2015 Personality Lecture 04: Heroic & Shamanic Initiations II: Mircea Eliade

All right, so we've been talking about a code of representations in some sense of symbolic representation, and I've been trying to guide you through some developing understanding of that code of symbolic representation so that as we progress through the course, you'll have the ground rules in some sense for interpreting all the different theories that we encounter. And, uh, we're going to continue that today. This is the last lecture on sort of pre-psychoanalytic conceptions of personality, and then we move to PJ and then to Yung.

So the first thing I tried to point out to you was that social primates like us likely have a cognitive structure that's based on social categories, and that when our systems elaborated up enough to start thinking about the world in more abstract terms beyond our immediate environment, there's a high probability that we learned we used the same cognitive structures that had evolved to begin the process of abstract conceptualization.

And so, in some sense, you could say we used our knowledge of personality to start to understand the external world based on the initial axiomatic assumption. It's not a cognitive assumption; it was a perceptual assumption that the world was like a personality, and we do this automatically.

So, I want to show you a little video here. This is quite a famous video. It shows you how easily you can abstract out a narrative from the most abstract of events. Okay, so watch what happens.

Okay, let's watch that one more time. So, it's something like we'll go over it again. It's something like the little circle, the poor little circle is trying to escape, and when it does, the bad gray triangle comes up and sort of steals it. And then the blue triangle has a little scrap with the gray triangle and, you know, puts the little yellow, or the little circle back into its safe enclosure.

Right? And so, the reason that that demonstration was developed was to indicate or to, and also to test how little information you really needed, how low resolution the information was that you needed in order to perceive, to directly perceive something that was like a narrative.

So, you know, and that's a relatively complicated narrative, all things considered, for a square, two triangles, and a circle interacting for maybe 3 or 4 seconds. So, you know, the point of this demonstration is to indicate just exactly how prepared you are to read the world in narrative terms.

So, all right. Now, I talked to you about these figures before, and I was trying to make so, here, here's kind of a, an overview of what I'm attempting to describe to you. So, there’s one category of representation that has to do with the territory that you inhabit and that you understand; that's primarily social territory, and it tends to be symbolized by masculine and usually like older male symbols. So that's the patriarchal structure.

I really think what it is, is a personified representation of the dominance hierarchy structure. So, um, if Remember The Lion King, you know, the Pride Rock thing? So, the Pride Rock is sort of associated with Simba's father, and so that's that category of symbol is the symbol that I'm talking about.

So, he used that high place on a mountain as an indicator of dominance structure. You saw that at the opening of The Lion King movie where all the animals come, they gather around; they all bow before the rock with the King on top of it, and the King, like the lion, is generally a symbol of something like solar power because the lion is a top predator, it's an apex predator, and it lives in Africa under the sun, and it has a mane that's sort of like a sun.

And then later in The Lion King, we'll actually see this today, you'll see the father lion, uh, Mufasa, yes, he appears in the sky with a solar halo around him. So, that's the masculine category. And then the feminine category, I told you a little about, is a more chaotic category, and it's a chaotic and plastic category out of which new forms emerge.

And then one of the categories that we haven't talked about is the category of the individual, and the individual is the hero in hero stories and is the initiate in initiatory routines. And so, the hero is the person who is attempting to become a complete biological and historical entity personality so that they're capable not only of adopting independent existence but of adopting independent existence that's productive and that's productive in a way that's also of benefit to the community.

So, it's a particular pattern of development, and that needs to be catalyzed by human societies because in order for a society to maintain its structure, and for the people within it to thrive, the developing individuals have to mature to the point where they can take care of themselves in a way that doesn't disrupt the whole social structure.

And so, that's the path. It's a natural path for human beings, I would say, to some degree, because we're such intensely social creatures, but because we're also quite malleable and complex and also grounded in history and cultural creatures, it's also something that has to be taught, both from the perspective of imitation and explicitly.

And so, a lot of initiation rights, for example, are predicated on the idea that you take the person out of their childhood context; you destroy their personality, usually as a consequence of some quasi-traumatic encounter, and then you refill them with the cultural norms, and that makes them an adult.

And so, you know, to some degree, that's what you guys are doing in a very slow way when you make the transition from high school, say, to university, or the transition from high school to a job. We don't, in our culture, have the kind of abrupt ceremonies though that are designed to catalyze that transformation.

And, you know, maybe that's an okay thing, and maybe it's not an okay thing. I mean, one of the things that Freud pointed out, and he's absolutely right about this, is that because human beings have such a long dependency period, it's not that easy for us to grow up, and sometimes it takes a shock in order for that to happen.

And so, one of the potential problems with having a dependency period as long as the human dependency period is that it never ends and that you stay immature forever. And really, I believe that that's the central edle problem that Freud talked about, and I believe also that it's a real problem.

Now, whether Freud formulated it, you know, with precise accuracy, that's a different story, but, you know, you got to give the guy a break. At least he formulated it, and I mean, I was much more impressed with Freudian Edo theorizing after I did clinical work for a long time because a large number of my patients, their primary problem is getting the hell out of their family. They just can't do it.

And so for them, the world is the family; it's the only thing that matters. It's often parental opinion or something like that—they just cannot break free of it. So, you know, initiation ceremonies in part were designed to catalyze that break so that your mother in particular, but also your father to some degree, were no longer the dominant figures of influence.

Your, your personal mother and father weren't no longer the dominant figures of influence in your life. So because really that's what maturation means in some sense is that when you become an adult, the opinions of your parents are as important as the opinions of any other reasonable people that hypothetically care for you but no more important than that.

So, and I told you about some of the symbolic associations that gather around, say, images of the unknown. You could also think of the unknown as unexplored territory, but it's a tricky kind of territory because if the person beside you does something spectacularly weird, you move from explored territory to unexplored territory as soon as you don't understand what they're doing.

So it's not exactly spatial-temporal territory; it's more like temporal-spatial territory. It's time and space because the same place can be a different place from one moment to the next. That happens all the time when some event that you don't expect occurs in the place that you are.

So, and your body is prepared to react; it's instinctively prepared to react to the emergence of chaotic circumstances. It basically does that by hyperactivating your preparation for action and increasing your capacity to pay attention and preparing you to do a very large number of things at once because you don't know what to do.

It's a high-stress reaction, but it's built into you. And so interesting because what that means, that is part of what's built into people is the ability to deal with what they don't understand, which is a real paradox, right? Because how can you deal with what you don't understand? You don't understand it.

So, but the answer is, well, you ramp up your ability to react in a very large number of ways, and you do that by increasing your general level of arousal and your attention. And it's a good, that also increases the probability that you're going to be attentive to new information and pull it in and utilize it so you can decide how to act rapidly.

So other things happen. For example, you know, some of you may have been in car accidents or events like that where you knew for a few seconds that the event was going to occur, and time slowed down. It's quite a common, commonly reported phenomena. I've experienced it a number of times actually, and, uh, it was actually experimentally tested.

