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  • What?

  • Hey, everyone, here we go.

  • So I I saw somebody ask right off about if there were any women.

  • I think they said girls, actually, if there any women in the audience, Um and if there are, well, that's good.

  • So welcome.

  • Um, thanks to all you patri on people for your continued support, it's a really big deal.

  • It's made a huge difference.

  • And you're a big part of the reason that biblical lecture was so ridiculously successful.

  • I think more than two million people have watched it so far, so that's success by any stretch of the imagination.

  • So let's start with some questions here.

  • I've got to live chat going, and, um, we also set it up so that, uh, we had we had questions taken to begin with that people could up fault, which seems to be a good idea.

  • Let's start with one from Practice Cube.

  • What would be a practical approach for developing your shadow?

  • Well, that's a good one.

  • Let's let's do a little review of union psychology.

  • The first thing is, if you want to know about this, the proper sources.

  • Carl Young's collected Works Volume nine, Volume nine, and there's two parts to Volume 9 a.m. be published as separate texts, and Volume nine is called Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, and the other one is called I Own.

  • But in archetypes the collective unconscious, there's a good discussion of the persona and the shadow.

  • The persona, you could say, is a good way of thinking about it.

  • You know, you watch all those wrong coms where there's always kind of a beta male guy who's being real friendly and always failing miserably with women because basically, he's lying to himself.

  • And to them, um, he's a persona, and a persona is the face that you show to the world when you're trying to pretend and to convince yourself and others that you're, I would say harmless.

  • But we could say a good person.

  • But a good person isn't harmless.

  • A good person is capable of.

  • Well, maybe a good person is capable of anything but is willing to hold that in the bands.

  • I read this interesting commentary a little while ago on a statement by Christ in the New Testament, and the statement generally interpreted is that the meek shall inherit the Earth.

  • But I was looking up.

  • The multiple translations of the word meek and meek is actually derived from a Greek word, of course, because the Bible, at least some of the original forms of the Bible were in Greek.

  • Um, and that word didn't exactly mean Mieke.

  • It meant something like, um, those who have weapons and the ability to use them.

  • But certain but determined to keep them sheathed will inherit the world.

  • And that means that people who are capable of force, let's say, but decided not to use it, are in the proper moral position and needs.

  • You commented on that a fair bit, too, you know, he he thought of most moral morality as cowardice, not because morality itself was cowardice, but because most people who are cowards disguised their coward cowardice as morality.

  • And they claim that they're harmless nous, which is actually a consequence of their fear and inability to be harmful, say, or to be dangerous is actually a sign of their moral integrity.

  • And that's a really bad idea.

  • So, you know, if you're an ax murder, but you don't have an axe, that doesn't mean that your moral so now, with regards to so that's the persona and the persona is the mask that you wear.

  • And that's what persona means is the mask that you wear to convince yourself in the world that you're not a terrible monster, so that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you don't have to run away screaming.

  • You know when you might think, Well, that's a bit of an overstatement, but you was very interested in phenomena such as, um, say psychological, the psychological phenomena that would characterize the actions of someone who might be in our sweats camp guard, for example.

  • And, uh, you know, that's pretty monstrous form of behavior.

  • And the thing about our Schwitz camp guards is that there's no reason to assume, really, that they were much different than normal people Now.

  • There would have been exceptions, obviously, but and what that means is that perhaps you two could be in Auschwitz camp guard, and perhaps you would even derive some enjoyment out of it, and you might think not.

  • But you shouldn't think not so quickly.

  • And what that also implies is that if you could see what that meant when you looked in the mirror and looked at yourself you might run away screaming because you'd have a revelation of just exactly what the human being is capable of.

  • And that's a very unpleasant revelation and also one of the things that stops people from being enlightened, because that revelation of the evil of the self is part of the journey to enlightenment and an early part.

  • Now the shadow would be all the parts of the personality that the persona rejects, and that might be the aggressive elements.

  • Certainly the that's the case with for people who are hyper agreeable.

  • And now you can tell, I think one of the best.

  • There's two pathways to the development of the shadow, and they're tightly allied with one another.

  • The fundamental pathway is truth, and that's to face the bitter truth about yourself.

  • But to break that down more particularly, you might think about that as the capacity to observe your own resentment.

  • You're going to be resentful and bitter in many situations because you don't get what you want.

  • And if you watch that resentment bitterness, you'll see that it produces fantasies that can be unbelievably dark, and that can be very frightening, and you might not want to admit to yourself that you're actually capable of having fantasies like that, or impulses of like that or aggressive feelings like that.

  • But the thing is is that if those aggressive feelings and impulses and fantasies are integrated into your character, it's like you're opening up a dialogue with a part of yourself that could be very forceful and strong and dangerous.

  • And it's really useful to be dangerous, because if you can, if you convey dangerous, you often don't have to be, and it's it's often weak people.

  • For example, it's weak men, generally speaking, who rape, you know that.

  • That's a very, very common occurrence, and that's a violent act.

  • But it's born out of weakness, not out of strength, that's for sure.

  • And so, anyways, you attend to your resentment honestly, and you observe yourself and what you're actually like.

