2017 Personality 04/05: Heroic and Shamanic Initiations

[Music] All right, so I suggested to you last class that human beings view the world as a place of action through the lens of their social, cognitive, biological substructure. I made that argument on the basis of the supposition that our primary environment was actually other people. I mentioned to you, I believe, that those other people are arranged in hierarchies of influence and authority or power or dominance, which is often how it's construed. The dominance hierarchy as a structure is at least 300 million years old, which makes it older than trees. It's for that reason that you share the same neural biology to govern your observations of your position in the hierarchy as lobsters do, which is a remarkable fact. You know, it's remarkable that the lobster uses serotonin as the mechanism to adjudicate its status position and that modifying the serotonin function in the lobster can produce changes in its behavior; it can help the lobsters overcome defeat, for example, which is very much equivalent to what happens to a human being when they take antidepressants. You know, it's a good example of the conservation of biological structure by evolution and a good illustration of the continuity of life on Earth. It's really amazing, but the other thing it is a testament to is the ancient nature of the social structure.

Now, we tend to think of the social structure as something other than nature, right? Because society is, I suppose, mythologically opposed; it's opposed in a narrative way. Culture is opposed to nature. It's the town in the forest, but the town has been around a long time, so to speak, and the structure of the town is also part of nature in that the dominance hierarchy is part of and because it's so ancient, you have to consider it as part of the mechanism that has played the role of selection in the process of natural selection. What seems to happen is that there is a plethora of dominance hierarchies, especially in complex human communities, and many of them are masculine in structure. In that their dominance hierarchies that primarily men compete in, or that has been the historical norm, some men rise to the top based on whatever the dominance hierarchy is based on, and they make their preferential mates. It's a good strategy for women to engage in because, why? Many sorts of female animals do precisely this: they let the males battle it out and then pick from the top and often the dominant males. There's no choice on the part of the females; it's the dominant males just chasing away the subordinate males.

But with humans, it's usually the case that the females have the opportunity to do at least some choosing. If you think about what that implies, we have evolved to climb up dominance hierarchies. I would say it's not exactly that even because there are many different dominance hierarchies. The skills that you might use to climb up one might not be necessarily the same skills that you would use to climb up another. So then I would say what we have all evolved for instead, and I'm still speaking mostly on the masculine edge of things historically speaking, is the ability to climb up the set of all possible dominance hierarchies. Right? And that's a whole different idea; it's like the averaged hierarchy across vast spans of time.

I think it's for that reason that, among others, we evolved general intelligence because general intelligence is a general problem-solving mechanism. It seems to be situation independent, so to speak. Of course, there's been an arms race for the development of intelligence between men and women because each gender has to keep up with the other, and women have their own dominance hierarchies. There's certainly no doubt about that. And of course, now men and women increasingly compete within the same hierarchies, and we don't exactly know how to sort that out yet because it's an extraordinarily new phenomenon.

In any case, because of the permanence of the dominance hierarchy, it has come to be represented in fundamental narratives because human beings, and this is something that we share everywhere, it's the thing the Wall Street bankers share with the Kalahari Kung Bushmen, who are among the genetically speaking very close to what the original most original human beings were like in Africa before the Diaspora about fifty thousand years ago. You know, both of those people, despite their vast differences, live in communities that have a hierarchical structure that are composed of individuals that are embedded in a natural world; the world outside of the dominance hierarchy. So that's the standard human environment, I would say. Stories that rely on the representations of those environments and their interactions are what you might describe as universal stories, and that's why people can understand them.

I would say further, and this is drawing substantially on say derivations of the work of Carl Jung because I think he delved into this more deeply than anyone else. A lot of this stuff is quite Jungian in its origins. The commonality between human beings is, you know, you have to have commonalities in order to communicate, right? Axiomatic commonalities because otherwise, you have to explain everything. There are many things that human beings don't have to explain to one another. We don't have to explain anger; we do have to explain jealousy. We don't have to explain fear; we don't have to explain pain; we don't have to explain joy; we don't have to explain love, etc. Those are built into us. They are predicates of being human, and you could say that those human predicates and the standard human environment produce standard narratives.

And then you could say even further, and this is more of a leap I would say, is that those who act out the role of the victor in those standard narratives are precisely the people who attain victory in life, I would say biologically defined in that they make more attractive partners. But also, I believe that there's an alignment between human well-being, which is a very weak word, and participation in these meta narratives that drive success. Because, well, do you want to be a failure or a success? Well, you know, it's hard to be a success. You have to adopt a lot of responsibility. You might be willing to take your chances as a failure, but I'm not going to make the presumption that that's going to put you in a situation other than one where you experience a lot of frustration, anger, disappointment, depression, pain, and anxiety at the bottom of the heap. Generally, that's not what people are aiming for, although under certain circumstances, if people don't like responsibility and are willing to take their chances, they might take the irresponsibility and its apparent freedoms over the necessity of thinking things through in the medium and long run.

Anyways, I'll stop here. I suggested to you that one of the primary narrative representations was the known or culture or order. I think those or the explored territory or the dominance arc; I think those things are basically interchangeable from a representational perspective. In the movie The Lion King, that's represented by Pride Rock, which is the central place of orientation founded on law, which is the sort of thing that people embed their memories in. That's why we make sculptures and gravestones and that sort of thing. Rock stands for permanent and to have rock under your feet is to be on a solid foundation, and that's a pyramid in some sense in that movie, and the pyramid has topped by, you know, the king and queen and their offspring. So that's the divine couple, that's one way of thinking about it, and Simba, of course, is the newborn hero.

You know, you extend that even though it’s lions and drawings of lions at that, and animals are acting it out, it’s completely irrelevant to you that those characters happen to be animated and that what you’re watching is a fiction. So I would say to you with regards to fiction, you know, you might say, “Well, is fiction true or not?” and the answer to that is yes and no. It’s not true in that the events portrayed in fiction occurred in the world; they didn’t. But fiction is true the same way numbers are true, I would say. Like, you know, if you have one apple, one orange, and one banana, the common analogy between all of those three is one, and you might say, “Well, is one as real as one fruit? Is the abstraction one as real as one fruit?” and I would say it depends on what you mean by real. But representing things mathematically and abstractly gives you incredible power, and you could make the case that the abstraction is actually more real than the phenomena that it represents, and certainly mathematicians would make that case. They would say that mathematics is in some sense more real than the phenomenal world.

And you know, you don’t have to believe that; mostly it’s a matter of choice in some sense. But you can’t deny the fact that an abstraction has enough reality so that if you’re proficient in using it, you can really change the world in insanely powerful ways. You know, I mean, all the computational equipment you people are using are depending on the abstractions one and zero essentially, and I mean, look at what emerges from that. So I would say with regards to fiction, if you take someone like Dostoyevsky, whom I think is a favorite of mine, I would highly recommend that you read all five of his great novels because they are unparalleled in their psychological depth. If you’re interested in psychology, Dostoyevsky is the person for you. Tolstoy is more of a sociologist, but Dostoyevsky, man, he gets right down into the bottom of the questions and messes around. Transformative reading.