They, uh, threw people off bungee cord apparatuses, you know, those apparatuses, so they were plummeting down, you know, in a quite frightening manner and had them look at digital timers that were flashing information while they were falling. And it turned out that the people who were falling could process the digital information faster than people who were just standing there under normal circumstances.

How they got that past an ethics committee is beyond me, but it's a brilliant, it really is a brilliant experiment. So I went through some of the symbolism of the unknown. I want to go through some of the symbolism that's associated with the known today, so give you some sense.

Flags are definitely patriarchal symbols; they're cultural symbols, and here's some, I'll just lay out a variety of terms, and so that'll give you some indication of the network of associations that's associated with the symbol of the dominance hierarchy fundamentally. Culture, Aeolian control, that's after Apollo, the god, super ego, the conscious, the king, the patriarch, the plow because the plow opens up the Earth, the phallus, order and authority, and the crushing weight of tradition, the Wise Old Man, and the Tyrant, Dogma, the day, Sky, the Countryman, the island, the Heights, the ancestral spirits, and the activity of the dead.

Now, these symbolic realms are kind of— they're, they're, they're situationally transformable. So if you look across cultures very frequently in stories, you see characters that exemplify each of these categories, but the characters can shift to some degree. For example, so often, if the story involves the ocean and an island, then the ocean will be feminine and the island will be masculine.

But if the story utilizes an island and the air, then the island will be feminine, and the air will be masculine. So it isn't as if there's a one-to-one correspondence between the entities in the story and these archetypal categories because their definition depends on—they can't be defined within isolation.

So it's, it's, it's sort of like—this is a really stupid example, but it's the best one I can come up with at the moment. If you're trying to interpret statistics, you can't understand what a given statistic means unless you know the number of people in the experiment, the effect size, and the probability that that effect size is—that had emerged at a better than chance level.

Any of those pieces of information without the other two are actually meaningless, and it's the same situation here. You have to have the representation of culture, and you have to have the representation of nature, and you have to have the representation of the individual, and then you can figure out what entities are being used in those different categories even though there's some similarity across stories, which is partly why you can actually understand stories, right? Because if there was no similarity across them, then you wouldn't be able to understand them.

So, um, there are some representations of the great father. The one on the left, which is on the right, right, was quite a horrifying image, you know, and that's a kind of a devouring father figure.

And you know, here’s a way of thinking about that which I think is extremely useful. So you here you guys are in university, you know, and so, um, university is one of those patriarchal institutions that gives with one hand and takes away with another, right? So when you come here, there are thousands of you; there are tens of thousands of you.

So in some sense, as an individual, you're rather faceless, and you're also in some sense at the bottom of the power hierarchy of the university. I think more than you should be, but whatever you, you are at the bottom of it, and so there’s a crushing institutional weight that comes along with being part of such a big university.

In particular, you know, that's really hard on students in their first year. You know, it's always seemed to me that it's better for first-year students to go to a smaller place where the institutional weight is not so heavy.

And you know, I've tested UFT students in their first year with things like the Beck Depression Inventory, and about 30% of UFT students meet criteria for hospitalized depression. They do. You know, but that's also because the Beck is way more sensitive to that than it should be, at least that, you know, because I don't think its criteria for when you should be hospitalized are reasonable.

But the point is, is that the depression and the anxiety is quite high and so—but on the other hand, of course, you're benefiting from going to university, and so that's the kind of bipolar nature of the symbol. It's the tyrant and its benevolent tradition at the same time, you know. It's molding you. You could even say it's crushing you because an educational system does that, but at the same time, it's like, well, unless you allow yourself to get crushed by it, you're not going to get the benefit.

And that's the paradoxical relationship that individuals have with culture everywhere and at all time. You know, without culture, you're nothing, but with culture, you have to be a cog in some sense. And so, the tension between those two things is continual and constant.

You could think about it as an existential constant ever since there's been complex human societies, and maybe even when there were only tribal human societies that's been a problem for the individual.

So culture, tradition, the dominance archy is a solution and a problem, and nature, the unknown, unexplored territory is a solution and a problem. And then the third category—well, you see, I'll just tell you a couple of things about these images. So the one on the right, that's the devouring father, that's also giving birth.

So in some sense, your personalities are being devoured by the university, but at the same time, a new personality is coming, you know, emerging as a consequence of that. And hopefully, it's a better personality than the previous one if you can tolerate the tension of being transformed, the heat and the pressure; then hopefully, you come out, you know, you come out though it's worth it. The process is worth it.

Okay, now you know you see on the left there at the top on the, sorry, on the right at the top you see a picture of an old man kissing Joseph Stalin, which is quite a weird thing to do given that Joseph Stalin was probably responsible for the deaths of, you know, some number of people in excess of 10 million, perhaps in excess of 30 million people; people argue about this all the time.

He certainly starved 6 million Ukrainians to death in the 1930s, which is something that, you know, for some reason, you don't hear much about in your education. But, you know, 6 million Ukrainians, probably worth noticing a little bit. But, it doesn't matter because this old man, this was taken after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he's nostalgic for the times when everything was certain, you know.

And the gold statue of Stalin is a representation, in some sense, of a deified leader, and the old man is there in a position of worship. And then Captain Hook there at the bottom on the right-hand side, he's quite an interesting character because he's basically a tyrant, and the Peter Pan story is very interesting because Peter Pan sort of means everything, and Peter Pan is the sort of person who wants to retain the dynamic potential of childhood.

'Cause when you're a child, you're not anything; but you could be anything. So you're pretty much only potential. And then you might say, well, why should you sacrifice that potential to become something actual? Because in some sense, it's actually a limiting process.

So, for example, and I mean this in the most concrete possible way, you have more neural connections when you're born than you do at any other time in your life, and most of those die by the time you're two. So you go through this tremendous pruning process from when you're born from till two.

So it's like you're dying into your childhood personality, and then again, the same thing happens at the end of adolescence between say 16 and 20, which is also the peak time for risk for the emergence of schizophrenia, and some people think that's the pruning process gone wrong.

But, you know, as an adolescent, you also shed childhood potential to become the limited but specialized and potentially useful thing that you will become. And so you might say, well, is it worth it? Is it worth shedding that potential?

And Peter Pan's answer to that is, well, no, he wants to remain in Neverland as a magical boy forever, and he's King Of The Lost Boys, which I would say is not a very—that's not much of a dominance hierarchy, right? It's like you're the king, king of the king of the losers, so to speak, people who can't get their act together and mature now.

And you notice in Peter Pan that Peter Pan doesn't grow up; he doesn't establish a relationship with Wendy, who's actually real; he has to settle for Tinkerbell, who, you know, is a fairy, and they don't exist. And so she's really in some sense a figure of his imagination because he won't mature; he can't have an actual relationship with a genuine person, so he has to satisfy himself with—well, it's something like a pornographic fantasy, actually.

So seriously, it is; it is like that. I mean, it's toned down a lot in the movie version, obviously, but still, that's what's underlying it. Now, you might say, well, why doesn't Peter Pan want to grow up? And the answer is the only figure of authority that's around for him is Captain Hook, and he doesn't like Captain Hook.

