2015 Maps of Meaning 07a: Mythology: Chaos / Part 1 (Jordan Peterson)

So the last time we met, we talked about the Greek myth, I believe. Is that correct? We talked about Horus and Isis. Okay, good. So I want to talk to you about this symbol today, which reminds me there's another slide that I need to use to do that. This took me a long time to sort out. It looks to me like mythology uses two classic myths, and the symbols that are associated with classic myths use two different symbols to represent the unknown. One of them, as far as I can tell, represents the absolute unknown.

These are complicated conceptual categories, all these are, because otherwise they would be articulated and explicit categories instead of imagistic and artistic categories. The symbols express a very large variety of things that are difficult to formulate into an explicit set. Now, one of the theories that Jung had about symbols, which I really like, is different than the Freudian idea. Now, Freud believed that your mind produced symbols to represent content that you repressed, basically.

Maybe it does that from time to time, but Jung thought of the symbol in a different way. He thought of it as something that floated up from the depths, so to speak. I actually think that's the right way of thinking about it, like a dream. Now, we don't really know much about consciousness. It's proved very elusive to scientific study, and we don't really know much about the process by which the understanding of very complex concepts comes about, although we've started to take that apart to some degree.

In the class, you're often confronted with things that you don't understand and can't control, and it's necessary to categorize those because you have to figure out how to deal with them. We've already established the proposition that most human categories that are fundamental are associated with action rather than representation. Or you could think, in some sense, that the action is the representation, right?

Which would mean you might say, well, what's a monster? Or we could even do something simpler: we could say, what's a chair? I could say, well, a chair could be a bean bag and a chair could be a stump. Then you might ask, well, a chair, a bean bag, and a stump have virtually nothing in common apart from the fact that they're both made out of matter. They’re very dissimilar entities, yet you can encapsulate them under the same heading.

The reason for that is because you can sit on them. So the category is actually predicated on the use, and we talked about the idea that we categorize things as tools or that we categorize them in relationship to their implication for action. Now, there were mammalian creatures around between 60 and 220 million years ago, which is a very long time. It's long enough for those mammals to have been overlapping with dinosaurs quite nicely.

You know, our early ancestors were quite small and easily preyed upon, and then our later ancestors were tree-dwelling primates, and now we're city-dwelling primates. You know, there was a tremendously long period where we were preyed on by things that came in from the outside. That's one way of looking at it.

From this perspective, a monster is something that's predatory and that comes from outside; it's something that you don't expect, and that inhabits unexplored territory. It's something that you don't understand. It's all of those things at once. To the degree that the psyche is transpersonal, which means to the degree that your mind is capable—excuse me—that the concepts that your mind uses to organize the world are an expression of a heritable structure, then it's reasonable to propose that you have an inbuilt representation of something like the predator.

But it's more complicated in human beings now. You might say, well, is there any evidence for that? Jung's ideas of archetypes of the collective unconscious have never really been accepted by general psychologists. A lot of biological psychologists are interested in it, by the way, because they're much more familiar with the idea of built-in instincts and action patterns. Instincts and action patterns that are built in can be unbelievably complicated.

We do know, for example, that rats that are never exposed to a cat in their life will still panic if you waft cat odor over their domicile. So rats do not like the smell of cats, and they don't have to learn that for a long time. Psychologists believe that you learn fear through conditioning, and then there was an idea that certain fears were prepared, so you could learn them more easily.

For example, if I wanted to condition a fear response to you and I showed you a picture of a snake and associated it with a small electric shock, compared to if I associate it with a picture, say, of a daisy or even a pistol, which is also a dangerous thing. Obviously, you're going to learn to be conditioned to the snake much faster. So that's sort of the weak version of prepared categorization. But there are stronger versions of prepared categorization too, and I actually think they're correct, and I can't see why they wouldn't be.

The stronger version is that no, you don't have your apprehension, your alert apprehension—the alert apprehension that you would devote towards something like a predatory reptile—is not something that you need to learn at all. You already know how to do it. I wouldn't say that that's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, but we do know that chimpanzees react with fear to a variety of stimuli that they didn't necessarily come into contact with during their developmental period.

So for example, chimpanzees don't like bodies of chimpanzees that don't move. So if you bring an anesthetized chimp into a group of chimps in a zoo, say, the chimps are not happy about that at all. They also don't like snakes, they don't like even plastic snakes, and they don't like snakes even if they've never seen a snake. If they see a snake when they never have, they'll get the hell away from the snake, but then they'll turn around and look at it, and look at it, and look at it. In the wild, they do something similar.

If a chimp comes across a snake, a big snake, say, it makes a particular noise, which is called a snake raw, and I guess that's a representation of the noise that the chimp makes. But what happens when the chimp makes that noise is that all the other chimps will come running and look at the snake. They're sort of enraptured by the snake, I think is the right way to think about it. I think they're in awe of the snake to tell you the truth.

You might think, well, chimpanzees can't feel awe. It's like, well, don't be so sure. You're a modified chimpanzee and you can feel awe. But there's more to the story than that. You ever listen to a piece of music that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, or a shiver run through you? Is that a familiar experience to people? Has anyone not had that experience? Okay, maybe whatever the shiver is, a consequence of piloerection.

What that means is that when you have that feeling, you're doing the same thing that a cat does when it puffs out. The reason that the cat does that is to look big, and the reason it wants to look big is because it sees something that is inspiring. That's partly a mixture of terror and fascination, yes, that's the right way of thinking about it.

But what's interesting about the piloerection response in human beings is that it's often manifested to something of great beauty or great excitement. That reaction is so old, my point is that reaction is so old that we still have hangovers, biological hangovers from it, so to speak, from the time when it was actually useful for us to puff up our fur, and that was a long time ago. I don't think it's unreasonable to presuppose that chimpanzees can feel something like awe.

Now, I would also like to point out that awe can be felt toward a variety of different things. I think that what a low-ranking chimp feels to a very high-ranking chimp is also something akin to awe. The reason I think that is first because of how low-ranking chimps act around high-ranking chimps. They act subordinate. But also because there have been studies with monkeys, and I think these were done with vervets, although I'm not precisely sure of the breed. They showed vervets a troop; they took a vervet from a troop and showed vervet pictures of the low-ranking vervet.

They showed pictures of the high-ranking vervet, and the vervets preferred to gaze at the high-ranking vervet. Yes, they knew them, but there might also be something about them physically. I don't know the answer to that. We know that human beings can hypothetically look at an array of middle-aged men and pick out the CEOs without knowing them. They can do it at better than chance.

Now, they're not exactly sure what cues are being used, or maybe they are and I just don't know the literature well enough. That might be part of it. We do pick up cues of dominance. A wide jaw is one of them, you know, and there are weird variations on this too. I can tell you, for example, if you show women pictures of the same man and you vary the jaw width, when the women are ovulating, they like the guy with the thick jaw, the heavy jaw. When they're completely opposite to ovulating, they like the guy with the thinner jaw.

