2014 Personality Lecture 02: Mythological Representations

Today we're going to talk a little bit about, I guess you could call them the underlying structures of perception. I picked this image; it's a very old image. It's an image that portrays man being cast up on the beach by a whale; it’s Jonah, a biblical figure. In the story of Jonah, Jonah was out on a rough ocean storm, and he had been commanded by God to do something which he was ignoring.

The storm was sufficiently rough so that he got cast overboard; he was eaten by this giant, this whale. As far as medieval people were concerned, it’s obviously not what we would think of as a whale, but they didn't know much about whales anyways. He was swallowed up by the whale and then cast back up on shore a number of days later. It's a death and rebirth story, and the reason I use it as an image is because it represents something of psychological import that you're all familiar with, but that you might not know that you're familiar with. Symbols are often like that.

A symbol often stands for something that you know but that you don't know that you know. There's lots of things that you know that you don't know that you know. Almost everything is like that, in fact, and it's rather obvious if you think about it because if you were transparent to yourself and you knew everything you knew, you wouldn't have to study anything about psychology because you'd understand yourself completely. We understand ourselves poorly, and so we have to study ourselves as individuals, and then you know, as phenomena in the world, as other people, and as mammals, and as animals, and as living things, and as political actors, and so on, just to get some minor notion of what's actually going on.

What that means, in part, is that you're more complicated than you can understand. When you hear, say, psychoanalytic thinkers talking about ideas like the unconscious, the unconscious is actually a representation, in some ways, of the fact that there's far more to you than you know about. What that means also is that there are different kinds of unconscious, and we certainly know that to be the case. There are different kinds of memory, for example.

So, a lot of your procedural knowledge is unconscious, and so your procedural knowledge is what allows you to do things like ride a bike or walk, for that matter, because you don't really know how you walk. It's actually a controlled fall, so you lean forward, and then you use your legs to stop you from falling on the ground. It's encoded in your architecture rather than something that's apprehensible to your conscious understanding.

Now there are lots of phenomena that are procedural and unconscious. Then there are sort of borderline phenomena that you have some idea about that you can represent but you still don't completely understand. So those sorts of representations tend to be more imagistic, and those are the sorts of things maybe that pop up in your fantasies and your dreams, and those are also the sorts of unconscious sources of knowledge that allow you to understand, say, complex works of literature or art that draw their meaning from multiple sources simultaneously and attempt to inform you at a deep level about how things are connected and how they're different.

Now, this particular image is a journey to the underworld image, and that's a very, very old idea of a journey to the underworld. It's maybe the oldest myth, one of the oldest mythological ideas or one of the oldest archetypal ideas. The underworld is a difficult phenomenon to grasp, although you certainly encountered the concept, particularly in movies. For most of you, how many of you have seen all the Harry Potter movies? Right, of course.

In the second movie, I believe it's the second movie, where Potter encounters a basilisk underneath Hogwarts, is that right? Is that the second one? Yeah, well, that story is a journey to the underworld story. The architectural setup of the movie—by architectural setup, I mean the relationship of Hogwarts, the castle, to the underground structures—is a symbolic representation of the representation of consciousness embedded in culture. That would be Potter and his friends embedded in the realm of magical knowledge, so to speak, that's outside of them, and that's represented by the castle, which is a representation of knowledge cast in stone.

So that's a form of memory, to cast something in stone. Potter and his friends are being enculturated in this enclosed environment, this safe enclosed environment. It's like a university; it's like the university more on the other side of the campus than on this side for various reasons. Now, underneath the—well, in the background of course in the Potter series, there's a battle between good and evil going on, and that’s also an extremely old archetypal idea. I mean that's an idea that's probably as old as human beings.

That's partly because human beings are very strange creatures, and they're capable of very, what would you call, profound acts of deception. One of the things that separates human beings from most other animals is our capacity to use deception, and it's associated with our imaginativeness, right? Because we can imagine a variety of alternative potential realities and move towards them. That opens the door for us to deceive ourselves and others because we can replace our accurate vision of the world, in so far as it's accurate, with whatever vision and representation we wish to choose.

One of the things you find in childhood development, for example, is that the smarter the child, the earlier they learn to lie. It's an offshoot of the ability to use fantasy, and so the idea of good versus evil part comes out of that, to some degree, because if you're dealing with people, you're always dealing with phenomena that can trick you in some way. They can represent reality as other than it is, and that's a tremendous problem for human beings because it makes other people extremely difficult to figure out.

Now if you're honest and straightforward, then you're easy to figure out because you don't have to be figured out. I can just take you at your word, which means you'll tell me something and it'll be relatively straightforward. I'll be able to understand it, and then you'll go do it. No problem; I don't have to know anything about you. On the other hand, if you don't do things according to what you say you'll do, then you're a bottomless pit of incomprehensibility, and God only knows what you're going to be up to.

So that's an archetypal problem for human beings, and that's the problem of having to deal with the latent deceptive capacity of other people, and of course of ourselves. So that's all going on in the background of the Potter series. But underneath the castle, for example, remember what's under the castle in the second film? What is it? It's a basilisk, right? Yeah, and what happens when you look at a basilisk?

Stone, right! And so what might that mean, if you're thinking about it intelligently? Say, what phenomena might that represent? What happens to prey animals when they encounter a predator? Freeze! They freeze! Exactly! Yeah, so it's a representation of the fact that there are certain classes of phenomena that will freeze you on sight.

You freeze because there are parts of your brain that respond to phenomena in the external world as if you are prey, and the reason for that is, well, first, you are. Second, from an evolutionary perspective, your ancestry going back, say, tens of millions of years is an ancestry that was composed of predecessors that were continually preying upon, and we have entire systems in our brain that react to the class of potentially predatory events.

Now, for human beings, that system has differentiated cognitively so that many of the things that we would experience as predatory threats in the modern world don't come in the shape of, say, crocodiles and bears, and giant cats and so forth, the sorts of things that would necessarily prey on you in the night. But they're analogous in that the outcome is the same; you can be preyed upon by many things. You can be preyed upon by, you know, a corrupt corporation, and so it's perfectly reasonable to symbolize the actions of a corrupt corporation as a form of predation.

Also, to categorize that even more deeply as a reflection of the underlying consequences of the fact that people can deceive each other, and those sorts of representations get deep very, very rapidly. But they're active and living representations in that they still represent something that's profoundly true, which is not so much what things are in and of themselves, which is what science does, but what things are in relationship to you, which is more like what things mean.

Things generally have a motivational or emotional meaning, and that meaning is generally quite tightly tied to the necessity that you have to survive and to thrive, and to find someone to be with and to reproduce, and all the Darwinian things that you're supposed to be up to. So a lot of these more archaic categories are meaningful categories; that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it.