And that's because Captain Hook is a tyrant; he's brutal, you know, and he's also a coward because he's lost a hand already to a crocodile with a clock in its stomach; that's chaos and time, you know? That's the dragon that lives underneath everything; it's like the basilisk in Harry Potter.

And that damn crocodile's already got a piece of him, which is exactly the case. Like, that crocodile's got a piece of me, you know? I'm older than 50, and so time has already got its rip on me, and you know part of the problem of being adult is that you also have to take the fact that you're finite and limited into account.

And if you're terrified by that, which people tend to be, then it can easily turn you into a tyrant because you're afraid of everything or disgusted by everything, and you have to ramp up the amount you control it. And so Peter Pan looks at Captain Hook and he thinks, "There's no damn way that's what I want to end up as," so he's got a bad role model, you know?

So Captain Hook and Stalin and this sort of devouring monster are good representations of the negative or tyrannical element of the great father. So that's the tyrannical element of the dominance hierarchy. So same thing here; there's Stalin, you know, he’s the great father of the family, and these kids are—they're kind of like the Soviet equivalent of Cub Scouts; they're sort of worshiping him.

And then I really like the other one on the right because, I mean, you could hardly find a more hellish representation of a tyrant than that, right? I mean, it looks—and this is quite interesting—it looks like Stalin is standing in front of a mandorla because a mandorla is a shape like this, an almond shape; you see that in Renaissance art all the time.

It's an extremely old symbol; it's the oldest symbol that people have ever found evidence for, and the thing is on fire. It's like Stalin, there he is, king of hell, and it's exactly right, you know? It's eerie that that's the mode of representation that emerged for him, but it's certainly accurate.

So, you know, the whole tyrannical end of the great father is this sort of thing that results from it, you know? It's like the elevation of the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy to the status of some kind of quasi-deity certainly happened in Hitler's case, and then the brutal murderousness that can emerge from that.

Those are pictures from the concentration camps at the end of World War II. So, you know, so I told you that the feminine can be, represent the terrible unknown, things can be represented by the feminine, sort of a monstrous figure, you know? But it's certainly the case that the monstrosity of culture is roughly equivalent to the monstrosity of nature, you know?

And one of the things you might think about is that common ideologies tend to utilize these symbolic categories—it's almost as if they appropriate them. So the environmental movement, for example, basically says benevolent nature, right? So that's the positive feminine, negative culture because that's cultures out there, rapaciously destroying the pristine wilderness of Mother Nature, and the negative individual too.

Because, you know, human beings are part of that as individuals, and we're kind of a cancer on the face of the planet, if you know what I mean. That's a pretty dark way of looking at it, obviously, but it's one-sided because you can easily say, "Yeah, well, you know, we're in a war with nature because obviously she's trying to kill us as fast as possible."

And we better have some culture because otherwise, we'd be sitting outside in the freezing snow. And you know, you might be a rapacious consumer, but on the other hand you're just trying to survive, and it's not that easy. And so, you know, you need to have both of those stories together before you have a reasonable representation of the world.

It's not easy to cope with something like that, and every institution has this potential and this element because institutions tend towards bureaucratization and tyranny as they develop. They close up and become rigid, and so, you know, that's a rough thing to deal with.

And then, of course, this is a rough thing to deal with too. So you might think, well, you could have a little bit of sympathy for human beings, not just throw them in the horrible rapacious creature category, which I think is an extraordinarily pathological and also a pre-genocidal thing to do, you know?

Because you hear environmentalists, for example, now and then say the planet would be better off without people on it. It's like, well, you know, that's kind of what Hitler thought as well about certain kinds of people, anyways. God only knows where he would have stopped.

So you know, when someone says something like that, one of the things you might think is you should take a good look at your unconscious structure there, bucko, because fundamentally, you're—you know, there's a genocidal ideology at the bottom of your thought structure.

And you know, you might think that you're an environmentalist, but you're actually possessed by a genocidal ideology, and you better do something about that because if you ever get any power, you're going to be one dangerous creature.

So one of the things that's really interesting about psychoanalysis, and one of the things I love about it, is that the psychoanalysts tell you if someone says, "I'm good," or "I stand for a good thing," the first thing you want to look for is the opposite of that. It's like, "Okay, that's what you say; what might really be going on?" Or is it actually the case that you're Jesus Christ and all the saints combined; you know, you're this perfect person?

Or are there dark motives for what you're doing that you claim to be doing for the good? So guy named George Orwell, who was one of the world's most creative essayists in this—in the 20th century, he was a leftist; he wrote some things that were very critical of socialist movements, and one was one of the early critics of Soviet Russia when it was sort of in vogue among intellectuals to be supportive of the Soviets.

One of the things he said about left-wing socialists was that they didn't really like the poor. He was talking about middle-class left-wing socialists, not the working-class guys who were in the unions and, you know, had some justification for their struggle against those who were at the top of the power hierarchy.

He was more looking at people that were already at the top of the power hierarchy who were claiming to be advocates for the working class, you know, and his claim fundamentally was that those people didn't like the poor; they just hated the rich.

And you know, that's the—it was difficult for the publisher who was publishing that book, which was called Um, The Road to Wigan Pier, which is an amazing book. It's a book about coal miners in Northern Britain, and it's brutal. Those people had brutal lives, man.

So, but anyways, you know, the publisher, which was the left book club, if I remember correctly, was very loathed to publish the essay that went along with that book because it was such a devastating criticism of sort of middle-class socialism.

Anyways, the psychoanalysts are always telling you, "Look, you know, there you are, there's no monster." It's like, "Okay, where's the monster?" Because it's somewhere; it's somewhere. There's a “the monster” in everyone, and if you're hiding it or covering it up or pretending that, you know, you only stand for the good, it's like all that means is that you're ignorant and naive about your own possibility.

There's a monster around there somewhere. So yeah, and that's partly 'cause, you know, if you're not a monster, it's pretty hard to stay alive because, you know, you have to contend with things like—sorry, things like this and things like this and things like this and things like this, you know? That's your life—you contend with that.

Nature is brutal; culture is brutal, and other people can be brutal too. And so, if you're not prepared for that and able to withstand it, then you're just going to get rolled over. So you better get the old inner monster developed and under conscious control because even though it's a terrible thing, you need it.

So the Dos, for example, they represent the world in terms that are quite similar to those that I just described for you. So, the central Dao symbol is this one, the Yang symbol, and Yang basically stands for order; that's what it means. But it means all the things that I've listed there; it means order, masculinity, the daytime, the known; it also means authoritarianism and fascism.

And then Yin on the opposite side is chaos, femininity, the night, the unknown, decadence, and nihilism, and it's also a relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious is represented by light, and the reason for that is, well, when are you conscious? You're conscious during the day, right?

Because we're creatures that live in the day unlike rats, for example; you know they live at night. So for us, consciousness is associated with enlightenment and illumination and daytime and sunrise and the bright noon sky, and the unconscious is associated with the nighttime.

