2017 Personality 22: Conclusion: Psychology and Belief

[Music] I called the course personality and its transformations and I think you could think about that as a restatement of the idea of being and becoming and that's what you are you're for whatever that means you're an entity that both is and is transforming and there's a rule that goes along with that by the way which is don't sacrifice who you could be for who you are which means if you have to choose to transform in a positive direction or maintain your current position then it's better to transform in a positive direction so you might

even think of that as the core of your being that's a piagetian idea it's a union idea as well who are you you're the thing that transforms who you are now you're also who you are but on top of that you're the thing that transforms who you are and I do think that that's and that's not an arbitrary statement you know one of the things that modern universities do dreadfully now is convince their students that value structures are relative and that and that's a that's a big mistake it's there's a lot of things wrong with

that idea and one of the things that's wrong with that ideas that doesn't include what I just mentioned which is that's a good moral rule is you are the thing that is and you're the thing that becomes and you should put the thing that becomes at a higher place than the thing that is that means you also have to allow yourself to shake off those things about you that you might be pathologically attached to habits and people for that matter ways of thinking all of those things you have to allow yourself to shake those off

and that's more like a burning that's why the Phoenix is that's why the Phoenix is the symbol that it is right it's all in a deteriorate so bursts into flame and then it's reborn it's like well do you want to be reborn like that's not the question the question is do you want to burst into flame and the answer to that generally is no but that's the wrong answer the right answer is you let all that nonsense burn away and you know and you might say well I don't know what I should leave behind and

the answer to that is that's a lie you know some of the things that you should leave behind you all you have to do is ask yourself you'll come up with a list instantly of a hundred stupid things that you're doing that you know you could stop doing some of them maybe you don't know you could stop doing well fine leave those alone for now but there's a bunch of things you perfectly know well that you could stop doing that would improve your life and so do that see what happens that's a good that's a

good idea all right so it's personality and its transformations because partly I wanted to talk to you about talk to you about what you are as a human being and also as an individual but also what you could become and that's actually a crucial question in the domains of clinical psychology in particular because a lot of what you're doing with people as a clinician is trying to figure out who they could become that's right you come you have a problem your life isn't what it could be it's like fine let's see what it could be

like if we changed it we'll figure out how to change it that's got to be a negotiated dialogue right because like I don't know what the hell you should do with your life I can help you figure it out maybe we can talk about it but you are the person who has to decide if the things that you're aiming for you know get you out of bed in the morning because that's really the that's at least one of the crucial issues so you got to specify the goal and then you go to specify the transformation

processes and start practicing them and you have to understand that you're going to be bad at it but it doesn't matter because Bad's fine persistence is what you need to be if you persist with tiny improvements if you persist you win so okay so in a broader you know in a broader context you can think about this as a more fundamental ontological question so one the one question is how you should act to the world the other question is well what is the world and that's a complicated problem this this is a scientific answer to

that question and that is that the world is a collection of objective phenomena and that's a very powerful perspective and we have a good method for determining what the world is like as a collection of objective phenomena and and that's made us very technologically powerful and so more power to us and all that but leaves a question unanswered and the question is well the world isn't just a place of objective phenomena because it's not a panoply of inert matter it has living conscious creatures in it and that's a different they're a different order of be

and the fundamental issue for conscious active creatures is not what is the world from an objective perspective but how it is it that you should conduct yourself in the world and that's a and there's a very there's a kind of unbridgeable gap between those two domains of inquiry and I think the reason for that is that there's a the scientific method removes value from its description so that's actually what it does and so once you're left with value free descriptions it's very difficult to extract out a value proposition from them because you've that's the scientific

method removes the value propositions you're supposed to be left with only that which is objective right and value propositions are in the domain of the subjective so I think the idea that you can derive what you should be or do from a collection of facts is flawed a because the collecting the facts themselves gets rid of the value structure but B there's an infinite number of facts and so which how are you gonna pick which ones should guide you you can't you can't you you have to do something else the facts do not tell you

what to do with the facts you need something else to help you figure that out well it's come to me over the years that that's what essentially that's what the narrative cognitive framework does it's the framework that we use to specify how we should act in the world and so you could divide the world into the world as it is and the world as perhaps it should be that gives you some direction and you need that and we know this technically right you need direction the reason for that is its direction that produces the primary

that produces primary positive emotion and so if you need positive emotion to move through life which you do because you can't even move without positive emotion and also positive emotion is a good bulwark against terror and pain if you need those things then you need direction you need a goal you need a value structure so that doesn't seem particularly disputable to me you could still say well what value structure it's like okay fine that's a good question but I was you know I've thought a lot about that too so if we're gonna adopt a value

structure there's a couple of rules that go along with it and this is why the bloody post modernists are wrong as far as I can tell is a it can't just be my value structure because I'm stuck with you and we're both stuck with all these other people and so if I'm going to lay out a value structure which is a way of interpreting the world let's say and there's an infinite number of potential ways of interpreting the world it's like the out fine no problem except that I have to interpret the world in a

way that I can use while I'm dealing with you and the world two of us are dealing with everyone else and while all of you are dealing with everyone else and so that that's the piagetian game proposition if you want to be a popular kid on the playground you better play games that other people want to play that's a brilliant brilliant brilliant observation and I told you that Piaget was trying to heal the rift between science and religion and that's one of the things that he did that he thought helped do that his question is

well where the moral judgments come from well they partly come emerge as a consequence of consensus and it's a bounded domain if we're gonna if we're gonna occupy the same space for any length of time and those are two critical propositions the same space and a long time then we have to figure out how to play an iterative game that doesn't spiral downward hopefully that might even improve that we both don't object to because otherwise it's not gonna work right you'll walk away and play another game or the game will will disintegrate catastrophically so there's

massive social constraint on what constitutes an appropriate frame of reference so so much for the relativist argument and then there's another issue that's equally relevant and it's associated with the idea of objective reality to some degree but it's not exactly it's not that's not exactly correct because it's not exactly objective reality let's say that you and I decide to occupy the same place for some substantial amount of time and we figured out how to solve the problem of being together but you and I still have to figure out how to solve the problem of being