Now in the Potter situation, which is related to this image, the one that's up here, the idea is that everything that's stable rests on something that's unstable and dangerous, and that's underneath in the Potter series. The other thing that happens continually in the series, but particularly in the second episode, particularly in the second episode, is that Potter has to go down beneath things to encounter something that's terrifying and deadly; that's actually preying on his friends and on the community.

It's very much like, for example, The Hobbit, having to go off and steal treasure from Smaug, I think the dragon's name is. Except that in the Potter sequence, the dragon, which is the Basilisk, they equivalent. It’s the same thing as this. In The Hobbit, the dragon hoards gold. Whereas in the Potter representation, what does the basilisk guard? What has it captured? It's the little redheaded girl, Ginny, right? Ginny? Right? And that's a very, that's a very old story.

Now Potter's kind of in love with her, right? I mean, it’s—they're young and sort of platonic, but you can see the relationship sort of burgeoning. Now he has to confront this thing that's terrifying that exists underneath everything in order to free this virginal figure from the clutches of something terrible and reptilian. Now it's a very, very interesting story, that, and what it means has a whole variety of things.

What it means to some degree is that a male human being can't really become mature until he confronts the terrible things that lie underneath the civilized veneer of society. That’s one thing it means. Another thing it means is that it's the capacity of the male in that situation to do that that makes him attractive enough to wake up the females that he might be associated with. So that's like a Sleeping Beauty motif.

It has evolutionary echoes because much of what we've battled with for the last 60 million years, say, because I think you can trace the development of our cognitive structures quite straightforwardly back 60 million years, there's been an endless battle between human beings and predators. Many of those predators were reptilian and so, you know, we’re the result of a very long battle between mammals and reptiles.

In our case particularly, it appears that part of the reason we evolved our tool-using capacity and our great capacity for vision was because our ancestors were continually predated upon by predatory snakes when they lived in trees, and that's a long time ago. These symbolic representations are unbelievably archaic, and they're kind of as archaic as the underlying biological systems in your brain that provide you with motivation and emotion, and those are extremely old.

You share those with, well, you share those with any animal that you have any hope whatsoever of understanding at all, and that even means lizards. You know, my daughter had these lizards that were called—I can't remember, unfortunately—they're a desert kind of lizard, and they make a good initial pet. But they're very little creatures because they, you know, they're very lizard-like, being that they're lizards, and they have points all over them. If you put them in water, they puff themselves up, which is quite fun, and then they zoom around on the water.

But more importantly, they like to stack on top of each other; they're very, very social and they're friendly, which is not exactly something that you'd expect from a lizard. But my point is that even something that's as distant as that from you in the evolutionary hierarchy shares enough commonality of biological structure with you so that you can understand a fair bit of its motivation.

So, for example, it's pretty easy to tell when one of those lizards, even though they're basically friendly, gets angry because it'll puff up and hiss, and you know right away you don't have to have a discussion with the rest of your family to figure out that that's an angry lizard, right? It maps onto your body immediately.

The same thing applies to snakes; it even applies to insects. Lots of insects have developed the kind of warning behavior that will immediately signal to you that you're about to be bitten or, or it’s usually bitten with insects. So this is all to say that there are levels of understanding that are underneath, say, your normative, mundane, day-to-day comprehension that inform everything that you do with deep levels of meaning.

A lot of the activities that you pursue that you might regard as entertaining actually draw on those representations, and you find them entertaining because they're actually deeply meaningful. Now, the idea that a man can be swallowed—or a human being, because there are myths like the myth of Prapan, where the protagonist is clearly female, where there’s an underground journey and then a reemergence—and that’s the journey to the underworld. That's the journey that Harry Potter undertakes continually by the way throughout the Potter series.

The underworld takes different forms as the series progress. That’s also a death and rebirth idea, and that's a very old and profound idea. It's actually one of the most profound ideas that human beings have. It's the idea that you will spend time in your life underground. Now you might think, what does that mean?

Well, it means what the Potter movie, the second Potter movie was trying to represent, which is that there will be times in your life when you are faced with things that will terrify you into paralysis and that will take you underneath your normal set of assumptions. Because when your normal set of assumptions is functioning, you don't end up facing something that's terrifying enough to freeze you.

When your normal set of assumptions is working, the world stays happily predictable around you, and most of the time that's where you are; that's the normal world. But that's blown apart whenever something that you're attempting to do fails in a dramatic or less dramatic way. The more dramatic the way, the deeper you go into the underworld.

The underworld is, in some sense, the substructures of your presuppositions. Now, you know this already because I don't suppose there's a single person in here who hasn't spent some time in the underworld, so to speak, because this is what happens when something terrible happens to you, unpredictable and terrible.

There are sort of classic categories of events that send you to the underworld: the death of someone you love, a serious illness of some sort, either for you or for someone you love, the death of a dream of some sort, you know, so you've got some goal that you think is really important, and all of a sudden you find out for one reason or another that there's just no way you're going to be able to pursue it.

Betrayal—that's a really good one. People—that's a really rough one, and that'll throw you for a loop, for sure. So they're all elements of the part of the world that you can't control, that in some sense always remains beyond your control, that has, in some sense, a predatory relationship to you because it can devour you, at least metaphysically.

When that happens, you go somewhere, and the place that you go is very dangerous; it's underneath everything. Maybe you come back out, and if you come back out, what that means is that you've reconstructed your erroneous presupposition so that you can function once again in the world.

But maybe you don't; maybe you don't. People who have post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, they go into the underworld; they just stay there. You know, and if you're chronically depressed or if you can't get over your grief, or if you're in a state of continual anxiety and upset, or if you're nihilistic, for that matter, you exist essentially in an underworld domain because you can't master the perceptual apparatus, the culturally informed perceptual apparatus, that would help you orient yourself in the world so that the things that you want to have happen and that you need to have happen actually happen.

So that's what that picture means. It also means, at least in principle, that people have the capacity to die and be reborn at different levels of analysis. You know there are minor disappointments that you encounter when you have to drop some presupposition that you have and let it die, and then put a new one in its place. And that's painful, but it's nowhere near as painful as holding on to the things when they don't work because then you just end up wandering around as sort of a clattering collection of dead presuppositions.

Nothing that you ever want will happen under that circumstance because you're armed with tools that don't fit the world. When you try to apply them, the world won't do what you want it to do, and then that’s endlessly anxiety-provoking and frustrating.

So part of pain is part of the price that you pay in some ways for being updatable, you know, because the world transforms around you. As a consequence, you have to be able to transform with it; otherwise, it runs ahead of you and you get left behind. And you know that happens to people to some degree anyways as they age; that's actually one of the evolutionary explanations for why people die.