I think this is part of the reason that women have trouble with men, actually, because I think that from a sexual perspective they might be more wired to be attracted to men who produce monstrous sons, but you know, like powerful attractive sons. Because from an evolutionary perspective, you're much more likely to get a grandchild or, to speak in a more Darwinian sense, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you have a son who's successful at attracting mates.

There's no reason to assume that the man who will produce sons that are more capable of attracting mates is going to be the sort of man that will treat you right or won't fool around because basically you're gambling in some sense that your son will have the opportunity to fool around because that's your best bet in terms of moving your genetic material forward. Why is it that—is it about a wide jaw dominance? Testosterone? Has it been shown that people with wide jaws are actually more dominant in a social sense?

Yeah, they are. A wider face is one of the markers, actually. So these are, you know, I wouldn't say they're overwhelmingly powerful effects, but they're detectable. It also goes along, I think, with some things like preferring symmetry because you know, there's a higher probability that an asymmetrical person has had something go wrong with them at some point in their biological development. So people find symmetrical people more attractive, and that's the truth, even for creatures like butterflies.

So there are butterflies that will not mate with another butterfly, even if they're asymmetrical by almost an unmeasurable amount. They're very attuned to it. I think what this symbolizes, as far as I can tell, is that which exists beyond our comprehension. That's different than something unknown; it's different in some ways anyways.

You remember the hierarchy diagram I showed you? I showed you that over and over, right? With the little high-resolution actions at the bottom and then the really low-resolution actions at the top? So maybe you can think about it this way. The unknown seems to be able to be represented by this serpent, reptile, predatory symbol. It also seems to be able to be represented by the negative feminine, and it also seems to be represented by the positive feminine.

So maybe if you think about that hierarchy, what happens is that the trivial novelties you encounter whenever you do something wrong, that's only a small mistake. Those tri-novelties maybe they're best symbolized by the positive mother because they're not going to blow you into pieces just because you've encountered a small error. You'll learn something from it, and it won't be very costly. You might even be interested in it.

As you go higher up the hierarchy, it's likely that the positive mother representation is going to shade into the negative mother representation because what's happening is if you get hit at a high level of abstraction is that it's going to start to demolish larger and larger portions of your personality structure. Maybe at the very top, the thing that would demolish that is this—it's this for the same reason that this is the thing that would eat you if you went too far away from your tribe.

Or this is the thing that would eat you if you moved too far away from the fire or if you fell out of the tree. You know, or the thing that would slither along the branches and swallow you, or maybe swallow your offspring millions of years ago. You might think, well, is there any reason to presuppose that those experiences left traces on us?

Well, I think, actually, I think the propositions that psychologists started with—and this happens very frequently—are backwards. I think the onus is on people to prove that our minds aren't structured by our biological and evolutionary past rather than that they are. I mean, the whole bloody physiology is structured. The entire body in which the mind inhabits is structured by evolutionary processes.

We know that there are certain sets of pretty formulaic cues that men and women use to evaluate each other, and those don't seem to be learned in any important way, although learning can modify them. We know that we're not born able to speak a language, but we are born able to babble the phones of all languages. I don't know if you know that, but when a baby's laying in their crib and they're babbling, they're capable of babbling virtually every noise human beings use in all of their languages.

Then what happens is that they lose the ability to babble all the phonemes that aren't used in that particular language, and then it's very difficult often for an adult to either learn to hear or to say those phonemes. So babies are obviously born prepared to learn a language. It's not like we actually teach them to speak. We might make minor corrections now and then and tell them how to say a word, but most of the time they just pick it up by observing, and they do it very rapidly, and they're incredibly good at it.

Clearly, that's biologically prepared because no other animal does it, and you can't get other animals to do it, really, except maybe parrots. African gray parrots turn out to be extraordinary language users. But with regards to the relationships between the sexes, I mean sex is very old. Sexual differentiation is exceptionally old, and the probability that we're not evolved to that is zero.

Now, I'm going to show you another picture. I want to tell you a little bit about this one first, I guess. So this symbol means a lot of things. Well, first of all, it's a dragon; it's a serpent, so it's a snake. But it's also a lizard; it's a predatory thing. It can breathe fire—that's one of the characteristics of a dragon. Fire is a transformative substance, and it's a very mysterious substance.

One of the things you might note about fire is what happens when you're sitting around a campfire. What do you look at? The fire, right? You can't not look at a fire. It's like a baby. If there's a baby in the room, a two-year-old, you're going to look at that two-year-old; you can't keep your eyes off it. It's like a flickering TV, and fire is like that for people. We can't keep our damn eyes off it. I think the reason for that was that we're all descended from the first creature who decided that he was going to play around with fire.

Far more, you know, he probably came home with his fur all burnt off when he was an adolescent. His mother said, "Are you out there playing with fire again?" It's like, "Yeah, I can't help it." That mutation made it impossible for that creature to become accustomed to fire; it was fascinated by it. Once we had fire, there was no stopping us. The probability that we're all descended from arsonist apes is extremely high.

This probably explains a lot. Yes, no doubt. Insane fire-wielding chimpanzees—that's our ancestors! So fire is a transformative substance. It's this strange mode of material. If you put something in it, it turns into something else, which is very, very cool.

And, you know, it's also extraordinarily useful, as it turns out. Fire is not only a transformative phenomenon, but it can be used to represent other transformative phenomena. So the dragon is something that's innately attractive for a whole variety of reasons. It can breathe fire; it's very predatory. It's also an infinite creature, and that's why it has its tail in its mouth.

It's self-contained; it needs nothing else. This is where the symbol starts to stretch beyond the representation of the predator to the representation of the unknown as such. You know, one of the things you might wonder if you're a human being is, "Well, what is the unknown like?" And you might think, "Well, why do you have to understand that?" And the answer is because horrible things come leaping out of the unknown all the time.

So then you might ask, "Well, is it better to figure out how to deal with each of those horrible things, or is it better to learn how to deal with the source of all those terrible things, which would be the unknown itself?" Now, you remember Tiamat in the Mesopotamian myth? When she went to war against Marduk, she was sort of in the background creating all sorts of monsters, and then they all went to battle against Marduk.

So I'm going to tell you a dream that my nephew had, and I think this is a good way of representing what this symbol means. Remember, human beings abstract, and what we're trying to do is to look at singular phenomena and abstract out what's common across them so that we can learn to deal with the common things. That way we can apply it to the entire set of those things instead of having to isolate each one.

We know, in some sense, possibly, that human beings can do this, and animals can't. I went and heard Temple Grandin speak at one point. I don't know if you know who Temple Grandin is, but she's probably the most accomplished autistic professor. When she was a small child, she learned that if she built this enclosure that kind of tightened in on her that it would calm her down.

She applied the things she learned that would calm her down to calming down cattle when they're being held in pens prior to being slaughtered. So she's redesigned many of the cattle handling facilities in the United States to keep the animals calm. One of the things she's designed is this kind of spiral enclosure so the cows can't see what's in front of them, basically, and it's fenced in because if cows are going down an enclosed area like an alley and there's a Coke can lying in the middle of it, they'll all stop and look at the Coke can.

