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Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God
by Dr. Jordan Peterson
Thank
you all very much for coming. Itâs really shocking to me that you donât
have anything better to do on a Tuesday night. Seriously though, itâs
very strange, in some sense, that so many of you are here to listen to a
sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible
stories. Itâs something Iâve wanted to do for a long time, but it still
does surprise me that thereâs a ready audience for it. Thatâs good.
Weâll see how it goes.
Iâll start with this, because itâs the
right question: why bother doing this? And I donât mean why should I
botherâI have my own reasons for doing itâbut you might think, âwhy
bother with this strange old book at all?â Thatâs a good question. Itâs a
contradictory document thatâs been cobbled together over thousands of
years. Itâs outlasted many, many kingdoms. Itâs really interesting that
it turns out a book is more durable than stone. Itâs more durable than a
castle. Itâs more durable than an empire. Itâs really interesting that
something so evanescent can be so long-living. So thereâs that; thatâs
kind of a mystery.
Iâm approaching this whole scenario, the
Biblical stories, as if theyâre a mystery, fundamentally because they
are. Thereâs a lot we donât understand about them. We donât understand
how they came about. We don't really understand how they were put
together. We donât understand why they had such an unbelievable impact
on civilization. We donât understand how people could have believed
them. We don't understand what it means that we donât believe them now,
or even what it would mean if we did believe them. On top of all that,
thereâs the additional problemâwhich isnât specific to me, but is
certainly relevant to meâthat, no matter how educated you are, youâre
not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the
Biblical stories. But Iâm going to do my best, partly because I want to
learn more about them. One of the things I've learned is that one of the
best ways to learn about something is to talk about it. When I'm
lecturing, Iâm thinking. Iâm not trying to tell you what I know for sure
to be the case, because thereâs lots of things that I donât know for
sure to be the case. Iâm trying to make sense out of this, and I have
been doing this for a long time.
You may know, you may not, that Iâm an admirer of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was a devastating critic of dogmatic
ChristianityâChristianity as it was instantiated in institutions.
Although, he is a very paradoxical thinker. One of the things Nietzsche
said was that he didnât believe the scientific revolution would have
ever got off the ground if it hadnât been for Christianityâand, more
specifically, for Catholicism. He believed that, over the course of a
thousand years, the European mind had to train itself to interpret
everything that was known within a single coherent frameworkâcoherent if
you accept the initial axioms.
Nietzsche believed that the Catholicization of the phenomena of life
and history produced the kind of mind that was then capable of
transcending its dogmatic foundations, and concentrating on something
else. In this particular case, it happened to be the natural world.
Nietzsche
believed that Christianity died of its own hand, and that it spent a
very long time trying to attune people to the necessity of the truth,
absent the corruption, and all thatâthatâs always part of any human
endeavour. The truthâthe spirit of truthâthat was developed by
Christianity turned on the roots of Christianity. Everyone woke up and
said, or thought, something like, âhow is it that we came to believe any
of this?â Itâs like waking up one day and noting that you really donât
know why you put a Christmas tree up, but youâve been doing it for a
long time, and thatâs what people do. There are reasons Christmas trees
came about. The ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.
Nietzsche was a critic of Christianity, and also a champion of
its disciplinary capacity. The other thing that Nietzsche believed was
that it was not possible to be free unless you had been a slave. By
that, he meant that you donât go from childhood to full-fledged adult
individuality: you go from child to a state of discipline, which you
might think is akin to self-imposed slavery. That would be the best
scenario, where you have to discipline yourself to become something
specific, before you might be able to reattain the generality you had as
a child. He believed that Christianity had played that role for Western
civilization. But, in the late 1800s, he announced that God was dead.
You
often hear of that as something triumphant, but, for Nietzsche, it
wasnât. He was too nuanced a thinker to be that simpleminded. Nietzsche
understoodâand this is something Iâm going to try to make clearâthat
thereâs a very large amount that we donât know about the structure of
experienceâthat we donât know about realityâand we have our articulated
representations of the world. Outside of that, there are things we know
absolutely nothing about. Thereâs a buffer between them, and those are
things we sort of know something about. But we donât know them in an
articulated way.
Here's an example: Youâre arguing with someone
close to you, and theyâre in a bad mood. Theyâre being touchy and
unreasonable. You keep the conversation up, and maybe, all of a sudden,
they get angry, or maybe they cry. When they cry, they figure out what
theyâre angry about. It has nothing to do with you, even though you
might have been what precipitated the argument. Thatâs an interesting
phenomena, as far as Iâm concerned, because it means that people can
know things at one level, without being able to speak what they know at
another. In some sense, the thoughts rise up from the body. They do that
in moods, images, and actions. We have all sorts of ways that we
understand, before we understand in a fully articulated manner.
We
have this articulated space that we can all discuss. Outside of that,
we have something thatâs more akin to a dream, that weâre embedded in.
Itâs an emotional dream, that weâre embedded in, and thatâs based, at
least in part, on our actions. Iâll describe that later. Whatâs outside
of that is what we donât know anything about, at all. The dream is where
the mystics and artists live. Theyâre the mediators between the
absolutely unknown and the things we know for sure. What that means is
that what we know is established on a form of knowledge that we donât
really understand. If those two things are out of syncâif our
articulated knowledge is out of sync with our dreamâthen we become
dissociated internally. We think things we donât act out, and we act out
things we donât dream. That produces a kind of sickness of the spirit.
Its cure is something like an integrated system of belief and
representation.
People turn to things like ideologiesâwhich I
regard as parasites on an underlying religious substructureâto try to
organize their thinking. Thatâs a catastrophe, and what Nietzsche
foresaw. He knew that, when we knocked the slats out of the base of
Western civilization by destroying this representationâthis God idealâwe
would destabilize, and move back and forth violently between nihilism
and the extremes of ideology. He was particularly concerned about
radical left ideology, and believedâand predicted this in the late
1800s, which is really an absolute intellectual tour de force of
staggering magnitudeâthat in the 20th century hundreds of millions of
people would die because of the replacement of these underlying
dream-like structures with this rational but deeply incorrect
representation of the world. Weâve been oscillating back and forth
between left and right ever since, with some good sprinkling of nihilism
and despair. In some sense, thatâs the situation of the modern Western
person, and increasingly of people in general.
I think part of
the reason that Islam has its back up with regards to the West, to such a
degreeâthereâs many reasons, and not all of them are validâis that,
being still grounded in a dream, they can see that the rootless,
questioning mind of the West poses a tremendous danger to the integrity
of their culture, and it does. Westerners, usâwe undermine ourselves all
the time with our searching intellect. Iâm not complaining about that.
There isnât anything easy that can be done about it. But itâs still a
sort of fruitful catastrophe, and it has real effects on peopleâs lives.
Itâs not some abstract thing. Lots of times when Iâve been treating
people with depression, for example, or anxiety, they have existential
issues. Itâs not just some psychiatric condition. Itâs not just that
theyâre tapped off of normal because their brain chemistry is
faultyâalthough, sometimes that happens to be the case. Itâs that they
are overwhelmed by the suffering and complexity of their life, and
theyâre not sure why itâs reasonable to continue with it. They can feel
the terrible, negative meanings of life, but they are sceptical beyond
belief about any of the positive meanings of it.
I had one
client whoâs a very brilliant artist. As long as he didnât think, he was
fine. Heâd go and create, and he was really good at being an artist. He
had that personality that was continually creating, and quite
brilliant, although he was self-denigrating. But he sawed the branch off
that he was sitting on, as soon as he started to think about what he
was doing. Heâd start to criticize what he was doingâthe utility of
itâeven though it was self-evidently useful. Then it would be very, very
hard for him to even motivate himself to create. He always struck me as
a good example of the consequences of having your rational intellect
divorced, in some way, from your Beingâdivorced enough so that it
actually questions the utility of your Being. Itâs not a good thing.
Itâs
really not a good thing, because it manifests itself not only in
individual psychopathologies, but also in social psychopathologies.
Thatâs this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, and I
really do think of them as crippled religions. Thatâs the right way to
think about them. Theyâre like religion thatâs missing an arm and a leg,
but can still hobble along. It provides a certain amount of security
and group identity, but itâs warped and twisted and demented and bent,
and itâs a parasite on something underlying thatâs rich and true. Thatâs
how it looks to me, anyways. I think itâs very important that we sort
out this problem. I think that there isnât anything more important that
needs to be done than that. Iâve thought that for a long, long
timeâprobably since the early â80s, when I started looking at the role
that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social
health. You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get
if you challenge their belief systems. Why the hell do they care,
exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms
are 100 percent correct?
People get unbelievable upset when you
poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of
the imagination obvious why. Thereâs a fundamental truth that theyâre
standing on. Itâs like theyâre on a raft in the middle of the ocean.
Youâre starting to pull out the logs, and theyâre afraid theyâre going
to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them
from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the
ideological system? These are not obvious things. Iâve been trying to
puzzle that out for a very long time. Iâve done some lectures about that
that are on YouTube. Most of you know that. Some of what Iâm going to
talk about in this series youâll have heard, if youâve listened to the
YouTube videos, but Iâm trying to hit it from different angles.
Nietzsche's
idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own
values. He understood that we had bodies, motivations, and emotions. He
was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time. He
knew that our capacity to think wasnât some free-floating soul, but was
embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions, shaped by our
motivations, and shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still
believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for
human beings themselves to become something akin to God, and to create
their own values. He talked about the person who created their own
values as the Overman,
or the Superman. That was one part of the Nietzschean philosophy that
the Nazis took out of context and used to fuel their superior man
ideology. We know what happened with that. That didnât seem to turn out
very well. Thatâs for sure.
