The Problem That Won’t Let You Go

Hi everybody. I'm pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week from my extensive tour archive beginning this Sunday and then repeating every Sunday after that. This allows me to do something interesting and useful while I'm otherwise incapacitated. My health is such at the moment that I can't really return to podcasting or public lecturing, but we recorded these with the express intention of preparing them for release and we've all determined that this is a very good time to do that. So, that's what's going to happen. I hope you find them useful and compelling. They'll be particularly attractive to those of you who liked my early YouTube work that was very lecture focused. It's a return to my roots I suppose in some ways and I'm as happy as I can be under the current circumstances given my ill health to be participating in this process and to have these lectures prepared for release. Thank you very much for your continued interest and support. >> There's no adventure without trouble and the greatest adventure has the most trouble. And if you took on the full trouble of your life unstintingly, you'd have an adventure that would justify the misery. [music] Why do you need a why? Have you tried making your way forward without meaning? What are you going to do? You're going to work with no purpose? You're going to sacrifice with no purpose? You're going to suffer with no purpose? Present or absent, we wrestle [music] with God. That's human destiny. All aimed at answering the same question. On what [music] principle is the world founded and on what principle should the world be founded? If you gaze upon all the things that terrify you simultaneously, then you become [music] who you could be and that would be the spirit that could withstand death and hell and yet prevail. >> [cheering] [applause] >> Thank you. So, I was sitting backstage trying to figure out how I would open this 50-city tour new tour. And a phrase came into my mind and that was present or absent, we wrestle with God. And that reminded me of an interview I did a while back with a very urbane and sophisticated English actor, Stephen Fry. And I did a debate with Stephen. He was on my side at uh forum called the Munk Centre in Toronto. I debated a We debated a New York Times journalist and you can imagine what that was like. And uh um a compatriot of hers uh And Mr. Fry was a delight. He's educated the way that only educated Englishmen are educated with their with the accent that makes them sound intelligent even if they're reading a telephone book. And uh he was witty and charming and brilliant and everything you'd hope a man might be. And we got to know each a bit, you know, um and I interviewed him for my YouTube channel and he's a he's very interested in mythology. He's he's very interested in stories. Well, he's an actor, so that makes sense. Stories compel him. And myths myths are the deepest form of stories. That's a good way of thinking about it and we'll talk about that a lot trying to get to the bottom of just what a story is and Stephen said some things that were quite surprising to me. He he said a lot. I listened to him a lot. He needed to talk. People really need to talk. They really need to be listened to. And that's partly because we actually organize our brains at the highest level, our psyches, our souls at the highest level of abstraction and unity with language. And if we don't have someone to listen and and to allow us to think on our feet, we our brains get terribly disorganized and our aim goes astray and we become chaotic and anxious and we wander off into the desert or off a cliff. It's it's not a good thing. And Stephen is a very intelligent man and uh he had a lot to say. And he said something that I found extremely interesting. There's a scene in Dostoyevsky's great book The Brothers Karamazov, which is a classic scene. Uh the book features the brothers, obviously. Two of whom are Ivan and Alyosha. And Al- Alyosha. And Alyosha is a monastic novitiate, so he's a religious man. And his brother Ivan is a charming materialistic atheist, uh who can really wrap his brother up in verbal arguments with no problem. One of the things that makes this book so utterly remarkable is that Ivan really has everything going for him on the arrogant intellect side. But Dostoevsky shows in the dramatization and characterization in the novel that Alyosha is the better man. And what he's trying to indicate there is that whatever constitutes the deepest form of ethic is not necessarily the same thing that makes you the most effective verbal adversary. And also to make the point that just winning the argument doesn't mean you're right. And that's something to really remember with people. It's really something to remember with your wife or your husband. But I'm dead serious about that, you know. The fact that you might be able to defeat your wife in an argument or vice versa does not mean that you were right. Right? Um and and if you're wrong and you win, that's a really bad thing. Cuz then you're wrong and you think you're right. And if you were unbearable before, you're going to be a lot more unbearable after that. And so, one of the reasons you really want to listen to your partner, and maybe even help them make their point, is you know, just so you could investigate the off probability that someone as you still has something to learn. And you know, the thing is if you're stupid and you learn why, you know, it's painful, the advantage is that you don't have to be stupid again in the future. And that's a big advantage, you know. And it's a really big advantage for your wife. So, and so Ivan trounces Alyosha regularly when they have discussions about, for example, whether or not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the proclamation that absent or present we wrestle with God. Ivan does something famous in this book. He He mounts what's probably the most powerful argument ever offered in a in the literary domain for the for the atheist claim. And he does it essentially on moral grounds, interestingly enough. He tells this story that Dostoevsky actually took out of a Russian newspaper about this four-year-old girl who had tyrannical, terrible, brutal, psychopathic, tyrannical parents. And one night to punish their daughter, they locked her in the outhouse. And this was Russia, and it was like 40 below, and she froze to death during the night while she was screaming to be released. And that became a scandal in Russia. And it was a well- publicized event. Well-publicized, horrifying event as the torturous death of a child is self-evidently, we hope, a moral crime. Though that we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently. Um And Dostoevsky uses that event as an argument that Ivan puts forth about the I would say about the iniquity of existence, essentially. And he asks Ivan asks his brother, you know, if this God you believe you believe to be a moral being, said, is willing to torture even one child to death, regardless even if that holds up the whole world, is that something you yourself would do? That's what he asks his brother. And Alyosha has no idea what to say because what do you say to to a question like that? And Ivan says to his brother, I know you wouldn't do that. But the God that you claim exists and that is good and that you worship apparently does. And so, apart from the utter preposterousness from a materialistic perspective say that the deity is a necessary supposition, I think your case for his existence is shaky on moral grounds. And Alyosha is silent in the onslaught of that argumentation, but uh it isn't obvious that it shakes his faith and it's still the case that as the novel progresses he shows himself to be the better man. Ivan, being brilliant intellect, is characterized by the pride that the brilliant intellect has as its greatest sin. You know, I've been thinking recently about how the cosmic scales of justice are balanced. Let's say there's a gospel line that says that to those from those who to whom much has been given, much will be expected or demanded. And that's a very interesting line, you know, because one of the things we wrestle with in the culture now, let's say, is the issue of privilege. Maybe you're born wealthy, maybe you're born tall, maybe you're born Caucasian. Apparently, that's an advantage. Maybe you're born Asian, maybe you're born good-looking. You know, we are all awarded privileges that uh constitute a temperamental advantage or maybe a situational advantage. And there's something that seems unfairer about that, arguably. It's certainly the case that people differ painfully in their intellectual capacity, for example. It's also equally obvious that that difference is a major determinant of success economically, let's say, as you move forward. Even the trait conscientiousness, which is associated with orderliness and industrious industriousness, and also predicts economic success, has quite a substantial genetic influence, which means that it's really not attributable to the It's not a trait that's attributable to the person that bears it. It's a gift in some ways that's given to them at birth. And you might say, well, if talents are and abilities are distributed unequally, how can there be any justice? And the answer to that might be, if you're fortunate, you better pay for it somehow. And one of the things you see with people who are very intelligent is that they fall prey to the temptation of pride. And that temptation for intelligent people is proportionate to the degree of their intelligence. And I would say the potential downside of their gift gone astray is sufficiently great to be the factor on the other side of the scale. Now, so if you're intelligent and you're a proud of that and you get arrogant, that will take you places that you couldn't go if you weren't that bright. And those aren't going to be places that you're particularly going to enjoy being. >> Imagine your favorite lecture, dial that up on max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements [music] to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture. >> I went to college because I had to. I go to Peterson Academy because [music] I want to. I'm still paying off college from 10 years ago, and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college. >> universities, a lot of times it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy [music] as the professors at Peterson Academy. >> It is a completely different experience to learn from somebody >> [music] >> who actually wants to teach you. >> If you've been on the fence about this, this is the time. >> That thing that's calling [music] to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself. You have the opportunity to investigate that calling. >> And so, with every gift comes a equivalent temptation, and with every talent comes an equivalent responsibility. And I really do believe that's the case. You know, I think that if nothing else, if you are unfairly privileged, and you don't make much of that, if you don't offer other people the benefit of your privilege, then you'll take yourself apart in one way or another. And so, Ivan's a very intelligent man, and he's very prideful as a consequence, and that doesn't work out very well for him, and and uh he points to the suffering of children as his evidence against the existence of God, and when I was talking to Stephen Fry, he did something that was similar. And I found this extremely interesting because first of all, he talked about his interest in mythology, and then he made a claim which I believe to be untrue, that the mythology upon which are the stories, the deep stories, cuz that's what I mean when I say mythology, the deep stories upon which our culture are predicated, the essentially the biblical stories, were of perhaps inferior quality to other collections of ancient stories that we have accumulated. And that surprised me because that's by no means evident to me. And I know a reasonable amount about mythology. And I've found great wisdom in Taoism and and in ancient Egyptian theology and in ancient Mesopotamian theology and many places that I've looked, but I certainly the case that I found a wealth of wisdom at least as rich in the biblical corpus and the Judeo-Christian stories. And I would say deeper. And that's partly because a lot of them were a lot of those stories were they're the culture part of the culture heritage of Judaism. And the Jews are smart. And preternaturally smart in some ways. And they were immensely remarkable stellar storytellers. And the stories they told are unbelievably deep. They're insanely deep. And we'll wander through a couple tonight. And I'll show you some of that depth. And I'll And then Fry did something interesting. You know, he he started talking about God. And I said, "Well, you know, what what's your problem exactly with with God as a concept?" And I was expecting something akin to the materialist atheist notion that God is a superfluous hypothesis. Um And uh you know, that's a perspective, but not a very deep perspective in my estimation. And a very dangerous one as we're finding out right now. But Fry actually got angry. And what he got angry about, one of the things he pointed to, was the suffering of children, just like Ivan. He he talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer. You know, and uh how dreadful that was and how preposterous it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering of innocence. That anything that could be regarded as a transcendent good might be held to exist. Now, but and fair enough, you know, you can understand that argument, but what I found so remarkable was he was actually angry about it. He was angry about it. He was morally outraged about it. He was shaking his fist at the sky. Well, that's what you do to someone that you're angry about. You don't shake your fist at the rocks on the ground. You shake your fist at the imaginary being in the sky, even if you're an atheist. And that's an interesting thing because what it what it indicates, at least to some degree, is that A, even if you're atheistic, you wrestle with God. And B, even if you're atheistic, you're at least unconsciously in a relationship. Because why else bother with the anger? Why else what else is the source of the moral outrage? And you know, one of the things I've noticed is that cuz I've read a lot of comments from atheists like, I don't know, maybe more than anybody else in the world. You know, I'm dead serious about that because I did I've done a lot of analysis of biblical stories, let's say, online. And I read I read most of the comments that are put on my YouTube channel, and that's often like, you know, a thousand 5,000 comments a week. A lot of comments. And some of the arguments that the atheists mount against what I'm elucidating, let's say, are rationalistic, materialistic, atheist objections. And but most of them are angry. And a lot of them are written by people who were hurt by people who purported to be religious at some point in their lives. You know, they had a tyrannical They encountered the tyranny of dogmatic insistence in religious guise, and that damaged them and left them with with a resentment towards anything with a religious flavor, let say. But even that, that's not a rational argument, by the way. Let's point that out very clearly. That's an emotional argument. Um and it's the kind of emotional argument that you would mount against someone that you were in a relationship with. Now, then you might ask yourself about that. Are we in a relationship with the spirit of being and becoming? That's a good way of thinking. But I don't mean with the material world. That's not what I mean exactly, because the material world, in some sense, isn't the whole world, you know? And we all know that, because, well, first of all, we exist in the within the material world, and we're conscious, and we don't know how to relate that to the material realm at all. Not at all. We have no idea. We don't understand the relationship between consciousness and matter at all. And you might say, well, it can be reducible to neurological function, and I would say most of the neurological function that characterizes you has no consciousness. And so, how we distinguish between the neurological function that hypothetically underlies consciousness and the neurological function that seems equally complex, but has no consciousness, is not something that anyone knows. And I would say, the one undeniable truth that we have at hand is the fact of our consciousness. That was basically Descartes' proposition. He said, I think, therefore, I am. But what he meant in more modern parlance is something like the brute fact of my own consciousness is one is the most is the deepest of undeniable realities. And so what that appears to indicate is that well, you can make a materialist case that matter is at the bottom of being itself, but you can make an equally powerful case philosophically that consciousness is at the bottom of things. Part not not least because I can't even imagine how you could come out come up with an an account of being, materialist or otherwise, in the absence of consciousness. If there's no experience of what is there? And no materialist has ever come up with a satisfactory answer to that. That's a complicated question. And then so there's the fact of consciousness and that's a strange fact. And then there's also the fact of the manner in which we're organized, we're constructed. So, human beings are personalities. And personalities exist in relationship. And in so far as we're personalities, we're our personalities, speaking materialistically, let's say, are an evolved function. We're personalities because being a personality is what allows us to orient ourselves in the world. And so if at the highest level of our being we're personalities, how is it that we're not in relationship with the essence of reality? Otherwise, it wouldn't work. So, that's a very interesting that's a very interesting fact. Now, here's another twist for you. So, I've been in touch with Richard Dawkins, who's probably the world's most famous living atheist, and he's like the avatar of the enlightenment mind. He's the last standing avatar of the enlightenment mind. That's a good way of thinking about it. And uh formidable a formidable uh a formidable intellect. And uh someone I actually like. I've met Richard a couple of times. And uh he's an ordinary bastard, you know? And he's tough as a boot, and you don't mess with him lightly. And he's disagreeable enough to cut you into pieces like Englishman can at the drop of a hat. But, you know, I think fundamentally he's a genuine scientist and uh and that that's a difficult thing to be. And you have to be a dedicated pursuer of the truth to be a scientist. And there's a certain moral element to that, a profound moral element to that. Um and I I I tried to get Dawkins to talk to me a number of times, and he put me off you know, in various ways for a while. But then one day he he wrote me, and he said, "I don't know what the hell I can never understand what you're talking about, Peterson, but but uh I don't know why you want to talk to me, and I don't think I'd have the patience for it anyways. But uh I kind of think maybe you're interested in this." And so he sent me a paper, and I thought, "You son of a you know exactly why I want to talk to you." And so it was a paper I actually knew about from about 30 years previously, and he made a very interesting claim in that paper. He said that every biological organism is a microcosm of its environment by necessity. Like a model. Like a like a low-resolution representation of its environment. And and here's what he meant by that. So, he said if Imagine you were an alien scientists like to to imagine such things. They don't believe in angels or demons, but aliens, man. Well, those those things are there for sure. Anyways, anyways. He said, "Imagine you gave an alien scientist a bird a dead bird." And he said, "What could this scientist conclude about What could the alien, who'd never seen the Earth, let's say, conclude about the Earth from analyzing