Or they stop and look at a briefcase; they're kind of freaked out by these things. If they're walking down an enclosure and it's open and there's a windmill or something spinning off to the side, they'll stop and look at that too. Now, Temple Grandin thinks that she thinks like an animal, which is why she thinks she can figure out how animals think.

One of the things she said, I remember her presentation, she said, "Okay, so if I say to you, 'Church,' what do you see in your mind?" Just anybody tell me, what's the prototypical church? How would it appear?

Okay, does that seem reasonable to people? What popped into your minds when I said that? Church bells? Okay, stained glass? Okay?

Now, when Temple Grandin thinks of church, she doesn't think of church. She thinks of that church. She can't abstract out the commonalities across churches, and she thinks that’s partly why autistic people have a hard time learning language. Because for an autistic person, there aren't the prototypical church; there are just churches. She thinks that's how animals see: they see the particulars; they don’t see the abstracted universals that unite the particulars.

And of course, that makes sense if you think about it. One way of thinking about that too is that until you can abstract out the commonalities across a class of phenomena, and maybe you have to do that in an image, you can't talk because you can't use the word church unless what you do when you receive the word church is apply it to a class of phenomena that may have very little in common from a visual perspective.

I mean, just think about how different a given church looks from different angles. Now, I don't know if you know about the autistic savant who can draw like mad. You can see some of these people on YouTube. I mean, one guy is just absolutely—he's so amazing; it just staggers the imagination. They can fly him across a city in a helicopter, and then he can go home and on this huge piece of paper draw the whole city. He can only has to see it for about an hour, and he can draw the windows and like everything.

There are artistic people who can figure out how many windows are on a building with one glance. They don't see things the same way we do. They don't see the abstractions, and animals don’t seem to either. The reason I'm telling you that is because you've got to understand the process of abstraction before you can understand what symbols mean.

What Jung believed that a symbol did was exactly what I just described, which was that there’s a class of phenomena that we’re struggling to understand. The way that we build our first representations of it is with an image, just like you had the image of a church. Then you can label that image with a word, and you can use the word, and that’ll evoke the image, and that’ll evoke the class of phenomena.

But part of the reason that normal, so to speak, human beings can't draw is that when they draw, they don't draw; they draw hieroglyphics. Think about, you know, you think a child's drawing of a person is very primitive. A head, stick, stick, stick, maybe they put little circles on the feet or something. You think, well, that's pretty primitive. It's like, that's wrong. That's really, really sophisticated.

It's ridiculously sophisticated that a child can figure out how to schematize a person with like five sticks in a circle, and they know that's a person, and that you do too. That's amazing; that's not primitive. Now, the autistic savants, they seem to draw—they seem to be able to draw so damn accurately because they don't see the abstraction; they just see the particularities.

Another really interesting phenomenon that goes along with autistic drawing is sometimes you'll see, remember this girl who could draw horses like mad? She lost the ability later when she picked up language, but she could start with any part of the horse. She could start by drawing the tail, you know, which is not how a normal person would draw a horse at all. First of all, you'd sort of center it on the paper, and then maybe you'd sketch it in. You just don't start somewhere and draw out a whole horse.

Her horse drawings were like Michelangelo quality. They're remarkable. This symbol, I think, this is the symbol that people were using or that we use to represent the ultimate unknown. The ultimate unknown is a very difficult thing to represent. This symbol is making a case, and the case is, well, it’s something like fire because it’s a transformative substance.

It’s something like a predatory reptile because it lurks in places where you don't expect it to lurk, and it can consume you. It’s also something like a spirit or a bird of the air because it has wings. Why that is? Well, maybe that's because things come swooping down that you don't expect.

I mean, there are lots of small primates that are attacked fairly frequently by predatory birds. The air is another place where the unknown can emerge, but the air is also sort of the place of spirit, and the ground is sort of the place of matter. This symbol here is a representation of the conjoined union of spirit and matter, and I'll talk about that a bit later because that's a very, very complicated idea.

Now, I'm going to tell you my nephew's dream. He was about five, and he was having nightmares and night terrors, so he'd wake up screaming. When people asked him what the problem was, he didn't know, which is quite common with night terrors with children. But you could kind of infer that he was having terrible visions at night.

Anyways, during the day, he was running around with a plastic knight hat and a sword, playing knight. You might think, well, why would he play knight? It's like, well, I don’t know exactly why he would play knight, but you know he’d watch Disney cartoons and that sort of thing. He'd been exposed to a fair bit of media, so his little brain was picking up archetypes in some sense and he was acting them out, trying to figure out what they meant.

He's a pretty smart kid. When he went to bed, he put the sword and the little knight hat beside him. Regardless, he was having night terrors. There were some problems in his family at that point, and a divorce happened relatively soon after, so there were things lurking under the surface around him. He was also preparing to go to kindergarten, which is, definitely, you know when you take a step out into the broader world, whatever that happens to be.

So he was surrounded by unknown things. One night when I was there, he had night terrors and he came to sit at the table with his family. I asked him if he had dreamed about anything, and he got very intense, and he said, "Yes, I was out in this field and I was surrounded by these little dwarfs that only came up to my knees. They didn't have any arms, and they had a huge beak like this, and they were covered with hair and grease, and on the top of their head, there was a cross shaved in them, and they had big strong feet and legs, and when I was walking around, these things would jump at me and bite me with their beaks."

The breakfast table got very quiet when he said that, as you might imagine. It's a pretty horrifying vision, really. You could think, well, that's why he's waking up screaming! It's like, you know, little peak dwarfs are like gnawing on him at night. That's reason to be freaked out! So, I asked him what he could do about that.

Now, you see, that’s an interesting question because, you know, you often think that when you ask someone a question they provide you with the answer. But it's not exactly right because when you ask them a question, you also provide them with the seed of an answer, and you can't help that. That's why it's very difficult not to lead witnesses in a trial, and it’s also very difficult to interview children.

Because every time you ask them a question, you're inevitably hinting about what you want the answer to be. But I was doing that on purpose, and what I was telling him was it's hypothetically possible that a creature like you could do something about that. If such a creature could do something about that, what would it do?

I was introducing, really, what I was doing was introducing the idea of the hero to him. It's like you're beset on all sides by monstrous enemies—what's the appropriate response? Well, I do know if you have a client who has nightmares, you can get them to envision the nightmare. You say, "Sit down, close your eyes, bring the images back to mind."

Some people are really good at this. My experience has been that women are better at it than men; women are somewhat more open than men on the openness dimension. Maybe that's why they like fiction better too. But anyway, because women like fiction and men like nonfiction, roughly speaking. I mean, there's lots of overlap.

But if you have a client who has a nightmare and you have them bring it to mind, you can get them to change the ending, but it has to be in some quasi-realistic manner. So I had a client once who had two fears at the same time: she was afraid of mice, particularly afraid of mice running up her leg, which they will do.

