2014 Personality Lecture 03: Heroic & Shamanic Initiations (Part 01)

I have okay so we're going to continue today with our initial exploration of different ways to see the world and so the last time I talked to you a little

bit about um perceptions of what you might describe as action orientation so the case I made for you was something like

this that there's two significant patterns of facts in a sense that you need to know about the world and one has to do with the objective reality of things and the other has to do with how

you configure your behavior in the face of that objective reality and those two overlap to some degree but a lot of what scientists would normally consider

subjective experiences are part of the domain that is applicable to how you comport yourself or how you act that's the moral domain

um because psychology especially in its clinical manifestations is concerned with how people should act which is in part mental health and how they should perceive and and even experimental psychology to some degree is concerned

with Psychopathology it's necessary to account for the subjective and also for values as you move forward in your investigation of of psychology

personality psychology or Clinical Psychology so um I want to we we started last week talking a little bit about mythological

representations um which I think of as the precur or to a lot of the clinical theories that we're going to cover um today I want to go into that in a little bit more detail and with a little bit

more specificity because I want to talk to you about shamanic initiations and other rights of initiation because it's appeared to me for a long time and this is this is something that that has also

been observed by psychoanalytic thinkers that there are um relevant and important points of of uh

similarity between these archaic rituals and the sorts of things that people undergo in Psychotherapy so I can give you a brief example and then we'll we'll we'll we'll consider this in more

detail people learn almost everything they learn that's important in the face of fear and although that's slightly more pest pessimistic Viewpoint than it

might be because you can optimize the the rate at which you expose yourself to things that would otherwise cause you to be afraid and then they tend just to Captivate you and make you intensely

interested so but as you're progressing through life what you're doing continually is either act interacting with things that you understand well which means that you know how to behave in the face of or you're interacting

with things that you don't understand at all and your body and your mind are prepared to respond to things that you don't understand at all and they basically respond by putting you on

alert and being on alert is a sign from your from the deep unconscious recesses of your mind and your body for that matter that you don't know what you're

doing in this particular space and as a consequence you have more things to learn and so the way you learn when you're encounter something that you don't understand is by progressing

voluntarily into the space and time that's unknown and so you're always learning as a consequence of facing the unknown and the unknown is something that can be frightening although it can also be interesting if you if you

calibrate your exposure properly now this is just as true for Psychotherapy as it is for any other form of learning and that's because Psychotherapy really is a form of guided and structured

learning and one of the things that you continually do with people who are seeking psychotherapeutic help is to determine what it is that they're afraid of or what it is that they don't understand and then to break it down

into what you might describe as manageable Doses and then get people to expose themselves to that situation or set of situations voluntarily and the consequence of that is that people

become less afraid and more able and the original hypothesis was that was because you were doing some form of counter conditioning that people had learned to be afraid in in a particular circumstance and you were teaching them

to not be afraid that's wrong that Viewpoint what what you're really doing with people when you expose them to situations that they're afraid of or that they don't understand is expanding

their range of competence and you either do that by literally teaching them how to behave in those circumstances which is what you would do with children or maybe with friends um or by helping them

observe their own reactions when they're placed in a situation like that because lots of people who are afraid of things think that when they confront something they're afraid of voluntarily that they'll be absolutely terrified and

unable to cope but they often find that if they do Place themselves in the situation carefully and voluntarily that they're nowhere near as Paralyzed by the encounter as they might have thought and

so partly what you're teaching them then is that there's more to them than they thought generally when you're teaching people about the world given that the world is a frightening place if you're a

psychotherapist there isn't a lot of utility in trying to convince people that the world isn't as dangerous as they think because the world is just as dangerous as you think it is it's actually quite a remarkable fact that

we're all not paralyzed with anxiety all the time but but we're not but part of what you have in your Armament against the Terrors of the world is the possibility that you hold within you and

people are unbelievably tough and resourceful creatures and even if you think that you're not up to the challenge you can be sure that encoded in your bodily structure somewhere are abilities that you don't really

understand that would come to the Forefront if you put yourself in the situation where they were necessary so and that's a lot of psychotherapy is precisely that it's helping the person learn that there's more to them than

they think not so much that the the world is less frightening so there to be exposed to something you're

afraid of often means to reconfigure your own preconceptions because if you're afraid of something it usually means that you've coded it or understand it in a certain way and so that when you

encounter it not only do you have to learn something new but you also have to let go of your old presuppositions maybe that's what you do for example if you overcome some kind of prejudice that you

might have to to people or things or places because you don't you don't approach the the the object that you're afraid of in a conceptual vacuum you have presuppositions and what that what

that also implies is that when you're learning even when you're learning incrementally there's a process of Letting Go and a process of building so when you learn something new you have to let go of an old presupposition of some

sort and those presuppositions are are alive because they're part of you and part of what that means is that every every element of learning in the face of

something novel is often also an undoing of previous learning and that's partly why the motif of death and rebirth is such a powerful one through throughout

human history it's a primary motive of human um what would you call it of the human story it's certainly of human mythology and the the experiences that

people have in Psychotherapy are often similar to death and rebirth experiences in part because they come in damaged and fragmented and hurt and often have to

encounter even more of the material that caused them trouble to begin with but the consequence of that is that they can shake the the structures that are inhibiting their further development

even though that might cause some pain and then hopefully they can come back alive and you know that when you encounter something that's truly unknown you go through a process that's similar

to that too in that if you if you if you've ever been in a situation for example where you deeply desired something but you failed to get it for one reason or another there's a

tremendous amount of pain associated with that that could be a person or or a goal or a dream or something like that it it's extraordinarily painful not to

be able to attain a a valued goal and the failure generally produces literally produces pain it's it's it's it's cognitive pain but many of the same

pathways are involved and when when you have to give up something that value you're giving up a part of yourself the part of yourself that's predicated on that on that vision

and not only is that painful but it can really throw you for a loop um the phenomena that we're going to talk about today

are representations of that process as well as attempts to experiment with it because people have known for a very very long time that there was something

about partial death and rebirth that was also akin to the revocation of the human spirit and that's knowledge that human beings have had for we we really don't know how long it's certainly tens of

thousands of years and it might be longer than that so that's what we're going to talk about today now I'm going to back up a little bit and clarify some of the things that

we talked about in the last class so I I want to give you some sense of why people see the world the way they do because as as materialistic people and and by that I mean

people who are embedded in a conceptual World whose primary presupposition is that the fundamental level of reality is material we have some misconceptions about our own perceptions so for example

for creatures like us who are alive and who are primates the objective world isn't the primary target of our perception the social world is the primary target of our perception now

that's not so surprising even if you examine your own behavior so you might think how much time do you spend during the day interacting with people in one form or another if you include texting

and emailing and phoning and face-to-face conversation or if you're not interacting with them directly you're thinking about them or you're watching them or listening to them so

maybe you're watching them in a movie or you're watching them on TV or you're listening to them sing or you're watching them perform the point is is that most of the world that that

confronts us is the world of other human beings and and the world of other human beings has been around us evolutionarily ever since there have been human beings and it's very difficult to pinpoint the

precise moment in time when human beings came into existence but there were certainly vaguely humanlike Things 2 million years ago we seem to have split from the common ancestors of chimpanzees

