2017 Personality 02/03: Historical & Mythological Context

[Music] Now you know I used this picture to represent my class, and you might not know anything about this picture. It's a picture of Jonah being thrown up out of a whale's belly after spending three days inside it. It's an old biblical story. It's a myth. It's a fairy tale. That's one way of looking at it, and I don't mean that derogative manner. We know, for example, that some of the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales are perhaps fifteen thousand years old. They've been traced way back; they're really, really old.

Old stories are strange, and they're strange because, well, they've been told generation after generation after generation. You could imagine that something retold over such an expansive time has been reduced to its gist many, many times. Nothing that's in the story anymore is superfluous; it’s all meaningful in some sense. It's sort of like a meta story—that's one way of thinking about it. Imagine that you took a hundred adventure books, and you had to extract out the central features of an adventure book.

Now, it's hard to do that; it's like you're averaging across them or something like that, distilling them in some manner. Then you get a meta adventure, and it would be like a myth upon which all adventures are based. This story is actually one of those stories, and I'm going to tell you what I think the story means. I'm not saying that this is all it means, because most stories of this sort are, in some sense, inexhaustible, just like great works of art are inexhaustible.

There's more information in them than you can possibly articulate. That's what makes them profound; that's why you go look at them. Otherwise, someone could just tell you about the painting and that would be the end of that, but that doesn't work. So, that Jonah is being spat up by this whale, and of course, on the face of it, that's an impossibility because, well, you can't live inside a whale. That's why it's impossible.

Now, you may remember, and likely do, that you all know a story about someone who is inside a whale. That's Pinocchio, right? And you know, you go to that movie, maybe even as an adult you watch that movie, and Geppetto is down there in the whale in his little boat. You know, it's big, cavernous inside; you don't really care that there's a bunch of things you don't care about. You don't care that those are drawings and not real people; you don't care about that.

You don't care that the inside of a whale isn't a cavern, and you don't care that Pinocchio is a puppet for that matter. None of that matters to you at all, and that's because you're really strange creatures, and you don't even notice when you're doing something absolutely absurd. That's one of those times when you are.

But if someone taps you on the shoulder and says, "You know, you're just watching drawings of a puppet. Puppets can't really move autonomously." And now, he's at the bottom of the ocean; you have no idea why he's going to rescue his father, and you're just sitting there annoyed, and you're okay with that. You'll say "shut up" because I want to finish watching a movie.

And so that's interesting; you see, that tells you something about your unconscious if you're psychoanalytically minded because you're doing something that you cannot account for. Now, you might say, "Well, it's enjoyable." Well that's deep, man; you're really, really going a long ways with that.

The question is: A, why is it comprehensible? B, why is it enjoyable? C, exactly what are you doing there? And you think that whatever you are doing there is so valuable that you'll actually pay to do it. Weird. Very, very weird. And you know, when you read about, let's say, the archaic rituals of tribal people, and you ask yourself just what are they up to? You might think, "Well, they're up to the same thing that you're up to when you go see a movie."

And then you might also notice that the most expensive artifacts, or among the most expensive artifacts that human beings create, are movies. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on them, and we consider that a good deal. And you know, it drives our technology too, because the high-tech movies, like the Marvel movies that require so much computer animation, they actually drive the demand for high-end graphics chips.

So, our technological advance forward is actually motivated, in part, by our desire to represent things fictionally in ever more spectacular manner. So, Jonah—let me tell you the story of Jonah, and I'll tell you why I'm going to tell you it. This is from Camille Paglia, who's a critic of the modern university and a very brilliant woman. I would say very controversial, incredibly rapid speaker, and she can think so fast it's just unbelievable. She's really fun to watch if you like that sort of thing—a vicious adversary in an argument.

She says the number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students, but ignorant professors who have substituted narrow expertise and theoretical sophistication—a preposterous term—for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. Art is a vast interconnected web work, a fabricated tradition, and over concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Here's a problem I had. I wrestled with this when I was trying to understand some of the things that I'm going to teach you about. There are some things that you kind of have to grasp as a whole, you know? Sometimes you have a flash of insight, and a bunch of things that you didn't know were related fall together. That's supposed to happen in psychotherapy when you link different disparate patterns of behavior together because you've linked them, say, with a single cause.

You get this excited feeling of illumination and possibility, and there are forms of communication that require the simultaneous realization of a multitude of disparate phenomena, like a movie can be like that. You know, you listen to a movie, you watch a movie, and then you don't know what the hell is going on, and then something happens near the end and everything clicks together.

It's because you've sort of seen the thing as a whole, and a lot of the things that we—a lot of the ways that we interact with the world that are mysterious are like that. This is what Paglia is referring to, and this is a psychoanalytic proposition, I would say, or a romantic proposition.

Now, the idea roughly is that way out in the periphery of reality are all those things that not only do you not know, but you don't even know you don't know, right? There you're completely blind to their existence, and then there's unknown things that you have some suspicions about, and then there's unknown things that you can start to imagine and act out and dramatize.

All of that is on the periphery of our knowledge. That's a psychoanalytic dictum. Where do thoughts come from? Well, partly they're nested in dreams. Dreams are the birthplace of thoughts. Fantasy—it's not that surprising; fantasy is the birthplace of ideas. You know, if you're thinking about what you're going to do in the future, you enter into a reverie, a dream state, and you contemplate multiple possibilities.

Then you start thinking them through; you use your imagination to search beyond where you are. The collective human attempt to do that is our mysterious humanistic artistic tradition, which is very difficult to justify from a formal articulate point of view. What good is dance? Like, what is it that you're doing when you're dancing? Well, you don't care because you like to dance—why? Well, you don’t know.

What you do, it's built into you. Music is a human universal. Cultures use music to organize themselves, right? They use music to catalyze their identities; they use music to unite around. You know, in more archaic societies, less differentiated societies, let's say, a mask that represents part of the family tradition will have a particular design, and there'll be a particular song written for it, and there'll be a particular dance about it.

The song and the dance are something like the symbolic representation of a mode of being in the world. Like maybe the mask is a wolf mask, and so you act out the wolf, and there's music that goes along with that. You think, well, what are you doing when you're acting out the wolf? Part of that is what you're trying; you're trying to understand wolves.

You know, it's an image; it's imitation in part. You know if you live in the natural world, and if you hunt, and if you're preyed upon, then understanding the things that you're hunting and preying upon is useful. There are also perhaps useful things to learn from them. We play this strange symbolic game with the world like children pretending.

That's another way of thinking about it, and we do that to act out and to begin to understand things we don’t understand, like how to act. Now, for me, the most important question in life is not what the world is made of. In fact, I would say that's a relatively new preoccupation of humankind.

You know, we didn't really formalize—you could say that the ancient Greeks originated, laid the groundwork for the emergence of empirical science, and then it emerged more formally with Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, five, six hundred years ago—not very long. Like a blink, blink to the eye in human terms. Before that, people were engineers; they could build things and so forth, but they didn't know how to—they weren't scientists; they didn't really conceptualize the world as an objective place.