the bird?" And the answer is, "Well, a tremendous amount, because you could you could calculate the density of the atmosphere from its wings. And if you analyzed its blood properly, you would know the composition of the atmosphere. And you'd be able to calculate the gravitational pull of the Earth and its approximate mass. And And you'd by analyzing its DNA at a deep level, you could reconstruct a lot of the tree of life that characterizes Earth itself. I mean, a bird is a densely packed microcosm of its environment. And I thought, "Well, I don't know if you know this, Dr. Dawkins, but there was a medieval conceit among Christians hundreds of years ago that the human soul was a microcosm." Right. And which was a reflection of the cosmic order. And your proposition as an evolutionary biologist is that you can't adapt to an environment that you're not a microcosmic replica of. That's exactly the same claim that the Christians made like in in the in the medieval period. We're a microcosm. Our soul reflects the cosmic order. You might say, "Well, what the hell does that mean, Dr. Peterson?" It means that if you're not in tune with the structure of reality at all of the levels at which it manifests itself, then you die. That's what it means. And so, I found that extraordinarily interesting, especially because it has another implication, which is that if we are a microcosm of the cosmos itself, and we're a personality, then maybe the deepest way that we can conceptualize our relationship to being and becoming itself is as a covenant, as a relationship, as a as an understanding between beings, rather than as an alienated consciousness inhabiting a cold and dead material world. And so, I was interested in that partly because there's an insistence in the Old Testament stories that we're in relationship with being and becoming. And you know, when Tammy made reference to that in relationship, let's say to prayer, and it's easy to be cynical about such things, especially if you're a Luciferian intellect, but I would say that the thought that rationalists worship is secularized prayer historically speaking. And so, why would I say that? Well, you you follow along, you tell me if you think that this is incorrect. I can't see a flaw in it. As a scientist, I might ask myself, well, what do I What do I do when I'm generating a scientific hypothesis? Now, this is a very interesting question because scientists never discuss how they generate their hypotheses. They write down their experimental results and their methods, and they just take the hypothesis part for granted. Or maybe they make up some story about how they were driven to their hypothesis by rational means, and that's just not true. That's not how it works at all. I had a great student at at Harvard, Shelley Carson. Um Shelley was uh creative and intuitive, and she'd come up with a bright idea, and you can't just write your damn bright idea down in a scientific paper. You have to tell people how you came to it logically. So, then she'd have to invent a story about how she came to her intuitive idea logically, and that was the introduction to her scientific paper. And scientists do that all the time. Every single scientific paper is like that. Where do your hypotheses come from? Your research question. What grips your interest? What compels you and calls you forward? And how does that make itself manifest? Zero instruction in that in the scientific realm. Okay, so let's take that apart a bit. Well, the first thing that you need if you're a scientist is a problem. It has to be a real problem. It has to be something and how do you know if it's a real problem? How do you know if you have a real problem? It won't let you go. Well, that's a funny way of thinking about it. It's like what won't let you go? You? Well, what do you mean it you won't let you go? This is your conscience, let's say. It's you that won't let you go. Well, if you can't let yourself go, if you can't escape from a problem that besets you, what makes it what's makes you think for a moment that it's you that's besetting you with the problem? And you know this perfectly well. You know this perfectly well because many times in your life if you had the chance of just saying to yourself, you should let that problem go, you would. But you can't. You can't, for example, when your conscience calls you out or if you do, you damage yourself by lying that deeply. And it's the same if something calls to you, not so much besets you, but grips your interest, which is something that happens to scientists all the time. They're insanely called forward by some phenomena and phenomena some set of phenomena. Phenomena means to shine forth. They're called forward by what shines forth to them. And so you need that calling and conscience to specify your problem. And so you do that in relationship to what besets you and interests you. And there's an autonomy in that. You know this, too. You can't decide what you're interested in. This is so weird. This is part of what got me interested in psychoanalysis thought so many years ago cuz Freud and Jung both said that there are autonomous There's an autonomy of spirit operating within you. They put it in the unconscious said, "You're motivated by things that aren't under your voluntary control." They have an autonomy. They call to you. They They plague you. You can't control it. Well, what the hell is that? So, you need to have a problem. And maybe it's a problem because you're fascinated by something. You're You're locked onto it by a a force that's beyond your control. Or you're plagued by it. Your conscience screams that you have to do something about the cancer of children, for example. Cuz someone needs to. Because the suffering is wrong. That's a moral claim, by the way, not a scientific claim. From the purely scientific perspective, the cancer cell has just as much right to live as you do. You start your investigation with an a priori set of moral claims. All sorts of moral claims. The claim that the truth is at hand if you approach the problem properly. The claim that the truth is comprehensible. You have to believe that to be a scientist. The claim that your pursuit of the comprehensible truth will make the world a better place. That's an axiom of faith. Are we so sure that our technology has made the world a better place? Well, maybe we are now, but if we wiped ourselves out with hydrogen bombs, we might rethink that hypothesis. So, it's not self-evident. You have to have a problem. You know, that's an interesting thing to know, too, you know, because you're going to have a lot of problems in your life. And a problem approached comprehensively is an opportunity. And that's something very, very useful to know. And the deeper the problem is, more it's going to hurt you. But the more opportunity lurks in that problem. Because the fact that it besets you means you could be the person to pursue the solution. And that's something very interesting to know. It's akin to the claim that the dragon hoards the gold. And implicit in that is the notion that the larger dragons have the more valuable gold. You know, and Tammy referred to that to some degree tonight. You know, she's been in a situation over the last few years where she's had to face very serious illness and death on a multitude of fronts in many, many ways. And that's about as bitter as it gets. Although as bitter as it gets is a very deep form of bitterness. And it it's not too much to say that because she approached the problem on her knees, let's say, that the net consequence of that suffering has been positive. And I suppose that's the secret to a life well lived, isn't it? Because there's going to be no shortage of serious problems that are coming your way. And if you can't transform themsel- them into stellar opportunities, then you're going to be left in the dust. And you do that at least not least by faith, but also as a consequence of a certain form of humility. So, we could get to that next. You have a problem. You're a scientist. The next thing you have to admit is you don't know the answer. And that's not much different semantically speaking than approaching the problem on your knees. It's like you have a problem, it's a real problem. It's an insufficiency. You have an insufficiency. You have to admit to the insufficiency. Deeply, you have to understand that it's an insufficiency that you would like to have rectified. You have to ask, you have to knock, you have to seek. And the consequence of that intensely pursued will be something like a revelation. You know, we say us moderns that we say things like I thought this up. And I would say that's not really very accurate psychologically or spiritually. If it was you that thought it up, why didn't you know it to begin with? Well, that's a good question, right? Where did that come from? How did you call it forth? Or under what conditions did it make itself manifest to you? Those are the same questions. You're not going to get much of an answer unless you ask the question. You know, and that's really what a prayer is in in the final analysis. It's an admission of insufficiency and it's a reaching into the beyond for a revelation. Now, thought itself doesn't end there because your prayers might be warped. And what that means to some degree is that the revel You might be aiming at the wrong thing. And what that might mean is the revelation you receive might not precisely be from God, which is why you have to test the spirits, so to speak, to see if they're of God. And there's actually no difference between that critical thinking. You know, you'll ask yourself a question, hopefully a well-aimed one, hopefully one that's aiming up, not something like, "How can I take advantage of this situation for myself in this moment maximally and to hell with everyone else?" For example, which isn't exactly a prayer to God, let's put it that way. And so, you have to check yourself and you do that with critical thinking of various sorts, which is another manifestation of the creative process. And I don't see any difference between that on the scientific