The Divine Feminine and Motherhood

At Betfair, we know that nothing is certain in football, least of all when it comes to England . Maybe it really is coming home this summer . Maybe it isn't . Maybe we can squeeze free number ten's into our lineup. Maybe we've only got one ten and he plays up front . Maybe forty eight teams is just too many . Maybe some of them aren't as bad as you think. Everyone's got an opinion, back yours at Betzfair eighty plus gambler Hi everybody . I'm pleased to let you know that we're going to release a lecture a week 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 podcast ing 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. 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 with God. And that's human destiny, all aimed at answering the same question. On what principle is the world founded? And on what principle should the world be found? If you gaze upon all the things that terrify you simultaneously, then you become who you could be. And that would be a spirit that could withstand death at hell and yet there Thank you . So I was sitting backstage trying to figure out how I would open this fifty 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 urban and sophisticated English actor Stephen Fry . And I did a debate with Stephen. He was on my side at a forum called The Monk Center in Toronto . I debated we debated a New York Times journalist and you can imagine what that was like and a compatriot of hers and Mr Fry was a delight. He's educated the way that only educated Englishmen are educated with their with with the accent that makes them sound intelligent even if they're reading a telephone book . And he was witty and charming and brilliant and everything you'd hope a man might be . And we got to know each other a bit, you know , and I interviewed him for my YouTube channel. And he's he's very interested in mythology. He's very interested in stories. 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 his story is. And Stephen said some things that were quite surprising to me. 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 to allow us to think on our feet, our brains get terribly disorganized and our aim goes astray and we become chaotic and anxious and we wander into the desert or off a cliff. It's not a good thing . And Stephen is a very intelligent man and he had a lot to say . And he said something that I found extremely interesting . There's a scene in Dosteevsky's great book, The Brothers Karamazov, which is a classic scene . The book features the brothers, obviously, two of whom are Ivan and Eloshia and Eliosha, and Eliosha is a monastic novic iat, so he's a religious man . And his brother, Ivan, is a charming materialistic atheist 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 Dostevsky shows in the dramatization and characterization in the novel that Eliosha 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? And if you're wrong and you win, that's a really bad thing . Because 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 just so you could investigate the off probability that someone as wonderful as you still has something to learn . And you know, the thing is if you're stupid and you learn why, even though 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 trunces Eliota regularly when they have discussions about, for example, whether not God exists. And I started with this discussion with the procl amation that absent or present, we wrestle with God . Ivan does something famous in this book. He mounts what's probably the most powerful argument ever offered in the literary domain for the atheist claim . And he does it essentially on moral grounds, interestingly enough . He tells this story that Dostoevsky actually took out a Russian newspaper 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 forty 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 we seem to be committing an awful lot of those recently . And Dostevsky 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 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 Nellyosh has no idea what to say because what do you say to a question like that? And I've insisted you're 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 prep osterousness 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 Eliosa is silent in the onslaught of that argumentation , but it is 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 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 constitute a temperamental advantage or maybe a situational advantage . And there's something that seems unfair 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 , econom ically, 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 So if you're intelligent and you're 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 gonna enjoy being . Imagine your favorite lecture, dial that up on Max, put that on steroids, and then add some cinematic elements to it. That's the best way I could describe a Peterson Academy lecture . I went to college because I hadn't to. I go to Peterson Academy because I want to. I'm still paying off college from ten years ago and I'm also still questioning the value that I got out of college. In traditional universities, a lot of times it's just pretty dry. They don't bring the same energy as the professors at Peterson Academy. And it is a completely different experience to learn from somebody who actually wants to teach you. You become the events about this, this is the time. That thing that's calling to you, you won't have an answer for it unless you enroll and see for yourself. You have the opportunity to investigate, not calling And so with every gift comes an equivalent temptation and with every talent comes an equivalent responsibility , and I really do believe that's the case . 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 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, because that's what I mean when I say mythology. The deep stories upon which are cult ure are predicated, 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 doubt about mythology. And I've found great wisdom in Taoism and in ancient Egyptian theology and in ancient Mesopotamian theology and many places that I've looked, but it's certainly the case that I've found a wealth of wisdom at least as rich in the biblical corpus in the Jud eo 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, a cult part of the culture heritage of Judaism and the Jews are smart and predaternaturally smart in some ways. And they were immensely remarkable 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 then Frey did something interesting. You know, he started talking about God and I said, Well, you know, what's your problem exactly with God as a concept? And I was expecting something akin to the materialist atheist notion that God is a superfluous hypothesis . And 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 talked about watching children with bone cancer suffer, you know , and how dreadful that was and how preposterate it was to presume that in a world characterized by the suffering of innocence anything that could be regarded as a transcendent good might be held to exist. Now 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 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 one of the things I've noticed is that because 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've done a lot of analysis of biblical stories, let's say, online. And I read most of the comments that are put on my YouTube channel and that's often like you know a thousand five thousand comments a week, a lot of comments. And some of the arguments that the atheists mount against I'm elucidating, let's say, are rationalistic, materialistic atheist objections. But most of them are angry . And 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 guys and that damaged them and left them with a resentment towards anything with a religious flavor, let's 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 . 