We do that automatically because science has seeped so far into our set of presuppositions that doesn’t make us good scientists, by the way, but it does make us believe that the fundamental reality of the world is an objective reality. I'm not going to dispute that particularly, but it leaves one set of questions unanswered, probably by its nature, because it wasn't designed to answer the question.

Then that question is: How should one conduct oneself in the world? And that's an important thing since you're alive, and hypothetically you'd rather stay alive, and while you're alive, you probably don't want to suffer any more than you have to, and no more stupidly than you have to. It might also be good if some of the things that you want actually happened.

So, you know, you're motivated to know how to act, and people are always telling each other how to act. We're sending each other information all the time about how to act. We do that with our expressions on our face, and of course, when we talk to people, we always look at their face.

That's because their face tells you what they're up to. You know, if they're smiling and paying attention to you, well then you can assume that you're doing something right. If they're looking annoyed or disgusted, that's a particularly bad one, then you might think. You might take a hint from that, especially if you know three or four people are doing it at the same time.

So, we're reflecting some ideal to one another constantly, and the more attentive you are, the more likely you are to act in accordance with that ideal, and the more likely you are to move towards it. You may not even know what the ideal is in an articulated sense; in fact, you probably don't.

You know, you could come up with, "Well, you know, a good person is nice and friendly and, you know, cooperative." Yeah, yeah, you know, that's all just cliché, but you don't—you know, your conception might be very hollow. It's very likely that it's very hollow, even though you may be able to act in a very sophisticated manner.

Alright, so anyways, this is a story. I'd say, oh, it's a meta story. It's what would happen if you collected a bunch of stories, and then you extracted out a story from them. It's sort of a story about destiny, and it's couched in religious language. But that's okay, because most of these distilled stories form the foundation of religious texts, and religious texts and myths and stories are, as I said, part of the outer perimeter of our society.

They have a coherent nature, and they form a foundation, and it's on that foundation that everything that you take for granted rests, even if you don't understand the foundation. So I can give you an example. There's a metaphysical idea that underlies Western civilization, and that metaphysical idea is that the individual has transcendent worth.

That's the idea from which the notion of natural rights is derived, and of course, our legal system is predicated on the idea that you have certain natural rights. They're enshrined in the Bill of Rights, for example, and in the states when the Bill of Rights was being formulated, the formulators said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." What does that mean? They're axioms of faith right there; they're propositions, and there's no proof for them. They're a mode of operation in the world.

And so the hypothesis is something like, well if I treat you like there's something about you that has transcendent value, implicit intrinsic value, whatever that might be, and there are stories about that, and we'll talk about that. And you do the same to me, and then we set up a body of laws that recognizes the sovereignty of the individual so that the law itself has to act with respect towards every individual, even if that individual has done something reprehensible, which is very weird if you think about it.

Then our society will work better, and well, perhaps that's true. But for better or worse, that is what this society is predicated on, and that's a very, very, very, very, very, very old idea. It's an idea that people came to with great difficulty because it was over thousands of years that people learned how to take their little tribal groups, which are always squabbling with one another, right? Because they're human beings; they're very violent, and tribal groups are by no means civilized.

There's no noble savage like the Europeans thought. If you study tribal groups in the world today, the murder—the death rate by violence is unbelievably high. Something unites a tribe within a tribe; it's often kinship. But then tribes come together to form larger civilizations, and they have to determine some sort of meta-principle that guides them so that they can cooperate and come together without destroying one another.

They have to extract out a principle by which the society might function, and that has to work. Then as societies get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, they have to bring more and more of these diverse traditions together and extract out something from them that has power and functional utility that allows people to unite. This is one of the stories that talks about that; it's a story about individual responsibility and what happens when it's not heeded.

So, you know, because we could say you are a social creature, right to the core, and most of your environment is other people. And those other people want something from you, and you want something from them, so you're going to play games with them. You're either going to be good at it, or you're going to be bad at it, but you're going to play games with them.

And so the game might have rules—really sophisticated rules, in fact. And you'd expect that because as your behavior more and more approximates an ideal, assuming such a thing exists, then you're more and more sophisticated. The nature of the ideal is perhaps more and more complex and difficult to understand. You get a hint of this, though.

You can get a hint of this because you will see if you pay attention to your own soul, your psyche, your unconscious, you'll see that there are people that you admire and that there are people that you have contempt for. That it isn't necessarily that you're a hundred percent accurate in your judgment. You know, it's not such a bad idea to criticize your first impressions, but those states exist. And so there's a reason you admire someone, and there's a reason you have contempt for someone.

There may be multiple reasons, and that's a hint to your intrinsic value structure. It's a hint about your intrinsic value structure, right? You wouldn't admire someone unless there was something about them that you valued, and perhaps that you would also like to be able to do. And you wouldn't despise someone or have contempt for them if you didn't feel that something they were doing was wrong and that it would be wrong if you did it too.

You're bringing to bear on the situation an implicit morality, and you have to do that because, as I said, you can't act without a morality. Because if you're going to act, you're going to try to make things better. If otherwise, why bother? If you're acting to make things better then some things have to be better and some things have to be worse, and that's a value structure, so you have one.

Alright, so Jonah, he gets a call from God, and God tells him that there's a city, Nineveh, that's falling into moral disarray. Now, what does that mean? Well, it's a universal story; it's like all cultures are always falling into disarray; it's their nature. Just entropy does that, right? Things change; the world changes; the environment changes, and the culture doesn't keep up very well.

And then, of course, it has corrupt elements, and so it's an eternal story. The individual is always placed in relationship to a culture that's somewhat corrupt. The question is: well, what do you do about it? If the answer is nothing, well then it'll just get more corrupt. If the answer is be corrupt too, then it will just get more corrupt. So the answer has to be to oppose the corruption because that's the only way it's going to stop.

Now God threatens to destroy this city because of its corruption, and I don't think you need to presume anything particularly metaphysical about that to understand it. It's very straightforward that the more corrupt the culture is and the less trust is possible between individuals, the less productive the culture is going to be. Because why do anything if some corrupt person is just going to come and take it? You know, it might even be that the culture is so corrupt that if you are good for something and you produce resources, you're actually more likely to get killed because you have something of value.

So like this, you're just not going anywhere with that, and why would you work if you didn't have any sense that you know you store up the value of your work for some reasonable time in the future? So if the society is corrupt and there's no trust, it's degenerating, and you know it might live for a while but isn't going to last very long.

So that's the idea: corrupt societies collapse. That leaves open what corruption means. Anyways, Jonah thinks, "No, no, bloody way! I'm not going to that city; they can go to hell as far as I'm concerned," and that's really what he thinks. "Why in the world should I do anything about it anyways?" And these are good objections.

It's like why would you do that? You'll face this, believe me, in your life. You will face this. In fact, you already do, always, constantly, continually in small ways perhaps when you're interacting with people who aren't treating you properly. And when you're acting—those might be your parents, they might be your friends, they might be people at your workplace, they might be professors.

