012 Maps of Meaning: 12 Truths that Matter (TVO)

There’s this piece from search for the Holy Grail. And the Holy Grail is a myth that was constructed in England. And the myth goes something like this: There is a cup, the Grail, used to hold Christ’s blood. And that cup has redemptive significance and it’s been lost. And the knights – King Arthur’s knights – who go off to look for the Holy Grail are after this cup. So, it’s a redemption story, right? It means the world’s damned, unredeemed. There’s some object that can serve as the source of redemption – the source of nourishment, say, thinking about it from a symbolic perspective – and it’s worthwhile to go on a quest of that sort.

And the King Arthur story is set up in an interesting way, ‘cause there’s a king, Arthur, but he has all these knights, these nobles, and they all sit at a round table. And they’re at a round table because they’re equals. So, although it’s a hierarchical story, there’s a motif in it that transcends the hierarchy. It says: Well… yeah, under normal circumstances everyone’s arranged in a hierarchy. But when you’re out to seek whatever you need, then everyone’s an equal. And so, fine, so they sit at the round table, and then they go off to search for the Holy Grail.

And the story opens with a very interesting motif, which is the knights look at the forest and then they try to find the part that looks the darkest, to them. And then, they go that way. That’s the marker for their mission, right, to go to the darkest place. And of course, each knight goes off in a different direction because the world looks slightly different to each knight. So… objectively speaking, they’re going to a different place.

But psychologically speaking, they are going to the same place, right? And that place, I suppose, is being represented in mythology and literature as “The Heart of Darkness”. And if you were ever curious about why people aren’t enlightened – since it seems to be a possibility – you can always think about the story of King Arthur and the knights of the Holy Grail, and think: Well, do you really want to enter the forest at the darkest place? And the answer to that is of course: No, because the darkest place means precisely that place you least want to go. And it’s the same for everyone.

So then, I have this little nephew, although he’s almost 15 now. He had this dream when he was four years old. And the background to the dream is this: He was waking up in the middle of the night for months, screaming. He had night terrors. And this went on for like six months. And what was happening in his life was twofold: There was some instability in his family, ‘cause his parents got divorced about a year after that. And also, he was at the transition point from staying at home to going to kindergarten.

So, you know, not only was he making the big move out there into the terrible world, but the stable point from which he might like to have moved was shaky. So, you know, he wasn’t having that great a time. So anyways he’s screaming away at night, and this is pretty unsettling, right, ‘cause night terrors are no joke, and so he’s upset about it, and his mom’s upset about it, and so I’m watching him and he’s running around the house; he’s only about this high, a very verbal kid, and he’s got this knight hat on, and this sword and this shield, and he’s running around the house being a knight.

And at night he takes his knight hat and his shield and his sword to bed, and I think, well that’s pretty cool, and you can see how that makes sense, right, and you can see how it’s an enacted reality ‘cause children enact or act out their reality before they can explicitly understand it, just like we do. And so I’m staying there, he wakes up, and he has, you know, one of these fits, and then the next morning he comes to breakfast, and I said, hey, did you have any dreams last night, and he goes, yeah, I had a dream; I said, well, tell us the dream, and there’s six adults sitting around the table and, you know, we’re ready for this dream, or so we think.

And then he says, okay, I was out in this field and I was surrounded by beaked dwarfs, and they came up to my knees, and so these dwarfs they had no arms, they just had shoulders, and powerful legs, and they were all covered with hair, and they had a cross shaved on the top of their head, and they were all covered with grease, and everywhere I went these dwarfs would jump up with their beaks and bite me, and you’re looking at him like, that accounts for the night terrors, right?

And so then he says, yeah, and there’s more to it too; if, if you look in the background behind all the dwarfs there was a dragon way in the background and it was puffing out fire and smoke, and every time it puffed out fire and smoke, a whole bunch more of these dwarfs would get made, and you think, that’s pretty cool, that’s a hydra story, right, remember the story of the hydra, cut off one head, two more grow, it’s one of Hercules’ trials, and that’s an observation about the world, which is, you solve one problem, and like two more problems pop up, and then you solve those and…

Anyways, he says, okay, well I’ve got this dragon back there, and so this is his problem, right, he’s been eaten by beaked dwarfs, and that’s not good, and there’s not much sense fighting them off because there’s just more of them made every time this thing lurking in the background breathes, so I said, what could you do about that it’s like his brain was working all these ideas around and he’d heard lots of Disney stories and had lots of books read to him, and had abstracted out a lot of information, but he hadn’t quite got it right, and it was all seething around in his head, and I just said, well, what could you do, tap, and he went, oh I know what I could do.

