2017 Personality 22: Conclusion: Psychology and Belief

[Music] I called the course "Personality and Its Transformations," and I think you could think about that as a restatement of the idea of being and becoming. And that's what you are. You're, for whatever that means, you're an entity that both is and is transforming. And there's a rule that goes along with that, by the way, which is: don't sacrifice who you could be for who you are. Which means if you have to choose to transform in a positive direction or maintain your current position, then it's better to transform in a positive direction. So you might even think of that as the core of your being. That's a Piagetian idea; it's a union idea as well.

Who are you? You're the thing that transforms who you are now. You're also who you are, but on top of that, you're the thing that transforms who you are. I do think that that's—and that's not an arbitrary statement. You know, one of the things that modern universities do dreadfully now is convince their students that value structures are relative, and that’s a—that’s a big mistake. There's a lot of things wrong with that idea, and one of the things that's wrong with that idea is that it doesn't include what I just mentioned, which is that's a good moral rule: you are the thing that is, and you're the thing that becomes. And you should put the thing that becomes at a higher place than the thing that is.

That means you also have to allow yourself to shake off those things about you that you might be pathologically attached to: habits and people for that matter, ways of thinking—all of those things—you have to allow yourself to shake those off. And that's more like a burning. That's why the Phoenix is—the symbol that it is, right? It’s all in a deteriorate, so it bursts into flame, and then it’s reborn. It's like, well, do you want to be reborn? Like, that's not the question. The question is: do you want to burst into flame? And the answer to that, generally, is no. But that's the wrong answer. The right answer is you let all that nonsense burn away, and you know, and you might say, well, I don't know what I should leave behind. And the answer to that is that's a lie. You know some of the things that you should leave behind you. All you have to do is ask yourself; you'll come up with a list instantly of a hundred stupid things that you're doing that you know you could stop doing. Some of them maybe you don't know you could stop doing—well, fine, leave those alone for now—but there's a bunch of things you perfectly know well that you could stop doing that would improve your life, and so do that. See what happens. That's a good idea.

All right, so it's personality and its transformations because partly I wanted to talk to you about what you are as a human being and also as an individual, but also what you could become. And that's actually a crucial question in the domains of clinical psychology in particular, because a lot of what you're doing with people as a clinician is trying to figure out who they could become. That's right. You come, you have a problem, your life isn't what it could be. It's like, fine, let's see what it could be like if we changed it. We'll figure out how to change it. That's got to be a negotiated dialogue, right? Because, like, I don't know what the hell you should do with your life. I can help you figure it out. Maybe we can talk about it. But you are the person who has to decide if the things that you're aiming for, you know, get you out of bed in the morning, because that's really the—that's at least one of the crucial issues. So you gotta specify the goal, and then you go to specify the transformation processes and start practicing them.

And you have to understand that you're going to be bad at it, but it doesn't matter because bad's fine. Persistence is what you need to be. If you persist with tiny improvements, if you persist, you win. So okay, so in a broader—you know, in a broader context, you can think about this as a more fundamental ontological question. So one, the one question is how you should act to the world. The other question is, well, what is the world? And that's a complicated problem. There’s a scientific answer to that question, and that is that the world is a collection of objective phenomena, and that's a very powerful perspective. And we have a good method for determining what the world is like as a collection of objective phenomena, and that’s made us very technologically powerful, and so more power to us and all that.

But it leaves a question unanswered, and the question is, well, the world isn't just a place of objective phenomena, because it's not a panoply of inert matter; it has living conscious creatures in it, and they're a different order of being. And the fundamental issue for conscious active creatures is not what is the world from an objective perspective, but how is it that you should conduct yourself in the world? And there's a very—there's a kind of unbridgeable gap between those two domains of inquiry, and I think the reason for that is that there's a—the scientific method removes value from its description. So that's actually what it does. And so once you're left with value-free descriptions, it's very difficult to extract out a value proposition from them, because you've—that scientific method removes the value propositions. You're supposed to be left with only that which is objective, right? And value propositions are in the domain of the subjective.

So I think the idea that you can derive what you should be or do from a collection of facts is flawed: A, because collecting the facts themselves gets rid of the value structure; but B, there's an infinite number of facts, and so which—how are you gonna pick which ones should guide you? You can't! You can't! You have to do something else. The facts do not tell you what to do with the facts; you need something else to help you figure that out. Well, it's come to me over the years that that's what—essentially, that's what the narrative cognitive framework does. It's the framework that we use to specify how we should act in the world. And so you could divide the world into the world as it is and the world as perhaps it should be. That gives you some direction, and you need that. And we know this technically, right? You need direction. The reason for that is it's direction that produces the primary positive emotion. And so if you need positive emotion to move through life—which you do because you can't even move without positive emotion—and also, positive emotion is a good bulwark against terror and pain.

If you need those things, then you need direction. You need a goal. You need a value structure. So that doesn't seem particularly disputable to me. You could still say, well, what value structure? It's like, okay, fine, that's a good question, but I was—you know, I've thought a lot about that too. So if we're gonna adopt a value structure, there's a couple of rules that go along with it. And this is why the bloody postmodernists are wrong, as far as I can tell. A: it can't just be my value structure, because I'm stuck with you, and we're both stuck with all these other people. And so if I'm going to lay out a value structure, which is a way of interpreting the world, let’s say, and there's an infinite number of potential ways of interpreting the world, it's like, oh, fine, no problem, except that I have to interpret the world in a way that I can use while I'm dealing with you and the world—two of us are dealing with everyone else. And while all of you are dealing with everyone else—and so that that's the Piagetian game proposition. If you want to be a popular kid on the playground, you better play games that other people want to play.

That's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant observation. And I told you that Piaget was trying to heal the rift between science and religion, and that's one of the things that he did that he thought helped do that. His question is: well, where do the moral judgments come from? Well, they partly emerge as a consequence of consensus, and it's a bounded domain. If we're gonna occupy the same space for any length of time—and those are two critical propositions: the same space and a long time—then we have to figure out how to play an iterative game that doesn't spiral downward, hopefully that might even improve, that we both don't object to. Because otherwise, it's not gonna work right. You'll walk away and play another game, or the game will disintegrate catastrophically.

So there's massive social constraint on what constitutes an appropriate frame of reference. So much for the relativist argument. And then there's another issue that's equally relevant, and it's associated with the idea of objective reality to some degree, but it's not exactly—that's not exactly correct, because it's not exactly objective reality. Let's say that you and I decide to occupy the same place for some substantial amount of time, and we've figured out how to solve the problem of being together. But you and I still have to figure out how to solve the problem of being together in a manner that doesn't make the world object too much. And it isn't just other people, although that's a huge part of the world. You want them to know what object. You may even want them to support you. That would even be better. But you also have to deal with the—know the tendency of matter to object, because so your mode of being in the world, your interpretive framework as a description of how you should act, is actually the laying out of a strategy that will produce the ends that it predicts, which are the things that you want.