They're playing a crooked game, and you don't like it, and you know it's crooked. So then the question is, well, what should you do about it? Well, if you know you're correct, and know it's crooked, it's not so good to play along with it. I mean, we'll say that, you know, it's crooked by your own standard of values; it degrades you to play along with it.

You're going to stand up and oppose it? Well, no, probably not. You're probably going to do what Jonah did: jump on a ship and get the hell out of there. You know, that's a logical thing to do, but it doesn't solve the problem. I think this has something to do with human ethical responsibility, because there are other old stories.

I'll tell you one likely where the son of the king, the Lion King, the son of the king, goes off, and he's some pathetic adolescent. Then he's shamed by the reappearance of his old girlfriend into turning into something vaguely useful. He opens his eyes and goes back and fights Scar, and you know it's a scene of hell, right? Because there's fire everywhere, and he fights Scar, finds Scar killed his father; he casts him into the pit, roughly speaking.

Then the rain comes, and then, you know, the movie returns to its beginning fundamentally. It's a paradise lost, paradise regained—that's the movie. And I mean, that's the story of human beings. You know, you're in a place that's working out pretty well; something happens to knock you off your perch; you're down in the chaos for a good amount of time. Maybe you never get out, but maybe you learn something down there; maybe a strength in your character, then you pop up to a new place, and maybe it's better, better you now.

I'm not being overly optimistic about this; I know perfectly well that people encounter impediments during their life that they find almost impossible to recover from. But it's the best shot you have. So anyways, Jonah runs away, but God isn’t very happy about that because it’s actually Jonah’s destiny. It’s necessary for Jonah to repair the city. So God sends a storm, and you know, the waves are high.

And I think what that means is because the water is often a symbol for the unconscious, and that’s because things lurk down there in the water that you could pull up that are useful—monstrous things that you can pull up; they're useful; you can fish for them. You can go fishing in your own being for answers, which is what you do when you try to think, right? You ask yourself a question and you wait; maybe an answer appears. It's like, where did that come from? You didn't know what the answer was before it appeared, but it just popped into being out of nowhere. Who knows?

So you fish. So anyways, the waves come, and the boat's going to be knocked over, and that's what happens. I think when you know you should do something— I mean everyone has this experience, I believe—perhaps you would be willing to put up your hands if this experience is foreign to you. Okay, just part of your telling you should do something, and it's hard to do it; it's effortful.

Maybe you're afraid of it, and so you don't do it; you just procrastinate, right? And so how do you feel about that? Good, I mean what do you feel? That you're betraying yourself? Your anxiety actually gets worse, not better, even though you know you can put it off moment to moment, but that doesn't help. Because every time you put it off, the anxiety just grows a little bit.

You're not proud of yourself; you have a sense that you're making things more chaotic than they should be, you know? If you do that long enough, and I'm sure many of you have had that experience—if you do that long enough, if that becomes habitual, things will get so stormy around you that you'll fall right into the chaos, into the watery chaos, and maybe you’ll drown.

So it's not a very good idea to run from your destiny, let's say, whatever that might be. And you need a destiny; you need a place to aim at because that's what gives your life meaning. You need meaning in your life, because life is hard. So you know you need something to buttress yourself against that.

So anyways, they wake Jonah up, and Jonah says, "That's probably my fault," because, like I'm running away from something I'm supposed to do, and you know God isn’t very happy about that. "So why don’t you just throw me overboard?" And the crew isn’t very happy about that, but the waves are really starting to come up, and Jonah's pretty insistent that he's the cause of the problem.

So they draw a lot, and Jonah is chosen. They decide to toss him into the ocean, and immediately everything is calm. So he's a center of chaos because he's not doing what he's supposed to do. Fine.

Well then that whale comes up and swallows him, and then he's in the whale for three days. Now that's a weird thing, the whale—that's the way all that Geppetto's is, that’s a dragon. It's the thing that you have to go out there and conquer to get something of value.

Now when you've made an error, when you've fallen off the pathway, when you deviated from what you know you should do, it produces a state of internal chaos and worry and concern. You're thrust into the unknown; you're thrust into unknown territory and chaos. You don't know what to do, and that's often symbolized by the encounter with a monster, like a dragon. Something that lives under the water.

That's—and I think the reason for that is, as far as I've been able to tell, is that human beings, because we've been prey animals for forever, in our battle with carnivorous lizards, for example, and alligators and even dinosaurs—because there were dinosaurs around at the time of our most distant ancestors—there was even a cat at one point that was adapted with teeth to pierce human skulls.

So it had a head that was exactly shaped to grab you here and put a tooth through the back of your skull. So like we've come through some rough times, man. We have a system in our mind—a threat predator detection system. That's the thing that makes little kids think about monsters in the dark, right?

Because, well, there are monsters in the dark. Parents always say, "Well, there's no monsters in the dark." It's like, that's not true. The dark is full of monsters. There might not be any in your room right at that moment, but that doesn't mean there aren't monsters in the dark. Crimes take place; criminals don't get up at 6:00 in the morning and, like, you know, have breakfast and go rob a bank.

They do that sort of thing at night. People do the things that are fit for the night in the night, and lots of predators are nocturnal, and you can't see very well in the dark. Kids aren't stupid, you know; they've evolved to stay pretty damn close to the fire because the kids that wandered away from the fire got picked off by hyenas and lions and, you know, crocodiles and whatever else the hell was out there to eat the unwary.

So the circuit that we use to defend ourselves against predators as we've evolved cortically—that circuit has come to represent what we don't know in general because the predators, of course, inhabit where we don't know.

Evolution is a conservative force, and we use the circuits that we've evolved to represent new things. The unknown, the chaos, is often represented by a monster that swallows you up. And you know, when you're feeling terrible, you don't say, "Well, I'm feeling up." You say, "I'm feeling down."

Well, why is that? Well, down is worse, I guess. You're flat on the ground when you're down, or you're in a hole or something like that. You're hiding in a hole; you know it's down! And you're threatened by something.

You know, maybe you're threatened by your own inadequacy; that might be part of it. Maybe that's partly what you imagine as a monstrous force because you know your proclivity towards procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld, and that's the underworld—the mythological underworld—that's where you go when things fall apart.

If you understand that, if you know that that's what that means, then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you, and you understand things. You could live, can be organized, going very well, and then something comes up, and poof! Everything changes; some axiom that you were living by.

And it might be the existence of a partner; it might be a job; it might be your health—any of those things go on, and you go somewhere when that happens. You go somewhere; it's a state of being. You're still in the same world, but it's not the same at all anymore. Everything about it is different; it's all negative and dark, and you don't know what to do. You're confused.

So what do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart? Especially if, oh, if it's the worst possible case scenario, and you realize that you actually had something to do with your demise? That's really annoying, you know, when something bad happens to you, and then you grind yourself into bits trying to figure out what the hell happened, and then you realize that, well, you were playing a causal role.

Now, sometimes you're so depressed you assume you're playing a causal role. It's not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination. It isn't that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it, but sometimes you find that you are off the path somehow and maybe even that you knew it and didn't attend to it, and that's why all of this hit the fan.