I could take my sword and I’d get my dad, which is a good notion, right, ‘cause he’s small, and then I’d jump up on the dragon and I’d pop out both of its eyes with the sword so it couldn’t see me, and then I’d go down its throat to the box where the fire came out, and then I’d carve a piece out of the box and I’d use that as a shield, and I thought, great, you really got the story, and the story’s something like this, right: If you’re being plagued by midget dwarfs and you wipe them out and they keep multiplying, well you’re obviously aiming at the wrong target, right? You should be going to their source.

So he went after the dragon, but not only after the dragon, he went right down the throat of the dragon, which is, you know, a fairly brave thing to do, and then right to the place where the fire, the transforming element, was being produced, and he took a piece of the device that made the transforming element, and he used it as a shield. Okay. Well that’s really cool, and the story’s better than that, I think, and it’s true even, so it’s not one of those fake, he-was-dreaming-and-then-woke-up sort of stories; this actually happened; he didn’t have any more nightmares, so when I checked with his mother, repeatedly after that because I thought, well this is too good to be true, right? He’s got this terrible night terror thing, he does one little mythological dream thing, and, bang, he’s better, but that’s the case, it is the case, he didn’t have any more nightmares after that, and I think that’s because he’d almost already got it, right; he was running around like a knight; he knew, almost, it just had to be made a little more explicit, and not even that explicit ‘cause it was still a story.

He didn’t know you should go to the source of your anxieties, right, to the thing that plagues you the most, and you should explore that in detail until you find the information that it contains that will protect you against it. He couldn’t say that, but he could tell the story, and he could act it out, and that looked like it was good enough, so that’s pretty cool. So he basically, you know, he managed this; essentially, he fought the dragon of chaos, popped back up, as what, as he who can obtain victory over the dragon of chaos, and that’s a pretty good story because it says, well, if your frame of reference gets blown away by something you don’t understand, some new challenge, and you face the challenge, at least courageously and humbly, which means, you know, you’re not gonna run away, and you still have something to learn, then you can extract something out of the battle that will enable you to withstand it.

And you think, well why should I believe that, right, and the answer to that would be, well, don’t knock it till you try it, and the second answer would be, that’s exactly what we do in clinical psychotherapy all the time, and there are endless amounts, I think, of empirical evidence saying that you bring someone in, they’ve got an anxiety disorder, maybe they’re even depressed, whatever, they’re running away. You say, you actually don’t have to run away; here’s what you have to do: you have to break the problem down into little pieces, digestible pieces, and then you have to hit it one by one, and what you’ll discover is, not that you habituate to the anxiety because that’s a silly theory; instead what you discover is that you thought you were the person who had to run away, but it turns out you’re not the person who has to run away, you’re the person that can stand there while you’re anxious and learn something.

And what you most particularly learn is that you’re the person who can stand there when they’re anxious and learn, and if you’ve learned that, you don’t have to be anxious anymore, or even more importantly, if you’re anxious, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean your life’s over, it just means that there you are on the threshold, right, between what you know and what you don’t know, and you have something to learn, and you can learn it, and I think that’s what the empirical evidence suggests too because you got Edna Foa’s work with post-traumatic stress disorder victims, primarily women who were violently raped, and Foa says, well I know you don’t like to think about the event, and it’s no bloody wonder, look what it did to you, and how terrible it was, but if you re-live it over and over and over again in your imagination, in as much detail as possible, including all the motivational and emotional details, which she measures psycho-physiologically, you will get better faster and you will stay better longer, and her work’s well documented.

And then there’s endless cases of exposure in psychotherapy, you can certainly eliminate simple phobias within an hour, and even complex phobias like agoraphobia, which is more like fear of everything. It’s not an intractable disorder. Imagine that throughout your whole life you never turned away from a mistake, not even once, never. So that whenever you made a mistake that you could rectify, you did rectify it. Then the question would be, well, what exactly would you be like? Would you be suffering from all your existential trouble? Would you be vulnerable to anxiety? What would you be like? And then I think, well I only know a couple of stories like that.

