Maps of Meaning 13 (Harvard Lectures)

Look at my neighbor's. Was that the one where, like, astronomers photograph? It's got a picture of Heaven that was in my science class. Like, look, they've done—I mean, did okay. Now there's Jimmy. Ha! See, his head's still intact, but nobody—oh yes, I mean the things they can do with photography are so wonderful, aren't they?

There is a little bit—there is an article, but no more pictures or no more different pictures, actually. Oh, there's no more pictures. Well, Kennedy was shot dead to stop him from revealing truths about UFOs. Did you see Dole's great-grandmother? There's a picture! Talk to me for two minutes after class, comp.

Right, what the mother? Anything that makes reference to mother and see the shape. Well, you have to look at a bunch of those. Tell just by looking at the one you're describing, but there's lots of symbols like that.

Okay, well, I guess this is all the people going to get. Yeah, that's great. Okay, so today we're going to—I want to pass around the picture first. You can all take a look at it. It's this picture here. This is very interesting. I think there's a number of pictures like this from around this time period in European art. This is about the best complete representation that I've seen.

All right, so I'll pass this around. Anyway, the picture is divided into two halves. On the right side, this is the Tree of Life, the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, sort of combined into one image, which is not all that infrequent. On the right side of the image is Eve, Adam sitting in the background here. Eve is handing out fruit from the tree, taking it from a Serpent's mouth. By the way, that's the serpent of chaos, taking the Apple from the Serpent's mouth and handing it to humanity over here.

And in the background is this figure that clearly represents death, and also you'll note in the tree one of the apples is replaced by a skull. All right, then on the right hand, or on the left-hand side of the image, there's a figure that represents the Church, given maternal form here, seen as a counterpart to Eve. And there's a picture of Christ crucified up in the branches of the tree, and that symbolizes the notion that—the old Christian notion that Christ was the second fruit of this tree.

So the first fruit was the fruit that bestowed on people knowledge of Good and Evil that had as its negative consequence consciousness of death. And the second fruit was the figure of the hero here, who's construed in most myths as the answer to the question that was posed by the original event. So you see, the Christian story makes a loop, basically. It posits that there's a problem, which is the fact of mortality or the fact of knowledge of mortality, depending on how you look at it, and that there's also an answer to that problem which is whatever pattern of being is represented by this figure.

So the thing that the figure representing the Church is handing out are hosts, and the hosts in the Catholic Mass are theoretically considered to be equivalent to Christ's body. And that's a reference to really archaic—what would you say? Archaic sacrificial symbology of incredibly archaic nature based on the notion that if you ingest something, that you can become like it, which is the idea that sort of stands behind the Mass.

So, anyways, you can take a look at this painting. There's another one that's sort of like it, although it's not quite as good an image in this particular book on page 121, expressing the same sort of idea. So I'll just pass that around. You can take a look at it and think about it because it makes a nice background for the talk that'll end this class off, which is today.

So I'm going to read you some things today from the last part of this manuscript because while I spent a lot of time constructing them and I think they're more—because I have to cover a tremendous amount of material today, I don't want to miss the essential lines of the argument.

So, this whole course has been aimed at trying to understand motivation behind acts of cruelty that have no apparent justification. One of the things that we've been trying to understand is what forces motivate individuals to protect their social territory in general. And the idea is—well, will you shut the door, please? Thanks.

So, I mean, the initial hypothesis basically is predicated on the idea that people have an innate response to novelty, that novelty is terrifying at first encounter, particularly if that encounter is involuntary. And that the reason we construct organizations of social order is to keep that novelty at Bay, which is to say that we would rather live where there's order than where there's chaos because chaos has an intrinsically overwhelming affective valence.

So we have one level of motivation to protect our territory that stems purely from our psychobiology. Everything stems from our psychobiology, I suppose, but it's most clear there. Then there's a second level of phenomena that have to be accounted for. I've told you some stories more recently that Goldhagen had gathered together when he was talking about the Nazi death camps near the end of the war, making the point that the Nazis did not—assuming that they were motivated—as you might assume, by the desire to take over the world, to dominate the world, which would be motivated by the desire to spread their particular pattern of beliefs everywhere, so there was no chaos anymore anywhere.

You'd expect that when they put people like the Jews or the gypsies into the concentration camps that they would have tried to extract from them as much productive labor as possible in order to further this particular end. But it seems to be the case, at least frequently, that the labor that was extracted from the victims in the concentration camps had no productive value whatsoever. It certainly wasn't useful in furthering the cause of the war. It may have even hampered it evidently at that point because, of course, the Germans lost a tremendous amount of their intellectual capacity when the lucky Jewish intellectuals managed to escape their clutches.

Goldhagen points out—and sociologists detail this sort of thing quite frequently too—that much labor, so to speak, was only implemented for the purpose of cruelty and humiliation. So Goldhagen tells a story about a typical work operation which involved moving a large rock from one place to another while being beaten and then moving it back. This is a parody of work—not work itself—and obviously only instituted to humiliate and torture people who are already about as victimized as you could possibly imagine.

You know, you need another level of motivation, another level of explanation to account for that sort of phenomena, which is gratuitous cruelty, or even cruelty as a sort of aesthetic, as a way of life, as something worth pursuing in and of itself. And I don't think you can understand—you don't understand what human beings are like. You certainly don't understand motivation for acts of social conflict until you get both parts of the story sort of firmly embedded in your mind.

So, you could say, well, it's more purely the case that the fear of unknown territory motivates our desire to associate with a group. A group is composed of people whose actions we can predict. Furthermore, while we're in that group, we can predict our own actions. So that pretty much keeps the novelty of the environment, so to speak, at Bay, but also the novelty that's in other people and ourselves.

Then you need to—then you—but then you have to account for this other level of phenomenon. The way I attempted to do that was by discussing mythologies of the dawn of consciousness, two of them in particular, the Buddhist, the mythology of the initial stages of the enlightenment of the Buddha, and also the myth that's contained in the story of Genesis, which describes how Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then immediately became aware not only of their own mortality, but of everything that that sort of signified.

Which was partly the fact that they were going to die, partly the fact that now it was necessary for them to make moral choices—they had that capacity—partly that they were going to have to work—not that’s something we haven’t concentrated on that much. They have to work to sustain their existence. You only have to work when you can envision negative possibilities that your instincts would not have normally construed of themselves.

I mean, animals don’t work, they just live. We work because we can imagine a plethora of negative possibilities that do not exist in the present, and we're always attempting to ensure that they don't exist in the future as well, which is just a hypothetical place in a sense. But the fact that we work means that we're dissociated, in a sense, from what we'd like to do because we certainly normally just assume work is what you do, so you get to do what you would like to do, at least under normal circumstances.

So part of the Fall, part of the consequences of the fall—or the rise into self-consciousness, depending on how you look at it—was the necessity of endless work. So knowledge of death. Endless work—that basically about sums it up. Of course, it's also the case that when Adam becomes self-conscious, he puts on his fig leaf. He adopts the trappings of culture. He also immediately hides from God.

And, well, those ideas are all tangled together in the Genesis myth. I mean, Adam hides from God because he's ashamed, and the reason he's ashamed is because he clearly recognizes his own vulnerability. And that vulnerability, the recognition of that vulnerability, makes it impossible for him to exceed to God, or to see God, at least in the mythological story.