  • You gotta pay attention, as if you don't know yourself as if you might harbor hidden devils, and then maybe they'll emerge now.

  • Young also felt that sort of embedded inside the shout.

  • It were the Contra sexual tendencies.

  • And so, for example, sometimes you see people who are well developed men, let's say and we can We can also talk about women in this regard.

  • Men who have integrated their shadow often also developed a kind of peculiar grace that would be a consequence of not only allowing they're aggressive side to step forward, but also their their feminine, compassionate side that might, that they may have kept squelched because of embarrassment about it or because they've been harassed for being weak or any number of things.

  • So.

  • But the practical approach for developing your shadow, I would say, is to contemplate and consider your resentment and notice what it says.

  • And because your resentment will also tell you what you have to say, you know?

  • So, look, look what happened Google this weekend.

  • You know, James Damore wrote that memo, and you can imagine he was pretty angry and perhaps even somewhat resentful at having to attend that diversity seminar, and I'm really just using this as an example.

  • But what he did was decide that that meant that he had something that he had to say and then look at the consequences of that man.

  • It's absolutely unbelievable.

  • And so you know, if you're feeling oppressed at worker, you're oppressed in your life or you know where you're oppressing yourself, then you got to notice that you're feeling oppressed.

  • Then you have to notice that you're feeling resentful, resentful and and angry and bitter and maybe even like cane in the story of Cain and Abel, because cane is sort of the archetypal bitter man, and then you have to decide what it is that you need to do in order to remove from yourself that bitterness, and that's usually means that there's something that you have to say, and then you have to say it because your soul depends on it.

  • And not only does your soul depend on it, I would say the fate of the world depends on it because you know you might be wrong, and then you should be straightened out.

  • Maybe you're just being whiny, and you have to talk to somebody about that.

  • But it may be that you're actually detecting something wrong, some tyranny that's directed towards you and other people, and it's like your moral obligation to speak up about it.

  • And so many workplace has become toxic to use.

  • A terrible question cliche because of the people in them won't speak up for what they actually want or they speak up too late, and then they're all twisted up about it and and, you know, they're torturing other people because they're so unhappy and so forth and so on.

  • So practical approach for developing in shadow fundamentally is radical honesty.

  • And Young said that, you know a genuine moral effort was a good substitute for psychotherapy.

  • What is my opinion on open relationships?

  • Polyamory, other forms of non monogamy?

  • Well, I think that as a medium to long term strategy, they're completely untenable because human beings, as far as I'm concerned, are fundamentally pair bonding.

  • And, you know, if you're just talking about casual sex, first of all, I think casual sex is a contradiction in terms.

  • I don't think there's anything about sex that's casual, and I think that people are deceiving themselves badly whenever they think so.

  • They might like to live in a 19 seventies Playboy adolescent fantasy, but I don't I've never seen that work under any circumstances whatsoever, and I think people get hurt badly.

  • It's also a bad medium to long term strategy because no pair bonding is a is the most stable arrangement we know of at least so far.

  • Well, I won't even put it that way.

  • It's the only stable mode of being that we know for the long run, and that's especially the case when you bring Children into the equation.

  • So I think it's delusional, fundamentally, and I think that people who are who believe that such things work.

  • I mean, sometimes they're open people in their creative in their exploratory and all of that, and fair enough.

  • But often they're just unconscious, anxious, and they don't want to take any responsibility.

  • And they want to live in this wish fulfillment fantasy where everybody can have all the sex they want all the time.

  • And it's always wonderful and no one gets hurt.

  • And it's like Sorry, that just doesn't work in the real world.

  • So my girlfriend is quite overweight, but I really love her.

  • Should I try to encourage her lose weight?

  • Aside from personal preference, is this likely to explode into a major issue down the road?

  • Who?

  • I don't think that you can fool yourself about what you're attracted to?

  • And yes, it's certainly likely to develop into a major issue down the road.

  • Um, it's tough, you know, uh, because it's so The devil's in the details, you know?

  • Should you try to encourage her lose weight?

  • I guess the question is, how would you do that without disrupting the relationship and and without knowing more about the details of that, I would say that I don't know how to tell what to tell you to do about that.

  • I think that it's necessary to be truthful in a relationship period.

  • But I also think that you can't use the truth to hurt.

  • You know, the truth is a very complicated thing, and it's it's a sword and it cuts and you can't use it to hurt.

  • Now, you know, maybe you would be subtle enough to figure out some way that you could both embark on a health promoting endeavor together, and that would work out.

  • But I would say, you know, if you if you're in a stable, long term relationship with someone, it's pretty much necessary for both of you to address all the issues that are making you unhappy with each other.

  • Um, you know, assuming there's some give and take on that, because otherwise the relationship can easily come apart at the seams like I would say, My wife and I are both very hard on each other about our physical appearance, Let's say, and I've gained a fair bit of weight from the time I was, say, 40 till the time I was 50 about probably because I was eating things that weren't good for me.

  • And I would say that was primarily carbohydrates.