And the one that I told you is the story of Solzhenitsyn. Because Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist sitting in the concentration camps in the Gulag archipelago, thinking, starving, this isn't so good. How in the world did I get here? And the simple story is well Stalin put you there and he was bad, right? End of story. It's not your problem. Stalin's problem. But Solzhenitsyn said, well, that doesn't really leave me anything to do, right, to construe myself as a simple victim of fate? And I do have a lot of time on my hands since I'm not really doing anything that requires a tremendous amount of intellectual effort. Let's try a game.

Let's do this. Let's pretend that the reason that things happen to me that I don't like, even terrible things say, or that I can't tolerate, is not because I'm a victim of fate, evil cruel fate, but because there’s something I didn't do. And so Solzhenitsyn said, well, I'm gonna go back over my whole life, right? Step by step, detail by detail. And I’m gonna try to remember every time I let something go or I didn't do something I was supposed to. Not because of some adherence to some, you know, arbitrary moral code, 'cause we don't believe in those anyways, right? But just because I noted that I can tell when I owe a debt to existence, right?

So then you look at Solzhenitsyn and he says, okay, well so I spent fifteen years trying to untie all the knots that I tied up in my brain. And the consequence was, of that was first I started to notice there are some people out there I really admired, man. They were so tough it was unbelievable. You put them in the worst circumstances and they didn't bend an inch. They were tough. And even the nastiest prison guards in the... well, they could kill them, that's for sure. But they couldn't bend them. And they couldn't break them. And I really learned something from that, right? And it's a good story.

Because he's in the worst possible circumstance. So there's kind of no bottom past that. You don't get much worse than the Gulag prison camp, right? That’s, it’s cold. You don't get anything to eat and you’re being worked to death, right? For something pointless. And to serve Stalin. That's, that's the bottom. And he said even under those circumstances there were still people who could thrive, who could manifest admirable qualities. He said once I figured out I was wrong, I could actually find them and learn from them.

Then he wrote this book, which you know about, the Gulag Archipelago, which was released in the west and then circulated all through the Soviet Union. And was undoubtedly one of the factors that contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. And so then you think, well that's pretty interesting, isn't it? You got this one wacko, right? Russian prisoner, starving to death. Tattooed. He says maybe I had something to do with this. But he didn't mean it in some casual sort of, maybe I had something to do with this way. He meant geez, this is really awful. Doesn't get much worse. Maybe it's my fault. You know, I don't know how it could be.

But it, after all, I'm the one that's suffering. So, maybe it was me. Maybe I could fix it. What would happen if I did? And so his conclusion was at the end. And it's not a conclusion that he reached alone, was one person who stops lying can bring down a tyranny. And you think that’s a metaphorical statement, right? Because you're the victim of your own tyrannies, just as you are the victim of someone else's tyrannies. And maybe if you stop lying, construed in this manner of sin of omission, right?

Don't avoid anomalies anymore. But confront them head on. Maybe if you quit lying, well then you wouldn't be a victim of tyranny. Maybe no one else would be either. The G.R.E. say, the bad exam, that’s a bad thing, but it’s not the worst thing; the worst thing is the sort of thing that knocks existentialists for a loop, right, the worst thing is more like Ivan Karamazov’s suffering of innocent children, right? The fact that children are tortured, or the worst thing is the fact that perfectly good people get sick and die, and sometimes painfully, or the worst thing is there are tyrants all over the world and they torture people for no cause or maybe even just because they like torturing people, and that’s an anomaly of a different order, right?

It’s not just that you’re going from Point A to B and something you don’t like happens, it’s more like there are some aspects of existence that look so terrible in and of themselves associated with our vulnerability that just apprehending them might be enough to knock the bottom out of your faith in any frame of reference, and that’s a kind of Nietzschean theme. Nietzsche says: look, when you’re going from Point A to B and something bad happens, something you don’t expect, you don’t get to where you wanted to go, that’s bad, but what’s even worse is, you can’t have any faith in the frame of reference that you were using, ‘cause it’s been invalidated.

But what’s even worst is, you plow your way through two or three frames of reference, and then you start to develop some skepticism about frames of reference in general, right? So I was a socialist, say, and then I was a Catholic, and, you know then I developed some new age philosophy, and none of those really worked, and what that made me think was, well you can’t trust socialism, you can’t trust Christianity, and those new age people are certainly out to lunch, maybe you can’t trust any frames of reference, and that’s a really devastating discovery.