And I think what that's trying to represent is in part the fact that it's knowledge of our own vulnerability that makes us doubt our what would you say? Our fitness in the sight of God. It's hard to talk about this without lapsing into mythological terms. It's knowledge of our own vulnerability that leads to our own shame, I guess that's the simplest way to put it, and that makes us hide from the possibilities in ourselves that are most potent.

Yeah, so then I told you a little bit of a story that sort of went like this. I mean, that there's a feedback loop in a sense that's generated as a consequence of the dawning of self-consciousness. And one is the—well, one is the generation of shame. The other is the moving away from destiny that's most appropriate, that leads to a weakening of character. Weakening of character makes the world seem much more terrible than it is because, well, as you lose sight of the process that can allow you to adapt to things the way they are, it is the case that things that you can no longer handle take on a more and more aggressive and hostile and vicious face.

So I guess the simplest way to look at that is to think that, in the world, it is such a complex place, so unpredictable in its essence, and so charged with danger everywhere that in order to adapt to it properly, it's necessary to utilize all of your resources. Your own knowledge of your own limitations is enough to stop you from believing that those resources have any value. The more you move away from those resources, partly because they take work, partly because you don't believe in them anymore, the weaker you get and the more terrible the world appears.

Well, Milton basically, I think, represented that part in his description of Satan's generation of hell around it, tying in another complex aspect of the argument, which is the inability to admit to error. It's hard in brief to demonstrate how all those ideas are are tangled out. I guess the basic notion is that it's knowledge of our own essential vulnerability that makes us lack belief in our capacity to face the consequences of our own errors or even to admit that those errors are there.

Without that capacity, it's impossible for us to further the development of our personalities because it's only after admission of error that further exploration can take place. It's out of the consequences of exploration that personality is generated and the terrors of the world transformed into something either positive or at least irrelevant.

Okay, so what we are hoping to do today to some degree in a very brief period of time is to describe how that process how all the negatives that are associated with the processes that we've described might be overcome to some degree. I'm going to start that by reading something. I mean, I guess the argument basically hinges on this point. Does the fact that there are negative things necessarily corrupt people?

You can see Nietzsche said—and I quoted his statement last week. He said that everyone who—only he who suffers from actuality has motivation to lie himself out of it. And of course, that that statement was Nietzsche's attempt to account for human behavior in general, making the case that we all have reason to suffer from actuality and therefore are all motivated to lie ourselves out of it. Freud took an extreme position like that, saying that our fear of reality—which was essentially knowledge of our own mortality—was sufficient to have generated all of the religious and artistic structures that we've erected, which Freud basically regarded as neurotic delusions against the anxiety of death.

That's a powerful argument, I think. I guess the problem I have with that particular perspective is that it's extraordinarily pessimistic because it's basically predicated on the idea that unvarnished reality, so to speak, is of necessity so terrible that it's impossible to face it, so that some falsehood of some sort has to be rectified between you and your actual experience in order to make that experience tolerable.

Now, I can understand the rationale behind that argument. It springs up again in these social psychological studies that we’ve been—that idea springs up again. You know that a certain amount of delusion is necessary for mental health. Well, I guess really what I want to do is explore that idea, look at the opposite perspective, which is that, well, no, that's not right. It's insufficient grasp of reality that makes it too terrible to bear.

And the story I want to tell you today is the story about the exploration of that particular hypothesis. The first thing that I thought might be useful—because one of the things we've been trying to do in this class so far is to draw distinctions between things, you know, so that we can figure out distinctions between various negative things and distinctions between various positive things and to look at how the mythological imagination categorizes the world so that we can understand it more rationally.

One of the things that I think is very useful to draw a distinction between when we're talking—when we're trying to answer the question, "Is the world so terrible that it cannot be actually perceived properly?"—is to attempt to draw a distinction between evil and tragedy.

And I'm going to—because it's certainly the case—look, it's certainly the case, as we all know, that in the course of our life we're going to encounter the same sort of phenomena that Buddha encountered when he went outside of his walls. And there's no possibility in anyone's existence for them to escape sickness or old age or death. I mean, those things are absolutely certain and certainly tinged with negative affect, at least in terms of their apprehension.

So the question is, under those—given that those are the background conditions of existence, is it possible nonetheless that existence can be positive enough so that it can be apprehended accurately instead of hidden from? And I think one of the things that you have to understand before you can answer a question like that is the nature of the distinction between evil and tragedy.

And in order to address that distinction, I turned first to an argument that was put forth by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, which is regarded, as far as I can tell, as one of the most potent pro-atheistic arguments that's ever been set down in literature. Now, Ivan and Alyosha are two of the brothers Karamazov, and Alyosha is a spiritual person. He wants to be a monk, and his brother Ivan is also, I suppose, of the same sort of spirituality from the genetic perspective—they are brothers, after all—but he's also extraordinarily intellectual, and his intellectual ability has completely destroyed his ability to manifest the sort of faith that characterizes Alyosha.

And so they're sitting down one time, I believe they're both drunk—I don't remember, although most of the characters do, yes, these novels are always drunk—and they have a very lengthy discussion about, well, about the central meaning of the world, I guess. And Ivan makes a very, very powerful case.

And it's a case that it's sort of the worst-case scenario. And he says, look, this is how the world is constituted by all approaches I can conceive of. If it's constituted in this way, it's necessary to adopt the attitude of "Girus Mephisto," which is basically that the conditions of existence are so unbearable that existence itself has no justification. It should cease to be.

Now, under most conditions, we don't draw that sort of conclusion, but there are times, especially when our worlds become much less secure than they normally are, where that sort of thing springs naturally to mind.

And you know, as long as things are going according to plan, we don't think like that. But when the unexpected rises up and manifests itself in some extraordinarily destructive way, that's the first sort of notion that comes into our minds.

So I'm going to outline that argument. This is from Jeffrey Burton Russell, who wrote a four-volume series on the devil in the modern world. He presents Ivan's argument for atheism. Ivan's examples of evil are all taken from the daily newspapers of 1876. They're unforgettable.

There's a nobleman who orders his hounds to tear a peasant boy to pieces in front of his mother. A man who whips his struggling horse on its gentle eyes. Parents who lock their tiny daughter all night in a freezing privy while she knocks on the walls, pleading for mercy. A Turk who entertains a baby with a shiny pistol before blowing its brains out. Ivan knows that such horrors occur daily and can be multiplied without end.

He states, "I took the case of children to make my case clearer." And so, of course, what he's doing is he's presenting a situation where the innocent are tormented because that's an archetypal situation, fundamentally, right? Because an archetypal situation is where the most extreme situations that characterize any particular case are brought up into the story.

So if you want to tell a very good story, what you do is you make the extreme case, and that's what Ivan's doing. He says, "How can you justify the suffering of innocence? Of the other tears with which the Earth is soaked?" I will say nothing.

Russell states, "The relation of evil to God has, in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, once again become a center of philosophical and theological discussion. The problem of evil can be stated simply: God is omnipotent, God is perfectly good; such a God would not permit evil to exist. But we observe that evil exists; therefore, God does not exist."

Now, I think it's absolutely necessary to realize that this line of reasoning does not have to be formulated in a purely theological manner. I mean, whether or not you consider the conditions of existence generally as God or as due to God has no relationship really, necessarily, on the attitude you bring to bear on the conditions of existence, whether you're an atheistic or religious. Explicitly, the same problem presents itself to you, which is that things that are terrible by any manner in which terrible can be defined constantly occur without apparent reason and also without our ability to control them.