  • I can tell you if you want to lose weight, you start eating carbohydrates, man, you'll lose weight like you wouldn't believe.

  • I wouldn't necessarily recommend it because it has some dangerous, but it certainly works.

  • But you know, the the alternative to protect to the alternative is to pretend that everything's all right.

  • And all that means is that you're likely to get drunk sometimes and someday and have an affair out of bitterness and spite in the fact that you're no longer attracted to your partner.

  • So it's pretty rough, so that's pretty rough way of thinking about things.

  • But life's pretty rough.

  • So what is the story behind the logo that you use in your intros?

  • Where did it come from?

  • That's that logo is called the meaning of music, and it's actually a sculpture that I made in 1985.

  • That's about 5.5 feet by have 5.5 feet and about eight inches thick.

  • And it's made out of foam core, which is this.

  • But it's a sub.

  • It's, Ah, material that's often used as a backing for paintings or for when you get them framed.

  • It's it's Styrofoam sheet about 1/4 of an inch thick, with paper on both sides, and you can cut it very accurately with an Exacto knife.

  • And so what I did was make a stack of those of those foam core sheets about eight inches high, and I made the thing in quarters and so that it would fit together on the wall because it would have been too big to maneuver easily.

  • And it's a very complicated image.

  • It's actually a three dimensional representation of A.

  • It's a three dimensional representation of a two dimensional representation of a four dimensional object and that four dimensional object you could think of as it's a representation of time and space.

  • And I can tell you I kind of have to hint at what the painting means.

  • It or the sculpture.

  • It means the same thing that music means.

  • You know how music unfolds, and then something else unfolds within it.

  • And then it unfolds again within it, like a rose opening into the into the day.

  • Or like a lotus flower that sort of comes up from the darkest depths up through the dark water and then blooms on the on the surface of the water and the sun.

  • And that's where the Buddha, you know, What would you say?

  • Simple.

  • Symbolically rest.

  • So imagine that thing opening and then imagine that that's what that painting is an image of, and that's the same thing as music.

  • So it's a Mandela image.

  • And for Young that Mandela was a symbol of the self and the self was something that unfolds like music, which is actually why we like music.

  • And it's like the the Rose, the rose that you see the geometric rows that you see in stained glass.

  • It's the same thing.

  • That's the stained glass window that Pinocchios reprehensible compatriot What's his name?

  • Lampwick breaks when he's in Pleasure Island and he throws a rock, too.

  • Destroy the model Holman to demolish the sub structure of Western civilization, So I had a very intense religious experience at one point when I was contemplating that.

  • So when I drew the image to begin with, I drew it in about 10 minutes, kind of rough.

  • And then I used a straight edge to straighten it all open and a protractor to or a compass to make the curves.

  • But I drew it very quickly, and I had been thinking about.

  • I've been reading young a lot at that point, like for months, months of intense reading, and that image sort of popped out of me very, very suddenly.

  • But it took about three months to make the actual image, and then I had only 1/4 of it hanging on my wall because it was so big and I had finished it.

  • After about three months of works, this was back in 1985 when I was a graduate student.

  • I was listening to the Jupiter Symphony, which is the piece of music that I use that was used for the intro to my my videos, and it's a Mozart symphony and this happened man.

  • So this happened.

  • So I was really watching that Mandela that quarter, Mandela that I have made intensely and caught listening to the music, trying to understand what the music music was signifying, you know, because music has intrinsic meaning, which is a very strange thing now.

  • The part of the reason for that is that language has meaning, and our language has a musical quality, right, and that's processed mostly by the right hemisphere, so that when people speak, there's a there's a malady in their language and that carries a lot of the emotional import.

  • And then what musicians have done has figured out how to use that that that that musical faculty, let's call it that non semantic musical faculty to sort of purely denote meaning.

  • That's part of what music means.

  • And so, but I was still trying to understand what the meaning waas.

  • You know what?

  • Because it's non verbal, the meaning of music.

  • And I was trying to figure out how to articulate that.

  • And that's partly why I made the The sculpture was to get a grip on it, to understand it.

  • Anyways, I was really, really concentrating hard on that Mandela and and that sculpture and I had been working on it intensely for about three months.

  • You know that's a lot of meditation on a single idea, and I was standing in my living room and then had this very strange experience, and I can't explain this property because there's no way of really describing it.

  • But I'll do my best.

  • So you know, when those Renaissance paintings sometimes you see well.

  • First of all, you see great cloud, great great sunny skies with with massive what stupendous impressive bills of clouds and then light shining through the sunlight, shining through in streams.

  • Sometimes that's captured very beautifully, but especially English later later artists, usually there later than the Renaissance.

  • But you see it in Renaissance paintings, too, and you are you also see in Renaissance paintings, especially in the earlier phase of the Renaissance, the sky opening up in God sort of peering four through the clouds.

  • And that's exactly what seemed to happen to me is that I had this sense.

  • It was like a vision, although I was still in my living room and knew it.

  • But inside the theater of it, my imagination, I could feel the the sky opening up now.

  • It wasn't the sky it was, I would say the only way I can really think about it is that was something like another dimension.