together in a manner that doesn't make the world object too much and it isn't just other people although that's a huge part of the world you want them to know what object you may even want them to support you that would even be better but you also have to deal with the you know the the the tendency of matter to object because so your mode of being in the world your interpretive framework as a description of how you should act is actually the laying out of a strategy that will produce the ends that it predicts

which are the things that you want so this is the pragmatist perspective this was worked out by William James and his people back in the late 1800s in New England the only genuine brand of American philosophy and what the pragmatist said is how do you decide if something's true the answer is how the hell can you you don't know anything well that's true but that isn't helpful because there you're stuck with the problem of how to be in the world well so what you do is you lay out a mode of interpretation that has an

endpoint and then you run the mode of interpretation embodied right because you act it out and if it doesn't produce the outcome then it's not let's say true the claims within it aren't they're not true by the definition of the game itself so you might say well you're a kid on a playground you want to play a game one of the implicit demands is that the game is fun if it's not fun it's not worth playing so you play it for a while and then you see well was that fun if the answer is yes

then you keep playing the game you say well that game is it's good enough it's accurate enough it's true enough and so you lay out interpretations in the world and they're subject to massive constraints other people have to go along with them and cooperate with you because if they don't then look the hell out like it's a major serious non-trivial constraint and then the other thing is well social proof isn't good enough it also has to work in the world outside of the social world you know so if you have an illness and you have

some hypothesis about how to construe it you might say well is my understanding of the illness correct well it implies that I take these actions well how do you know if it's correct while you take the actions and if the illness gets worse then by the definitions that are implicit in the framework of reference that you're using you've made an error and so there's no relativism in that you could still say well there's a lot of potential solutions to any potential set of problems it's like yeah yeah there's lots of different ways to play chess

on the on a single board right but that doesn't mean that any old solution is as good as any other solution it doesn't mean that at all so okay so then we're looking at things two ways we're trying to figure out well how does the world present itself and then how is it that you should act in it and so well there's other there's other constraints on the mechanisms of interpretation that you place in the world so we could say well you're constrained in your interpretations by the constraints that other people place on you but

there's internal constraints as well we talked about those mostly from a biological perspective because you could also regard yourself in some sense as a loose internal society that's sort of a psychoanalytic dictum right you're you're a collection of sub personalities or you could say your collection of subroutines I don't care how you how you formulate it but you're a unity but you're a you're a universe unity that brings together a plurality of sub components and part of the constraints on how it is that you lay out your interpretation of the world is that you have

to satisfy those internal subsystems right so you're the ego but it's more like you're the captain of a ship full of people who were rowing you got to keep the people rowing you're not you know a tyrant you're not an impotent tyrant of your own destiny you're constrained by the nature of your own being and so you have to provide yourself with food and you have to provide yourself with shelter and you have to provide yourself with water and all of these things and and those are demands that are laid on you by the nature

of your internal processes and of course how they lay themselves out as demands and what the appropriate solutions to that is to those problems are is is debatable infinitely but you can see that constraints stack up you have to satisfy your internal constraints so they have to be brought into a unity that seems to happen at least in part but between the ages of two and something like between the ages of birth and four years old maybe even two years old you bring yourself together into something that's sort of functioning as a unity then you

have to turn that unity into a unity that can function in the social world in with increasing breath and that unity in the social world has to be a unity that can function inside the natural world it's something like that so it's you're stacking up these games into a hierarchy of increasing complexity and one of the questions that emerges from that is well what should be at the top of the hierarchy if it's a hierarchical structure it has to be a hierarchical structure because some things have to be worth doing more than others or you

can't act which is another thing I really don't like about the postmodernist ethos because it claims that value structures are there to eliminate to exclude and oppress and never once notices that well yeah fair enough but value structures are also there so that you know which way to walk because you can't figure out which way to walk without saying that that direction is preferable to that direction so you stuck with the damn things and and they do exclude obviously category structures exclude the question is if you're going to have a value structure how is it

that it should be constituted well ready to describe some of the constraints like if your value structure is perfectly functioning except that you don't get enough to eat that turns out actually to be a fatal problem right and it might be you can run into all sorts of fatal problems you're too lonesome while means you're let's say that your value structures too narcissistic there's lots of reasons to be lonesome but that might be one of them or you're too timid or something like that like you're gonna be informed by your own internal biological mechanisms when

the value structure that you're laying out in the world is insufficient to keep itself propagating across time and some of that's just you and some of that's other people in some of that's the natural world constraints galore and so in the phase of all those constraints and absolutely unreasonable to say and the old solution goes try it generate a random solution run it as a simulation in the world and see and see how many slings and arrows come your way they'll be plenty and you might say well I don't care about slings and arrows it's

like ya know that's a claim you don't get to make so okay so you know you're you're being informed internally as to the nature of your value structure you have to specify where you are you have to specify where you're going you have to integrate all your underlying biological mechanisms into that into that schema it's something I think that's actually kind of weak about the P a jetty an idea say because Piaget a great fan of Piaget but Piaget tended to think that the child came into the world with nothing but a set of reflexes

and that's his technical claim and that the boots drop off those reflexes and I think that's it underestimates the degree to which the child comes into the world as it already prepared unit and I mean he just thought of those things that's so self-evident that you don't need to talk about them but that's actually not true you do need to talk about them we know for example that if you provide children with food and shelter and an adequate food and shelter but you don't interact with them socially almost all of them die in the first

year right it's not optional touch is not optional for children attention is not optional for children play is not optional for children so it isn't just like well the child comes in to the world with a set of reflexes and can adapt to any old environments like no the environment has to be structured in a certain way or the child will die and it's very interesting when it comes to things like play and touch because you wouldn't think of those as fundamental necessities right but it turns out that they are if you deprive a child

badly enough of play and touch in the first three years of their life even if they survive what comes out at the end of that is often something that's like barely recognizable as a functional human being and cannot be repaired after that point and that that experiment was done with Romanian orphans back in the back in the 90s so it was it was an ugly situation to say the least okay so now you take these underlying biological systems and maybe they aggregate themselves into something that vaguely looks like your temperament your your five temperamental dimensions