Under such circumstances—which evidently exist—is it possible to posit in any tenable manner that life itself is worth living? Now, that doesn't have to be a religious argument or expressed in religious terms. Although at its core, it’s the only religious argument, really. It’s the only question. Variations on the theme are nearly infinite.

The problem is not only abstract and philosophical; of course, it is also personal and immediate. Believers tend to forget that God takes away everything that one cares about: possessions, comforts, success, professional craft, knowledge, friends, family, and life. What kind of God is this? Any decent religion must face this question squarely, and no answer is credible that cannot be given in the face of dying children.

Okay, so that's the argument there is set up for the worst-case scenario. This is typical of Dostoevsky's novels. I mean, that’s what makes him a great novelist fundamentally. His great novels all address problems that are basically impossible: the relationship of good to evil in "Crime and Punishment," the relationship of divinity and individuality in "The Idiot," the relationship of personal behavior to social catastrophe in "The Devils," and the relationship between fathers and sons—that's part of it—in "The Brothers Karamazov" where this argument is also discussed.

What do you say to a dying child? You say, "Look, my love, you can do it. You're strong enough to do it." You hold her hand and fight the suffering you can't control with the love that you can. It seems to me that we use the horrors of the world to justify our own evil. We make the presumption that human vulnerability is a sufficient cause of human cruelty. We blame God and God's creation for twisting and perverting our souls and claim all the time to be innocent victims of circumstance.

I don't have much experience as a clinical psychologist. Two of my patients, however, stayed in my mind. The first was a woman about 35 years old. She looked 50. She reminded me of a medieval peasant, at least of my conception of a medieval peasant. She was dirty—clothes, hair, teeth—dirty with the kind of filth that takes months or even years to develop. She was unbearably shy. She approached anyone who she thought was superior in status to her, which was basically everyone, hunched over with her eyes shaded by both hands, as if she could not tolerate the light emanating from her target.

She'd been in behavioral treatment as an outpatient before and was a site known to the permanent staff at the clinic. Others had tried to help her overcome her unfortunate manner of self-presentation, which of course made people on the street shy away from her, made them regard her as crazy and unpredictable. She could learn to stand or sit up temporarily with her eyes unguarded, but she reverted to her old habits as soon as she left the clinic.

She might have been intellectually impaired—a consequence of a biological fault was difficult to tell because her environment was so appalling it may have caused her ignorance. I thought perhaps that she had an IQ of about 80 or 85. She was illiterate as well. She lived with her mother—whose character I knew nothing about—and with an elderly, desperately ill, bedridden aunt. Her boyfriend was a violent, schizophrenic alcoholic, at least as far as I could determine, who mistreated her psychologically and physically and was always muddling her simple mind with tirades about the devil and the worship of Satan.

She had nothing going for her: no beauty, no intelligence, no loving family, no skills, no employment—nothing. She didn't come to therapy to resolve her problems, however, to unburden her soul or to describe her treatment and victimization at the hands of others. She came because she wanted to make friends with someone who was permanently hospitalized.

The clinic where I was interning was associated with a large psychiatric hospital. All of the patients that still remained after the shift to community care in the 60s were so incapacitated that they could not survive on the streets. When you have seen street people and they're incapacitated enough as a general rule, just imagine how incapacitated people who weren't allowed to go back on the streets were—at the basement of that hospital.

There was a Coke room down in the basement of the hospital. The hospital was connected by tunnels all over the place. I think probably because it was so cold there, it looked like a scene from Dante's Inferno in that Coke room. I mean, there were people in there that were so damaged, it was just beyond your capacity to imagine. Anyway, she’d done some volunteer work of some limited type in that hospital and decided that she could maybe take someone for a walk and make friends with them.

I think she got the idea because she had a dog which she walked regularly and which she liked to take care of. All she wanted from me was help in arranging this—help finding someone she could take outside—help finding someone in the hospital bureaucracy who would allow this to happen. I don't think I was very successful in aiding her, but she didn't really seem to mind.

It is said that one piece of evidence that runs contrary to a theory is sufficient to disprove that theory; of course, people don't think this way and perhaps should not. In general, a theory is too useful to give up easily. It is too difficult to regenerate, and evidence again should be consistent and believable before it's accepted. But the existence of this woman made me think she was destined for a psychopathological end from the viewpoint of biological environmental determinism—as fated, as faded, as surely as anyone I'd ever met.

And maybe she beat her dog sometimes and was rude to her sick aunt. Maybe I didn't see her when she was vindictive or unpleasant even when her simple wishes were thwarted. I don't want to say that she was the saint because I didn't know her well enough to tell, but the fact was that in her misery and simplicity, she remained essentially without self-pity and still capable of seeing outside of herself.

I hesitate to say that I learned more from her than she did from me because that sounds literary and trite, but she didn't learn anything from me. Why wasn't she a criminal? Cruel? Unbalanced and miserable? She had every reason to be, and yet she wasn't. It seemed to me that in her simple way, she'd made the proper choices. She remained bloody but unbound out, and she seemed to me rightly or wrongly to be a symbol of suffering humanity, sorely afflicted yet capable of courage and love.

Such, I created all the ethereal powers and spirits, both them who stood and fell, who fell not free. What proof could they have given, sincere, of true allegiance, constant faith, or love? Were only what they needs must do appear, not what they would. What praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid when will and reason, reason also was choice, useless in vain. A freedom both despoiled made passive both had served necessity, not me. They, therefore, as to right belonged, so were created, nor can justly accuse their maker or their making or their fate as if predestination overruled their will disposed by absolute decree or high foreknowledge. They themselves decreed their own revolt, not I, if I foreknew, for knowledge had no influence on their fault, which had no less proved certain unforeseen.

So, without least impulse or shadow of faith or aught by me immutably foreseen, they trespass authors to themselves and all both what they judge and what they choose. For so I form them free; free they must remain till they enthrall themselves. I else must change their nature and revoke the high decree unchangeable, eternal, which ordained their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall.

That's God's discussion of the relationship between choice and evil in Milton. The other patient I wish to describe was a schizophrenic in a small inpatient ward at a different hospital. He was about 29—a few years older than me—had been in and out of confinement for seven years when I met him. He was, of course, on antipsychotic medication, participated in occupational therapy activities on the ward, taking coasters and pencil holders and so on, but he couldn't maintain attention for any length of time.

Wasn't even much good at craft. My supervisor asked me to administer an intelligence test to him, standard WASTA—more for the sake of my experience than for any possible diagnostic good it might do. I gave him a dozen or so red and white blocks for the block design test. He's supposed to arrange the blocks so they matched a pattern printed on the cards that came with the test.

He picked them up and started to rearrange them on the desk in front of him while I timed him stupidly with a stopwatch. The task was impossible for him even at the simplest of stages. He constantly looked distracted and frustrated. I asked, "What's wrong?" He said, "The battle between good and evil is going on in my head."

I stopped the testing at that point. I didn't know exactly what to make of his comment. He was obviously suffering, and the testing seemed to make it worse. What was he experiencing? He wasn't lying, that's for sure. In the face of such a statement, it seemed ridiculous to continue. I spent some time with him in that summer. I never met anybody who was so blatantly ill.