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung. It was through Jungâand also Jean Piaget, a developmental psychologistâthat I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream. That dream is informed, in a complex way, by the way we act. We act out things we donât understand, all the time. If that wasnât the case, we wouldnât need psychology, or sociology, or anthropology, or any of that, because weâd be completely transparent to ourselves, and weâre clearly not. Weâre much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
Part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it, for thousands and thousands and thousands of yearsâextracting out patterns of behaviour that characterize humanity, and trying to representâpartly through imitation, but also drama, mythology, literature, art, and all of thatâwhat weâre like, so that we can understand what weâre like. That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories. Itâs halting, partial, awkward, and contradictory, which is one of things that makes the book so complex. But I see, in that, the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and become conscious of what it means to be human.
Thatâs a very difficult thing, because we donât know who we are, or what we are, or where we came from. Life is an unbroken chain going back 3.5 billion years. Itâs an absolutely unbelievable thing. Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for 3.5 billion years. Itâs absolutely unbelievable. We rose out of the dirt and the muck, and here we are, conscious but not knowing, and weâre trying to figure out who we are. A set of stories that weâve been telling for 3,000 years seems, to me, to have something to offer.
When I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, in some sense, with a beginnerâs mind. Itâs a mystery, this book: how the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, why it happened to motivate an entire culture for 2,000 years and transform the world. Whatâs going on? How did that happen? Itâs by no means obvious. One of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they donât take the phenomena seriously. Itâs a serious phenomena, not least because people have the capacity for religious experience, and no one knows why that is. You can induce it reliably, in all sorts of different ways. You could do it with brain stimulation. You can certainly do it with drugs, especially the psychedelic variety. They produce intimations of the divine extraordinarily regularly. People have been using drugs like that for God only knows how longâ50,000 years, maybe more than thatâto produce some sort of intimate union with the divine. We donât understand any of that. When we discovered the psychedelics in the late â60s, it shocked everybody so badly that they were instantly made illegal. They were abandoned, in terms of research, for like 50 years, and itâs no wonder, because who the hell expected that? Nobody.
Jung was a student of Nietzscheâs, and he was also a very astute critic of Nietzsche. He was educated by Freud. Freud started to collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream. It was Freud that really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind. We take this for granted to such a degree, today, that we donât understand how revolutionary the idea was. Whatâs happened with Freud is that weâve taken all the marrow out of his bones and left the husk behind. Now, when we think about Freud, we just think about the husk, because thatâs everything thatâs been discarded. But so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception, nowâincluding the idea that your perceptions, your actions, and your thoughts are all informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control.
Thatâs a very, very strange thing. Itâs one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories. The psychoanalytic theories are something like, âyouâre a loose collection of living subpersonalities, each with its own set of motivations, perceptions, emotions, and rationales, and you have limited control over that.â Youâre like a plurality of internal personalities thatâs loosely linked into a unity. You know that, because you canât control yourself very wellâwhich is one of Jungâs objections to Nietzsche's idea that we can create our own values.
Jung didnât believe thatâespecially not after interacting with Freudâbecause he saw that human beings were deeply, deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. No one really knows how to conceptualize those things. The cognitive psychologists think of them as computational machines. The ancient people thought of them as gods, although itâs more complicated than that. Mars would be the God of rage; thatâs the thing that possesses you when youâre angry. It has a viewpoint, and it says what it wants to say, and that might have very little to do with what you want to say, when youâre being sensible. It doesnât just inhabit you: it inhabits everyone, and it lives forever, and it even inhabits animals. Itâs this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body politic, like a thought inhabiting the brain. Thatâs one way of thinking about it. Itâs a very strange way of thinking, but it certainly has its merits. Those things, in some sense, are deities. But itâs not that simple.
Jung got very interested in dreams, and he started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths. He was deeply read in mythology, and he would see, in his clientâs dreams, echoes of stories that he knew. He started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes: the dream and the story, and storytelling. You can tell your dreams as stories, when you remember them, and some people remember dreams all the timeâtwo or three, at night. Iâve had clients like that. They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures. I think thatâs more the case with people who are creativeâespecially if theyâre a bit unstable at the timeâbecause the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty, and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality, before you get a real grip on it. So the dream is the birthplace of thinking. Thatâs a good way of thinking about it, because itâs not that clear. Itâs doing its best to formulate something. That was Jungâs notion, as of post-Freud, who believed that there were internal censors that were hiding the dreamâs true message. Thatâs not what Jung believed. He believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated, conscious comprehension.
A thought appears in your head, right? Thatâs obvious. Bangâitâs nothing you ever asked about. What the hell does that mean? A thought appears in your head. What kind of ridiculous explanation is that? It just doesn't help with anything. âWhere does it come from?â âWell, nowhere. It just appears in my head.â Thatâs not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out. You might think that those thoughts that you think...Well, where do they come from? Theyâre often someone elseâs thoughtsâsomeone long dead. That might be part of itâjust like the words you use to think are utterances of people who have been long dead. Youâre informed by the spirit of your ancestors. Thatâs one way of looking at it.
Your motivations speak to; your emotions speak to you; your body speaks to you, and it does all that, at least in part, through the dream. The dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea. They donât just come from nowhere fully-fledged. They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is. Even to say, âI am consciousâŚâ Chimpanzees donât say that. Itâs been something like 3 million years since we broke from chimpanzeesâfrom the common ancestor. They have no articulated knowledge, very little self-representation, and very little self-consciousness. Thatâs not the case with us, at all. We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that 7 million year voyage. I think some of thatâs represented and captured in these ancient storiesâespecially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories weâre going to start with. Some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories. Itâs very, very instructive, as far as I can tell.
Iâll give you just a quick example. Thereâs an idea of sacrifice in the Old Testament, and itâs pretty barbaric. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a good example. Abraham was called on to actually sacrifice his own son, which doesnât really seem like something that a reasonable God would ask you to do. God, in the Old Testament, is frequently cruel, arbitrary, demanding, and paradoxical, which is one of the things that really gives the book life. It wasnât edited by a committee that was concerned with not offending anyone. Thatâs for sure.
So Jung believed that the dream was the birthplace of thought. Iâve been extending that idea, because one of the things I wondered about deeplyâyou have a dream, and then someone interprets it. You can argue about whether or not an interpretation is valid, just like you can argue about whether your interpretation of a novel or a movie is valid. Itâs a very difficult thing to determine with any degree of accuracyâwhich accounts, in part, for the postmodern critique. But my observation has been that people will present a dream and, sometimes, we can extract out real, useful information from it that the person didnât appear to know, and they get a flash of insight. Thatâs a marker that we stumbled on something that unites part of that person that wasnât united before. It pulls things together, which is often what a good story will do, or, sometimes, a good theory. Things snap together for you, and a little light goes on. Thatâs one of the markers that Iâve used for accuracy and dreams, in my own family.
When I was first married, Iâd have fights with my wifeâarguments about this and that. Iâm fairly hot-headed, and Iâd get all puffed up and agitated about whatever we were arguing about. Sheâd go to sleep, which was really annoying. It was so annoying, because I couldnât sleep. Iâd be chewing off my fingernails, and sheâd be sleeping peacefully beside me. Maddening. But, often, sheâd have a dream, and sheâd discuss it with me the next morning. Weâd unravel what was at the bottom of our argument. That was unbelievably useful, even though it was extraordinary aggravating. I was convinced by Jung. His ideas about the relationship between dreams, mythology, drama, and literature made sense to me, and his ideas about the relationship between man and art.
I know this Native carver. Heâs a Kwakwakaâwakw guy. Heâs carved a bunch of wooden sculptures, totem poles, and masks that I have in my house. Heâs a very interesting personânot particularly literate, and really still steep in this ancient, 13,000-year-old tradition. Heâs an original language speaker, and the fact that he isnât literate has sort of left him with the mind of someone who is pre-literature. Pre-literature people arenât stupid; they just arenât literate. Their brains are organized differently, in many ways.
Iâve asked him about his intuition for his carvings, and heâs told me that he dreams. Youâve seen the Haida masks; you know what they look like. His people are closely related to the Haida. Itâs the same kind of style. He dreams in those animals, and he can remember his dreams. He also talks to his grandparents, who taught him how to carve, in his dreams. Quite often, if he runs into a problem with carving, his grandparents will come, and heâll talk to them. He sees the creatures that heâs going to carve, living, in an animated sense, in his imagination. I have no reason to disbelieve him. Heâs a very, very straightforward person, and he doesnât have the motivationâor the guile, I would sayâto invent a story like that. Thereâs just no reason he would possibly do it. I donât think heâs told that many people about it. He thinks itâs kind of crazy. When he was a kid, he thought he was insane, because heâd had those dreams, all the time, about these creatures, and so forth. It wasnât something he was trumpeting.
Iâve found it fascinating, because I can see in him part of the manifestation of this unbroken tradition. We have no idea how traditions like that are really passed on for thousands and thousands of years. Part of it is oral and memory, part of itâs acted out and dramatized, and part of itâs going to be imaginative. People who arenât literate store information quite differently than we do. We donât remember anything; itâs all written down in books. But if youâre from an oral cultureâespecially if youâre trained in that wayâyou have all of that information at hand. Itâs so that you can speak it. You can tell the stories, and you really know them. Modern people really donât know what thatâs like, anymore. I doubt thereâs more than maybe two of you, in the audience, that could spout from memory a 30-line poem. Poetry was written so that people could do that. Thatâs why we have that formâso that people could remember it and have it with them. But we donât do any of that, anymore.