7 million years ago so it's somewhere between 2 and 7 million years that we've been in environment that's primarily made up of other people and then there's a great prehistory before that of tens

of millions of years where our the animals that surrounded us weren't precisely human but they were certainly social and they were primates and so

even stretching back back past far past when we were human we lived in an environment that was fundamentally characterized by social interactions and what that what that means is that our

brain is essentially set up to perceive the world through a social lens so here here's a here's a a quote from a paper on primate social cognition now this is

this is a group of researchers who are trying to understand uh the protol linguistic representations I think with this paper of baboons because the idea would be

before human our human ancestors had language they had the perceptual structures and the conceptual structures that were linguistic like that that

language emerged out of and and and the the the understanding that we eventually transferred to language was there in its prototypical form prior to our ability

to utter I can give you an example of that it's kind of a funny example you know you how many of you know what Tourette syndrome is yeah how many don't okay well Tourette syndrome is a A

syndrome it's a neurological syndrome that's characterized oddly enough by the propensity to curse and so it's very strange because you'd wonder how in the world of neurological condition can make

you curse it also people with it also move they have motor ticks and so they they'll move in stereotyped Fashions and and and they really can't control that so if they're concentrating on something

they can control their motor output but if their concentration wanes then they're often possessed by fairly complicated motor processes that sort of run independently of their will as well

as these vocalizations now you might think how in the world could you have a neurological disorder that would make you curse that would make you swear it just doesn't make sense in some sense

that your brain would be so fra at in its specialization that you that a neurological condition could emerge that was that specific but but here seems to

be the answer um most curse words are very very short and kind of guttural and there are usually four letters as in the famous four-letter word and they're also usually expressed during conditions of

high emotion now it turns out that certain kinds of primates have distress calls so for example um perhaps there's a monkey

troop and one of its primary enemies are you know predatory birds that swoop down from the sky and so the monkeys have evolved a cry that basically

means look out there's a there's an eagle in the sky that's going to eat you and then once that cry is emitted by any any of the group members all of them immediately scatter and take defensive

action they hide or maybe they have this it's another troop and maybe they're prayed on by leopards or something like that and they also have an alarm cry for the leopards and that means you know hit the trees or do whatever you have to do

to get away from the leopard well it turns out that the linguistic centers that are in those monkeys that produce the alarm cries to predators are the same circuits that you use to curse and

if you have Tourette Syndrome what happens is it's those old protol linguistic circuits that you share with lower order primates that are disinhibited and so you can see a good

example there of a Proto prototypic language structure because monkeys are complicated enough to be able to say something like holy there's a Jaguar right and and and and it's

usually the most nervous monkey in the path who's always jittering around on hyper alert who who manages to curse out a warning and so so anyways you have this protol linguistic this underlying

protol linguistic capability that's that's that's at least part perceptual and conceptual so we know for example that primates and this is true for animals that are way less sophisticated than primates are very good at social

cognition so they know to they know to the individual exactly what strata the other members of their group occupy imagine they're in a dominant hierarchy right there's there's the the top primates and

the bottom primates and then there's strata of primates all the way up just like there is in most animals and primates are unbelievably good at knowing who's who and they need to be because if you mess with a high order

primate you know one that's high up the dominance Arc and you're sort of lowly you're going to get hurt and it's it's better to be holy and know your place or at least this is how animals manage it

than it is to get hurt young males who are sort of climbing up the hierarchy will often take an awful lot of abuse trying to get to the to the peak but most animals in a social troop are

pretty much resigned to their local because it's safer to be there and often the the casts so to speak in the primate hierarchy are actually hereditary so

generation to generation the same families so to speak occupy the same rungs so one of the things we know about social cognition is that and and human cognition is is that it involves social processing and that it's also very much

focused on status there's some very funny studies of this sort of thing I think one was done with macx if I remember correctly where they'd show maax photographs of other Ms from their

troop and those photographs are either of low status maacs or of high status sort of celebrity maacs and the Macs would spend much longer time gazing at

the high status celebrity Maxs than like the low people creatures whatever have you that they you know had nothing but contempt for so you can think a lot of

our pre-existing perceptual and conceptual categories are social so we're always processing other creatures humans for sure but other living creatures as well and we're also very

concerned with who's doing what to who and when and who's got the power because it turns out that do dominance hierarchy status for example is it's unbelievably important in

determining well productive opportunities in particular but also also General Health and access to you know Prime access to resources unbelievably important the internal

representations of language meaning evolv partly from our pre-linguistic ancestors knowledge of social relations remember when we tell stories or listen to stories they're always about social relations all the

time like modern monkeys and apes or ancestors lived in groups with intricate networks of relationships that were simultaneously competitive and cooperative the demands of social life created selective pressures for just the

kind of complex abstract conceptual and computational abilities that are likely to have preceded the earliest forms of linguistic communication although baboons have Concepts and acquire propositional

information from other animals vocalizations they cannot articulate this information they understand dominance relations and matrilineal kinship but have no words for them this suggests that the internal

representation of many Concepts relations and action sequences does not require language and that language did not evolve because it was uniquely suited to representing thought well you

know as I mentioned to you in in the last class or maybe the previous class not only do monkeys baboon say which are very complex not only are they able to track dominance hierarchy structures

without language like lobsters are able to do it so you can be very you can be very very sure that the underlying basis for the linguistic representation of social interactions is is deep Beyond

one belief since we share it with Crustaceans so and it's very useful to know this because it also helps understand why certain things have intrinsic meaning you know like the

dominance hierarchy and the position in the dominance Hier and the relative status of creatures is an intrinsically meaningful piece of information to us because it's an important determinant of

our survival and reproductive opportunities so the meaning is there you don't have to learn it you just have to figure out what to map it on to and that that means that that kind of

meaning status related meaning is archetypic it's it's built into you as a as as the ground of understanding so and I I'll show you something hopefully this

will work um be a miracle for work there we go okay so this watch this so watch it one more

time okay so anybody willing to Hazard a guess about what was happening there an attack it was an attack that's that's one hypothesis yes any anyone

else let's let's look at the Players once again well so the point little pink circle is trapped and then it's trying to get out and when it does get out the big gray triangle Shepherds it away but