We talked on the ward, and occasionally I would take him for a walk through the hospital grounds outside. He was the third son of first-generation Middle Eastern immigrants. His firstborn brother was a lawyer. The other a physician. His parents were obviously ambitious for their children, hardworking and disciplined. Being a graduate student at Mill, working towards a master's degree in immunology, I don't remember exactly.

His brothers had set him a daunting example, and he felt pressured to succeed. His experimental work had not turned out as he had expected, however, and he apparently came to believe that he might not graduate—not at least when he hoped to. So he faked his experimental results and wrote up his thesis anyways. He told me that the night he finished writing, he woke up and saw the devil standing over him at the foot of his bed.

This event triggered the onset of his mental illness from which he'd never recovered. Of course, it might be said that the apparition merely accompanied the expression of some stress-induced pathological neurological development, whose appearance was biologically predetermined and that the devil was a personification of his cultured conception of moral evil manifesting itself in fantasy as a consequence of his distress.

Such a description would remain accurate and plausible, but the fact remains that as a person he saw the devil, and that the vision accompanied—or was the event that destroyed him. He was afraid to tell me much of his fantasy, a very well-developed fantasy world. It was only after I paid careful attention to him that he opened up.

He wasn't bragging or trying to impress me. He didn't want to tell me any of this. He was terrified about what he thought. He was terrified as a consequence of the fantasies that impressed themselves upon him. He told me that he couldn't leave the hospital because someone wanted to shoot him—that's a typical paranoid delusion.

Why did someone want to kill him? Well, he was hospitalized during the Cold War—not its height, perhaps, still during a time when the threat of purposeful nuclear annihilation seemed more plausible than it does now. Many of the people I knew used this threat—the existence of this threat—to justify to themselves their failure to participate fully in life, a life which they thought of romantically as doomed and therefore as pointless.

But there was some real terror in this pose. The thought of countless missiles pointed here and there around the world, sapping the energy and faith of everyone hypocritical or not. My schizophrenic patient believed that he was, in fact, the incarnation of the world annihilating force and he was destined upon his release from the hospital to make his way south. He was in Canada— to a nuclear missile silo on American territory and to make the fateful decision that would launch the Third World War. The people outside the hospital knew this, and that's why they were waiting to shoot him.

He didn't want to tell me this story because he thought then I might want to kill him too. My friends in graduate school thought it was quite comical that I had contact with a patient like this. My peculiar interest in Jung and Jung's ideas regarding the collective unconscious were well known to them. It seemed absurdly fitting that I would end up talking to someone with delusions of this type, but I didn't know what to do with his ideas.

Of course, they were crazy and they did in my patient, but it still seemed to me that they were true from a metaphorical viewpoint. His story in totality linked his individual choice between good and evil with the cumulative horror then facing the world. His story implied that because he had given in to temptation at a critical juncture, he was in fact responsible for the horror of the potential of nuclear war.

How could this be? It seemed insane to me to even consider that the act of one powerless individual could be linked in some manner to the outcome of history as a whole. I'm no longer so sure. I've read much about evil and its manner of perpetration and growth, and I'm no longer convinced that each of us is so innocent or harmless.

It is, of course, illogical to presume that one person, one speck of dust among four billion, is in any sense responsible for the horrible course of human events. But that course itself is not logical, far from it, and it seems likely that it depends on processes that we do not understand. Jeffrey Burton Russell argues in his work on the history of the concept of the devil that the classic distinction drawn between natural evil and moral evil is untenable.

That occurrences such as plagues and earthquakes belong in the same category of events as concentration camps and wars. The existence of natural evil for which God is theoretically responsible has been used as evidence for the most potent arguments for the non-existence of God. Say, for the non-existence of any meaning, such as Ivan's outlined previously. Doki states, "Perhaps the entire cosmos is not worth a single innocent child suffering. How can the universe be constructed so that pain is permitted? How can a good God allow for the existence of a suffering world?"

It seems reasonable to me to draw a distinction between tragedy and evil. Tragedy has an ennobling aspect, at least in potential, and has been constantly exploited to that end in great literature and mythology. Tragedy exists where the heroic encounters limitation. Evil, by contrast, is anything but noble. Participation in acts whose sole purpose is expansion of innocent pain and suffering destroys character.

While forthright encounter with tragedy might increase it, this is the meaning of the symbol of the crucifixion. It’s Christ's full participation in a freely chosen acceptance of his fate which he shares with everyone that enables him to manifest his full identity with God. And it's that identity which enables him to bear that fate and which strips it of its evil. Conversely, it is our voluntary demeaning of our own characters which makes the necessary tragic conditions of existence appear evil.

Why do these conditions exist? Why are we subject to unbearable limitation, to pain, disease, and death, and a cruelty at the hands of nature and society? It seems to me that it is because a game cannot be played without rules. God and man are in a sense twins, says a Midrash. And this means that God made man because he lacked limitation.

If we could have everything we wanted merely for wishing it, if every tool performed every job, if everyone was omniscient and immortal, then everything would be the same—the same, all-powerful thing. God and creation wouldn't exist. It is the differences between things, which is a function of their specific limitations, that allows them to exist at all, should they be.

It seems to me that we answer this question implicitly but profoundly when we lose someone loved and grieve. Grieve presupposes having love. Presupposes the judgment that this person's specific bounded and vulnerable existence was valuable, was something that should have been. But still, the question lingers: why should loved things exist at all if their necessary limitations cause such suffering?

I dreamed I was walking out of a deep valley along a paved two-lane highway. The highway was located in Northern Alberta where I grew up and came out of the only valley for miles around in endlessly flat prairie. I passed a man hitchhiking and could see another in the distance. As I approached him, I could see that he was in the first stages of old age, but he looked terribly strong. Someone passed him in a car driving the opposite direction, and a female voice yelled out, "Look, he has a knife!"

He was carrying what looked like a wooden-handled kitchen knife—well-worn and discolored—but it had a blade at least 2 and 1/2 ft long. Across his shoulder, he was strapped a large leather sheath. He was walking along the edge of the highway muttering to himself and swinging the blade in a jerky and chaotic fashion. He looked like the landlord who lived next door to me when I was a graduate student living in a poor district in Montreal.

My landlord was a powerful aging ex-biker, former president of the local Hell's Angels chapter. By his own account, he'd spent some time in prison as a younger man. He'd settled down somewhat typically as he became more mature and had brought his drinking under control for a time. His wife committed suicide, however, when I lived there, and he went back to his wilder ways.

He often went on binge-drinking sprees and spent all the money he'd earned in the electronic shop he ran out of a small apartment. He would drink 40 or even 50 beer in a single day and would return home in the evening, blind drunk, howling at his little dog, laughing, hissing between his teeth, incoherent, good-natured, still, but able to become violent at the slightest provocation.

He took me once to his favorite haunts in slightly better condition on his 1200cc Honda, which had the acceleration of a jet plate for short distances—me perched precariously on the back of his bike, clinging to him, wearing his wife's helmet, which sat on my head ridiculously as it was at least five sizes too small.

Drunk, he was almost innocently destructive and ended up in fights constantly, unavoidably, as he would take SLS from people whose path he crossed who were insufficiently cautious in our conversation with him. I hurried by this figure. He seemed upset that no one would stop and pick him up, as if he were unaware of the danger he posed.