Anyways, back to Jung. Jung was a great believer in the dream. I know that dreams will tell you things that you donât know. Well, how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you donât know? How does that make any sense? First of all, why donât you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream? Itâs like somethingâs going on inside you that you donât control. The dream happens to you, just like life happens to you. There is the odd lucid dreamer who can apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time youâre laying there, asleep, and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you, and you donât know how. You canât do it when youâre awake, and you donât know what it means. Itâs like, what the hellâs going on?
Thatâs one of the things thatâs so damn frightening about the psychoanalystsâyou get this both from Freud and Jung. You really start to understand that there are things inside you that control you, instead of the other way around. You can use a bit of reciprocal control, but thereâs manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you, that determine the manner in which you walk through life, and you donât control it. And what does? Is it random? There are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neural firing. I think that theory is absolutely absurd, because thereâs nothing random about dreams. They are very, very structured, and very, very complex. Theyâre not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio. Iâve also seen, so often, that people have very coherent dreams, that have a perfect narrative structure. Theyâre fully developed, in some sense. So that theory doesnât go anywhere, with me. I just canât see that as useful, at all. Iâm more likely to take the phenomena seriously.
Thereâs something to dreams. You dream of the future, then you try to make it into reality. That seems to be an important thing. Or maybe you dream up a nightmare, and try to make that into a reality. People do that, too, if theyâre hellbent on revenge, for example, and full of hatred and resentment. That manifests itself in terrible fantasies. Those are dreams, then people go act them out. These things are powerful, and whole nations can get caught up in collective dreams. Thatâs what happened to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It was an absolutely remarkable, amazing, horrific, destructive spectacle. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union, and the same thing happened in China. You have to take these things seriouslyâyou try to understand whatâs going on.
Jung believed that the dream could contain more information than was yet articulated. I think artists do the same thing. People go to museums and look at paintingsârenaissance paintings or modern paintingsâand they donât exactly know why they are there. I was in this room in New York that was full of renaissance artâgreat painters, the greatest painters. I thought that, maybe, that room was worth a billion dollars, or something outrageous, because there was like 20 paintings in there, priceless. The first thing is, why are those painting worth so much? Why is there a museum, in the biggest city in the world, devoted to them? Why do people from all over the world come and look at them? What the hell are those people doing? One of them was of the Assumption of Maryâa beautifully painted, absolutely glowing work of art. There were like 20 people standing in front of it, and looking at it. What are those people up to? They donât know. Why did they make a pilgrimage to New York to come and look at that painting? Itâs not like they know. Why is it worth so much? I know thereâs a status element to it, but that begs the question: why do those items become such high-status items? What is it about them thatâs so absolutely remarkable? Weâre strange creatures.
Where does the information thatâs in the dream come from? It has to come from somewhere. You could think of it as a revelation, because itâs like it springs out of the void, and itâs new knowledge. You didnât produce it; it just appears. Iâm scientifically minded, and Iâm quite a rational person. I like to have an explanation of things thatâs rational and empirical, before I look for any other kind of explanation. I donât want to say that everything that's associated with divinity can be reduced, in some manner, to biology, an evolutionary history, or anything like that. But, insofar as itâs possible to do that reduction, Iâm going to do that. Iâm going to leave the other phenomena floating in the air, because they canât be pinned down. In that category, I would put the category of mystical or religious experience, which we donât understand, at all.
Artists observe one another, and they observe people. Then they represent what they see, and transmit the message of what they see, to us. That teaches us to see. We donât necessarily know what it is that weâre learning from them, but weâre learning somethingâor, at least, weâre acting like weâre learning something. We go to movies; we watch stories; we immerse ourselves in fiction, constantly. Thatâs an artistic production, and, for many people, the world of the arts is a living world. Thatâs particularly true if youâre a creative person.
Itâs the creative, artistic people that move the knowledge of humanity forward. They do that with their artistic productions, first. Theyâre on the edge. The dancers, poets, visual artists, and musicians do that, and weâre not sure what they're doing. Weâre not sure what musicians are doing. What the hell are they doing? Why do you like music? It gives you deep intimations of the significance of things, and no one questions it. You go to a concert; youâre thrilled. Itâs a quasi-religious experience, particularly if the people really get themselves together, and get the crowd moving. Thereâs something incredibly intense about it, but it makes no sense whatsoever.
Itâs not an easy thing to understand. Music is deeply patterned, and patterned in layers. I think that has something to do with it, because reality is deeply patterned in layers. I think music is representing reality in some fundamental way. We get into the sway of that, and participate in Being. Thatâs part of what makes it such an uplifting experience, but we donât really know thatâs what weâre doing. We just go do it, and itâs nourishing for peopleâyoung people, in particular. Lots of them live for music. Itâs where they derive all of their meaningâtheir cultural identity. Everything thatâs nourishing comes from their affiliation with their music. Thatâs an amazing thing.
The question still remains: where does the information in dreams come from? I think where it comes from is that we watch the patterns that everyone acts out. We watch that forever, and weâve got some representations of those patterns thatâs part of our cultural history. Thatâs whatâs embedded in fictional accounts of stories between good and evil, the bad guy and the good guy, and the romance. These are canonical patterns of Being, for people, and they deeply affect us, because they represent what it is that we will act out in the world. We flesh that out with the individual information we have about ourselves and other people. Thereâs waves of behavioural patterns that manifest themselves in the crowd, across time. Great dramas are played on the crowd, across time. The artists watch that, and they get intimations of what that is. They write it down, tell us, and weâre a little clearer about what weâre up to.
A great dramatist, like Shakespeareâwe know that what he wrote is fiction. Then we say, âfiction isnât true.â But then you think, âwell, wait a minute. Maybe itâs true like numbers are true.â Numbers are an abstraction from the underlying reality, but no one in their right mind would really think that numbers arenât true. You could even make a case that the numbers are more real than the things that they represent, because the abstraction is so insanely powerful.
Once you have mathematics, youâre just deadly. You can move the world with mathematics. Itâs not obvious that the abstraction is less real than the more concrete reality. You take a work of fiction, like Hamlet, and you think, âwell, itâs not true, because itâs fiction.â But then you think, âwait a minuteâwhat kind of explanation is that?â Maybe itâs more true than nonfiction. It takes the story that needs to be told about you, and the story that needs to be told about you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and it abstracts that out, and says, âhereâs something thatâs a key part of the human experience as such.â Itâs an abstraction from this underlying, noisy substrate. People are affected by it because they see that the thing thatâs represented is part of the pattern of their being. Thatâs the right way to think about it.
With these old storiesâthese ancient storiesâit seems, to me, like that process has been occurring for thousands of years. Itâs like we watched ourselves, and we extracted out some stories. We imitated each other, and we represented that in drama, and then we distilled the drama, and we got a representation of the distillation. And then we did it again, and at the end of that processâit took God only knows how long. Theyâve traced some fairy tales back 10,000 years, in relatively unchanged form.
It certainly seems, to me, that the archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old, and are likely embedded in prehistory, which is far older than that. You might say, âwell, how can you be so sure?â The answer to that, in part, is that the ancient cultures didn't change fast. They stayed the same; thatâs the answer. They keep their information moving from generation to generation. Thatâs how they stay the same, and thatâs how we know. There are archaeological records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years: it was discovered in caves, in Japan, that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe. So these things can last for very long periods of time.
Weâre watching each other act in the world, and then the question is, how long have we been watching each other? The answer to that, in some sense, is as long as there have been creatures with nervous systems, and thatâs a long time. Thatâs some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that. Weâve been watching each other, trying to figure out what weâre up to, across that entire span of time. Some of that knowledge is built right into your bodiesâwhich is why we can dance with each other, for example. Understanding isnât just something that you have as an abstraction. Itâs something that you act out. Thatâs what children are doing, when theyâre learning to rough-and-tumble play. Theyâre learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious wayâlearning to cooperate and compete. Thatâs all instantiated right into their body. Itâs not abstract knowledge, and they donât know that theyâre doing that. Theyâre just doing it. We can even use our body as a representational platform.
Weâve been studying each other for a long time, abstracting out what is it that weâre up to, and what should we be up to. Thatâs an even more fundamental question: if youâre going to live in the world, and youâre going to do it properly, what does properly mean? How is it that you might go about that? Itâs the right question; itâs what everyone wants to know. How do you live in the world? Itâs not what the world is made of; itâs not the same question. How do you live in the world? Itâs the eternal question of human beings.
I guess weâre the only species that has ever really asked that question. All the other animals just go and do whatever it is they do. Not us. Itâs a question, for us. We have to become aware of it. We have to speak itâGod only knows why. But that seems to be the situation. So we act, that acting is shaped by the world and society into something that we donât understand, but that we can model. We model it in our stories and with our bodies, and thatâs where the dream gets its information. The dream is part of the process thatâs watching everything, and then trying to formulate it. Itâs trying to get the signal out from the noise and portray it in dramatic form, because the dream is a little drama. And then you get the chance to talk about what that dream is. You have something like articulated knowledge, at that point.
I would say the Bible exists in that space that is half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge. Going into it, to find out what the stories are about, can aid our self-understanding. The other issue is that, if Nietzsche was correct, and if Jung was correct, and Dostoevsky, as wellâŚWithout the cornerstone provided by that understanding, weâre lost. Thatâs not good, because then weâre susceptible to psychological pathology. People that are adamant anti-religious thinkers seem to believe that, if we abandoned our immersement in the underlying dream, weâd all, instantly, become rationalists, like Descartes or Baconâintelligent, clear thinking, rational, scientific people. I donât believe that for a moment. I donât think thereâs any evidence for it. I think we would become so irrational, so rapidly, that the weirdest mysteries of Catholicism would seem positively rational by contrastâand I think thatâs already happening.