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 rel ationship 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 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 neurolog ical function that characterizes you has no consciousness . And so how we distinguish between the neurolog ical 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 before therefore I am, but what do me youant in more modern parlance is something like the brute fact of my own consciousness is the deepest of undeniable realities . And so what that What appears to indicate is that well, you can make a materialist case that matters 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 least because I can't even imagine how you could come up with 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 '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 insofar as we're personalities , we're our personal 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 D awkins, 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 . And formidable , a formidable , a formidable intellect . And someone I actually like. I've met Richard a couple of times and 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 Englishmen can at the drop of a hat, but, you know, I think fundamentally he's a genuine scientist and 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 . And 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 wrote me and he said, I don't know what the hell. I can never understand what you're talking about, Peterson, but 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 I kind of think maybe you're interested in this. And so he sent me a paper and I thought, You son of a bitch, you know exactly why I want to talk to you . And so it was a paper I actually knew about from about thirty 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 low resolution representation of its environment. And here's what he meant by that. So he said, if imagine you were an alien , scientists like to imagine such things. They don't believe in angels or demons, but aliens, man . 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 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 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 p ull of the Earth and its approximate mass and you'd by analyzing its DNA at a deep enough 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 hum an 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 the medieval period. We're a microcosm. Our soul reflects the cosmic order. You might say, well, what the hell does that mean, doctor 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 were a personality that may be the deepest way that we can conceptualize our relationship to being and becoming itself is as a covenant, as a relationship 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, and Tammy made reference to that in relationship let's say to prayer . And it's easy to be cynical about such , 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 fall 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 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 exper imental 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 Harvard, Shelley Carson . Shelley was 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 hypothesis 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 this 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? 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 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 proble m 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 besetes you, but grips your interest, which is something that happens to scientists all the time. They're insanely called forward by some phenomen a 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 in 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 psychoanalytics . I thought so many years ago because Freud and Jung both said there are autonomous there's an autonomy of spirit operating within you. They put it in the unconscious . You're motivated by things that aren't under your voluntary control . They have an autonomy . They call to you , they plague you . You can't control it. 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 locked onto it by a force that's beyond your control , or you're plagued by it, your conscience screams at, you have to do something about the cancer of children, for example, because 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 li ve 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, the 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 holds 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 to night . 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'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 themselves them into st ellar 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 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 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 the final analysis. It's an admission of insufficiency and it's a reaching into the beyond 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 revelation 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 and 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've 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 . Now 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 right off the tyrannical cliff , as you may have noticed . The world is composed of a set of empirical facts. That was opposed starting in the nineteen seventies by the post modernists who claim that no , you see the world through a story and turns out the facts support the post modernists 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 neuroscientists in the world now regard each word as a micronarative , 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 . Two hundred 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 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 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 figure this out too . You do this every time you take a glance . So and this is so interesting 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 a 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 persons 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 perception 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 . It's perception, visual perception, auditory perception, 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 . Now 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 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 . And 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 onto 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 character izes the protagonist. And then you split yourself into all sorts of people while watching the movie , one person per act , and you experience all those emotions and you absorb all those stories, then why do you do that? Well, maybe the protagonist is an antihero like the Joker in Batman, like Heath Ledger's Joker. And why would you watch the jok er ? 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 tenets 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 an even deeper question. You know that part of our attempt to to build faster and faster computers is so that we can have more and more realistic fictional simulations . You don't need the newest super utcomerp in your laptop. You were pretty much taken care of on that front in nineteen ninety five . 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? Because 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, sh allow, 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'll see a movie, for example, that moves you to your depths, that'll evoke tears, that'll sometimes even change your life. You'll read a book like that, a book of fiction . And so we have this instinct and this unerring sense and this knowledge that there are levels of depth in fiction, right? 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 Dostoyevsky, for example, and I loved clinical psychology. I love 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 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, they tell each other 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, I mean if you're bored of your spouse, all that means is they're not letting you know who they are . Because if they did , you'd be interested enough to stay awake at night worrying . So here's the theory about fiction . We have to see the world through a hierarchy of valuation and a description of a hierarchy of valuation is a 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 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 ? How about 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 depends on your definition of real. It depends on the purposes toward which you're putting the levels of abstract ion, 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 nineteen seventies . 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 postermnodists 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 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 Marx ists . And I'm not making this up . Go look it up for yourself. We're talking about France in the nineteen seventies . Okay, so that in itself should be a clue. Right. And we know perfectly well that the universities have been left leaning since the nineteen sixties , and that was particularly true of France during the nineteen seventies and probably no more true true, more among the humanities oriented French intellectuals of the nineteen seventies than anywhere else. And if they weren't outright Marxists, they were implicit Marxists, and they said that themselves. And when Solzonitsin came out and demolished the moral pretensions of theun Cistomm Universe, they kind of scuttled underground , but not really. They just invented a kind of metamarxism would have made old Carl had he lived to understand its 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 no one 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 it 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 eighteen hundreds in his critique of moral ity as cowardice , you know 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 because 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 post modernists 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 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 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 a group of people who use nothing but strategies of power , psychopaths . They're about three percent 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 . Psychoopathy 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 itiner ant . 