  • And then I could feel this force descend appoint me, which I think was something that you know would have Bean considered classically something like the Holy Ghost, I suppose.

  • And it filled me with this intense sense of, of, of, of, of paradise A ll, uh, paradise ALS.

  • I don't know how to say it.

  • While it was like being in heaven for some some some brief period of time and I could feel myself transformed transmuted as a consequence of this experience.

  • And And it was as if I was in the presence of something that was living, you know?

  • And I suppose that was an experience of God.

  • If you wanna put it that way, that's certainly what it seemed like.

  • And I felt that I could live that way.

  • I could live transfigured like that permanently if I desired it.

  • And I thought, My God, I wouldn't be able to walk down the street in this sort of elevated state.

  • Let's say I don't know how I would act.

  • I don't know how we would interact with people.

  • I don't know how people would interact with me.

  • I just don't think that I could do it.

  • And then I felt whatever have descended.

  • It seemed that is, if it was sorrowful and and and it departed from me slowly and with no, like with no punitive intent.

  • And I wouldn't say with any dissatisfaction.

  • It was as if a gift had been offered that I wasn't in no position to receive.

  • And I went I talked to my wife soon afterwards, I shook for about physically for about half an hour after that experience.

  • Like like I was shaking, you know, like like like you shake after a car accident if you've ever been in a car accident and my pupils were completely dilated and I had a couple of experiences like that, like echoes of it a couple of times after that.

  • And so anyways, that was a very, very powerful experience.

  • I've certainly never for gotten out, and, um well, you know, I don't know.

  • Well, I don't know what to think about that.

  • I mean, God only knows what the world is really like, that's for sure.

  • And I've had a variety of very strange experiences that have convinced me that we know very little about anything.

  • So, um, for those who are very creative but high in neuroticism, how should one work to gain emotional stability in order to go out into chaos, to do more creative things?

  • That's a really good question.

  • You know, one.

  • I learned about that by reading Young's works on Elka.

  • Me, weirdly enough, and so back again in graduate school when I was writing, starting to write maps of meaning and really tearing myself apart psychologically, trying to understand evil, I suppose, the evil of the Cold War in the evil of the individuals who composed Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.

  • Um, I was reading Karl Young because he wrote his tracks on El Camino were a lot about self transformation, and he talked about.

  • It's hard to explain his works on alchemy, but suffice it to say that his advice was something like.

  • The advice he derived from the alchemist was that if you were going to make a mess around with very complicated and dangerous matters, that's a good way of putting it, that you should really put your life together.

  • And so I would say the right way to deal with your neuroticism is to increase your conscientiousness because we also know that the higher your conscientiousness, the lower your neuroticism conscientiousness does seem to keep neuroticism and check.

  • And so I would say and have said this to many people, um, clean your room, organize your life like get a routine, get up every day at the same time, go to bed at the same time, established disciplined habits.

  • And that will help a lot Schedule like.

  • And here's how to use a schedule.

  • Use it.

  • Use a calendar, Use Google calendar, but don't use it as a tyrant.

  • You know you want to use your use a calendar as if it's your your confidante and adviser, and what you want to do is use the calendar, sit down, open the calendar and think, OK, well, here's what I'm going to do.

  • I'm going to design a week off days that I would really like to have.

  • So what that would mean is that you would schedule things that you would consider meaningful and productive, you know, on a daily basis, so that you feel that your life is justified by having a day like that and also to schedule enough of your responsibilities so that you make progress day by day instead of falling farther behind.

  • And what that will do is it doesn't directly affect your neurophysiology, but you know you're reacting as a neurotic person person high neuroticism say you react to uncertainty any unexpected, with more physiological preparedness and Maur expenditure of energy than the typical person.

  • And so what you want to do is organize your surroundings because it's a lot easier to organize your surroundings, at least to begin with.

  • And it is to do radical reconstruction on your fundamental temperament, which you might not be able to do it all.

  • So I would say Discipline, discipline and the other thing I would say for creative people and this is true for people in general.

  • But it's really important for creative people is that if you want to be creative, which is very, very dangerous and very, very unlikely to succeed, although absolutely necessary, if you happen to behind openness is that you should organize the rest of your life except for your creative endeavors in a pretty traditional and conservative manner.

  • If you can do that, because what that does is buttress you against the unexpected and give you some stability on many you know along many of the potential dimensions of your life, and that frees you up to take larger risks in the creative domain.

  • Now it's hard for creative people to do that because they're sort of blasting out.

  • You know, laterally in old direction simultaneously.

  • But you exhaust yourself that way, and you also risk scattering yourself.

  • Louis Waterson here at added question, How would you suggest someone who's a jack of all trades and master of none conduct themselves while you're probably high in openness, high and creativity?

  • And one of the dangers of being heightened creativity, especially if you're also high in neuroticism, is that it's hard for creative people to catalyze an identity because they're basically Pan like, you know, like Peter Pan, or like are like Pan, which means that everything the God of the forest is the god of everything to some degree, and the problem with being everything is that you're also nothing at the same time because you never specialize.

  • And so I would say that if your idol, I think that being a jack of all trades, it's pretty damn useful.