so maybe if you're an extrovert you're dominated by the dopaminergic system just like you are is if you're high an openness and if you're if you're you know if you're high in eroticism it's mostly that you're dominated by anxiety systems and systems that mean mediate emotional pain and if you're agreeable you're dominated by the function of the underlying maternal slash care affiliation systems but so you could say well you've got these loose you've got a multitude of fundamental biological predispositions that manifest themselves as implicit stories something like that and they organize themselves into the primary

temperaments and the primary temperaments are biasing factors that determine in part the nature of the interpretive structure that you're going to lay out in the world it's not entirely determined by your temperament we know that personality is only predicting you know something like let's say 10% of the variance in most complex social outcomes and and the other elements are well temperamental as you might be used have to get along with other people in the world so you you know you come in with these internal biases but they have still have to be modified extensively by

your social and your natural surround okay and then you develop your routines from the bottom up as Piaget pointed out and sometimes from the top down because now and then you can think yourself into a radical transformation but mostly what you're doing is building the micro units of your interpretive schemas and your behaviors and aggregating them into higher order structures that you can then tag with higher order abstractions and we talked about that you can't tell a three-year-old to clean up his room and the reason for that is he those are empty boxes as far

as the kid's concerned clean he's doing he might he might have room he might have that clean he doesn't have he might have pick up the teddy bear and put it in that space right so that's one of these little micro routines and maybe you say you put 20 of those micro routines together and now you can say clean up your room and basically what you're saying is here's implement the 10 micro routines that you've learned and so a well-functioning personality has all the micro routines in place that's actually something that you help people with

if you're a behavioral therapist because one of the things you assume if you're a behavioral therapist is that sometimes the reason people aren't doing things is because they don't know how you know sometimes maybe the person is depressed but potentially high-functioning they got all the damn micro routines they're well socialized they're just dormant you got to get them awake again and implementing them but sometimes you get someone in your in your practice say who's just been neglected like you cannot believe right the parents never paid any attention to them or maybe just punished them every

time they did something good that's really fun and then you know they didn't make friends and so they're really really big and and and poorly articulated and so then what you do is you work at the bottom of the micro routines and get them to practice building up all these little attributes that they didn't build up and you know one of the things you can think about in terms of character development is so now maybe understand something about your own personality you might say well what could you do to improve your personality and the answer

is develop some of the micro routines on the other side of the personality distribution so if you're disagreeable as hell maybe start learning how to do nice things for people and that actually works by the way so if you take disagreeable people who are depressed and you get them doing nice things for other people their depression tends to lift but then by the same token if you're agreeable then you should practice doing some things for yourself and being more tough minded in your negotiations and so you can sort of place yourself on the on the

personality trait distribution you know you're extrovert it's like okay man learn to spend some time with yourself right you're low in openness well try reading a book that's outside of your you know your your sphere of interest now and then if you're conscientious well you should probably learn how to relax occasionally and and so forth so you can I think partly what you're doing is you're developing your personality is not moving the mean much the average where you know where you're located but you're extending the standard deviation so that you're a bigger bag of tricks

than you were before and I think you can practice that consciously it's like you're hyper orderly it's well get a dog you know dogs they're messy horrible things you know it's just what you need if you're hyper orderly because they're gonna leave hair everywhere and force you live with it and so okay so and so this is sort of you right this is your personality it's this connect collection of root subroutines that you've turned into a hierarchy and then there's something at the top of it and that's that's a big question like what the hell

should be at the top of the hierarchy because that's the ultimate question of unity and then the clinicians would say well it's the self-actualized person or it's the self or something like that you know that's that's the ID that's the implicit and perhaps explicit ideal that you're aiming for and you might say well is does such thing exists that I would say well do you admire people because that's your answer right do you despise people well you like some people and you don't like others you respect some people you don't respect others well you're acting

out the notion that there's at least an implicit ideal you do the same thing when you go to movies you know you you know who the hero is you know who the bad guy is you're acting out the proposition that there's some sort of value hierarchy and there's some sort of manifestation of it that's coherent across time so you appear to believe that and you know you are driven at least to some degree by your own inner ideals and so you tend to answer the question is that real with an affirmed and if you don't

there's catastrophic consequences Nietzsche and the existentialist we're very good at detailing that's like you let your value hierarchy disintegrate well then what well part of it is nihilistic chaos whoo that's not so much fun and then there's the alignment of nihilistic chaos with the intrinsic desire that someone will come along and tell you what to do right so what happens is if you let this devolve you end up with nihilistic exists not with nihilistic chaos or the demand for for the tyrant to come forward and we've had that happen lots of times and doesn't seem

to have gone that well so all right well so what happens when you you lay out these little routines in the world at different levels of analysis well this is how your emotions function broadly speaking you know you're aiming at something and this is an oversimplification which is why I want to show you this right when I show you this assume that it's made out of that right it's just a schematic oversimplification because even if let's say that I'm trying to do something as simple as walking towards the door I mean that the action of

walking towards the door is predicated on the existence of all the subroutines that enable me to propel my body across time and space and like there's that took a lot of internal organization to get that right it's a traumatized now and so you can treat it like it's invisible but implicit in any one of these structures is this entire structure and you actually see this in therapy very frequently too so I was talking to a client the other day it was so interesting this person said something he had been talking to his mother and he's

he just made a casual comment he said he was talking to his mother who was in a state of grief for for good reasons that were it independent of this particular person who said and I hate her and I thought oh that's interesting like where did that come from and so I made a comment on that that's a Freudian slip right because there was the conversation was flowing and then this little emotion tagged utterance came forward and whenever an emotion tagged utterance of that sort comes forward you know it's associated with a whole rat's nest

of underlying pain and anxiety and and and on what would you call it disappointment and frustration that hasn't been properly rectified so it's like a marker and yet you know this when you're talking to people they say something and you think oh you know what Wow too much information that's one way of thinking about it's like just what are you up to and and then if you have any sense you just forget that that even happened and you continue but that's that's like the snout of a dragon peeking out from a cave and you might