that irritates the blue triangle which Shepherds it back into the box and the gray triangle isn't able to enter something like that you can tell a story about it and does that I don't know like I'm not saying that's the canonical

interpretation of the triangle Behavior or any of that but you would agree I presume that that's a reasonably plausible interpretation of what those triangles and circles were up to yes okay well no right cuz they're triangles

and circles but the point is the point is is that our our ability to perceive social interactions is so

deep that we can take entities that are only living in so far as they're moving in certain ways and we immediately attribute like motivation to them we can tell a little story about them and we

can also agree on the story now you could say well it was sort of built in by the people who made the little animated demonstration but but that that doesn't matter because the point is they

were able to build in with with with virtually no representation whatsoever and communicate because they they knew that we understand that sort of information

so all right so let's push our luck and see if this works for all well you get the basic idea

so there's a couple of things that are interesting about that clip one is everything is animated everything has a life and that's actually okay you can watch that and you understand it which

is quite strange because of course generally trees don't dance around and so forth but but but the the this module that we have so to speak it's a bad way

of describing it because it's it's more like uh an entire mode it's the entire mode of human perception has being called the hyperactive agency Detector

by people who are somewhat skeptical about its operation but um because we're evolved to exist within living environments it's very living

Dynamic animal oriented environments it's very easy for us to see everything in that way everything is alive a priority and that's why when you're reading stories to your kids it's like

Thomas the Tank Engine has you know a personality and motivations and so does The Little Engine That Could and all these things that that that that are used to represent to Children ways of

interacting in the world so all right so the the point of all this basically is that we've evolved to categorize the world into social categories and the social categories

that we use or that use us that's that's a more accurate way of looking at it because these aren't tools that we voluntarily use these are ways that we perceive the world they're they're underneath our

understanding they're preconditions for our understanding so we tend to parse up the world into personal ified categories

and I didn't even say that properly exactly because that implies that you're projecting something onto the world this personification it's deeper than that it's that the world appears to you

naturally in a in a in a living and animated Manner and the reason for that is because most of what you process and this was certainly the

case in to a great degree before human beings became technologically proficient because we weren't that good at manipulating the objective world at all everything that we thought about and everything we did essentially was

dependent on other creatures and so what that also means is that whatever advances we've made in understanding the objective Material World we've made by

by with a tremendous amount of effort removing that tendency to see things in an animated way from our Collective perception and and and working

diligently to come to terms with with the fact that there are ways of treating certain phenomena that aren't animated that work better it's very very difficult for us and that's why for

example we really didn't come up with a science-based technology until about 500 years ago we really had to work against our own instincts and we've still done them tremendous damage because to the

degree that we now perceive the world as objective and material and sort of dead in a sense it's also it's also being deprived of meaning and people really suffer for that you know because modern

people can certainly say given our understanding about the nature of reality is it reasonable to propose that anything truly has meaning well that's a very difficult question I would say

don't give up on it too too quickly okay so here's here's some natural categories of apprehension so there's the dominance hierarchy that's for sure and that's the social group that's actually what Yung

called the Animus leaping ahead a little bit to the to the to the young portion of this um of these lectures the the the

the dominance hierarchy is basically what modern social constructionists call patriarchy and it's often symbolized by an adult male and it that can have two

aspects positive and negative because you know you're the beneficiary of your culture and you're also its victim so to speak it prays on you and pushes on you and shapes you and molds you and takes

taxes from you and finds you and doesn't let you do things but on the other hand here you are in this University and you're not starving to death and you can all communicate and it's pretty peaceful so you know there's there's the the

great father so to speak bifurcated into two elements positive and negative and I I told you the other day that that was Osiris and that's who he represented for Egyptian mythology he's sort of standing

on a pillar and uh in the representation to the right which is kind of an odd Christian representation you have God the father in the middle he's sort of encapsulated inside Mary and he's

holding a figure of Christ and everyone in the the thing opens everyone on the door is sort of looking at Christ um so there's the father in the middle there and the father in the

middle there and then on this side you have what's essentially the Sun s o n and S N at the same time and that's Horus there and it's Christ there

there's equivalent figures in other religious and cosmological systems and then on the right you have Isis and Isis is related to Mary especially in this image because Mary is basically

portrayed there as the mother nature that incorporates culture that's holding the individual it's a brilliant representation both of them are the one on the right is is spectacular

representation because it sums up the existential situation of human beings in in one sculpture and that is that well all around us is nature and nature gives

and takes away and nature gives rise to culture and culture supports us and while it supports us we suffer and hopefully we suffer and can manage it and that's why everyone is gazing at the

figure in the middle who's basically accepted the inevitability and necessity of his own death as a precondition for life so it's an amazing representation

and a brilliant brilliant work of art um a lot of that was elaboration of these earlier Egyptian ideas there's awful lot of similarities between the mythological representations of Horus for example and

of and of Christ their parallels are many um that makes people often cynical about say the claims of Christianity but that's foolish as far as I'm concerned because

what both of these representational systems point to is something deeper way deeper way underneath both of them manifests itself in many forms

so so this is the personified representation so mother nature father culture and the individual okay so now imagine that that's sort of your primary as a primate who's striving towards

lingu representation that's kind of what you've got to work with as far as you're concerned that's the Primal structure of the cosmos so there's you that's the individual there's your mother and

nature there's your father and culture and wherever you are that's what there is and that's what you've got to work with to begin with okay now you know evolution is a conservative process and

so what that means is that it's not a radical renovator usually what evolution does is Cobble something new onto something old while the old is conser served so for example you have

mechanisms way down in your in your neurological systems that enable you to do things like detect snakes with Incredible rapidity and jump out of the way those are reflexes and same reflexes

similar reflexes that are operative say when you put your hand in a hot stove and jerk it away before you even know it's hot so the reason you have the reason you can do that is because your

body has conserved incredibly primitive neurological Loops say when you jerk your hand away from a stove that only run from your hand to your spinal cord and back so they're super fast but you

know they can't do much they can jerk your hand away which which is enough if it's burning it's like it's a good thing to have conserved so human beings as they evolve cognitively started out with

this social cognitive architecture that that they interpreted the world through and you can see why this would be partly because while we do live in in a intensely social environment there's

always been mothers there's always been fathers and then you add to that the human fact that we have this unbelievably long developmental period where we're um incapable fundamentally

incapable of taking care of ourselves right so you know when something like a a moose calf is born it's like 3 minutes later it's wandering around and if a wolf shows up it can you know it can run

beside its mother it's like human baby just lays there for like a year you know and part of that is because you may not know this but for a mammal of our size

we should have a gestation period of 2 years so when those of you who are women have children in the future and you know at 9 months you're pretty damn sick of