  • But I would also say that it's really necessary to buckle down and find one primary mode of discipline and Jack or Louis.

  • If you can't figure out what you should do, then guess.

  • Just pick something that you think that you could hit hard and concentrate on.

  • You don't have to be perfect at it.

  • You don't even have to get it right.

  • But pick something rather than nothing or pick something rather than all things and then set yourself to master that because you know you need to have a uhm discipline, a primary discipline.

  • It's absolutely necessary to succeed in life.

  • Now, once you have a primary discipline, then you could branch out and become a multiplicity in your disciplined approach, and then you're absolutely bloody unstoppable.

  • But you really need that initial disciplinary routine.

  • You know, this is something needs your new up knew very well, he said.

  • For example, I just wrote about this today that it was the long, unfree DM of the of Europe subject Gatien to the dogmatic structures of the Catholic Church that in noble dhe, the European Mind, and gave it the capacity to widely range that it eventually developed.

  • But it was that initial subject, Gatien, that initial voluntary slavery that produced the discipline that produced the spirit that could then go out and do other things.

  • And it's really, really useful to subject gate yourself something to something voluntarily.

  • You know, I think that's partly why it's useful to practice a religious faith because you subject yourself to a disciplinary structure that way, and you might think, Well, that's all oppressive and all of that.

  • And of course that's true.

  • But it also makes you disciplined.

  • And once you're disciplined like you're like a sharpened sword man like well tempered blade and then you could go out there and operate in the world.

  • So and if you haven't found your passion, then I would say, Well, don't wait around till you find the damn thing because you may never find it is pick something and focus on it.

  • You know, if you move strongly and forthrightly towards it for a number of months at least, or even a number of years and then you find, well, that wasn't the thing for you.

  • It isn't gonna be a waste anyways, because most of the time the pursuit of any disciplined knowledge pays off, even if it doesn't pay off in the way that you initially expect.

  • So Alex Bernstein said.

  • What is the female equivalent of the hero archetype?

  • That's a great question, man.

  • I spent a lot of time thinking about this.

  • And of course, the women in my class and perhaps some of the women on Line two are irritated or or put off.

  • Or maybe just alienated and perhaps properly so by the fact that the archetypal hero is masculine now.

  • There's complex reasons for that, and I would recommend for those who are actually interested in such things, to read Erik Norman's The Origins and History of Consciousness and also The Great Mother, which are two great works of union psychology.

  • Camille Paglia, by the way, is a big fan of both of those books.

  • For those of you who might be interested because Norman does the best job that I know of of describing why the symbolism of the hero was laid out the way it is, why Mother Nature is mother feminine and why the hero is masculine now now.

  • But here's how I've come to understand it, and I'm gonna use Christian symbolic language because because it's it's the quickest.

  • It's the shortest route to this sort of explanation.

  • So I would say that in the male psyche, the dragon, the dragon slaying hero, is at the forefront.

  • And so that would be Christ in the archetypal mode, because this dragon he defeats is the evil that is encompassed in within the figure of Satan.

  • So that'd be like the ultimate dragon.

  • And then behind that is the feminine, that compassionate, the caring and that would be embodied, say, in the Christian figure of Mary.

  • So you have in both male in the male and female soul.

  • Let's say you have Christ and married but in the mail, Christ is for Mount Foremost, That's the Dragon Slayer will say, and Mary is the secondary character, and although both should be very well developed, and that means that makes for a much better character.

  • And in the female it's the other way around.

  • Is that the maternal slash feminine.

  • So let's say Mary is is at the forefront, and Christ is in the background, the dragon slayers in the background, but should be well developed.

  • Young felt that you know it was possible for men to develop the more feminine side of themselves, especially in the last half of life, which is also when he felt that women should develop the more masculine side of themselves.

  • And, you know, we could debate that.

  • But it's a perfectly reasonable proposition now.

  • We should note that the figure of Mary is actually Ah is actually what would you say?

  • A heroic figure in and of itself because, like, you can really understand this if you look at Michelangelo's Pieta.

  • So in that great sculpture you see Mary, who's holding the crucified Christ, and that's basically her son, right?

  • Her her son, who's just being offered up to the world and betrayed by his friends and broken on the cross.

  • And, in other words, he's being subject to the worst that life can throw at him.

  • And the thing about Mary is that she knew initially when she agreed to give birth to the savior of mankind, that he would be broken.

  • And that's an archetypal story because women know when their heart of hearts that their Children are going to be broken and killed by the world.

  • That's that's the human condition and So there's a cur.

  • And, of course, a woman who's who's a woman who's well developed, loves her child more than herself, loves her job more than anyone else, which is something you can't really understand till you've had a child.

  • But it's still willing to bring that child into the world, knowing full well what his or her fate will be.

  • And so there's a real heroism and that and so and then there's the standard heroism that a woman can undertake where she develops her masculine side, which is basically what happens, for example, in Sleeping Beauty, when when Sleeping Beauty is awakened by the prince's kiss, you can think of that.

  • You can think of her being rescued by an actual man.