And the reason for that partly too is that your unconscious is actually a lot more active at night. First of all, that's when you dream, and it's also the time when, if you're frightened of something or if you're depressed and ruminative, the frightening thoughts and the depressing and ruminative thoughts are going to come up.

So many, many people have the experience of waking up in a kind of quasi-cold sweat at 3 in the morning and having a, you know, nothing but a continual stream of worries run through their head. And there's pretty good evidence that a lot of what you're doing at night when you sleep, when you're dreaming, and when you're not dreaming is actually processing threat, you know?

But most of the time you're asleep for that. Sometimes you wake up during it, and it's like it's not something you really want to conscious about, you know? It's hard on you, and it's very, very common among people who are depressed, you know? So if you want to diagnose someone for depression, one of the things you ask them is, "Well, is your sleep chopped up?" You know, "Do you wake up multiple times at night? And when you wake up, what happens?"

And if they say, "Well, you know, I have worries running through my head, and I can't stop them," that's rumination because it's an automatic process; it's an unconscious process. Then you know that the balance between positive and negative emotion has shifted too far for that person—there's so much chaos and pain in their life or their emotional systems have become disregulated, that it's starting to pop up into consciousness and dominate it.

So now the In-Yang symbol is interesting for a variety of other reasons too because, um, the Dos believe that that symbol represents being. Now, being is not the same thing as objective reality; being is what you experience as a conscious creature.

That's being; and for the Dos, being is made up of these two elements: Order and Chaos. And the reason for that is quite straightforward. The reason for that is wherever you go and whenever you live, and whoever you are, each environment that you're in is composed of things you understand and things that work the way you expect them to and things you do not understand and that can pull the rug out from you at any moment.

And so you can say in some sense that these symbolic representations are representations of the most unchanging elements of being, so the most real things because, you know, a typical modern person looks at this and thinks, "Well, those aren't real." It's like, "They are real; in fact, they're hyper-real."

Because one of the things that defines real is that it's permanent, and it is permanent. No matter where you go, there are things you know and things you don't know, and it doesn't matter who you are; it's permanent. So it's part of the existential landscape of human being.

Now, the other thing is there are two other things that are quite cool about the In-Yang symbol, and one is that each of the black paisleys has a little white dot in it, and the white paisley has a little black dot in it. And the reason for that is the Dos also recognize quite well that chaos could turn to order at any moment, you know?

So a new order can arise out of a chaotic structure; that's like a—that's a revolution in some sense. But by the same token, if you're in a place that's orderly and predictable, something can happen that casts you into a chaotic situation right away. So there's a dynamic—even though these two things oppose each other in some sense, there's a continual dynamic interplay between them.

And then the final thing that's quite interesting about this symbol—this is a mind-bogglingly brilliant idea—is that because Dao also means the way, and the way is the line between the two. And so what that indicates is this is a brilliant idea is that the optimal position for a human being isn't in chaos or in order because if it's too much order, then it's totalitarian.

And if it's too much chaos, then it's disgust and fear and pain and depression. So where's the proper place? And the Daoist answer is, right on the line where you have one foot in order so that you're fairly stable, and you have another foot in chaos so that new and interesting and compelling and transforming things are happening to you.

And one of the things that you might note is that your nervous system basically tells you when you're there. And the way it tells you is by making you interested in whatever it is that you're engaged in. Because the fact that the thing that you're engaged in grips you, which is really an unconscious process; you can't really control that.

It's something that happens to you is because your nervous system, which is actually adapted to the environment of chaos and order, is telling you that if you're engaged and interested, you are at—in the place where the balance between chaos and order is perfect.

Now you think about that. It's no use reading a paper that you cannot understand at all, even though hypothetically that would be a tremendously informative paper, right? But you can't understand it because it's all chaos to you.

And then, there's absolutely no reason reading a paper the tenth time if you've already extracted the information out of it. It's going to be boring. Okay, so what do you want? Well, you want a paper that you can almost understand.

So, there's—you know, your frameworks, the cognitive frameworks that you have at hand are sufficient for you to take the next step into the unknown, and the paper will inform you of that. And so those are the sorts of things books do, that movies do, that conversations do, that even lines of thought do—that if they're exactly at the right level of complexity for you, they're going to engage you.

And people know this, man; they know it. So here's an example. Let's say you're trying to—you know, we could say you're trying to teach your child to talk, which of course you don't do. What you do to a child is talk to it.

But it's very interesting because there have been studies of how parents talk to children, and what they do is always use language that's slightly more complex than the child can understand, and they do it automatically. It's part of our, what in some sense our innate knowledge structure about language.

So you don't only use words that the child understands; you use words that they understand plus a few words and phrases and sentence constructions that they don't. And so that's sort of pulling them along.

And a Russian psychologist named Vygotsky called that the zone of proximal development, and the zone of proximal development is that place because it's a place in the environment where information flow into the psyche is maximized. And that has to be so—it has to be quasi-comprehensible; you know, it's something I try to do in my lectures.

You know, I try to tell you things that you know and associate them with things that you don't know so that you're not swamped hopefully by an excess of incomprehensible information, but you don't think, "Oh God, he's saying that again, I already know that," you know, etc., etc.

And anything that's dramatic in structure is doing that for you; it's keeping you on the edge of attention, and that place is where your adaptation is maximized because not only are you firming up the structure that's underneath your feet, you're relying on it.

And you know, it's part of the platform on which you stand, but you're absorbing information at a rate that allows you to increase the solidity and area of that solid ground without undermining you so much that it falls apart beneath you. So it's lovely; it's such a good idea because think about what it would mean if it was true.

It would mean that if you pay attention to what captures your interest and you follow that, that means you're going to always be interested in what you're doing. But even better than that, it's going to mean that you're going to maximize your adaptive capacity as much as possible at exactly the same time.

Man, that'd be a great deal if it actually happened to be true. Now, it's a bit complicated because what culture wants from you and what is intrinsically interesting to you, there's going to be a conflict there, right? Because culture wants you to do what a good cultural entity should do, which is to do what you're told to do.

But you're not—you know, you're not a robot. And so part of the existential problem that you have in life is trying to figure out some compromise between what you find personally engaging and that develops and supports you and what the culture will provide resources to you for pursuing, and it's hard.

There's no simple answer to it. But I would say that if you sacrifice your capacity to engage in meaningful activity to the security of a given position in a dominance hierarchy, then you turn into something that's like a soulless slave, and that's a really bad idea because there's no way you can do that for any length of time without getting bored and resentful.

And once you're bored and resentful, the move from that to dangerous is a very, very small step. So it's hard, and it isn't even necessarily the case that you're going to make the balance, you know, you're going to be able to manage it. But if you don't, you're going to pay a massive price for it.

So I would say, you know, don't let people mess around with what you find compelling any more than is absolutely necessary. You know, so because it's very dangerous to do that; it's very dangerous to do that, just like it's dangerous not to find a position in the dominance hierarchy at all because then you end up in a chaotic place.

And my experience has been—you might wonder about this. It's like, what's the probability that someone can live a healthy life, healthy, productive, and stable life outside a dominance hierarchy? So without external structure.