But she was also afraid of being attacked and raped in a cabin that she had north of Montreal. There was a Freudian connection between the mouse fear and the rape fear. We treated her mouse phobia with exposure; I took her to Miguel, where the rat labs were. First of all, she just kind of peered in at the rats. Then she got closer and closer, and we did graduated exposure, and finally she picked up a rat and petted it—all in the same day, by the way.

That was quite—she was quite happy about that! Direct behavioral treatment—exposure, right? With the whole cabin thing, what we did was, first of all, suggest that she get a decent lock and maybe an alarm because she was up there alone, and you know what the hell? Part of her fear might have been predicated on an observation that she was at risk—that was higher than it might be appropriate to be.

I didn't know, but you might as well air on the side of conservatism, and maybe she could bring a dog up there; that might be helpful too. So that was the practical addressing of the problem. But she had these dreams where some guy would break in through the window and, you know, rape her. So we had her bring—I had her bring the dream to mind, and then we armed her with various things.

One thing was a bat, and another thing was some rope, and another thing was a can of oven spray. So when the guy jumped in, she sprayed him with the oven spray, hit him with the bat, and then tied him up. She visualized this quite intently, and she was pretty damn happy about the whole visualization.

It was because it put her in the role of a person able to defend herself rather than in the role of a helpless victim. Anyways, that was the end of her nightmares, and that's not actually very uncommon. I had another client who was walking down a beach in her dream, and on the beach, above the dunes, there was this man who had a big boa constrictor, and he was showing it to the crowd.

She just walked on by, and she was facing a variety of very difficult things, and I said, "Well, you know, all those other people were curious about looking at the snake. Maybe you could look at the snake." She said, "Well, I think that the person who's handling the snake is a charlatan and a phony, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it."

So I said, "Well, let's work with the dream a bit." So she closed her eyes, and we went into it. I said, "Now I want you to go up there and just take a look at the snake. Get closer." She says, "I'm afraid that the crowd will make me touch the snake." So that's interesting because what that meant was she was afraid that if she associated with people, she would be forced by peer pressure to engage in things that she was afraid of doing.

She was afraid of the crowd and its attitude. I said, "Okay, well, if people ask you to do that, you just tell them that you know, 'Thanks very much, but I'm not comfortable with that. It's enough for me to look at the snake.'" You know, probably they'll back off. So she did that, and they backed off.

Then she was watching, and this is an act of imagination. Jung would call this an act of imagination. She was watching the guy handle the snake, and she said, "You know, because the fantasy was continuing like a daydream." She said, "Well, he's not a charlatan at all. He knows how to handle these snakes, and he's out here on the beach to show other people how to handle snakes safely. He's actually a good guy."

I thought, well, that's pretty damn interesting because a snake handler, like a snake handler, is an archetypal messiah fundamentally. So, I told you those stories back to my little nephew. Now, all right, so these things are jumping on him. I said, "Well, what could you do about that?" He perked up, which is an interesting postural adjustment because he was sort of like this before, then he perked up, and his eyes got kind of bright.

He's excited about this idea, and I think that was the activation of the approach systems, right? Rather than the freezing and retreat system. He sits up; his eyes get bright; he's excited. He says, "I would take my sword, and I would get my dad." Oh, sorry, I'm missing one key element. After he told us about the beaked monsters, he said there's a dragon behind them, and the dragon is puffing out smoke and fire.

Every time it puffs out smoke and fire, the smoke turns into the beaked dwarfs. It's a big problem, right? Because you've got all these beaked dwarfs around, and you're going to be fighting them off hypothetically, but there's an infinite supply of beaked dwarfs because there's a dragon behind it that is like puffing up all the beaked dwarfs. So what the hell are you going to do about that?

I knew that that was like a Hydra story; it's an old story. A Hydra is this multi-headed snake, and if you cut off one head, seven more heads grow. It's like, that's a problem. Apparently, you're supposed to drop a very large rock on Hydra because cutting the heads off isn't going to be helpful. It doesn't take a tremendous amount of imagination to notice that what that story means is that sometimes when you solve a problem, you bring on seven more problems, right?

That's actually life because very few things that we provide solutions to don't generate a host of new problems. You know, like the car is a really good example of that, you know, because we like to think that the car is a thing to get from one place to another, but it could turn out that what a car actually is is an entity that transforms cities and also the atmosphere, right?

Or maybe it's the assembly line that's not just an assembly line. Maybe this assembly line is the thing that transforms cities by making cars and also fills the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and then we all die, right? That's a big problem. So, at least hypothetically, that's a big problem. So, it's not always the case in life that when you move forward in one direction that even if you solve a problem, that doesn't mean you've solved the problem of problems. The best solution to a problem isn't the solution to a problem.

The best solution to a problem is the solution to the problem of problems, right? It's a category—how best to face the world if the world is composed of problems? All right, so there's this dragon. That's when I said, "What could you do about that?", and he said, “I would take my sword, and I would go get my dad. Then I'd go jump on the dragon's head, poke both of its eyes out with the sword, and then I'd go right down its throat to where the firebox was and cut off a piece of the firebox, and I'd make a shield."

I thought, way to go, kid! Perfect! Right? Because what he did was so perfect. First of all, he went right to the source of the problem, right to the heart of the matter—right down the dragon's throat. Perfect!

The best part about it, though, was that he cut a piece of the firebox off so he could use that as a shield. It's so brilliant. The reason it's brilliant is that it is possible that if you confront a dragon, you will obtain a shield. That's like the story of humanity, right?

If we face down our predators, if we confront the unknown instead of running away, if we explore and voluntarily engage, it turns out that every time we encounter a problem, we can extract out a solution. That solution might be a solution for all sorts of things rather than just a solution for that problem.

We've had to learn that the problem is also the place that generates solutions. So there's nothing more informative than a problem. Now, the problem is that a problem might kill you. That's a problem. But it’s not like we have been able to make the problem disappear—but we’ve come up with a pretty damn good way of dealing with them.

What do we do then from that? What are we extracting? Well, he extracted out a shield. Of course, that would protect him from the fire because it was made out of the firebox. It’s like, good work, kid! When we confront a problem, what we extract out is information, and we use the information. We use the information; we build with it; we learn new things about it.

You can conceive of a problem as a place of information. It's worse than that. That's not a sufficient conceptualization because it's a place of information that has this nature. You can't get—you can't just turn it into an abstract issue because the place of information is also the place of horrible predatory matter—spirit, reptile.

It's all tangled together in one thing. We use the systems that we've evolved to rapidly identify predatory reptiles, but predators of all sorts, but predatory reptiles for the point of this argument. Once we've become capable of abstraction, we used the same damn system to represent problems, abstract problems.

You know because we know how evolution works. It's a conservative business. Once you lay the platform for one kind of perception or cognition, then you transform that; you increase its power and generalizability. You have to build it on the same platform. You know, it's like the continuous generation of new versions of Windows.

You’ve already got the infrastructure in place. You can't just demolish everything completely and build it from scratch. We have the same body plan as reptiles and mammals and birds and whales and, not fish, but you know, that's a pretty wide range of things that basically have the same skeleton we do.