So this is the pragmatist perspective; this was worked out by William James and his people back in the late 1800s in New England—the only genuine brand of American philosophy. And what the pragmatists said is: how do you decide if something's true? The answer is, how the hell can you? You don't know anything. Well, that's true, but that isn't helpful, because there you're stuck with the problem of how to be in the world. Well, so what you do is you lay out a mode of interpretation that has an endpoint, and then you run the mode of interpretation embodied, right, because you act it out. And if it doesn’t produce the outcome, then it's not—let's say it’s not true. The claims within it aren't—they're not true by the definition of the game itself. So you might say, well, you're a kid on a playground; you want to play a game. One of the implicit demands is that the game is fun. If it's not fun, it's not worth playing. So you play it for a while, and then you see, well, was that fun? If the answer is yes, then you keep playing the game. You say, well, that game is—it’s good enough, it's accurate enough, it's true enough.

And so you lay out interpretations in the world, and they're subject to massive constraints. Other people have to go along with them and cooperate with you, because if they don't, then look the hell out. Like, it's a major, serious, non-trivial constraint. And then the other thing is, well, social proof isn't good enough; it also has to work in the world outside of the social world. You know, so if you have an illness, and you have some hypothesis about how to construe it, you might say, well, is my understanding of the illness correct? Well, it implies that I take these actions. Well, how do you know if it’s correct? Well, you take the actions, and if the illness gets worse, then by the definitions that are implicit in the framework of reference that you're using, you've made an error. And so there's no relativism in that. You could still say, well, there's a lot of potential solutions to any potential set of problems. It's like, yeah, yeah, there's lots of different ways to play chess on a single board, right? But that doesn't mean that any old solution is as good as any other solution. It doesn't mean that at all.

So okay, so then we're looking at things two ways. We're trying to figure out, well, how does the world present itself? And then how is it that you should act in it? And so, well, there’s other constraints on the mechanisms of interpretation that you place in the world. So we could say, well, you're constrained in your interpretations by the constraints that other people place on you, but there's internal constraints as well. We talked about those mostly from a biological perspective, because you could also regard yourself, in some sense, as a loose internal society. That's sort of a psychoanalytic dictum, right? You're a collection of subpersonalities, or you could say you're a collection of subroutines. I don't care how you formulate it, but you're a unity. But you're a universe unity that brings together a plurality of subcomponents. And part of the constraints on how it is that you lay out your interpretation of the world is that you have to satisfy those internal subsystems, right?

So you're the ego, but it's more like you're the captain of a ship full of people who are rowing. You've got to keep the people rowing. You're not an impotent tyrant of your own destiny. You're constrained by the nature of your own being. And so you have to provide yourself with food, and you have to provide yourself with shelter, and you have to provide yourself with water, and all of these things. And those are demands that are laid on you by the nature of your internal processes. And, of course, how they lay themselves out as demands and what the appropriate solutions to those problems are is debatable infinitely. But you can see that constraints stack up. You have to satisfy your internal constraints, so they have to be brought into a unity. That seems to happen at least in part between the ages of two and something like between the ages of birth and four years old—maybe even two years old. You bring yourself together into something that's sort of functioning as a unity.

Then you have to turn that unity into a unity that can function in the social world with increasing breadth. And that unity in the social world has to be a unity that can function inside the natural world; it's something like that. So you're stacking up these games into a hierarchy of increasing complexity, and one of the questions that emerges from that is, well, what should be at the top of the hierarchy? If it's a hierarchical structure, it has to be a hierarchical structure because some things have to be worth doing more than others, or you can't act. Which is another thing I really don't like about the postmodernist ethos because it claims that value structures are there to eliminate, to exclude, and oppress, and never once notices that, well, yeah, fair enough, but value structures are also there so that you know which way to walk, because you can't figure out which way to walk without saying that that direction is preferable to that direction.

So you're stuck with the damned things, and they do exclude. Obviously, category structures exclude. The question is, if you're going to have a value structure, how is it that it should be constituted? Well, ready to describe some of the constraints: like if your value structure is perfectly functioning, except that you don't get enough to eat, that turns out actually to be a fatal problem, right? And it might be you can run into all sorts of fatal problems: you're too lonesome—well, it means your value structure's too narcissistic. There are lots of reasons to be lonesome, but that might be one of them. Or you're too timid or something like that; like you're gonna be informed by your own internal biological mechanisms when the value structure that you're laying out in the world is insufficient to keep itself propagating across time. And some of that's just you, and some of that's other people, and some of that's the natural world constraints galore. And so in the phase of all those constraints, it's absolutely unreasonable to say—and the old solution goes: try it; generate a random solution, run it as a simulation in the world, and see how many slings and arrows come your way. There'll be plenty.

And you might say, well, I don't care about slings and arrows. It's like, yeah, no, that's a claim you don't get to make. So okay, so you know you're being informed internally as to the nature of your value structure. You have to specify where you are. You have to specify where you're going. You have to integrate all your underlying biological mechanisms into that schema. It's something I think that's actually kind of weak about the Piagetian idea, say, because Piaget—a great fan of Piaget—but Piaget tended to think that the child came into the world with nothing but a set of reflexes; and that was his technical claim, and that the boots drop off those reflexes. And I think that it underestimates the degree to which the child comes into the world as an already prepared unit. I mean, he just thought of those things as so self-evident that you didn't need to talk about them. But that's actually not true. You do need to talk about them.

We know, for example, that if you provide children with food and shelter—adequate food and shelter—but you don't interact with them socially, almost all of them die in the first year, right? It's not optional. Touch is not optional for children; attention is not optional for children; play is not optional for children. So it isn't just like, well, the child comes into the world with a set of reflexes and can adapt to any old environments. It's like, no, the environment has to be structured in a certain way or the child will die. And it's very interesting when it comes to things like play and touch because you wouldn't think of those as fundamental necessities, right? But it turns out that they are. If you deprive a child badly enough of play and touch in the first three years of their life, even if they survive, what comes out at the end of that is often something that's like barely recognizable as a functional human being and cannot be repaired after that point. And that experiment was done with Romanian orphans back in the 90s, so it was an ugly situation to say the least.

Okay, so now you take these underlying biological systems, and maybe they aggregate themselves into something that vaguely looks like your temperament—your five temperamental dimensions. So maybe if you're an extrovert, you're dominated by the dopaminergic system, just like you are if you're high in openness; and if you're, you know, if you're high in neuroticism, it’s mostly that you're dominated by anxiety systems and systems that mediate emotional pain; and if you're agreeable, you're dominated by the function of the underlying maternal/care/affiliation systems. But so you could say, well, you've got these loose—you’ve got a multitude of fundamental biological predispositions that manifest themselves as implicit stories, something like that, and they organize themselves into the primary temperaments. And the primary temperaments are biasing factors that determine in part the nature of the interpretive structure that you're going to lay out in the world.