say well it's just a snout man but it's not because dragons snouts tend to be attached to the whole damn dragon and so this is also something to know about relationships because when you're in a relationship with someone they'll do that now and then they'll you know utter something and you think huh-huh it's like there's a bump in the road well we're gonna look underneath that at our peril but if you do go down there and you look at it then then the whole thing comes you can start to disentangle the the web of of

memories and and experiences that are all tangled together as a consequence of their emotional identity because I could say well everything that makes you anxious or everything that makes you upset is the same as every other thing that's ever made you upset and so and then there's an even different subset instead of that which is all those things that have made you upset that you've never dealt with they're all laying down there at the bottom of your nasty little soul waiting to pop themselves up in some in some random utterance right and so then you

go in there at your peril because if you're the person who pokes around in that then you're gonna get blasted with all of that stuff it's gonna come out like almost uncontrollably then then you can sort it out and so what you find is if you ask a person a question like that and then you let them free associate which is just talk about it they'll do a wandering around like that maze that I told you about they'll do a wandering around of that entire territory and sometimes just having them worn during it can help

them straighten it out but you might find out that something happened to them 15 years ago that left them with a terrible sense of guilt or dismay or frustration and then when when they interact with their parents in a certain way the parent knows exactly how to tap that and then that all comes up and that's what produces that that little that little utterance and so that's the material of the world manifesting itself that's what matters manifesting itself and it almost always manifests itself as an object something that objects we're having a conversation it's going

quite well no problem there's a bump in it there's an emotional disjunct right now we're no longer in the same place at the same time we're no longer playing the same game so that I might say okay well let's open that up and see what's behind it well the question is what's behind the game you're playing and the answer to that is all the world that you're ignoring always so when so when imagine that think about it this way you're trying to do well in a class and you get a bad grade okay so you're

in this little frame you want to get a good grade that isn't happening you got a bad grade okay what is it that's manifesting itself as the bad grade well you could say well it's a c-minus on a piece of paper it's like well that's you know really no that's the objective manifestation you got a piece of paper with a c-minus the value-free proposition is that you've been delivered a piece of paper with a curve on it a little you know negative sign well you think well that's what that is well you know it's as

dopey as thinking well here you got your failing grade you go into the lab and you like weigh it on a scale then you burn it and see what it was made of it's like well why did I get so upset about that it's just paper it's like no that's not just paper it's an entity that exists in a web of connections the fact that it's signified by paper is almost completely irrelevant what is it the answer is you don't know and that's why when you pick it up you get this paralyzed sinking feeling because

your limbic system is a lot smarter than your perceptual systems and your perceptual systems say well that's a piece of paper and your limbic system says nah for sure dragan right right and so then you're sweating and then maybe you put it away and you go play video games because you know better the hypothetical dragon than the real dragon and so instead you pull out the piece of paper maybe and you think okay why I did I get this c-minus well that's a hell of a question isn't it it's like maybe you're stupid well that

could be or at least stupid compared to who you think you are like that's that's the real horror that's lurking there writes like all I thought it was kind of smart that's a that's a proposition of the highest order I thought I was kind of smart it's like yeah well what about this c-minus it's like well that goddamn professor right that's the first thing it's it's I've been attacked by a predator that's the first response right so it's it's a nonsensical message it's just delivered by someone evil and predatory well that's you know possible but

I wouldn't go there I wouldn't go there first necessarily so but then well then say you don't go there okay well so what is this exactly do you not know what you thought you know are you not who you think you are do you not work hard enough or your values not organized properly do you misuse your time are you in the wrong field is the way you're construing your life completely inappropriate are you acting out what your parents wanted you to do it and you're pissed off about it so you're only running at 40%

despite them despite the fact that they're paying $25,000 a year for your education because that's a fun game yeah I'll go do what you want me to do but I'll fail but not completely because then that would wouldn't cost you very much I'll just fail a little bit so that you have to spend all that money forcing me to do what I don't want to do but you'll never get to escape from it and then every time we interact I'll stab you in various ways that you don't quite understand just to show you how irritated

I am that I happen to be acting out the destiny that you've put forward for me so maybe that's part of the dragon' right and then that pulls in the whole parent thing and you know it's these are bottomless pits often when you when you're in the world there's something objects to you something that matters objects to you then in the entire unrealized world is in that thing that objects it's all tangled up inside that's why it's the great dragon of chaos it's everything that's outside of your conceptual structure and what is that it's everything

that lurks outside of your of your walled city and it's manifested itself like the snake in the garden and the easiest thing to do is say I'm not having anything to do with that but the problem with that is well you get your c- and you don't do anything about it maybe you're a little bitter and more resentful in your study habits get a little worse so the next time you get like a d-plus and then you collect a bunch of FS and then you stop going to school then you stop showering right then you

end up jumping off the bridge and so that's a that's that's how the dragon eats you when you don't pay attention to it and so it's no bloody wonder that people avoid you know it's really no wonder that they avoid because error messages contain within them the implicit world now the upside of that is while they contain within them the implicit world and the world isn't all negative and so maybe you get your c-minus and that's actually the best gift you ever got because somebody finally took you and went whack you no clue in and

so you take that apart and you think oh I don't know how to write I don't know how to think I've never read anything in my life my study habits are abysmal you know like maybe I'm working at 2% efficiency which which is probably I would suspect that you know some of you aren't doing that but I bet you that I bet there's thirty thirty to fifty percent of the people in the room are working at two percent efficiency it's like you got it that's so to find that out is so optimistic I mean if

you're barely hanging in there but you're only working out 2% you might imagine what you could have as a life if you work it out like 50 percent so so that the c-minus can be the best gift you ever had and that's the gold that the Dragon hoards right that's exactly what that means and so well so you're moving from point A to point B in your little circumscribed world you've made everything invisible and as long as that works then your Theory's good enough it's accurate enough it's true enough you're in your little paradise but

if something comes up and objects well that's where your character is tested fundamentally that's the character test it's like what do you do with messages of error and that's a tricky issue okay so here's a solution to that here's what not to do I am a bad person I got to see mice I'm a bad person I'm out I'll just go jump off the bridge it's like no that's not good because what that means is that every time every time you try to learn something you're going to make a mistake because what do you know