  • But you can also think of that as the masculine part of her psyche, waking up her unconscious femininity so that the two of them can unite and rule the kingdom.

  • It's it's perfectly reasonable interpretation of that story, and so and so that would be the development of the masculine side in a female that decide that's stout, stalwart and forthright and willing to go forth into the world and conquer and conquer uncertainty And and then there's the beauty and the beast archetype, which I think is is in some sense, the primary female sexual archetype and beauty and the beast is another kind of dragon slaying story.

  • It's more like a dragon taming story, I suppose, where the woman, um, the virginal woman who's who's out for an adventure finds a beastly male.

  • And that's the dangerous man that I was talking about earlier, right?

  • The man who has the capacity say to kill the capacity to harm the capacity for violence at hand, right at hand and then proceeds to tame him, which is a real adventure.

  • And, you know, we know that this is the case, because again we can refer to those you know, bro, those wrong comes that air so popular now with the failed beta males always trying to make friends with the girl and failing.

  • The girls are interested in the rough guys who have who have the capacity to also be sophisticated and to be, let's not say, tamed but civilised into channeling their harsh roughness, their capacity for evil even into productive competition and and because competition can be very productive.

  • And then the sharing fourth of the fruits of that competition with with family and so those air, all heroic aspects of feminine being.

  • And they're not to be taken lightly there.

  • Major life tasks and major life contributions.

  • No one, I guess, another part of the heroic element of the female is the subject ation of her own primacy with regards to her child.

  • Because my daughter just had a child, by the way.

  • So I'm a grandfather.

  • So hooray for that.

  • And it went really nicely.

  • And I'm so happy about that because a I love my daughter and B, I really, really like kids.

  • I think they're so great.

  • And so now I'm gonna have a kid around again.

  • So that's great.

  • But I mean, you know, one of the things you notice very rapidly if your apparent is that you bring someone into the world who's now Maur important under all circumstances than you are, and there's a there's a heroic subject, Gatien of Selfishness that's that goes along without that's characteristic deeply characteristic of the property developed feminine spirit.

  • So what is it that you are doing to avoid becoming arrogant?

  • Your current situation is very inviting for that.

  • Yeah, well, I would say a good dose of existential terror curia that you know, there's a saying in the Old Testament that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

  • And like, first of all, there's some real truth in that, you know, like I don't want to make a mistake.

  • And so I live in constant terror that I'm going to utter some damning phrase that's going to sink everything I've done.

  • And so I'll tell you, if you feel that way about the situation, then either probability that you're gonna be arrogant.

  • It's pretty damn low and like, I don't feel I have any reason to be arrogant, You know, like here's here's something you could do if you're really interested in this.

  • But it's really hard.

  • There's a paper by Carl Jung called the relations between the Ego and Unconscious, and it's an unbelievably brilliant paper.

  • It's very difficult to understand, but it has to do with what Young called ego inflation and so imagine that as you move up ah, hierarchy of authority or competence, we're not going to call them dominance or power hierarchies, because I don't think that's reasonable.

  • But as you move up, you know, you're you have the you have the temptation of having your ego inflate to match your hypothetical position of status.

  • But what that is is in some sense that taking on of the archetype as if it's a personal triumph for a personal construct or a perp personal invention.

  • And you weren't very, very strongly against that.

  • And he knew what he was talking about.

  • Because, of course, Young had his followers and was an extraordinarily powerful man from a spiritual and the physical perspective.

  • He was certainly no pushover in a very brave person, and he had the temptation of becoming while a cult leader, for example, which people have accused him of being in which he certainly wasn't.

  • And he knew that.

  • You know, if you if you have the privilege of rising in a in a hierarchy, what that means If the rising Israel is that the archetype is operating through you and that you can't take credit for that, you have to.

  • You have to separate your personality in some sense, from the archetype.

  • I can give you a funny example of that.

  • It's like and I hope that nobody takes this wrong, but it's very comical.

  • You know how all the superheroes have alter ego so you can't be Superman unless you're also Clark Kent and you can't be while Batman isn't such a good example, because he gets to be a Playboy billionaire like Iron Man.

  • But Superman is better example.

  • You know he's this mild mannered and meek reporter, and without that, he can't be Superman.

  • It's like, Well, that's the reason that such a well established comic trope is because comics are deeply mythological.

  • And there's the idea there that the person has thes two elements.

  • One is the archetypal and its associated with the infinite.

  • It's like the God in man.

  • You could say that there's a great icon by the way of Christ as Panto Crater, one of very earliest icons that show him with two different facial have the eyes, they're different, and the face is asymmetrical.

  • 11 face is the face of God have faces the how face of God and the others that have face of man, and he's holding a book.

  • It's I'm having Jonathan Pasha, who's a brilliant carver.

  • I'm having him carve me that image so that I can put it in my front porch because I love it and the Christ is holding a book.

  • And so you know, it's It's such a beautiful image, this idea of man as a duality between the finite and the infinite and simultaneously holding forthis in a wealth of knowledge that's been gathered by the human race.

  • It's mine.

  • Mind expanding visual imagery anyways.