And the answer to that is there might be one person in this class that could do that; it's really hard because what happens to most people is that if they don't have a substantial amount of external structure and routine, they just fall apart. They don't sleep properly; they don't eat properly; you know, they're depressed.

It's tremendously effortful to continually reinvent yourself day after day. And so there's some real utility in routine and social identity, you know? And Yung would say the part of you that has adapted to routine and social identity is the persona and sort of the mask you wear in public—it might even be who you think you are.

And he thought that people who were only persona were dangerous because they were only thoughtless advocates of the system for which they stood. But he also believed that people who had no persona were in an equally terrible situation because they’re psychologically chaotic, and they don't have a social structure around them to ham them in and continually remind them how to be sane and productive.

So it's a matter of balance, you know? There's horrors on both sides, and there's advantages on both sides, and the trick is to place yourself in a location where you're deriving maximal advantage from both. And you'll be able to tell if you do that because if you are doing that, you're going to find your life engaging and meaningful enough so the fact that it's also tragic and potentially composed at least partially of slavery is going to be acceptable.

And that's what—that's the goal in some sense. It's hard to do that, but you know, it's hard not to do it too, so you're screwed either way, so you might as well pick the path that's going to be of maximum utility to you, you know?

So, and hopefully to everyone else. Okay, so this is the individual instead. So we have explored territory, unexplored territory, or the known and the unknown, or order and chaos, and then we have the thing that mediates between them, and that's the individual.

And this is an old medieval representation, which I really love, you know? There's the dome of the sky there; it's a very archaic idea that the earth is a dome because it kind of looks like that if you go out in a flat field; you know, if you're out in the ocean, the world looks like a dome on a disc. And so that's sort of the representation here; it’s a very ancient idea.

And this guy at the bottom left of the picture is poking his head through the comprehensible world and looking at the chaos beyond. And so he's a heroic figure. So the knower is the individual; is always the hero of a story, right? The protagonist of a story.

Now it can be an anti-hero too because just like the known has a negative element and a positive element, and the unknown has a negative element and a positive element, the individual has a negative element and a positive element. And so there's the hero and the adversary, roughly speaking.

And you know there's all sorts of movies where the protagonist is an anti-hero. You know, and those movies are usually there to show you bad examples in some sense, or you get mixed characters like Batman, and he's tangled up with the Joker.

And as the Joker points out in that brilliant performance, they're mirror images of one another. And so the Joker is an adversary; it’s more complicated than that. But so, some of the symbols that commonly represent the individual in symbolic representations are, well, and also conceptual representations, are ego, consciousness, the trickster.

Bugs Bunny is a good example of a trickster, the fool, the hero, the coward, spirit as opposed to matter or as opposed to dogma, the son, the son of the unknown and the son of the king. So, and those are very, very common figures, and I'll walk you through some of that as we progress today.

So, and then there's the figure of the adversary, so you see on the right-hand left-hand side there you see Horus, who's the bird-headed god of Egypt, who I told you about, who represents the capacity to pay attention. Very important concept because the Egyptians realized, and really it's brilliant, it is something modern people do not understand because we tend to make rationality the highest god.

That’s not a good thing; that's a pathway to totalitarianism. What the Egyptians knew, but they only knew it in symbolic form, was that it was the capacity to attend to things that, in some sense, was the highest psychological function. Because it's the capacity to pay attention that actually moves you beyond what you only know, and rationality tends to make you know integral systems that are coherent, that are box-like, and then claim that they're absolutely right.

Whereas attention is always looking beyond what you know, and attention is an unbelievably powerful force, you know? That's why advertisers pay for it; that's why people demand it; that's why children can't live without it; that's why it's what you want from your friends and your family; you want them to pay attention to you.

It's an unbelievably valuable resource. And so, one of the things I always tell my clients, for example, if they're socially anxious, I say, "Look, pay more attention to the person you're talking to." If you pay, if you really pay close attention to them, then the thoughts that are making you anxious will be suppressed, and because you're paying close attention to them, you'll match your movements to theirs.

And you'll match your conversation to them, and then there’s no reason for you to be socially anxious because socially anxious people will go like this when they're talking; you know, they don't want to look at you. Of course, how the hell can you engage anyone if you're not in a little dance with them, you know? You can't.

And a lot of it's non-verbal; it's physical and it's embodied, and without paying attention, then you lose people. And you see this with speakers all the time too, they're in front of audiences; they have their paper and they're going like this, and usually they're talking like this too.

And you know, the logical thing to do in that case is like look at Facebook or get the hell out of there or something, but they're not paying attention to the audience. And so there's no power in the dynamic conversation at all. So anyway, so there's Horus, and then there's the guy on the right there is set, and he's like the precursor of the Christian representation of Satan.

In fact, the name Satan seems to have been a transformation of the name Set, and Set is actually—he's like the god of totalitarian possibility because in Egyptian mythology he represents the brother, the evil brother of the rightful king who's always plotting to overthrow the rightful king. And Horus is his natural enemy.

And what this means—I tell you, man, it's really important. So, I have in my clinical practice frequently people who are stuck in the middle of absolutely moronic bureaucracy. So I can give you an example of this; I just love this one.

One of my clients who worked for a large corporation, who’s a pretty sensible woman, she was being driven mad by the political correctness that had infected the organization, and she sent me a 32, 32 email letter exchanges that were circulating around the word flip chart.

I don't know if any of you have heard the flip chart controversy, but it's pretty mind-bogglingly moronic. And so the deal was that somebody—you know, what a flip chart is, right? It's one of those paper pads that you flip paper over. Well, it turns out hypothetically that "flip" is a pejorative term for Filipinos, and so they believed that the idea—the flip chart phrase was no longer acceptable because it was potentially offensive to Filipinos.

Although I bet they would have had to vacuum up the whole planet to find one Filipino who actually cared whether or not someone called that a flip chart, you know? And that person would have had plenty of problems that were worse than that, anyway.

There was like a 32 serious email exchanges about what terminology should be used instead of flip chart. You know, so that's what people were doing instead of trying to actually have a life and do something useful, and it was driving her completely mad. They did rename them and made it part of corporate policy that it was inappropriate to use the word flip chart.

I don't remember what the hell they called them; who knows? But the reason I'm telling you this story is a lot of you are going to find yourself embedded in bureaucracies. And you know, and there’s that for better or for worse, and one of the things that's going to happen to you is that people are going to ask you to do stupid and ridiculous things.

And the fact that they're asking you to do stupid and ridiculous things is going to do two things—three things to you. One is it'll warp you so that you'll pretend that you agree with it, and then eventually you will. And like good, so much for your soul.

And then the other thing is it'll demotivate you because you'll think, "Why should I be like slaving away at this job when, you know, I'm being pecked to death by morons with stupid rules?" And the third thing that it'll do is make you resentful and irritated, and that will also undermine your motivation and make your life miserable.

And so you might think, well, what should you do about that? And the answer to that is you should object at the earliest possible point. Because first of all, you'll find that if you do, if you object to radical stupidity when it first emerges, you kind of make people aware of the fact that what they're doing is radically stupid, and they'll usually back off.