You have the unknown world. Thatâs just what you donât know, at all. Thatâs outside the ocean that surrounds the island that you inhabit. Something like that. Itâs chaos itself. You act in that world, and you act in ways that you donât understand. Thereâs more to your actions than you can understand. One of the things that Jung saidâI loved this, when I first understood it. He says that everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. You should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy, and maybe you donât want it to be. Thatâs really worth thinking about, because you have a pattern of behaviour that characterizes you. God only knows where you got it. Itâs partly biological, and itâs partly from your parents; itâs your unconscious assumptions; itâs the way the philosophy of your society has shaped you; and itâs aiming you somewhere. Is it aiming you somewhere you want to go? Thatâs a good question. Thatâs part of self-realization.
We know we donât understand our actions. Almost every argument you have with someone is about that. Itâs like, âwhy did you do that?â You come up with some half-baked reasons why you did it; youâre flailing around in the darkness; you try to give an account for yourself, but you can only do it partially. Itâs very, very difficult, because youâre a complicated animal, with the beginnings of an articulated mind, and youâre just way more than you can handle. So you act things out, and thatâs a kind of competence. Then you imagine what you act out, and you imagine what everyone else acts out. Thereâs a tremendous amount of information in your action, and that information is translated up into the dream, and then into art, mythology and literature. Thereâs a tremendous amount of information in that, and some of that is translated into articulated thought.
Iâll give you a quick example of something like that. I think this is partly what happens in Exodus, when Moses comes up with the law. Heâs wandering around with the Israelites in the desert. Theyâre going left and going right, worshipping idols, having a hell of a time, and getting rebellious. Moses goes up in the mountain, and he has this tremendous revelation in the sight of God. It illuminates him, and he comes down with the law. Moses acted as a judgeâI know this is a mythological storyâin the desert. He was continually mediating between people who were having problems, and he was constantly trying to keep peace. What are you doing when youâre trying to keep peace? Youâre trying to understand what peace is. You have to apply the principles. What are the principles? Well, you donât know. The principles are whatever satisfied the people enough to make peace.
Maybe you act as judge 10,000 times, and then you get some sense of the principles that bring peace. One day it blasts into your consciousness, like a revelation: âhereâs the rules that weâre already acting out.â Thatâs the Ten Commandments. They were there to begin with. Moses comes forward, and says, âlook, this is basically what weâre already doing, but now itâs codified.â Thatâs all historical process condensed into a single story, but, obviously, that happened, because we have written law. In good legal systems, that emerges from the bottom up. English common law is exactly like that: itâs single decisions, that are predicated on principles, that are then articulated and made into the body of law.
The body of law is something that you act out. Thatâs why itâs a body of law. Thatâs why, if youâre a good citizen, you act out the body of law. The body of law has principles. Ok, so the question is, what are the principles that guide our behaviour? Well, thatâs something like what the archaic Israelites meant by âGod.â Itâs not a good enough explanation, but imagine that you are a chimpanzee, and you have a powerful dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society. That represents âpowerââmore than that, because itâs not sheer physical prowess that keeps a chimp at the top of the hierarchy. Itâs much more complicated than that.
You could say thereâs a principle that the dominant person manifests, and then you might say that principle shines forth even more brightly, if you know 10 people who are dominant and powerful. Then you could extract out what âdominanceâ means from that. You can extract what âpowerâ means from that, and then you can divorce the concept from the people. We had to do that, at some point, because we can say âpower,â in the human context, and we can imagine what that means. But itâs divorced from any specific manifestation of power. How the hell did we do that? Thatâs so complicated. If youâre a chimp, the power is in another chimp. Itâs not some damn abstraction.
Think about it. Weâre in these hierarchies, many of them across centuries. Weâre trying to figure out what the guiding principle is. Weâre trying to extract out the core of the guiding principles, and we turn that into a representation of a pattern of being. Thatâs God. Itâs an abstracted ideal, and it manifests itself in personified form. Thatâs ok, because what weâre trying to get at is, in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning, properly social, and properly competent individual. Weâre trying to figure out what that means. You need an embodiment. You need an ideal thatâs abstracted, that you could act out, that would enable you to understand what that means. Thatâs what weâve been driving at. Thatâs the first hypothesis. Iâm going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that weâve formalized as God, but thatâs the first hypothesis: a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself, first, as a concrete pattern of behavior thatâs characteristic of a single individualâand then itâs a set of individuals, and then itâs an abstraction from that set, and then you have the abstraction, and itâs so important.
Hereâs a political implication: One of the debates, we might say, between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire was whether or not an emperor could be Godâliterally to be deified and put into a temple. You can see why that might happen, because thatâs someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy, who has a tremendous amount of power and influence. The Christian response to that was, ânever confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself.â Itâs brilliant. You can see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that, so that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to a divine principle, for lack of a better word. Even the king himself is subordinate to the principle. We still believe that, because we believe our Prime Minister is subordinate to the damn law.
Whatever the body of law, there's a principle inside that even the leader is subordinate to. Without that, you could argue that you canât even have a civilized society, because your leader immediately turns into something thatâs transcendent and all-powerful. That's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union, and what happened in Maoist China, and what happened in Nazi Germany. There was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to. Youâre supposed to be subordinate to God. What does that mean? Weâre going to tear that idea apart, but partly what that means is that youâre subordinateâeven if youâre sovereignâto the principles of sovereignty itself. And then the question is, âwhat the hell is the principles of sovereignty?â I would say we have been working that out for a very long period of time. Thatâs one of the things that weâll talk about.
The ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Egyptians had some very interesting, dramatic ideas about that. For exampleâvery brieflyâthere was a deity known as Marduk. Marduk was a Mesopotamian deity, and imagine this is sort of what happened. As an empire grew out of the post-ice ageâ15,000 years ago, 10,000 years agoâall these tribes came together. These tribes each had their own deityâtheir own image of the ideal. But then they started to occupy the same territory. One tribe had God A, and one tribe had God B, and one could wipe the other one out, and then it would just be God A, who wins. Thatâs not so good, because maybe you want to trade with those people, or maybe you donât want to lose half your population in a war. So then you have to have an argument about whose God is going to take priorityâwhich ideal is going to take priority.
What seems to happen is represented in mythology as a battle of the gods in celestial space. From a practical perspective, itâs more like an ongoing dialog. You believe this; I believe this. You believe that; I believe this. How are we going to meld that together? You take God A, and you take God B, and maybe what you do is extract God C from them, and you say, âGod C now has the attributes of A and B.â And then some other tribes come in, and C takes them over, too. Take Marduk, for example. He has 50 different names, at least in part, of the subordinate godsâthat represented the tribes that came together to make the civilization. Thatâs part of the process by which that abstracted ideal is abstracted. You think, âthis is important, and it works, because your tribe is alive, and so weâll take the best of both, if we can manage it, and extract out something, thatâs even more abstract, that covers both of us.â
Iâll give you a couple of Mardukâs interesting features. He has eyes all the way around his head. Heâs elected by all the other gods to be king God. Thatâs the first thing. Thatâs quite cool. They elect him because theyâre facing a terrible threatâsort of like a flood and a monster combined. Marduk basically says that, if they elect him top God, heâll go out and stop the flood monster, and they wonât all get wiped out. Itâs a serious threat. Itâs chaos itself making its comeback. All the gods agree, and Marduk is the new manifestation. Heâs got eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. When he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat. We need to know that, because the word âTiamatâ is associated with the word 'tehom.' Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis, so itâs linked very tightly to this story. Marduk, with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words, goes out and confronts Tiamat, whoâs like this watery sea dragon. Itâs a classic Saint George story: go out and wreak havoc on the dragon. He cuts her into pieces, and he makes the world out of her pieces. Thatâs the world that human beings live in.
The Mesopotamian emperor acted out Marduk. He was allowed to be emperor insofar as he was a good Marduk. That meant that he had eyes all the way around his head, and he could speak magic; he could speak properly. We are starting to understand, at that point, the essence of leadership. Because whatâs leadership? Itâs the capacity to see what the hellâs in front of your face, and maybe in every direction, and maybe the capacity to use your language properly to transform chaos into order. God only knows how long it took the Mesopotamians to figure that out. The best they could do was dramatize it, but itâs staggeringly brilliant. Itâs by no means obvious, and this chaos is a very strange thing. This is a chaos that God wrestled with at the beginning of time.
Chaos is half psychological and half real. Thereâs no other way to really describe it. Chaos is what you encounter when youâre blown into pieces and thrown into deep confusionâwhen your world falls apart, when your dreams die, when youâre betrayed. Itâs the chaos that emerges, and the chaos is everything it wants, and itâs too much for you. Thatâs for sure. It pulls you down into the underworld, and thatâs where the dragons are. All youâve got at that point is your capacity to bloody well keep your eyes open, and to speak as carefully and as clearly as you can. Maybe, if youâre lucky, youâll get through it that way and come out the other side. Itâs taken people a very long time to figure that out, and it looks, to me, that the idea is erected on the platform of our ancient ancestors, maybe tens of millions of years ago, because we seem to represent that which disturbs us deeply using the same system that we used to represent serpentile, or other, carnivorous predators.
Weâre biological creatures. When we formulated our strange capacity to abstract and use language, we still had all those underlying systems that were there when we were only animals. We have to use those systems that are there. Part of the emotional and motivational architecture of our thinking, part of the reason why we can demonize our enemies who upset our axioms, is because we perceive them as if theyâre carnivorous predators. We do it with the same system. Thatâs chaos itself, the thing that always threatens usâthe snakes that came to the trees when we lived in them, like 60 million years ago. Itâs the same damned systems.