It's not entirely determined by your temperament. We know that personality is only predicting, you know, something like, let's say, 10% of the variance in most complex social outcomes. And the other elements are well, temperamental. You might just have to get along with other people in the world. So you come in with these internal biases, but they still have to be modified extensively by your social and your natural surround. Okay, and then you develop your routines from the bottom up, as Piaget pointed out, and sometimes from the top down, because now and then you can think yourself into a radical transformation. But mostly what you're doing is building the micro units of your interpretive schemas and your behaviors and aggregating them into higher-order structures that you can then tag with higher-order abstractions.

And we talked about that: you can't tell a three-year-old to clean up his room. And the reason for that is those are empty boxes, as far as the kid's concerned. Clean? He might have that clean; he doesn’t have—he might have picked up the teddy bear and put it in that space, right? So that's one of these little micro routines. And maybe you say you put 20 of those micro routines together, and now you can say "clean up your room." And basically what you're saying is here’s implement the 10 micro routines that you’ve learned.

A well-functioning personality has all the micro routines in place. That's actually something that you help people with if you're a behavioral therapist, because one of the things you assume, if you're a behavioral therapist, is that sometimes the reason people aren't doing things is because they don't know how. You know, sometimes maybe the person is depressed, but potentially high-functioning. They've got all the damn micro routines; they're well socialized; they're just dormant. You’ve got to get them awake again and implementing them. But sometimes you get someone in your practice, say, who's just been neglected like you cannot believe, right? The parents never paid any attention to them. Or maybe just punished them every time they did something good that was really fun. And then, you know, they didn’t make friends, and so they're really, really big and poorly articulated.

And so then what you do is you work at the bottom of the micro routines and get them to practice building up all these little attributes that they didn't build up. And you know, one of the things you can think about in terms of character development is—so now maybe understand something about your own personality. You might say, well, what could you do to improve your personality? And the answer is develop some of the micro routines on the other side of the personality distribution. So if you're disagreeable as hell, maybe start learning how to do nice things for people. And that actually works, by the way. So if you take disagreeable people who are depressed and you get them doing nice things for other people, their depression tends to lift. But then, by the same token, if you're agreeable, then you should practice doing some things for yourself and being more tough-minded in your negotiations.

And so you can sort of place yourself on the personality trait distribution. You know, you're extrovert; it's like, okay man, learn to spend some time with yourself, right? You're low in openness—well, try reading a book that's outside of your sphere of interest now and then. If you're conscientious, well, you should probably learn how to relax occasionally and so forth. So you can—I think partly what you're doing is you're developing your personality as not moving the mean much, the average where you're located, but you're extending the standard deviation so that you're a bigger bag of tricks than you were before. And I think you can practice that consciously. It’s like you’re hyper-orderly—it’s well, get a dog. You know, dogs, they're messy, horrible things. You know, it's just what you need if you're hyper-orderly because they're gonna leave hair everywhere and force you to live with it.

And so, okay, so—and so this is sort of you, right? This is your personality; it's this collection of root subroutines that you've turned into a hierarchy. And then there's something at the top of it, and that's—that's a big question. Like, what the hell should be at the top of the hierarchy? Because that's the ultimate question of unity. And then the clinicians would say, well, it's the self-actualized person, or it's the self, or something like that. You know, that's the idea; that's the implicit and perhaps explicit ideal that you're aiming for. And you might say, well, does such a thing exist? I would say, well, do you admire people? Because that's your answer, right? Do you despise people? Well, you like some people, and you don't like others. You respect some people; you don't respect others. Well, you're acting out the notion that there's at least an implicit ideal. You do the same thing when you go to movies. You know, you know who the hero is; you know who the bad guy is. You're acting out the proposition that there's some sort of value hierarchy, and there's some sort of manifestation of it that’s coherent across time.

So you appear to believe that, and you know, you are driven, at least to some degree, by your own inner ideals. And so you tend to answer the question of is that real with an affirmative, and if you don't, there's catastrophic consequences. Nietzsche and the existentialists were very good at detailing. That's like you let your value hierarchy disintegrate. Well, then what? Well, part of it is nihilistic chaos. Whoo, that's not so much fun. And then there's the alignment of nihilistic chaos with the intrinsic desire that someone will come along and tell you what to do, right? So what happens is if you let this devolve, you end up with nihilistic existence, not with nihilistic chaos or the demand for the tyrant to come forward. And we've had that happen lots of times, and it doesn't seem to have gone that well.

So all right, well, so what happens when you lay out these little routines in the world at different levels of analysis? Well, this is how your emotions function broadly speaking. You know, you're aiming at something—and this is an oversimplification, which is why I want to show you this, right? When I show you this, assume that it's made out of that, right? It's just a schematic oversimplification because even if, let's say that I'm trying to do something as simple as walking towards the door—I mean, the action of walking towards the door is predicated on the existence of all the subroutines that enable me to propel my body across time and space. And like—there's—that took a lot of internal organization to get that right.

It's traumatized now, and so you can treat it like it's invisible, but implicit in any one of these structures is this entire structure. And you actually see this in therapy very frequently, too. So I was talking to a client the other day— it was so interesting. This person said something. He had been talking to his mother, and he just made a casual comment. He said he was talking to his mother, who was in a state of grief for—for good reasons that were independent of this particular person who said, “And I hate her.” And I thought, oh, that's interesting. Like where did that come from? And so I made a comment on that. That's a Freudian slip, right? Because there was—the conversation was flowing, and then this little emotion-tagged utterance came forward. And whenever an emotion-tagged utterance of that sort comes forward, you know it’s associated with a whole rat’s nest of underlying pain and anxiety and, and—what would you call it?—disappointment and frustration that hasn't been properly rectified. So it's like a marker.

And yet, you know this: when you're talking to people, they say something and you think, oh, you know what? Wow, too much information. That's one way of thinking about it. It's like, just what are you up to? And then if you have any sense, you just forget that that even happened, and you continue. But that's—that's like the snout of a dragon peeking out from a cave. And you might say, well, it's just a snout, man. But it's not, because dragon's snouts tend to be attached to the whole damn dragon. And so this is also something to know about relationships because when you're in a relationship with someone, they'll do that now and then. They'll, you know, utter something, and you think, huh, huh, it's like there's a bump in the road. Well, we're gonna look underneath that at our peril. But if you do go down there and you look at it, then—and the whole thing comes—you can start to disentangle the web of memories and experiences that are all tangled together as a consequence of their emotional identity.