As I went by, his gaze fell on me and he started after me—not from anger, more for desire for companionship, I think—but he was too unpredictable for me. He wasn't fast, however, so I stayed ahead of him on the road. The scene shifted. The knife-wielding figure and I were now on opposite sides of a huge tree, perhaps 100 yards in diameter, on a spiral staircase that wound around the tree.

Out of the depths below into the heights above, the staircase was made out of old worn dark wood. It reminded me of the church pews in the church I attended with my mother as a child, where I was married. This figure was looking for me. He was a long way back, and I hid myself from his view as I ascended the staircase.

I remember wanting to continue on my original journey out of the valley onto the flat surrounding plain where the walking would be easy, but the only way to stay away from the knife was to continue up the staircase, up the axis Monday—the awareness of death, the grim reaper, terrible face of God compels us inexorably upward towards a consciousness sufficiently heightened to bear the thought of death.

The point of our limitations is not suffering, it's existence itself. The point of evil, by contrast, is conscious destruction, manifest desire for increase of pain, anxiety, and suffering. We've been granted the capacity to voluntarily bear the terrible weight of our mortality. We turn from that capacity and degrade ourselves because we're afraid of responsibility.

The necessarily tragic preconditions of existence are made intolerable. Perhaps we could reserve answer to the question of God's nature—his responsibility for the presence of the evil in creation—until we have solved the problem of our own. Perhaps we could tolerate the horrors of the world if we left our characters intact and developed them to the fullest. If we took full advantage of every gift we've been granted, perhaps the world would not look horrible then.

It seems to me that it's not the earthquake, the flood, or the cancer that makes it intolerable. Horrible as those events appear, we seem capable of withstanding natural disaster, even of responding to that disaster in an honorable and decent manner. It is instead the pointless suffering that we inflict upon each other that makes life appear corrupt beyond acceptability and that undermines our ability to manifest a faith in our central natures.

It makes us work even more diligently for the destruction of everything that lives and breathes. Christ said, "Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect," but how it seems stimulated, as always, by Pontius Pilate's ironic query, "What is truth?"

Well, even if we don't know precisely what the truth is, we can certainly tell each of us what it isn't. It isn't greed and the desire above all else for constant material gain. It isn't denial of experience we know full well to be real and the infliction of pain for the purpose of pain.

It appears possible to stop doing those things which we know beyond doubt to be wrong, to become self-disciplined and honest, and maybe therefore to become able to perceive the nature of the positive good. The truth seems painfully simple—so simple that it's a miracle of sorts that can never be forgotten: "Love God with all thy mind and all thy acts and all thy heart; serve truth above all and treat your fellow men as if he were yourself—not with a pity that undermines his self-respect and not with a justice that elevates yourself above you, but as a corrupted divinity could yet see the light."

It is said it's more difficult to rule oneself than a city, and this isn't a metaphor; this is truth as literal as it can be made. It is precisely for this reason that we're always trying to rule the city. It is a perversion of pride to cease praying in public and to clean up the dust under our feet instead.

It seems too mundane to treat those we actually face with respect and dignity when we could be active against in the street. Maybe it's more important to strengthen our characters than to repair the world. So much of that reparation seems selfish anyway. It's selfishness of intellectual pride masquerading as love, creating a world polluted with good works that don’t work.

Who can believe that it’s the little choices that we make every day between good and evil that turn the world to waste and hope to despair? But it is the case we see our immense capacity for evil constantly realized before us in great things and in small, but can never seem to realize our infinite capacity for good.

Who can argue with the soi-disant when he states, “One man who stops lying can bring down a tyranny?" Christ said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out upon the Earth, but men do not see it." What if this were in fact the case? What if it was nothing but our self-deceit, cowardice, hatred, and fear that polluted our experience and turned the world into hell?

It's a hypothesis at least, at least as good as any other, admirable and capable of generating hope. Why can't we make an experiment to find out if it is true?

I want to read you something else now. This is another—this is a description of a dream that I collected from my nephew, and I'll read you the story about it. Because it's related to the experiment that I was just describing, the hypothesis that I was trying to generate.

In that chapter, it was that, look, if you're treating someone in psychotherapy for an anxiety disorder—which basically means treating them because they're too afraid to continue living their life in the way that it has to be lived, even for it to continue—it appears beyond reasonable doubt now that attempting to convince the person of the unreality of their fear or of the unreality of the category of things to be afraid of is not useful. People do not respond to that. You can't talk someone out of their neurotic beliefs. All you can do is help them learn to confront those things that terrify them, and then perhaps what they learn is that they can confront those things that terrify them.

They don't learn that the thing itself is any less terrifying, but they seem to learn that their own conception of themselves was so pathologically limited that it was that conception that was, in fact, leading to their discomfort. Because the neurotic person who runs from everything that he or she is afraid of is positing to themselves that whatever it is that they are in essence is something so trivial that it can't stand up to negative emotion and prevail.

And in therapy, what you do is structure the situation so that the person can learn as a consequence of their own experience, not a consequence of the therapist's words, that if they are brave enough to look at what they can't tolerate looking at, that they'll in fact get better.

And the thing that's so interesting about that, and that's mysterious even from the standard psychoanalytic viewpoint, is that when you do that to someone, their ability to withstand fear generalizes. Which means that if you teach them to withstand fear in one situation, then they’re better at doing it in other situations. Their fear, even if it's symbolic underneath, doesn't multiply everywhere that you haven't exposed them.

So they may also get more confident, for example, in their interpersonal relationships. And that's a very common concomitant of exposure therapy for agoraphobics. For example, that they start standing up to their husbands. Because, of course, prior to that their husbands were categorized in the category of all those things that are too terrible to face, and what the therapist is teaching the client—even if the therapist doesn't know it explicitly—is that "You are the sort of creature who is capable of standing up to the category of all things that are too terrible to face, and all you have to do is give it a shot for a while."

Which is basically to say, basically, that you have to manifest some behavioral faith in yourself and you can discover that all by yourself. That's, as far as I can tell—and I've looked at different personality theories and different theories of psychotherapy—they tend to boil down to the same thing.

In some way, that same thing is that, well, first of all, that you need a coherent theory about what things are about, and second of all, that exposure to the things that frighten you cures you. There's an alchemical dictum that, according to Jung, was the primary alchemical dictum: "Inquilinus inventur."

I hope that's pronounced right, but my Latin isn't any good. The translation for that is "It is found in cesspools." And that was the alchemists' general theory about where the philosopher's stone was to be found. The philosopher's stone was a material substance in theory that possessed the power to grant eternal life, but also to bring about eternal health, youth, and wealth. In other words, it was a thing that would grant the bearer all wishes.

And the alchemical notion went: "You can find this thing where no one will look." And what that also means from the personal perspective is where you won't look. Well, that's a strange notion, but it's a bit more comprehensible if you start to think about it from the psychological perspective rather than from the empirical perspective.

Because you could say, "Well, even though the places that we won't look differ from person to person from the perspective of a natural category, it might be reasonable to posit that that place where one will not look is similar in some sense across individuals." Which is only to say that all of us have those particular things that we're afraid of facing and the particulars differ, but the fact that those things exist is standard across people.

King Arthur's knights sit at a round table because they're all equal. They set off to look for the Holy Grail, which is a symbol of salvation—symbolically, a container of the nourishing blood of Christ, which is another reference to sacrificial symbolism. Keeper of redemption. Each knight leaves on his quest individually. Each knight enters the forest to begin his search at the point that looks darkest to him.