And so then they won't torture you to death. So, you know, you have to take a risk, which is, “Oh no, what happens if I complain about this?” But you know, it's another one of those situations where you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don’t.

So if you complain, that’ll cause some trouble, although usually it causes way less trouble than you'd think because people are generally not very courageous, and if you push them with some strength on a when they're doing something absolutely moronic, they'll usually back off because they don't know what to do when they're being challenged.

And then you won't have to put up with it for the rest of your life. And so why I'm telling you this is because all sorts of bureaucratic entities—corporations, government institutions, nonprofit organizations—anything that's above a certain size, because it doesn't matter if it's government or corporate; it's all the same bloody foolishness. When it gets too big, it's like those things tend towards totalitarian structures.

It's part of their—the innate danger that's associated with social organization. And so then, you might say, well, how do you keep the enterprise that you're part of alive and dynamic and also keep it a place that a sensible person who's got a proper orientation could stand to work?

And the answer is do not do things you know to be stupid. Stand up and say, "Look, that's dumb; I'm not doing it." And if they ask you why, then you can say, "Well, A, I think it's stupid, B, if I, I’m going to get irritated and resentful, and also if I do it, it's going to decrease my motivation, so I'm not doing it."

And then if they push you too hard, it's like, "Hey, it's time for a different job." And that might be the best thing that ever happened to you because if the structure you're in is going in that direction and you can't stop it, it's like get the hell out of there and find something else.

So it's not that hard to find a job when you already have a job; that's another thing to keep in mind too, you know? Whenever you're working, and you will be, especially in the world of today where jobs are relatively uncertain, you should always have an escape route planned, and it should be active.

Because if you don't have an escape route, and you can't get away, you can't say no, and if you can't say no, you can't bargain, and if you can't bargain, you're a slave. So that's how the world is set out at the moment; it's probably always been like that, but it's something that you really need to know because you got to watch if you're being—objecting to someone—something that someone is forcing you to do.

Maybe you're right; maybe you shouldn't be doing it. And lots of people end up living meaningless lives, and that's a—not a very good term because there's no such thing as a meaningless life because one of the meanings of life is suffering, and there's no bloody way you're going to escape that.

So you will not have a meaningless life; you'll have a life that's only suffering, and I wouldn't recommend that because it'll make you one miserable creature, and plus you'll warp everyone around you because you'll be vengeful. So these things are really important; they're really important.

So all right, so the individual, as like culture and like nature, also has its negative element. Yung would call that the shadow, you know? And we're going to discuss the shadow in some detail because one of the things that Yung believed—and he kind of got this idea from Freud—was that when you grow up, and maybe as a consequence of your temperament, you tend to think that some of your attributes are good and some of them are negative, you know?

So you make moral judgments about them, and fair enough. So, you know, you might think for the psychoanalysts the two elements of human being that were commonly regarded as negative from a moral perspective were sexuality and aggression.

But Yung's notion is that, well, you know, you might be someone who's modest and careful and never causes any conflict, and then we might say, well, you're a well-socialized person. But Yung's point would be, yeah, but you got no power; you've got no power.

And so people are just going to roll right over you. So you better dive into that morass of sexuality and aggression and pull out those powers and integrate them into your psyche so that you can use them consciously because without that you're harmless.

But you know, I don't think that's a very good ambition. You know, what do you want to be when you're 30? Well, I want to be harmless. It's like, you know, really, that's what you want to be? It's like you might as well not even be if that's your goal.

So, you know, this dichotomy between the positive individual and the negative individual is very, very complex because what's positive and what's negative is not obvious from the beginning, and arbitrary judgments don't help. It's very difficult for a given individual to look at themselves and say, well, what is it about me that's actually worth developing?

And I can tie this into, to some degree into Big Five Theory. So one of the big five characteristics is agreeableness, say, and people tend to think of agreeableness as a virtue, which is a complete—that's completely idiotic to think that because every virtue has its vice.

But agreeable people are sympathetic and empathetic and compassionate and polite, and those all sound like good things, but they're also part of being a, you know, an edle parent, by the way.

But, but anyways, the problem with being agreeable is that people take advantage of you, and then you get resentful. So I'm sure there's a whole pile of you in here that are agreeable and resentful; you know, I'm sure you know who you are.

And one of the things I would mention, and you should think about this CU, it’ll help you a lot if you do it, is that resentment is your best friend. If something makes you resentful, do not do it.

So, or there's a more sophisticated rule, which is if something makes you resentful, there's only two possibilities. One is that you're sniveling and immature, and you won't adopt your responsibilities, and you're whining about it.

The other is that you're being pushed around, and people are attempting to enslave you. So you want to eliminate the first possibility, right? You got to think, well, am I just being immature and whiny about this? Is it something that people are reasonably demanding of me?

And if you think that through and maybe you talk to some people about it and you think, no, no, this isn't reasonable, then the resentment is telling you to act. Act! Because otherwise, that's what you'll be— you'll end up, 15 years, especially if you're married or something like that, with 8,000 things you're resentful about, and then, you know, you'll be in some kind of painful divorce that lasts for 10 years.

So, better to nip it in the bud! If someone is after you to do something and you don't feel like you're getting proper regard or proper response or you don't think it's fair, it's like have some courage and get a hold of your anger and use it.

Doesn't mean you're right, but at least it means you can push the person hard enough so they have to engage in a dialogue with you. And you know, these are necessary skills. Like if you cannot do this, you have to be able to say no to negotiate; you have to be able to say no.

So you always want to put yourself in a position where you can do that. That's part of power. And the other thing is do not let people push you around because you'll get pushed right into a corner and you'll end up as a slave.

And that's because there's tyranny, slavery, or negotiation; that's what you've got. Yes, what if it's not an individual pushing around? There's no one to engage in dialogue with? What if society as a whole? Then you're looking at it from the wrong perspective; your level of analysis is wrong.

Because, so, you know, it is society as a whole, but what the hell good is that going to do you? You can't complain to society as a whole. You have to look for the micro-manifestations that actually occur in your realm and work on those, and that's the only level of analysis you have any control over.

Anyways, fix the things that are within your realm of power, and what'll happen as a consequence of that is that your realm of power will grow. But you start local because, like, what the hell do you know? You're 19 or 20 or whatever it is. Like you have—you have a scrap with society; it's like that's just an archetypal problem; that's all it is.

Because you don't know enough about society to have that opinion, you know? And I'm not being—I'm not being, like, I'm not trying to be cynical about this; I am telling you it's an archetypal problem, you know? Of course, everybody who's young has a problem with society; you're all at the bottom of the bloody dominance hierarchy unless you count the entire rest of the world, in which case you're already in the top 1%, right?

So, you know, that's worth thinking about too. So, and you know, if you are involved in a battle in some sense with society, you’re dominated by the figure of the great father, the negative figure of the great father. You also have to—a lot of what you should do about that is increase your level of gratitude, you know?