Anyways, Dostoyevsky's character, Raskolnikov, is a character in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov is a materialist rationalist, I would say, which was a rather new type of person back in the 1880s. He was sort of taken by the idea that God was dead and convinced himself that the only reason that he or anyone acted in a moral way in a traditional way was because of cowardice; they were unable to remove from themselves the restrictions of mere convention and act in the manner of someone who rose above the norm. He’s tortured by these ideas. He’s half starving; he’s a law student, he doesn't have enough to eat, he doesn’t have much money. You know, he’s not thinking all that clearly either and he’s got a lot of family problems. His mother is sick and she can’t send him much money, and his sister is planning to engage in a marriage that’s loveless to someone who’s rather tyrannical, who he hopes will provide the family with enough money so that he can continue in law school.

They write him brave letters telling him that she’s very much in love with this guy, but he’s smart enough to read between the lines and realizes that his sister is just planning to prostitute herself in an altruistic manner. He’s not very happy with that. At the same time as all this is happening, he becomes aware of this pawnbroker who he’s pawning his last possessions to, and she’s a horrible person. Not only by his estimation, she pawns a lot of things for the neighborhood, and people really don’t like her. She’s grasping and cruel and deceitful and resentful, and she has this niece who’s not very bright, intellectually impaired, whom she basically treats as a slave and beats all the time.

So Raskolnikov, you know, involved in this mess and half-starved and a bit delirious and possessed of these strange new nihilistic ideas decides that the best way out of this situation would be just to kill the land, let the pawnbroker take her wealth, which all she does is keep it in a chest. Free the niece so that seems like a good idea. Remove one apparently horrible and useless person from the world, free his sister from the necessity of this loveless marriage, and allow him to go to law school where he can become educated and do some good for the world.

You know, one of the things that’s lovely about Dostoyevsky is that, you know, sometimes when one person is arguing against another or when they're having an argument in their head, they make their opponent into a straw man, which is basically they take their opponent and caricature their perspective and try to make it as weak as possible and laugh about it, and then they come up with their argument and destroy this straw man and feel that they’ve obtained victory. It’s a very pathetic way of thinking; it’s not thinking at all. What thinking is, is when you adopt the opposite position from your suppositions and you make that argument as strong as you can possibly make it, and then you pit your perspective against that strong iron man, not the straw man, and you argue it out; you battle it out.

That’s what Dostoyevsky does in his novels. I mean, the people who stand for the antithesis of what Dostoyevsky actually believes are often the strongest, smartest, and sometimes most admirable people in the book. It takes great moral courage to do that. In Raskolnikov, what he wanted to do was set up a character who had every reason to commit murder—every reasonable reason philosophically, practically, ethically, even. Well, so Raskolnikov goes and he kills the old lady with an axe, and it doesn’t go the way he expects it will because what he finds out is that post-murder Raskolnikov and pre-murder Raskolnikov are not the same people at all; they're not even close to the same people. He’s entered an entirely different universe. Dostoyevsky does a lovely job of describing that universe of horror and chaos and deception and suffering and terror and all of that. He doesn’t even use the money; he just buries it in an alley as fast as he can and then doesn’t want anything to do with it again.

Anyways, the reason I’m telling you all this is potentially to entice you into reading the book because it is an amazing, amazing book. But also because you might say, “Well, Raskolnikov, what happened to Raskolnikov? Are the stories in that book true?” And the answer to that is, well, from a factual perspective, clearly they’re untrue. But then if you think of Raskolnikov as the embodiment of a particular type of person who lived at that time and the embodiment of a certain kind of ideology that had swept across Europe and really invaded Russia, and which was actually a precursor— a philosophical precursor to the Russian Revolution—then Raskolnikov is more real than any one person. He’s like a composite person; he’s like a person whose irrelevancies have been eliminated for the purpose of relating something about the structure of the world.

I like to think of those things as sort of meta real—meta real, they’re more real than real. Of course, that’s what you expect people to do when they tell you about their own lives, about their own day. You don’t want a factual description of every muscle twitch; you want them to distill their experiences down into the gist, which is the significance of the experience. The significance of the experience is roughly what you can derive from listening to the experience that will change the way that you look at the world and act in the world.

So it’s valuable information, and they can tell you a terrible story and then that can be valuable because that can tell you how not to look in the world, look at the world and act in it, or they can tell you a positive story where you can derive benefit either way. Which is why we also like to go watch stories about horrible psychopathic thugs, you know? And hopefully we’re learning not to be like them. Although, there are additional advantages in that, you know, someone—some might say that someone who is incapable of cruelty is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of cruelty. I would say, and this follows Jung as well—that’s incorrect, and it’s dangerously incorrect because if you are not capable of cruelty, you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is.

So part of the reason that people go watch anti-heroes and villains is because there’s a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them, which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect. Because it’s impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. If you grow teeth and you realize that you’re somewhat dangerous—or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous—and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing.

That doesn’t mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel. What it means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel. Because in the first case, you’re nothing but weak and naïve, and in the second case, you’re dangerous but you have it under control. You know, a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training. They say, “We’re not training you to fight; we’re training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights.” But if you happen to have to get in one—then I guess the philosophy also is that if you’re competent at fighting, that actually decreases the probability that you’re going to have to fight.

When someone pushes you, you’ll be able to respond with confidence. And with any luck—and this is certainly the case with bullies—any reasonable show of confidence, which is very much equivalent to the show of dominance, is going to be enough to make the bully back off. The strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace. That’s partly why Jung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate their shadow, and he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt because the human shadow—which is all those things about yourself that you don’t want to realize—reaches all the way to hell.

What he meant by that was it’s through an analysis of your own shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable— and you, as well—of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterize, let’s say, the twentieth century. Without that understanding, there’s no possibility of bringing it under control. When you study Nazi Germany, for example, or you study the Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin, and you’re asking yourself, “Well, what are these perpetrators like?” Forget about the victims; let’s talk about the perpetrators. The answer is, they’re just like you. If you don’t know that, that just means that you don’t know anything about people, including yourself. Then it also means that you have to discover why they’re just like you, and believe me, that’s no picnic.

So that’s enough to traumatize people, and that’s partly why they don’t do it. It’s also partly why the path to enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy, then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom. But it’s not that at all; it’s a matter of facing the thing you least want to face. Everyone has that. There’s this old story in King Arthur where the knights go off to look for the Holy Grail, which is either the cup that Christ drank out of at the Last Supper or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified. The stories vary, but it’s basically a holy object, like the Phoenix in some sense—that’s a representation of transformation.

King Arthur’s knights, who sit at a round table because they’re all roughly equal, go off to find the most valuable thing. Where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don’t know where it is? Well, each of the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him. That’s a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of personality, which is exactly the same thing, is precisely through the porthole or portal that you do not want to climb through.

