Appendix:
Transcript of the Jordan Peterson video referred to in Talk 5: What Talking to Sam Harris Made Me Realize in the Past Few Months. (Edited)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_ENmvKoV8&feature=youtu.be
What new wisdom have you acquired in the past few months that you want to share with us?
Well I've got one I think. I thought up a bunch of new things but this one I'm really happy with. Some of you know that there's a mythological trope that I discussed fairly frequently about ‘rescuing your father from the belly of the Dragon or the belly of the beast’. It's a motif that you can see in the Lion King. You see it when Simba is being initiated by the baboon after Neljä humiliates him because he's still a pathetic adolescent. He follows the baboon, I think it's a mandrill actually, down underground, essentially through a long tunnel. There's a lot of kind of scary music in the background and he ends up contemplating himself in a dark pool. And then his father appears in the sky. So that's one example of the reconstruction of the mythology of encountering your father in the abyss. You look into the abyss and you see your father.
And then in the Pinocchio story when he's trying to become a genuine human being instead of a marionette pulled by other people's strings; or an erotic(?) or a liar or a jackass, as those are his alternate destinies. He goes down to the darkest place he could find at the bottom of the ocean and finds the biggest monster he can look at and inside he finds his father and then he rescues him. The question is ‘why do you find your father when you look into the abyss?’
I really do think I figured this out and it's quite exciting to me. It's such a brilliant image. So we know as clinicians and also I would say as sensible people, and there's good clinical documentation of this, that if you imagine someone's pursuing a goal and some of the things they have to accomplish or confront on the way to that goal frighten them and they start to avoid and then they get more afraid and of course their ability to pursue their goal or to
accomplish the goal deteriorates because they're avoiding. If you're a psychotherapist or even a friend or a supportive loved one, let's say, you're going to encourage the person to face the challenges that are making them afraid, to face them voluntarily and what happens as a consequence of that is that the person usually is able to overcome those fears and develop the necessary skills and to prevail and that's partly because not so much because they get less afraid but because they get more skilled and more courageous.
So imagine that if you bite off a little more than you can chew you get stronger as a consequence and you do that in the gym for example when you go lift weights. You lift weights that are a little heavier all the time and as a consequence you develop yourself physically and you turn into who you could be. You turn into more than you are. Okay, so if you face fears a little bit at a time, fears and challenges, and you do that voluntarily then you become more than who you are.
Now let's recast that in archetypal language and make it into a kind of ultimate. So if you want to become everything that you could be then you look into the abyss itself, which is the darkest place that you can possibly contemplate and that would be the terror of mortality and insanity and of suffering and of malevolence, all of those. It would be like looking into hell I suppose, to some degree. By voluntarily doing that then you call upon the strongest part of yourself to respond and the strongest part of yourself is symbolised as the sleeping father nested inside the beast. So the fundamental truth when you look into an abyss is that you don't see the abyss if you look long enough. It's like the answer to Nietzsche's conundrum: if you look long enough into the abyss then the abyss looks into you. If you look long enough into an abyss, past when the abyss looks into you, you see who you could become in the form of your great ancestral figures nested inside the catastrophe of life and then you can join them so to speak. You can incorporate that and become stronger and you do that partly by taking on the challenge voluntarily and that informs you because you learn when you take on challenges voluntarily, you also do that as a consequence of psycho- physiological transformation when you place yourself in challenging situations.