When I was about halfway through writing this manuscript, I went to visit my sister-in-law and her family. She had a son—my nephew—who's about 5 years old. He's very verbal and intelligent. He was deeply immersed in a pretend world and liked to dress up as a knight with a plastic helmet and sword. He was happy during the day to all appearances, but didn't sleep well at night. Had been having nightmares for some time.

He'd regularly screamed for his mom in the middle of his rest and appeared quite agitated by what was going on in his nightmares. This was a daily occurrence essentially, enough so that the household was being disrupted. I asked him one morning, after he'd woken up, what he dreamed about. He told me in the presence of his family that dwarf-like, beaked creatures who came up to his knees had been jumping up at him and biting him.

Interestingly, I was just looking through some mythological imagery on the weekend and I found out that, well, there are some archaeological notions—and I don't know how valid they are—that there was a point in European history where worship of the mother goddess was very widespread, and the cultures that performed this worship were then overrun by patriarchal cultures later, and patriarchal religions replaced these early matriarchal religions.

I don't know if similar theories to that, like Boffin's theory—that the human race was once matriarchal and then was later patriarchal—have been discredited in the past, and I'm not so sure that this isn't just a projection of mythological structure onto history, which happens very often. But it doesn't matter. There are very many ancient images of goddess figures. We’ve looked at some of them and I found out this weekend that many of them are figures of the combination of a woman's body with a bird.

Sometimes the figure has wings; sometimes it has a beaked head. It's quite interesting. I guess this would be an example of synchronicity because I've been thinking about this. I just saw the movie "Crum." Have any of you seen that? David Lynch—you should all see that, by the way. Because it's, first of all, it's a very interesting study of an extraordinarily pathological family.

Three brothers: one who molests women is a bum in the streets of San Francisco, who also sits on beds of nails and has a very aesthetic attitude; another man, 50 years old, never left home, never slept with any women, depressed since he was 20, multiply suicidal, finally kills himself a year after the movie's made; and this other brother, named Crum, who's a famous underground cartoonist who produces a lot of images while he perceives himself in relation to women in general as a small thin outcast sort of figure who tends to cling to the back of very large, powerful-looking women—who, by the way, often have bird heads, which I found very interesting.

Anyways, these figures that popped up in my nephew’s dreams—these dwarf-like beak creatures—were these sorts of archaic sort of images representing the source of all things. And while you say, "Well, why would a beaked goddess be a good representation for the source of all things?" Well, it has something to do with the notion. There's a whole bunch of notions compiled all together in that. One is that, well, birds, they fly, so they're spiritual creatures because they're associated with the air and the sky, and so they have a masculine aspect, like the Holy Ghost, for example. They have a masculine aspect, and the goddess, of course, is a more downto-earth figure.

So these figures represent the union of opposites, just like the dragon of chaos which is a serpent with wings. Anyway, so that's what pops up in this particular dream. So anyways, he told me in the presence of his family that dwarf-like beak creatures who came up to his knees had been jumping up at him and biting him. Each creature was covered with hair and grease and had a cross shaved in the hair on the top of its head.

The dream also featured a dragon who breathed fire. After the dragon exhaled, the fire turned into these dwarves who multiplied endlessly with each breath. I thought that was a great image too. He told the dream in a very serious voice to his parents and to my wife and I, and we were shocked by its imagery and horror. It was really interesting to watch him because, well, like I said, he was always running around in this little knight outfit.

Anyway, so he's in this world, whatever it was composed of. He was imaginative, but then as soon as we asked him about the dream, I mean, he just launched into it without a pause. You know, you could almost—it was almost as if you could see the imagery running in his head, and he just told the story with no hesitation whatsoever.

And, well, the other thing I guess that was—what made it so interesting to watch him was that his attention moved from the outside world. You know, we were all obviously inside because he wasn't focusing on anything while he was telling the story. He was just letting the imagery run.

Anyways, the dream occurred at a transition point in his life. He was leaving his mother to go to kindergarten and was joining the social world. The dragon, of course, served as for the source of fear itself, for the unknown in general. There, the burros, while the dwarves were individual things to be afraid of.

So you see the mythological imagery is the dragon of chaos that breathes fire standing at the back of everything, and it produces these things that have this archaic matriarchal nature, which is the unknown as it actually manifests itself in experience. And so there's this eternal source and as it breathes fire, particular things that frightened him would pop up.

The thing that I thought was so interesting is there's Hydra mythology in it too because the Hydra, of course, is a multi-headed dragon. You cut off one head and like seven more grow. Well, that's basically, well, that's a pretty accurate representation of the way life progresses under some conditions because every time you solve a problem, some other problem pops up somewhere else.

Or sometimes when you solve a problem, the solution that you use to solve the problem generates a whole bunch of new problems. The Hydra mythology is basically just a representation of the idea that, you know, no matter how much time you run around putting out fires, new fires keep popping up all over. And that's, that will always be the case.

It's also a representation of the fact that a political utopia that's conceived of as a permanent state is impossible because when you generate a solution, the solution generates problems, and there's no way you can stop that, partly because the solution does far more things than you would like it to do—which is why, for example, drugs have so-called side effects.

I mean, you have a problem, you apply the drug to it, the drug produces all sorts of other problems. I mean, hopefully that are at least smaller than the original problem, but sometimes who knows? Maybe they're bigger. It still remains to be seen, for example, whether T ision has solved more problems than it's created. My guess is the reverse, but whatever, the point is things do all sorts of things other than what you think they'll do.

Anyways, I asked him what he could do about this dragon. He said immediately, "I would take my dad and we'd go after the dragon. I'd jump on its head and I'd poke out its eyes with my sword. Then I'd go down its throat to where the fire came out. I'd cut the box out that the fire came from and make a shield from it."

Well, that really—I mean that really blew me away. I couldn't believe that he could—I mean, the idea of going—first of all, he blinded the dragon, which I thought was very interesting. But then he went down its throat. I mean, that's—that's—I showed you that Pinocchio video, right? Where they go inside the whale? I mean, that's exactly—exactly archaic imagery.

But then there was a twist of brilliance in this dream because he said that the thing to do was to take the box that the fire came from, which was the source of the unknown itself, and transform it into something that he could actually use against the unknown. That idea is so brilliant that it's, well, it's a miracle of sorts that it could be reproduced in the dream of a 5-year-old.

Because what it says is that what is necessary is to go to where fear itself resides, where the unknown itself resides, to identify with that thing, and to use it as a defense against the unknown itself. Which is exactly what we do all the time when we adapt to the fact that there is an unknown, which is to say that when something unknown occurs—which means when some new information pops up—because the two things are precisely equivalent.

It's as a consequence of exploring that new information that you generate new things that you can use to further the process of adaptation. So you say, "Well, the unknown is the source of all the problems." Oh, we know that, but it's also the source of all the answers to the problems. And it is the case that, well, we use nature against nature so to speak— to quote an ancient source that I can't remember—that's the process of constructing culture, as we use the material world to defend ourselves against the material world.

And, well, hopefully, the balance remains on our side. He had reproduced an archaic hero myth in perfect form, I thought. The use of making a shield from the firebox or I thought the idea of making a shield from the firebox was brilliant. This gave him the strength of the dragon to use against the dragon. His nightmares ended at that point and did not return even though he had been suffering from them almost every night for a number of months.