And so then down there in that chaos, you decide that you're going to do what you're supposed to do instead, and then maybe you get to rise up again, renewed if you're lucky, and then you can go fix the city, and that's what this story's about.

And that's why I picked the image to represent the course because really what happens, you see, with the psychoanalysts, the road to health, if you're not doing well—which means that as you act in the world, you're not getting what you want. There's something wrong with your—the match between your presuppositions and your actions habitual and the way the world is responding to you.

And so it's not turning out for you, and the question is, well, what can you do about that? And one answer might be to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well and to find out what they are and what to do about them. Maybe some of that is maybe you're not moving forward because of fear and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you've never been able to understand.

Maybe one of the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could in fact live properly in the world is to go back to those terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them. That's what psychotherapy is about, in large part. Psychoanalytic behavioral, it doesn't matter—what are you afraid of? What are you avoiding? What are you failing to develop?

Maybe from fear; maybe from avoidance; God only knows; maybe from disgust. How can you get over it? How can you reclaim those parts of yourself? Now, I said in the first lecture that I was going to try to provide you with a schema into which you could place the theorists that we're going to discuss, and it requires going down deep to do that.

There are presuppositions within my presupposition, and this is a psychoanalytic presupposition. It's predicated on a poetic tradition, I would say; an ancient tradition. I learned most of it from reading Jung. It was Carl Jung that helped me understand that we're nested inside a dream; we have to be, because we don't know everything. We have to take things as givens, and the things that we take as givens are nested inside stories, and we accept the stories as valid.

Then outside the stories is the absolute unknown, you know? Partly the stories are tricky, you know? One of the classic stories, it's a variant of the Jonah story, I would say, is St. George and the dragon. That story was represented during the Renaissance and during medieval times thousands and thousands of ways. It's like the story of St. Patrick who chased the snakes out of Ireland; same idea.

The typical St. George story is the Hobbit or Harry Potter. So in the second volume of Harry Potter—correct me if I have any of these details wrong—you remember there's that snake, the basilisk? So this is Magic Castle, right? You guys have no problem with that. Magic Castle, no problem. There's an orphan; he goes to the Magic Castle to learn how to be more than normal, right? The Muggles—the Muggle family. We're not too happy with the Muggle family; they have some blacks.

Now, of course, the reason for that is that, well, that's what teenagers often feel about their parents, right? They fail. "Jeez, these couldn't really be my parents. I must have some other parents who are like together; those are like magical parents, right? Parents that live in the sky." And of course, Harry Potter has earthly parents; that's the Muggles, and Dursley, I think, is the kid; he's one—he's a wonderful piece of work.

And you know ill-formed, spoiled, ill-formed, selfish, very far from the ideal; he's a foil for Harry, and of course, he's appreciated and doted on, and Harry is actually punished for his virtues. That's a classic story, right? To be punished for your virtues—I mean, if you look at the story, the central story in Christianity—the central story in Christianity is about someone who is precisely punished in the worst possible way for the highest possible virtues.

That's what makes it an archetypal story, because there isn't anything more unfair than that. And so it's a limit, in a sense; it can't be worse than that. Being punished for being, you know, unworthy, it's like, "Yeah, yeah, well, at least it makes sense." But to be punished because you have your act together and you're a good person—that's real punishment, and that's what happens to Harry.

So luckily, he finds out that he's magical, which is quite convenient. Off he goes to Wizarding school, and you know, that's actually like taking— that's actually like going and studying the humanities. I mean, it was when they still were, you know, because it's through the humanities that you make contact with the magic of your culture. That makes you more than merely the child of your parents because you are more than merely the child of your parents.

You're the child of nature, and you're the child of culture, and until you understand what that means—understand that you have two sets of parents, like the divine hero always has two sets of parents—you can't construe yourself properly as an individual; you're not situated properly in the world. You don't know what your responsibilities are; you can't orient your values properly, and you will suffer for that.

Because as far as I can tell, because life is so difficult, you have to do something that's truly worthwhile in order to justify it. So, well, that's what all these stories tell you. That's what the story of Jonah is telling you. It's like you have an ethical duty to straighten things up, and if you don't do it, you're going to be sorry.

That story's echoed everywhere. Well, now St. George—well, let's go to Harry Potter—well, that's what we were talking about. So he goes off to the Magic Castle, and he's learning to be a wizard, and he's kind of an interesting character because he's not really good. We find out, I think, that's because—does he have a piece of Voldemort in him?

He's not as good. What happens? Yeah, and that's what that means is that to be good, truly good, you can't just follow rules. That's very clear in the Harry Potter story. You also have to be able to understand and malevolence, and in order to understand malevolence so that you can withstand it, you have to understand that part of you that's malevolent because if you don't, you're naive.

And if you're naive, you're easy pickings. That's a Union idea too. And the Union idea is that part of personality development is to understand your shadow, and the shadow is those things about you that you do not want to admit to.

You can learn about your shadow by reading history. You know, you can read about Auschwitz. You can read about the concentration camps in Russia, and you can imagine yourself as a guard instead of as a heroic rescuer of unfortunate victims, which would be very, very unlikely.

Once you can imagine yourself as a guard—which is a terrifying thing to do—then you understand something about yourself, and I actually think—and I think this is also from students studying Jung—that you cannot have proper respect for yourself until you know that you're a monster because you won't act carefully enough.

You know, if you think, "Well, I'm a nice person. I'd never do anyone any harm." It's like, you're no saint; you can be sure of that. And the harm that you do people can come in many, many ways, and so if you regard yourself as harmless, inoffensive, nice—well, why do you have any reason to be careful? You're like a teddy bear sitting on a shelf; even if you throw it at someone, no one's going to get hurt.

But that isn't what you're like because you're a human being, and human beings are some vicious creatures, and there's utility in knowing that. Because it's also the case, you know, in the Harry Potter series, Harry could stand up against Voldemort and understand him and speak his language because he was infected by him to some degree. A very, very interesting idea.

Anyways, the reason I'm telling you this—and this is worth thinking about—it's like how long were each of those books? Like 500 pages? They're long, eh? And there was how many of them? Seven? And how many of them were sold? I mean, how many of you read every Harry Potter book, right? That's how many of you read at least one.

Okay, how many of you saw the movies? It's like you're all in a cult! You are! I'm telling you, really; that's the truth. It's really the truth. So in the second volume, there's this snake that's zip-it around there—the basilisk, right? And it lives in the underground; that's chaos.

That's chaos, and that's because wherever you are, you're on thin ice, and underneath your thin ice is chaos. Here we are in this unbelievably civilized environment, and everyone's getting along so perfectly, but you know, we've got hot guard lights with electricity; the sewage system is working; no one's hungry. It's like we can be peaceful, but if any of that fell apart—and it could easily fall apart because it's a bloody miracle it ever works at all—then the chaos that's just underneath the surface is going to come up, right?