The Marduk story is partly the story of using attention and language to confront those things that most threaten us. Some of those things are real world threats, but some of them are psychological threats, which are just as profound but far more abstract. But we use the same system to represent them. Thatâs why you freeze, if you're frightened. Youâre a prey animal. Youâre like a rabbit, and youâve seen something that's going to eat you. You freeze, and youâre paralyzed. Youâre turned to stone, which is what you do when you see a Medusa with a head full of snakes. You turn to stone. Youâre paralyzed, and the reason you do that is because youâre using the predator detector system to protect yourself. Your heart rate goes way up, and you get ready to move.
Things that upset us rely on that system. The Marduk story, for example, is the idea that, if there are things that upset youâchaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous, underworld things that threaten youâthe best thing to do is open your eyes, keep your speech organized, and go out, confront the thing, and make the world out of it. Itâs staggering. When I read that story and started to understand it, it just blew me away. Itâs such a profound idea, and we know itâs true, too, because we know, in psychotherapy, that youâre much better off to confront your fears head-on than you are to wait and let them find you.
Partly what you do, if youâre a psychotherapist, is you help people break their fears into little piecesâthe things that upset themâand then to encounter them one by one and master them. Youâre teaching this process of internal mastery over the strange and chaotic world. All of that makes up some of the background. We havenât even gotten to the first sentence of the Biblical stories yet, but all of that makes up the background. We extracted this strange collection of stories, with all its errors and its repetitions and its peculiarities, out of the entire history that weâve been able to collect ideas, and itâs the best weâve been able to do. I know there are other religious traditions. Iâm not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an example. What Iâm hoping is that we can return to the stories with an open mind and see if there is something there that we actually need. I hope that will be the case. As Iâve said, Iâll approach it as rationally as I possibly can.
This is the idea to begin with. We have the unknown as such, and then we act in it like animals act. They act first; they donât think. They donât imagine; they act, and thatâs where we started. We started by acting, and then we started to be able to represent how we acted, and then we started to talk about how we represented how we acted. That enabled us to tell stories, because that is what a story is: itâs to tell about how you represent how you act. You know that, because if you read a book, what happens? You read the book, and images come to mind of the people in the book behaving. Itâs one step from acting it out. You donât act it out, because you can abstract. You can represent action without having to act it out. Itâs an amazing thing, and thatâs part of the development of the prefrontal cortex. Itâs part of the capacity for human abstract thought. You can pull the representation of the behaviour away from the behaviour and manipulate the representation before you enact it. Thatâs why you think, so that you can generate a pattern of action and test it out in a fictional world before you embody it and die because youâre foolish. You let the representation die, not you. Thatâs why you think, and thatâs partly what weâre trying to do with these stories.
What do I hope to accomplish? I hope to end this 12-lecture series knowing more than I did when I started. Thatâs my goal, because Iâve said that Iâm not telling you what I know; Iâm trying to figure things out. This is part of the process by which Iâm doing that, and so Iâm doing my best to think on my feet. I come prepared, but Iâm trying to stay on the edge of my capacity to generate knowledge, to make this continually clear, and to get to the bottom of things. Thatâs what I hope to accomplish. It seems like people are interested in that, so weâre going to try to accomplish that together. Thatâs the plan.
The idea is to see if thereâs something at the bottom of this amazing civilization that weâve managed to structure, that I think is in peril, for a variety of reasons. Maybe, if we understand it a little bit better, we wonât be so prone just to throw the damned thing away, which I think would be a big mistake. And to throw it away because of resentment, hatred, bitterness, historical ignorance, jealousy, the desire for destruction, and all of thatâŚI donât want to go there. Itâs a bad idea, to go there. We need to be better-grounded.
All right, so how do I approach this? Well, first of all, I think in evolutionary terms. As far as Iâm concerned, the cosmos is 15 billion years old; the world is 4.5 billion years old; thereâs been life for 3.5 billion years, and there are creatures that had pretty developed nervous systems 300 to 600 million years ago. We were living in trees as small mammals 60 million years ago, and we were down on the plains between 60 million and 7 million years ago, and thatâs about when we split from chimpanzees. Modern human beings seemed to emerge about 150,000 years ago, and civilization emerged pretty much after the ice ageâsomething after 15,000 years ago. Not very long ago, at all. Thatâs the span across which I want to understand.
I want to understand why we are the way we are, looking at life in its continual complexity right from the beginning of life itself. Thereâs some real utility in that, because we share attributes with other animalsâeven animals as simple as crustaceans, for example. Crustaceans have nervous system properties that are very much like ours, and itâs very much worth knowing that. I think in an evolutionary way. I think itâs a grand and remarkable way to think, because it has this incredible time span. Itâs this amazingâI mean, people at the end of the 19th century, middle of the 19th century, really thought the world was about 6,000 years old. 15 billion years old is a lot more. Itâs a lot grander and bigger, but itâs also a lot more frightening and alienating, in some sense, because the cosmos has become so vast. Itâs easy for human beings to think of themselves as trivial specs on a trivial spec out some misbegotten hellhole-end-of-the-galaxy among hundreds of millions of galaxies.
Itâs very easy to see yourself as nothing in that span of time. Thatâs a real challenge for people. I think itâs a mistake to think that way, because I think consciousness is far more than we think it is. Itâs still something that we have to grapple with. Iâm a psychoanalytic thinker. What that means is that I believe that people are collections of subpersonalities, and that those subpersonalities are alive, not machines. They have their viewpoint; they have their wants; they have their perceptions; they have their arguments; they have their emotions. Theyâre like low resolution representations of you.
When you get angry, itâs like a very low resolution representation of you. It only wants rage, or it only wants something to eat, or it only wants water; it only wants sex. Itâs you, but shrunk and focused in a specific direction. All those motivational systems are very, very ancient, very archaic and very, very powerful. They play a determining role in the manner in which we manifest ourselves. As Freud pointed out with the id, we have to figure out how we take all those underlying animalistic motivations and emotions and civilize them in some way, so that we can all live in the same general territory without tearing each other to shreds, which is maybe the default position of both chimpanzee and humanity. So I take seriously the idea that weâre a loose collection of spirits.
It says in the Old Testament, somewhere, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. I think this is akin to that. If you know that youâre not in control of yourself thoroughly, and that there are other factors behind the scenesâlike the ancient Greeks, who thought that human beings were the playthings of the gods; thatâs the way they conceptualized the world. They sort of meant the same thing. They meant there are these great forces that move us, that we donât create, and that weâre subordinate to, in some sense. Not entirely, but you can be subordinate to them, and they move our destinies. That was the Greek view.
Understanding that teaches you humility, and that thereâs a hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes. Youâre the driver of a very complex vehicle, but you donât understand the vehicle very well, and itâs got its own motivations and methods. Sometimes you think itâs doing something, and itâs doing something completely different. You see that in psychotherapy all the time, because you help someone unwind a pattern of behaviour that theyâve manifested forever. First of all, they describe it and they become aware of it, then, maybe, they start to see what the cause is. They have no idea why they were acting like that. They have to have the memory that produced the behavioural pattern to begin with. It has to be brought back to mind, then it has to be analyzed and assessed, and then they have to think of a different way of acting. Itâs extraordinarily complex.
LiteraryâŚWell, thereâs this postmodern idea about literatureâand about the world, for that matterâthat, if you take a complex piece of literature like a Shakespeare play, thereâs no end to the number of interpretations that you can make of it. You can interpret each word, each phrase, each sentence, each paragraph. You can interpret the entire play. The way you interpret it depends on how many other books you've read, and it depends on your orientation in the world. It depends on a very, very large number of thingsâhow cultured you are, or how much culture you lack. All of those things. It opens up a huge vista for potential interpretation. The postmodernists sort of stubbed their toe on that, and thought, âwell, if thereâs this vast number of interpretations of any particular literary work, how can you be sure that any interpretation is any more valid than any other interpretation? And if you can't be sure, then how do you even know those are great works? How do you know they're not just works that people in power have used to facilitate their continual accession of power?â Which is really a postmodern idea, and a very, very cynical one. It has its point, but the thing is grounded in something real.
Yes, you can interpret things forever. I want to briefly show you something. Weâll get back to it later. Look at this. This is one of the coolest things that Iâve ever seen. At the bottom here, every single one of those lines is a Biblical verse. The length of the line is proportional to how many times that verse is referred to in some way by some other verse. So this is the first hyperlinked book. Iâm dead serious about that. You canât click and get the hyperlinks, obviously, but itâs a thoroughly hyperlinked book. Itâs because the people who worked on these stories that are hypothetically at the endâwhich is the end; the end canât affect the beginning. Thatâs the rule of time: what happens now canât affect what happened to you 10 years agoâŚeven though it actually canâŚyou reinterpret things, then theyâre not the same. But whatever. We wonât get into that. Technically speaking, the present cannot effect the past. But thatâs not right, if youâre looking at a piece of literature; because when you write the end you know what was at the beginning, and when you write the beginningâor edit itâyou know whatâs at the end, and so you can weave the whole thing together. Thereâs 65,000 cross-references, and thatâs what this map shows. Thatâs a great visual representation of the book. Why is the book deep? Well, just imagine how many pathways you could take through that. Youâd just journey through that forever. Youâd never, ever get to the end of it. Thereâs permutations and combinations, and every phrase is dependent on every other phrase, and every verse is dependent on every other verseâŚwell, not entirely, but 65,000 is not a bad start.
Thatâs another issue that seems to make the postmodernist critique even more correct: how in the world are you going to extract out a canonical interpretation of something like that? Itâs like, itâs not possible. But here is the issue, as far as I can tell: the postmodernists extended that critique to the world. They said look, text is complicated enoughâyou can't extract out a canonical interpretation. What about the world? The worldâs way more complicated than a text, and thereâs an infinite number of ways that you can look at the world. How do we know that any one way is better than any other way?