It’s a mystery, right? There are elements of you that are immortal. You know the cells that give rise to you are immortal. The DNA that produced you is at least 3.5 billion years old; it might be older than that. So structures can maintain themselves over unbelievably vast expanses of time. So it’s not self-evident why human beings have to die, but we do, and we die at about after you're done being a grandparent is kind of when you're done.

The hypothesis is that at that point, in some sense, it's too costly to keep you updated, and you have to be replaced by a younger version, which would of course be your grandchildren or whatever. You know you’ve sort of exhausted your plasticity and flexibility, and then it's cheaper just to replace you than to update you. So that's kind of a drag, but yeah.

So here's a funny question for you; this is the question that scientists are always devoted towards answering: what's the world made of? Well, that's a complicated question. I mean, the simple answer is that it's made out of matter, and that matter is made out of atoms. That theory was originally formulated by Democritus, but Democritus didn't exactly say that the world was made out of atoms. He said the world was made out of atoms and space.

That actually happens to matter because the way that atoms are arranged in space gives rise to another property, which is information. So if you have atoms in space, you also have information, and you can think of the world as being made of information just as easily as you can think of it as being made of matter.

Now, in fact, I think that—and, you know, I'm not alone in this hypothesis—that it's actually more useful to conceive of the ground of reality as being something like information rather than being something like matter. But we don't have to discuss that at length at the moment; what we'll say instead is that one way of looking at the world is the materialistic perspective, and the materialistic perspective is a very powerful perspective.

It's basically been dominant for about since the time of Galileo. That's about when that perspective got thoroughly going and, for many reasons, Bacon and Descartes as well, were major players in the establishment of the materialistic framework. It came about, in many ways, because people were suffering from their inability to understand objective reality. We still suffer from that because there are all sorts of diseases we don't know what to do with, and we age, and, you know, things don't work out exactly like they're supposed to, and so we pay a big price for our ignorance, and so we're motivated to overcome it.

One way we have overcome it was by developing materialistic philosophy, and that materialistic philosophy enabled us to specify the structure of certain elements of the world and then to learn to predict and control it, at least to some degree. Now, you know, you learn to predict and control something and sometimes you generate more monsters doing that, so that's problematic.

But all things considered, I think it's a lot better to live now than to live three or four hundred years ago, or maybe even thirty years ago for that matter. So, it looks like the whole materialistic thing has been doing a lot of good for us, but it also has some serious problems.

The problems have to do with another fundamental problem that human beings have to solve, which is what you should do about what is. Because human beings are dynamic and active creatures, and so we do not only—we're not machines of representation; we don't just care what the world is, we care what you should do with the world. And the reason we care for that—well, the fundamental reason, if you're thinking about it from a scientific perspective, is essentially Darwinian.

You can imagine the conflict between the moral worldview and the materialistic worldview as a battle in some sense between Newton and Darwin. So Newton was the fundamental author of the idea that the world was made out of material and that it operated like a machine. You know, which was a pretty powerful perspective.

That perspective came about during the time of clocks, you know, when Europeans, in particular, were starting to build things that would function in a very predictable manner once they were set in motion. In some sense, Newton was influenced by that and assumed that the entire cosmos could be understood as a deterministic machine and that it would be ultimately predictable and controllable.

In a famous statement, and I don’t think this was Newton, although I can't remember; it might have been Descartes. Anyway, the idea is that if you knew the position of every subatomic or every atomic particle in existence, if you knew the position and the momentum of those particles, that you could then predict the entire outcome of the future. It was strictly deterministic, and the only thing that stopped you from being able to describe everything in terms of machinery was your ignorance. There was nothing at the bottom of the cosmos, so to speak, that was fundamentally unknowable.

Well, that turned out to be wrong. It wasn't really discovered to be wrong until, you know, the first couple of decades of the 20th century, but it definitely turned out to be wrong. We now know that under no conceivable conditions could we gather enough information to predict the outcome of what appears to be a relatively unpredictable cosmos. There are levels of resolution that remain relatively constant and that you can manipulate, but our hope for total knowledge is gone.

That was mostly a consequence of the development of quantum mechanics, and the quantum theories have never failed in experimental tests. They're the most powerful theories that human beings have ever designed. So in some ways, they seem—well, they're probably not final—but they're pretty final.

So, okay, so that's sort of the materialist end of things. Now there’s a Darwinian end of things, and the reason I'm telling you about both these things is because part of what we need to solve in order to progress properly with this course, we need to solve the problem of exactly what constitutes truth.

Now, the first thing that I might say is that truth, in some ways, whether or not something is true, is a question that's sort of like whether or not a tool that you have does the job that it has. It's not so much a question about the ultimate nature of reality because you can't get a truth that completely informs you about the ultimate nature of reality. So you're sort of stuck with partial truth.

Then you might ask, well, how do you tell a useful partial truth from a non-useful partial truth? Or maybe a partial truth from a lie or from fiction? It's very complicated to do that, but one way you can progress towards that is to start thinking about things in terms of their tool-like capability, and that's a pragmatic approach, by the way, from a philosophical perspective.

The pragmatists, who were very influenced by Charles Darwin, by the way, came to the conclusion at the beginning of the 20th century that truth was bounded by claims of practicality. So, if you're trying to determine whether a statement is true, the implicit question that goes along with that is true in relationship to what end.

And the question then is sort of like, is your tool that you're using to represent the world or to act on it good enough to do what you're trying to do with it? Then if it's good enough, then your claim is true enough. Now this is tightly tied to Darwinian philosophy, and the pragmatists recognized this right away. The pragmatists were an American group of philosophers who worked on the East Coast, particularly in Boston, and they immediately took the Darwinian hypothesis to their heart, so to speak, because the Darwinian hypothesis is also pragmatic.

The Darwinian hypothesis says whatever reality is, is and also becomes. So it's something, but it's something that's changing too, and changes in a way that's actually not predictable. Technically, it's not predictable. It's like the stock market in that way. There are periods of time over which you can make predictions, but if you wait long enough, no matter what you think, you're going to end up wrong, especially given what knowledge is for a human being because your knowledge is bounded.

The way the Darwinian process solves that is by death, essentially. Things that aren't good enough to solve the problem that currently presents itself to them either die or fail to reproduce. To the degree that organisms can come up with truth claims that are sufficient, then they live long enough to reproduce, and then the next generation faces the same problem.

That’s always the way it is, is that truth chases a reality that's fundamentally unpredictable and that's transforming constantly. Now, the reason I want to tell you that is an important thing to understand because I'm going to make a claim here that the ways of looking at the world that are more mythological than material are also real ways of looking at the world, and it’s not what people generally think.