The reason for that’s actually quite technical; this is a Jungian presupposition. There are a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped, and a lot of those things are because there are things you’ve avoided looking at because you don’t want to look at them, and there are parts of you that you’ve avoided developing because it’s hard for you to develop those parts. So it’s by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don’t want to look because that’s where you’ve kept it. There’s a unique idiosyncratic element of it for everyone. Your particular place of enlightenment and terror is not going to be the same as someone else’s, except that they’re both places of enlightenment and terror, so they’re equivalent at one level of analysis.

And different than another. So anyways, back to the fiction and what it does if it distills truth and it produces characters that are composites. The more they become composites, the more they approximate a mythological character, and so they become more and more universally true and more and more approximating religious deities. But the problem with that is they become more and more distant from individual experience, and so with literature, there’s this very tight line where you need to make the character more than merely human but not so much of a god that, you know, one of the things that happened to Superman in the 1980s—Superman started out—he’s got a heavenly set of parents, by the way, and an earthly set of parents, and he’s an orphan, like Harry Potter; it’s a very common theme.

When Superman first emerged, he could only jump out of buildings, you know, and maybe he could stop a locomotive. But by the time the 1980s rolled around, like, he could juggle planets and, you know, swallow hydrogen bombs, and, you know, he could do anything. Well, people stopped buying the Superman comics because how interesting is that? It’s like something horrible happens, and Superman deals with it, and something else horrible happens, and Superman deals with it. It’s like, that’s dull! He turned into such an archetype he was basically the omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God, and that’s no fun. It’s like God wins, and then God wins again, and then again God wins.

And, you know, so then they had to weaken him in different ways with kryptonite—you know, so green kryptonite kind of made him sick and red kryptonite, I think, kind of mutated him, if I remember correctly. They had to introduce flaws into his characters so that there could be some damn plot. That’s something to think about; you know there’s a deep existential lesson in that. Your being is limited and flawed and fragile; you’re like the genie, which is genius, in this little tiny lamp. You know, this immense potential but constrained in this tiny little living space, as Robin Williams said when he played the genie in Aladdin. But the fact that you have limitations means that the plot of your life is the overcoming of those limitations and that if you didn’t have limitations, well, there wouldn’t be a plot, and maybe there would be no life.

So that’s part of the reason why perhaps you have to accept the fact that you’re flawed and insufficient and live with it and consider it a precondition for being. It’s at least a reasonable—it’s a reasonable idea. So anyways, one of the main characters is the country, the known, the explored territory. We went over that a bit. It always has two elements. I mean, your country is your greatest friend and your worst enemy. You know, because it squashes you into conformity and demands that you act in a certain manner and reduces your individuality to that element that’s tolerated by everyone else. It constrains your potential in a single direction, and so it’s really tyrannical. But at the same time, it provides you with a place to be and all of the benefits that have accrued as a result of the actions of your ancestors and all the other people that you’re associated with.

So there’s the good tyrant or the bad tyrant, and the good king—those are archetypal figures, and that’s because they’re always true, and they’re always true simultaneously. You know, which is partly why I object to the notion of the patriarchy because it’s a myth. It’s the apprehension of a mythological trope, which is that of the evil tyrant, without any appreciation for the fact that the archetype actually has two parts. The other part is the wise king, and you know, you can tell an evil tyrant story about culture—no problem. But it’s one-sided, and that’s very dangerous because you don’t want to forget all the good things that you have while you’re criticizing all the ways that things are in error. That’s a lack of gratitude, and it’s a lack of wisdom, and it’s founded in resentment, and it’s very dangerous both personally and socially.

I told you that Captain Hook is a tyrant because he’s got this crocodile chasing him. The crocodile has a clock in its stomach, and that’s death. It’s like, obviously, right? Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. He’s a tyrant, and he wants to wreak havoc everywhere. Then Peter Pan, of course, looks at Captain Hook and thinks, “Why the hell should I grow up and be a tyrant and sacrifice all the potential of childhood?” The answer to that is the potential sacrifices itself if you don’t utilize it as you mature, and you just end up a 40-year-old lost boy, which is a horrifying thing to behold. It’s almost as if you’re the corpse of a child—the living corpse of a child. Because who the hell wants a six-year-old 40-year-old? You’re a little on the stale side by that point and not the world’s happiest individual.

So, you know, your potential is going to disappear because you aged anyways, and so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction and at least become something, no matter how limited, rather than nothing. So, you know, Peter Pan—that’s a great story; it’s a great mythological story. So, let’s talk about tyrants. Well, not only are they mythological figures, but they exist, and they tend to be deified. I mean, Stalin was for all intents and purposes God-the-Father in Soviet Russia, although he was pretty much only the worst elements of Old Testament God, who was constantly smiting people and wiping out populations and doing all sorts of things that seem quite nasty. But nonetheless, you know, people worshipped him in many ways, and he’s a representation of just exactly what goes wrong when things really go wrong—when people stop paying attention and when they all lie; because one of the things that characterized the communist state was that no one ever got to say anything they actually believed ever.

That was partly because one out of three people was an informer, which meant if you had a family of six people, two of them were informing on the government about you, including your own children. If you were an informer, you were often amply rewarded by the state so that if you lived in an overcrowded apartment building with three families in the same flat and you informed on, you know, the woman down the hall that you didn’t like, she got shipped off to the old concentration camp and you got her apartment.

So that was a lovely society, and it only killed about thirty million people between 1919 and 1959. So, that’s what happens when the archetypal structure gets tilted badly. When people forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill as citizens—as awake citizens who are capable of stating the truth—and the archetype shifts. So, there’s nothing left of the Great Father except the tyrant, and let’s not have that happen. I mean, the one on the right is really interesting because consciously or unconsciously, you know, there’s Stalin, surrounded by what is for all intents and purposes fire. You know, he looks like Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty when she shows up at Aurora’s christening. You know, she puts her arms up in the air and green fire surrounds her. It’s like, it’s like he’s surrounded by fire, and there’s Lenin above him, who’s like king of the fiery realm, and that’s for sure.

So, I mean, all the terrors that happened in the Soviet Union didn't start under Stalin; they started under Lenin, and Lenin was, or Stalin was definitely Lenin’s legitimate son, let’s put it that way. So, you know, this is another example of the tyrannical element of the Great Father and the sorts of things that can happen. I mean, I kind of got an evil kick out of this bad—it was quite old, kitschy in some sense—and you know, I don’t think that’s something you’d ever see at a magazine today, “Ten Unusual Stamps Showing Evil Dictators.” You know, well, fair enough. I mean, that’s what he was and that’s the consequence. And that’s just a tiny bit of the consequence because the Nazis wiped out a very large number of people, often using compassion as a justification. So, when they went after the mentally ill and the terminally ill and those whose intelligence was compromised for biological reasons and those who were too old, they basically justified it by saying that the enforced euthanasia was merciful and that you were actually being a good person by complying with the requirements.