this you might well think the structure of the cosmos that you don't have you know 15 more months to go because that's how long the baby should remain in utero the reason it doesn't is because its

head grows too fast because we have this big brain and so there's this weird evolutionary arms race between the mother's body and the pelvic GLE and the head size of the infant and the way

that's all sorted itself out is women's hips are still narrow enough so they can run because if they were any wider they'd have a hard time running and the baby is born n at 9 months instead of 24

with the compressible head because baby's skull bones aren't put together and so when they pass through the birth canal their head can be crushed and quite a lot so that you know hopefully

they live so anyways we have this incredible period of dependency after that it's abject dependency for the first wild but then you're really not I

don't know how long it takes people to really get up and going it's like well 18 will say but of course that's complete rubbish it's more like 30 so there's a very long dependency period

and so that's all the more reason why we would tend to view the world as you know mother father and then expand that on into our conception of the cosmos and here here seems to be how people did it

so it's a complicated Association to manage but I think the best way of managing it is to think of the figure of Mother Nature and that that would be Mary here with the Isis there now nature

is a funny thing because I don't want you to think about nature the way that modern people think about nature I want you to think about nature as that which lurks outside of culture so imagine in

the typical tribal scene or let's say in the typical rather primeval uh Village or gathering there's a domain that people in habit that that they're sort of

comfortable with that's where all the people are that's where the dominance hierarchy is and then that's sort of surrounded by God only knows what like the outside world The Barbarians the the

darkness that eats the sun when it goes down at night all the things that are foreign and uncomfortable are outside of that Circle and that's nature what's outside of culture is nature and so

nature is the unknown and then what's inside is culture that's the known and that's actually turns out to be weirdly enough even though it's a worldview that's predicated on this underlying

social cognitive structure it turns out to be a worldview that's unbelievably useful because it happens to map onto the structure of subjective experience

extremely well in that wherever you go you're viewing the world through a cultural lens and you're usually encapsulated in a culture as well I mean

you virtually it's virtually impossible now to go anywhere where culture isn't with you and around you I mean you can do it from time to time but even if you manage that it's still inside you in in

in it's it's it's it's coded in the way that you behave and it's structured the way you perceive things and think about them so even if the outside world is devoid of cultural artifacts doesn't

matter because you're a cultural artifact right to your core despite that and and and it's the incorporation of the culture that allows you to maneuver and live and act and and do that

somewhat successfully despite that despite that you're inculturated and embedded in culture nature can pop up and disturb you pretty much at any

moment and that happens when whatever it is that you're doing doesn't work and so the way that that Humanity naturally perceives the world and

symbolizes the world is as a place that's basically composed of culture and culture is where you are when things are going according to how you want them to go that's sort of the definition of

knowing right it's it's not knowing a set of facts it's it's knowing how to behave so that the ends that you're pursuing get Acquired and that's more important in many ways than knowing

facts facts may help you do that but they they may not too so there's there's there's the place you are when you know what you're doing and you get what you want and then there's that other place

that pops up all the time where you haven't got a clue about what to do and that's the place that it's like a Transcendent place and that's nature and the Transcendent place is where all the mysteries of life come from the things

that you cannot handle the diseases the ill illnesses death disappointments frustrations all the things that knock you for a loop and make you tumble underground and that's nature nature

like a predator and it's a strange Place nature because on the one hand it gives because nature is the source of all things given that it's the source of all new things but on the other hand it

takes away because because it surrounds you and because it transcends your knowledge it's eventually what what kills you so people have a very

ambivalent relationship with nature and and and with nature because of its because of its bifurcated and

paradoxical um existence culture is the same way I mean in formal logic a thing can't be one thing and it's opposite at the same time and these mythological categories that are derivatives of

social cognition things are what they are and their opposites at the same time just as you're a beneficiary and a victim of culture and a beneficiary and a victim of nature so

now the reason part of the reason I'm telling you this is because it's it's it's very complicated to grasp but what's what's happened with you neurologically in part is that the part

of your brain that that evolved to deal with things like predators and dangers you know things that were emanating from nature that would directly threaten you

once those things became abstracted so that they could handle became sophisticated enough so that they could handle abstractions instead of dealing with things like Predator a or Predator b or Predator C

or dangerous situation A they got sophisticated enough to deal with the class of those things and so human beings instead of perceiving a dangerous animal or a dangerous place started to

be able to perceive danger as such and to conceptualize danger as a class of events but the same circuits that were originate that originated to do things like take care of you know to make sure

that you knew where the snakes were coming from are also the circuits that now in enable you to conceptualize danger in the abstract and to you know to deal with it one way or another

potential future danger danger now the fact of danger as an existential reality all of that only human beings can conceptualize the class of all dangerous

things and part of that's associated with nature so so there's the there's the domain of nature outside the domain of culture it's it's like an ocean surrounding an

island and then there's you standing on the island the Island's nice and secure it's a very standard mythological representation of the cosmos by the way and there's culture and there's nature

and there's you and that's the that's the archetypal situation of the human being and that's essentially our reality and it's it's a reality that's not

merely objective because it's so tied up with life and with other people and and with her own essential being here are some now we can we can move

from the sort of underlying domains of nature the unknown culture the known and the individual and then we can start to put some symbolic flesh on those bones and this will help us when we get into

discussions of psychoanalytic theory because the analytical psychologists like Yung and the psychoanalysts like Freud were very very interested in the images that were produced by what they regarded as the unconscious mind now

you're most direct contact with those sorts of images would come from two sources one would be your dreams and the other would be the stories that you're exposed to

both ancient and new because those stories are full of mythological motifs I mean it's very weird you know in recent years the most expensive artifacts that human beings produce

virtually maybe with the exception of plants that fabricate chips are movies visual representations of mythological themes so for example the Marvel movies

Iron Man and those sorts of movies and the Avenger those are among the most expensive things that people have ever created and you know you say well there's there's obviously a profit mode

of underlying that well yeah it's not a very intelligent analysis the point is is that people are still devoting a staggering amount of effort to representations like that and everybody

goes and watches them so just for an example you know um in The Avengers movie there's all I can name half a dozen mythological motifs that that are

embedded in that so for example Iron Man is El chemical symbol because he's he's turning into gold and iron turns into gold as far as the ancient Alchemists

are concerned that's part of its moral progression towards Perfection and his suit represents that because it's gold even though he's the Iron Man He's also Icarus right remember Icarus flies to

close to the Sun and then plummets to Earth so of course um Iron Man does that when he's encountering the thermonuclear explosion that eventually wipes out the you know the Demonic

aliens that are pouring through the the portal in in time so in the Thor movies that's a hostile Brothers Motif so there's Thor and Loki that's like Cain and Abel or Christ and Satan's the same