so you're gonna make mistakes and if the rule is every time you make a mistake you're gonna go jump off the bridge then that's not a useful problem-solving strategy and so when you make a mistake you don't get to beat yourself to death with a club it's a bad strategy and you'll have your internal tyrant in there who's perfectly happy about doing that that's the you know overactive super-ego that Freud talked about maybe it came to you via a parent who was too authoritarian or a grandparent or or maybe it's just you because you're disagreeable

and neurotic and so you'll take you're at hyper conscientious you'll take yourself apart well starting the and so you've got a problem something has objected to you then the question is well what does that mean well maybe you're not looking at the world right maybe your goals are wrong maybe you're not acting properly it's okay so the question that arises when an obstacle emerges is which part of this structure needs attention and the first answer can't be all of it which is why when you're arguing with someone in an intimate relationship and you're angry at

them and you want to win which is a big mistake you want to win you say well your this is what you're like here's another ten examples of how you've done that in the past and I can enumerate more of them if you'd like and so it doesn't that's actually what you like and I've tried fixing you and didn't work and so it looks like you're gonna be like that up into the future and you're basically saying to them well you're a bad person and the only thing they can do is either collapse or punch

you and punching you is actually better than collapsing look you don't you know what I mean it's such a counterproductive way of arguing they you don't leave the person any out and so maybe while they're civilized so it doesn't get physical well maybe that's good and maybe it isn't but then they end up either really not happy with you in a way that they will manifest the first possible opportunity they get or they have to go off in the corner and cringe it's like great you won it's like now your partners either hates you or

is cringing it's great that's a real good victory man cry rack up about a hundred victories like that and you'll be in divorce court and spending two hundred and fifty thousand dollars while being miserable about it yeah so anyway so something objects to you and you think okay well I need to I need to take myself apart right because there's a piece that's broken somewhere and then you might think well let's let's assume it's a little piece to begin with that's the right mechanism it's like okay you got a c-minus that doesn't prove that you're

stupid and now it implies that you might be stupid but it doesn't right really it does and that's why you don't want to look at it maybe it implies that you're lazier implies that you're ignorant or like it implies all sorts of terrible might imply that you're a bad person even but you don't want to leap to that and that's sort of the proclamation of innocence before guilt assume that you're the least amount of reprehensible and ignorant possible and so then you look at the micro routines it's okay well I got a c-minus in this

course maybe I should study for that course fifteen minutes more a day for the next three months and then you ask yourself do you think you could do that no I'm too useless okay how about fifteen minutes every second day you think you could do that you put it in your schedule like 15 minutes every second day in the morning and that's while you think well what's wrong with me well I'm not very good at managing my study schedule that's not quite down here at the behavioral level but it's pretty close because what you you

can take an action you can open up your schedule and you can say all mark 50 minutes of it aside then you can practice doing that it's pretty low level in the hierarchy means while you're still not a horrible person you just gotta polish up your work ethic and so what you want to do is you want to it's like it's like the old adage you got to stand up for yourself but you don't want to make unnecessary enemies that's a really good thing to know it's like shut the hell up most of the time

but now and then you don't shut up because it's time to say something you don't you don't want to make unnecessary enemies though well you don't want to take yourself apart any more than is absolutely necessary start little and you do that with people around you too like if you have a child you know and the child does something that isn't right then you think okay minimal necessary intervention what can we do to decrease the probability that that's going to occur in the future so and that's so that's a good thing to know with children

it's also a good thing to know with your partners you have an argument some it's like okay what the hell do you want what's the minimum thing you can request from them that would satisfy you and the evil part of your soul is going to be I want them cringing in a corner it's like yeah get that get that stuff under control man see if you can figure out what that person could offer you that would be minimal that you would accept and then tell them that it's like here's the words I would like you

to say in the apology I would like you to formulate assuming that you think you did something wrong we have to argue about that because maybe you didn't but if you did I want to specify it precisely and narrowly and I want to give you an escape route and you know you might only be able to do it badly because you're still mad so you apologize half-heartedly it's like you get a pat on the head for that good next time it'll be 51% not half-heartedly right so it's careful training its careful training of yourself and

other people with with the goal in mind but also with the least amount of harshness possible and then the other thing to do as well and this is also true for you and this is something I learned from studying the behavior is like watch the people around you like a hawk whenever they do something that you think is good you tell them that's wisdom man you'll get so far with that you cannot bloody well believe it because most people you know they're afraid of any number of things but one of the things they're really afraid

of is that now and then they'll creep out of their cynical shell and try to do something good you know it's like they're it's like they're popping out this thing that's unbelievably vulnerable to try to do something good and creep right back into their persona and they'll look around see if anyone noticed and sometimes they'll get punished for it and then well then they won't do it again so don't do that but then now and then you think hey I saw you do this it was actually that was actually pretty good Oh someone noticed it

looks like wow and then they'll think yeah I could maybe I like I could do that again and if you want to live with someone for a long period of time I would say every time they do something that you would like them to do more of number one notice number two tell them right because I know you don't want to because you really want to dominate them and you don't you don't want them thriving because then maybe a they'd be competition to you and you wouldn't be able to go complain to your mother about

what a miserable partner you have and you know how delightful that is so you have to forego all that pleasure if you actually help your person develop so you got to get over all that it's really annoying so you know you've got this person peg this yeah you're stuck with them and you know maybe it's the best you can do but you got one eye open and then every time they do something good you don't want to notice because if that elevated them a little bit you wouldn't be able to feel so resentful and miserable

and keep your eye open for the next possible affair and that is what people are like that is what people are like and that's what you're like - that's what people are like so you got to decide if that's what you want or you want to help the person that you're with grow you know that's dangerous because they might out sign you well good then you have someone to compare yourself to that would be a good deal it's really rough with kids you know because parents will stop their children from succeeding beyond them they get

jealous and then they'll put them down and then they have kids that do not like them and they'll pay for it so one of the things that I figured out over the last years is this is a good proposition so you know it's pretty self-evident that life is has got its rat's nest of miseries and that's for sure and maybe you could even make a categorical statement that life is mostly a rat's nest of misery you know and you can make a pretty powerful argument for that but then there's a counter question which is well