Because I could say, well, everything that makes you anxious or everything that makes you upset is the same as every other thing that's ever made you upset. And so—and then there's an even different subset instead of that, which is all those things that have made you upset that you've never dealt with. They're all laying down there at the bottom of your nasty little soul waiting to pop themselves up in some random utterance, right? And so then you go in there at your peril, because if you're the person who pokes around in that, then you're gonna get blasted with all of that stuff. It's gonna come out like almost uncontrollably, and then you can sort it out.

And so what you find is if you ask a person a question like that, and then you let them free associate—which is just talk about it—they'll do a wandering around like that maze that I told you about. They'll do a wandering around of that entire territory, and sometimes just having them wander during it can help them straighten it out. But you might find out that something happened to them 15 years ago that left them with a terrible sense of guilt or dismay or frustration; and then when they interact with their parents in a certain way, the parent knows exactly how to tap that, and then that all comes up. And that's what produces that—that little utterance.

And so that's the material of the world manifesting itself; that's what matters manifesting itself. And it almost always manifests itself as an object. Something that objects— we're having a conversation; it's going quite well, no problem. There's a bump in it; there's an emotional disjunct. Right now we're no longer in the same place at the same time; we're no longer playing the same game. So then I might say, okay, well let's open that up and see what's behind it. Well, the question is: what's behind the game you're playing? And the answer to that is all the world that you're ignoring always.

So when—so when you imagine that, think about it this way: you're trying to do well in a class, and you get a bad grade. Okay, so you're in this little frame. You want to get a good grade; that isn’t happening. You got a bad grade. Okay, what is it that's manifesting itself as the bad grade? Well, you could say, well, it's a C-minus on a piece of paper. It's like, well, that's—you know, really, no, that's the objective manifestation. You got a piece of paper with a C-minus, a little, you know, negative sign. Well, you think, well, that's what that is. Well, you know, it's as dopey as thinking, well, here you got your failing grade; you go into the lab and you like weigh it on a scale, then you burn it and see what it was made of.

It's like, well, why did I get so upset about that? It's just paper. It's like, no, that's not just paper. It's an entity that exists in a web of connections. The fact that it's signified by paper is almost completely irrelevant. What is it? The answer is you don't know, and that's why when you pick it up, you get this paralyzed sinking feeling because your limbic system is a lot smarter than your perceptual systems. And your perceptual systems say, well, that's a piece of paper. And your limbic system says, nah, for sure dragon, right? Right? And so then you're sweating, and then maybe you put it away, and you go play video games because you know better the hypothetical dragon than the real dragon. And so instead, you pull out the piece of paper maybe, and you think, okay, why did I get this C-minus?

Well, that's a hell of a question, isn't it? It's like maybe you're stupid. Well, that could be, or at least stupid compared to who you think you are. Like that’s—that's the real horror that's lurking there, right? It's like, all I thought it was kind of smart. That's a—that’s a proposition of the highest order; I thought I was kind of smart. It’s like, yeah, well, what about this C-minus? It's like, well, that goddamn professor! Right? That's the first thing. It's—I've been attacked by a predator! That's the first response. Right? So it’s—it’s a nonsensical message that's just delivered by someone evil.

Well, that's, you know, possible, but I wouldn't go there. I wouldn't go there first necessarily. So—but then—well, then say you don't go there. Okay, well, so what is this exactly? Do you not know what you thought you know? Are you not who you think you are? Do you not work hard enough? Or your values not organized properly? Do you misuse your time? Are you in the wrong field? Is the way you're construing your life completely inappropriate? Are you acting out what your parents wanted you to do, and you're pissed off about it? So you're only running at 40% despite the fact that they're paying $25,000 a year for your education, because that's a fun game.

Yeah, I'll go do what you want me to do, but I'll fail, but not completely. Because then that wouldn't cost you very much. I'll just fail a little bit, so that you have to spend all that money forcing me to do what I don't want to do. But you'll never get to escape from it, and then every time we interact, I'll stab you in various ways that you don't quite understand just to show you how irritated I am that I happened to be acting out the destiny that you've put forward for me. So maybe that's part of the dragon, right? And then that pulls in the whole parent thing. And, you know, these are bottomless pits often. When you're in the world, there's something that objects to you; something that matters objects to you, and then the entire unrealized world is in that thing that objects. It's all tangled up inside. That's why it's the great dragon of chaos; it's everything that's outside of your conceptual structure.

And what is that? It's everything that lurks outside of your walled city, and it's manifested itself like the snake in the garden. And the easiest thing to do is say, I'm not having anything to do with that. But the problem with that is, well, you get your C-minus, and you don't do anything about it. Maybe you're a little bitter, and more resentful in your study habits; get a little worse, so the next time you get like a D-plus, and then you collect a bunch of Fs, and then you stop going to school. Then you stop showering, right? Then you end up jumping off the bridge. And so that's a—that's—that's how the dragon eats you when you don't pay attention to it, and so it's no bloody wonder that people avoid. You know, it's really no wonder that they avoid, because error messages contain within them the implicit world!

Now, the upside of that is, while they contain within them the implicit world—and the world isn't all negative. And so maybe you get your C-minus, and that's actually the best gift you ever got, because somebody finally took you and went whack, you know, clue in! And so you take that apart, and you think, oh, I don't know how to write; I don't know how to think; I've never read anything in my life; my study habits are abysmal. You know, like maybe I'm working at 2% efficiency, which— which is probably—I would suspect that some of you aren't doing that, but I bet you that, I bet there's 30% to 50% of the people in the room are working at 2% efficiency. It's like you got it— that's so—to find that out is so optimistic!

I mean, if you're barely hanging in there but you're only working out 2%, you might imagine what you could have as a life if you worked it out like 50%. So the C-minus can be the best gift you ever had, and that's the gold that the dragon hoards, right? That's exactly what that means. And so, well, so you're moving from point A to point B in your little circumscribed world; you've made everything invisible. And as long as that works, then your theory's good enough, it's accurate enough, it’s true enough. You’re in your little paradise, but if something comes up and objects, well, that’s where your character is tested fundamentally. That's the character test. It’s like, what do you do with messages of error? And that's a tricky issue.

Okay, so here's a solution to that. Here's what not to do: I am a bad person; I got a C-minus; I'm a bad person; I'm out; I'll just go jump off the bridge. It's like, no, that's not good because what that means is that every time--every time you try to learn something, you're going to make a mistake, because what do you know? So you're gonna make mistakes, and if the rule is every time you make a mistake, you're gonna go jump off the bridge, then that's not a useful problem-solving strategy. And so when you make a mistake, you don't get to beat yourself to death with a club; it's a bad strategy. And you'll have your internal tyrant in there who's perfectly happy about doing that. That’s the, you know, overactive superego that Freud talked about. Maybe it came to you via a parent who was too authoritarian, or a grandparent, or maybe it's just you because you're disagreeable and neurotic. And so you’ll take—you're a hyper-conscientious—you'll take yourself apart.