front and prayer, not on the hypothesis-generating side. And so, and I think also it's completely reasonable claim anthropologically and historically to generate the hypothesis that the thought that moderns are capable of literate, semantically sophisticated moderns is a variant of the prayer which clearly preceded that historically. So, you know, there's a gospel statement that says, "If you ask, you'll receive. If you knock, the door will open. And if you seek, you'll find." But it's nested in another set of propositions, which is something like, "Careful what you ask for." And seriously. And so, if you ask for what is highest, you'll receive what is highest in return. And if you ask for what is lowest, you'll receive what is lowest in return. And I wouldn't recommend that. All right. Well, that's a bit of preamble musing, let's say. To set the stage, I have one other thing I want to discuss with you before we get to the stories themselves. I want to discuss with you what constitutes a story. Now, you know, we're engaged in a culture war. And part of the reason for that culture war is the clash of two claims about the structure of reality itself. And the rationalists and the empiricists, they make the claim that the world is composed of a set of objective facts, and that you can be guided by those facts. You can follow the science, for example, right into the All right, off the tyrannical cliff, as you may have noticed. Um the world is composed of a set of empirical facts. And that was opposed, starting in the 1970s, by the postmodernists who claimed that no, you see the world through a story. And uh turns out the facts support the postmodernists and not the scientists. And that isn't an opinion anymore, because the same realization occurred simultaneously in multiple fields of inquiry. So, the greatest neuroscientist in the world now regard each word as a micro narrative, let's say, or as a tool. The AI engineers learned that they could only produce supercomputing intelligences by training them within the framework of something approximating a hierarchy of values. The computational scientists learned that it was impossible to generate a robotic machine that could function merely as a consequence of modeling the facts. All of those things basically happened at the same time. And here's why. Here's why. 200 years ago, something like that, a Scottish philosopher named David Hume put forward a very famous proposition, which was that you couldn't derive an ought from an is, which meant something like no matter how many facts you aggregated around you, you couldn't use those facts as an unerring guide as as to where you should go. So, imagine this. Imagine that you're dropped in the ocean and you're trying to determine which way to swim. There's no set of facts at your disposal that is going to map that territory for you. The same is true if you're lost in an expansive desert. The geography itself will not signify to you your destination. Now, why is that? What is the problem? It seems like it's one of something approximating volume. The facts can't guide you because there's an infinite number of them. And if you rank order and prioritize them, you're not in the domain of facts, you're in the domain of value. So, and you do this. The perceptual scientists figured this out, too. You do this every time you take a glance. So, and this is so interesting, eh, because the empiricists say, "Well, you just look at the world and there are the facts." But, the perceptual scientists say, "No, you can't even look at the world without looking at the world through a lens of value." Now, and so what do I mean by that? Well, imagine you're out on a date. Okay, you're in the restaurant. There's a lot of things you could pay attention to. You could pay attention to the waitress who happens to be more attractive than your date, let's say. Now, that's not a strategy of value that's going to endear you to your date. Right, so what do you do if you're polite and you have a clue? And this is what you do with the person of the opposite sex, say that you're with all the time, is you you attend to the facts that accompany them. You prioritize your perceptions so that in the restaurant, for example, you don't listen to the conversations two tables away, although you could. You listen to what your date is saying. And the way you do that is you focus on what it is that she's uttering and you suppress into invisibility everything else. And what that means is that you put her utterances at the pinnacle of a structure of value and you subsume everything else beneath that. And you do that with every single glance you take. You couldn't even focus your eyes if you didn't do that. As perception, visual perception, auditory perception, they're they cannot be dissociated from action. You don't see and then act because you can't see without acting. And it's the same with all of your senses. And so you have to make a decision about what's important literally with every glance. Even with the unconscious movements that keep your eyes actually functioning because they're vibrating constantly, even though you don't know that because your brain corrects for it. You have to live within a hierarchy of value. You have to live within a hierarchy of value. There's no way out of that. And once you know that, and we know that, and we know that factually, we know that incontrovertibly, once you know that you live within a structure of value, two questions might arise. How is that structure of value to be characterized? And what should be valued? So, to answer the first question, a description of a hierarchy of value is a story. That's why we're so interested in stories. We want to see how other people see the world. We want to have them help us solve the problem of what to attend to. Here's a scientific justification for that claim. Your eyes evolved so that other people can easily see where you're pointing them. That's why you have whites. When you look at someone, when you talk to them, you look at their eyes. You look at their face, but mostly their eyes. And the reason you look at their eyes is so that you can see where they're pointing their eyes. Because if you can see where they're pointing their eyes, you can figure out what they're aiming at. And if you can figure out what they're aiming at, you can figure out what they're up to. And if you can figure out what they're up to, you can use your body to mimic their responses emotionally, and that's how you understand them. You say, "Well, how do you know that's true?" Think What do you do when you go to a movie? You pay to go see a movie. It's a story. You'll even go pay to see a story that horrifies and terrifies you. That's how important it is for you to understand the broad landscape of evaluation. You'll go watch someone confront a horrifying death, and you'll walk through those emotions just so you can orient yourself in that landscape. And you'll pay for it. And the reason you'll pay for it is because you'll pay for not doing it. And you'll pay more. So, you go to a movie and what do you do? You watch the hero. You watch the protagonist. And you try to infer what's he up to? What's he doing? Why is he doing it? What are his aims? What's his moral structure? And you lock on to him. And as soon as you start to understand his motivations, assuming the movie is well written and well portrayed, you start to feel the emotions. And that's because your body is You're using your body as a computational landscape to mimic the state of being that characterizes the protagonist. And then you split yourself into all sorts of people while watching the movie. One person per actor. And you experience all those emotions. And you absorb all those stories. And why do you do that? Well, maybe the protagonist is an anti-hero, like the Joker in Batman, like Heath Ledger's Joker. And why would you watch the Joker? To learn how not to let the world burn pointlessly. How about that? And why would you watch a superhero movie? Well, maybe to ally yourself with the central tenants of heroism per se. I mean, if you have a better explanation. What's the general explanation? It's entertaining. I enjoy it. Don't make too much of it. It's like, "No, sorry. You're gripped by an instinct." That's how a biologist looks at it or a psychologist. What else is dragging you to the movie theater? You can't just brush it off as entertaining. You're missing the point. Why is it entertaining? Why will you pay for that? Well, here's something even deeper question. You know that part of our attempt to build faster and faster computers is so that we can have more and more realistic fictional simulations. You don't need the newest supercomputer in your laptop. You were pretty much taken care of on that front in 1995. And so, what's driving our desire to build these insanely complex machines? Well, how about the ability to play more realistic games? Story-based games. How about the ability to construct more and more realistic fictional worlds? Why? Cuz it matters. It matters. So, then we might ask yourself, what are we to make of fiction itself? And a thoughtless rationalist would say, "Well, fiction is the opposite of fact." That's a stupid answer. And here's one of the reasons, is because there's a lot of reasons, but here's one. We seem to recognize different levels of quality in fiction. You know, you'll go home when you're tired and watch a movie you know to be trivial, light, shallow, and foolish. Just entertaining, right? It doesn't move you, doesn't require any effort on your part. You're probably even embarrassed to watch it. But, you know, maybe you worked hard that day and that's pretty much what's left of you. You know, you can lay on the couch and watch Barbie. And I could only make it halfway through Barbie, by the way. But then, you know, you'll you'll see a movie, for example, that moves you to your depths. It'll It'll evoke tears. It'll sometimes even change your life. You'll You'll read a book like that, a fiction book of fiction. And so, we we have this instinct and this unerring sense and this knowledge that