Motif and it's representative of the sort of eternal battle between good and even evil that's going on in the background of human consciousness and

like it's on and on and on these movies portray these symbol iic realities for us and we're so hungry for them that we'll line up and pay to watch them it's very strange if you think about it you

know there's there's not many forms of activity that you will do that for you know and they're very informative those movies but you know you don't generally line up and pay for lectures movies man

you'll go to those for fun it's like it's very strange Behavior especially when you look at what the things are representing you know and everything that medieval Christians for example you

know got exposed to in the Catholic church and in the mythology that went along with that we go to movies and see so and the movies set up the same way a church

is right there's seat rows and rows of seats and all the mythological actions at the front and it's bright and there's music and it's exactly the same thing so

here's some symbolic equivalents and the reason you might think of a symbol AS something that represents something else but that's not exactly the right way to

think about it this the symbols in this sense are elements of this domain so they the domain encompasses a tremendous number of phenomena and these are some

of the phenomena so there's nature nature is the unconscious why well it's beyond you your unconscious mind that's not you that's nature inside you it does what it wants it'll do all sorts of

things you don't want it to want what don't want it to do and there isn't much you can do about it and all you have to do is notice all the stupid things you've done in the last 6 months to understand to what degree you're in the

grip of the unconscious you know maybe you fall in love with someone and you don't even like them I mean what the hell's up with that and there's nothing you can do about it you'll act like a just like everybody every human being who's

ever lived acted like a when that happened to them so you're gripped by it the darkness that's nature too that's what lurks outside the campfire it's like the Terrible Things That prey on

the uny and of course that's true that's why it's not just symbolic these things aren't aren't just symbolic there are monsters you know parents will tell their children when they have a dream well there's no such thing as a monster

it's like and then you know then they'll tell them not to ever approach a stranger on the street because God Only Knows what'll happen it's like those two things do not go together they're either

monsters or there aren't people are so damn afraid of them still that you know they torture their children to death with with with threats with with the idea of threats that don't even exist

like the probability that it given child is going to be abducted by a stranger is so close to zero that you know you might as well not even bother thinking about it it's almost always a you know a

divorced parent that comes along and grabs them and runs off with them so you know well it's a custody it's a custody disp most of the time hardly anybody gets abducted by strangers why

would they want your child Nature has got this other element too which which you sort of hear about it at a funeral where it's ashes to ashes and dust to dust right nature is the thing you emerge out of like poof

there you are you're born and you weren't around before and then you know 50 60 70 years give or take a decade you're gone again what did you come out of and where do you go well that's

nature from a symbolic perspective too it's out of nothing you come and back to nothing you go and it makes absolutely no sense but it doesn't matter because that's what happens so that sort of

nature as as the unconsciousness and and and the devouring and then there's the great mother the Queen the Matrix The Matriarch the container the Cornucopia you know what a cornucopia is it's one

of those things that you see at Thanksgiving weird thing it's got this point at one end and it opens up into a kind of a big circle it looks like a horn it's made out of wicker and things

pour out of it it's like what is that thing well it's it's it's it's a cornicopia and it's a it's a representation of the of the portal in a sense that everything flows out of so

you can think about it in some ways you ever watch those time-lapse photographs of a flower opening of course you have you know how it sort of comes out of nowhere and and manifests itself that's what the cornicopia is a representation

of the place from which all new forms constantly emerge and that's what you're supposed to be thankful for it Thanksgiving and you should be thankful for it it's a pretty be a pretty gmal

world if that stopped happening and then there's this the object to be fertilized the source of all things the fund and the pregnant that that kind of helps explain why the it's the it's the

representation of the feminine that was used to represent the unknown because the unknown is the place that all new forms emerge from and that makes it fundamentally feminine

so so that's one domain of unconscious symbolism things get assimilated to this too so for example the strange is part

of the unknown strange idea can be part of the unknown the emotion and that's because emotion overtakes you you know you're at a movie and all of a sudden poof you dissolve in tears it's like it

Wells up from from where from from the unknown interior and and possesses you and at the same time it does with everyone else in the movie or you know everyone else who's tuned in who has

some feelings so other representations of the same domain The Foreigner that's a person who comes from foreign lands because they're contaminated with things you don't

understand and sometimes that can be terrible because the thing they're contaminated with especially in human you know in the dark recesses of human history the illnesses I mean God only know where the Great Plague comes from

but we know that it came on ships and so people left Italy because that's where the plague seemed to First manifest itself they left they went somewhere picked up some new rats came home and

like poof a third of Europe was dead it was even worse when the Europeans went to the new world right because as soon as the New World natives shook hands with the Europeans it was like bang 95%

of them died in the next 50 years so the idea that the Foreigner is contaminated with the unknown that's a non-trivial idea and if it isn't you know the pathogens they carry then it's the damn ideas that come sneaking into your

culture and just blow it into bits over you know a fair number of decades it's something to be terrified of you know by the same token there's in calculable wealth has been generated culturally and

and materially as a consequence of the intermingling of human human beings from all over the world so it's another one of those situations where it gives with one hand and it takes with the

other hell death and the grave the moon ruler of the night in the mysterious dark matter matter Matrix mother same root words and the Earth

Mother Earth so those are all those those all those all those images are related to the same under underlying well of meaning and and that that's a

representation of that which is always Beyond you from which all new things come and to which all things return that's the unknown artists are very good at

representing this sort of thing this is quite nasty so these are your basic you know hell like Monsters devouring other monsters which maybe might actually be a

good thing so but that that's that's a representation in some sense of the war of everything against everything you know the old idea about nature being red in tooth and Claw everything devouring

everything else to keep to keep existing and a representation too of the sort of pain and strife that goes along with a life that's even quite peaceful nature is a vicious place and and you have to contend with

it and you don't know what it's up to and it's virtually impossible to keep up with it in in Ellison Wonderland Mother Nature is there and that's the Red Queen the Red Queen and she's the one who's

always yelling Off With Their Heads when they're trying to play croquet it's like really you know that just doesn't seem civilized and and and it's it's it's the Red Queen who says to Ellis In My Kingdom you have to run as fast as you

can just to stay in the same place that's a good definition of life because nature is always transforming this is C the Devourer it's

a Hindu representation and uh well she's quite the character as you can see um I can tell you a little bit about the image in the middle so that you kind of have some sense of what this like

religious images are often trying to represent these fundamental realities that I've been describing these underlying structures of perception and cognition so call here is kind of a

she's a representation of all the things that you should run away from screaming which is a good category it's like the category of monsters and horror and so let's investigate her so first of all

she's a spider that's why she has eight legs and you know people don't like spiders much cuz they they're kind of poisonous and they weip whb spin webs and capture the unwary and then devour