Now, it's useful to know that because it makes you properly grateful if you really understand it. It makes you proper, be grateful for the bloody miracle that it is that you can be here in peace. So anyways, there's this snake that's underneath the surface, and you know no joke that thing; it's big, and it's ancient.

What happens? If you look at it, it turns you to stone, right? It paralyzes you. Well, that's the more—that's the Gorgon; that's Medusa, the woman with the head of snakes. If you look at her, it paralyzes you. What does that mean? Well, you're walking through the jungle, and a big snake appears. What do you do? You freeze, and no bloody wonder because you're a prey animal, and that's what they do when they see things that are going to eat them.

And so the snake—well, lots of people still die from snakebite, and our ancestors were—and I mean our ancestors like, you know, tens of millions of years ago when they were living in trees and weren't very big; they made a nice snack for a snake. And there's a woman named Lynn Isbell, who's an anthropologist at UCLA, who's correlated the presence of carnivorous snakes with the acuity of primate vision.

What she found was that the more snakes around, the better the primates could see. So, and we're particularly good at picking up patterns like snake camouflage in the lower half of our visual quadrant, you know? People generally don't like snakes; you can learn to handle them, but no, snake fear appears to be an innate instinct in chimpanzees, and it tends to increase as you age rather than decreasing.

You can overcome it, but—well, my daughter had snakes, and one day her snake bit her; it was a fairly big snake, and she hadn't paid attention to it for a while, so it nailed her. From then on, she had a very difficult time grabbing the snake. It was like bitten once; you know, she was shy permanently.

She also told me years later she had nightmares about snakes all the time when she had a snake in her room. It's like, you know, and I think it was probably the smell. So anyways, Harry Potter decides he's going to go after the basilisk, right? He's going to go out there and face the thing that he's most afraid of, so he does that, waits out in the depths.

It's like Jonah going down into the depths, and he faces the basilisk, and it bites him. And you know, that's a— that's right, because if you go down into the depths, you can get bitten. Like, it’s no joke. This is a hero story, but the thing about the hero stories, it’s actually real. The thing that you're facing is actually dangerous, and even though facing it voluntarily might be your best bet and is likely your best bet because that's the central story of humanity doesn't mean you're going to succeed.

It's the real thing. So anyways, he gets bitten, right? And he's going to die. Now, he's rescuing Ginny—so that's the St. George story. If you go after like dragon—dragons like to capture virgins, God only knows why. I think it's because I think it's because one of the things that male humans have done from the beginning of time is chase the damn predators away, and I suspect that the males from God only knows how long ago who were particularly good at that were rewarded with female attention, and why the hell not?

So it's deeply rooted inside of us that idea of facing the unknown and freeing the woman. So the idea there is that if you—it's a male idea, and in large part, I can talk about the central female myth, and I will as we proceed. The idea is that if you're this sort of person who can stand up against the unknown and the frightening, then you're also likely, if you develop into that sort of person, then you're also likely to develop into the sort of person that other people will find attractive.

So you know, and that's why Jung believed that inside the shadow was the anima, which is like a female figure. His idea was something like—you know, if you look, watch movies, there's always this beta male guy—the romantic movies—and he's a nice guy, and he's the friend, and you know the woman tells him everything, but she doesn't like him a bit. She likes the guy who's got an edge, and who's capable of—I would say mayhem, but at least of aggression.

Now, that doesn't mean she wants them to be aggressive, but what it does mean is that she wants him to be able to be aggressive. That would be good. And so he's the romantic target, and so he's the person that's incorporated the shadow and is someone that is respectable and perhaps useful.

Well, that's a very old story. So let's think about this for a minute. I've already offered you a proposition, and I think it's an important proposition. I'm offering you this proposition so that you can make sense of art, literature, mythology, religion, dance, and all those strange ritualistic things that human beings do, which seem central to us, including, including not least, the inerradicable tendency of us to seek out stories of heroes.

I should finish the Harry Potter story. So Harry Potter goes down there to rescue Ginny. No, that's not her name. What is it? Ginny? Yeah, but there's a formal name for that; it's a variant of Virginia.

Anyways, which is a very divergent. So, he gets bitten, and the bite is poison, and so there is dying, which doesn't seem to be so good. Then what happens? And again, you guys swallow this; it's no problem. So what's his name?

The Dumbledore character; he's got a bird, right? So he's the wise old man; he's the ruler of the castle; he's the ruler of the Magic Castle. He's the Magic King. You know, he's like God the Father as far as Harry Potter is concerned, and he has a bird—what kind of bird is it?

It's a Phoenix, right? One of the things that's very strange about a Phoenix is that, well, it's immortal but in a strange way, you know? It lives and lives; I think a hundred years, and it gets older and older. And then one day, poof! It bursts into flames and turns into an egg, and then you get a new Phoenix.

So that's a symbol of transformation; it's a symbol of transformation. The bird is a spirit or psyche, and so here's what it means in part. You know how when you learn a lesson in your life that that's not very pleasant, right? It's not like when you learn something important, it's the best day of your life. It's often the importance of what you learn is often proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it.

You know? You learn things the hard way; you learn things by getting hit. Because obviously, if what you're doing is working, you get where you want. There’s no learning in that, and that's happy. It's when you're doing something, and you hit an obstacle, and maybe, yeah, bloody well hit it hard.

Then you know you recoil, and then you down into the depths you go, and you have to sort yourself out. You realize that you're, you know, this particular kind of idiot and that you should probably fix that; and that's really annoying and difficult. You know, maybe you're down in the dumps and anxious for quite a while, and then you get it repaired, more or less.

You know, you put yourself back together; that's the Phoenix. Poof! Into flames. Bang! Egg, new you. And so you know, that's the ability to learn. Now, human beings are very strange creatures, right? Because we're very malleable compared to most animals.

You know, like grizzly bears now and grizzly bears a thousand years ago; it's like whatever—they're the same thing; they do the same thing; there's no transformation about human beings. We have this massive brain, and you know, it's a pain because it means you have to take care of human children until they're 40.

And that's a big burden. And so, you know, we pay a big price for it; it also makes childbirth very difficult, and it's costly; you have to eat a lot because you have a big brain because it uses up a lot of energy.

So, you know, you pay a price for it, but the advantage is you're plastic; you can learn. Now, learning is a strange thing because you can think of it as just acquiring more information, but you could also think of it—and this is more accurate—as finding out something that you're doing wrong.

So that's sort of built into you—a character element of your character, a presumption of your perception, or a deep habit. It's really built into you; it's a neural structure, right? It's a little life, and you have to kill it because it isn't working properly.

The pain that you go through in part when you're suffering because you did something stupid is something like your—the neurology—I can never get this quite right; it's the pain of the death of that structure. That could be a huge chunk of you; you know, if you really have to go through a massive revision, it's like the person that comes out the other end might hardly be the same at all.

You know that happens for example if you're trying to combat alcoholism, which is just, you know, a wretched thing to do because, well, all your friends are alcoholics, and all your family drinks too much. The only thing you know how to do when you're socializing is to go to the bar and drink too much, and you spend like 20 hours a week on it.

