Lecture: Biblical Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers

So I'm going to read you something. I get some. I had a lot of mail. And I don't know where I got this. I've been a lot of different places in the last week, and this showed up at one of them, and I'm going to read it to you. I have no idea what to make of it. It's written in a female hand, so that's about all I can tell. But there's no address or name on it.

This isn't a question but a comment, or more accurately perhaps a message. I spent this past weekend in an ayahuasca ceremony, which, for those of you who don't know, is a South American visionary plant medicine. Some of you may roll your eyes at this, but ayahuasca brings you into direct contact with the archetypal realm of being. Users of this medicine—initiates I should say—refer to ayahuasca as she because the spirit of the plant is decidedly feminine. An encounter with ayahuasca is an encounter with the great mother of creation, the Goddess, the void from which all things come, the feminine counterpart of logos.

Dr. Peterson, you appeared in one of my ayahuasca visions. Might account for why I've been rather fatigued lately. Dr. Peterson, you appeared in one of my ayahuasca visions, and I asked her, "Who is Jordan Peterson? What is he doing?" Which is something I'd really like to know as well. And she responded with crystalline clarity, quote, "Here he is, here to invoke and initiate the divine masculine principle on Earth at this time."

So I'm up here to thank you deeply and profoundly on behalf of the great mother herself, the Goddess, the divine feminine principle who has been eagerly awaiting the awakening of the masculine principle into divinity and service. So, you know, get a letter like that every day? Actually, I get a letter like that every day. So you know what went through my head when I read this? And this is, of course, a completely crazy parallel, but we know one of the things I learned to do as a psychotherapist was just to tell people who were talking to me what came into my head.

It isn't what I'm thinking exactly because that's not exactly the same thing. You know, what comes into your head is more like a dream; it comes unbidden. It's like your imagination. If you're thinking, there seems to be like a voluntary element of that, right? I mean, some—who knows how we think—but it seems partly voluntary at least. Jung thought about, Carl Jung thought about it like a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. There is a constant, continual dialogue, but when things just pop into your mind, it's not much different than walking into a room and having something there.

This is an observation I also derived from Jung, by the way, because he pointed out quite rightly that people don't really think that thoughts appear to them. Now you can think because you can take the thoughts that appear to you, and then you can subject them to criticism and elaboration and so on, instead of just assuming that they're true right off the bat; but people often don't do that. They just—something just pops into their head, and then they assume that it's true.

Anyways, one of the things that I tend to do in psychotherapy is just to tell people what pops into my head because, well, why? Because then the person that is talking to me gets one person's untrammeled opinion—not even that reaction—not opinion. It's not really an opinion, I don't think. An opinion maybe is what I think later, and there's this personal flavor to it.

What popped into my head was the story about Socrates. You know, he had this, when he was being put on trial by the Athenians for corrupting the nation's youth—something I've been accused of, by the way—although it's not self-evident to me that it's me doing the corrupting. He said that somebody had asked him once, had asked the Delphic oracle once, and the Delphic oracle was this retreat that you could go to if you were an ancient Greek citizen. You'd be there, and you'd have a dream, and then you'd go ask the Delphic oracle to interpret it.

Nobody really knows what was up with the Delphic oracle, how that worked exactly, but she would interpret your dream in a...