what if you tried not to make it any more miserable that had had to be right then what then what would it be like and my suspicions are is that a lot of that misery I would suspect that most of that misery would go away because it's the unnecessary misery that really brings you down you know it's like well someone has cancer it's like that sucks but it's not like it's not like you can say if only we had done this differently then that wouldn't have happened but when someone's out like torturing you in a

malevolent way or maybe you're doing the same you could always ask yourself was it really it's this really necessary is this just like an useless add-on to the miseries of life that's what disheartens people and so even in your own life if if you if you aren't suffering from self-imposed misery and your only suffering from an escapable misery maybe you could handle that and you know you could you could survive you could bear it and even maybe without becoming irredeemably corrupt so the goal would be well yeah life is a rat's nest of miseries and

maybe it has no ultimate meaning we could say that for feeling particularly pessimistic but it still leaves one question open which is if you didn't do everything you could to make it worse how good could you make it be and the least answer is well it it could be tragedy but maybe not hell and I think that's right I really believe that that's that's the most pessimistic proper statement the worst-case outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your life could be tragic but not hell and that's blood better than hell right it's

it's and you think I could give you an example of the difference you're at your mother's deathbed well that's tragedy here's another scenario you're at your mother's deathbed and all you you and all your idiot siblings are arguing well that's the difference between tragedy and hell and you might be able to tolerate the first circumstance and maybe it would even bring you closer together with your family members the second one no one can bear that you walk away from a situation like that sick of yourself and sick of everything else - and you know it's

often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the Dragons because the stress is high and all those things that people haven't dealt with they don't have the energy to repress and and all the bitterness comes pouring forward it's like seriously man you know so that's actually a good it's a rough lesson but it's a good hallmark for figuring out whether or not you're you've got yourself adjusted properly and in relationship to your siblings it's like if you are all gathered around the bed of someone close who is dying could you manage it if the answer

is no it's like well put your life together because it's going to happen and you should be the person who's there that can do it and do it properly and then maybe you'd find that it isn't the sort of thing that will undermine your faith in life itself and I've seen I've seen both of those situations you know ugly ugly ugly situations you know murderously ugly situations and then they're opposite where people had terrible things happening to happen to them as a family and you know they pull together and they rebuild their damn ship and

they sail away so that seems to me to be a lot better that makes you know when the flood comes right well okay so the same thing the question emerges well who are you well you could say your this plan that's what people usually that's how people usually identify maybe they have no plan at all and they're just in chaos right that's like being in the belly of the beast they're nihilistic and chaos they have no plan they're just chaos itself and that's a very dreadful situation for people to be in or maybe they conjure

together a plan that's their identity it's kind of fragile and they're holding on to that with with everything they've got it's their little stick of wood that they're floating in the ocean clinging to you know and so they're identifying really hard with that plan that's what happens when you're an ideologue is that you're identifying really hard with that plan the problem is if something comes up to confront it well how do you act well you can't let go with a plan because you drown then you cling to it rigidly well that's no good because then

you can't learn anything then if that's you you're a totalitarian you're not going to learn anything you're gonna end up in something that's close enough to hell so that you won't know the difference and you might drag everyone along with you that's happened plenty of times right it's the whole story of the 20th century happened over and over and over and it happens in people's States it happens in their business organizations it happens in their cities it happens in their provinces it happens in their states and it happens in their psyches all at the same

time you can't blame the manifestation of that sort of thing on any of those one levels it happens when a society goes down that way it goes down everywhere at the same time it's not the totalitarians at the top and all the happy people striving to be free at the bottom it's not that at all it's totalitarianism at every single level of the hierarchy including the psychological and so you don't want to be the thing you don't want to be in chaos that's for sure but you don't want to be the thing that clings so

desperately to the raft that you can't let go when someone comes to rescue you right you don't want to be that so then you think well exactly what are you you know what the chaos you not the plan maybe you're the thing that confronts the obstacle and I would say that's the categorical lesson of of psychology insofar as it has to do with personal transformation that's what you always teach people in psychotherapy I don't care what sort of psychotherapists you are you're always teaching them the same thing you're the thing that can you not you're

not the plan you're the thing that can confront the obstacle to the plan and then when you know even further that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself well then your whole view of the world can change because you might think well I've got this plan something came up to object to it it's like it's possible that the thing that's objecting has something to teach you that will take you to the place where you develop an even better plan that's a nice framework to use it's like are you so sure that this

is a problem is that the only way that you can look at it or is it an opportunity I mean I'm not trying to be you know naively optimistic there are some things that's pretty hard to extract gold from some dragons and maybe the death of a family member is a good example of that but in even in a situation like that I can tell you that it's an opportunity for it's an opportunity for maturation that's for sure and the thing is you might say well it's pretty miserable to go to be digging for gold

when someone's falling into the grave well if they really love you first of all that's what they'll want you to do and second you're gonna make their death a lot more palatable experience for them if you're someone who can be in the room and be helpful instead of be you know quivering in the corner and feeling that the entire world is collapsing in on you I mean that's another you want to be the useful person at the funeral how's that for a goal that's a good goal man you know that you've got yourself together in

a situation like that because you're gonna be at them and maybe you want to be the person on whose shoulder people cry that'd be a good goal that's kind of you know I don't like being naively optimistic so when I tell you to get your life together I'm not gonna say roses and sunshine it's like that's that's that's that's pablum for fools but it really is something to be the reliable person out of funeral right and you can aim at that you can do that it's and you got to be tough to do that because

it also means that you can sustain a major loss without collapsing and that you've got to be a monster to do that right because you might think and I've had clients like this while I love my child I love my mother so much that I couldn't survive if anything happened to them it's like you have some serious thinking to do about that it's like you really want to curse someone with that kind of love do you I couldn't live without you it's like my god get away from me really it's terrible that's the eatable mother

right that's like I'll forgive you no matter what you do it's like really you no matter what I do eh you are not my friend that's for sure not at all it's a horrible thing to do to someone that's that's the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story all gingerbread and outside to the lost kid inside you feed them candy and make them fat and eat them right that's Hansel and Gretel that's the eatable mother that's one of Freud's major discoveries it gets a major discovery it's like the devouring force of love you want the