So evolution is a very conservative process. Now, my nephew intuited that if you confronted the heart of the problem, you could extract out something that would protect you from the problem itself. That's what human beings do, right? We're always on the frontier. Some of us are on the frontier, and there's always a frontier.

You know, we conceptualize the frontier as the place where our knowledge ends. There are journals called the frontiers of neurology, and we also think about that as the cutting edge, right? Well, what's it cutting into? Well, it's cutting into Tiamat. That's one way of thinking about it. It's sort of a variant of Plato's idea that you cut nature at the joints. There’s a knife-like element to it.

Well, and that’s partly because, of course, you do use a knife to cut things up so that you can figure out what they are. You know, the symbols are as grounded in reality as they can possibly be. They're not—as Jung pointed out—the symbols aren't trying to make things hard; they're trying to make things we don’t understand easy.

The symbol stands when you get out to the frontiers. All you've got when you look past the frontiers into the abyss is the symbol. The symbol is created by the parts of your mind that are capable of sort of groping blindly in the darkness and formulating monstrous representations of what might be there as first-pass approximations of what it is. Then, of course, you refine that, you refine that, and you refine that, and at some point, it gets so refined that you can articulate it and you can lay it down in a mathematical theory, and you can control it.

But to begin with, it starts like that. Now, there's a matter-spirit element here, and there's an informational element. I think the best way to approach that is to think about it from a Piagetian perspective. Now, Piaget was a constructivist, so this is how he thought children learned things: they would run through a routine that they'd mastered.

They started out with just basic reflexes. So there were things they could do as soon as they were born. For example, they can take in milk, and that also helps them establish an initial relationship with the mother, and their eyes are roughly focused in, so far as they're focused at all, about the same distance that the mother's face would be from their eyes if they're breastfeeding.

They're capable of some movements, and their tongue and their mouth are pretty wired up, and they get control over their eyes relatively quickly. Then they start to experiment with these reflexes. You know, they can kind of fling their arms around because they moinate from the center outward, so they start out undifferentiated, basically, and then they differentiate outward and become more and more articulated.

They learn to experiment with their basic reflexes and modify them, and you know, it's like you think about when you're first learning to dance. You kind of clunk around, you know? You lose these low-resolution movements, and those are often, by the way, controlled more by your right hemisphere.

Once they become high-resolution and extremely skilled movements, they start to be more controlled by your left hemisphere. You sort of start out like Frankenstein, you know, and you end up like a new if you're fortunate. Although you probably—stay more like Frankenstein; at least I do.

So now what Piaget pointed out was that—you want to remember that Piaget was mostly interested in figuring out how people figured things out. That was his primary goal, and underneath that, by the way, was the goal of uniting science with religion, which is something that hardly anybody knows about Piaget, but he stated it bluntly and actually wrote a novel about it.

Anyways, he was curious about how people figured things out. His notion was that a child would be lumping along with its sort of low-resolution psychomotor schema, and it would do something that it didn't expect. Now, I don't know how many of you are really familiar with babies, but they have a remarkable startle response.

So if you have a relatively new baby and you blow on it, it just goes like this; you know, it's really amazing. It has a full-body startle; it's quite cool. They're very capable of being surprised by things, and you know, maybe they're laying in their crib and they're looking at a mobile up there. If you buy your child a mobile, by the way, it should be black and white, and you shouldn't hang the damn thing this way, right? Because the child actually is going to be looking up.

So people buy their children mobiles all the time, and from the child's perspective, they just look like lines hanging in the air. It's like, no, no, they're supposed to be facing down; so keep that in mind.

So anyways, the baby's lying in the crib, you know, and it’s looking at things and it's sort of moving around, and maybe it whacks the mobile—so it's pretty—it goes whacks the mobile and goes like this. It's like that was not what it expected.

From Piaget's perspective, what would happen is the child would try to do that again because it was interesting. So in some sense, the first interaction with the mobile was quasi random, you know, because it doesn't really know what it's doing. But maybe it's foot kicked the mobile, and something interesting happened. So the child tries to see if it can organize itself to give that thing a kick again.

Then maybe it'll practice that, you know what kids are like, man, they will obsessively practice something. When my daughter was young, probably 18 months old, we gave her these Disney books. They were hardback; they were only about this big, and maybe ten pages. There were like five of them that fit in a little box.

It turned out not to be so easy to put them in the box. She probably spent, oh God, 40 hours picking up a little hardcover thing and putting it in the box and then picking up another and getting them all in. Then she’d shake them all out, and then she'd do it again.

You might think, well, what was she doing? Well, she was sharpening up her putting-things-into-things ability, which is a pretty good ability because you're going to be doing a lot of that throughout your entire life. By practicing that, that's how she built up that particular subset of transferable skills.

Okay, so then you might think, well, exactly what was that box of books for her? How would you conceptualize it? If you look at it, you say, well, that's a box of books. It's like, no, it's not! It’s a box of books for you, but for her, it was something else—it was a phenomenon that enabled her to extract information about how to organize her motor activity.

You see this with kids all the time. You buy them a toy for one purpose. You buy them a big toy, and then they play in the box. So you know, and it was interesting when we had little kids because they would go around and they would do weird things with things all the time.

So we got milk and milk bottles, at that point, and the milk bottles had these foil wrappers on them, and my daughter would always use those as suns in her little house drawings. She’d be walking around and take things that we’d already categorized as a certain kind of thing, and she’d do something completely different with it.

That's, in part, lack of latent inhibition. The fact that she hadn't categorized the thing meant that it was polyvalent; there were many things that you could do with it instead of the thing that you do once you categorize it.

So Piaget basically conceptualized the unexpected event as a source of new matter, roughly speaking, and as a source of new spirit, roughly speaking. Why? Well, first of all, the novel thing would attract your attention, and then second, as you're interacting with it, you're doing two things. Just like Marduk!

So this little Marduk baby in the crib, it's like by whacking the things with its hands, it starts to conceptualize their function as defined and categorized entity, right? You get a sense of—imagine—imagine this is like, say your eyes are closed and you have a basketball, and there’s a pillar in a room and you’re trying to figure out what’s in the room, and all you can use is the basketball.

But you can move around; you could bounce the basketball off of that pillar a lot, and sooner or later, you develop a visual image of it, right? It’s a low-resolution investigative tool, a basketball, but you could still use it if you’re bouncing off it, so to speak.

You can build up a representation of it, and from the Piagetian perspective, that’s how a child builds up the representation of the world. That’s how it creates the material world for itself, that way! By banging up against it and at the same time, it’s learning how to bang up against it in ever better ways.

So, the unknown, which is the thing that attracts the child's attention, can be best conceptualized. Imagine this: here’s another—here's another—so the child is surprised by a mobile that it kicks, and the child is surprised when it drops a clump of baby food on the floor. The child is surprised when a glass of water tilts over, and the child is surprised when he pulls a dog’s tail and the dog barks.

You know? The child's surprised all the time, okay? So then the question is, what is the similarity between all of those surprising events? If you had to categorize the category of all surprising events, what would that category look like?