Let's say the abyss is the archetype of the ultimately challenging situation, then you turn on new genes in your nervous system and in your body that code for new proteins and you build new structures inside of you and none of that's going to happen without the demand that's placed on you by willing to confront the full terror of life. I would say the full terror of life is something like the reality of suffering and death and the ever-present and the ever looming presence of malevolence in your own heart and in the heart of other people. So it's evil and suffering and to confront that is really, well, you risk blindness by confronting that. That's also a very old story. You risk damaging your vision, but if you do it forthrightly then you discover who you could be as a consequence and who you could be is the solution to malevolence and suffering. So that just blew me away when I figured that out. It was partly a consequence of having lengthy discussions with Sam Harris and thinking this through more and more and being pushed to think it through. I don't know if I've articulated it fully but articulating it more fully really had a profound effect on me
I think that's it's such a brilliant conceptualisation, that inside the darkest place is the heroic ancestor whose identity you could incorporate. Perfect it's perfect and I really believe it's true and what it does is it says that a human being is actually stronger than the greatest challenge that can be set before him or her and that's really something. The other thing that's so interesting about that is that it it transforms pessimism into optimism. It's like well the world is a very dark place it's full of suffering and it's full of malevolence and it might even be so full of suffering and malevolence that a reasonable person could question the justification of its being, as Ivan Karamazov does in theBrothers Karamazov which I would highly recommend by the way. That's an absolutely great book by Dostoevsky, but the truth of the matter seems to me that if you face the pessimism full-frontal so to speak then you find something in you that's strong enough to take it on and that's really saying something about the relationship between human beings and divinity, I would say, because it takes something of a transcendent power to be able to rise above the genuine suffering and malevolence of life and I do think that we have that within us if we don't shy away from the challenge. So you know there's in the
story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. So the Holy Grail is one of two things; it's a cup that either held the wine that Christ drank at the Last Supper or that was used to catch his blood when he was speared on the cross. Either one but it's the reservoir let's say of the fluid that eternally nourishes. It's something like that and when you go to look for the Holy Grail you don't know where to look because you don't know where the Holy Grail is and so King Arthur and his knights who all sit at a round table because they're essentially equals. Each goes off to find the Holy Grail and each of them enters the forest to begin the quest at the place that looks darkest to him and that's another example of the same idea. It's another example of a dictum from Carl Jung which he extracted from the alchemical literature which was [quote in Latin] which means roughly speaking ‘what will be found’ or more to the point, ‘what you most need will be found where you least want to look’. But you have to look purposefully. If it chases you you are prey. If you confront it, then you are the thing that can transcend it and that's a unbelievably optimistic message because it suggests that if you're willing to take on the burden of being with its suffering and malevolence that you can awaken that which is within you that will allow you to prevail and God only knows how deep an idea that is. It might be the deepest of ideas because who knows what the limit of a human being is. So well that's some of the wisdom so to speak that I've acquired in the last few months and there's quite a bit more too. I'm gonna write all this down and hopefully publish a bunch of it in my next book. I figured out a bunch about hierarchies too and how they function and I've developed a whole new way of conceptualising one of the things I was arguing with Sam Harris was the relationship between facts and values...............
Bibliography
Von Balthasar, H.U. (2005) Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter. Ignatius Press, San Francisco.
Bass, J.W. (2014) The Battle of the Keys: Revelation 1:18 and Christ’s Descent into the Underworld. Paternoster, Milton Keynes, UK.
Christian, D. (2018) Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. Penguin, Random House, UK.
Friedman, R.E. (2011) Who Wrote the Bible? E-book available on Amazon.
Friedman, R.E. (2017) The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters.HarperOne, New York.
Hall, C.S and Nordby, V.J. (1973) A Primer of Jungian Psychology, New American Library, New York.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit (A.V.Miller). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hikota, R.C. (2018) And Still We Wait: Hans Ur von Balthasar’s Theology of Holy Saturday and Christian Discipleship. Pickwick Publications, Eugene Oregon.
Jung, C.G. (1969) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW Voume 8. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Henley.
Jung, C.G. (1979) Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Collins Fount Paperback, Glasgow.
Mills, J. (2002) The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. State University of New York Press, New York.
Mills, J. (2014) Underworlds: Philosophies of the unconscious from psychoanalysis to metaphysics. Routledge, London and New York.
Nagel, T. (2012) Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Olson, A.M. (1992) Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy and Phenomenology. Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey.
Peterson, J. (2018) What Sam Harris Made Me Realise in the Past Few Months. YouTube video https://youtu.be/Mc_ENmvKoV8
Pitstick, L. (2016) Christ’s Descent into Hell: John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger,
and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Theology of Holy Saturday. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Tickle, P. (2014) The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy is Shaping the Church. Baker Books, Grand Rapids Michigan.