So, something to think about more mythological representations. I like these quite a bit—Hitler as Knight of the Faith, essentially, with, I suppose that’s a recreation of the Christian Holy Spirit, dove, you know, except it’s an eagle, which is a bird of prey and a scavenger. Right, so that’s kind of interesting, but that’s Hitler as Knight of the Blood, roughly speaking. And then this is an allied war poster, essentially, that assimilates the Nazis to poisonous snakes. You know, we don’t like poisonous snakes very much, and it’s probably because they’ve been preying on us for approximately twenty million years because snakes and primates, humans in particular, co-evolved. So the snake is a representation of that which lies outside the comfortable domain, and that can be, you know, a snake, obviously, or it can be an abstract snake.

The abstract snake is your enemy, or an even more abstract snake is the evil in your own heart. This is going to be a bit of a leap for you, but there’s this ancient idea that developed in the West over thousands of years, far predating Christianity, that at least its origins that the snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan. Which is like, what the hell? It’s a very strange idea, but the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that, you know, we have this circuitry that detects predators, and a predator representation of a predator is a snake or a monster that incorporates snake-like features like a dragon or something like that or a dinosaur with lots of teeth or a shark that lives under the water and will pull you down.

You know, because I suspect a lot of our ancestors met a nasty death at the hands of Nile crocodiles while they were in the African veldt, going down to get some nice water. So, you know, that’s the thing that jumps up and pulls you under, and you know that happens in your own life because things jump up and pull you under, you know, and use the same circuitry. We use the same circuitry to process unknown things that upset us as we once used to detect predators who were likely to invade our space.

Human beings are capable of abstraction, and so you could think about the real predator that might invade your space. Maybe that’s a snake or a wolf or some kind of monster, you know? That’s pretty concrete and biological. Chimps have that. You know, chimps don’t like snakes, and so if a chimp comes across a snake in the wild—let’s say, a big, I don’t know what live with chimps, I don’t know if they’re pythons, but they have constrictors there.

Anyways, so, you know, maybe there’s like a twenty-foot constrictor, and the chimp stays a good distance away from it, but it won’t leave, and then it has this particular cry that it ters, that’s called a snake ra—WRA—A, and so it makes this noise which means something like, “Holy shit, that’s a big snake!” And I actually mean that because the circuits that primates use to utter distress calls are the same circuits that we use to curse, just so you know. That’s why people with Tourette syndrome swear. Because, like, what’s up with that? How can you have a neurological condition that makes you swear?

Well, it turns out that guttural, effect-laden curses are mediated by a different speech circuit, and that’s the speech circuit we share with the predator alarms of other primates, so that’s pretty cool. So anyways, this chimp stands there and makes this snake noise, and then a bunch of other chimps come running. Some of them stay a fair ways from the snake, and some of them get pretty close, and they’ll stand there and watch that snake for like twenty-four hours. You know, they’re fascinated by it, and you know, if you’ve handled snakes, you can understand that fascination because they’re fascinating, you know? They’re numinous—I would say that’s the right way of putting it. Numinosity is a word that means intrinsically meaningful, like a fire.

You know, you can’t look away from fire. You know, if you’re sitting in front of a fireplace, it’s like you’re staring at it, and that’s because you’re all descended from the first mad chimpanzee who had some weird genetic mutation that made it impossible for him to stay away from fire. He was like the first chimp arsonist; you know, and he figured it out and, well, hey, now he was a chimp with a stick with fire on it, like that’s a mega chimp man.

So, you know, we have that mutation in spades, and no wonder. So they make this, you know, they have this reaction to snakes, and chimps that have never seen a snake, if they’re in a cage and you throw a rubber snake in there, it’s like bang, they hit the roof! But then they look at the snake. So it’s like it’s terrifying and fascinating at the same time, and you should look at the snake because you want to know what it does, but you should stay away from it because it’s a snake.

So you’re kind of screwed in terms of your motivations, right? One is get the hell away, and the other is, well, don’t let that thing do anything that you’re not watching. So that’s really the reaction we have to the unknown; it’s terrifying, but we watch it. And then, you know, the meta-story is that not only do we watch it, but we go explore it. And so you might think, well, back in the Garden of Eden, so to speak, when we were living in trees, the snakes used to come and eat us and, and our offspring, more likely. And you know, we weren’t very happy about that. And then we figured out how to, maybe by accident, draw up a stick on a snake, and that was a good thing because the snake didn’t like that. And then maybe the next thing we learned a little later was to, like, actually take a stick and, like, hack the snake with it.

You can believe that the first primate who figured that out was just as popular as the guy who mastered fire. And so we’re pretty good at whacking snakes with sticks, which is why Springfield has a snake-whacking day; it’s devoted to nothing but that, right? I don’t know if you know that Simpsons episode, but it’s quite comical.

So, well, you think about the snake as a predator, and it’s the thing that invades the garden always because you just can’t keep snakes out of the damn garden no matter how hard you try. And then you think of snakes and maybe you think of meta-snakes. An example of a meta-snake would be also a predator, but maybe that’s the predator that represents the destructive spirit of the other tribe. Because chimpanzees, for example, are quite tribal, and they definitely go to war with one another. And so you think you abstract out the idea of the predator to represent malevolence as such. And then you take that one step further, and you realize that the worst of all evil predators is the human capacity for evil.

At that point, you know, you’re starting to, I would say, psychologize or spiritualize the idea of danger and make it into something that’s conceptual and something that’s psychological and something that you can face sort of en masse. I mean, one of the things people had to figure out was how do you deal with danger? So you figure out how to deal with a specific danger once you figure out what the class of all dangerous things is, and that’s a lot better. You could solve all the dangerous problems all at once instead of having to conjure up a different solution for every dangerous thing. That’s basically, as far as I can tell, where the hero's story came from.

The hero's story is basically, you know, there's a community. It’s threatened by the emergence of some old evil, often represented by a dragon. That’s sort of typical, say, of the Lord of the Rings stories. There’s a hero, often a humble guy but not always, sometimes a knight who decides he’ll go out there, you know, and chase down the snake, maybe even, or the serpent, or the dragon. Maybe even in its lair and he’ll have a bunch of adventures on the way that transform him from, you know, a useless naive hobbit into, you know, a sword-wielding hero. He confronts the dragon and gets the gold and frees the people that it had enslaved, and then comes back transformed to share what he’s learned with the community. It’s like, well that’s the human story fundamentally, and that’s our basic instinctive pattern. It’s represented in narratives constantly, and that’s partly what this sees.

This has meaning. You know, why do you know? Well, you know, because it draws on symbolic representations that you already understand. You understand that a mess of tooth snakes is not a good thing and that maybe the sensible thing to do is stomp them. It’s not like you need an instruction manual to figure out what the poster means. And so, you know, that’s two different representations of Hitler; that’s sort of the pro-Hitler representation, and I would say that’s the anti-Hitler representation. And you know, that’s the real Hitler, who, at this point, does not look like a very happy clam.