person to be able to stand on their own and price you pay for that is that you stand on your own it's like good to have you around I'm glad you're here but if if tragedies win and if and when tragedy strikes either of us I hope that one of us is standing when it blows past and and that there's a harshness about that that's unbelievably cruel because you know you say well if my mother died I could live well what kind of monster are you exactly death of your mother doesn't do you in well

turns out that being a monster is the right thing so and that's a rough thing to learn but it's necessary to learn you know because it also makes you you know at some point for example as you get older mm-hmm by the time you're in your mid-20s something like that you should start having a relationship with your parents that's approximately one of peers and you can tell if you have that so here's a little trick you can use so you have parents obviously they have friends you probably care what your parents think I would imagine

do you care what their friends think of you and answer that is well not nearly as much and so then I would say well why do you care what your parents think of you then they're the same you know what I mean it's just luck of the draw that your parents are someone else's kids friends they don't think the same way about them that you do well that's where you see that you have a projection right if by the time you're 30 if what your parents think of you matters more than what say a random

set of their friends think of you then you've still got your parents confused with with God that's one way of looking at it you've still got them confused with an archetype and you're still a child and you might think well it's pretty damn rude not to think about what your parents think of you anymore not to care it's like yeah it's kind of rude but maybe you'll be useful for them when they get old and that's a much better form of caring it's like you're going to be independent enough and strong enough and and detached

enough so that when the taught when the when the power dynamic shifts which it will that you'll be the person that can carry things forward well you can't do a better thing for them than that right that's the best of all possible outcomes for your parents well you can think about the world this way you can think about it as your orderly little plan that's a place and you can think about it as the place that things that disrupt your plan comes from that's another place this is a bigger place than this because there's an

endless number of things that can disrupt your plan and only a tiny number of them that can you know that will help you work it out so part of the question then too is like are you the friend of your plan or are you the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan and I would say you should work to become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan because there's a lot of that and then if you become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan then you start to develop strength in

proportion to the to the disruptive force and that's really what you want you want to be able to implement your plan obviously but you want to be able to take on the consequences of error and learn from it and then then you win constantly because even if something goes sideways you think there's something to be derived from this that's wisdom fundamentally so and so those are the eternal domains right there's the domain of order that's a snake by the way and that's a domain of chaos and that's the world and maybe you're in the order

and maybe you're in the chaos but those can flip on you and maybe you shouldn't be in either of those places maybe you should be right in the middle and that's where you should be as far as I can tell and I think this is this is another escape from postmodern nihilism let's say that's actually a real place it's not metaphysical or maybe it is but it's metaphysical if metaphysics is more real than physics and you can tell when you're at that place because that's a maximally meaningful place and you drift in and out of

it all the time in your life and when things are really bad for you you're not there hardly at all right because everything is overwhelming you or the things have become sterile but if you watch your life even over a week or two you'll see that now and then you're there I think you stand up straighter right because you're in the right place at the right time you think aha I got the forces of chaos and order properly balanced it's unstable and it'll fall apart on you but you know you can practice bringing things together

continually and then you can end up so that you're there more often than not and then that's that's a meta place it's not a place it's a meta place and it's a place that you can be in all places and and it's not an illusion of any sort it's the deepest reality your nervous system is always orienting yourself your is always orienting you to that place always and and that's because it's a real place that's another way of thinking about it well that's the normal world with that's the garden with the snake in it and

that's chaos that that's the chaos that arises when your plans collapse right that's the world in the underworld and so the underworld is always there and it's lurking beneath everything it's like the figure of the shark in the jaws poster right there you are swinging at the top and there's that terrible thing underneath that can come up and pull you down that's the world so you need to be able to operate here and you need to be able to operate here and when you operate here well that's when you rescue your father from the belly

of the whale that's when you go down you see when you're down in chaos and you don't know what the hell's going on you have to rediscover the values that orient people have oriented people forever that's what you have to discover so for example when I'm dealing with people have post-traumatic stress disorder and they've usually encountered someone malevolent they have to relearn the description of good and evil because if they don't they have no framework they're lost they think well there's a malevolence afoot in the world and I'm a naive I'm a naive I'm a

prey animal a naive prey animal for the malevolence of the world it's like well good luck functioning under that set of assumptions man you just do not recover from that you stay at home in your burrow that's what you do well you have to you go down into that you think okay well malevolence is afoot I better be the sort of person that can understand it and deal with it and that's another reason why you have to transform yourself into a monster that's the Jungian incorporation of the shadow it's no bloody joke because the only

thing that a monster won't mess with is another monster and you might say well I don't want to transform myself into a monster it's like you don't have a choice you can either be a pathetic monster or you can be a monster with some power those are your options there's no non monster alternative weak or strong and I don't mean strong like dominating tyrant strength that isn't what I mean at all I mean strength like functioning at a Funeral strength and that's a kind of monstrosity and when you're down in chaos that's what you have

to rediscover well that's partly what that means you're lucky if you come back out remember I told you the story of Jonah at the beginning of the course it's like he had something to do and was refusing to do it and so God pulled him down to the depths of being and threatened him with death but worse not just death he'll really well he decided it was better to come popping up back into the light and go do what he was supposed to do well there's a reason that like that's the oldest story of mankind

as far back as you go into the archives of history you find this story right and it's because well it's because not only is it because it's true it's because it's true and everyone knows it's true even though they don't know that they know that this is the story - it's the same thing there always a city it's always enclosed right there's always people who inhabit it there's always someone who's willing to notice that the dragon hasn't gone away the skulls are still around there's someone who's willing to come out of the fortress and and

take that on right and to prefer perform the job of rescuing that's an eternal story are you the city are you the dragon are you the thing that engages voluntarily in combat with what lies outside your range of safety because that's what that image represents it's that is the monster amalgam symbolic amalgam of all that which lies outside your realm of safety you want to be safe forget that right that is that's not that's not in the cards you're not gonna be safe well then you have to be meta safe and that's way better because