Because you think about fiction as not real, and underneath fiction is mythology and religious claims and that sort of thing—that's the domain of fiction and mythology. We don't think about that as real, but that's because we think about what's real from a Newtonian perspective and not from a Darwinian perspective. From a Darwinian perspective—and this is also a claim that Nietzsche made—truth serves life.

What Darwin would say is you can't define truth in any other way than that which serves life. That's it. You're not going to get past that. The truth, as far as a bounded living organism is concerned—and that certainly means us—is the body of knowledge, conceptual and embodied, that best enables survival in the face of continual transformation. There's nothing under it.

As soon as you know that, then what happens is that it turns out the things that mean things to you are also real. Now science is a funny business, right? Because what science attempted to do—and for good and for very useful reasons—was to strip everything subjective and subjectively meaningful off the picture of the world. Right? So if you're a scientist, you want to be objective.

Part of the way you do that is by trying to suppress your own subjectivity in the search for the objective truth. But also, you do that by relying on other people's observations. So, we kind of make a deal, and the deal is if I see it and can describe it, and you see it and can describe it, and then a bunch of other people do the same thing, and we come to the same conclusion, we're going to treat that as real.

And that's useful; it's useful because it’s useful to specify things precisely and to put them in the appropriate categories. In a sense, that's what science does; it continually strives to differentiate things and put them in identifiable categories, and that means that increasingly we’re able to use what we categorize as knowledge to help us confront the world.

So, you know, it's a great process; it's a brilliant process, and it's even more remarkable because relatively stupid people can do it because it's algorithmization with the method. So sooner or later, you'll produce new information, and that’s a great thing. You know, it's like a factory that produces knowledge.

So, well, that’s wonderful, but what's not so wonderful about it, arguably, is that it's in some sense warping our concept of what constitutes reality, and it’s never really solved, as far as I can tell, this conflict between a Newtonian perspective on what's real and a Darwinian perspective on what's real.

As far as I can tell, Darwin trumps Newton, and that's true if you're a biologist for sure because there isn’t anything that's more true that sits underneath biology than the theory of natural selection. That's partly a philosophical claim, and the claim is because you can't represent all of external reality with ultimate accuracy, you're going to fail. Everything that's bounded, or even everything that's not as complex as the thing that's trying to be represented is going to fail.

So how do you deal with that? You generate variations, and it has to be somewhat random because you don't know what's coming. You generate random variations, and then hopefully, one of those variations will work in relationship to whatever is coming. So it’s also a kind of truth claim; that's an embodied truth claim, right? You carry the fundamental truth of your existence in the shape of your physiology.

Earlier claims of philosophical truth were mostly disembodied; there was some implicit idea that the consciousness or the soul was more real than the body. Well, it’s nice to think about that in some ways because it opens the door to the idea of things like immortality, but it doesn't seem to be very—it’s hard not to associate that with a dream.

Alright, so category systems: when you encounter something that frightens you, your body categorizes it as something that presents a danger or a threat to you, and danger is the probability that something will damage you, like it'll be too loud or too hot or too cold; it'll damage your sensory systems or it'll directly pose a threat to your physiological or psychological integrity.

You're designed, so to speak, to protect yourself against that. You feel pain for that reason, and instead of pain, you also feel anxiety, which alerts you to the fact that you might feel pain and should do something about that; you should freeze or you should run away.

What emerges from that is the beginnings of a natural category system. So you could say, “Well, here's one useful category: that is the category of all things that you should freeze at or run away from.” And that’s a deep sea; it’s a biologically predicated category. It's also a category that has meaning, right? Because the meaning is what you should do when something like that shows up.

It's not—a meaning isn't stripped out of the category at all; it's actually fundamental. Now, it turns out that a lot of our perceptions—when people think about the way they perceive the world, they think, "Well, out there are a bunch of objects, and you look at them, and once you look at them, you see them, and once you see them, you figure out what they are, and then you evaluate what you should do, and you progress on that basis."

So, object perception, cognition, emotion, action. Well, the problem with that is it's wrong. The first reason it's wrong is because things don't exist out in the world as self-evidently separable entities. Partly because everything can be segregated into smaller entities, and every entity can be aggregated together with larger entities, so the boundary that defines something as a self-evident entity is by no means clear.

Part of the way your body deals with that is by categorizing things with regards to their immediate impact for you. So, when you look at something—let's say you're looking at this, and you say, “Well, that's a bottle.” And so you might ask, “Well, what is your brain doing when you're looking at that?” And the answer is it's molding your body to prepare to pick that thing up, and that's how it understands it.

Your eyes perceive a pattern that's constant across some duration. It's not made of smoke; it's made of something that lasts. So there's a pattern there, a bottle-shaped pattern that lasts across time. You have some sense of what it is, having interacted with these sorts of things before, but also its shape, obviously, indicates that it's a grippable thing.

What that means is that when you look at it, your eyes activate your motor cortex directly, even before you see the object, like before you form an image of it in your imagination. Your retina—the pattern on your retina activates your grip, right-handed or left-handed, whichever hand you happen to be. Part of what you're seeing when you see that bottle is what you would do with it if you were interacting with it.

So you see the manner in which you would interact with things, and that's the case for virtually everything that you see. For example, when you look at a chair, your body prepares to sit in the chair or maybe to stand on the chair if you're going to change a light bulb. Or, you know, when you look at your computer, you see the keyboard because that's the thing you move your fingers up and down on.

Your perception is tightly tied to the implication of objects for action immediately. Now you might say, "Well, that's not real; that's not the reality of it. The reality of it is the objective thing." But as I said already, it depends on how you define reality. You take a Newtonian take on it or a Darwinian take on it, and from the Darwinian perspective, the implication of something for action is actually its primary meaning, which is don't stand around and contemplate a tiger while it's trying to eat you.

Because the fact that it's trying to eat you is more important than the fact that it's a tiger, and if you don't figure that out quick, then you're not around anymore, and so much for your claims to truth; you're just gone. That's an error, right? Whatever was in you that enabled you to make that error is not going to be transmitted to the next generation, or at least hopefully not.

So there's a domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things. Now, most of what the psychologists have dealt with, who are clinical psychologists, is actually the domain of categorization that has to do with the meaning of things. It's actually, as far as you're concerned in your life as a human being, you live inside a network of meanings of things.

Right? So for example, when you look at your mother, you're not looking at her as an object and then attributing all sorts of meanings to her; you see the meaning of your mother right away. That meaning is multi-dimensional; it has a very long history, and it affects you directly at a physiological level.