Thatâs a good question. The postmodern answer was, âwe canât.â Thatâs not a good answer, because you drown in chaos under those circumstances. You can't make sense of anything, and thatâs not good, because itâs not neutral to not make sense of things. Itâs very anxiety-provoking and depressing. If things are so chaotic that you canât get a handle on them, your body defaults into emergency preparation mode. Your heart rate goes up, and your immune system stops working. You burn yourself out; you age rapidly because youâre surrounded by nothing you can control. Thatâs an existential crisis. Itâs anxiety-provoking and depressingâvery hard on people. Even more than that, it turns out that the way weâre constructed neurophysiologically is that we donât experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim and we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim.
It isnât precisely attaining the aim that makes us happyâas you all know if youâve ever attained anything. As soon as you attain it, the whole little game ends, and you have to come up with another game. So itâs Sisyphus, and thatâs ok. But it does show that the attainment canât be the thing that drives you, because it collapses the game. Thatâs what happens when you graduate from university. Itâs like, youâre king of the mountain for one day, then youâre like serf at Starbucks for the next five years.
Human beings are weird creatures: weâre much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attaining it. What that means is that you have to have an aim, and that means you have to have an interpretation. It also means that the nobler the aim, the better your life. Thatâs a really interesting thing to know, because youâve heard, ever since you were tiny, that you should act like a good personâyou shouldn't lie, for example. You might think, âwell, why should I act like a good person? Why not lie?â Even a three-year-old can ask that questionâbecause smart kids learn to lie earlier, by the wayâand they think, âwhy not twist the fabric of reality, so that it serves my specific, short-term needs?â Thatâs a great question. Why not do that? Why act morally if you can get away with something, and it brings you closer to something you want? Well, why not do it? These are good questions. Itâs not self-evident.
It seems, to me, tied into what I just mentioned. You destabilize yourself and things become chaotic, and that's not good. If you do not have a noble aim, you have nothing but shallow trivial pleasures, and they donât sustain you. Thatâs not good, because life is difficult. Thereâs so much suffering and complexity. It ends, everyone dies, and itâs painful. Without a noble aim, how can you withstand any of that? You canât; you become desperate. Things go from bad to worse very rapidly, when you become desperate. And so thereâs the idea of the noble aim, and itâs something thatâs necessary. Itâs the bread that people cannot live without. Itâs not mystical bread: itâs the noble aim. And what is that? It was encapsulated, in part, in the story of Marduk: itâs to pay attention, speak properly, confront chaos, and to make a better world. Itâs something like that. Thatâs enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without cringing at the very thought of your own existenceâso that you can do something thatâs worthwhile, to justify your wretched position on the planet.
The literary issue is that you can interpret a text in a variety of ways, but that's not right. This is where the postmodernists went wrong. What youâre looking for in a textâand in the world, for that matterâis sufficient order and direction. We have to think, âwhat does sufficient order and direction mean?â You donât want to suffer so much that your life is unbearable. That just seems self-evident. Pain argues for itself. I think of pain as the fundamental reality, because no one disputes it. Even if you say that you don't believe in pain, it doesnât help when youâre in pain. You still believe in it. You canât pry it up with logic and rationality. It just stands forth as the fundament of existence, and thatâs actually quite useful to knowâto say you donât want any more of that than is absolutely necessary. I think thatâs self-evident.
But then you say, âwait a minute. Itâs more complicated than that.â You don't want any more than necessary today, but also not tomorrow, and not next week, and not next month, and not next year. So however you act now better not compromise how youâre going to be in a year, because thatâd just be counterproductive. Thatâs part of the problem with short-term pleasures. âAct in haste, repent at leisure.â Everyone knows exactly what that means. You have to act in a way that works now, and tomorrow, and next week, and next month, and so forth. So you have to take your future self into account. Human beings can do that. Taking your future self into account isnât much different than taking other people into account.
Thereâs this Simpsons episode, and Homer downs a quart of mayonnaise and vodka. Marge says, 'you know, you shouldn't really do that.â And Homer says, âthatâs a problem for future-Homer. Iâm sure glad Iâm not that guy.â Itâs so ridiculous and comical. But, ok, you see we have to grapple with that. The you thatâs out there in the future is sort of like another person, and so figuring out how to conduct yourself properly in relationship to your future self isnât much different than figuring out how to conduct yourself in relationship to other people. Then we can expand the constraints. Not only does the interpretation that you extract have to protect you from suffering and give you an aim, but it has to do it in a way thatâs iterable, so it works across time, and then it has to work in the presence of other people, so that you can cooperate with them and compete with them in a way that doesn't make you suffer more.
People are not that tolerant. They have choices. They donât have to hang around with you; they can hang around with any one of these other primates. So if you donât act properly, at least within certain boundaries, youâre just cast aside. People are broadcasting information at you, all the time, about how you need to interpret the world, so they can tolerate being around you. And you need that because, socially isolated, youâre insane, and then you're dead. No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time. We canât retain our own sanity without continual feedback from other people. Itâs too damned complicated. Youâre constrained by your own existence, and then you're constrained by the existence of other people, and then you're also constrained by the world. If I read Hamlet and what I extracted out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge, it puts my interpretation to an end rather quickly. It doesnât seem to be optimally functional.
An interpretation is constrained by the reality of the world. Itâs constrained by the reality of other people, and itâs constrained by your reality across time. Thereâs only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space. Thatâs part of the reason that postmodernists are wrong. Itâs also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who are trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in a body. It turns out that you just canât make something intelligent without it being embodied, and itâs partly for the reasons that I've just described. You need constraints on the system, so that the system doesnât drown in an infinite sea of interpretation. Itâs something like that. So thatâs the literary end of it.
Moral. Morality for me is about action. Iâm an existentialist, in some sense, and what that means is that I believe that what people believe to be true is what they act out, not what they say. Thereâs lots of definitions of truth. Truth is a very expansive word. You can think of objective truth, but behavioural truth is the same as objective truth. What you should do isnât the same as what is, as far as I can tell. People debate that, but I think the reason that has to be the case is becauseâthink about it this way: Youâre standing in front of a field. You can see the field, but the field doesnât tell you how to walk through. Thereâs an infinite number of ways you could walk through, and so you canât extract out an inviolable guide to how you should act from the array of facts that are in front of you. Thereâs just too many facts, and you don't have directionality. But you need to know how not to suffer, and you need to know what your aim is, and so you need to overlay that objective reality with some interpretative structure. Itâs the nature of that interpretive structure that weâre going to be aiming at hard.
Iâve already given you some hints about it. Weâve extracted it in part from observations of our own behaviour and other peopleâs behaviour, and weâve extracted it in part by the nature of our embodiment, thatâs been shaped over hundreds of millions of years. We see the infinite plane of facts, and we impose a moral interpretation on it. The moral interpretation is what to do about what is. Thatâs associated both with securityâbecause you just donât need too much complexityâand also with aim. Weâre mobile creatures, and we need to know where weâre going. All weâre ever concerned about, roughly speaking, is where weâre going. Thatâs what we need to know: where we are we going, what we are doing, and why. Thatâs not the same question as, âwhat is the world made of, objectively?â Itâs a different question. It requires different answers. Thatâs the domain of the moral, as far as Iâm concerned, which is, âwhat are you aiming at?â Thatâs the question of the ultimate ideal, in some sense. Even if you have trivial little fragmentary ideals, thereâs something trying to emerge out of that thatâs more coherent and more integrated and more applicable and more practical. And thatâs the other thing: you think about literature, and you think about art, and you think those arenât very tightly tied to the earth. Theyâre empyrean, airy, spiritual, and they donât seem practical. But Iâm a practical person.
Part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary, aesthetic, and evolutionary perspective is to extract out something of value thatâs practical. One of the rules that I have when Iâm lecturing is that I donât want to tell anybody anything that they canât use. I think of knowledge as a tool. Itâs something to implement in the world. Weâre tool-using creatures, and our knowledge is tools. We need tools to work in the world. We need tools to regulate our emotions, to make things better, to put an end to suffering to the degree that we can, to live with ourselves properly, and to stand up properly. You need the tools to do that. So I donât want to do anything in this lecture series that isnât practical. I want you to come away having things put together in a way that you can immediately apply. Iâm not interested in abstraction for the sake of abstraction. Itâs gotta make sense, because the more restrictions on your theory, the better. I want it all laid out causally, so that B follows A and B precedes C. That way itâs understandable and doesn't require any unnecessary leap of faith.
Another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible is that youâre called upon to believe things that no one can believe. Thatâs no good, because thatâs a form of lie, as far as I can tell. Then you have to scrap the whole thing, because, in principle, the whole thing is about truth. If you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of liesâhow in the world are you going to get anywhere with that? I donât want any uncertainty at the bottom of thisâor I donât want any more than I have to leave in it, because I canât get any farther than that. Itâs going to make sense rationally. Even though science is in flux, I donât want it to be pushing up against what we know to be scientifically untrue. Thatâs something of a dangerous parameter. If it isnât working with evolutionary theory, for example, then I think that itâs not a good enough solution.
And then, finally, itâs phenomenological. Modern people think of reality as objective, and thatâs very powerful, but that isnât how we experience reality. We have our domain of experienceâand this is a hard thing to get a grip on, even though it should be the most obvious thing. For the phenomenologists, everything that you experience is real. Theyâre interested in the structure of your subjective experience. You have subjective experience, and you have subjective experience, and so do you, and thereâs commonalities across all of those. For example, youâre likely to experience the same set of emotions. We've been able to identify canonical emotions, and, without canonical motivations, we couldnât even communicate, because you wouldnât know what the other person was like; youâd have to explain infinitely. Thereâs nothing you could take for granted, but you can.