Here you are, it's warm, the chair works, the floor isn't going to fall apart, right? You're at a prestigious institution; you're well on your way to being one of the top 1% in society; you're just too damn young right now for that to happen. You're smart, you're healthy, you're good-looking, except for that weird thing you're wearing around your head.

So, like, you know, what the hell? Everything's good for you. So, I mean, I know there's a tyrannical element there; it is real, but if that's all you see, you're blinded, and that's not good; it'll warp you.

So, okay, so here's an example of how people automatically see the world as animated. So it makes sense, so you know, because I said we automatically perceive the world in personified categories. So let's look at this for—okay, so I would say that's the beginning of the journey into the unconscious, so that's—that he's going, what would you say, into the underworld fundamentally.

[Music]

Okay, so the first thing you note is that you can all understand that, right? It’s sort of like the world of childhood, but it makes sense for all those things to be animated, to manifest themselves in personified form.

It's a way of looking at the world that we can really understand, and it's a natural way—sorry about that—it's a natural way for children to look at the world. All their books are like that, everything's animated because that's what they assume about the world. That's their first understanding of the world is the world of a place of personalities, and they have to move beyond that to start developing some concept of the objective world.

And it isn't even clear that that's necessary. So, okay, so now I would say that that's—that's what—you call that—that's part of the symbolic structure that represents the shamanic initiation.

So I'm going to read something from Maud, which is one of the readings that you have. I should like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane; it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology.

So what he's saying is that it's not psychopathological; it’s part of normative personality development; it has an initiatory structure in significance and signification. In short, it reproduces a traditional mystical pattern. The total crisis of the future shaman, sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the personality and to madness, can be evaluated not only as an initiatory death but also as a symbolic return to the pre-cosmogonic chaos, to the amorphous and indescribable state that precedes any cosmogony.

Cosmogony is the account of the initial creation of being. So in the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, that would be the emergence of order out of the initial state of chaos that's produced by God's word. So, and that's another symbolic representation.

There's chaos, there's the act of word, and there's order, and those are the three initial elements of being. And so, the shaman in some sense is reducing himself as a consequence of exposure to something radical to the initial components of his being and then being reconstructed out of that.

And that happens to you all the time in some sense when you encounter obstacles that really set you back because, you know, you've ordered the world, and then what you find out is the ordering of the world is incorrect. And before you can reorder it, it has to become chaotic. It does become chaotic; that's what sets you back.

And then out of that chaos, you have to bring out a new order if you can, you know? So for example, you get betrayed by someone that you love; it's like, okay, it's time to update your world model. Now can you? Well maybe not, you know, because if you really update it, you have to come to terms with the fact that the individual—which would also include you—is capable of radically immoral acts because betrayal is a radically immoral act, right?

If there's anything that's actually immoral, it's people telling you one thing and then doing a whole bunch of other things behind your back. And then that comes—brings up a question, which is, well, how the hell can people be like that? Especially because I'm also a person. And then also how can I be so naive and moronic that that can happen to me?

So, and those are not trivial questions, you know? If you can't—if you don't have an answer to them at hand, what it means is that there's half the world you haven't mapped out, which would be the negative half, and you may have to revisit and revise and destroy virtually all of your assumptions about the world.

So that's a reduction to chaos; it is not fun, especially if it happens accidentally. And it can be traumatic enough, so you never recover from it. Post-traumatic stress disorder is like that. Like if you watch soldiers in battle and they get post-traumatic stress disorder, it's very frequent that they get it because of something they did, not because of something that happened to them, you know?

So they're out on a mission of some sort, and they shoot a three-year-old child, it's like—and maybe they do it consciously, and then, you know, they wake up after they do it and they think, well, that's not me; it's like, oh yes, it is, it's just not the you that you think you are.

And the you that did that, man—encountering that's going to be enough to damage your consciousness, and that is what happens to people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Like it blows them apart so badly and not just psychologically, right? It radically alters them physiologically; their amygdalas grow and their hippocampi shrink. If you have post-traumatic stress disorder, it's a whole brain transformation; it's like—it’s no joke.

And the human capacity for evil is so deep that, well, Yung, for example, he thought that, you know, an accidental encounter with it was enough to lead to madness in some cases, and it's—it's no joke.

All right, so here's a way of thinking about things. I'm going to move through it relatively quickly. So, um, you look through the world, you look at the world through a frame of reference, and the reason you do that in part is because there's more to the world than you can understand.

And so that would be the actual chaos of the world. It's like the world is very, very, very, very complicated, and you know, you're very complicated too, but you're not as complicated as the world. So you're continually surrounded by a chaotic structure that you don't really understand, and you have to frame it in with a frame of reference that only allows you to see those things that are necessary for you to see at the time of your given action.

And as far as I can tell, this is a cybernetic model of personality. The elements of that frame are something like this. This is a basic story—you are somewhere; you're located somewhere in time and space, always, you know where that is, and you have some sense of the qualities of that localization.

So people ask you about that because they ask you, “Well, how are you doing?” And what they're asking is, you know, what's your representation of your current state of being? And the answer to that is generally for people, um, it's okay, but it's insufficient because if it wasn't insufficient, well, what, why would you be doing anything?

In principle, now, isn't good enough because there's something else that could be better, and that's what you're pursuing. And if—it’s kind of a weird thing because it means in some sense that if you weren't dissatisfied permanently, you wouldn't be motivated to do anything.

And so that's also part of the reason that a lot of human experience is characterized by somewhat negative emotions. It's like this; we're permanently dissatisfied. Why? Well, because we can act to change things. So if you're not dissatisfied, you don't want it to be better.

So, in some sense, what you're doing is looking at the world through a frame that says this is what there is, and here's how I evaluate it, and here's what could be, and that's what I want; I would like to bring that about.

And so that gives things value. It gives things value because things that will move you to where you want to go, they have a positive value, and things that get in your way when you're trying to get to where you want to go, they have a negative value.

And so that's partly how your emotions work. So—and you can put almost anything in the box of what should be. It's weird because normally for animals, what would be in the box of what should be would be deep motivational states that are biological in origin.

So maybe an animal hasn't had enough to eat, and so pop, it's feeling hungry—that's undesirable, it wants to have something to eat. And so, these different underlying biological systems like hunger and thirst and sexual lust and aggression and temperature regulation and so on, they're what set the goals and the perceptual frame and the emotional responses.

But in human beings, we're so damn abstract that we can take that structure and we can put almost anything in that goal box. So, for example, you can go to a soccer game, and you can say, well, I'm going to identify with my team.

So, you expand the boundaries of your current state of existence to incorporate the team. And then you say what's really important to me, that they kick that little round sphere through that net. And so your whole nervous system says, “Okay, well, if that's the goal, we're going to align our emotions with that.”

And then, you know, guys, you don't know, run down the field and kick a little sphere through a net, and you're like up there, you know, celebrating in a way that you'd never do in your actual life. It's like you don't do that when you get a good grade on an exam, you know, just jump up in the air and hug all your friends.