Maybe you hate her, and so the sight of your mother makes your heart race, and your brain produces cortisol because she's categorized as unpredictable and a chronic threat. That’s a standard Thesian situation. Yeah? No one would laugh if there wasn't—sometimes that was true. Those are Freudian slips, by the way.

When you discuss something like that, and people laugh, then that's an admission on their part—like a deeply unconscious admission on their part—that there is truth to the statement, and it's also a truth that is somewhat painful to admit. So you can tell that. You can tell that when you're listening to comedians; they do that all the time.

They tell you something that's absolutely brutally evident that no one will admit, and everyone laughs, and that is a Freudian slip technically because Freud often listened to the sorts of things that would make his patients laugh or make an audience that he was speaking to laugh because that would give him some insights into what they were repressing, so to speak, and what they would allow to come to light.

Jokes are often about things that are taboo, right? It’s hard to make a joke about something that isn't taboo.

Alright, so I've kind of made a classification structure of these two different ways of looking at things: there's a meaning-centered way of looking at things, and the meaning is then the implication of the thing for action on your part. Then there's a more materialistic-centered thing, which is sort of like the world as it exists if you weren't here. That's the fundamental hypothesis of science, is that there's something around that would be here and look the way it does look now, if none of you were around, and you know, it's possible that that's true, and it's also possible that—it's possible that it's true, it's possible that it's not true.

But most possible is the fact that it's true in a way that we really don't understand because the existence of things, the way we perceive them, is clearly dependent on our existence as a perceiver. So what the nature of the world would be if there was no one around at all to perceive it—if there was no such thing as consciousness—is like that is a completely unsolved problem.

So maybe it would be like a field of quantum potential or something like that, but it isn't even possible to really understand what that means. So now having established that, having established—I’ll give you another example of it before we move on. So I said, for example, that when you interact with objects around you, you're not really interacting with objects; it's more like you're interacting with tools because your primary concern is well, what's the world in relationship to me? What do I have to avoid, you know, if I want to get to where I'm going, and what can I use to further my pursuits?

So you're like that deeply; that's why human beings are tool-using creatures. We have hands that manipulate the world, and those hands—well, they're built into our cognitive architecture. It's not like our brain is separate from our hands. Far far—it’s very opposite to that.

We wouldn't have the brains we have if we didn't have the hands we have. That’s why things like octopuses, by the way, or octopi, are very intelligent. They are, even though they're invertebrates, they only live a couple of years, so they can't learn that much. But they're extraordinarily intelligent; it’s partly because they're tentacled, and because they're tentacled, they can grab things and manipulate them.

So you know, they've developed an intelligence that's identifiable to us because we have little tentacles on the ends of our hands, and you know, we're using them to fiddle around with the world all the time. So now, there's the perceptual reality, which is that we know about already that when you look at something and we track the way that you're interacting with it, we know that one of the first things that happens is the relationship between the perceived object and your body is established very rapidly.

Because you want to map the object onto your body so you know what the hell to do, how to orient yourself so that you're safe and productive at the same time. There's a guy named JJ Gibson—what's his name—who was a psychologist of perception who operated in the late '70s.

People thought his theories were—they weren't behavioral, that's for sure. They were of a different classification or category. Gibson also made the first sort of claim that what you saw in the world were things like tools. He called them affordances. So for example, when you approach what you would call, from an objective perspective, a cliff, Gibson would say you don't see a cliff; you see a falling-off place.

You might infer cliff, but you see falling off place. And if you think about it again from a Darwinian perspective, of course you see falling off place. That's why you might shrink from a precipice. Your whole being perceives that as a place that would instantly make you extinct. It’s not a secondary derivation from your analysis of a set of objective facts; it’s a primary perception.

It has to be because you'd better move quick. If you're too near a cliff, you don't have any time to think. The same thing occurs when maybe you're being potentially struck by a snake; you have circuits in your brain that will see that snake and make you jump way before you know it’s a snake.

Because sitting around, standing around, waiting for the image of snake to form in your consciousness means that you've been bitten five or six times already because you're just not fast enough to see and then move. You see move, and then perceive, and that's what keeps you safe. A lot of what you perceive in the world are the meanings that you map onto your body.

So then you can think what human beings have done in response to this bifurcated way of perceiving reality is we've developed two different systems of classification to deal with it. Now, for most of human history, we only had one, and the one we had was basically the meaningful system. It wasn't the scientific system, right?

We didn't get around to figuring that out. Even the ancient Greeks and the Romans—the Greeks in particular, who were unbelievably intelligent—really never got around to positing something like an objective reality. Certainly, the Romans didn't. There was no science. Science only evolved in Europe in, you know, the late 1500s.

Very strange, and it's very difficult to understand. So we've been elaborating out this materialistic viewpoint for only about 500 years; it's not very long. The other viewpoint, that's the natural habitat of humanity, and that's the viewpoint that's made up of all the stories that people have told about themselves and the world since the dawn of human consciousness.

Those are the knowledge forms, the stories that actually constitute the base of culture because culture is not so much about what the world is and how to perceive it, as it is about how you should act in relationship to the world. So when you read fiction, and when you talk to each other endlessly about what your friends are up to and what their friends are up to and what they're doing on Facebook, and when you go to movies and you watch actors act out roles, and you know, when you do everything you do to examine other people around you, you're embedding yourself in this ancient culture that's there to tell you how you should operate yourself in the world, what you should do.

Because that's a primary question. You need to know what to do. Human beings need to know what to do because if you don't know what to do, well, that's a very unpleasant emotional state. That's partly because it indicates that you're not well adapted to your current circumstances.

You know, if you just stand around long enough, not knowing what to do, you’ll age and you’ll die. It’s not an effective way of dealing with the world. You have to be oriented towards something. The job of culture in part is to tell you to what you should be oriented. That's where the rubber hits the road with regards to psychology because especially in its clinical variants, and personality theory has to be an element of clinical personality theory must be a sub-element of clinical theory.

What psychology has to contend with, as I mentioned in the first lecture, is not only what you are but what you should be. The reason for that is when you're talking about a human being, you can't separate out the bare facts that present you about that person from the ideal. We do this all the time.

What's mental health? Well, you could say, “Well, it's the absence of mental illness.” Well, you know, really, if someone tells you that, you should just stop the conversation because all they've done is solve one problem with an equally large problem. There’s no progress there.

It's a kind of a smart aleck thing to do, you know? It sort of means go away and don't bother me with your stupid question. If you want to understand what mental health is, it's very difficult to get people to define it. You have to watch how they act when they're talking about such things as mental health because then you can derive some sense of what they actually understand or presume about it, instead of what they just say about it, right?