You might think, well, that's, you know, that's not an appropriate category. It’s like, well, it’s not clear that that's not an appropriate category because the category of all surprising events is exactly the category of the unknown as such. And as I said before, it's better to know how to deal with the unknown as such than it is to deal with—to know to deal with specific aspects of the unknown.

That’s exactly what was expressed in my nephew's dream, right? He wasn’t going to fight off the little dwarfs; there was no point in it. He had to go to the thing that was the source of the trouble and fight that. You know, that’s how people are. That’s what our most archetypal stories are about.

Some of you are Star Trek fans, perhaps. What’s the motto of Star Trek? It’s to boldly go where no one has gone before, right? And everybody’s pretty happy about that. You know, it’s a very, very basic archetypal story, but it does encapsulate the human relationship with reality.

We think of reality that way. We think of the known and the unknown, and we think of there being a boundary between the known and the unknown, and we think about being on the edge of that boundary and looking over. That’s the archetype of exploratory behavior.

Now, the serpent symbol is even deeper than that because the serpent symbol represents the world before it's even been categorized. It’s like, what’s there when there’s no one there? That’s what this symbol represents. It’s the ultimate in the unknown; it’s the source of all things.

So it’s infinite and self-contained, and it’s matter and spirit at the same time. It’s partly infinite because you never run out of unknown things, and it’s eternal because you never run out of unknown things, and it’s matter because when you interact with it, you conjure up the material world, so to speak, in all sorts of different ways.

You know, sometimes by actually crafting material things, and other times by merely defining the material of the space that you’re in. But you also extract information out of it to build yourself out of. Because you might say, well, where do you come from? Well, part of it is, there you are; you have a biological structure, but obviously we think of nurture. You’re extracting information from the environment all the time.

Now, you might say, well, how do you do that? I think there are a variety of ways. One is, you know, Piaget would say, well, you mimic the world with your motor apparatus. So, for example, when you look at the can—this is part of looking at the can. The can is a graspable object.

That’s the can; that’s how you define it. So this is like the can, and so that’s a pattern insofar as it’s stable in space across time. It’s a pattern, and you can match that pattern, and so it’s a transfer of the pattern here to a transfer to the pattern here, and that’s the use of information.

Information is information. There are lots of different definitions of information, by the way, but the information that we think of is that you can gather, that you can then use, you incorporate it, and then you can use it. So in so far as you're constantly adjusting to the external world and its demands, you're reproducing the pattern of the external world in your body.

That's one form of representation; that's an informed representation. And then you abstract out of that to make your abstract representations. But the point is you're pulling the information out of it. So the unknown is the ultimate source of information, and it can be very, very dangerous.

But it doesn't matter because it's less—the human supposition is that the unknown is there, and it's dangerous, but the best thing you can do with it is confront it voluntarily when it makes itself manifest, when you're prepared. That's your best bet, and that's our archetype fundamentally. That's our bet on reality.

You know, evolutionary biologists say that we occupy the cognitive niche. Well, I'm trying to do that. It’s okay; I will—that's what this next bit is about. So your question is perfectly timed.

Okay, now I want to show you this image that I forgot to put in here. There we go. Okay, so I'm going to walk you through this diagram. In the middle is an anomaly. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about anomaly.

Anomaly is the unexpected that emerges when you’re laying down a routine on the world. You want the world to do something, but it does something else. We've talked about that a lot. What does it do? That something else? Here’s a way of thinking about it.

So the word phenomenon comes from a Greek word, "phainō," and that word means to shine forth. An anomaly is something that shines forth, and you might say, well, what does that mean to me? I would say, well, you can watch for this—like, all you have to do is watch in the next week. Watch the things that attract your attention because they will; there are things that will automatically attract your attention.

You get interested in them, you know, or they catch the corner of your eye, and you have to look at them. I mean, those are the things that are shining forth in some sense. The idea that they're shining forth is actually quite an accurate idea because here’s a way of looking at your perception.

I mentioned that my little daughter would take all these foil things and make suns out of them, and she was always making one weird thing out of something that we’d already categorized. So here's something to think about: what do you see when you look at the world? The answer is mostly you see your memory because you're not smart enough to actually see the world; it's too damn complicated.

So you spent a lot of time seeing the world, and so you've built up all these representations of the world. Now, when you see the world, you use the representation because why the hell wouldn’t you? It’s just so hard to look at the world. So once you learn to do it, you're going to use what you've learned.

Then what you see is what you've learned; you don't see the world. I could even say that as long as things are going your way, you never see the world; you only see your representations of the world. So then you might say, well, what's behind that representation?

Well, what's behind the representation is the thing that shines forth. Now, I think people experience this when they take hallucinogenic drugs because I think what the hallucinogenic drugs do, in part, is stop them from seeing their memories, and then they see the unknown as such more. Although you can never see the unknown as such, everything that’s no longer hyper-attractive and new and revitalizes. That’s what Hawley reported—the doors of perception.

We know that if you’re pre-exposed to a stimulus, and the stimulus means nothing, so first of all, something pops up, and it attracts your attention. But then you see it again and again and again and again, you habituate to it, and then it no longer has any effect on you. It becomes invisible.

I don't really believe that you habituate; I think it's the wrong word. You habituate if it's the kind of stimuli that your spinal cord processes, you know? So if you take a snail and it comes out of its shell and you tap it, it’ll go into its shell; and then it’ll come out, and you tap it, it goes into its shell—and it'll come out. You keep doing that. Sooner or later, you can tap the snail and it won't go into its shell.

The reason is that the snail has figured out that tap does not imply an event that would require a snail to pull into its shell. Now, it hasn't done that because it's all reflex. But in people, we still have those simple reflexes that can just habituate. But then we have much more complex models of the world that we have to actively engage in constructing.

Also, once we construct those, they can stop us from reacting to the stimulus. Now think about it: here you are in this room. Look at everything around you, which you can't do, by the way. But look at everything around you. How many of those things are you reacting to? The answer is none, really.

I bet I could take half of you out of this room, and I could take all of you out of this room, and half of you wouldn't know what color the room is, would you? Right? Because, all of a sudden, then it shines forth. It's like, oh! Now that has meaning again. You wouldn't know what color those sound-absorbing panels on the back are. You probably wouldn't even know those are there. You wouldn't know the color of the floor or the design on the floor. You might not even know the color of the chairs.

And why would that be? It’s because, well, why is it? Why wouldn’t you know those things that you’ve been exposed to so often? Part of the answer to that is—and this is an interesting way of thinking about it—it doesn't matter. Well then, you might think, well, what does matter mean? Because matter is a weird word, right? Because things are made out of matter, right?

But you can also think that things are made out of what matters, and it’s actually more accurate to think of things as being made out of what matters. What happens when you build a model of what matters is that most of it stops mattering. And that's okay because you don't want to be overwhelmed by everything all the time.