It's like it's not just that you're addicted to the substance; it's like that's how you live. And so if you want to stop being an alcoholic, not only do you have to stop drinking alcohol, but you have to stop seeing all your drunk friends, and then maybe you've had them for your whole life.

You have to have continual battles with your drunk family, and then you have to figure out something to do with that 20 hours that's now like hanging around your neck like an albatross. And so you have to let that whole part of your personality die, and a new part has to spring forth, and that's what the Phoenix is.

The Phoenix is the capacity of the person to transform, and so when Harry gets bit by the snake that freezes him, he gets seriously injured. The Phoenix comes in, Christ, some tears in his wound; it prepares him, bang, he's back to life.

The strange thing is that that's okay with all of the viewers. Now, why would that be? There's nothing about it that's rational, nothing, right? Magic Castle; that's not rational. Giant snake underneath it; that's a little more irrational.

Turning you to stone, going down there to face it, being rejuvenated by a Phoenix—it's like, yeah, yeah, that's okay; we can—we'll watch that clue; well, swallow it; we'll be completely engaged in it. And the reason for that is because it's a myth. It's about how people—it's a meta story about how to act, about how to conduct yourself in the world, to face the things that you're afraid of that would otherwise paralyze you, to let the death of what is insufficient about you occur, and then to wait for the rebirth.

Okay, so science is about what the world is, and myth and drama and dream and the unconscious, all of that, let's say the aesthetic and artistic and fantastic side of humanity— that's more about how things should be. It's more about how to act. There are lessons in how to act, and they're abstract lessons.

People are capable of abstraction, right? So you say, well, there’s something good about you, and there’s something good about you, and there’s something good about you, and there’s some bad about you, and you and you.

So we'll take all the good things and make one good thing out of that; we'll take all the bad things and make one bad thing out of that, and then we sort of understand the difference between good and bad, and we get better and better and better over the centuries as we distill that.

Then we have a figure of ultimate good and a figure of ultimate evil, and that helps us understand what those two things are. Those are the hostile brothers. That's a very common mythological motif, and you could say, well, they're at war inside you, and I think that that's a universal truth. It's an existential truth; the domain of ethics and morality is how are we in the world and what—how should we be? What's the good?

And the reason I'm telling you all this, apart from the fact that you should know it—because this is what you should know if you go through university—is that it bears directly on issues of health. You're trying to accomplish something, say if you go see a psychotherapist. You know, you could say, well, I'm trying to get healthy, but you know that's not really right. What you're trying to do when you go see your therapist is just get your life together.

And that's not the same thing. You know, like mostly when I'm acting as a therapist it's not like I'm directly treating mental disorder. Like mental disorders aren't there; they're just not neat little boxes. It's not like someone has a fully functioning life, but they have an anxiety disorder, and then you bring them, and you treat the anxiety disorder, and they go back to their fully functioning life; it’s not like that at all. The disorder is tangled out into their life.

You know if you're depressed—well, usually your workplace isn't going very well, and your relationships with the people around you are damaged. And you know you're connected in the actual world with all of these things. And so when you come to see a therapist, you have to work on putting your life together in a sustainable manner.

That's certainly not just removing the mental illness. It's very rare now. And then you see someone who's depressed whose life is together, and they're just depressed.

Something's gone wrong, probably biochemically, and so with someone like that, you can often give them an SSRIs—I can't give them to them, but I can recommend them, recommend they go see a doctor. Anyway, sometimes that just does the trick because, you know, their life is actually pretty good; they just can't see it. But that's bloody rare, man.

It's usually the case that someone comes and sees you, and things are in a serious state of chaos, and all of that has to be addressed, and some of it is psychological and a lot of it's just practical—it's embedded out there in the world. That's what the behavioral psychologists are particularly concerned about.

So anyways, psychology, especially the clinical end, is predicated on—it’s necessarily predicated on the question: how is it that we obtain the good? How do we aim at the good? And what would that be? When my clients come to see me, one of the things I often ask them is, “Okay, well, let’s say you look a year ahead. What do you want? What are we aiming at? What would—what wouldn't your life?”

Isn’t the way you want it to be? How would it look if it was the way you wanted it to be, or at least partly that way? And we aim at that, right? We look for impediments, psychological impediments, fears, avoidance strategies, that sort of thing, and we develop strategies and we try to move towards that, I would say ideal.

Alright, to understand the categories of myth, we’ll say we have to understand something about the nature of categorization. Now, categorization is a tricky thing, and we're going to run through some complicated ideas relatively quickly. You know, you think you put things in the same category because they're similar, but the problem is, first of all, that’s not an answer; it's just a restatement of the initial proposition.

Second of all, you can put things in the same category that are by no means identical, and you often do that. Third, it's things that are similar are often also importantly different.

Picking which element of similarity—you know, like, let's say, oh, if you have a group of books, well are they the same? Well, obviously, no, unless they're, you know, all the same book. But the category of books is a pretty strange category because the content of the books differs completely. Well, you could still make a group of books, and you pick some arbitrary element that unites them and consider that grounds to make a category.

There's other categories, more scientific categories; and scientific categories tend to actually contain things that are very, very similar across multiple dimensions, like protons are like that. As far as I can tell, there's nothing that distinguishes one proton from another, and the same with electrons.

And you know the set of triangles is like that because you can define it precisely. But most of the categories that human Jews aren't so neat, and the problem with that is that unless the categories are neat, like scientific categories, it's very difficult to investigate them scientifically.

So for example, you might do research on a group of people with anxiety disorders, but the problem with that is that the anxiety disorder category is so heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to identify the commonalities across all the people who are in that category. That's partly because the category isn't actually a scientific category; it's a hybrid category; it's a practical category.

I can give you an example of that. No, I can't because I must not have saved it. Anyways, many of the DSM categories—so these are categories for psychopathology—require if you're part of that category. Imagine there's seven symptoms that you could have or eight symptoms that you could have that would put you in that category, like antisocial personality.

Eight symptoms—you steal, you kick, you hit, you bite, you're abusive—I don't remember the categoricals precisely. But you can be in the category if you have symptoms two through five, and you can be in the category if you have symptoms six through eight. They aren't the same symptoms, but you're in the same category.

You think, well, how the hell can that be? Well, that's a family resemblance category, roughly speaking. Lots of the things that we use are family resemblance categories. There's a prototype, and then if you have enough of the features of that prototype—imagine the prototype has ten features, and if you have six of its pro features, you get to be in that category.

But it means that the categories are actually quite diverse, and that's one of the problems that plagues psychiatry as a science and clinical psychology as a science. It's a really big problem because if the categories aren't homogeneous, then it's very difficult to draw conclusions about the members of the category.

The psychologists and the psychiatrists claim that's a scientific category, but but they're not, and they can't be partly because they're aimed at the classification of health, or ideal versus non-health or non-ideal. And partly because they play multiple roles.