Phenomenology is the fact that at the center of my vision my hands are clear, and out in the periphery they disappear. Phenomenology is the way things smell and the way things taste, and the fact that they matter. You could say, in some sense, that phenomenology is the study of what matters, rather than âmatter.â Itâs a given, from the phenomenological perspective, that things have meaning. Even if youâre a rationalist, a cynic, and a nihilist, and say nothing has any meaning, you still run into the problem of pain. Pain undercuts your arguments and has a meaning. Thereâs no escaping from the meaning. You can pretty much demolish all the positive parts of it, but trying to think your way out of the negative parts...Good luck with that, because that just doesnât work. The Bible storiesâand I think this is true of fiction in generalâis phenomenological. It concentrates on trying to elucidate the nature of human experience. That is not the same as the objective world. Itâs also a form of truth, because it is true that you have a field of experience and that it is has qualities. The question is, what are the qualities?
Ancient representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomenaâthings we would consider objective factsâand the projection of subjective truth. Iâll show you how the Mesopotamians viewed the world. They had a model of the world as a disc. If you go out in a field at night, what does the world look like? Well, itâs a disc. Itâs got a dome on top of it. That was basically the Mesopotamian view of the world, and the view of the world of people who wrote the first stories in the Bible. There was water on top of the dome. Well, obviously. It rains, right? Where does the water come from? Thereâs water around the dome. The disc is made of land, and then underneath that thereâs water. How do you know that? Well, drill. Youâll hit water; itâs under the earth. Otherwise, how would you hit the water? And then whatâs under that? Fresh water. And then whatâs under that? If you go to the edge of the disc, you hit the ocean. Itâs salt water. So itâs a dome with water outside of it, and then itâs a disc that the dome sits on, and then underneath that thereâs fresh water, and then underneath that thereâs salt water. That was roughly the Mesopotamian world.
Thatâs a mix of observation and imagination, because that isnât the world, but it is the way the world appears. Itâs a perfectly believable cosmology. The sun rises and the sun sets on that dome. Itâs not like the thing is bloody well spinning. Who would ever think that up? Itâs obvious that the sun comes up and goes down, and then travels underneath the world and comes back up again. There's nothing more self-evident than that. Thatâs that strange intermingling of subjectively fantasy, right at the level of perception and actually observable phenomena. All of the cosmology thatâs associated with the Biblical stories is exactly like that: itâs half psychology and half reality, although the psychological is real, as well.
To know that the Biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing. The poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure. I understand why, because it does organize their societies and their psyche. So they've got something to cling to, but they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth. They try to gerrymander the Biblical stories into the domain of scientific theoryâpromoting creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. Itâs like, that just isnât going to go anywhere. The people who wrote these damned stories weren't scientists to begin with. There werenât any scientists back thenâthereâs hardly any scientists, now.
Really, itâs hard to think scientifically. Man, it takes a lot of training, and even scientists donât think scientifically once you get them out of the lab, and hardly even when theyâre in the lab. You have to get peer-reviewed and criticized. Itâs hard to think scientifically. However, the people who wrote these stories thought more like how dramatists thinkâmore like how Shakespeare thoughtâbut that doesnât mean there isnât truth in it. It just means you have to be a little bit more sophisticated about your ideas of truth, and thatâs ok. There are truths to live by. Ok, fine. We want to figure out what those are, because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much. And so if you know that what the Bible stories, and stories in general, are trying to represent is the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals, you open up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding. It eliminates the contradiction thatâs been painful for people, between the objective world and the claims of religious stories.
Letâs take a look at the structure of the book itself. The first thing about the Bible is that itâs a comedy, and a comedy has a happy ending. Thatâs a strange thing, because the Greek God stories were almost always tragic. The Bible is a comedy. It has a happy ending. Everyone lives, and thereâs a heaven. What you think about that is a completely different issue. Iâm just telling you the structure of the story. Itâs something like, there was paradise at the beginning of time, and then some cataclysms occurred, and people fell into history. History is limitation, mortality, suffering, and self-consciousness. But thereâs a mode of beingâor potentially the establishment of a stateâthat will transcend that, and thatâs what time is aiming at. Thatâs the idea of the story.
Itâs a funny thing that the Bible has a story, because it wasnât written as a book: it was assembled from a whole bunch of different books. The fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable. The question is, what is that story about? And how did it come up as a story? Is there anything to it? It constituted a dramatic record of self-realization or abstraction. I already mentioned that. The idea of the formulation of the image of God is an abstraction. Thatâs how weâre going to handle it, to begin with. I want to sayâbecause I said I wasnât going to be any more reductionist than necessaryâthat I know the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but itâs not explicable, and so I donât want to explain it away. I want to just leave it as a fact, and then I want to pull back from that and say, ok, weâll leave that as a fact and mystery. Weâre going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out an ideal, and to consider it as an abstraction outside of its instantiation. Thatâs good enough. Thatâs an amazing thing, if itâs true. But I donât want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Itâs a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors. What does that mean? Many people wrote it, thereâs many different books, and theyâre interwoven togetherâespecially in the first five books by people who, I suspect, took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization and tried to make their accounts coherent. They took a little of this, and they took a little of that, and they took a little of this, and they tried not to lose anything, because it seemed valuable. It certainly seemed valuable to the people who collected the stories, because they werenât gonna tolerate too much editing. But they also wanted it to make sense, to some degree, so it wasnât completely logically contradictory and completely absurd. Many people wrote it, and many people edited it, and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time. We have very few documents like that, and so just because we have a document like that is sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena, and to try to understand what it is that itâs trying to communicate. I said itâs also the worldâs first hyperlinked text, which is very much worth thinking about, for quite a long time.
Thereâs four sources in the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bibleâfour stories that we know came together. The first one was called the Priestly. It used the name Elohim, or El Shaddai, for God. I believe âelâ is the root for âallah,â as well. This is usually translated as âGod,â or âthe gods,â because âElohimâ is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible. Itâs newer than the Jahwist version. The reason Iâm telling you that is because Genesis 1, which is the first story, isnât as old as Genesis 2. Genesis 2 contains the Jahwist version. It contains the story of Adam and Eve. Thatâs older than the very first book in the Bible, but they decided to put the newer version first. I think itâs because it deals with more fundamental abstractions. Itâs something like that. It deals with the most basic of abstractionsâhow the universe was createdâand then segues into what the human environment is like. That seems to be the logic behind it.
The Jahwist version uses the name YHWH , which, apparently, people didnât say, but we believe was pronounced something like âYahwa.â It has a strongly anthropomorphic God, that takes human form. It begins with Genesis 2:4. This is the account of the heavens and the earth, and it contains the story of Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and Noah, and the Tower of Babel, and Exodus, and Numbers, along with the Priestly version. It also contains the law in the formâjust the formâof the Ten Commandments, which is like a truncated form of the law.
Thereâs the Elohist source. It contains the stories of Abraham and Isaac. Itâs concerned with a heavenly hierarchy that includes angels. It talks about the departure from Egypt, and it presents the covenant code, which is this idea that society is predicatedâthis was Israeli societyâon a covenant with God thatâs laid out in a sequence of rules, some of which are the Ten Commandment, but many of which are much more extensive than that.
The final one is the Deuteronomist Code. It contains the bulk of the law and whatâs called the Deuteronomic History. Itâs independent of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. And so we know that, at least.
Now, thereâs debate about this, like there is about everything. Iâm brushing over a large area of scholarship, but people generally assume that there were multiple authors over multiple periods of time. The way they've concluded that is by looking at textual analysis, trying to see where there are chunks of the stories that have the same kind of style or the same references. People argue about that because, you know, obviously itâs difficult to recreate something ancient. But thatâs the basic idea. It is an amalgam of viewpoints about these initial issues, and thatâs important to know. Itâs like a collective story.
Ok, to understand the first part of Genesis Iâm going to turn, strangely enough, to something thatâs actually part of the New Testament. This is a central element of Christianity. Itâs a very strange idea thatâs gonna take a very long time to unpack. This is what John said about Christ. He said, "in the beginning was the word." That relates back to Genesis 1. "In the beginning was the word, and word was with God, and the word was God." Three sentences like that take a lot of unpacking because, well, none of that seems to make any sense whatsoever. "In the beginning was the word, and the word was both with God and the word was God." So the first question might be, what in the world does that mean? "In the beginning was the word." Thatâs the logos, and the logos is embodied in the figure of Christ. Thereâs this idea in John that whatever Christ isâa son of Godâis not only instantiatedâa particular time and place, as a carpenter in some backwoods part of the worldâbut is also something eternal that exists up outside of time and space, that was there right at the beginning.
As far as I can tell, what that logos represents is something like what modern people refer to when they talk about consciousness. Itâs something like thatâitâs more than that. Itâs like consciousness and its capacity to be aware and to communicate. Thereâs an idea underneath that which is that Beingâespecially from a phenomenological perspective, so the Being that is experienceâcannot exist without consciousness. Itâs like consciousness shines a light on things to bring it into Being. Without consciousness, what is there? No one experiences anything. Is there anything, when no one experiences anything? Thatâs the question, and the answer this book is presenting is that âno, you have to think about consciousness as a constituent element of reality. Itâs something thatâs necessary for reality itself to exist.â
Of course, it opens up what you mean by âreality,â but the reality that's being referred to hereâIâve told you alreadyâis this strange amalgam of the subjective experience and the world. But the question is deeper than that, too, because it is by no means obvious what there is, if thereâs no one to experience it. The whole notion of time itself seems to collapse, at least in terms of something like felt duration. The notion of size disappears; thereâs nothing to scale it. Causality seems to vanish. We donât understand consciousness, not in the least. We donât understand what it is that is in us that gives illumination to Being.