Maybe that’s a paradisal, or maybe a hellish experience, but it makes you nonfunctional. There's just not enough of you to process everything all the time. So you zero everything out by building a model of it, and the model says, "You—this is zero; it’s irrelevant; it has no bearing whatsoever on what you're trying to accomplish in this time and place," and it ceases to draw your attention.

Now then you think, wait a sec! Not everything has ceased to draw my attention. Now that's a strange thing—a strange thing. You remember that little snitch thing that Harry Potter used to chase around when he was playing Quidditch? That's the unknown, by the way. That's actually a symbol of the unknown. It’s called the winged chaos.

I had no idea how the hell J.K. Rowling knew about the winged chaos—or the round chaos is another way of describing it because if you put round chaos into Google, the only thing you get is my website. Now, it’s something I took from Jung. But it's pretty damn obscure. Apparently, she studied a lot of alchemy before she wrote Harry Potter, and that knowledge, consciously or not, made it into the text. She's pretty damn smart, so she’s creative, you know?

If you're creative—there's always a dance between your consciousness and your unconscious mind, a creative dance. Things emerge, and you play with them, but they emerge and then you play with them like the writers I know—their characters come alive for them.

Then they just write down what the characters are likely to do. There’s going to be some conscious direction, but it’s this dance between unconsciousness and consciousness that really makes up creativity. But anyways, you know in the Harry Potter Quidditch game, what happens when Harry gets the little ball? Right?

So there’s really two games going on at the same time: there’s the game everyone else is playing, and then there's the game that the seeker is playing. When the seeker wins, everyone wins. That’s the rule in Quidditch. That’s the rule—when the seeker wins, everyone wins. That’s an archetype too.

So the round chaos, the thing that Harry's chasing—that's the coolest thing because that was the alchemical representation of matter, and it was a container. It contained—it’s like the dragon, in some sense. It contained matter and spirit, and if you caught it, then you could inculcate the matter or the spirit and utilize the matter.

Now back to what attracts your attention—I hate to say this, but because what attracts your attention is the same thing that Harry's chasing in the Quidditch games. It’s the same thing. Now it’s the category of what attracts your attention. Jung was very interested in this. He thought that what attracted your attention was a consequence of the manifestation of the higher self—the self is what he called it.

The self is what you are; the ego is what you think you are, and it might also—close enough. The self is what you actually are. Well, you have no idea what you actually are because you don’t know very much about yourself, and you’re really, really, really complicated. There are lots of things going on that you have no idea about.

The world is a really strange place, and the self is also the thing that you are now and the thing that you were, and all of the things that you could potentially become. That’s a strange idea. So maybe you guys can help me think about this, you know, because I've been thinking for a long time about these sorts of things.

You know, so there’s that—you might say, well, is the unknown, is that a reasonable representation of the unknown as such? The unknown as such is the place from which matter and spirit emerges.

Okay, now you think, well, no, I'm saying that's the best definition of reality. That’s the best definition—or we're going to make that proposition. You say, "Well, no, no, that's not right." The best definition of reality is material reality. Material reality, you can decompose it down to the elemental and the atomic level, and that’s objective reality.

Everything else is a secondary manifestation of that, and that’s the modern worldview, although we don’t—and can’t factor consciousness into that. But whatever—it's a pretty powerful view; it's enabled us to get a lot of places. So then, if you're going to offer a counterposition, and by the way, although it took me probably 30 years to figure this out, there are many other people who have made this case.

Heisenberg, for example, made the case that I'm making, and Jung made the case that I'm making, although I knew that. Other people have wandered down this path fundamentally, so it's not as idiosyncratic or strange as you might think. What do you see? What is it that you are facing when you face the future?

Now, there’s a variety of ways of thinking about that, but let's think about how you act and how you think when you think about confronting the future. I would say, well, you see the future as a field of possibilities, right? You do. That’s what you do. You see the future as a field of possibilities, and you use your faculty of imagination to map potential routes through that sea of potentiality.

Because you imagine that you could be A or you could be B. You could be a plumber, you could be a lawyer; you could be a supermodel, you could be a nerd. Like, there’s all these possibilities that lie open to you, and some of them are more at hand than others in that you could get from here to there very rapidly.

So for example, if you wanted to get a drink of water in the next ten seconds, you could probably make that reality manifest itself. But if you wanted to be a billionaire, then it’s going to take a fair bit of maneuvering to make that reality manifest itself. Some are there and some are far. But you act as if what you’re up against is possibility, and then what you also act out is that you’re the thing that can transform itself in response to the transformations of that possibility.

Everyone believes that, even though they don’t notice it. So your parents say, "Live up to your potential." What in the world is that? Your potential! Now it’s weird, it seems to me—it’s weird; it’s hard to measure. I mean, if I gave you guys an IQ test, that would be some clunky way of measuring part of your potential, but it’s not even easy for us to measure potential.

Then you think, well, what is the stuff that we call potential? It's not the way things are; it's the way they could be. It seems to be that they could be a whole bunch of ways, not just one. What seems to happen is that this field of potential collapses into a single actuality as we interact with it.

Now I should also point out that there are models propagated, mostly by John Wheeler and his school. He’s a quantum physicist. His hypothesis, he calls his hypothesis, it from bit—bit being a piece of information. He believes that the ground of reality is basically something that’s best conceptualized as information, and that when consciousness interacts with it—whatever consciousness happens to be—it transforms itself from potential to actuality.

It snaps into place, and there’s weird corollaries to this. Here’s a weird—a bloody weird thing. This is from Wheeler: let’s say you go outside and you look at a distant galaxy. It’s maybe, who knows how far it is away; it doesn’t really matter. Three million light-years away, you look at it; a photon hits your retina. Wheeler claims that that photon couldn't have left that star 30 million years ago unless your eye was there now to perceive it.

That’s a bloody weird thing to say. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up. I wouldn’t say something like that unless I was reasonably sure that that is, in fact, what he would say. Wheeler believes that the quantum waveform, which is, I think it’s something like this horizon of potentials, doesn’t become realized until it’s interacted with by something that’s conscious.

Not everybody believes Wheeler, but the physicists who don’t believe Wheeler believe something that’s even weirder. They believe that every time a quantum event—so, if you go down far enough into the subatomic realm, you get to events that are no longer divisible, basically. So a quantum event, for example, would be the bouncing of an electron from one shell to a lower shell, in which case, if I remember correctly, it emits a photon.

So the bounce is a quantum event. The electron goes from here to here, but it doesn't pass through the intervening space, however that happens, and then it releases a photon, and the photon is a quantum event. So things are quantum because at some point, you can't break them down any further.

Your computer screen is quantized, right? Because if you get the resolution up higher enough, you can see the singular pixels that it’s made out of, and that’s it. You can’t go any further than that. So these other physicists believe that every time there’s a quantum event that could go one way or could go another, a new universe is created in which, if it goes one way here, it goes the other way in that new universe.

There are infinite numbers of infinitely branching universes. You might say, "Well, where are those?" And the answer is they don’t know. They can’t really detect them in some sense. Then you might say, "Well, that’s a hell of a theory to explain something simple; all you do is posit an infinite number of infinite universes and poof, you solved your problem."