Well, starting the— and so you've got a problem; something has objected to you. Then the question is, well, what does that mean? Well, maybe you're not looking at the world right; maybe your goals are wrong; maybe you're not acting properly. It's okay, so the question that arises when an obstacle emerges is, which part of this structure needs attention? And the first answer can't be all of it, which is why when you're arguing with someone in an intimate relationship and you're angry at them and you want to win, which is a big mistake, you want to win, you say, “Well, your this is what you’re like. Here’s another ten examples of how you’ve done that in the past, and I can enumerate more of them if you’d like.”

And so it doesn’t—that’s actually what you like, and I've tried fixing you, and it didn’t work. And so it looks like you’re gonna be like that up into the future, and you’re basically saying to them, “Well, you’re a bad person.” And the only thing they can do is either collapse or punch you. And punching you is actually better than collapsing. Look, you don’t— you know what I mean? It’s such a counterproductive way of arguing; you don’t leave the person any out! And so maybe while they're civilized, so it doesn't get physical—well, maybe that’s good, and maybe it isn't—but then they end up either really not happy with you in a way that they will manifest the first possible opportunity they get, or they have to go off in the corner and cringe. It's like, great, you won! It’s like now your partner either hates you or is cringing. It’s great; that’s a real good victory, man.

Cry, rack up about a hundred victories like that, and you'll be in divorce court and spending $250,000 while being miserable about it. Yeah, so anyway, something objects to you, and you think, okay, well I need to—I need to take myself apart, right? Because there’s a piece that's broken somewhere. And then you might think, well, let's assume it’s a little piece to begin with; that's the right mechanism. It's like, okay, you got a C-minus; that doesn’t prove that you’re stupid. And now it implies that you might be stupid, but it doesn’t really—it does. And that’s why you don’t want to look at it; maybe it implies that you’re lazier, implies that you’re ignorant, or like, it implies all sorts of terrible things. It might imply that you're a bad person even, but you don’t want to leap to that.

And that’s sort of the proclamation of innocence before guilt. Assume that you're the least amount of reprehensible and ignorant possible. And so then you look at the micro-routines. It's okay, well, I got a C-minus in this course. Maybe I should study for that course 15 minutes more a day for the next three months. And then you ask yourself, do you think you could do that? No, I'm too useless. Okay, how about 15 minutes every second day? You think you could do that? You put it in your schedule—like 15 minutes every second day in the morning. And that's while you think, well what's wrong with me? Well, I'm not very good at managing my study schedule. That's not quite down here at the behavioral level, but it's pretty close because what you—you can take an action; you can open up your schedule; and you can say, oh mark 50 minutes of it aside.

Then you can practice doing that. It's pretty low level in the hierarchy, it means while you're still not a horrible person; you just gotta polish up your work ethic. And so what you want to do is you want to—it's like the old adage: you gotta stand up for yourself, but you don't want to make unnecessary enemies. That's a really good thing to know. It's like shut the hell up most of the time, but now and then you don't shut up because it’s time to say something. You don't—you don’t want to make unnecessary enemies though. Well, you don’t want to take yourself apart any more than is absolutely necessary. Start little, and you do that with people around you too. Like if you have a child, you know, and the child does something that isn't right, then you think, okay, minimal necessary intervention. What can we do to decrease the probability that that's going to occur in the future?

So—and that’s so that’s a good thing to know with children; it’s also a good thing to know with your partners. You have an argument, some—it’s like, okay, what the hell do you want? What's the minimum thing you can request from them that would satisfy you? And the evil part of your soul is gonna be, I want them cringing in a corner. It's like, yeah, get that stuff under control, man. See if you can figure out what that person could offer you that would be minimal that you would accept, and then tell them that. It's like, here are the words I would like you to say in the apology. I would like you to formulate, assuming that you think you did something wrong. We have to argue about that, because maybe you didn’t, but if you did, I want to specify it precisely and narrowly, and I want to give you an escape route.

And, you know, you might only be able to do it badly because you’re still mad. So you apologize half-heartedly. It’s like you get a pat on the head for that; good! Next time, it'll be 51%! Not half-heartedly, right? So it's careful training. It’s careful training of yourself and other people with with the goal in mind, but also with the least amount of harshness possible. And then the other thing to do as well—and this is also true for you, and this is something I learned from studying the behavior is, like, watch the people around you like a hawk. Whenever they do something that you think is good, you tell them! That’s wisdom, man! You’ll get so far with that, you cannot bloody well believe it, because most people, you know, they're afraid of any number of things. But one of the things they're really afraid of is that now and then they'll creep out of their cynical shell and try to do something good.

You know, it's like they're popping out this thing that's unbelievably vulnerable to try to do something good and creep right back into their persona, and they'll look around and see if anyone noticed, and sometimes they'll get punished for it. And then, well then they won't do it again. So don't do that! But then, now and then, you think, hey! I saw you do this; it was actually pretty good! Oh, someone noticed! It looks like, wow! And then they’ll think, yeah, I could maybe—I could do that again! And if you want to live with someone for a long period of time, I would say, every time they do something that you would like them to do more of—number one, notice. Number two, tell them, right?

Because I know you don’t want to, because you really want to dominate them, and you don’t want them thriving, because then maybe they’d be competition to you, and you wouldn’t be able to go complain to your mother about what a miserable partner you have—and you know how delightful that is. So you have to forego all that pleasure if you actually help your person develop. So you got to get over all that; it’s really annoying. So, you know, you’ve got this person pegged—you’re stuck with them—and you know, maybe it's the best you can do, but you got one eye open, and then every time they do something good, you don't want to notice because if that elevated them a little bit, you wouldn't be able to feel so resentful and miserable and keep your eye open for the next possible affair.

And that is what people are like; that is what people are like, and that's what you're like—too. That's what people are like. So you got to decide if that's what you want, or you want to help the person that you're with grow. You know, that's dangerous because they might outshine you. Well, good! Then you have someone to compare yourself to; that would be a good deal. It’s really rough with kids, you know, because parents will stop their children from succeeding beyond them. They get jealous, and then they’ll put them down, and then they have kids that do not like them, and they’ll pay for it.

So one of the things that I've figured out over the last years is this is a good proposition. So, you know, it's pretty self-evident that life has got its rat's nest of miseries, and that's for sure. And maybe you could even make a categorical statement that life is mostly a rat's nest of misery, you know? And you can make a pretty powerful argument for that. But then there's a counter question, which is, well, what if you tried not to make it any more miserable? That had to be right. Then what? Then what would it be like? And my suspicions are that a lot of that misery—I would suspect that most of that misery would go away. Because it's the unnecessary misery that really brings you down.