Transcript of the Jordan Peterson video referred to in Talk 5: What Talking to Sam Harris Made Me Realize in the Past Few Months. (Edited)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_ENmvKoV8&feature=youtu.be
What new wisdom have you acquired in the past few months that you want to share with us?
Well I've got one I think. I thought up a bunch of new things but this one I'm really happy with. Some of you know that there's a mythological trope that I discussed fairly frequently about ‘rescuing your father from the belly of the Dragon or the belly of the beast’. It's a motif that you can see in the Lion King. You see it when Simba is being initiated by the baboon after Neljä humiliates him because he's still a pathetic adolescent. He follows the baboon, I think it's a mandrill actually, down underground, essentially through a long tunnel. There's a lot of kind of scary music in the background and he ends up contemplating himself in a dark pool. And then his father appears in the sky. So that's one example of the reconstruction of the mythology of encountering your father in the abyss. You look into the abyss and you see your father.
And then in the Pinocchio story when he's trying to become a genuine human being instead of a marionette pulled by other people's strings; or an erotic(?) or a liar or a jackass, as those are his alternate destinies. He goes down to the darkest place he could find at the bottom of the ocean and finds the biggest monster he can look at and inside he finds his father and then he rescues him. The question is ‘why do you find your father when you look into the abyss?’
I really do think I figured this out and it's quite exciting to me. It's such a brilliant image. So we know as clinicians and also I would say as sensible people, and there's good clinical documentation of this, that if you imagine someone's pursuing a goal and some of the things they have to accomplish or confront on the way to that goal frighten them and they start to avoid and then they get more afraid and of course their ability to pursue their goal or to
accomplish the goal deteriorates because they're avoiding. If you're a psychotherapist or even a friend or a supportive loved one, let's say, you're going to encourage the person to face the challenges that are making them afraid, to face them voluntarily and what happens as a consequence of that is that the person usually is able to overcome those fears and develop the necessary skills and to prevail and that's partly because not so much because they get less afraid but because they get more skilled and more courageous.
So imagine that if you bite off a little more than you can chew you get stronger as a consequence and you do that in the gym for example when you go lift weights. You lift weights that are a little heavier all the time and as a consequence you develop yourself physically and you turn into who you could be. You turn into more than you are. Okay, so if you face fears a little bit at a time, fears and challenges, and you do that voluntarily then you become more than who you are.
Now let's recast that in archetypal language and make it into a kind of ultimate. So if you want to become everything that you could be then you look into the abyss itself, which is the darkest place that you can possibly contemplate and that would be the terror of mortality and insanity and of suffering and of malevolence, all of those. It would be like looking into hell I suppose, to some degree. By voluntarily doing that then you call upon the strongest part of yourself to respond and the strongest part of yourself is symbolised as the sleeping father nested inside the beast. So the fundamental truth when you look into an abyss is that you don't see the abyss if you look long enough. It's like the answer to Nietzsche's conundrum: if you look long enough into the abyss then the abyss looks into you. If you look long enough into an abyss, past when the abyss looks into you, you see who you could become in the form of your great ancestral figures nested inside the catastrophe of life and then you can join them so to speak. You can incorporate that and become stronger and you do that partly by taking on the challenge voluntarily and that informs you because you learn when you take on challenges voluntarily, you also do that as a consequence of psycho- physiological transformation when you place yourself in challenging situations.