And Nietzsche associated that with the death of God, right? It’s like, no frames of reference work, and then you have the problem that, well, without a frame of reference life is chaos, and chaos is intolerable, and therefore logically life is intolerable. And I tried to make a case for you then that’s kind of a side case, which was, people protect their ideologies ‘cause they don’t want to lose their frames of reference, they don’t want to fall into chaos, but then there’s this additional problem, which is that you can develop a kind of deep cynicism about life in a secondary manner, which is like constant loss of faith.

Maybe what you conclude under those conditions, like the aggressive child concludes, is that, fundamentally, I’m not to be trusted, you’re not to be trusted, society is not to be trusted, and maybe the structure of the world as a whole isn’t to be trusted, and therefore, logically, you’re more or less obligated to work against it, and so then you have a nice sub-story for the propagation of evil, which is, well, we like to have our ideological frames of reference retained, and that gives us ample reason to squash anyone that’s different, but then there’s this additional reason, which is, when you get right down to it, things are pretty, bloody awful, and maybe the sensible thing to do is to just work for the annihilation of things, and I think we’ve had endless examples of people who did precisely that in the 20th Century and almost got away with it.

In case you’re tempted not to take this sufficiently seriously, right, we know that Stalin, in all likelihood, who I think you could make a case for being if not the most evil man that ever lived, certainly the most evil man that lived this century, and that’s really a high honor, right? ‘Cause he was up against some really top contenders. We know, as a consequence of recently-released KGB documents, that he was probably gearing up to start the Third World War, and not one of these little half-rate, you know, little local Third World Wars, we are talking about the whole H bomb exchange thing designed to eradicate, you know, the U.S. for sure, but also the Soviet Union.

And, well, mere territoriality isn’t enough to account for that, but then maybe you can see Stalin’s point, right? Like Tolstoy can see it, you know, if life is really so awful at bottom, which there are perspectives from which that certainly seems to be the case, then why bother having it around at all. Well, you know, that’s a pretty dismal perspective, so that’s a real anomaly, right? That’s not one of these little second-rate you’ll-get-over-it-in-a-month-or-two anomalies, this is the sort of anomaly that’s laid out in Genesis, where Adam and Eve discover that they’re mortal, vulnerable, they’re gonna die, that really takes the shine off existence out of paradise they go, they wander around the planet for the rest of history, you know, working themselves to death and being miserable and killing each other, and that’s basically the story that’s laid out in the Old Testament.

And viewed from that perspective, well, it’s not precisely an empirical description of the big bang say, but it’s not a bad description of the nature of human existence, and it’s pretty dismal. There’s an essential symbolic relationship between the ingestion of food and its transformative capacities and the ingestion of ideas, and their transformative capacity. And what happens when Adam and Eve eat this fruit, which they’re not supposed to eat, is that they learn that they’re going to die, and that screws up Paradise, and in case you just think I’m making this up, which would be, you know, kind of annoying, then you want to look at this picture, which is from the 14th Century, and it’s a really remarkable picture.

So what you’ve got in the middle here is the tree of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and you’ve got Eve over here, and you’ve got the Church here, and what you see happening, you got to look really carefully at this tree ‘cause the first thing you see is it’s got this snake wrapped around it, this agent of transformation, right, who’s associated with Satan, and then up in the branches you have apples and you have skulls, and then if you look at Eve here, she’s got grapes here, and a skull in her hand, and what this artist is trying to indicate is that there’s this tight relationship between Eve tempting Adam towards higher knowledge and delivering him death.

So that’s a pretty dismal story, and all the people over here on the left side, all these unhappy people, are the people who are living in chaos and misery as a consequence of being, of having their vulnerability revealed to them, and that’s the negative side of the story, but then there’s the positive side of the story over here, and it’s just as complicated, and that’s partly why it’s expressed in imagistic form, so you’ve got the Church here, symbolized at least in part as Mary, and she’s handing out something too, and if you look at those they’re little round circles with crosses on them, and what those are, are hosts, hosts, they’re the symbols of transformation, particularly in Catholicism.