So, that’s the known; that’s culture, that’s order. What’s eternally juxtaposed to culture and the known and the explored, and order, is the unknown. The unknown is a strange place. The unknown is actually a physical place. The unknown is the place that when you’re camping, and you’re around a fire: the unknown is everything outside the circle of the light. And you remember in the Lion King, you may not remember when Mufasa—that’s the king, right?—goes and takes Simba up to show him his territory. He says, “He is the king of everything that the light touches.” That’s a very old idea, and you guys had no problem with, you know, that was fine; that made sense.

And I would be on the light was the darkness, and that was the elephant graveyard. That was death; that was the place of death and danger—that’s where the hyenas hung out. You weren’t supposed to go there. Of course, Simba, because he’s a rule-breaking hero, just like Harry Potter, immediately goes there. And so, you know, that’s like the forbidden fruit; it’s the same sort of idea. If you want someone to do something, the best thing to do is tell them that they shouldn’t and not explain why.

You know, for example, if I said to you at the beginning of this class, “Look, I’ve got one rule here: don’t sit in that chair no matter what.” You’d be thinking the whole year, especially if I reminded you, “Well, just what’s up with that chair?” Like, what’s that chair? Is it magical? All of a sudden, some of you might even want to—well, you probably wouldn’t because this is a ridiculous example, but maybe you know, you come to class early and sit in that chair just to see what would happen. You know, people are very curious, and that’s exactly what we’re like.

That’s a very old story too, right? It’s like opening Pandora’s box—“Don’t open that box; you’ll be sorry.” It’s like, “Oh, huh?” You know, all the horrors of the world fly out, and believe me, you will open Pandora’s box many times in your life because, you know, with your family, or maybe your mate, or maybe your children, you’ll have this idea that they have a box with things in it that you want to know about, and you’ll say, “Well, I’m kind of curious about this particular event. So why don’t you tell me about it?” They say, “Well, no, we probably really shouldn’t open that box.” You keep bugging them, and then they open it, and then all sorts of things fly out that you didn’t expect, and then maybe you think, “Hey, it would have been better if I would have just left that damn box closed.”

But you can do the same thing to yourself. Believe me! The Pandora's box idea, the forbidden fruit idea, that’s a major league idea. Part of the reason in the Judeo-Christian tradition why people are saddled with the notion of original sin is because hyper-cognitively developed chimpanzees without much sense can keep their hands off things. And so they keep exploring even when they know better.

And every time they do that, they learn something that is—that destroys the paradise that they currently inhabit. Right? Because there’s plenty—you’ll never learn anything in your life that’s of importance without it having a pretty damn destabilizing effect on you at the moment of realization. You learn something happy, and it’s like whatever. All that means is that I was doing things right. Like, it’s nice and everything, but it’s not informative. You do something, and all hell breaks loose. That’ll make you think, that’s for sure. You might never stop thinking for the rest of your life.

So anyways, the unknown is that which surrounds the known. It’s an unexplored territory. It’s usually represented as female, I think, for a variety of reasons. And not female exactly; it’s not the right way to think about it—as feminine. And that’s not the same thing because feminine is a symbolic category whereas female is like an actual female, and so you don’t want to confuse the metaphor with the actuality, because we have these social cognitive categories built in, you know? You might say masculine, feminine, and offspring—something like that.

We had to use what we could to represent what we were attempting to figure out, and we kind of mapped them onto the external realities of being the best we could using what we could. And so, you know, nature is benevolent and it’s fruitful. You know, all things come from nature and all things come from the unknown, right? Because the known is already there; it’s the unknown that manifests the new, right? So that’s part of the reason for the characterization of the unknown as feminine.

And then there’s also the case that women play a massive role in sexual selection among human beings. From an evolutionary perspective, you’re twice as likely to be a failure if you’re a man than you are if you’re a woman, in that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. You think, “Well, that’s impossible,” but it’s not. All you have to do is imagine that every woman has one child, half the men have two, and the other half have zero, and so end of problem. That’s basically how it works out.

So women are more choosy maters than men by a substantial margin. There was a funny study done by the guy who established one of the big dating sites, and he looked at how women rated men, and they rated the 50th percentile man at the 15th percentile—so 85% of men were below average according to women’s ratings. Now, men had their same arbitrary choices because, of course, they preferred younger women to older women, and they were more swayed, I would say, by attractiveness, but that didn’t have nearly as big an effect on their actual writing of women.

So anyway, from a Darwinian perspective, nature is that which selects, so that’s all it is. Sexual selection plays a massive role in human evolution. You know, the fact that we have these massive brains is very likely a consequence of a positive feedback loop and sexual selection. You know, because otherwise, that’s the only time you can get really rapid changes in evolutionary space where you get a process going that reinforces itself.

So there’s a little preference for intelligence, and that produces more intelligent men and women, and then there’s a little more preference for intelligence, and, you know, maybe then that turns into the ability to speak and/or to master fire. Then there’s way more selection for intelligence, and the brain just goes like this, you know? And women have paid a pretty big price for that because your hips are basically so wide that you can barely run. If they were any wider, then you couldn’t; and of course, the pelvic passageway through which the baby travels is too small, so it’s really painful and dangerous.

The baby’s head has to compress quite a lot; I mean, they come out cone-shaped often and then they’re born really young, so you have to take care of them forever—all that hell you know? A deer is born—a fawn is born and it’s like two seconds later it’s standing, and then it’s running from a lion. It’s like, you know; it’s like fifteen minutes later and a baby, it’s like it just lies there and utters plaintive noises—that’s all it can do. It does that for like ten months before it could skitter away from a sloth if it was predatory, you know?

So, you really got to take care of those creatures, and so that’s a big price to pay. That’s a big price to pay for our cortical evolution. So anyways, here are some of the symbolic representatives of the unknown, the unconscious, Dionysian force—that’s sort of Freud’s representation of the unknown, the terrors of the darkness—that’s the unknown. The monsters that lurk—they’re the source and the resting place of all things—the great mother, the queen, the matrix, which means matter, which means mother—the matriarch, matter, mother—the container, the cornucopia, the object to be fertilized, the source of all things, the fecund, the pregnant, the strange, the emotional, the foreigner, the place of return and rest, the deep, the valley, the cleft, the cave, hell, death, and the grave because it’s beyond the moon—ruler of the night and mysterious dark and matter and the earth.

Then you know all this because when you watch a movie that’s rife with symbolic representations, it draws on those underlying metaphors and they’re natural. I mean, where does a witch live? Well, in a swamp for God’s sake. She doesn’t live in the penthouse of a New York Tower; she lives in a swamp, and it’s dark there, and if the moon’s up, that’s better, and maybe it could be a crescent moon or maybe it could be a full moon. But you know witches live in the right place if you’re going to understand it, and you all—you understand all of that, and it’s part of the structure of your imagination, you could say.