  • I mean, back to the arrogance issues that you know, I'm so I'm So what would you say?

  • Attuned to the fact that I'm barely staying on that line between chaos and order and that any foolishness on my part or any attempt to manipulate the situation for my own, let's say selfish, personal gain, you know, that sort of impulsive, um and and shallow and immature and and and short sighted personal gain that willingness or wished to lord it over other people or to feel in some sense superior man.

  • If I go there with the exposure that I've got right now, I'd be sunk so fast that it wouldn't even be funny, and that would not be pretty and I would not want that.

  • So I'm I'm doing my best man to keep myself on the ground and where is where I want to be.

  • And I've got my family to help me without.

  • And I've got my friends who are offering me, you know, corrective criticism on an ongoing basis.

  • And I listened to the negative comments on me on YouTube, and I try to pay attention to them and evaluate them, not just dismissed them out of hand.

  • You know, if they're crude or crafts or any of those things, then I'm less likely to pay attention to them.

  • But, you know, even when I'm called far right, I pay attention to that.

  • You know, because, well, you gotta listen to your enemy.

  • That's the thing.

  • That's another New Testament injunction.

  • You should listen to your enemy because your enemy will tell you things about yourself that no one else will tell you now.

  • Some of those things might not be true, but some of them might be.

  • And if your enemy tells you something terrible about yourself, that's true.

  • Then he's immediately become your best friend because you bloody well want to know if there's something terrible about you so that you can get it rectified before it ruins your life and ruins your family's life.

  • And you know detrimentally affects the course of the world and all of that.

  • So in one of your lectures, you said the film frozen was garbage.

  • I don't think I said garbage, I say, Think I said reprehensible propaganda, which I believe it was.

  • Can you elaborate on your thoughts on the film?

  • I can't because I haven't seen it recently enough to three.

  • Only thing I can say is that I left the film with a strong sense that it was produced for ideological reasons and it was produced as a sort of anti sleeping beauty.

  • And I felt that was entirely inappropriate because it wasn't a genuine artistic attempt.

  • It was an ideological statement.

  • I actually really liked Joanna.

  • I hope I'm pronouncing that properly.

  • I thought it was that I like that.

  • You know, that little girl in the movie allied herself with this very, very powerful but rather uncivilized masculine force.

  • And I thought they got the archetypal balance in that film really, quite really quite nicely.

  • So I thought it was quite beautifully done, so I like more than 1/4 bit.

  • What were you like when I was 25 two.

  • Well, I was obsessed.

  • 25.

  • So that would mean 87.

  • I've been in graduate school for two years.

  • Well, you know, when I was 25 or so, I probably weighed about £138.

  • I smoked, like, pack cigarettes.

  • Day.

  • I drank tremendous amount of alcohol.

  • I was from northern Alberta, this rough little town up in northern Alberta called Fairview.

  • And, you know, there are long winters there, and my friends were heavy drinkers, and most of them dropped out of school by the time they were 15 or 16 went off to work on the oil rigs.

  • And, you know, it was a rough town, and we drank a lot.

  • I started when I was 14 and, you know, um and so I was I had a lot of bad habits, let's say and, uh, things that were and I wasn't in great shape physically.

  • And I was also still intellectually obsessed by as I am now.

  • And, uh so that would be That would have been in 85.

  • But when I But I decided around that about 85 84 something like that.

  • Maybe a little earlier that I was really gonna try to get my act together And, uh so I started doing that.

  • I You know, I first of all I I quit smoking.

  • Well, that took a long time because I eventually had to quit drinking, too, in order to quit smoking.

  • And I started working out starting playing sports, which I'd never done.

  • I was a small kid.

  • I mean, skipped a grade, and I was a small small for my age.

  • So sports were never especially.

  • Team sports were never really a domain of expertise for me, although I skied and went trapping with my dad went, you know, cross country skiing and camping and old out.

  • So But when I went to graduate school, I started swimming.

  • The first, the first physical exercise routine idea.

  • I enrolled in a swim, sir.

  • Size course.

  • I think it was called.

  • It was me and this, like, really overweight kid and like these 60 year old women and men make it out.

  • Exercise me like Matt.

  • It was really embarrassing me in the overweight kid.

  • You know, we'd be just panting ourselves 3/4 to death at the end of the bloody workout in these 60 year old women who weren't great shape or, like, you know, chatting away a CZ.

  • If nothing was going on at all in the pool, so that was quite embarrassing.

  • And as was going to the wait room, you know, because when I started, I could barely best bench press £75 people used to keep coming over and helping me, which was the last thing I bloody well wanted but certainly needed it.

  • I got to the point where I could bench press £225.

  • I think that was the best I did.

  • And I gained about £30 of muscle in a year and 1/2 so that was good thing.

  • So, like, I was kind of a wild man.

  • And, you know, I'm a little bit manic in my in my temperament.

  • And so, you know, I was I was kind of going every direction at the same time.

  • So and, you know, I don't regret that I had a fine time when I was a kid, and but I needed really to get disciplined, and I had to do it because I was working on these hard problems that you know, that I've been discussing with all of you.