You know, it's like, well, someone has cancer; it's like that sucks, but it's not like it's—not like you can say, if only we had done this differently, then that wouldn't have happened. But when someone's out like torturing you in a malevolent way, or maybe you're doing the same, you could always ask yourself, was it really—it's this really necessary? Is this just like an useless add-on to the miseries of life? That's what disheartens people. And so even in your own life, if you if you aren't suffering from self-imposed misery and you’re only suffering from an inescapable misery, maybe you could handle that. And you know, you could—you could survive; you could bear it. And even maybe without becoming irredeemably corrupt.

So the goal would be, well, yeah, life is a rat's nest of miseries, and maybe it has no ultimate meaning. We could say that for feeling particularly pessimistic, but it still leaves one question open, which is, if you didn’t do everything you could to make it worse, how good could you make it be? And the least answer is, well, it could be tragedy, but maybe not hell. And I think that's right; I really believe that's—the most pessimistic proper statement—the worst-case outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your life could be tragic, but not hell. And that's blood better than hell, right?

And you think I could give you an example of the difference? You're at your mother's deathbed—well, that’s tragedy. Here's another scenario: you're at your mother's deathbed, and you and all your idiot siblings are arguing. Well, that's the difference between tragedy and hell. And you might be able to tolerate the first circumstance, and maybe it would even bring you closer together with your family members. The second one? No one can bear that! You walk away from a situation like that sick of yourself and sick of everything else!

And you know, it’s often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the dragons because the stress is high, and all those things that people haven't dealt with—they don't have the energy to repress, and all the bitterness comes pouring forward. It's like, seriously man, you know? So that's actually a good—it's a rough lesson, but it's a good hallmark for figuring out whether or not you've got yourself adjusted properly. And in relationship to your siblings, it's like if you are all gathered around the bed of someone close who is dying, could you manage it? If the answer is no, it's like, well, put your life together, because it's going to happen.

And you should be the person who's there that can do it and do it properly. And then maybe you'd find that it isn't the sort of thing that will undermine your faith in life itself. And I've seen—I've seen both of those situations. You know, ugly, ugly, ugly situations. You know, murderously ugly situations. And then the opposite, where people had terrible things happening to happen to them as a family. And, you know, they pull together, and they rebuild their damn ship, and they sail away. So that seems to me to be a lot better.

That makes—you know, when the flood comes, right? Well, okay, so the same thing. The question emerges: well, who are you? Well, you could say you're this plan— that's what people usually—that's how people usually identify. Maybe they have no plan at all, and they're just in chaos, right? That's like being in the belly of the beast; they're nihilistic and chaotic; they have no plan; they're just chaos itself. And that's a very dreadful situation for people to be in. Or maybe they conjure together a plan—that's their identity. It's kind of fragile, and they're holding on to that with everything they've got. It's their little stick of wood that they're floating in the ocean clinging to.

You know? And so they’re identifying really hard with that plan. The problem is, if something comes up to confront it, well, how do you act? Well, you can't let go of the plan because you drown. Then you cling to it rigidly. Well, that's no good because then you can't learn anything. Then if that’s you, you’re a totalitarian; you’re not going to learn anything—you’re gonna end up in something that’s close enough to hell so that you won’t know the difference. And you might drag everyone along with you. That’s happened plenty of times, right? It’s the whole story of the 20th century. It happened over and over and over, and it happens in people's states, it happens in their business organizations, it happens in their cities, it happens in their provinces, it happens in their states, and it happens in their psyches—all at the same time.

You can't blame the manifestation of that sort of thing on any of those one levels; it happens when a society goes down that way, it goes down everywhere at the same time. It's not the totalitarians at the top and all the happy people striving to be free at the bottom. It's not that at all! It's totalitarianism at every single level of the hierarchy, including the psychological, and so you don’t want to be—the thing you don’t want to be in chaos, that’s for sure. But you don’t want to be the thing that clings so desperately to the raft that you can't let go when someone comes to rescue you, right? You don’t want to be that.

So then you think, well, exactly what are you? You know? What the chaos? You're not the plan? Maybe you're the thing that confronts the obstacle. And I would say that’s the categorical lesson of psychology insofar as it has to do with personal transformation. That's what you always teach people in psychotherapy. I don't care what sort of psychotherapist you are; you're always teaching them the same thing. You’re the thing that can—you’re not the plan; you’re the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plan. And then when you know even further that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself, well then your whole view of the world can change.

Because you might think, well, I've got this plan; something came up to object to it. It's like, it's possible that the thing that's objecting has something to teach you that will take you to the place where you develop an even better plan. That's a nice framework to use. It's like, are you so sure that this is a problem? Is that the only way that you can look at it? Or is it an opportunity? I mean, I'm not trying to be, you know, naively optimistic. There are some things that's pretty hard to extract gold from some dragons, and maybe the death of a family member is a good example of that.

But in even in a situation like that, I can tell you that it's an opportunity for—it’s an opportunity for maturation, that's for sure. And the thing is, you might say, well, it's pretty miserable to go be digging for gold when someone's falling into the grave. Well, if they really love you, first of all, that's what they'll want you to do. And second, you're gonna make their death a lot more palatable experience for them if you're someone who can be in the room and be helpful instead of being, you know, quivering in the corner and feeling that the entire world is collapsing in on you. I mean, that's another—you want to be the useful person at the funeral. How's that for a goal? That's a good goal, man! You know that you've got yourself together in a situation like that because you’re gonna be at them.

And maybe you want to be the person on whose shoulder people cry. That'd be a good goal! That's kind of, you know? I don't like being naively optimistic, so when I tell you to get your life together, I'm not going to say roses and sunshine. It's like that’s— that's pablum for fools. But it really is something to be the reliable person out of funeral, right? And you can aim at that! You can do that! And you've got to be tough to do that, because it also means that you can sustain a major loss without collapsing, and you've got to be a monster to do that.

Right? Because you might think—and I've had clients like this— while I love my child; I love my mother so much that I couldn't survive if anything happened to them. It's like, you have some serious thinking to do about that. It's like, you really want to curse someone with that kind of love? Do you? I couldn't live without you. It's like, my God, get away from me! Really? It’s terrible! That's the eatable mother, right? That's like I'll forgive you no matter what you do. It's like, really? You—no matter what I do, eh? You are not my friend, that's for sure. Not at all. It's a horrible thing to do to someone. That’s the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story—all gingerbread and outside to the lost kid inside. You feed them candy and make them fat and eat them, right? That’s Hansel and Gretel. That's the eatable mother; that's one of Freud's major discoveries; it’s a major discovery.

It's like the devouring force of love. You want the person to be able to stand on their own, and the price you pay for that is that you stand on your own. It's like good to have you around; I'm glad you're here. But if tragedies win and if—and when tragedy strikes either of us, I hope that one of us is standing when it blows past. And that there's a harshness about that that's unbelievably cruel, because you know you say, well, if my mother died, I could live. Well, what kind of monster are you exactly? Death of your mother doesn’t do you in? Well, turns out that being a monster is the right thing.