It’s part of the unspoken fantastical imagination that unites all of us, and it makes us specifically human. There’s a good representation of the underworld and the place of transformation. So that’s Hell, and Isis in Egypt was queen of the underworld, and the underworld generally has a queen, and she usually shows up when order falls apart. You go to the underworld when your life falls apart—that’s what it means. So when you see these stories of the hero journeying to unknown lands of terror and danger, that’s what happens to you. It happens to you all the time.

You know, you’re in this little safe space, like the Hobbit in the Shire, and then, you know, there’s a great evil brewing somewhere, and you can no longer ignore it. So off you go into the land of terror and uncertainty. It’s better to go on purpose than accidentally, that’s for sure, because at least you can be prepared. We also know that if you’re going to face a threat, if you face it voluntarily, what happens is your body activates itself for exploration and mastery. But if you face it involuntarily, same-sized threat, then you revert to prey mode, and you’re frozen. That’s way, way, way more stressful; it’s way harder on your body.

So it’s better to keep your eye open and watch for emergent threats because you all know you know what you’re not doing quite right and where your life is likely to unravel. You all have a sense of that, and the best thing to do is to not ignore that, to pay attention to it, to watch it, and to take corrective action early. Then, you know, you stay on top of things, and your little trip to the underworld might be a few minutes long instead of a catastrophe that produces post-traumatic stress disorder, knocks you out for four or five years, and maybe you never recover.

So, that’s right. You know, that’s what these kinds of symbolic representations mean. Those are states of being that indicate being devoured, and you can be devoured by your own unconscious. Jesus, that happens all the time. What does that mean? Well, you know it’s an autonomous thing in some sense. You know, if you get depressed or if you get really anxious, you don’t have any control over that. It’s like it sweeps up over you and pulls you down. Why down? Well, down is where you go when you’re sad. You don’t go up. Man, I’m up today! Oh, that’s too bad. No, it’s, “Man, I’m down today.”

Well, that’s partly this, and it’s partly because this is subordinate and it’s partly because down is closer to the ground and farther from the sky. There are all sorts of reasons you’re feeling down rather than up. Up is where you’re aiming, right? You don’t aim down. Well, the reason those phrases make sense is because they’re locked deeply into this underlying structure of imagination. And well, those are the archetypal structures according to Jung. I think that as far as I can tell, he’s dead accurate, and I think we understand the biology of such things much better than we did.

So there are more representations. She’s quite the friendly creature, that Kali. I like this representation better. Those are heads, by the way, in hands, so she sort of represents well very complex things. She represents death; she represents transformation. I already like this representation. I think it’s brilliant. Imagine that what the people were doing who formulated these representations; what they were trying to do was to make a representation of the domain of threat itself, right? So that they could deal with the idea that—because we can say threat—well, what is that?

What the hell does that mean? Well, threat is the category of all threatening things, and so then you can think about threat, and you can think about threat across all those individual instances, and maybe you can figure out how to deal with threat, right? What’s the best way to be in the world so that you most effectively deal with threat? Well, that’s sort of like, apart from how do you deal with pain, that’s sort of like the ultimate question of human beings. You want to be terrified? No! So you want to be in danger? No! So, like, you better figure out how to deal with threat.

So first of all, you have to conceptualize it. So we’ll take a look at this representation. So that’s Kali; her hair is on fire. Well, fire, you know, that’s a numinous phenomenon—dangerous but transformative. She’s wearing a headdress of skulls. She has a weapon in this hand, and she has a tiger’s tongue. She often has a snake around her waist. None of these do, but she often does, but in this case, this—then— that’s because, you know, it’s a snake. We’ve already covered that.

Well, these things that look like snakes here aren’t. You notice how her belly is concave? Well, it’s because she’s just given birth to this unfortunate person that she happens to be standing on, and she’s eating him intestines-first. That’s a fire ring which he is in, and then it’s got skulls on the inside of it. It’s like what’s that supposed to do? Well, partly it’s supposed to represent that which terrifies you. It’s like, yeah, fair enough, man, because I don’t imagine you saw those things in there before I explained them, but someone who was familiar with that image would know what it meant. It’s like some poor artist was sitting there thinking, “Well, how do I represent destruction?” It’s like, bang! Whoa! Okay. Well, put that down and then we won’t look at it again.

So, and then what do you do with this? You make sacrifices to it. You think, “Well, that’s kind of primitive.” You know, first of all, I don’t really believe that exists. Well, it does, if it’s an amalgam of threat symbols. I can tell you that it exists; that’s for sure. So it exists as an abstraction if nothing else. Do you offer it sacrifices? Well, what the hell do you think you do? What are you doing in class? Why aren’t you drinking vodka and snorting cocaine, you know? Because you could be doing that instead. Here you are, listening to me; you know, slaving away in university. You’re young. It’s like, really? You’ve got nothing better to do than sit there? You know, well, what you’re willing to forego today is pleasure for tomorrow’s advantage, and that’s what sacrifice is.

Human beings discovered that dramatically first. You know, like we were apes, for God’s sake. We didn’t just leap up and think, “Oh, we better save for tomorrow.” You know? It took thousands of years for that idea to emerge, and it emerged in dramatic form, and it was sort of like, “Well, society is sort of like a god.” No, they weren’t thinking this through. It’s like, if you’re going to represent society, well, it’s like this masculine God that’s always judging the hell out of you; it’s everywhere all at the same time. It’s like, yeah, yeah, that’s true, absolutely. And what do you have to do with it? Well, you have to give it what it wants. Why? Why do you have to give it what it wants? Because it’ll crush you if you don’t.

That’s exactly right, and if you’re lucky and you give it the right sacrifice, then it’ll smile on you, and you get to have a good life. That was like the major discovery of mankind. Man, that was a killer discovery. It was like the discovery of the future. You know, we discovered the future as a place, and it was a place that you could bargain with. You can bargain with the future. Wow, that’s just what an idea that is! You know, it’s so unlikely. Well, how do you bargain with the future? Well, you give it what it wants, and you know, some of that—you maintain your social relationship, you know, you make yourself useful to other people, and you shape yourself so that you can cooperate with people, and you don’t act impulsively, and maybe you squirrel something away for the next harvest. Even if you’re hungry, and you know, and then the future isn’t hell—and you make the proper sacrifices.

So if you sacrifice to Kali, then she turns into her opposite and showers benevolence on you, and that would be Mother Nature, right? It’s like, “Look out for Mother Nature, man.” You know, two weeks out in the bush right now and you’re dead. It’s not pleasant. And then if it’s spring, you last longer, huh? But the bugs eat you, and so that’s not very fun either. So, nature, you know, it’s bent on your destruction, but if you treat it properly and carefully and make the right sacrifices, then maybe one of her trees will offer you some fruit, and that would be okay.