there are levels of depth in fiction, right? There's There's levels of quality in fiction and what that seems to indicate is at least even if fiction is the opposite of fact, some fiction is much more real than others. And so I'm a great admirer of Dostoevsky, for example, and I loved clinical psychology. I loved being a clinical psychologist because I found that if I listened intently to my clients, they all turned into characters from a Dostoevsky novel. You know, because people are so interesting. If they If you get people to tell you the truth, they're so interesting that you want to run away screaming. And so, that's why husbands and wives don't listen to each other, by the way. It's They tell each other platit- platitudinous half-truths so that none of them are terrified enough to leave the house in a fit of horror. And they miss the best of the other person as a consequence of that cowardice. You know, what I mean? If you're If you're bored of your spouse, all that means is they're not letting you know who they are. Cuz if they did you'd be interested enough to stay awake at night worrying. So, here's a theory about fiction. We have to see the world through a hierarchy of valuation. And a description of a hierarchy of valuation is the story. You're looking at the world through the eyes of someone else trying to adopt their frame of reference, trying to understand their position, their aim, their conclusions, their emotions, their motivations. Now, imagine there's sets of stories, right? And some are more compelling than others. And then imagine you aggregate all the compelling stories and you make super compelling stories out of that aggregation and those are the deepest possible stories and the most real possible representations. That's what mythology is. It's it's a it's it's a form of truth that surpasses the merely literal. Now you might say, well, that's a preposterous claim. Nothing's more real than concrete reality. Really? How about numbers? What's more real? The world of brute material facts or the world of numbers? How powerful are you if you are a master of the world of numbers? Well, our computational devices are a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers. Our technological prowess is a consequence of our mastery of the world of numbers. Are numbers more or less real than what they represent? Well, I think the proper answer to that question is it it depends on your definition of real. It depends on the purposes toward which you're putting the levels of abstraction, but you're a bloody fool if you think the answer to that question is simple and you're certainly a fool if you think that making the claim that the realm of numbers is real is a preposterous claim. It's that just means that you have a definition of reality that you really know nothing about. Abstractions can be plenty real and deep fiction is the ultimate abstraction of value and that's crucial because we see the world through a structure of value. Now, the postmodernists figured this out in the 1970s. Why? Well, how about because they were literary critics? Now you'd think literary critics, no wonder they're in the university. Nothing more useless than a literary critic. What if you live by stories? Then there's nothing more powerful than a literary critic. Especially one that takes the stories your culture is predicated upon apart. Which is exactly where we are now. It's worse than that. Even though the post-modernists got their central claim correct that we see the world through a web of stories, let's say. They got their answer wrong. And that was because they were possessed by the spirit of Luciferian pride. They put the cart before the horse. They thought well, we have to see the world through a story. Now, remember these same people, they're all Marxists. And I'm not making this up. Go look it up for yourself. We're talking about France in the 1970s. Okay, so that in itself should be a clue. Right? And we know perfectly well that the universities have been left-leaning since the 1960s and that that was particularly true of France during the 1970s and probably no more true true more among the humanities oriented French intellectuals of the 1970s than anywhere else. And if they weren't outright Marxists, they were implicit Marxists and they said that themselves. And when Solzhenitsyn came out and demolished the moral pretensions of the communist universe, they kind of skedaddled underground, but not really. They just invented a kind of meta-Marxism that would have made old Carl, had he lived to understand it, spin and hopefully at a very rapid and uncomfortable rate for all of eternity. What did the postmodernists claim? The central story that possesses us is one of power and nothing else. Well, fair enough in some ways, you know, I mean certainly there isn't anyone here, there's anyone alive who hasn't been tempted by There's people who are unable to utilize power. And they're just useless. And then they might mask their lack of uselessness with a moral veneer. I'd never use power. And my objection would be well, doesn't really matter to me one way or another because you're so incompetent, you don't have the opportunity. And so that's not a moral claim. That was something Nietzsche pointed out in the late 1800s when in his critique of morality as cowardice. You don't If you're weak and useless, the best justification you have for it is that you don't do terrible things because you're good. It's like, no, you don't do terrible things just cuz you're useless. Now, that doesn't mean that's necessarily the only reason that people don't do terrible things. That is not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that the accusation thrown by the postmodernists at the human race that our fundamental motivation is one of self-serving power. Because power properly defined has to be self-serving. Otherwise, it's not power, it's cooperation. So, I need to exercise power if I'm trying to compel you to do something you don't want to do. Maybe that's all we do. You're out for your power, I'm out for my power. It's a bloody nightmare of power competition and whatever stability we manage to attain is merely a consequence of the balance of our fundamentally competing interests and that ethos is core to the unholy alliance between the postmodernists and the Marxists. There's no genuine reality, there's no genuine morality, there are a variety There's There's no genuine reality. There's nothing but a set of competing claims to power. And then there's the oppressed and the victimized and then there's the victimizer and that's a power dynamic and you can understand marriage that way and you can understand the family that way and you can understand history that way and it's nothing but power. And uh as I said, fair enough, you know, human beings are pretty damn brutal and you look at a regime like the National Socialist regime or Maoist China or Stalinist Soviet Union, you think or the degeneration of great institutions in the West and you think power's on the march and maybe there's nothing else. There are There are a group of people who use nothing but strategies of power. Psychopaths. They're about 3% of the population cross-culturally. And that fact in itself is pretty damn interesting because if there was nothing but power, why wouldn't the people who use nothing but power be the majority and be dominant? And they're not. Psychopathy turns out to be a very counterproductive strategy. Many psychopaths land up in prison. Psychopaths can't cooperate. If I interact with you and I get what I want from you on our first interaction and then to hell with you, you're not going to interact with me again. So, psychopaths are itinerant. Even psychopathic chimps don't do very well. The idea that the fundamental human motivation is one of power is about the most cynical and self-serving story that you could possibly tell. Now, it's a bit compelling, eh? It's compelling because when a human social organization goes wrong, it degenerates in the direction of power. You know, if you and your wife are not getting along, you can't cooperate, you can't communicate. That's all off the table. You're left with the relationship of tyrant to slave, and maybe you swap those roles. But, it's in the degeneration of the institution that the manifestation of power takes place. I suppose it can degenerate into a kind of puerile and infantile hedonism, too. Now, if you can't organize yourself at some relatively high level of sophistication, you can degenerate into the situation where you do nothing but allow yourself to be possessed by your basest whims. There's not much difference between that and being psychopathic, by the way. It's an unbelievably corrosive doctrine. But, then you might object, "That's naive because everything runs on power." I don't think it's naive at all, by the way. But, a more fundamental objection would be, "Well, if it's not power that the world is founded on, if it's not the war of all against all, then on what principle is the world founded?" And on what principle should the world be founded? And that's what the biblical corpus investigates. I say biblical corpus because it's a body, like a body of laws. It's a body of stories. It's a body of animating stories. That's another way of thinking about it. And all stories contain within them an animating spirit. That's the moral of the story, by the way. The seed around which the entire story organizes itself, or the seed from which it grows. The seed that is planted in you when you hear a story or tell a story. Over millennia, our ancestors aggregated stories that burned themselves into their memory. All aimed at answering the same question. Toward what should sacrifice be devoted? Now, that archaic terminology grates on our modern ears. We think of burnt altars and smoking carcasses and primitive gods that enjoy the smell of high-quality roasted fat, and we fail to investigate. To what end should sacrifice be devoted? What does that mean? You will wrestle with that question your entire life. There is no difference conceptually between sacrifice