You'll do that at a soccer game; it's like, what the hell is wrong with you? So, but you do that because this is a very malleable and extendable frame, and you're using it for everything. When you go into a movie theater and you watch the protagonist, you basically adopt his or her frame of reference, and then you see the whole world that's portrayed on the screen through the eyes of the person that you're identifying with; that's part of our capacity for imitation.

So basically what you—what it seems what you do there is like if you're talking to someone else and you adopt their frame of reference, it's not exactly a cognitive operation. What you seem to do is first of all come to some understanding about what it is that they want, and so that's the goal. Once you know what they want, you can represent them in your body.

So it's almost like you're playing them as a simulation on your own biological platform, and then you can infer from your own emotional responses if you also simulate the situation that they're in what their emotions are, and that enables you to understand other people.

So we're these weird biological computers that are capable of running other psyches on our biological platform, and that makes us able to imitate and also to understand each other. So that's a basic narrative: I was here and I'm trying to go there.

And so if you're asking your kindergarten kid what they did today at school and teaching them to tell a story, they might say, "Well, I was at home, and then Mom took me to kindergarten." It's like not a very exciting story, but it's a story.

Then a little more exciting story might be, "I was at home, my mom took me to school, and on the way there, a big dog ran up to the fence and barked at me." And the right question that would follow that story is, "Okay, what did you do?"

And that's a real story because the kid says, "Well, look, I was in this frame of reference, and I was aiming at goal A—actually, I was aiming at point B—and while I was aiming at point B and acting out the process that would lead me there, something unexpected happened." That's a story.

And then you say, well, what did you do? And the kid might say, "Well, you know, I was really scared and I hid behind Mom," or so that would be one response. And we still went to kindergarten and I was okay; it's pretty good, pretty good.

Or the kid might say, "Well, I wasn't scared at all because I know that if you stand up to dogs, they usually leave you alone, and we went to kindergarten and that was okay."

And you know, the kid is trying to tell, really, they’re trying to tell a little hero story, and if they're successful in the encounter with the thing that's unknown, then they triumph as a consequence of their encounter with the unexpected, and poof, you know, that's successful adaptation.

You pat them on the head and you say, "Yeah, that's really good," and they kind of smile and you know, you're teaching them—you're teaching them how to comprehend their existence in a narrative structure, and you're also teaching them what that narrative structure should be.

So this is like a meta-narrative, and the meta-narrative says, you were going from point A to point B, that's the oval on the left, and then something completely bizarre happened, like I was betrayed, and then I was in this terrible place for quite a long period of time, a chaotic place.

But I learned a bunch, and I put myself back together, and I'm a wiser person as a consequence of the encounter, right? Everyone knows that story, and that's paradise—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained; it's a cultural meta-narrative.

And it's a story that every—like, it's a human story; it's an apocalyptic story—that's why everybody's always all apocalyptic about everything, right? Apocalypse of the week, we're going to run out of oil, we're going to run out of gas, there's too much carbon dioxide, the Chinese are going to take over the world, we're ruining the E, we're ruining the ecology, the ocean's running out of fish, you know, the world is getting too hot.

It was getting too cold in 1970 when I was about your age. It's like Apocalypse of the week. Why? Because things fall apart, and because they can fall apart completely, and they often do. And so, everyone's always on the alert for, like, the next potential apocalypse.

And it's no wonder, you know? It's a permanent characteristic of life that things can radically fall apart. Now, luckily, it's a permanent characteristic of life that they can act also radically come back together.

And it turns out that whether or not they radically come together depends to some degree on how you choose to act when they fall apart. What is the pre-cosmogonic chaos? This is from, um, William James, who was a pragmatist, who lived on the East Coast at about the end of the 1800s.

He was one of the founders of modern psychology; he liked to sniff nitric—nitrous oxide, which is a hallucinogen; he was sort of like the world’s first major league hippie, and he wrote sort of hippie poetry as a consequence of his nitrous oxide experimentation.

And here's part of what he derived from his experiences. So, um, pure experience is the name which I give to the original flux of life before reflection is categorized. It only newborn babes and persons in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows can have an experience pure in the literal sense of a being.

That which is not yet any definite what, potential; potential. Because you might think, well, what's the world made of? It's made out of actuality, right? But that's not how you act. You act as if the world's made out of potential, and you interact with that potential.

And what James is saying is that there are times when you experience something that's akin to relatively pure potential, and then you might ask yourself whether or not potential is real, which is a really interesting question. But I can say, regardless of how you answer that question, you act as if it's real.

And you’ll also feel guilty if someone that you love comes up to you and says, "You're not living up to your potential." It's like, what the hell does that mean? What does it mean? It means you're not becoming that which you could be.

Well, what is that? It's like, you know, we're materialists; how are we going to measure that? You can't touch it; you can't taste it; you can't see it; you can't measure it, right? But nonetheless, it's like the substance of being.

And being is potential as well as actuality, and we're grappling always with the potential. And so that's what James is talking about: pure potential. I like to think of it as latent information, full both of oneness and many, but in respects that don't appear changing throughout yet, so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate.

Sounds like the yin and yang symbol and no points either of distinction or of identity can be caught. Here's his poem: no verbiage can give it because the verbiage is other incoherent, coherent the same, and it fades, and it's infinite, and it's infinite.

Don't you see the difference? Don’t you see the identity? Constantly opposites united, the same—me telling you to write and not to write. Extreme, extreme, extreme something, and other than that thing—intoxication and otherness than intoxication.

Every attempt at betterment, every attempt at amendment, it fades, and it fades forever, and forever as we move ahead. Now, as we know, for archaic and traditional cultures, the symbolic return to chaos is equivalent to preparing a new creation.

So, the death of your current state of being can be the preparation for a new being. Now, one of the things the psychoanalysts say, and this is implicit in Elad’s discussion of the shamanic transformation, is if you do this voluntarily, you have a much better chance of doing it successfully.

So the rule is, well, if you go out to hunt for a dragon and you're in pretty good shape while you're doing it and you're all prepared, then the damn thing might not eat you. But if you’re lying in bed, and you know you're covered with cheesy dust and you’re hung over from three days worth of drinking, then the dragon will just eat you.

And it's probably a good thing for everyone that it did. So, the point is be prepared, and part of the way that you're prepared is by being awake and having the many sources of power that are at your fingertips, that are part of your biological and cultural inheritance, at the ready so that you can respond.

It follows that we may interpret the psychic chaos of the future shaman as a sign that the profane man is being dissolved and a new personality is being prepared for birth. Transformation—constant theme: paradise, paradise lost, and redemption.

That's the story of mankind. We're in a fallen state. Why is that? Well, because things aren't perfect, and they could be better, and everyone's suffering. So things have fallen apart; they're always in the state of being fallen apart.

And what are we trying to do? Well, we're trying to put them back together. It's the eternal story of mankind, that now HRI Ellen B, who was an existentialist psychotherapist, um, and who was a leader of the existentialist movement in the 1950s, and also a profound student of psychoanalyst—psychoanalysis—talked about something he characterized as a creative illness, which was something that manifested itself in Freud and in Yung and in other people like Victor Frankl, for example, who went through periods of extreme and Darwin, extreme periods of chaotic