positive and negative, and it crushes you—it crushes the life out of you. A lot of it, and so you end up at your age, and you're all mopey because especially because you’ve been forced to sit down in school for, like, 17 years, you're all mopey, and it’s no wonder. You’ve had the spirit taken out of you by the process of discipline, but without that, you’d be completely useless.

So it’s another one of those paradoxical gifts and catastrophes that you encounter as you move through life. So anyways, Simba—look at how happy he is! You know, I mean, he doesn’t know a damn thing—he's so naive. You can tell, but, "Oh look, it’s my uncle Scar!" It’s like—you know, and this is not a guy you smile at, clearly.

But he's all positive emotion and joy and enthusiasm, and that’s not good because that means this character can take serious advantage of it—and that’s exactly what he does. Scar pretends to be on his side, which is what a good pedophile always does, by the way. You know, you take advantage of the child's trusting nature and openness in order to exploit them, and that’s what horrible people do all the time, including the parents of children and other children themselves.

There’s this false—I mean, look at the animators; they are so damn brilliant. Look at that expression, really! You just look at that and you think, "Well, that’s just a facial expression," but of course, it’s not. Some damn animators worked really hard to get that. They’re really observant, and they distill the facial looks—like the face covers the whole head—and they’ve got the eyebrow lifts proper, and they've got this horrible, sanctimonious smile and the tilt of the head.

You know, and he’s sort of crushing him while he’s hugging him at the same time. Really, really! And you know it took a lot of thought for every single one of these frames to be put together right. There’s a tremendous amount of cognitive effort that went into that. So none of this is accidental.

Well, that pretty much says everything. It’s like, "Woo, I hate that kid and can hardly wait 'til he’s gone, and didn’t I pull one over on him?" You know, it’s a real testament to an adult’s genius when he can fool a kid.

So then Simba encounters the anima—that’s the anima, the Jungian anima. The anima is the feminine counterpart in the soul—and she, well, you could tell what she does to him, right? Because she’s got this supercilious, judgmental, and teasing look on her face, and she’s really trying to put him down.

It’s working; it's not very happy about that at all. She’s the thing—this is what the anima does—the soul. She’s the thing that teaches the exploratory hero that it’s not everything it could be, right? And that’s part of this can be read multiple ways, but it’s part of the eternal tendency of women to make men self-conscious by their sexual selectivity. That’s part of it because that makes men self-conscious like nothing else.

It’s also perhaps been one of the phenomena that’s produced the evolutionary arms race in sex among human beings that caused our rapid cortical expansion and our quick movement away from chimpanzees, who aren't selective maters by the way.

So look at him—Jesus! You just want to slap him, right? He’s the son of a king, so he’s very, very privileged, and he confuses his privilege with competence. Rich, of course, all of you do because you’re all sons of the king, which is why you can sit here in the university, and you confuse your privilege with competence as well because it has nothing to do with any of you that the lights are on and the place is so peaceful, right?

But you take that for granted, and it can make you false and arrogant. Like, "Whoa!" That’s just so sad. You look at that kid, and you think he’s in for real trouble, man! He thinks he knows everything, and of course, then he has a wrestling match with—what's her name?—what’s it—was it Nala?

Yeah, he has a wrestling match with Nala, and she just pins him every time, right? Gotcha again! Pindy again! And that’s basically right. One of the things that happens with men when they meet a woman who they really desire is they project an idea onto her immediately—that’s an anima projection—and then that anima projection judges them, and they act all inferior and stupid, and it’s partly because they are. That’s why.

So then they go down in defeat constantly to this thing that they’re projecting, which at least has some concordance with the actual woman, but not that much. So, okay, they keep wrestling, and then they're on the fringe of the kingdom. This wrestling match between these pairs of opposites takes them to the edge of the kingdom, and they end up in the elephant's graveyard, right?

There are bones everywhere, and so now they’re out into the kingdom of death. What that means is that these two kids, as they've grown up, encounter death, right? They go outside the light. It’s very, very shocking for them. They're very curious about it, obviously; they go to explore the skeletons and all of that, even though they were told not to.

Their curiosity—they can't stay away from death—they’re too curious about it. So, they develop knowledge of death, and that—of course, out there in the deadlands is where the hyenas are. That's exactly right because hyenas are scavengers, right? They can break bones with their teeth; they're really quite the animal, and you know, you kind of have a shudder of repugnance when you see those things.

I think it's partly—I mean, we shared an evolutionary landscape with the ancestors of hyenas for a very, very long time, and like vultures too, you know? You couldn't imagine something that would be more well-designed to look like it was a horrible thing than a vulture, right? There’s this weird concordance, and crows and ravens are like that too—they're carrion eaters.

The eagles are kind of an exception, but they look just as creepy as they are, which is really quite interesting. And of course, hyenas fall into that category, and they laugh too, which is—you know, really—you also have to laugh really with all these other things you have going for you.

So anyways, the hyenas, and hyenas are enemies of lions, and they can take lions down. They’re tough creatures, and you know, they're not one high in, obviously, but a bunch of hyenas can give a lion a pretty damn rough time, and these little lions are really no match for the hyenas. So, they get threatened very, very rapidly, and one of the hyenas, of course, is just completely out of its mind.

One of the things that’s really interesting—and you see this with the Muppets too—there was often a puppet that was like a crazy puppet, and its eyes would move in different directions, you know? One of the things that happens with people who are schizophrenic is they show involuntary eye movements. It’s because you have a brain center that controls your eyes voluntarily, and you have another one that controls them involuntarily.

So you can see that look ahead and try to move your eyes smoothly back and forth; you can’t do it. You’ll see that they jerk, hey? But if you watch—put a finger in front of your face and then do this, they will move perfectly smoothly, and that’s because you’re using different eye control centers—one voluntary and one more involuntary.

And the involuntary one is actually more sophisticated. In schizophrenia, the involuntary eye control centers tend to disrupt the voluntary eye control centers, and that's likely part of the hallucinatory process, you know? Because you have the ego in this schizophrenic that’s being disrupted by processes underneath fantasies and that sort of thing, and that looks like it’s reflected in involuntary eye movements, like dream movements.

So anyways—so much for the crazy hyena—and they’re in real trouble now! The king’s eye, who's supposed to be keeping an eye on this, and was supposed to be watching Simba, is trying to intervene, but I mean, look at him! He’s a delicious little bird, and so that’s not working out very well.

Anyways, and then you see this immediate juxtaposition of the domain of death and the hyenas with hell, right? Everyone looks at that and they think, well, they know exactly what that means. It’s no surprise to anyone that that happens, and I suppose that’s partly because on the veldt, where we evolved in large part—but not by no means all part—fire was an ever-present danger in the grasslands, right? And so, that's a good example of hell.

So, huh! Well, I guess that’s it. We’ll do some more of this when we meet on Tuesday. Bye!