So if you look at how societies use the idea of mental health, they partly do use it normatively. If it's used normatively, then describing it as the absence of mental illness actually works. You say, “Well, you're healthy to the degree that you're normal.” So extremes outside of normality start to border on pathology.

But there are obvious limitations and problems with that approach, right? Because we don't think the average person is the best-looking person, and we'd assume that attractiveness is an ideal towards which we might all at least aspire. It turns out there are deep biological reasons for that because most of the things that men and women find attractive about each other are they find attractive for deep biological reasons.

Like symmetry, for example, which is an indication of sort of optimal biological development. For men looking at women, it's waist-to-hip ratio, which should be about 68, which is pretty precise. And you know, men are always computing that when they're looking around.

So you can't talk about what constitutes health by merely making a normative claim. You also have to take into account something like deviation from an ideal. And that's a weird thing because, of course, the ideal doesn't really exist. That’s what makes it ideal. But you can't get away from that problem if you're going to do anything serious about psychology.

Because implicit in the idea not only of mental health but of health itself is the question, what constitutes an ideal human being? You might think, well, that's not so relevant; you know, why would that be relevant in the scientific pursuit? And I would say, well, as people, we're not only ever engaged in a scientific pursuit, right?

We're engaged in the business of living, and we might be scientists sort of as a subset of that. But I would also say that if we're dealing in the realm of health and mental health, we're not being scientists anyways; we're being, it's like philosophical engineers because what we're doing is we're attempting to take our knowledge, however it's been gathered, including scientifically, and to make things better, not worse.

When you're trying to make things better, you're not being a scientist. What a scientist is trying to do is to describe what things are. As soon as that's transformed into, like, engineering, say, it’s more—it instantly becomes a variation of applied philosophy. It’s a different domain, and I think it's not right to just skip over that and pretend that what we're studying, say in a personality class, is something that can only be studied scientifically.

Because it's not—that maybe you can study people's conceptions of what constitutes ideal scientifically, but you're still faced with the problem that the question of what is the ideal lingers underneath all the phenomena that you're trying to understand and explain. Beauty—that's a good example. Intelligence, we tend to assume that more is better, right? We don't think the average is the right place to stop.

In fact, that's, you know, all of you people, there's not a single person in here I suspect who has an average IQ. You're probably minimally at the 85th percentile, and most of you are at the 95th percentile. So that's also—remember I told you last class that scientists are like, you know, albino elephants? They're very rare, and you guys are like that too. You know, you're not normal human beings.

So it’s true, you know? And as you progress up the ladder of success, you'll be in increasing contact with stranger and stranger variants of humanity because the successful people who are smart and highly conscientious, say, are smart and highly creative, are a tiny minority of the human population. And that's unfortunate—seriously unfortunate.

But you’re the beneficiaries of the lottery that determined in part your genetic structure of your intelligence. So you could—I suspect I've done some testing of UFT students, and the average comes out at around 126 to 130; that's two standard deviations above the mean. So, you know, it's probably actually higher than that because a lot of you have English as a second language, and so that tends to suppress your performance on IQ tests if they're assessing verbal knowledge in English.

Alright, let's see here. So part of what I'm going to talk to you today about is the sorts of things that Carl Jung would have called archetypes. An archetype is a ill-defined term; that's partly why it's very difficult to understand. It’s also very difficult to transform the sorts of things that he had to say into very precise scientific formulations, but that doesn't change the fact that it's extraordinarily useful from the perspective of general understanding.

Which is a useful thing to pursue, and also from the perspective of practical utility to understand something about these archetypal categories, and the reason for that is you're in their grip. One of the things that Jung said—this is a brilliant thing; it's terrifying. The psychoanalysts are terrifying people. Freud's bad now, you know, because Freud dug around in this pathology of the family, and like families can be great, but if you want real pathology, a family is a good place to look.

A pathological family is so pathological that it's unbelievable, and that's actually what Freud was interested in, and it's hard for normal sort of healthy people to appreciate that because if you're normal and healthy, and your family's kind of—you know, not half bad—you don't have all those Freudian problems. But if you do have them, that’s all you have; you never get out of it.

You're trapped in there like a fly in a spider web. In fact, the fly in a spider’s web is a common symbolic representation of the classic Freudian situation. So, okay, so I'm going to—I showed you this picture because I want to talk to you about a category system that will be useful in understanding what we're going to go through during this course.

So what I would like to do with all of you is to start from the bottom of things, and that's what we were doing today when we're talking about definitions of truth. So I asked you to consider for a moment that there are two ways of looking at truth. One is your objective, sort of Newtonian way, which by the way is outdated, but we still hold it because it's practically useful.

The other is the Darwinian perspective, which is the world is meaningful in relationship to you, and those meanings are real in so far as they have a bearing on whether or not you actually survive. So, and then you make the claim that there isn't anything more real than whether or not you survive. You can't get under that; that's where you start.

So you could say, I could say for example, if the pursuit of the Newtonian theory of reality culminated in the extinction of human beings, say, because our technological power got so great, that would be perfect evidence for its lack of truth because there are things it just wasn't taken into account, right? Because something that's true should take things into account, and one of the things it should take into account is that we're living things.

That we can only exist within certain parameters, and that we're also oriented towards an ideal. If your theory doesn't take that into account, well, maybe not only is it incomplete, it might be pathologically and genocidally incomplete.

Alright, this is a representation from ancient Egypt. I'm going to tell you a little bit about what the representations mean. So this person here is Horus, and this person here is Osiris, and that person there is Isis. Osiris is the god of tradition, and that's why he's sort of standing there on that pillar.

The Egyptians thought of these three—there's one other; there's Seth, and Seth is a bad guy, so Seth is the evil villain that's always whispering in the king's ear. You see that story repeated in all sorts of different forms. So Seth is a negative figure, and he's not included in these particular images, but we'll get to him. Seth is also, by the way, Osiris's brother, and that's because the Egyptians had figured out—and this is like 3,000 years B.C.—the Egyptians had already figured out that if you put a state together, so the state would be represented by Osiris.

Osiris is sort of like the abstraction of the patriarchal force that stands behind a tradition. So if you imagine that a tradition is a way of behaving, that’s what a tradition is. To the degree that you share a tradition, you're all manifesting the same pattern. The Egyptians would say the pattern that you're imitating—that's a deity.

I mean, they didn't think of it that way because they didn't think the way we think, but for all intents and purposes, the phenomena that they described as a god was the pattern that everyone was unconsciously imitating. Now, you have to unconsciously imitate the same pattern, or you can't get along, right?

In our society, for example, we have a body of laws, and most of it's derived from English common law. English common law emerged as a consequence of the necessity to solve disputes between people so that all hell didn't break loose. So, English common law was produced when one person took another person to court to say, “We’ve got a serious problem; we don’t know how to manage our behavior in the same space.”