So and that's a rough thing to learn, but it's necessary to learn, you know? Because it also makes you, you know, at some point, for example, as you get older, mm-hmm, by the time you're in your mid-20s, something like that, you should start having a relationship with your parents that’s approximately one of peers. And you can tell if you have that. So here's a little trick you can use. So you have parents, obviously; they have friends; you probably care what your parents think, I would imagine. Do you care what their friends think of you? And the answer to that is, well, not nearly as much. And so then I would say, well, why do you care what your parents think of you then? They’re the same! You know what I mean?

It’s just luck of the draw that your parents are someone else’s kids’ friends. They don’t think the same way about them that you do. Well, that's where you see that you have a projection, right? If by the time you're 30, if what your parents think of you matters more than what, say, a random set of their friends think of you, then you’ve still got your parents confused with God. That’s one way of looking at it. You’ve still got them confused with an archetype, and you’re still a child. And you might think, well, it’s pretty damn rude not to think about what your parents think of you anymore, not to care. It's like, yeah, it’s kind of rude, but maybe you'll be useful for them when they get old, and that's a much better form of caring.

It's like you’re going to be independent enough and strong enough and detached enough so that when the power dynamic shifts—which it will— that you'll be the person that can carry things forward. Well, you can't do a better thing for them than that, right? That’s the best of all possible outcomes for your parents. Well, you can think about the world this way; you can think about it as your orderly little plan—that’s a place. And you can think about it as the place that things that disrupt your plan comes from. That's another place. This is a bigger place than this because there’s an endless number of things that can disrupt your plan and only a tiny number of them that can, you know, that will help you work it out.

So part of the question then too is like, are you the friend of your plan, or are you the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan? And I would say you should work to become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan, because there's a lot of that. And then if you become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan, then you start to develop strength in proportion to the disruptive force. And that's really what you want. You want to be able to implement your plan, obviously, but you want to be able to take on the consequences of error and learn from it, and then you win constantly, because even if something goes sideways, you think there's something to be derived from this—that's wisdom fundamentally.

So—that’s—that’s the eternal domains, right? There's the domain of order—that's a snake, by the way—and there's a domain of chaos, and that's the world. And maybe you're in the order, and maybe you're in the chaos, but those can flip on you. And maybe you shouldn't be in either of those places; maybe you should be right in the middle. And that's where you should be, as far as I can tell. And I think this is another escape from postmodern nihilism, let's say. That's actually a real place; it's not metaphysical. Or maybe it is, but it's metaphysical if metaphysics is more real than physics. And you can tell when you're at that place, because that's a maximally meaningful place.

And you drift in and out of it all the time in your life, and when things are really bad for you, you're not there hardly at all, right? Because everything is overwhelming you, or things have become sterile. But if you watch your life, even over a week or two, you'll see that now and then you're there. I think you stand up straighter, right? Because you're in the right place at the right time. You think, aha! I got the forces of chaos and order properly balanced. It's unstable, and it'll fall apart on you, but you know you can practice bringing things together continually, and then you can end up so that you're there more often than not. And then that's—that's a meta place; it's not a place; it’s a meta place.

And it’s a place that you can be in all places. And it’s not an illusion of any sort; it's the deepest reality. Your nervous system is always orienting yourself; you're always orienting to that place. Always! And that’s because it’s a real place; that’s another way of thinking about it. Well, that's the normal world; that's the garden with the snake in it. And that's chaos; that’s the chaos that arises when your plans collapse, right? That’s the world in the underworld, and so the underworld is always there, and it’s lurking beneath everything. It’s like the figure of the shark in the Jaws poster: right there you are swinging at the top, and there’s that terrible thing underneath that can come up and pull you down. That’s the world.

So, you need to be able to operate here, and you need to be able to operate here. And when you operate here—well, that’s when you rescue your father from the belly of the whale. That’s when you go down, and you see, when you're down in chaos and you don't know what the hell's going on, you have to rediscover the values that orient people—have oriented people forever—that's what you have to discover. So for example, when I'm dealing with people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, and they’ve usually encountered someone malevolent, they have to relearn the description of good and evil, because if they don't, they have no framework; they're lost.

They think, well, there’s a malevolence afoot in the world, and I'm a naive—I’m a naive prey animal for the malevolence of the world. It’s like, well, good luck functioning under that set of assumptions, man! You just do not recover from that! You stay at home in your burrow; that's what you do. Well, you have to—you go down into that, you think, okay, well malevolence is afoot; I better be the sort of person that can understand it and deal with it. And that's another reason why you have to transform yourself into a monster—that's the Jungian incorporation of the shadow. It's no bloody joke, because the only thing that a monster won't mess with is another monster.

And you might say, well, I don't want to transform myself into a monster. It's like you don't have a choice. You can either be a pathetic monster or you can be a monster with some power. Those are your options—there's no non-monster alternative. Weak or strong! And I don't mean strong like dominating tyrant strength. That isn't what I mean at all. I mean strength like functioning at a funeral strength, and that's a kind of monstrosity.

And when you're down in chaos, that's what you have to rediscover. Well, that's partly what that means. You're lucky if you come back out! Remember I told you the story of Jonah at the beginning of the course? It's like he had something to do and was refusing to do it, and so God pulled him down to the depths of being and threatened him with death; but worse—not just death—he'll really well. He decided it was better to come popping up back into the light and go do what he was supposed to do. Well, there’s a reason that’s the oldest story of mankind. As far back as you go into the archives of history, you find this story, right? And it’s because—it’s because not only is it because it’s true, it’s because it’s true, and everyone knows it’s true even though they don’t know that they know that this is the story, too.

It’s the same thing: there’s always a city; it’s always enclosed, right? There’s always people who inhabit it. There's always someone who's willing to notice that the dragon hasn't gone away; the skulls are still around. There’s someone who’s willing to come out of the fortress and take that on, right? And to prefer perform the job of rescuing—that’s an eternal story. Are you the city? Are you the dragon? Are you the thing that engages voluntarily in combat with what lies outside your range of safety? Because that’s what that image represents. It’s that is the monster amalgam, symbolic amalgam of all that which lies outside your realm of safety. You want to be safe? Forget that, right?

That is—that’s not in the cards; you’re not gonna be safe! Well then, you have to be meta-safe. And that’s way better, because then you’re not safe, but you know how to cope with danger. Well, find that—that solves the problem. And maybe it's even a better solution, because if you're safe, then you just have to stay in your burrow. But if you can confront danger, then you can go wherever you want, and you can have an adventure. And maybe that’s what you need to do is to go out and have an adventure. So you don’t even want safety, because how exciting is that? Not Dostoevsky said very clearly, let’s say we made you perfectly safe. All that you had to do is eat cakes and worry yourself with the continuation of the species. What would you do? You'd smash it all down as soon as you possibly could just so you had something interesting and challenging to do!

