What are the constants of experience? Evolutionary biologists
and evolutionary psychologists have an Afro-centric view of evolution. This is
the idea that the primary forces that shaped evolution are based on a specific
time and environment—the millions of years we and our ancestors spent in
Are abstractions more real or as real as what they represent? This is a debate among ontologists. Numbers are abstractions, but they work so well to represent reality that they have an essential reality of their own.
The dragon of chaos is the category of potential. Consciousness extracts out the reality that we inhabit. More than material reality, Heidegger wanted to understand being itself, which includes non-material realities.
The individual is explored territory nested in unexplored territory, society nested in nature, order nested in chaos. The universal is comprised of the individual, culture, and nature. Myth says we are more than nature and nurture. We are conscious. The development of you as an individual across time and space is experienced by you as a conscious observer. Every story is a representation of that.
Knowing that there is positive and negative in everything keeps you from binary utopian ideology. You must be aware of malevolence, evil, and danger so you aren’t shocked and won’t collapse when it finds you. Every entity we encounter is complex and internally paradoxical. No one and nothing is all good or completely safe.
The category of that which is beyond our understanding is represented by the predator or dragon hoarding the treasure. We need to know what we don’t know in order to contend with it. We need to go into the unknown and into darkness where something is there to destroy us, but there is also something there that we absolutely need.
You get people figured out and put them in a box and marry them and hope they stay in a box, but people are so complicated and are continually jumping outside the box. Your relationship needs constant negotiation and reconceptualization. You never exhaust the person or the world with your perceptions. You are ever-engaging something new.
Existentialists talk about alienation—being alienated from your created products. Ford builds a factory and thinks he’s making an assembly line and cars, but he started a revolution of mass manufacturing and the car changed the climate and atmosphere, built cities, changed rural life, promoted individualism, and had political and economic implications. More than a machine, the car is the embodiment of the ideology that you as an individual can purchase something you can freely move around in. You make something and have no control over what you made and the consequences are unleashed on the world. The snakes and hydras released multiply their heads constantly and you can’t keep track of them. The same is true of you and other people. There are always snakes in everything. There is always chaos to contend with.
Human women are highly selective of the men they mate with. Human males are subject to vicious selection pressures. Nature is that which selects, which is why it is represented as feminine.
How do we determine that something is real? We have to measure it from different methods and see if they converge. The universal archetypes in stories manifest themselves in the evolutionarily space, neurological space, and conceptual space, so are based on solid, stable ground.
Alexander Luria is perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived. He was interested in trying to outline the overarching picture of brain function and structure. Peterson goes over brain structure and how it causes of us to perceive ourselves and reality around us and shapes what we experience and how we communicate it.
We are not blank slates that encounter stark facts, we actively engage with and process information. We are always interpreting data in relation to ourselves. Data comes in and we filter and bias it immediately. We are never passive observers.
The Hebrew slaves go from tyranny to catastrophe, and in the desert squabble and fight amongst themselves, wanting the good old days of tyranny again. Moses becomes a full time judge, mediating conflicts for months on end. When you invest an expert amount of time working on problems, you map patterns and find solutions. This is why your dreams can give you information you didn’t know you had. That Moses went up a mountain and got commands from God is a metaphor.
Movies focus on faces because facial expressions tell us what people are up to. People with plastic surgery appear lifeless and register as zombies. We are uncomfortable being unable to read their subtle facial cues.
Dreams aren’t random. They are hard to understand, but they aren’t random. Dreams, fantasies, and myths stretch you into the absolute unknown.
We confront the unknown, make something of it, then model and talk about how we did it. The mythological hero is at the top of all dominance hierarchies because he does this. When you win the treasure from the dragon, you are above all dominance hierarchies. This is not fiction, it’s meta-truth.
Negative emotional energy causes you to freeze. You stop. You hope the predator doesn’t see you. In danger, you hunch over and protect your neck or you get the hell out of there. Positive emotion makes you impulsive. Mania is an example of this. Full blown mania leads you all over the place. You don’t sleep for a week, you end up in debt and alienate all of your friends, and you die or crash into depression. When you are inappropriately happy and impulsive you will run right into the ground. Your goal is not to be happy. That’s impossible. You need a balance between positive and negative emotions to navigate the world.
Different tribal ideas are mined for unifying ideas and edited and unified into one motivating story, like Genesis using surrounding myths in its creation story. The Mesopotamian story of Marduk also emerges from many competing tribal stories.
In this story, there are two primary deities: Apsu and Tiamat. Tiamat is female and Apsu is male. They are locked in eternal embrace—yin and yang. The elder gods kill Apsu and make their home on his corpse. This is the same as Nietzsche’s death of God and trying to live on his corpse. The postmodernists do the same—they criticize, undermine, and destroy culture and live on the corpse of the values it developed over time. When you kill order, chaos comes back. Tiamat wakes up and decides to wipe the elder gods out. She creates 13 different chimeric monsters to lead an army and elects one as head monster, Kinu, an early representation of Satan. They try to confront chaos successfully, but keep failing. They produce Marduk who can speak magic words. He has eyes all the way around his head. He can speak and see. He asks to be voted king of the gods who can decide destiny before agreeing to fight. They agree and he goes out to combat Tiamat with a net and a sword. He overcomes Kinu, cuts him into pieces, and makes human beings out of his blood. This means we have evil in our blood, the same motif used in the Christian idea of original sin.
You think, you see, you confront chaos, you defeat it, and you bring order from it. This is what puts Marduk atop all dominance hierarchies. This is why he should be king.
Tiamat wasn’t happy that the gods were making a lot of noise and being obnoxious. The moral here is that if we muck about too much, nature will take her revenge, perhaps with global warming.
Adam and Eve wake up and know they are naked and can do good and evil. If you realize you are naked, vulnerable, upright, and exposed, you want to cover up and protect yourself because others know you are vulnerable and can plan malevolence against you.
At the Babylonian New Year ceremony, the old man dies, the new man is born, and New Year’s Eve is a time of chaos and partying. The emperor bows before the priest who slaps him, asks him how he failed in the past year, and how he intends to do better. This is much like our New Year’s resolutions.
Suffering, death, and mortality are the price to pay for being. To voluntarily accept suffering is the key to transcending it, not running from and avoiding it.
In Exodus, Moses leads the Israelites out of the desert and in chaos they worship other gods, so God sends them poisonous snakes to bite them. God tells them to make a bronze snake, put it on a poll, and everyone who looks at it won’t be bitten anymore. Christ on the cross is the same. Look at and transcend suffering. Face it.
There is a magical element to that, but it mirrors psychotherapeutic truth. Jung’s active imagination is used to confront dangers in your imagination and see what happens. In therapy, you don’t tell clients what to think and lead them, you let them figure it out themselves. But they need support. People are really disadvantaged when they don’t have the confidence of their father and have a disruptive relationship with their mother.
The bedrock of Western civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian
idea, developed from
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