then you're not safe but you know how to cope with danger well find that that solves the problem and maybe it's even a better solution because if you're safe then you just have to stay in your burrow but if you can confront danger then you can go wherever you want and you can have an adventure and maybe that's what you need to do is to go out and have an adventure so you don't even want safety because of how exciting is that not Dostoyevsky said very clearly let's say we made you perfectly safe all that

you had to do is eat cakes and worry yourself with the continuation of the species what would you do you'd smash it all down as soon as you possibly could just so you had something interesting and challenging to do so you don't want safety you want to be able to cope with danger that's a whole different thing and I'm like this isn't again metaphysical that did clinical data on this is clear when you treat someone for an anxiety disorder like Agra phobia you do not get rid of their anxiety you make them braver that's way

better there's no going back like once your agoraphobic your heart's not doing them you know it's it's it's missing beats now on that it's like death like the crocodile that's got the clock and it's in his stomach death is after you there's no there's no going back to naivety you don't get to be safe ever again well so what happens you get to be stronger well hey it turns out that's a better bar anyways so Lin is Bell an evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brain

in primates a radical new theory suggests the idea proposed by Lin is Bell and anthropologist at the University of California suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand that's Hercules right well that's infinity that symbol and this is the snake you cut off one head and seven more growth it's like the it's an infinite snake you're never gonna run out of snakes those are the things that object to your plans well you can't get rid of

the snake so what do you do you learn how to handle them right that's it that's that's the answers you learn how to become a handler of snakes both physical and metaphysical see you see the little halo around it I think that's st. George might be st. Michael but I think it's st. George why is he go to halo well that's the Sun well what does that mean it's gold - Gold is pure it's the pure gold Sun it's associated with consciousness it's the pure gold Sun of consciousness that can confront the terrible thing that

paralyzes and that's the same thing that's death right the clock in the stomach of the crocodile it's already got a taste of Captain Hook Captain Hook's no st. George that's why Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up I'd always sees his Captain Hook I don't want to be Captain Hook he doesn't see this so he stays at home and plays video games with the rest of the Lost Boys look I got nothing against video games by the way I mean everything in moderation right and I mean they demand skill well so what's this you know

there you are you go down into chaos and then you come back up and so you might say well am i this or am i the chaos or am i the new new solution an answer is you're not this or you shouldn't be because that's your old dead self right that's the thing that needs to burn away you know what chaos itself but you're also not the new regenerated order you're the thing that can make the journey and more than that you're the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily and then more than that

you're the thing that decides to make the journey voluntarily for as long as it takes and that's where you derive your strength it's like there's no getting rid of chaos it's eternal there's no getting rid of order it's eternal those are both traps you mediate between them and that's where your strength lies and that's not only strength for you it's strength for you it's strength for the people around you strength for the community and strength for everything it's the thing that makes everything order itself properly and thrive you have to ask yourself and this is

the thing you ask yourself this is the existential question do you want things to be ordered properly and thrive because if the answer to that is yes you have to give up your hatred of being you have to give up your resentment you have to give up your martyrdom and your victimization and all of that because to the degree that you carry that forward it will corrupt you and you will not want the best because to be if you aren't the best you have to be without Rachel hey treated rancor and and resentment because you

know if I resent you for your inadequacies or even for your for your accomplishments I'm not going to have a conversation with you where I'm aiming for the best I'm gonna have all sorts of motivations I'm gonna take you down somehow you know especially if you're successful that's the Cain and Abel story it's like I bet I want to be who you are but I can't be so I'll just cut you off at the knees and that'll do just fine and then I can get my revenge on you and I can get my revenge on

being and you know the fact that it helps turn everything into hell well maybe that's just an additional benefit that's represented all sorts of different ways the masculine Sun and the feminine moon and that's Horus in gold right Horus is all speech and eyes and that's Osiris the god of tradition and Isis the queen of the underworld you see the same thing here suffering individual that transcends it by accepting it nested inside of society and the patriarchal structure nested inside the natural world and the feminine that's the same idea there that's Buddha emerging from the

lotus flower and the lotus flower if its roots go down into the murk at the at the bottom of the of the the pond so it emerges out of the darkness and manifests itself and then it climbs upwards towards the light and then the Lotus floats on the surface of the water and blooms open and inside that the Buddha sits golden buddha sits in the light it's the flowering of being and that's that's a Mandela from the Union perspective it's the Mandela opens up and it reveals this mode of perfect being that's what the Buddha

means and he found enlightenment underneath the tree because that's the human environment there's to find enlightenment underneath the tree he's got the Sun on his head - and he's gold for the same reason gold is pure you see the same thing in Hinduism so that's the yoni feminine symbol case you were wondering masculine symbol that's the union of the two right that's the union of chaos and order with a snake lurking in the background and it's golden because it's the union of those two things that produces the power of the snake that's something that you

might think about you could think about those as two halves of the DNA molecule that is what they are although I can't tell you how I know that but it's the same idea it's the same idea here so this what happens here is that you see this is a very remarkable picture so this is Eve Eve is handing out skulls to mankind right it's self-consciousness and the discovery of death this is Mary as the church on this side and she's handing out these things that are the hosts it's those are pieces of Christ's body and

see so he's put up there on this tree the same as the skull as an antidote the antidote is something that you incorporate and the thing you incorporate is the voluntary acceptance of suffering as the cure for death that's what that picture means people worked on that bloody picture for a long long long long time and you know we see the picture but we don't know what it means but that's what it means means the same thing that this means it means the same thing that this means means the same thing that this means see

there's there's pride rock this is the Scandinavian world tree there's pride rock right there there's the territory outside see it's a serpent it's a snake that's the territory outside that's outside of the light and that's all in a tree that's how can you not read that as a history of the evolution of mankind that's exactly what it is that's our eternal home well we better stop before that girl comes in it was very nice having you all in the class and I appreciated the warm welcome I got especially in January because it was a rough

time in January and so I'm glad this all worked out so well and it was a pleasure teaching you so good luck to you all I mean it be what you can be God you let the world dissolve around you otherwise that's not a good thing you've got something that everyone needs man including yourself it's like let it out that's where everything you want is and it's this it's the case for every single one of you so you know hoist up your goddamn privilege and go out there and do something in the world see ya

[Applause]