So believe me, lots of people died trying to figure that out. So here’s another way of looking at it. So I said, you know, order and chaos—known, unknown, explored territory, unexplored territory. I love this Taoist symbol; it’s a symbol of being. Being isn’t reality as you would conceptualize it as a scientist; it’s more like reality as it manifests itself to you as a living thing, which is completely different. Science extracts out all the subjectivity; all it is, there is an array of objective facts of equivalent value. That’s part of its method, but that’s not the world in which you live. The world in which you live is full of motivation and emotion.

It’s full of terror and pain and joy and frustration and other people, that’s for sure. And so that’s the real world and so, well that’s what this is. It’s the real world, and what is it made out of? Well, it’s made out of all those things. You know that can get out of hand, you know, because the explored territory and the known can get so damn tight that it’s nothing but a tyrant. And then it’s all those things you don’t know, and that’s pretty exciting because, you know, you want to go find out some things you don’t know, and that adds a lot of spice to life. You want a little adventure.

You don’t want to go out with someone who’s so predictable that you know everything about them in a week, you know? Unless you’re hyper-conservative, you want to go out with someone who’s got—they’re a little erratic, like not too erratic. Let’s say they’re a little dangerous—perhaps not too dangerous, but some of that at least. You want predictability with a bit of unpredictability in there. Well, that’s exactly what this means. It’s like that’s predictability with a little unpredictability in it. And what that also means is that what you know can be turned into what you don’t know just like that.

That’s going to happen to you lots of times in your life. Man, when someone close to you dies suddenly, it’s like poof, order turns into chaos, and now you’re in chaos. What the hell are you going to do there? That’s a good question because you need to know what to do there because you’re going to be there. And it happens to you when your dreams fall apart. You know, I mean, your dreams for your life, or you know, when you discover something awful about yourself that you didn’t know. You know, it flips on you all the time—in small ways sometimes.

You know, you have a fight with a friend or in big ways that wipe you out for, well, indefinitely sometimes because you can fall into chaos and never get out. You know, that’s the people who are trapped in the belly of the beast. It isn’t necessary that when you descend into chaos that you learn something and get back out. You could just be stuck there, suffering until you die, and that’s—you know, I wouldn’t recommend that. It’s something to avoid, but it happens to people all the time. All the time. You see them wandering around, you know, shattered on the streets of Toronto. You know, they’re done. They’re in chaos, and there’s so much chaos around them that you won’t even go near them.

The chaos spreads like eight feet around them, and so when you see someone like that, you’re like, “Well, first, we’re not going to look too closely.” People like that often don’t like you to look at them because that also helps them remember where they are, and that’s no pleasant thing. You’re going to just stay away from that; maybe you’ll cross the street, maybe you’ll keep your head down, whatever. You’re not going anywhere near that chaos, and no bloody wonder, you know? You don’t think about it much after you pass it because it’s a hell of a thing to think about.

And what are you going to do about it anyway? You don’t know what to do about it; you might just make it worse. Well, so chaos, you know, that’s the other half of life, and it can turn into order sometimes—better order. That’s actually what you do when you explore, right? You explore; you find out something new—not too new, not too Pandora boxy. You know, you bite off as much as you can chew but no more, and so that rearranges the way you look at the world.

But you’re doing it voluntarily, so you can kind of tolerate the recalibration, and you strengthen the order, right? Because now you become more competent. I would say that you’re trying to live on the edge between order and chaos, and I mean that’s a real place. That’s an actual, meta place, but it’s more real than places because it’s so old. It’s such an old place; it really exists. Your nervous system knows that it sees the world this way. In fact, the right hemisphere is roughly specialized for chaos, and the left hemisphere is roughly specialized for order, which is why the left hemisphere tends to have the linguistic elements and why people are right-handed, and the right hemisphere has a more diffuse structure. It’s more associated with negative emotion and imagination, and the two communicate between each other through the corpus callosum. The right hemisphere appears to update the left hemisphere kind of slowly, often in dreams.

If your right hemisphere is hurt, for example, back here in the parietal lobe, then you lose the left part of your body; you can’t move it anymore. But you also lose the idea that you have a left part of your body, so it’s like blindness. It’s a blindness to the left, and so if someone comes along and says, “You know, you’re not moving your left arm,” you’re going to say “Yeah, well, my arthritis is bothering me today; I haven’t moved it for six months.” My arthritis is bothering me. “Oh, my my left foot, well, you know, I’m too tired.”

Well, what’s happened is the left hemisphere has a representation of the body, and it’s not being updated. The part of the brain that would notice that the left is gone because of a stroke isn’t there anymore. The left already has a model, and it’s not going to change. It’s hard to change your model of yourself; you know, you have a tooth pulled. What happens? It’s like your damn tongue is in that hole for the next six months, fiddling around constantly. And that’s because you’re rebuilding your neurological model of your body. It’s like, try it out with your whole left side and see how well you do. You know, so this guy named Ramachandran was experimenting with people like this.

One of the things he did was kind of—he was checking their balance, and you can do that by irrigating the ear with cold water, and that makes people go like this. It makes their eyes move back and forth because it upsets the vestibular system, and what he found was that if he poured cold water in the left ear of someone with right parietal damage who had left neglect, they’d all of a sudden sort of wake up catastrophically. They’d have a terrible reaction to the fact that they were paralyzed on the left, and they would know that it had happened and cry and, you know, amid all sorts of distress. No wonder.

Then, like twenty minutes later, they’d snap back into their damaged mode of being. They would not deny because that isn’t really what it is—it's just that they couldn’t update the model; they just didn’t have the neurology for it anymore. So they were back to not noticing that it was gone and coming up with stories about it. So, well, so that’s a good example of how the right and left hemispheres work together and how they’re kind of mapped onto this, weirdly enough, so, you know, we’re adapted to the meta-reality.

What that would be is we’re adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time, and that’s not the same things that you see flitting around you day-to-day—those are just— they just like clouds; they just evaporate. You know, there are things underneath that that are more fundamental: that are more fundamental realities like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you and that you pose to yourself. Those are eternal realities, and we’re adapted to those. That’s our world, and that’s why we express that in stories.

So then you might say, “Well, how do you adapt yourself to this world?” The answer to that isn’t—I believe this is a neurological answer—I believe this: that your brain can tell you when you’re optimally situated between chaos and order, and the way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. So let’s say there’s a place in the environment you should be. Okay, what should that place be? Well, you don’t want to be terrified out of your skull. Like, what good is that? And you know, you don’t want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep. You want to be somewhere where you know you’re kind of on firm ground here, but over here you’re kind of testing out new territory.

Some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable, you know, you’re going to go pretty far out into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself. Other people are going to just put a toe in the chaos, and you know that’s neuroticism, basically—that’s your sensitivity to threat, that’s calibrated differently in different people. Some people are more exploratory than others; that’s kind of extraversion and openness working together and intelligence. Some people are going to tolerate a larger admixture of chaos in their order. Those are liberals, by the way. I mean that technically: liberals are more interested in novel chaos, and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist.