and work. They're the same thing. Work. The sacrifice of the present to the future. Right? If you're doing something for fun, if you're engaged in the present, if you're captivated by the moment, you're not working. You're enjoying yourself. You're being entertained. You're playing. What are you doing when you're working? You're striking a bargain with the future. Or you're striking a bargain with the spirit of the future. And the bargain is I'll give up something I I and value now on the understanding that it will be returned to me manifold in the future. That's why you work. And so then the That's in in in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve are tossed out of paradise because of their sin of pride, God informs them that in this fallen world, they will have to work. They will have to toil in the fields. They'll have to toil to bring forth children. They'll have to work. It's the human destiny to work. Why? How about because we're aware of the future? How would that be? Above all other animals, we understand that we we stretch across time, that you have to save for your retirement because the you now will be the you that's 65 and damn soon. And you have this perspective on the world that spans the ages, so to speak. And you have to make a bargain between what's neat and correct and enjoyable and fills you with enthusiasm at the moment and how you have to organize yourself into the future, to make a bargain with your future self, to strike the same bargain with everyone else and all their future selves, and balance all that in the moment with work. What kind of work? That's the story of Cain and Abel. What sacrifice best pleases God? Abel's sacrifices are accepted. His life goes well. Cain's sacrifices are rejected. He becomes resentful, arrogant, bitter, murderous, and then genocidal. Sound familiar? Those two things are laid out. Those two pathways of adaptation, those two pathways of narrative valuation are laid out at the outset of the biblical corpus in about 20 of the most tightly written sentences ever penned. The story of Cain and Abel is inexhaustible. It sets the pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers, between Batman and and the Joker, between Superman and Lex Luthor, between the Hobbit and Sauron, between Harry Potter and Voldemort. It's the eternal battle of good against evil. And that's the most fundamental narrative trope. And it's the meta story that burns us that's burned itself into our imagination and our memory. And why? Because that's your story. Whether you know it or not. And no matter where you are in that story, you're in that story. And no matter which side you're on or what stance you take, you're in that story wrestling with God. And that's human destiny. There's probably no one who thinks of God more than a committed atheist. Right, and that's not accidental. All right, so I'm going to walk you through a bit of the first story in the biblical corpus just to give you a flavor of of exactly how this works. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Um And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. A few sentences. A relatively radical claim. So, let me delve into this a little bit. Without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. It's a juxtaposition of a sequence of metaphors. The original Hebrew word was tohu va bohu. And tohu va bohu means like formless potential. The spirit of God is that which wrestles with with which with which confronts and battles and differentiates formless chaos into the manifest structures of the world. Okay. Now, and you're made in that image. What does that mean? Well, it's a claim about the fundamental structure of reality itself. And it's not a materialist claim, and not in the least. First of all, it claims the existence of something that in some sense is non-material. And I would say the closest straightforward word we have of understanding what that is is consciousness. That's the brute fact of your awareness, but more than that, the brute fact of the fact that your awareness is integrally involved with the fact of being itself. And more, and more, that the being of your consciousness gives rise to the world. Okay, so let's just take that apart for a minute. And you you follow along with me, and you tell me what you think about this. What is it that faces you when you wake up in the morning? That's the dawn of the new day, right? God creates the world in 7 days, units of time. You wake up in the morning when the sun rises and the light reappears. And what confronts you in the morning? And because you're a materialist materialist, you think well, my bed, my the furniture in my room, my my rug, my the artifacts around me. And I would say, really, when when you get up in the morning, the first thing that you perceive and conceive is the furniture that you're 100% familiar with. Or how about this? How about this? This is what confronts you. How about if you think about the last time you were depressed or anxious? There's a That's a good That's a good way in. What confronts you when you wake up in the morning? How about the malformed potential of your life? How about the wasted potential of your life? How about the increasingly chaotic and demented chaos of your life? How about all those opportunities you could have made something of had you chosen to? How about all the wasted opportunities that saturate your house? All the closets that haven't been organized, all the fights you haven't had with your wife, all the issues you haven't settled with your children. All of that formless, chaotic, anxiety-provoking, terrifying potential. Well, that's on the negative side. You might say that's the dragon that is there in the morning when you awaken. You can paint a positive picture that's equally compelling. Maybe you're at a peak in your life and you wake up in the morning filled with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, that means to be filled with the spirit of God. Enthuse. Thuse is theos, deos. God. To be filled with the spirit of God. To be joyfully abunding in faith and hope. And why? Because you see a new business opportunity make itself manifest. Or maybe you're in love with someone and the first thing you think about is the potential of that future relationship, even if that's the date that night. Or maybe you have a new child and you're deeply in love with that child and you think about the joys that the new day might bring if you only conducted yourself properly. And so what do you confront when you wake up in the morning? Well, how about a field of potential? Maybe that's what your consciousness is for. Your consciousness is the mechanism that confronts a field of potential and casts it into reality, that makes it tangible. Now, do you believe that? Well, do you make decisions? Do things happen as a consequence of your choices? Is that not part of assembling and forming the world? And don't we all know that the world that we aggregate around us in is in some wise a consequence of what we've aimed at? Of our own free choice. And you might say, "Well, I don't believe in free choice." It's like, do you believe in your wife's free choice? Try Try treating her like an automaton for a week and see how well your relationship goes. Well, dear, I know that you really can't help how you are and you're just moving robotically through the motions and no matter how disarrayed our relationship happens to be, I can't attribute any responsibility to you because I know that at your core you're nothing but a mindless deterministic robot. It's like you can't even have a relationship with yourself with that attitude, much less someone else. And so, you might claim to be uh determinist, which by the way is not a useful scientific stance because the universe is not a deterministic place and it can't be conquered by algorithmic calculation. So, and we know that and that's actually a fact, not an opinion, because at the quantum level the world is fundamentally indeterministic and that indeterminism makes it matter self-manifest at all the levels of reality. It doesn't work technically and it doesn't work practically. It's a preposterous scheme and you mostly want to believe it so that you don't have to take responsibility for life for your life, but the catastrophe of that is that that potential that you encounter when you awaken is in that potential is everything that could ever possibly be offered to you if you only knew how to seize it. And you know that because you're beckoned forward into the future by the fact that something new and redeeming could still make itself manifest. And if you don't have that, you can't get out of bed. You say I'm hopeless. I have no hope. I have no enthusiasm. The joy has gone out of my life. The neurological systems that signal movement forward to a desired end have shut down and left you suffering, left you with nothing but the bitterness of the potential that's going to make itself manifest in the most negative possible way if you can't organize yourself and confront the world. And that's the same spirit. That's the same spirit that's claimed in the great book of Genesis to make itself manifest at the beginning of time. The spirit that confronts potential itself and casts itself and casts that potential into tangible order. And not only order. This is repeatedly insisted upon in the text, the order that is good. So imagine that you're conducting yourself as a proper conscious moral agent in your family. What are you doing? You're taking the raw potential of your children and your family and you're transforming them into the order that is good. And how do you do that? Well, do you love your children? I didn't ask if you liked them. Do you love your children? And you say, well, at least I'd like to. You know, and I'm not being cynical about that. We're all imperfect and none of us love our children with the depth that we should. But you see the best of people, I would say, in the love that they manifest for children. And what does it mean to love a child? I mean, even if you're If you don't have much hope for yourself, even if