Now that’s a very complicated idea, and this is the idea, it’s something like this: At Christ’s last supper before he was crucified, he told his disciples that they were going to have to ingest him, right, so they gave them wine and bread, and the wine was blood and the bread was flesh. And what’s the idea, what does it mean to incorporate someone? It means to embody them, that’s what it means, and this, this imagistic ritualistic process, is the notion that in order to attain redemption, it’s necessary to embody the hero, and that’s kind of what this picture is trying to portray. It says, okay, well you got this death apple over on the left-hand side, and that’s not so good, and you need an antidote to it, and the antidote is whatever this represents, whatever this represents.

And you see up in the tree here there’s all these hosts hanging. Now the hosts are representative of Christ, and for complicated reasons they’re made out of wheat, say, and partly the reason they’re made out of wheat is because if you look at hero Gods prior to Christianity, you see that wheat was often conceptualized as a dying and redeemed God, right, because it would die in the Winter and then be re-born in the Spring, just like all plants are. And the notion of the dying and redeeming, the dying and resurrecting hero, was kind of, what would you say, layered on top of that older agrarian idea, and all mixed together, and it sort of popped out in this idea of the host.

And so the idea here is that whatever ails human beings, which is their knowledge of vulnerability and death, can be rectified by their incorporation of whatever this symbol represents. And so then you might ask, well what exactly does that symbol represent, and, of course, the standard Christian answers to that, and the extended Christian answers are, well it represents your faith in Christ, say, but that’s not a very useful answer, all things considered, so let’s look at it in a little bit more complicated way. It’s not a useful answer I think because it’s too sectarian, right? It excludes many, many people, this notion, and there’s a whole formalism that you have to buy into to even get access to what that story means, and it’s an unfortunate formalism because first of all I think it’s more appropriate to an earlier time and place, and second of all because I think we’re actually sophisticated enough now intellectually, psychologically, to actually start to understand what some of these stories mean.

And since we have reasonably well-developed brains, and we might as well use them, it would be better if they were on our side, so to speak, than constantly conspiring to undermine our faith. Let's look at what a person is like. And a person is sort of just as complicated as an object, which is not that surprising 'cause there's an aspect of us that is object-like, right? Our objective being. And we know people are unbelievably complicated. They have nervous systems that have more connections in them than there are subatomic particles in the universe, just for starters.

And so that means that when you're looking at another person, you're looking at something that's more complicated than anything else that exists anywhere, including the sum total of everything that exists everywhere, except other people. More complex than everything. And then you have to understand too that just because you don't think of yourself that way doesn’t mean you're not that way. It just means that your conscious mind, your rational mind say isn't sophisticated enough to actually completely model who or what you are. And that's obvious because that's why we study ourselves. We don't know who we are. We're trying to figure it out. We've been trying to figure it out ever since we woke some thousands of years ago. We don't know when.

And you think well if you look at people, well you know, there's the kind of obvious level that you see people at, the self level, which is the privileged level of analysis for the west. But you’re a member of a family. And if I said well are you more yourself or your family, you might say well, most of the time I think I'm more myself, but I might be willing to sacrifice my life for my child's. In which case I would say well, then you’re just as much your child as you are you. Or maybe you’re even more your child. And what about your family? Well that's a tough question too. And then what about your cultural group?

Well you say no, it's me, not my cultural group. But then I'd say well what if there's a war? Is it you or your cultural group? And then you’ll say oh it's my cultural group. And then you see as well, well at this level of analysis are you your biological group? Is that what you identify with, the biosphere say? You say well no, not generally. But there's a lot of environmentalists out there, and they say well what we should primarily be concerned with is the global health of the planet because our survival depends on that. We're as much that as we are the self.

And you might not agree with that. And I suspect that most of the time there's screwy reasons for proposing such a thing. But on the other hand, a case can be made. I mean we know that you can undermine your ecosystems. It happened in Spain. They let, four hundred years ago they let the sheep eat everything. And so Spain turned into a desert. Doesn't seem like a particularly wise move. And then you think well below the phenomenological level there's all these sub-elements of you, your physiological structure, your cellular structure, your atomic structure. To infinite investigation. Absolutely complex.

You'll never exhaust it if you investigate it. And it's perfectly reasonable to presuppose that you're all these things. How does it change the world if you stop thinking about it as made of objects? But instead made of your own experience? And how does it change the world if you think you have an ethical relationship with that experience that, that's a primary fact, not some secondary derivative? So primary a fact that you can't even look at the world except through an ethical lens, primary fact. What is, how does that change the way you conceptualize yourself in relationship to the world? I don't know.