I asked his mother about his dreams more than a year later, and she reported no further disturbance. Of course, many of you are going to find that hard to believe that's true, that's actually what occurred. Now, you see, the thing is he was having this problem, obviously, whatever it was, it was plaguing him in his nightmares, whatever those were composed of.

He was running around like a knight trying to act out the solution, but he didn't quite have it. He was using his behavior in ritualistic form to address a problem of adaptation which he couldn't manage. But as soon as he made the dream explicit and then came up with a solution, that problem disappeared.

The little boy, guided by his imagination, adopted identification with the hero and faced his worst nightmare. If we're to survive individually and socially, each of us must do the same. In stillicide in filth it will be found—this is the prime alchemical dictum. What you need most is always to be found where you least wish to look.

It's not a mythological statement; it's only a recognition of the fact that in order to adapt to ongoing experiences, it is necessary to make use of every experience that you've had. And it's only those experiences that you haven't made use of—that you've determined are too terrifying to contemplate—and then as a logical consequence, it's necessarily the case that all those things that you've allowed to stay classified as too terrible to contemplate do in fact contain all that information that you need to survive.

Because it is their lack—it's their lack of use—that has actually resulted in you constructing a personality that's too trivial to withstand the full weight of your experience. You know, if something's bugging you—you know, it's like, let's say you have a situation with your parents that's never been resolved. It's like bugging you for—who knows? People, that things like that bug them for like decades without ever facing them.

The reason it's bugging you is because that's a little chunk of the unknown that your limbic system has detected, so to speak, and it's always popping it up saying, "Look, look, look, look, look. Here's some information you're not paying attention to." Well, I don't want to pay attention to it because it makes me anxious. Well, yes, it makes you anxious. That's how—that's the form that new information always takes.

That's right, that's how it enters into your consciousness to begin with—as something that makes you anxious. Of course, you have any number of reasons to move away from it since it makes you anxious. But the problem is if you keep doing that, then you don't make use of all the novel experience.

Well, the question is, well, why would you move away from it instead of facing it? Well, the answer to that is obviously because you don't think that you're capable of facing it. Which is to say that you've defined yourself in opposition to this thing which is intolerable, and the definition you use is that "I am too insignificant or weak," or whatever inconsequential, or unable to face this aspect of my experience which I know by my own rules actually exists.

Now, anomalous information brings terror and possibility—revolution and transformation. Rejection of an unbearable fact stifles adaptation and strangles life. There was a good man who owned a vineyard. He leased it to tenant farmers so that they might work it and he might collect the produce from them.

He sent his servant so that the tenants might give him the produce of the vineyard. They seized his servant and beat him all but killing him. The servant went back and told his master. The master said, "Perhaps they didn't recognize him." He sent another servant. Tenants beat this one as well.

Then the owner sent his son and said, "Perhaps they will show respect to my son." Because the tenants knew that it was he who was heir to the vineyard. They seized him and killed him. "Let him who has ears hear." Christ said, "Show me the stone which the builders have rejected; that one is the cornerstone."

I grip that particular story as one of the sources for the notion of the philosopher's stone. "Show me the stone which the builders have rejected; that one is the cornerstone." Well, it's a complicated story, wasn't it? The idea that in the Jewish temple, the cornerstone was the stone that had the perfect dimension. All their stones are based and built upon that one, right?

Right—that's one of Jesus as the Savior Messiah. And he is the one that—well, that's—I would say that's part of the symbolic structure that surrounds the idea. The story, in a sense, has a more straightforward interpretation in a way.

I mean, all that the moral of that story means is two things. One is that whatever it is you reject is the thing that you need. That's the first thing. It doesn't matter what it is. It's just the fact is that you have to make use of all the things that present themselves to you. Whether or not you find them affectively tolerable. Now, we already know that you determine what's affectively tolerable as a consequence of the value structure that you erect, right?

You're always analyzing phenomena in reference to the goals that you perceive as valid. So whether or not something is effectively tolerable depends to an immense degree on your interpretation of what's important.

And it may be the case that certain things to you appear intolerable because you're unwilling to give up a value structure that's really pathological. If you gave up the value structure, the thing that looked unbearable wouldn't be unbearable at all. It might even be positive.

So you can switch the valence of things very rapidly by just transforming the thing that you believe it. Well, we already know that certain forms of anomalous information have the capacity to completely overthrow the philosophies that you use to evaluate events.

What about the first part of that story or the other story there that seems a little bizarre? I don't quite see the meaning of that there. One—well, okay. Well, the idea of the story is saying—well, these two events are precisely the same, is that if you define yourself as that creature which is unable to accommodate to or assimilate negative events, you've abandoned your identification with the hero.

That's what that means. What do the individual characters symbolize in the story about the vineyard? They symbolize—well, that's what I was trying to get at with that—that the owner of the vineyard symbolizes God. Okay, now, what the story is trying to represent is the idea that sacrifice of identity with the hero, which is equivalent to his death internally, is equivalent to rejection of anomalous information. That's what it means.

Because it's—the thing that I've been trying to lay out, describing the relationship between the process that's represented by Satan in Milton, there's no difference between saying, "This thing is too intolerable to face," and saying, "I am too little to face it." Those are exactly the same thing.

So moving yourself away from information that you regard as too threatening to tolerate is identical to the destruction of identification with the hero. So why the two servants sent first? What—I mean, what are they—what's that prophet meant from a more—yeah, I don’t know.

I don't know, actually. What I was just having trouble grasping symbols in there. I see like the raising of anomalous information to small men. Well, yeah. Yeah, I guess what—what I guess what those figures represent is approximations to the hero that which would fit perfectly.

Well into the interpretation that they were prophets, I mean, you know that throughout like those—but they like the hero even less, right? Right. They weren't too thrilled with people who approximated the hero precisely. And so that—well that's exactly the case.

I mean, it's a reference to the fact that people tend to devour people in groups tend to devour those individuals upon whom the group actually depends. And what this story is pointing out, I guess, is that that would even be the case if the figure that constituted the archetypal individual upon whom the group depends appeared. Well, people would still be motivated to do precisely the same thing.

So, okay, well then the next thing, which I really don't have time to go into in much detail so you have to read this, but this will give you some intimation of at least what was going on. You know, look, I've been—well, it's been my position fundamentally that people have paid an insufficient amount of attention to Jung's writings.

Well, they're confusing, that's for sure. I give some reason why that might be the case in the manuscript. Most of his students were women; most of them were outside of the academic tradition. He discussed religious imagery to a large degree and psychology tends to shy away from any religious imagery because it's a very young science and it's just dissociated itself from philosophy, and it's dominated by materialists—like way more materialists in psychology than there are in physics, for example.

There are all sorts of reasons. It’s certainly the case with Jung's early writings, but it's even more dramatically so with his later writings. And all his later writings deal with alchemy, and nobody's been able to figure out what the hell he was talking about, why he spent all his time trying to decipher these alchemical writings.

But what Jung was trying to outline was the symbolic representations of the internal process that occurs when people do precisely what my nephew in this dream said that he should do.

Which is to say, what are the consequences of—you can put it all sorts of different ways—what are the consequences of admission of error, or what are the consequences of identification with the hero, or what are the consequences of the adoption of a stance of religious humility? Because all those things pile together and actually constitute the same phenomena.