them so so she's in this web of fire that's the kind of column or Arch around her and the fire is full of skulls you can see the skulls inside the fire so

it's like a it's like a web of flaming skulls you know doesn't get more awful than that really and then her hair is on fire and she wears a headdress of skulls and

then she's got a few weapons in case you're not already terrified enough and then she she often has the tongue of a tiger although I don't know if she does in that image and then often there's a

snake wrapped around her waist but in this case it's not a snake you see those sort of coily things around her belly her belly is sunken that's cuz she just gave birth to the guy that's she's standing on and she's devouring him by

the intestines so that's Cali and it's a representation of everything you really don't want to mess with and you should be very very careful about and if you make the proper sacrifices to Kelly well

then maybe she'll show you her benevolent side and that would be a really good thing and you know people been making sacrifices to Gods forever in goddesses to try to get them to stop

you know doing this sort of thing and you know it's very easy for modern people to think about that as a Superstition but it's not a Superstition it's one of the

most fundamental discoveries of Mankind and the discovery was if you let go of something that you value now maybe you'll get something better in the future it's like that is that that's the

discovery of time it's it's a phenomenal uh it's a phenomenal achievement human beings are the only people who've discovered it consciously like bees make honey and they store it up for the winter but probably they

don't know what they're up to but human beings can understand that a terrible fate might confront you but if you make the right sacrifices now you'll

propitiate fate and you'll you'll survive and thrive into the future and that's why you're all here at University instead of well I presume you do no shortage of partying but at least you're

not doing it right now you know you're making sacrifices to be here and the idea is that if you sacrifice your valuable time the time of your youth now

that the fates will smile on you in the future and then you know you if you would didn't believe that you wouldn't be here so you believe it and you act it out you understand it psychologically

and conceptually and archaic people understood it practically and dramatically but it was the same thing you better make sacrifices and hope that you can turn this into its benevolent

counterpart well then there's culture this is another domain of symbols it's a it's a very attractive domain of symbols I mean to the degree that you're an fici of a sports team you're you're Tangled

Up by your your symbolic longing for a place within a culture and it's it's so tied up with your psychological being

that you will act like the team is you in fact one of the weird things about human beings is that they'll often celebrate the victories of their heroes or their teams more intensely than they

would ever celebrate anything that ever happen to them I mean how often do you see people at work you know throw their hands up in the air and then run out in the hallways and dance around because something good has happen it's like it

never happens but if if it's a football game or a hockey game people will paint up their faces and when there's a goal scored which is a symbolic act too right because you know human beings like to

hit the target there's a sexual element to that but there's also an element of hunting and there's an element of specifying your Target and achieving it you know and and doing that cooperatively with all the other people

on your team and competitively in relationship to the other team it's real little microcosm the point is is the symbolic element of that will grab you just like you're a primitive tribesman

and you won't even notice you'll think I'm just having a party cuz my team want it's like yes you are some peculiar creature so when you know all the teams

they have their their their tribal logos essentially you know and and all the iconography that goes with it and they're treated almost as if they're sacred objects by people who are the fans you know they'll go look at the

silver cup and they're happy if it comes to their town it's like don't be thinking you're not superstitious you know it's just that our modern superstitions are invisible to us and we don't notice they're there

it's like you're superstitious right to the core and human beings have always been culture super ego Freud's categories id ego super ego map quite

nicely onto nature individual culture so that's kind of interesting the king the patriarch the plow the fellas order and authority and tradition

the Wise Old Man and the Tyrant Dogma the day Sky because it's illuminated it's illuminated the day sky is is masculine in it's symbolic nature your Countryman your brother the island the

Heights The ancest ancestral spirits and the activity of the Dead to the degree that you're patriotic no you're possessed by the symbolism of culture and the symbolism

of the known you would regard that as a virtue right what's more important to you your own being or your family or your own being or your family or your culture which is more you well it's not

obvious and depending on the situation people make different decisions as soon as it's wartime everybody says oh my culture is more important than me and off they March you know even if it's World War I and all they're marching to

is you know continual death there's no you're gripped by these things in ways that you just cannot understand Captain Hook he's a great representation

of the negative element of culture so hook why does he have a hook why does Captain Hook have a hook a crocodile bit it off right and

what does a crocodile have in its stomach and what does that mean time so what's bit old Captain Hook's hand off time it's chasing him

around it's going to take him under it's already got a taste of him and so he's terrified of that so he's an adult male right he's terrified of that he's a tyrant he's already lost a hand to time now that damn crocodile that's that

horrible Serpentine thing that lives underneath the depths first chance it gets going to take the rest of it he's terrified about that it makes him into a tyrant Peter Pan looks at him he's the only adult male around fundamentally

thinks there's no damn way I'm going to be a tyrant who's chased by the crocodile of time I'm going to stay a little boy forever that doesn't work so well right cuz all he gets is Tinkerbell

who doesn't even exist and he has to let Wendy go off and be real you know it's it's an eternal story of not growing up in the face of tyranny and it's a story that won't go

away either and it's a story that people act out like you wouldn't believe well and then there's the old man in the talk right that's Stalin by the way that he's kissing I mean really think about that Stalin probably killed

somewhere between 30 and 60 million people that's a lot of people but nonetheless this old man is so gripped by what he represents in his sort of gold wisdom that this is after the wall

fell down that he you know he can't stop himself from worshiping this thing that was so barbaric that it like it defies description the good old days yeah well they weren't so good that's a good

representation of stal that's for sure a terrible element of culture and that's patriotism gone wrong stellen

yes everybody's family favorite I really like the one on the right he's sort of he's like the devil standing in the Flames of hell it's really quite lovely

you know cuz it's very very accurate yeah Stell and following lenon that was quite a pair then there's Hitler you know the