I mean, the category isn't there just to provide neat demarcations for scientific study; the category is there to give people a language to talk about certain sets of symptoms to diagnose because, you know, when you come in and you have a set of symptoms, you might want to know what they are so that you also know what they aren't.

It's really a relief often to find a diagnosis, and then, of course, the diagnosis has certain implications for treatment and for billing and for all of that. So the category has to play all of those roles, so there are multiple types of category.

And the categories that we're talking about in relationships to ecology aren't scientific categories; they're categories about the world construed as a place to act. So here's a way to think about it: You're always looking at the world through a framework of reference, and you have to do that because there isn't very much of you. You can't see the whole world at once, and in fact, the amount of the world you actually see is so small you can't believe it.

The central part of your vision is zipping around, producing a pretty high-resolution representation of exactly what you're looking at, but outside of that center, like if I look at you— I can't see her eyes; I can see her glasses, but barely. I can't even tell whether you're male or female; the person past that I can't see at all.

Now, you don't notice that; you know you don't notice that you're that blind because you're—your central vision is always popping around, illuminating that tiny space. But you're so damn blind, it's just mind-boggling. I'm sure some of you have seen the invisible gorilla video, you know, where a gorilla comes into the video, and you don't notice, which is somewhat shocking because you would think that you would notice a gorilla.

But what happens is that you actually don't notice something unless it interferes with what you're doing because what are you going to do? Notice everything? You can't do that! You can hardly notice anything, so what you do is you pick something to focus on. It's usually something that you value, because why else would you focus on it?

So that means that your value system determines the direction of your perception. Bloody well think about that for a minute! That's a Buddhist idea, right? People live in a kind of illusion, and sometimes that illusion causes suffering and they can transform the way they look at the world and that can release them from their suffering.

But the idea that you do live in an illusion—well, I don't know if it's exactly an illusion, but you certainly do live within a framework of perception that’s determined by your values. Now that is so weird, you know, because we never think of the world as something that reveals itself through our values, but of course, it does because you look at what you want. You aim at what you want, and once you've aimed, the world lays itself out for you, and that's exactly how perception works.

That's why I represented it this way: you’re always somewhere—that's point A, that's somewhere in some place and some time, and you always have some notion about what you want to have happened next. You know, you're going to go to the next class; maybe you've got a plan after this. In this class, you have a plan. You're hoping to learn something, I presume.

Maybe you have a goal with regards to a grade, and that's nested inside your desire to get a degree and that's nested inside your desire to be educated and to have a career and and and and have a successful life. So attending to me at the moment, the reason you're doing that is because all of those values exist within you simultaneously, focusing your attention.

Some of that can be unconscious; in fact, a lot of it is unconscious because, you know, it's very difficult for you to get control of what you pay attention to. You know what that's like. You're trying to study; it's kind of a boring paper—Christ! Your attention—it’s just like everywhere, you know?

Maybe you'll vacuum under the bed instead of doing the paper reading the paper. You know, you can’t get a grip on that thing! So your attention has an autonomy, and that's another psychoanalytic idea. You know because you kind of think, well you're in control; it's like really? You ever try telling yourself what to do? How does that work for you? I'm going to go to the gym three times a week; right, sure.

Heard you—who are ya? I'm gonna quit eating sugar for a month; it's like how long does that last? Like 15 minutes, and you're eating like three chocolate bars. So this is—and this is Freud's central insight, I would say. You're an autonomous group of spiritual agents, let's say, personalities, and they don't really get along very well, and you—the ego—will say, is by no means necessarily in charge.

And that's a very strange thing to realize, but you can really realize that by noticing how little control you have over your attentional focus. Okay, so you've got your point A, you're going to point B; you're always doing that. You inhabit a structure of value, and it changes what the point A is and what the point B is, but the structure itself doesn't change.

When you're looking at the world, what you see is not objects; you see tools, and they make you happy. Those are things that facilitate your movement forward, and you see obstacles, and those are things that make you unhappy. When you encounter an obstacle, one of the problems is, well, you don't get to where you're going, and that's a problem.

But the other problem is if you encounter an obstacle, the frame might be wrong, right? Because you never know—it might be just something that you could detour around real easily. It might be a fatal flaw in your whole plan, and so obstacles have this dual nature; they get in your way, but they can also take your plan down.

And so they can produce anxiety. So my point is—and there’s a book called Visual An Ecological Approach to Visual Perceptions—a great book by Gibson, J.J. Gibson, if I remember correctly. This is although I thought of this a while back; I realized eventually that it was a variant of his theory. What he believed was that when people looked at the world, they saw a value first and an inferred object second.

So for example, for Gibson, if you’re standing by a cliff, you don’t see a cliff and then think about the fact that you might fall and then feel frightened. You see a falling-off place, and part of the seeing of that—part of the act of seeing—is being afraid of that, because your eyes are connected right to your emotional systems. And part of what your eyes do is tell you what the object is, but your eyes do all sorts of other things, like they prepare you for action; they prepare you for gripping; they prepare you for emotion.

None of that actually requires the existence, necessarily, of your perception of the object. There are people who have blindsight, and if you show them—their eyes are okay, but they’ve destroyed the visual cortex, so anyways, it’s perfectly plausible that, at least at one level of analysis, when you look at something, you see its utility first.

So you see a chair, and you might say a chair is an object, but I wouldn’t say that a beanbag is a chair and a stump is a chair, and they don’t share much in common except that you can sit on them. And so, you know, the chair is just—the chair is basically conceptualized by its functional utility.

When you look at a chair, what you perceive is its functional utility, and the chair tells you what to do; it says, “Sit on me.” And there are people who have prefrontal damage, and they engage in something called utilization behavior.

They can’t not do what the object tells them to do; that’s called utilization behavior. So that’s how the world is laid out, and I would say inside that domain you're in the predictable world; you're in the world that you understand, that you know, and that if you hit an obstacle or if you're outside that domain, you're in the unknown.

You're in unknown territory in the mythological world—in the world for action. You could conceptualize the world as a stage for action. This is a Shakespearean quote that sort of sums it up quite nicely: “All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”

And you might say, well, is that really true? And the answer to that is, well, it depends on what you mean by true. And that really is the answer because there are different ways of defining true. So, and it isn’t self-evident that there’s only one way of defining true that’s appropriate.

You know, the definition of truth might be more like a tool, and you know we are tool-using creatures. Really what we’re trying to do with our conceptions of truth is to work through the world successfully. So even science should be subordinate to our use of the world as a tool because if it isn’t a useful tool, like what are we doing with it? You know, just generating technology that might destroy the world? That seems like a bad idea.

So I think that the world as tool is actually the fundamental “sort of” truth, and I think that’s a Darwinian idea. Right? That our notions about the world have evolved through a Darwinian process, and that it’s appropriate for us to regard as what is most real those things that reliably ensure our continuation of our life and the probability of our propagation.

If you’re a true Darwinian, I don’t think there’s a way out of that argument, and it isn’t self-evident by any stretch of the imagination that seeing the world as all as objects is the way that our brain works. In fact, I don’t think it’s the way it works at all, and I think that’s why we’re so wired for stories.