It’s hardly an Aam's razor solution. Then you might say, "Well, why even bother with that theory?" Part of the answer is, well, there are people that are working very hard on quantum computation. Quantum computation involves the use of these things that I don't comprehend at all called qubits—q-u-b-i-t-s.

A qubit is a state of matter that could be a variety of different states but isn't any of those yet. You can use those qubits to compute, but the simplest way of saying what you're doing when you're doing quantum computation is that you're using the universes that are pretty close to ours to do your computations in so that you can get a lot more done in a lot shorter time because you're doing some things in this universe and you're doing other things in a bunch of other universes and so that’s a lot more efficient.

You might think, "Well, sure, but quantum computation does work." Now, there's even a company that has manufactured what they claim is a quantum computer, although you can do quantum computations at very local levels. That's been demonstrated, no one doubts it. It's published in journals like Science and Nature—this actually happens.

There's a company that claims that they've produced a commercial quantum computer, and people aren't sure if that's true or not for again reasons I don't understand. But the computer is capable of doing certain kinds of calculations much faster than a normal computer can. So that’s all pretty damn weird.

That's for sure. Now, it seems to me and I wrote a paper with my graduate students about this. We were stretching our knowledge to the right to the end of our limits. We were trying to unite the theory of anxiety with thermodynamics, basically, and we published this paper in a journal called Psych Review, which is a very good journal; it's very hard to publish in Psych Review.

It’s the only paper I've ever published there, and we basically proposed that when you get anxious, what you see in front of you, what you perceive in front of you, you can't actually see it with your eyes. It's more like you perceive it with your body, or your body perceives it.

What you see unfolding in front of you is a large and indeterminate space of potential worlds, roughly speaking, and the reason you get anxious is because all of a sudden there are all those potential worlds you have to deal with, and you didn't think that you were going to have to deal with any of them.

So you might say, well, when does that happen to you? I would say, okay, so it's 20 below, and you're late for class, and you jump in your car, and it’s snowing like mad. You drive two miles, and all of a sudden your car stops. Then you might say, well, what is it that you’re sitting in now? You will say, well, obviously I’m sitting in a car.

It’s like, that’s by no means obvious that what you're sitting in is now a car! It could be a tomb if it's cold enough! Even if it’s not a tomb, you're not where you expected to be. You’re not where you want to be, and it isn't exactly clear where you are.

So your body is going to get all—I just saw a dinosaur! It’s an apprehension; it’s a perception. It's a perception that the map that you were using to map your environment, to define all the objects and define your relationship to those objects no longer fits the territory.

Then you might say, well, if your map doesn’t fit the territory, then what the hell is the territory? The answer to that is many things, many of which you cannot control. You know you might get lucky, and all that has to happen is that somebody comes and tows you along and takes you to a mechanic.

But even that’s going to rattle your chain, because well, if your car breaks down, how do you feel about having to take it to a mechanic? Well, mostly you don’t feel good about it. Why? It’s like, well, you don’t know if the mechanic will find the damn problem. You don’t know if you might have to get a new car.

You don’t know if you can trust the mechanic to tell you whether you need a new car. Maybe it’s a $2 part, and he offers to put in a whole new motor. Then you have to deal with it; you have to find a place to take it; you have to assess whether or not the shop is honest.

So it's like, a whole can of snakes; and part of that can of snakes is, can I—is it the case that the mechanic to whom I take this car is the thing that he presents himself as? Now in an honest transaction, that problem never comes up because you just assume that the person in front of you is two-dimensional and you can assume that they are identical with what they say—that's an honest transaction.

So then you're not dealing with a can of snakes; you’re dealing with a few words. But if it’s not an honest transaction, it’s like can of snakes. Maybe someone stops to help you on the side of the road and you think, well, that's a good thing or is that a bad thing? Because the person who's approaching you in the snowstorm when it’s isolated is also a can of snakes.

Then there's the other snakes that come out, like, well, you aren't going to get to class, and so maybe you have an exam, and so then there’s the whole, well, what happens if I miss this exam? Maybe that’ll, you know, I won’t do so well in this course, and then I have to go talk to the professor, and it's going to be a big mess, etc.

I would say that what happens when your car stops on the way to school is that everything around you turns into a mass of snakes. Now obviously, that’s a symbol, right? Because they’re not real snakes. But they’re not your damn car either. You might to the degree that you confuse what you’re sitting in with a car; all you’re going to be is irritated and upset because it’s going to manifest none of the features of a car because a car isn’t a block of metal with four tires on it.

A car is something you can ignore while it takes you from point A to point B. As soon as it isn’t doing that, it isn’t a car; it’s some bloody chunk of metal with all sorts of parts that you don’t understand that a bunch of people you don’t know anything about are going to have to manipulate before it will turn back into a car at your expense.

The day that you proposed, which you had all mapped out, was quite simple—poof! All of a sudden, it’s not that day at all. God only knows what sort of day it’s going to be. It’s a perfect setup for a movie. These things happen all the time; you know, someone's car breaks down on a dark lonely road, and you know God only knows who comes out of the shadows to help.

The question is, where are you when you don’t know where you are? I’d say you’re as close to reality as ever as you're ever going to get. When you are where you don’t know where you are, and it’s a bit much to take in.

So people do everything they can all the time to make sure that the amount of reality that they have to come into contact with is delimited, filtered, and controlled. We do that a bunch of different ways. We do that by organizing our beliefs in a certain way—that's Terror Management Theory fundamentally, right?

We organize our beliefs to shield ourselves from the reality of death. But we also organize our societies and our interpersonal relationships in such a way that we’re shielded from death and so that we don't kill each other. That has nothing to do with the utility of our beliefs and keeping the fear of death at bay—that's something that keeps the lights on and keeps this room warm when it's minus 20 outside.

You think, well here we are in this room, and everyone knows what this room is. But it’s not the same room if someone pulls out a pistol. It is really not the same place! In so far as you think it’s the same place, all that means is you’re in real trouble because it is not the same place. So things can shift and change on you all the time.

In fact, to some, that's what time is doing. Okay, now you remember the Osiris-Horus story, right? Okay, so there’s Osiris, and Osiris is like the way things are. Now there’s a problem with that. He’s like the map. There’s a problem with that. The territory is always moving around, and your map is never quite up to date.

You can’t rely on Osiris; you know that. If you have one of those Google GPSs, now and then they’ve taken me like to the middle of parking lots because the map thinks there's something there that isn’t there, and there's nothing there. Maybe it’s not updated. It wasn’t Google; it was the thing that I was using in my car because Google tends not to do that.

But anyways, when the map isn’t an accurate representation of the territory—an accurate, pragmatic representation of the territory—then you can’t navigate in it, and you’re going to end up in places that you don’t understand. So the map gets out of date as the territory changes. Osiris isn’t good enough; the old map never works. It kind of works, and so you need Horus because Horus is the thing that updates the map.

It’s like he’s attending to those things—he’s attending to those locals where the map is no longer valid and