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 rules , 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 urile and infantile hedonism too . 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 bas est 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 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 want 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 that's 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 stretch across time that you have to save for your retirement because the you now will be the you that's sixty five 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 twenty of the most tightly written sentences evered penn . The story of Cain and Abel is inexhaustible . It sets the pattern of the battle between the hostile brothers between Batman and the Joker between Superman and Lex Luther , 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 exactly how this works . In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth 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 Vabohu. And Tohub Vabohu means something like formless potential . The Spirit of God is that which wrestles with which confronts and battles and differentiates formless chaos into the manifest structures of the world . Okay , now in your 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, 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 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 seven days, units of time. You wake up in the morning when the sun rises and the light reappears . What confronts you in the morning? And because you're a material materialist you think well my bed, my the furniture in my room, my rug, my the artifacts around me and I would say really Really , when you get up in the morning , the first thing that you perceive and conceive is the furniture that you're one hundred percent 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 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 . Eusnithas m, that means to be filled with the Spirit of God Enthus. Enthus is chaos , chaos , God, to be filled with the Spirit of God , to be joyfully abounding 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 , or 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 ? 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 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 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 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 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 self manifest to 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 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 f uture 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 cast thats 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 of is it 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 p otential. 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? 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 quest ion 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 was no water at the beginning . 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 is n'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 water 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 in your life ? Well , a monstrous , eternal , infinite of multi headed snakes . You 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.or 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 make our clothes out of animal skins . It means that 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 conflict with potential . It's echoed in the story of the Dragon and the gold . You confront what's terrifying possible and you gain what's valuable and necessary . And that's the eternal story 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' childreren of God made in the image of the creative being that sits at the center of reality itself , reflected in your soul and you forgotten in your mis 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 , to confront the terrible catastrophic dragon of chaos dressed in your suit of lions kin 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? Dostieevsky figured this out in eighteen eighty . When he was criticizing utopian delusional utopianism, he said, Look, if you took the typical person and 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 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 interest ing to do . Well 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 eighty percent of life. Well, what would happen if you had a real adventure . What would happen for example if you told the truth ? Because 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 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 one, eh? 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 something revealed itself to you to let you know that you were on the wrong path . And what was the price you paid for that ? How about 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 tyrannical of the tyrannical propositions that you use to imprison yourself out of the tyranny, as it says in Exodus , into the was teland 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 you're 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 stopped you from moving forward . And you did that full heartedly, unreservedly, and you made that the light motif of your life . What would you be like in a year, in five years, in ten years, in twenty 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 are 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 twelve 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 are 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 actually mean that and I can explain why to some degree pain abides by the narrative of victim and victimizer . All 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 victimiz ? Well, what's 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 models, 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 thirty years ago a pattern of clusters of concepts personality and laid out a somewhat inadequate but useful , five dimensional picture of human personality . 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 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 relationship can be quite closely juxtaposed and paradoxical . 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, cont empt, 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 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 surfite 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 knew that you can ask me . 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 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 learn understand that, you know, 'cause her father had just died and you could think what kind of a son of a bitch 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, not And 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 close the lilies of the field, and you faithless ones do not presume that you are of sufficient worse so that that could happen to you too. And 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 to provide everything that you need . And why would we assume anything other than 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 hundred 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, well try to do it . Just try to do it. Decide that before you look, before every word you speak , you place yourself 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 too weak to rely on the facts what facts did you rely on when you got married ? You know, 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 seasons, 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? Hammy and I were in Rome six months ago and in St. Peter's Basilica, which is perhaps the most remarkable building ever built , there is a remarkable sculpture by Michelangelo who 's carved this particular sculpture when he was a very young man and it's the Paieta, it's the Virgin Mary , the Divine Mother, the archetype of the of feminine perfection, if you'll have it that way . 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 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's very good to see you . Edith . Thank you for your time and attention