What happens in the Old Testament, at least in part, is that consciousness is associated with the divine. Now you think, âwell, is that a reasonable proposition?â Thatâs a very complicated question, but at least we might note that thereâs something to the claim, because there is a miracle of experience and existence thatâs dependent on consciousness. People try to explain it away constantly, but it doesn't seem to work very well. And hereâs something else to think aboutâI think itâs really worth thinking about. People do not like it when you treat them like theyâre not conscious. They react very badly to that. You donât like it if someone assumes that youâre not conscious, and you donât like it if someone assumes you donât have free willâthat youâre just absolutely determined in your actions, thereâs nothing thatâs going to repair you, and that you donât need to have any responsibility for your actions.
Our culture, the laws of our culture, are predicated on the idea that people are conscious. People have experience; people make decisions, and can be held responsible for them. Thereâs a free will element to it. You can debate all that philosophically, and fine, but the point is that that is how we act, and that is the idea that our legal system is predicated on. Thereâs something deep about it, because youâre subject to the law, but the law is also limited by you, which is to say that in a well-functioning, properly-grounded democratic system, you have intrinsic value. Thatâs the source of your rights. Even if youâre a murderer, we have to say the law can only go so far because thereâs something about you thatâs divine.
Well, what does that mean? Partly it means that thereâs something about you thatâs conscious and capable of communicating, like youâre a whole world unto yourself. You have that to contribute to everyone else, and thatâs valuable. You can learn new things, transform the structure of society, and invent a new way of dealing with the world. Youâre capable of all that. Itâs an intrinsic part of you, and thatâs associated with the idea that thereâs something about the logos that is necessary for the absolute chaos of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality. Thatâs an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a constitutive role in the cosmos. You can debate that, but you canât just bloody well brush it off. First of all, we are the most complicated things there are, that we know of, by a massive amount. Weâre so complicated that itâs unbelievable. So thereâs a lot of cosmos out there, but thereâs a lot of cosmos in here, too, and which one is greater is by no means obvious, unless you use something trivial, like relative size, which really isnât a very sophisticated approach.
Whatever it is that is you has this capacity to experience reality and to transform it, which is a very strange thing. You can conceptualize the future in your imagination, and then you can work and make that manifestâparticipate in the process of creation. Thatâs one way of thinking about it. Thatâs why I think Genesis 1 relates the idea that human beings are made in the image of the divineâmen and women, which is interesting, because feminists are always criticizing Christianity as being inexorably patriarchal. Of course, they criticize everything like that, so itâs hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance. But I think itâs an absolute miracle that right at the beginning of the document it says straightforwardly, with no hesitation whatsoever, that the divine spark which weâre associating with the word, that brings forth Being, is manifest in men and women equally. Thatâs a very cool thing. You got to think, like I said, do you actually take that seriously? Well, what you got to ask is what happens if you donât take it seriously, right? Read Dostoevskyâs Crime and Punishment. Thatâs the best investigation into that tactic thatâs ever been produced.
What happens in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is that the main character, whose name is Raskolnikov, decides that thereâs no intrinsic value to other people and that, as a consequence, he can do whatever he wants. Itâs only cowardice that stops him from acting. Why would it be anything else if value of other people is just an arbitrary superstition? Well, then why canât I do exactly what I want, when I want? Which is the psychopathâs viewpoint. Well, so Raskolnikov does: he kills someone whoâs a very horrible person, and he has very good reasons for killing her. Heâs half-starved, and a little bit insane, and possessed by this ideologyâitâs a brilliant, brilliant layoutâand he finds out something after he kills her, which is that the post-killing Raskolnikov and the pre-killing Raskolnikov are not the same person, even a little bit, because heâs broken a rule. Heâs broken a serious rule and thereâs no going back.
Crime and Punishment is the best investigation, I know, of what happens if you take the notion that thereâs nothing divine about the individual seriously. Most of the people I know who are deeply atheisticâand I understand why theyâre deeply atheisticâhavenât contended with people like Dostoevsky. Not as far as I can tell, because I donât see logical flaws in Crime and Punishment. I think he got the psychology exactly right. Dostoevskyâs amazing for this. In one of his books, The Devils, he describes a political scenario that's not much different than the one we find ourselves in, now. Thereâs these people who are possessed by rationalistic, utopian, atheistic ideas, and theyâre very powerful. They give rise to the communist revolution. Theyâre powerful ideas.
His character, Stavrogin, also acts out the presupposition that human beings have no intrinsic nature and no intrinsic value. Itâs another brilliant investigation. Dostoevsky prophesized what will happen to a society if it goes down that road, and he was dead, exactly accurate. Itâs uncanny to read Dostoevsky's The Possessedâor The Devils, depending on the translationâand to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsynâs Gulag Archipelago. One is fiction and prophecy, and the second is, âhey, lookâit turned out exactly the way Dostoevsky said it would, for exactly the same reasons.â Itâs quite remarkable. So the question is, do you contend seriously with the idea that, A, thereâs something cosmically constitutive about consciousness? and B, that that might well be considered divine? and C, that that is instantiated in every person? And then ask yourselfâif youâre not a criminalâif you donât act it out? And then ask yourself what that means. Is that reflective of a reality? Is it a metaphor? Maybe itâs a complex metaphor that we have to use to organize our societies. It could well be. But even as a metaphor, itâs true enough so that we mess with it at our peril. It also took people a very long time to figure out.
This is Genesis 1, and Iâm probably going to stop there because I believe itâs 9:30. We didnât even get to the first line. I want to read you a couple of things that weâll use as a prodromos for the next lecture. Iâll just bounce through a collection of ideas thatâs associated with the notion of divinity. Weâll turn back to the first lines when we start the next lecture. I have no idea how far Iâm going to get through the Biblical stories, by the way, because Iâm trying to figure this out as I go along.
Thereâs an idea in Christianity of the image of God as a Trinity. Thereâs the element of the Father, thereâs the element of the Son, and thereâs the element of the Holy Spirit. Itâs something like the spirit of tradition, human beings as the living incarnation of that tradition, and the spirit in people that makes relationship with the spirit and individuals possible. Iâm going to bounce my way quickly through some of the classical, metaphorical attributes of God, so that we kind of have a cloud of notions about what weâre talking about, when we return to Genesis 1 and talk about the God who spoke chaos into Being.
Thereâs a fatherly aspect, so hereâs what God as a father is like. You can enter into a covenant with it, so you can make a bargain with it. Now, you think about that. Money is like that, because money is a bargain you make with the future. We structured our world so that you can negotiate with the future. I donât think that we would have got to the point where we could do that without having this idea to begin with. You can act as if the futureâs a reality; thereâs a spirit of tradition that enables you to act as if the future is something that can be bargained with. Thatâs why you make sacrifices. The sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time, and now theyâre psychological. We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present and expect that youâre negotiating with something thatâs representing the transcendent future. Thatâs an amazing human discovery. No other creature can do that; to act as if the future is real; to know that you can bargain with reality itself, and that you can do it successfully. Itâs unbelievable.
It responds to sacrifice. It answers prayers. Iâm not saying that any of this is true, by the way. Iâm just saying what the cloud of ideas represents. It punishes and rewards. It judges and forgives. Itâs not nature. One of the things weird about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God and nature are not the same thing, at all. Whatever God is, partially manifest in this logos, is something that stands outside of nature. I think thatâs something like consciousness as abstracted from the natural world. It built Eden for mankind and then banished us for disobedience. Itâs too powerful to be touched. It granted free will. Distance from it is hell. Distance from it is death. It reveals itself in dogma and in mystical experience, and itâs the law. Thatâs sort of like the fatherly aspect.
The son-like aspect. It speaks chaos into order. It slays dragons and feeds people with the remains. It finds gold. It rescues virgins. It is the body and blood of Christ. It is a tragic victim, scapegoat, and eternally triumphant redeemer simultaneously. It cares for the outcast. It dies and is reborn. It is the king of kings and hero of heroes. Itâs not the state, but is both the fulfillment and critic of the state. It dwells in the perfect house. It is aiming at paradise or heaven. It can rescue from hell. It cares for the outcast. It is the foundation and the cornerstone that was rejected. It is the spirit of the law.
The spirit-like aspect. Itâs akin to the human soul. Itâs the prophetic voice. Itâs the still, small voice of conscience. Itâs the spoken truth. Itâs called forth by music. It is the enemy of deceit, arrogance, and resentment. It is the water of life. It burns without consuming. Itâs a blinding light.
Thatâs a very well-developed set of poetic metaphors. These are all...what would you say...glimpses of the transcendent ideal. Thatâs the right way of thinking about it. Theyâre glimpses of the transcendent ideal, and all of them have a specific meaning. In part, what weâre going to do is go over that meaning, as we continue with this series. What weâve got now is a brief description, at least, of what this is.
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth." We know itâs associated with the logos in this sequence of stories. We know itâs associated with the word, and with consciousness; and we know that itâs associated with whatever God is. And then I laid out the metaphorical landscape that, at least in part, describes God. Now we have some sense of the being that creates the heavens and the earth.
"The earth was without form and void"âthatâs that chaotic state of intermingled confusionâ"and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light.â
Weâll stop with that, because now weâre ready to take a tentative step into the very first part of this book. Itâs important to have your conceptual framework properly organized, so that you can appreciate where itâs going and what it might possibly mean. And so, well, Iâve done what I can today toâŚ.what would you sayâŚelaborate on this single word, I suppose. Hah. But itâs a big word, so itâs not so unreasonable that it takes a long time to get to the point where you have any sense of what it means, at all. That is nowhere nearâŚthat is notâŚI thought I would get a lot farther than that. Hah. Thank you very much.