  • And I've been working on them, really, you know, obsessively, since I was probably about 18 maybe even earlier than that, and got to the point around 25 when I was in graduate school trying to get my PhD is doing all my research.

  • That guy published 15 papers by the time I graduated with my PhD, which was bye.

  • I think by a fairly large measure, the most papers that any a graduate student at that time it ever published at McGill.

  • I think that's right, might have been twice as many or maybe twice as many, maybe even three times as many.

  • And at the same time I wrote maps of meaning, which was terrible, terrible, terribly difficult thing to do because I was writing about three hours a day doing that, and I couldn't do all that and continue with my misbehavior.

  • You know, my sort of my what would you say?

  • My, my my hedonistic, my hedonistic, my massive hedonistic consumption of alcohol and all of that.

  • I just couldn't keep it up and also work seriously on the issues that were at hand.

  • So you know, I had to stop.

  • That's a sacrifice I had to start messing about, straighten myself out.

  • I got married.

  • What might the woman who's my wife, Tammy, who I've known since she was eight years old?

  • She lived across Street from me in this little town called Fairview, and I was in love with her, like first time I saw, which is quite bloody thing.

  • So that's worked out pretty well for me.

  • But she came to live with me about the same time.

  • And, you know, we decided jointly to get Iraq together, and we swore that we tell each other the truth, which I think she's actually done better than me.

  • Like, I don't think I don't think she's lied to me ever in our entire marriage, which is unbelievable.

  • You know, it's being so useful because I can really tell her things that we can really talk.

  • So I tell you, if you want to have a good relationship, man, you embedded in the truth because if you don't embedded in the truth, you don't have a relationship.

  • It's just lies.

  • It's It's a tissue of lies, and it will.

  • It will dissolve in the chaos as soon as the crisis comes along.

  • So the truth is a terrible thing, but not not compared to falsehood.

  • So all right.

  • So let's look at the live chat here.

  • Um, please get a better quality microphone.

  • Well, I'm really hoping that the microphone that I'm using right now is working.

  • Well, it should be.

  • It's a really good microphone.

  • It's Ah, it's Ah, what do you call a road?

  • And I thought I was using it for quite a while there.

  • But I'd reorganized my office and I actually had unplugged the road.

  • And so my voice was unwittingly unbeknownst to me, coming through this little large deck High Def Micro are, ah, video camera that I have on top of my speakers.

  • And it might even be doing that for now.

  • Right now is you know, for all I know, I hope not.

  • Now it says the microphone is road in team anti U.

  • S.

  • B.

  • So, um maybe God, I hope so.

  • Anyways, you know, I've been mastering a lot of technical equipment in the last year, and so I've got most of it under control.

  • But I don't know if I have all of it under control.

  • So some fan and I wish I remembered his name because he deserves it, sent me this microphone.

  • So hooray for him.

  • And hopefully I'm going to get access to it.

  • So, um, let's see here.

  • I'm 20.

  • My parents have made it clear they don't want to leave home.

  • They're both drug addicted, depressed and antisocial.

  • How do I leave without killing the only positive relationship they have?

  • Well, I think you have to ask yourself a different question.

  • I think you might have to ask yourself the question of how do you maintain that positive relationship into the future if you don't leave and have your own life, you know, because you have to be thinking over five year periods here or even decades.

  • And first of all, you deserve to have your old life like your parents should be fostering your independence.

  • It's their moral duty to foster your independence now.

  • Hopefully, they can do that in a way that makes you strong, and that makes you better able to have a relationship with them.

  • But they have no right to use their their their dependents, Let's say, as an as an impediment to you becoming independent, drug addicted, anti depressed and antisocial.

  • Despite over that, they should be saying you get the hell away from us as fast as you can.

  • You get out there and have a life.

  • And if you can put yourself together and we get to see you from time to time would not be a wonderful thing.

  • So you know, you you you don't get in your Children's way.

  • You don't get in your Children's way.

  • So I would say, and you know, I I can't give you advice because I don't know you and the devil's always in the details.

  • But I can see generally that you won't be able to maintain a positive relationship with your parents.

  • If you do so at the cost of your own destiny, let's say that that isn't gonna work out.

  • So when no one has the right to deprive you of that destiny, family or not, man, you're to operate out there in the world like an independent soul and to make your way through the world and to offer what you have to offer, and those who love you should be behind you and encouraging you to do that in every possible way.

  • And if they aren't, then you have to seriously think about whether or not a whether or not they have your best interest in mind and be whether or not it might be better for you and for them if you went, did what you needed to do anyways, so I would say that.

  • So, do you have in mind a more specific breakdown of the social sciences?

  • I presume you mean in relationship to the postmodern neo Marxist that have taken over so much of the university?

  • I would say philosophy seems to be in pretty good shape.

  • Strangely enough, it isn't exactly clear why.

  • That's mostly my impression.

  • I would say that in the rest of the university, if the discipline has at least one foot in science, then it's relatively safe.

  • And so I would say psychology is relatively safe discipline because it's quite nicely constrained by the necessity of taking biology into account.

  • That's less true with

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