you've given up on yourself, even if you're bitter about the fact that you've wasted your potential, you have a child and you think if only, God willing, things could be better for him. The potential that I see inside him that constitutes the core of my love, that vision of potential. That could make itself manifest in a manner I was never able to manage. And you pray that that occurs and it hurts you when you see your child deviate from that path. And so what does that mean? It means when you orient yourself by love, you strive to bring about, within the confines of your family, the order that is good or even very good. And what that implies, too, is that the ultimate aim of the spirit that would best make use of potential is the spirit that acts in love. And that's why there's an insistence in the Judeo-Christian tradition that the ordering spirit at the base of reality itself is precisely the spirit that acts in accordance with the highest dictates of love. And you ask yourself, well, if you wanted to bring about a world that was good or very good, what else could you possibly be oriented by? And that love would not only be love for your children and for your wife, but even for yourself. But for yourself in the deepest possible sense, right? As the love for yourself as someone who carries within them the same flame that your son carries. And that you need to manifest when you're caring for your son so that he can manifest what's within him. And then you could ask yourself, too, if you were oriented, God willing, by nothing but that love, what could you make of your life? Now, there is a prayer. If I was oriented by nothing but the highest love, what could I make of my life? It's a terrifying question to ask because if you ask and you want to know, everything that interferes with that will burn away from you. And that might mean that there's precious little left standing. This idea of the spirit of God descending upon the chaotic waters. People ask, well, there there was no water at the beginning of time. None of this makes sense. It's like, you just don't know what you're talking about. You have no idea what constitutes a metaphor. What exists, this potential that exists at the beginning of everything isn't water. It's just that water's a useful metaphor. Well, why? You can draw things up from the water. The water is unknown. The water is dark and it's deep and it's mysterious and it's bountiful. You can drown in the water. You can sail on the water. The water is the The water is The water is a necessity of life. Use some imagination like the poets do. When Christ is baptized by John the Baptist, the spirit of The spirit descends upon him. What does that mean? Next slide, please. Oh, I'll tell you about this first. This is the same story told from a different perspective. So, what do you confront your life? Well, a monstrous, eternal, infinite mass of multi-headed snakes. You tell tell me that's never happened in your life. You wake up in the morning and think, "Oh my god, I wish I was asleep." Snakes everywhere. Right. And so, what does the hero do? Confronts the snake. Right? More than that, this is even implicit still in the biblical corpus. There are echoes of the representation of God as the primordial deity who slayed the serpent that existed at the beginning of time and made the world out of its pieces. Leviathan. What does that mean? Well, it means that we're hunters. It means that we built we make our clothes out of animal skins. It means that we we establish the order that is habitable by confronting the predators and making use of them, taming them, or destroying them. We establish order as a consequence of a of a conflict with potential. It's echoed in the story of the dragon and the gold. You confront what's terrifying and possible, and you gain what's valuable and necessary. And that's the eternal story of of the heroic element of the human spirit. And when we hear a story like that, it echoes deep inside us. That's why the stories are so compelling. It's like the baptismal scene in The Lion King. When Simba is adolescent and deluded and power mad and confused, and his father appears in the sky and says, "Remember who you are." Well, that's what the ancient stories do. They remind you who you are. Right? You're children of God made in the image of the creative being that sits at the center of reality itself, reflected in your soul, and you've forgotten in your mis-aimed presumptions, your pretension, your pride, and your ignorance. And the stories, the ancient stories, call to you to wake up and understand who you are, to adopt that responsibility, and to put that foremost above everything. Confront the terrible, catastrophic dragon of chaos dressed in your suit of lion skin and your armor so that you can render the void and the desert habitable for your family, yourself, and your community. That's the adventure of your life, you might say. Life is suffering, and it's bitter, and I should turn against it. And the rejoinder to that is there's no adventure without trouble. And the greatest adventure has the most trouble. And if you took on the full trouble of your life unstintingly, you'd have an adventure that would justify the misery. That's the offer. It's not comfort. You want comfort? Dostoevsky figured this out in 1880 when he was criticizing utopian delusion delusional utopianism. He said, "Look, if you took the typical person, and you you just gave them everything they wanted, so they could do nothing with their life but sit around and eat sweet cakes and sit in pools of bubbling water." He obviously had a vision of California. And and do nothing but busy yourself with the continuation of the species, what then? Said, "Well, we know what would happen then." Human beings, ungrateful to the core, unable to tolerate anything like a brief respite from their troubles, would in no time whatsoever smash everything to smithereens just so they had something interesting to do. Well, have have you never had the false adventure of trouble you caused just because you had nothing better to do? I mean, that's really That's like the definition of 80% of life. Well, what would happen if you had a real adventure? What would happen, for example, if you told the truth? Cuz that's a real adventure. You have to let everything go if you're going to tell the truth. You don't get to predetermine the outcome if you're going to tell the truth. You get to say what you need to say and cast yourself on the on the on the briny deep and let the waves take you where they're going to. And that's a bit on the destabilizing side, you might say, but it's no shortage of exciting. And maybe that's what you're built for, right? Viking adventure over the high seas and not the idiot comfort that were promised by our tyrant wannabes. That's what it means to be made in the image of God. To make that creative contending adventurous spirit suffused with love manifest within you in everything that you say and do. That's the dawn of the kingdom of heaven that's laid upon the earth that men are too blind to see. Next slide, please. Good thing we didn't miss that, would we? >> Yeah. >> Christ is baptized by John the Baptist. And the symbolic representations are that a dove descends from on high, the Holy Spirit, and comes to reside within him. That's when he goes to the desert, by the way. You ever had that time in your life where you woke up a little bit? You realized that you were living a false life? And and something revealed itself to you to let you know that you were on the wrong path. And what what was the price you paid for that? How about an an interregnum of confusion? How about a period of not knowing which way was up? That's the price you pay for letting go of your tiny tyrannical of the tyrannical propositions that you used to imprison yourself. Out of the tyranny, as it says in Exodus, into the wasteland and desert. Why do people cling to their foolish presuppositions? Because knowing something stupid is more comforting than knowing nothing at all. And the price you pay for the realization of your own ignorance is a brief exposure to the fact that your entirely lost. But you can wake up as a consequence, right? You can reestablish your relationship with the creative spirit that makes what's good out of potential. That's a rediscovery, that revelation of your own ignorance, your own bitter ignorance. That's a recontact with the ground of being itself. That's why it strikes you so hard. That's why it can be life-changing when you recognize your own insufficiency. This is part of what prayer calls you to do all the time. To pray. To pray on what's What do you pray if you're sensible? What am I doing that's stupid? Well, there's a source of inexhaustible wisdom precisely proportionate to your stupidity. And you might say, "Why bother?" Well, we covered that already. So, you don't fall into a pit. If you could do nothing but aim high and look within yourself for everything that stopped you from moving forward. And you did that full heartedly, unreservedly. And you made that the the leitmotif of your life. What would you be like in a year? In 5 years? In 10 years? In 20 years? Would you be headed for sainthood itself? Is that not something that is a possibility that resides within you? You know perfectly well that there was times in your life where you took a turn for the better. What if that was the pattern of your existence? Nothing but the constant turn for the better. And then you might also ask yourself, "Would there be any difference between living a life that was composed of nothing but constant turns for the better and existence in the kingdom of heaven itself? A place where everything is good and still getting better." That's the identification with the spirit of revelation that descends, that replicates the conditions that obtain at the beginning of time and space itself. That's the central core message of the first four sentences of the biblical corpus. Thank you very much. So, you know, when you came out when you came out on stage you said that you were going to talk about 12 rules, hey? But, you