It’s a mystery, you know? Like you won’t line up for two hours to go see a lecture, but you’ll line up for two hours; maybe you’ll even camp overnight if your mythological imagination has been seized for God only knows what reason by Star Wars. And you know, that’s the source of mythology; it’s the mythology of the modern person, and it fills a gap, and that’s why people do it.

So that to me speaks of men the manner in which our psyches are constructed, and that’s a Jungian idea. That’s the idea of the archetype, essentially—that to be human is to participate in a certain pattern of being, and that that pattern of being is socially, it’s acted out individually, but it’s also part of your structure, even your perceptual structure as a living organism of your particular type.

It would be the case, at least in part, that the hero myth—which is go out where no one has gone before, face the terrors of the unknown, gather something of value, and return—is the central story of humankind. It’s not the only central story, but it’s up there in the top three, and many of the dramas that you engage yourself in are variations of that story, and you watch it over and over and over because you're trying to learn how to do that because that's what you need to do to live.

Okay, here's an idea. What's common among people? Well, we're self-conscious, so we know of our own existence and we know of our own limitations. So that means that we have a certain innate terror and fragility. Our existence is a problem to us, and in some sense, what we're trying to do when we search for meaning is to search for a solution to that problem.

And that can be security, but it can also be mode of being. You know, and so, for example, being engaged in something worthwhile seems to be good medicine for being fragile, you know? Because you think, "Well, I'm doing this; it seems worthwhile." And the fact that there's a price to be paid for it and that things could befall me that aren't good, I'm willing to put up with that because what I'm engaged in seems to be of sufficient significance to justify all that.

We all become self-conscious, and we're all trying to do something about that to figure out how to deal with it. So there's a landscape that we inhabit, I would say, within which that takes place. So there’s a human being self-conscious doomed to tragedy and doomed to be aware of that. The human being has two elements, and that's the element that seeks the good, and there's the other element that seeks, I would say, revenge and destruction.

And we have our reasons. You know, if something tragic happens to you, it’s tragic and unfair, and it really brings you low. The probability that you're going to become resentful and want revenge is extraordinarily high—it's no wonder. And you know the archetypal representation of that is evil itself, and the archetypal representation of the good that you could do is the hero.

And so those things inhabit us. They're permanent elements of the human psyche. And then what else is universal to us? Well, we live in a society, you could say, and that's deep. That's deep. It's not just human society; like we've lived in a society forever.

So you know lobsters live in dominance hierarchies, and they use their serotonin system, at least in part, to keep track of their dominance position, and so you can use antidepressants on lobsters when they get defeated, and they don’t feel so bad from being defeated in a fight. Just think about that because the antidepressants do the same thing to us.

We're so bloody social that the circuits that evolved 300 million years ago when the lobsters and us had a shared ancestor are still operating at the base of your brain. That's why status is so important to people and reputation. I mean, that serotonin system governs your emotional regulation, how people respond to you and what they think of you—man, that matters.

That's why you're on Facebook all the time and checking your texts and obsessing continually about your online presence and assuming that you're doing that, and you know, contacting people frantically and seeing what the updates are, it's like where—how are you held in the esteem of others? Very, very important, and that's because it determines your emotional regulation.

It's really important! So we exist in a society, always, and the society has two elements: the tyrannical element of the society. That would be the tyrannical king, roughly speaking, a very common mythological theme. You see that in the Lion King too, right? Because that's Scar.

And of course, you see it in the real world with almost continually, and then the benevolent king, who is the source of all the good things about culture. You know, and you can see these things play out as mythologies in political terms. So I would say, for example, the continual harping about the oppressive nature of the patriarchy is part of a myth, and the myth is that society is oppressive.

It's like, well, yeah, obviously! You know, because you have to be quite a bit like you, and you have to be quite a bit like you, even if you're not, so that you can get along, right? Everybody sacrifices a tremendous amount of their individuality to the common mode of being. There's a tyrannical element to that.

But you know, by the same token, it's the basis of cooperation and stability of society, and the final element is that's often represented met in a masculine manner by the way, society. And I think that's because our primary dominance structures, given the creatures we are, like chimpanzees, the primary structures of dominance are masculine.

And then outside of what's known is the unknown, and we always have to contend with that. And it's wonderful in that it's the source of all new things, and it's terrible in that it's the place where all the things that destabilize you come from.

And so this is a good representation, although not the only one. So that's the feminine nature; that's the masculine order; and that's the individual who's destined to suffer in the grasp of those two things.

And I'll finish this next time. What have we got here? Yep, all right, good enough. We'll see you next time. So today, to begin with, we're going to finish the last lecture, and then with any luck, we're going to start the next one. They're somatically linked.

Anyways, well, you know what? All the lectures for the next, well, for the whole course hopefully will be thematically linked to some degree given that nominally they're about the same topic, but some are more tightly linked than others.

I started telling you last week about this idea of the voyage to the underworld, and I want to tell you a little bit more about that. Jung, in particular, conceptualized the voyage to the underworld as a journey into the unconscious, and the unconscious for the psychoanalyst is a place of fantasy and dream, an implicit presupposition and habit.

That’s all correct; you know, we—there is an unconscious, and it's perfectly reasonable to conceptualize it that way. The big difference, I think, between the psychoanalysts and the later, more empirical scientists is that the psychoanalysts sort of envisioned your psyche as a place of living partial personalities instead of cognitive computational systems.

They took into account the fact that you're alive, and that the parts of you are alive. And you know there’s a neuroscientist named Gazzaniga. I don’t know how to say his name—Gazzaniga? That's wrong. Is that Gazzaniga? Yeah, I think that's it.

Anyways, he did some of the earliest experiments on split brains. Sometimes if you have intractable epilepsy, which I wouldn’t recommend, by the way, one of the surgical procedures for mediating its negative effects is something called a—you cut the corpus callosum. It’s a very large structure in the brain that connects the two separate hemispheres.

And you know it’s not obvious why we have two separate hemispheres, although I’ll tell you a little bit about why I think it is. But anyways, they do communicate, and what Gazzaniga demonstrated was that you could tell one hemisphere something without the other one knowing that both hemispheres were conscious, and that the consciousness was somewhat independent.

It’s really strange—it’s very interesting reading. You know, because it suggests that fragments of ourselves—you could think of you have fragments of yourself within you that are like low resolution representations of you. And the psychoanalysts would think of those more like—they're kind of like one-eyed giants; that might be a way of thinking about it if you were thinking about it in a fantastical way.

So there's the angry you, and you know, you've all come in contact with the angry you. It’s a rather rigid—that’s the first thing you might say about it. It’s impulsive and short-term; it doesn’t think much about the past unless it's bad things about whoever you're angry at, in which case it thinks about them a lot.

It's not too concerned with long-term future consequences, and mostly it wants to be right. And you know when angry you disappears and normal you—assuming such a thing exists—reappears, you can be perfectly shocked about how angry you behaved.

And in fact, sometimes if angry you really gets out of hand like it might in a battle, like