What Jung said was, well, it's possible for people to undergo revolutions in their cognitive structures. We know that from Thomas much later, by the way. So this is not only true for empirical structures but also for moral structures. We know that's the case. And people have updated their views of the world over and over.

And well, what Jung was trying to point out was that this could actually happen within an individual. And not only that it could happen, but that it had happened many times in the past, and there were symbolic representations of all the stages of this particular process. Most of them are going to be pretty familiar to you already, because I've been trying to make reference to them all the time in the diagrams that I've been using.

Jung basically stated that there were five sequences of events, frequently intermingled in terms of the narrative structure that characterized alchemy. So what were the alchemists trying to do? Well, they were people who possessed by an intimation of the insufficiency of the church's representation of reality, followed their notion that there was still value to be apprehended in the interpretation and discovery of matter.

The alchemists were the first scientists, in a sense, not from the empirical perspective because they didn't have an experimental methodology, but from the standpoint of interest because they were the first people who were willing to posit that in this huge domain that had essentially been outlawed as heretical by the church, something of interest still might be there to be found.

He said, "Well look, you know, the church says as a consequence of these historical events, humanity is being redeemed." The alchemists, you might say, looked around and said, "Well, if this redemption is taking place, things are still in pretty sad shape. So maybe there's something more going on here that might meet the eye."

He became interested in—see, what Jung was trying to do was to explain why it was that we developed science, especially why it developed in Europe. So what were the historical precedents to the explosion of science in the last 500 years following the reasonably logical hypothesis that something of that magnitude was likely prepared by at least several centuries of previous thought rather than just coming out of nowhere all of a sudden and only in one culture?

He said, "Well, the first thing that preceded the development of science was the notion that the pursuit of knowledge about material might, in fact, be valuable." So that's a hypothesis that underlies science, is that if you investigated the transformations of the material world, you might find some information of value.

You can say, "Well, this first popped up in the form of what might be regarded as a kind of cultural dream." The dream was the dream of the philosopher's stone, which was that there was a material substance that if you only possessed it, would grant all of your wishes.

And you could say, "Well, what motivates science?" Well, this is why Jung thought that science was still embedded in a mythological format. He said that's what motivates us at the bottom. We're convinced that if we can just find out enough about the way things are made, that we won't have to get old anymore and we won't have to get sick anymore and there will be enough for everyone.

Well, that seems like a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, as far as I can tell. I mean, anyways, he tried to outline—the other thing that Jung pointed out, however—and this is, I suppose, where the argument gets very, very complicated—is that what the alchemists set out to investigate was not matter as we conceive it because they didn't know what matter was as we conceive it. They didn't even have a way of representing it—lacking entirely an empirical methodology—for what they were actually out to explore was the unknown part of which was matter in the material world.

And Jung basically made the point that what the alchemists did was paint that the notions of the church, which is the group identity basically, were not complete, were insufficient. Which is to say that y posited that the alchemist was someone who was willing to admit to himself that the manner in which the world had been interpreted was not complete, which is to say that there was still something left.

So you could say, "Well, he regarded himself as something that was still ignorant." And also the church community, which was essentially totalitarian, or as totalitarian a structure as could be imagined, was nonetheless incomplete.

And Jung said, "Well, it was merely the process of that presupposition— which is, I don't know everything—maybe there's still something left to explore—necessarily produced an identity of the alchemist with the hero, even though they didn't know it." I mean, that’s because what they were doing was acting out the role of the hero.

You say, "Well, whenever you do that, certain things happen, and those things are expressed in alchemical symbolism. And what happens when you adopt the role of the hero?" Well, we already know that it's like there's admission that unknown information exists. The information comes in, it blows the structure of your previous worldview.

You descend into a situation that's characterized by emotional chaos. As a consequence of processes that occur in that state of chaos, there's a reconstruction of a new worldview. Well, how was that represented in alchemy? The first stages were represented either by the prima materia or the descent of the king. Now, you guys should know enough about symbolism to start to understand what this means.

He said, "Well, what happens to you when you first admit that something that meant everything to you might not be complete?" He said, "Well, that can be represented in two ways depending on what stage of the process you're in. It can either be represented by the death of the king or by your identity with what was called in alchemy—the prima materia—which is basically chaos. The dragon of chaos and you can see, well, those two things are the same.

Why? Well, it's because the descent of the king—the descent of the king into the underworld or the death of the king or the dissolution of the king—and remember the alchemists: they were trying to explain things like why matter would dissolve, say, in salt water and mercury. Well, it's a weird mixture of empirical—quasi-empirical speculation and metaphysical theorizing.

Remember, the alchemists didn't have any scientific techniques, so all they could do when they were manipulating material—the material world, which was demonic by church association—was use their fantasies. And what were their fantasies full of? Well, that was mythology. Christian mythology—that was their worldview fundamentally.

So of course, that's how they saw everything. It's all they knew. That's the dragon of chaos—the prima materia, the source of all things. Well, in the medieval view, the prima materia was not just something material; it was much more akin to these mythological notions of the dragon that we've discussed because the alchemists said, "Well, whatever ever the world comes from is a weird intermingling of all those things that will eventually become society—the individual soul and matter."

Which is, I think, an unbelievably sophisticated perspective because, well, that's something you'll have to think about on your own. But it is the case that whatever the source of all things is, is that thing which in time turns into the subject and the object plus society at large.

Now we tend to think of that thing as something purely material, but that's because we make the presupposition that whatever we are as subjects is something that's reducible to whatever is purely material. And I would say, well, that might be true, but if it is the case that whatever we are is reducible to something material by the time we figure out how that relationship exists, the way we interpret matter will be completely different from the way we interpret it now.

I mean, that's one thing that really argues against a simple-minded material reductionism. This—the presupposition that you understand the phenomena to which you're reducing everything, which you don't, clearly.

Anyways, all these stages, they're descriptions of this process. The king, the death of the king produces immersement in chaos. That was also described as the negredo, which is an interesting stage. It's often represented in alchemical symbolism as an old man who is black, who looks very close to death, sitting in a pit, like breathing out a raven. It's, symbolic of anxiety and depression fundamentally, more than that also.

Emotional chaos. And all Jung was trying to point out in his analysis of alchemy was that if you lose a moral philosophy, your emotions become disregulated, and you're swamped with anxiety and depression. The alchemists regarded that as a state in this process of transformation, not as a final state necessarily—but it's the kind of thing that n is describing when he talks about standing at the edge of the cliff and looking off into the abyss.

Well, that's the abyss. The chaos is represented by the dragon, also by the queen of chaos. That was my representation, anyways. Said, "Well, the notion here was that the thing that was to be dissolved and the solvent—the king and chaos—could be represented as a king and a queen."

The queen sort of making reference to the sort of matriarchal symbolism that we've talked about in the past, and it was the union of those two things that would produce a new structure. And that's an idea that's very much like the old Egyptian idea of Osirus going into the underworld or the idea the Egyptians had that the Egyptian pharaoh was simultaneously the old dead pharaoh and the new pharaoh.

Which is to say that if you have a particular philosophical viewpoint, which is the manner in which you ascribe affective value to your environment, and it dissolves—all things that you had classified are no longer classifiable, and you're swamped, as a consequence swamped with anxiety and depression—which are two emotional phenomena that that whole classification system was erected to inhibit to begin with.

When that system blows itself apart, those emotions come back up. And how do you construct a new system? Well, you use the anomalous information that's blown your old system