20th Century's other manifestation of the horrible face of culture person who was able to produce Mass hysteria and his followers you know and who who represented for them everything that was Noble about

so-called Aryan culture all of that was the consequence it's like nature can do you in but so can culture and that's why you know your proclivity to identify with things to identify with groups and

to identify with states to identify with cultures it's like the greatest gift you have because it makes you civilized and and Cooperative but it's also like one of the most horrible things about you

because if it's activated property there's nothing more dangerous than you I told you about this but we'll go over it just briefly again because it's very important so this is the dowst symbol

that symbol is Dao Dao essentially means meaning but it also means the way means a bunch of things and da for the DST is what things are made of it's what it

it's the underlying reality of things and for the dsts that's more like meaning than it is like material or another way you could think about is more like information than it is like

material and so the Dost think that that that that experience you can't say reality because it's not the same conception that experience is Meaningful and that

the meaning is the primary reality and the meaning differentiates itself as it emerges and it differentiates itself first into masculine and feminine essentially

into the structure that you use to perceive reality that's culture and what it is that you're perceiving and that's nature and that it's a lovely conception

it's different than the way people look at the world in the modern world but it's it's it's parallel and I think it's if not more useful it's certainly

equally useful because it it helps you understand and and and articulate elements of your own experience that can't be understood from a framework

that has a different underlying structure so you know that sometimes you're comfortable and that things are going well for you and you know that sometimes all hell's broken loose and you've fallen through the ice and you're Dazed and Confused and maybe you won't

get up again and you know that those are two different places and that you'd rather be in the former than the latter and you also know that there's certain ways that you should act to make sure

that you stay where it's comfortable and interesting rather than wanding off to where it's like terrible beyond belief that you could call that in some sense your innate sense of morality

it's it's a it's a it's a kind of intelligence but it's it's deeper than that and as I said in the other class the other thing that's lovely about the DST interpretation is that it's the

interplay between these two things that constantly brings reality forth and that if you balance them properly which is the aim of a properly religious life from the doist perspective then you have all the benefits of what you understand

and what you're and what you're familiar with order and then you have the excitement of having one foot in the unknown and that's a perfect place for human beings to be because not only do

we want to stay with what we are and conserve it if it's good but we want to continually transform it so that it gets better and better and better so and I can give you an example of this I'll give you two quick examples and you'll

you'll understand what I mean so imagine you're watching a gymnastics performance two of them and the first performer comes out it's like the Olympics and the the first performer comes out and man

this person is like perfect you can tell they've spent $10,000 hours cuz that's what you need to master something like working on these routines and like every single movement they make is

impeccable and the routine goes on for a few minutes and then it ends and the person's you know they're triumphant about it and everybody claps and the judges are all like 9.9 out of 10 and

people are pretty happy about that and so that's we're all hooked into that because we've seen someone demonstrate Mastery and so we're thrilled about that because it shows that that's what a human being can do and we're human

beings too and so you know yay for us so then the next candidate comes out and they've got a real problem because of course what they have to face and overcome is perfection itself and you

might think well how in the world could you possibly do that and so they get out there and this performance is different it's got everybody on the edge of their seats because they watch that person go

through their absolutely perfect routine but they add one twist to it they push it so hard that you can tell by watching them that at every single second of their performance they're like this

close to disaster so they've taken their perfection and they've pushed it to the point where well they're well they're competing they're improving themselves they're taking that

risk and that's the sort of phenomena that makes everybody in the audience go absolutely dead quiet because everyone's on their edge of their seat thinking oh my God is this going to work is this going to work are they going to pull it

off and so no people are holding their breath and and they're they're they're tied right into it and then that person ends and you know they do their little triumphant landing and everybody's on their feet roaring and that's because

they just saw someone do this perfect Mastery plus they push themselves beyond that and so that's the proper way to play a game you're not just playing it

but while you're playing it you're improving your ability to play it here's a representation of that a medieval representation here's

the known and here here's the Explorer pushing his head out past the Dome of the gnome for a long time that's what people thought reality was right it was this disc that everyone lived in with

this Dome over top of it that's where the stars were and that's cuz if you go out in the field at night well that's kind of what it looks like it looks like you're on big disc with a dome over top of it he's gone beyond that he's trying

to understand what's outside the realm of his comprehension and that's what human beings are like we're always poking our nose out past our limitations trying to master the things that we

haven't yet mastered and there's real meaning in that you know it's maybe that's the deepest meaning that you can experience in life is the is the capacity to take to master something and

then to continually extend your Mastery at the rate that you see fit at the rate that's optimal for you and then there's the opposite of

that you know so just as the great father has its enemy the Tyrant and the great mother has its enemy the Devourer then the individual has its enemy and

this is very interesting representation from ancient Egypt this is Horus and this is set and set is the Egyption precursor to the later Christian idea of

Satan and in this representation it's good and evil that are this is like the tree of life here and what they're doing is sort of spinning it back and forth and the idea here is that human

existence is a dynamic interaction between these two forces one aiming at Enlightenment and good and the other aiming at darkness and that's what that represents too except in this

representation it's the overcoming of the darkness where that also happens in the Egyptian stories but not in that particular representation so you have the known or the unknown and it's two

elements negative and positive and you have the known and its two elements negative and positive then you have the individual and its two elements negative and positive and the interaction between

those categories makes up stories fundamentally and all the stories that you ever hear about how it is that you should live or shouldn't live are different ju depositions of those

characters and their interactions and the more archetypal the story The more clearly the case that structure is so for example in the Thor

movies Loki and Thor are sons of Zeus right so Zeus is the great father and he produces hostile brothers and that's the same that's echoed in Christian stories

by God and Christ and Satan it's the same idea and Cain and Abel and you see these hostile brother patterns everywhere and that's because people have to contend with what opposes them

not only outside in the world when they're contending against their opponents some of whom are corrupt and deceitful but also within themselves when they're trying to set them

themselves straight and to keep at Bay all those elements of their own character that seem to work at Cross purposes to themselves it's a very strange thing about people you know we can't just tell ourselves what to do

we're inhabited by all these strange subpersonalities that have a certain amount of autonomy and they're off doing whatever they want to at any given time and they're very difficult to bring

under control it's very hard to be the master of your own house so I subdivided up reality for you in one

way and so for the time being we're we're done with that now I want to subdivide reality up in another way because you can't understand what's going on in the heroic and shamanic

initiations and in the worldview that's encapsulated there and and the implication of that worldview for the understanding of phenomena like the unconscious and unconscious

symbolism without looking at the world from one other perspective so here here's a a decomposition of your computer let's say so first of all we'll imagine your computer's

working and so then you might think well what is your computer when it's working and then that's a hard question to ask because it's while you're keyboard because you're clicking on the keyboard in all likelihood and and then there's

the screen or there's what's on the screen cuz you're not actually looking at the screen right you're looking at what's on the screen and it isn't even clear where that is but the computer while you're using it sort of collapses

itself down into what you're watching on the screen and what you're interacting with that's the computer and then all of a sudden poof it stops working so you have an emotional response to that right

like the monkey who's just seen a Jaguar it upsets you and the reason it upsets you is because you actually don't have a clue about your computer and it either works well some of you more than others

it either works and then it's a computer or it doesn't work in which case God only knows what it is or what you're going to do about it so this is this is a good example of how what you

understand can collapse into what you don't understand because a computer turns out to be an unbelievably complicated thing and it can fail for innumerable reasons and if you want to

fix it then you have to take into account its insane complexity and start to piece it back together so that it's starts to behave like the computer you

want it to be instead of like a you know oblong oblong Rock so what do you have to do well I represented the computer is