And who’s right? Well, it depends on the situation; that’s why conservatives and liberals have to talk to each other because one of them isn’t right and the other wrong. Sometimes the conservatives are right, and sometimes the liberals are right because the environments go like this. You can’t predict the damn thing, so that’s why you have to communicate. That’s what a democracy does. It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate the damn societies.

So anyways, let’s say you’re optimally balanced between chaos and order. So what does that mean? Well, you’re stable enough, but you’re interested, right? Because a little novelty heightens your anxiety; that wakes you up a bit. That’s the adventure part of it, but it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity, and that’s actually associated with pleasure. That’s the dopamine circuit. So if you’re optimally balanced, you know, you’re there when you’re listening to an interesting conversation or you’re engaged in one; it’s a real conversation.

You know you’re saying some things you know, and the other person is saying some things they know. But the both of what you know is changing. It’s like, “Wow, that’s so interesting!” You’ll have a conversation like that forever, or maybe you’re reading a book like that, or you’re listening to a piece of music that models that because what music does is provide you with predictable forms, multi-level predictable forms that transform just the right amount. You think, “Wow, that’s so cool!”

It doesn’t matter how nihilistic you are; you know music still infuses you with a sense of meaning, and that’s because it models meaning. That’s what it does. That’s why we love it. You know, you can dance to it, and that sort of symbolizes you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality and positioning yourself properly. And you like that too, you know? You’ll pay for it. “Oh boy, I get to go dancing.” “Oh boy, I get to listen to music.” It’s like, what the hell are you doing listening to music? What good is that?

Well, you think that’s a stupid question. I don’t care about your dopey criticism; I’m going to listen to some music, right? There’s no rational—there’s no rational argument against music. It’s like you just don’t even think about it. You just walk away from someone who’s stupid enough to ask that question. It’s like some things are obvious. Well, why? Okay, so that’s pretty fun.

What mediates between these two domains? Well, that’s what consciousness does, far as I can tell, and that’s sort of the individual, and that’s the hero. That’s another way of thinking about it. It’s the logos; that’s another way of thinking about it. It’s the word that generates order out of chaos at the beginning of time. It’s the consciousness that, interacting with the matter of the world, produces being—that’s basically it. That’s basically you for all intents and purposes. How do you do that? Well, the unconscious does it to some degree—you know, because it’s with our fantasy that we first meet the unknown, right?

Well, look. Say you’re going out with a new person; it’s like, what do you do? You project a fantasy on them and then you fall in love with the fantasy. And aren’t you stupid because you’re going to find out that the match between your damn fantasy and the actual person is tenuous at best. So, Jung would call that a projection of either the anima or the animus. You know, the anima is what a man projects onto a woman he finds desirable; it’s like, “Oh, she’s the perfect woman.” It’s like, “Well, how do you know that? You’ve like seen her for four seconds.” You know?

But it grips you, and the same thing happens in the opposite direction, and it’s an action of instinct. You know, it’s like you fall in love with the image. But interestingly enough, what you do in a relationship that works is that you actually—I think that what you see is a rough approximation. When you project the ideal and fall in love with it, you see what could be—it could be that—but it’s going to take you a hell of a lot of work because you’ve got no shortage of flaws and the other person has no shortage of flaws.

So you’re bringing your flaws together, and that’s going to produce a lot of friction. You’re going to have to engage in a lot of dialogue before you approach that level of perfection again. But maybe you can do it, and then you get to live happily ever after. Wouldn’t that be nice? Well, so the unconscious meets the unknown, and it meets it with imagination and fantasy and dream and art.

That’s how you take, so you don’t just go from what you don’t know to fully articulated knowledge in one bloody leap. You can’t do that. You have to extend pseudopods of fantasy and imagination into the unknown. That’s kind of what theorizing is like, right? Even scientifically, you know, you don’t know something scientifically; you generate a theory. Well, it’s an imaginative representation that your unconscious is helping you generate, and so you meet the unknown with fantasy. That’s what the unconscious is for from the psychoanalytic perspective. That’s what dreams do.

You can see why you dream about the future. You know, it’s like, “Well, what’s the future going to be like?” Well, you have a little imaginative story going on, and it’s like you don’t really create it; it sort of comes to you from wherever the hell things like that come from, you know, the unconscious. That’s the psychoanalytic answer. It’s not really much of an answer because it’s more like a representation of a place that we don’t understand, but that’s where creativity comes from.

Some people are really creative right down to the bloody core, so in my clinical practice, I often see people who are high in openness because they’re attracted to me because they watch my lectures, and you have to kind of be high in openness to like my lectures. So, because, well, you do because they go everywhere, you know, and they’re not necessarily very orderly. So, anyways, a lot of my clients are really high in openness, and they’re funny people often, especially if they’re smart because sometimes they have the most nihilistic intelligence you can imagine; it’s just self-critical and nihilistic and brutally brutal, man.

They’re smart, and so they just criticize themselves out of existence. Often I have to just try to get them to quit listening to their chattering self-critical rationality and go out and create something with their massive creativity. As long as they’re doing that, they’re engaged in the world and happy as hell. But as soon as that self-critical rationality comes in and shuts down the creativity, they’re just like walking corpses, you know? It’s because if you’re really open— like that’s your a tree, it has some trunks, and you know your most prominent trait is the most lively trunk.

If you’re a creative person and you’re not engaging in a creative enterprise, you’re just a tree that has been that has had its vitality amputated. This is not trivial; this stuff is deeply, deeply, deeply rooted in your biology, and those are people often who have like dream lives. You just can’t believe—I have one client; he has like four spectacular dreams a week, and most of the time we just spend discussing them. I mean, God, he and I had another client who could be lucid in her dreams, which is more common among women.

She could ask the damn characters what they represented, and they would tell her. It was like, “Okay, that was pretty weird,” and, like, a lot of the things they told her were really helpful, and they were not things that she wanted to hear—she basically—one of them told her she, if she was gonna live, she’d have to go visit a slaughterhouse. And the reason for that was because she was raised as a little princess and protected from horrible Mother Nature until she hit puberty in which time she turned into an evil villain because that’s how the family worked; perfect child, evil teenager overnight.

Well, that was hard on her, and she wasn’t prepared because she thought the world was princess world, and, you know, she couldn’t go through a butcher store without having a fit. And no wonder! You know, like really, Jesus, you know, it’s no wonder, but you do it—but she couldn’t! So we used to go to butcher stores, and that would make her cry, and she was a vegetarian! That would make her cry and, you know, bemoan the cruelty of the world.

It’s like, yeah, fair enough, man, those are bloody slabs of meat. I don’t know why everyone isn’t screaming when they walk through the butcher store, but she couldn’t, so we went and watched this embalming, which was— I have a rather high level of disgust sensitivity, so it was a little on the rough side for me—but she sat there, and first, she was not looking at that man, no way; and she kind of go like this, and you know that was pretty good, and then she’d go like this, and then she’d go like this, and then she watched it.

Then she asked if