So, you don’t want safety; you want to be able to cope with danger. That’s a whole different thing! And there’s, again, it’s not metaphysical. The clinical data on this is clear. When you treat someone for an anxiety disorder like agoraphobia, you do not get rid of their anxiety; you make them braver. That’s way better! There’s no going back! Like once you’re agoraphobic, your heart’s not doing them, you know, it’s—it’s missing beats now, and that it’s like death—like the crocodile that’s got the clock and it’s in his stomach! Death is after you; there's no—there's no going back to naivety!

You don’t get to be safe ever again! Well, so what happens? You get to be stronger. Well, hey, it turns out that’s a better bar anyways! So Lin is Bell, an evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brain in primates. A radical new theory suggests the idea proposed by Lin is Bell and anthropologist at the University of California suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history—one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand. That's Hercules, right? Well, that's infinity; that symbol. And this is the snake—you cut off one head and seven more grow. It's like it's an infinite snake; you're never gonna run out of snakes. Those are the things that object to your plans.

Well, you can't get rid of the snake. So what do you do? You learn how to handle them, right? That’s it; that’s—that's the answers! You learn how to become a handler of snakes, both physical and metaphysical. See you see the little halo around it? I think that's St. George. It might be St. Michael, but I think it's St. George. Why does he go? The halo? Well, that's the Sun. Well, what does that mean? It's gold – gold is pure; it's the pure gold sun; it's associated with consciousness. It's the pure gold sun of consciousness that can confront the terrible thing that paralyzes. And that's the same thing; that's death, right? The clock in the stomach of the crocodile—it’s already got a taste of Captain Hook! Captain Hook's no St. George; that’s why Peter Pan doesn’t want to grow up!

He always sees his Captain Hook. I don’t want to be Captain Hook; he doesn’t see this. So he stays at home and plays video games with the rest of the Lost Boys. Look, I got nothing against video games, by the way. I mean, everything in moderation, right? And I mean they demand skill. Well, so what's this? You know, there you are; you go down into chaos, and then you come back up. And so you might say, well, am I this or am I the chaos or am I the new solution? And the answer is, you're not this or you shouldn't be, because that's your old dead self, right? That's the thing that needs to burn away. You know what chaos itself?

But you're also not the new regenerated order; you're the thing that can make the journey. And more than that, you're the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily. And then more than that, you're the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily for as long as it takes. And that's where you derive your strength. It's like there’s no getting rid of chaos; it’s eternal. There's no getting rid of order; it's eternal. Those are both traps. You mediate between them, and that's where your strength lies. And that's not only strength for you; it's strength for you; it’s strength for the people around you; it’s strength for the community; and it’s strength for everything.

It's the thing that makes everything order itself properly and thrive. You have to ask yourself—and this is the thing you ask yourself; this is the existential question—do you want things to be ordered properly and thrive? Because if the answer to that is yes, you have to give up your hatred of being. You have to give up your resentment; you have to give up your martyrdom and your victimization and all of that, because to the degree that you carry that forward, it will corrupt you, and you will not want the best, because to be—if you aren’t the best, you have to be without Rachel hey—treated rancor and resentment. Because you know, if I resent you for your inadequacies or even for your accomplishments, I’m not gonna have a conversation with you where I'm aiming for the best. I’m gonna have all sorts of motivations. I’m gonna take you down somehow.

You know, especially if you're successful, that's the Cain and Abel story. It's like I bet—I want to be who you are, but I can't be! So I'll just cut you off at the knees, and that'll do just fine. And then I can get my revenge on you, and I can get my revenge on being. And you know the fact that it helps turn everything into hell? Well, maybe that's just an additional benefit! That’s represented all sorts of different ways—the masculine sun and the feminine moon; that's Horus in gold, right? Horus is all speech and eyes, and that’s Osiris, the god of tradition, and Isis, the queen of the underworld. You see the same thing here: suffering individual that transcends it by accepting it, nested inside of society and the patriarchal structure, nested inside the natural world and the feminine.

That's the same idea there; that's Buddha emerging from the lotus flower. And the lotus flower, if its roots go down into the murk at the bottom of the pond, so it emerges out of the darkness and manifests itself, and then it climbs upwards towards the light. And then the lotus floats on the surface of the water and blooms open. And inside that, the Buddha sits—the golden Buddha sits in the light. It’s the flowering of being. And that's a mandala from the Jungian perspective; it's the mandala that opens up and it reveals this mode of perfect being—that’s what the Buddha means. And he found enlightenment underneath the tree because that’s the human environment; this is to find enlightenment underneath the tree.

He's got the sun on his head too, and he’s gold for the same reason: gold is pure. You see the same thing in Hinduism? So that's the yoni, feminine symbol, case you were wondering. Masculine symbol, that's the union of the two, right? That’s the union of chaos and order with a snake lurking in the background. And it’s golden because it’s the union of those two things that produces the power of the snake, that’s something that you might think about. You could think about those as two halves of the DNA molecule—that is what they are, although I can't tell you how I know that. But it’s the same idea. It’s the same idea here.

So this—a very remarkable picture. So this is Eve; Eve is handing out skulls to mankind, right? It’s self-consciousness and the discovery of death. This is Mary as the church on this side, and she’s handing out these things that are the hosts. Those are pieces of Christ’s body. And see? So he’s put up there on this tree, the same as the skull, as an antidote. The antidote is something that you incorporate, and the thing you incorporate is the voluntary acceptance of suffering as the cure for death. That’s what that picture means. People worked on that bloody picture for a long, long, long, long time. And you know, we see the picture, but we don’t know what it means. But that’s what it means!

It means the same thing that this means; it means the same thing that this means; it means the same thing that this means. See, there’s Pride Rock. This is the Scandinavian World Tree; there’s Pride Rock right there. There’s the territory outside. See, it's a serpent; it's a snake, that’s the territory outside—that's outside of the light. And that's all in a tree; that's how can you not read that as a history of the evolution of mankind? That's exactly what it is. That’s our eternal home.

Well, we better stop before that girl comes in. It was very nice having you all in the class, and I appreciated the warm welcome I got, especially in January, because it was a rough time in January. And so I'm glad this all worked out so well, and it was a pleasure teaching you. So good luck to you all! I mean it. Be what you can be! God, you let the world dissolve around you; otherwise, that's not a good thing. You've got something that everyone needs, man, including yourself! It's like let it out! That's where everything you want is! And it's this; it’s the case for every single one of you!

So, you know, hoist up your goddamn privilege and go out there and do something in the world! See ya.

[Applause]