that little black rectangle in the middle and it's I expanded it down one level so your computer is obviously full of subcomponents right of All Sorts

boards and chips and all the little things inside of electronic things that all of which when they work you can ignore but when they don't work instantly constitute a whole nest of

snakes and so any of those subcomponents could have gone wrong and then the subc components are made up of even smaller parts of course and any of those could go wrong and then underneath that

there's the elemental properties that the micr parts have to contend with in order to function and sometimes well sometimes weird things happen down there so I don't know if you know this or not

but computer chips have now got so small that there's only some probability that the electrons that are flowing along a given wire will actually be in that wire

because the uncertainty principle specifies that electron is probably here but it might also be somewhere else and at small enough levels of resolution or high enough level levels of resolution

that actually starts to become a problem so the electrons can just get outside the wires and that causes shorts so probably your computer isn't failing because of some pathology at the quantum

level of reality but you never know no micro part might be not working properly a sub component might not be working properly ah but there's other

ways of of the pro of considering the problem too you might say this is the last time I ever buy a compact computer and then what you're doing is you're attributing the cause of its failure to

act like a computer to the brand and then you might say well I bought one of those I bought a computer from a from an economic system that's still somewhat pathological so you might say well it's

a Chinese part for example and as a consequence the brand isn't reliable and the reason the brand isn't reliable is because the economic system isn't reliable and that's because the political system isn't reliable so maybe

the reason your computer doesn't function is because the political system that surrounds the manufacturer doesn't function well so you ended up with a cheap part and it doesn't work and so

all of those as soon as your computer stops being what it is to you which is the keyboard and the screen or what's behind the screen say then all of a sudden it turns into all these other things that it could be and in order to

get it working like a computer again or even to replace it you have to contend with all of these other multiple levels of reality

so there's two lessons from that one is well that's why you get stressed when something stops working it's because when it's working it's doing what you want it to do and that's what it is the

fact that it's doing what you want it to do defines what it is but as soon as it stops working God only knows what it is you know cars are like that except they're even worse because with a computer you can usually

just throw it away and replace it you know maybe that's a couple hundred dollars but maybe something went wrong with your car well that's a complete bloody catastrophe because not only does it not function as a car now it's just a

hunk of metal but you have to take it to someone who you don't know to fix it and who knows what they're going to do with it like they might fix it but they might not or they might fix something that

actually isn't wrong or they might overcharge you or I mean there's a whole Rat's Nest that's associated with having your car break down and that Tangles you right up it's funny because as soon as the car breaks down then you have to

contend with the whole culture that surrounds the car and any of the all of the pathology that might be embedded in that culture okay so one way of thinking about

this a computer is like that it manifests itself on multiple levels simultaneously but so do people and so do all other phenomena but we'll stick with people for now you know there's a level at which you're phenomenologically

apparent and that's the level at which we all see each other I can see your front but not the back of you or the sides of you and I can see your outside but not your inside and I can see you with I can't see your family that

surrounds you although if I was a chimpanzee and we were looking at each other and I knew you were a high status chimpanzee my body would detect your family because I would know that if I messed with

you they'd come after me and so I would perceive you're nesting in the social group even though you know you sort of manifest yourself to me as as just a

body but but my my my physiology would be smarter than that so another way of thinking about the world is like

this and this is a very old symbol as well so this is like the tree of life so this is the Scandinavian tree of life which is called

igil and then interestingly enough there's a Peruvian tree of life from the Amazonian jungle so that's quite cool I would say because those wh those look

remarkably similar right down to the fact that see at the bottom here this is rooted in chaos so down here maybe you can see it there are snakes and the

snakes are eating the roots they're always doing that but there's water down there and at the same rate that the snakes eat the roots the water makes the roots grow and so there's an idea that this whole multi-level manifestation of

reality is grounded in a chaos that constantly renews itself and it's Serpentine and then in the one next to it you can see there's the mountain there like there is

in in this representation but you see that big snake that's around the mountain it's it's biting its tail there that's called an eral Bros so that's another indication of the idea that

order that's culture is surrounded by chaos chaos is represented by that that big snake and and I think in this one there's a snake down here too yeah so

there's a snake in the Scandinavian world tree just like there is in the tree by the way in Genesis right so and then there's this tree which is being

drawn by a woman named Angelica gibart s who went to the Peruvian jungle and asked the Sham in there about their visions of the world and then Drew this picture as a consequence of what they told her and what you notice is well

there's a tree and there's this big snake that surrounds it and so that's an archetypal idea and so archetypal that you know the ancient Scandinavians and the Peruvian Shaman in the middle of the

Amazonian rainforest can have the same vision and the vision of reality is associated with that multi-level idea that I just told you about you know how can the world be like a tree well the

world's like a tree that Sprouts up from from the tiniest places up into the into the grandest areas it's it has multiple levels of resolution and that's what

this represents and it's a really lovely way of thinking about things it's it's not a way that we think about them normally and but it's relevant right because what you are isn't just what you

present phenomenologically which is what everyone else experiences it's all the Microsystems that you're made up of that are invisible and that can go wrong and that have to be diagnosed and fixed and then just like that you're embedded in

your families and your larger cultures and so on and if there's pathology there there's pathology in you as well and so you are structured in this treel like

Matrix of interconnections right from the subatomic level all the way up to the cosmic level It's all affecting you all simultaneously and this is a very nice

way of representing that I'll show you one more picture and then we'll stop my son Drew this when he was eight and he had a very well ordered

psyche which I was quite happy about but but let let me show you I I thought it was amazing when he came in short so I had laminate it's in my office so first of all you have this that's order those

are all mushroom houses for reasons I really don't understand and all of his friends live in those mushroom houses and they all have his friend's name on them and they've got little fires cuz kids always draw that there's always a

chimney with a fire who knows why and so that's order and then there's the line down the middle like the yin and yang line and then on the other side here's nature and Chaos right and then the tree

of life grows right in the middle so that's the sort of Jack and the beanock Tree of Life right and what's happening you may see see there's a ladybug here and then there's another ladybug on the

vine and I guess that's him and he climbs up the tree of life into heaven because that's Heaven up there and then climbs back down and with information and so what he's doing while he's

balancing Order and Chaos is climbing up and down the Eternal Tree of Life to the realm of his ancestors and then coming back it's amazing if you listen to kids dreams and if you watch what they draw

you see them produce these sort of archetypal things all the time and it's you know it's not exactly exactly instinctual right it's like there's a matrix that has a form that can be

filled in by cultural content I mean he'd heard Jack and the bean and you know he'd watched Disney movies and read all sorts of books and so the he could pick up the patterns from those things

and manifest themselves but it's still uh it's remarkable it's very difficult to account for oh well we'll account for it a bit

more on Thursday