You have to make a ruling, and then the judge would assess the situation and state who had the right to do what, and then that became part of the law. Now, in so far as you are law-abiding citizens, and so you abide by the body of law, you actually manifest the body of law in your behavior.

To the degree that you do that, other people like you; to the degree that you don't do that, you're either poorly trained, poorly socialized, antisocial, or downright dangerous, in which case other people will put you somewhere where you’re of less harm than you might be. Like it or not, you’re a mimicker, and what you mimic is the central pattern of cultural behavior that has evolved over, who knows how long?

Forever! Forever! Insofar as some of it’s associated, say, with dominant hierarchical behavior, which is unbelievably old—that's Osiris. That's Osiris; that's God the Father, so to speak, and it's part of the category of culture. Now the Egyptians also knew that culture was not only necessarily a good thing—as of course all of you know—because no doubt sometimes you note that you're the beneficiary of your culture; but sometimes, no doubt, you also feel that you're like crushed and mistreated and molded and bent out of shape by the culture because the culture says you better act like everybody else expects you to.

Of course, that's necessary, but you're not exactly like everybody else, so you kind of get mangled and crunched, and you know, male-formed as you're socialized, even though you also learn to speak and you learn to read and you learn all those things that culture can provide you with.

Now the Egyptians knew even 3,000 years ago that although culture was necessary, it was an element of existence that human beings were always embedded in, and that's why it's a permanent category. There's no non-cultural people. You can't be a human being without a culture; it's not possible. We're evolved; our physiological form presumes that we're going to emerge into the world in a culture, and that will inform us as we develop. That's why we have such a long developmental period.

We're born unformed, and the only reason that works is because the lack of form has been consistently manifested in an environment that would form it. Culture isn't just culture; it's the environment that we inhabit because culture has been around for so long.

And I'll give you one example of that: a big part of every culture is dominance hierarchy. A dominance hierarchy says who has access to what at what given time, and pretty much every creature is in a dominance hierarchy. Chickens are in dominance hierarchies; that's the pecking order. Members of wolf packs are in dominance hierarchies; members of chimpanzee troops are in dominance hierarchies.

Songbirds are in dominance hierarchies. You know, you hear them sing in the spring; it's all pretty—it's not that little bird is sitting out there saying, “I'm healthy and loud, and if you come over here I’ll Peck you to death because this is my tree.” The songbirds distribute themselves around the neighborhood by dominance, and the more dominant birds get the better nesting spaces and better means.

They don't get rained on, or at least not as much; their nests don't get blown out of trees; there's not so many cats around, and they're close to a good food source. That makes them attractive to potential mated partners, but it also increases the probability that their chicks will survive. Here’s a nasty bit of truth that goes along with that:

Let's say there are a bunch of birds in the neighborhood, and some kind of bird flu that's specific to birds comes wafting through, and it's killing birds. Well, the birds die from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy up. The reason for that is the bottom birds are all stressed out because their life is hard.

When they're stressed, their immune systems gets suppressed, and you know, they're all frazzled from being chased by cats and so on, and then they die. The top birds live. The same thing happens in human populations; when a plague sweeps through, people die from the bottom of the dominance hierarchy up. The reason they start to kill each other is because that's a good way of attaining dominance if you haven't got any other roots.

That's the relationship between income inequality and the destabilization of society. That's an extraordinarily powerful relationship. So for example, you can describe the steepness of a dominance hierarchy using a statistic called the Gini coefficient, and the correlation between the Gini coefficient and the male homicide rate in North America is about 0.8.

0.8 is like, okay, you’re done. You don’t have to figure anything else out. You know why it happens; it just covers it. You never see it; you never see an explanation not complete in psychology. It's like the most powerful effect ever discovered. So dominance hierarchies—this person, he's King of the dominance hierarchies, so you can think about him as the person who created it; that's one way of looking at it.

You can sort of think of him as the embodiment of it. He's a symbol; that's another way of looking at it. Because this King, Osiris, he's also a god; he was also the Egyptian pharaoh because the Egyptians presumed that their pharaoh was Osiris, and he had to take on the being of Osiris when he became king.

When he was coronated, it's like you're not a person anymore; you're the embodiment of the state. That happens to people when they turn into the president of the United States, for example. They're not whoever they were; they're hardly them at all; they're now this, and that's the thing that's at the top of the dominance hierarchy, and it's the thing that represents culture.

Now the Egyptians knew that it could go astray, could become tyrannical and rigid, and that's why Osiris had an evil brother, Seth. But we won't talk about them for a moment. Now he’s the upper world; this is Isis—Isis is his wife—and Isis is Queen of the underworld. The reason she's feminine, as far as we can tell, is because from a symbolic perspective, femininity represents more like possibility rather than actuality.

The defining characteristic of the feminine is the capacity to bring forth new forms. If you're going to use the feminine as a symbolic representation, you're going to use it to represent the domain from which new forms emerge. The domain from which new forms emerge—that's sort of the domain of the unknown or the domain of nature, which is why it's Mother Nature.

Isis is Mother Nature, but she's also Queen of the underworld, and she had an immense following in the ancient world, and variants of Isis—they liked her as a goddess of worship. Her span of existence was thousands and thousands of years.

Even a lot of the attention that's paid towards Mary in Catholicism is a variation of the veneration that was shown to Isis. That’s often, on top of her head, there—that’s usually a variant of the crescent moon, although I think in this particular situation, those are actually cow horns. Okay, so, Osiris and Isis—they are a team.

So they're wedded together: Order and Chaos. They're wedded together, and Order—that's culture—and Chaos—that's nature. Those are the two most fundamental constituent elements of the world from the mythological or symbolic perspective, and what that means is there's always been culture, at least always, as first any of us need to bother with it.

There’s always been an interpretive framework through which conscious creatures viewed the world. You can't be without having a structure, and that structure is inculcated inside you, and a lot of it’s culturally transmitted—not all of it; a lot of it.

So it’s a precondition for existence that you're a structured thing, and that structure is ordered. The other element of existence is that there are things that are outside of that order, always, that you can't cope with because you're a finite thing, and your culture is a finite and bounded thing.

Outside of that, there’s mystery. There's mystery! Like an outside is a funny place because it’s not outside in the way that you think about being outside of a building, although it is that in so far as it's cold and dangerous out there. But there are outsides everywhere.

So, for example, if you're, I don't know, someone, maybe you're in a relationship with them, and you know, you're kind of comfortable with them. Then one day, you're having a conversation with them, and they tell you something shocking. Like maybe you're in an intimate relationship with them, and they tell you that maybe it’s the day they tell you that they are having an affair, or maybe that they had five, and that they're still going on—who knows?