Let's say the abyss is the archetype of the ultimately challenging situation, then you turn on new genes in your nervous system and in your body that code for new proteins and you build new structures inside of you and none of that's going to happen without the demand that's placed on you by willing to confront the full terror of life. I would say the full terror of life is something like the reality of suffering and death and the ever-present and the ever looming presence of malevolence in your own heart and in the heart of other people. So it's evil and suffering and to confront that is really, well, you risk blindness by confronting that. That's also a very old story. You risk damaging your vision, but if you do it forthrightly then you discover who you could be as a consequence and who you could be is the solution to malevolence and suffering. So that just blew me away when I figured that out. It was partly a consequence of having lengthy discussions with Sam Harris and thinking this through more and more and being pushed to think it through. I don't know if I've articulated it fully but articulating it more fully really had a profound effect on me
I think that's it's such a brilliant conceptualisation, that inside the darkest place is the heroic ancestor whose identity you could incorporate. Perfect it's perfect and I really believe it's true and what it does is it says that a human being is actually stronger than the greatest challenge that can be set before him or her and that's really something. The other thing that's so interesting about that is that it it transforms pessimism into optimism. It's like well the world is a very dark place it's full of suffering and it's full of malevolence and it might even be so full of suffering and malevolence that a reasonable person could question the justification of its being, as Ivan Karamazov does in theBrothers Karamazov which I would highly recommend by the way. That's an absolutely great book by Dostoevsky, but the truth of the matter seems to me that if you face the pessimism full-frontal so to speak then you find something in you that's strong enough to take it on and that's really saying something about the relationship between human beings and divinity, I would say, because it takes something of a transcendent power to be able to rise above the genuine suffering and malevolence of life and I do think that we have that within us if we don't shy away from the challenge. So you know there's in the
story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. So the Holy Grail is one of two things; it's a cup that either held the wine that Christ drank at the Last Supper or that was used to catch his blood when he was speared on the cross. Either one but it's the reservoir let's say of the fluid that eternally nourishes. It's something like that and when you go to look for the Holy Grail you don't know where to look because you don't know where the Holy Grail is and so King Arthur and his knights who all sit at a round table because they're essentially equals. Each goes off to find the Holy Grail and each of them enters the forest to begin the quest at the place that looks darkest to him and that's another example of the same idea. It's another example of a dictum from Carl Jung which he extracted from the alchemical literature which was [quote in Latin] which means roughly speaking ‘what will be found’ or more to the point, ‘what you most need will be found where you least want to look’. But you have to look purposefully. If it chases you you are prey. If you confront it, then you are the thing that can transcend it and that's a unbelievably optimistic message because it suggests that if you're willing to take on the burden of being with its suffering and malevolence that you can awaken that which is within you that will allow you to prevail and God only knows how deep an idea that is. It might be the deepest of ideas because who knows what the limit of a human being is. So well that's some of the wisdom so to speak that I've acquired in the last few months and there's quite a bit more too. I'm gonna write all this down and hopefully publish a bunch of it in my next book. I figured out a bunch about hierarchies too and how they function and I've developed a whole new way of conceptualising one of the things I was arguing with Sam Harris was the relationship between facts and values...............
Bibliography
Von Balthasar, H.U. (2005) Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter. Ignatius Press, San Francisco.
Bass, J.W. (2014) The Battle of the Keys: Revelation 1:18 and Christ’s Descent into the Underworld. Paternoster, Milton Keynes, UK.
Christian, D. (2018) Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. Penguin, Random House, UK.
Friedman, R.E. (2011) Who Wrote the Bible? E-book available on Amazon.
Friedman, R.E. (2017) The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters.HarperOne, New York.
Hall, C.S and Nordby, V.J. (1973) A Primer of Jungian Psychology, New American Library, New York.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit (A.V.Miller). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Hikota, R.C. (2018) And Still We Wait: Hans Ur von Balthasar’s Theology of Holy Saturday and Christian Discipleship. Pickwick Publications, Eugene Oregon.
Jung, C.G. (1969) The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW Voume 8. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Henley.
Jung, C.G. (1979) Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Collins Fount Paperback, Glasgow.
Mills, J. (2002) The Unconscious Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis. State University of New York Press, New York.
Mills, J. (2014) Underworlds: Philosophies of the unconscious from psychoanalysis to metaphysics. Routledge, London and New York.
Nagel, T. (2012) Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Olson, A.M. (1992) Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy and Phenomenology. Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey.
Peterson, J. (2018) What Sam Harris Made Me Realise in the Past Few Months. YouTube video https://youtu.be/Mc_ENmvKoV8
Pitstick, L. (2016) Christ’s Descent into Hell: John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger,
and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Theology of Holy Saturday. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Tickle, P. (2014) The Age of the Spirit: How the Ghost of an Ancient Controversy is Shaping the Church. Baker Books, Grand Rapids Michigan.
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