talked about this even if you didn't notice it because that whole story that you told was wrestling with God. >> Yep. >> Right? So, you got that exactly right just >> So, you know what? No problem. >> Yeah. All right. >> Here's a question. What or who's behind the anti-Semitic surge in the US? It's not just in the US and in particular amongst Ivy League academia. >> Well, Satan, obviously. And I I actually mean that um and I can explain why to some degree. Cain abides by the narrative of victim and victimizer. Right? And Cain is resentful and bitter and arrogant and murderous and deicidal and genocidal. And the reason for that is that he construes himself as an eternal victim of innocence and everyone else, God included, as a victimizer. And that story leads to hell. So, that's the theological level of explanation. More prosaically it's a consequence of idiocy and moral degeneration. So, the idiocy part is the willingness of ignorant people to swallow hyper-simplified idolatrous rationalizations. And here's one. The world is founded on power. There's nothing but victims and victimizers. How do you identify the victimizers? Well, what's most most convenient if you're a failure? How about the successful? The successful are victimizers. What does that imply? The hyper-successful are hyper-victimizers. They're the worst. Who's most hyper-successful statistically? Jews. Right. End of argument. Why Ivy League people? Well, because all they do is perpetrate the victim-victimizer narrative. And so, here we are. >> How do I know when I'm wrestling with God versus wrestling with myself? >> If it's about what you want, then you're wrestling with yourself. You know, here I'll tell you something cool. So, psychologists have spent a long time with early large language model statistical modeling, that's a good way of thinking about it, looking at the relationship between concepts, the meaning of concepts, of clusters of concepts, and we identified 30 years ago a pattern of clusters of concepts of personality and laid out a somewhat inadequate but useful five-dimensional picture of human personality. Uh there's an important dimension missing, but we won't go into that at the moment. One of the dimensions is negative emotion, and so negative emotion, you can think of your emotional systems as a tree with two trunks. One trunk branching into two branching into many. One half of the trunk, or one of the separate trunks, is positive emotion, and the other is negative emotion. And uh they're independent neurological systems, each with their own biochemistry, and they cross-talk, because it's hard to be miserable when you're happy, although you can laugh and cry at the same time, right? The The relationship can be quite closely juxtaposed and paradoxical. Um you can weep with joy. The negative emotions all cluster together, coming as they do from the same trunk, let's say, sorrow, grief, pain, frustration, disappointment, shame, anxiety, horror, disgust, contempt, etc. And if you're more likely than most to feel any of those, you're more likely than most to feel all of them. There's a normal distribution of sensitivity to negative emotion, with some people being relatively immune, and so very um resistant to depression and anxiety, but also somewhat opaque to signals of distress and threat. Others extraordinarily sensitive to danger, but suffering because of a surfeit of negative emotion, with most people in the middle. That's the normal distribution. That's neuroticism. One of the big five traits. Tell me the question again. >> I I knew that you going to ask me that. How do I know when I'm wrestling with God? >> Oh yes. So, one of the Okay, so I outlined I outlined a sequence of negative emotions that were associated with the trait proclivity for negative emotion. Here is another. Self-consciousness. There is no technical difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. Right. So, if you're thinking about yourself you're wrestling with yourself in misery. When Tammy was talking about dealing with her grief, what did she say? She said she was feeling bitter and resentful because people weren't delivering to her what she felt was due her in her suffering. Now, you can go and understand that, you know, cuz her father had just died and you could think what kind of a son of a husband would leave his wife under such circumstances. Look, it was a question we wrestled with because there was conflicting moral obligations at that moment. But, what she realized was that she realized what only she could realize, which was that in so far as her suffering was a consequence of her fault the reason for that suffering is that her aim was inappropriate. She wasn't looking up enough. So, she looked up and she said, "Well, I need to reestablish my relationship with what's highest. I need to realign my aim away from bitterness and resentment towards only that which is optimally good. That's a good definition of God. A definition of God, note. What was the consequence? She got more than she expected. Right. In the Gospels, on the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says something strange. He says, "God takes care of the sparrows and the and clothes the lily of lilies of the field and you faithless ones do not presume that you are of sufficient worth so that that could happen to you, too." And it's he sounds like Jesus the hippie. You know, if you were just a flower or a bird, you know, the sky daddy would take care of you under his wing. That's not what that means. It's not what it means. It means that if your aim is true, there's nothing that won't be revealed to you. Even in the agonies of your misery, there's enough There's more than enough at hand to provide everything that you need. And why would we assume anything other than the the world we understand so poorly is anything but a well of inexhaustible plenitude? I mean, certainly you'd see the miracles that have occurred over the last 100 years, the the feeding of billions of people, the technological revolution that seems to have no end, the intensification of our computational ability, able to do more and more with less and less all the until what? Until what? Until we can do everything with nothing at all. That's what God did at the beginning of time. If it's about what something in you that you've allowed to possess you wants right now you're wrestling with the lowest parts of yourself. If you reorient yourself and aim at only what is best then you're attempting communion with God. And you might ask yourself, well, how do you do that? And I would say, well, try to do it. Just try to do it. It Decide that before you look, before every word you speak you place yourself in in relationship to what makes itself manifest to you as the highest possible aim at that moment. And practice that and ask yourself, why in the world would you not do that? Why in the world would you not want to make the most out of every possible moment? And there's no difference between making the most out of every possible moment and aiming up with as much vision and love and hope and faith as you can possibly muster. And you might say, well, faith, that's for people who are too weak to rely on the facts. It's like, what facts did you rely on when you got married? You know, your your knowledge of who a woman was or a man? What the hell did you know about the facts? You gamble in life. You stake your soul on your bet. You make your way forward with faith. You don't know how your new job is going to turn out. You don't know how your new friendships are going to unfold. You assume that if you navigate properly over even the stormiest of seas, you can eventually get to your destination. And that's an action of faith. And you have to make your life. You have to make faith manifest in your life unless you want to manifest the opposite, partly because you're steeped in ignorance. It's like, what the hell do you know? And so you're always facing the plenitude of the unknown in relationship to your own ignorance. That's like the definition of being mortal. And how do you step forward when you don't know where to step? You're like the fool in the tarot cards. You look up and you walk off the cliff. And you do that while you're looking up. And you do that with every step you take. And if you look up towards the highest possible heights, then every step you take will have the firmest of all possible foundations underneath it. And you can do that with every glance and every word. And if you did that, you would set the world right. >> Last question. You often talk about the ideal masculine, but what about ideal feminine? How can the divine feminine be integrated into society to make it greater, if it can. Tammy and I were in Rome 6 months ago and in St. Peter's Basilica, which is perhaps the most remarkable building ever built, there's a remarkable sculpture by Michelangelo who who's carved this particular sculpture when he was a very young man and it's the Pieta. It's the Virgin Mary, the divine mother, the archetype of the of feminine perfection, if you'll have it that way. And what and what does she have in her arms? She has the broken body of her perfect son. That's the female crucifixion. What's the highest possible offering? What's the highest possible offering to God? Child and self. And what does that mean for motherhood? Well, the good mother offers her child to the world to be broken and to be redeemed. The good mother cannot protect her child from the adventure of his life. She has to facilitate that, no matter what the cost. And the courage that's intrinsic to that is the core of female heroic being. It's not the only aspect, but it's the most feminine aspect. The woman who doesn't do that just the woman who does nothing but protects her child destroys her child. The woman who offers her child to God receives her child back. And that story is the core of the divinity and femininity. And every mother worth her salt knows that. And that's that. Thank you all. Thank you very much, everyone. It was very good to see you. Beautiful. Thank you for your time and attention.