All of a sudden, one second you were inside a close and isolated and comfortable cultural space, and the next second, you're outside. That's because no matter where you are, the boundaries of your knowledge only extend so far, and the fact that you're very limited in what you apprehend can be made manifest to you at any moment.

Any of your presuppositions can fail, especially in relationship to other people or yourself. Because if you're all of a sudden informed by a long-term partner that they have been having an affair, like that certainly says something about them, but it certainly also says something about you. It's like, how dumb can you get, right? How did you not notice? How are you so naive?

Now, you might think it’s cruel to blame the victim, and no doubt it is, but it's irrelevant in this case because that's what you're going to think in any case, right? You know, you're wandering around thinking you're a reasonably perceptive and well-adapted creature, and all of a sudden, poof! Someone pulls the rug out from underneath you.

It's like you might doubt them, and certainly you will, and maybe relationships for a long time. But, you can also be sure you’re going to doubt yourself and your past, which is weird because you think it was already done with—and your present and your future. It's like, all of a sudden, bang! You're not in culture anymore—poof! You're in the Underworld: Order and Chaos.

Now Order and Chaos, masculine-feminine, that's yin and yang as well. They can unite to produce some third thing, and that's often the sun. It can be the sun, as in the thing that shines, but also in terms of the biological sun. There are complicated reasons that those two things are interrelated.

This is Horus, and he's the offspring, the child of Isis and Osiris. Now I won’t tell you the entire story, but I'll tell you a couple of things about Horus that are worth knowing. You've all seen the Egyptian eye, right? The eye with the way the eyebrow. Everyone's seen that; it's kind of weird because it's really old, but you all know it, okay? That's Horus.

If you look at the Egyptian eye, the eye is really open, so that's an element of what Horus is. Horus, you could think of as the god of attention. It's not the god of intellect; there's a very important difference. Horus is the god of attention, and that's also why, in this representation, you see he's got the head of a bird.

It's not any old bird; it's a falcon, and the reason the Egyptians put the head of a falcon on Horus is because falcons can really see. They're like super-observant, so they fly above everything, so they can see everywhere. They're above everything; they're even above the dominance hierarchies. They're way up there in the sky, and from that position in the sky, they can see everything, and that makes them powerful.

So, the Egyptian idea was that the proper balance between Order and Chaos made you alert, with your eyes open, and that was what made you—that was the deepest expression of your soul, so to speak. Here's the way of thinking about that: so what happens to you if you're somewhere where everything is entirely predictable and comfortable? What do you do?

Lazy! You get lazy. You get bored. What else happens? Stop paying attention! Well, you certainly don't have to pay attention, right? So what happens when you really stop paying attention? You fall asleep, right? Because, you know, you're by the fire, you just had a nice meal—you know that like nothing's going to come rampaging through your front door.

So what the hell do you have to be awake for? Before, poof, asleep! So now that's good; you know, sometimes you have to sleep, but as a lifestyle, it's somewhat limiting. If you're just sitting around hyper-comfortable all the time, you get all doughy and useless, and it's not helpful. That's the sort of couch potato thing, right? It's not helpful because if anything does come along, you're in trouble, and plus you're nothing like you could be.

So you might think, well the more order, the better, which is exactly what fascists think, by the way. But the problem with too much order is that there's no utility in you even being there because everything's perfect and it's already done. You might as well just be asleep; there's no need for consciousness.

So you want to have a little chaos around, and then you might ask, well, how much chaos? And the answer would be, well, how about not enough to paralyze you? Because if it's too much, then you're just prey. You might be awake, but it’s like—terror is a form of consciousness, I suppose.

But we might as well not presume that it's the optimal form. It's also rather self-limiting because if you're terrified long enough, you’ll just die, so it's not an optimal state. It's also one you'll strive generally to avoid.

So let's say, well, how much chaos should you have around? How much of what's unpredictable should you have around? And we can say just enough to make you optimally awake, right? So you should be pushing yourself hard enough at each point; you want to have one foot in order, yes, so you're secure and stable, and you have one foot in chaos so that you're not exactly sure what's going to happen next, so that you're pushed to transform and change and grow and develop.

You can tell when you're there because then you're alert and you're paying attention. At that point, the Egyptians would say, well then you're optimally embodying Horus, who's the third element of experience: one, order; two, chaos; three, the thing that mediates between order and chaos. If you're doing that optimally, then you know the yin and yang symbol.

I think I've got it here actually—maybe yes. Those are two serpents, by the way. The black serpent, that's chaos, and it's an interesting symbol because there's a white circle in the middle of it, right? That means that things might be pretty gloomy and dark because it's all chaotic, but at any point, order can arise out of that.

You know how that is; you go through a terrible period of transformation, and everything’s unsteady and shaky, and like it passes, and maybe you're even better off than you were before it. Maybe not, but at least sometimes it happens. Then, the white serpent has a black eye, and that's because, well you know, just when you think you're safe, the rug gets pulled out from underneath you.

There's a dynamic—this is what the Egyptians believe, and what they state explicitly—the world is a dynamic between chaos and order. The world of experience, the world that human beings exist in, is a dynamic between chaos and order, and the function of a human being is to juggle those and keep them balanced.

You can tell when you're doing that because you're awake and you're paying attention, and not only are you healthy in who and what you are, but you're moving towards something better.

When that happens, you’re possessed by a deep intimation of meaning because meaning signifies something, and what it signifies is that you're in the right place at the right time. You can learn to stay there by paying attention to the balance of chaos and order in your life, and the better you get at staying there, this is the kickoff from the Egyptian perspective.

The better you get at staying there, the more impermeable you are to chaos and order because you can learn to handle it. You might say, well life presents you with a challenge with regards to its ultimate significance, right? You might say, well, what's the use of human striving in the face of everything that's terrible in the world—including our own vulnerability?

Well, you’re not going to eliminate that, but it’s possible that if you balance things properly, you can learn to live with it. Maybe you can even learn to understand that those two—the dynamism between those two things—is actually a precondition for being, and that without it, there wouldn't be any being.

Part of you is limited, and part of you isn't, and if that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be you. So the question arises, it's an existential question: what do you do with that set of facts? It looks like your nervous system, in a sense, has already set up to answer that: pay attention.

Put yourself in a situation where you're paying attention. If you pay enough attention, you're right in the place that you should be, and that will be at least sufficient. Maybe it'll be more than that. Maybe you'll say it's okay—the terrible preconditions of existence are justified by the manner in which it manifests itself, and that’s a definition of mental health.

That's implicit in all the clinical theories that we're going to investigate throughout the duration of the course. [Applause]