l5UOfUDjuZY.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          The story in the story of Adam and Eve is a Meta story and it's a story for two reasons. One is it's about how stories transform because Adam and Eve are in this unconscious paradise and then it collapses and that happens to every potential story, right? That's niches realization. He said, look, imagine that you live within a belief system and then something arises to challenge the belief system. Not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens. Your belief in belief systems collapses, and that's the road tonight. Now it doesn't have to because you can jump from one belief system to another, but sometimes that doesn't work is that you do a medic critique and you say, oh, I was living in this protective structure and it turned out to be flawed. Okay? One alternative is jumped to another protective structure. Fine. Another alternative is protective structures that themselves are not to be trusted.

Speaker 1:          00:53          Bang, you're in chaos. How the hell are you going to get out of that? That's the pathway. Denialism. While you can, you can. You can work your way through that. That's difficult, or you can do what young would regard as a soul damaging move and you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re identify with something real rigid and restricted, which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in or Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to to the current state of chaos. It's like I know that that people need to identify with local groups. I understand that, but they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate God and that's order, but that's not a good replacement for chaos. It's just another kind of catastrophe. Right? Too much order. Too much chaos, both. Catastrophes.

Speaker 1:          01:41          You want to stand in the middle somehow and mediate between the two and that's where you have your real strength because then it isn't that you've discovered a safe place because even the bloody right wingers or after a safe place, right? They just want it to be the state. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's no safe places and the next issue is do you really want a safe place? Is that what you want? You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat. What the hell kind of life is that? You're a paralyzed rabbit in a hole that's no life for a human being. You should be confronting danger and the unknown and mlevel. It's because, and the reason for that too is this is the weird paradox. This is, and I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha, but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity, which is that the PA, the solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face the who the hell would ever guess that.

Speaker 1:          02:40          It's completely paradoxical. It's a completely paradoxical suggestion, is that, well, why does it work well? Because the more you confront the two of them, the more you grow and maybe you can grow so that you're actually larger than the chaos and malevolence itself and you think, well, what's the evidence for that? And that's easy. That's what people do. That is how we learn. Like every time you expose your child to something new, a playground, what are they exposed to? Chaos and malevolence now there's more to it than that obviously because kids play and they, you know, they promote each other and they form friendships and all of that, but in the playground itself, there is the complexity of the social structure and the malevolence of the bully. It's right there and the q throw your kid in there and you say adapt, and they do.

Speaker 1:          03:26          Okay, so they can do it at a small scale. It's not trivial, but the playground is a complicated place. The kid can adapt. Well, how much can you scale that up? Can you scale that up to from the chaos and order and malevolence of the playground to chaos and order and malevolence itself? Well, that's the question. Well, I don't think there's any reason to answer that in the negative, so because we don't know the full extent of the human being and it is the problem that's worked out. So in the Buddhist story, for example, what happens after, so Buddha's world collapses in the same way that Adam and Eve's world collapses, it's a consequence of repetitive exposure to mortality and death. What happens to Buddha's? He realizes that the little protected city that his father made for him, the walled garden, it's exactly the same motif that's in this Adam and Eve story is, is it's.

Speaker 1:          04:20          It's what it's. It's fatally flawed. That kind of protection cannot exist and he discovered that in pieces, right? Which is exactly what happens to children is that they go out, they discover a limit. They run back and the parents can help them with the limit. They run out, they discover limit. They run back, but some at some point they run out, they discover a limit. They run back and the parents have nothing to say to them because they've hit the same limit that the parents hit. Just like, well, what are you gonna do with your life? How are you going to. How are you going to operate in this archetipal universe? While your parents can only say, well, they can say you identify with the proper archetypal figures they do that. They at least act that out for you, but at some point it's a problem that they cannot solve for you without making you weaker.

Speaker 1:          05:05          That's the thing, you know, so it's an interesting thing that I've learned in therapy because one of the things you have to learn as a therapist is how do you not take your client's problems home with you, so very common existential problem that beginning therapists face because they're afraid. It's like while you're dealing with people all the time who have serious problems, sometimes it's mental illness, although less frequently than you think and sometimes it's just that they're having a good catastrophe right there. Their parents have cancer or something like that, or their father has Alzheimer's and they're unemployed. They have a drug problem or they have a schizophrenia zonar like these aren't mental illness problems, right? Those are just catastrophes. And so people are discussing those with you all the time. How do you avoid being crushed by that or avoid taking it home? And the answer to that is you don't steal the problem that that's the answer.

Speaker 1:          05:57          It's like you have some problems. If you come and talk to me, I'll help you figure out how to solve them. I will not tell you how to solve. I won't steal your problems because what we're trying to do in therapy is number one, so your problem number two, turn you into a great solver of problems and the second one is way more important than the first one, and so you never solve someone's problem by removing from them the opportunity to solve their problem. That's theft. That's the eatables situation. That's the eatables situation. That's the over protective mother. No father can play that role too. We're talking about architectural representations. It's like all protect you at the cost of your ability to protect yourself. No wrong. That's that. That's a sin. That's a good way of thinking about it. That is not what you do with people, not with your children, not with your partner, not with yourself.

Speaker 1:          06:50          You don't do that. That destroys people's adaptive competence and it and it disarms them in the face of chaos and malevolence and that's a terrible, you know, send someone out are unarmed in a world like that, it's a terrible thing to do so. And if people aren't strong enough to manage it, then they get resentful and then when you get the downhill spiral that goes along with that. Okay, so the Med is story is partly you're in a mat, you're, you have a map, but it's insufficient and things will come up to disrupt it. And sometimes the disruption is catastrophic. Everything falls apart. That's what happens to the Buddha. And that's what happens to Adam and eve and the rest of the biblical stories are actually an attempt to put that back together. Now that that's been assembled, as I said, it's been assembled over centuries.

Speaker 1:          07:37          Right? Okay. We've got the problem. The problem is the apocalypse, the ever present reality of the apocalyptic fall, that's the problem. And so you could say, well what is that? It's the insufficiency of all potential conceptual schemes, right? Your conceptual schemes are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the world. It's a permanent problem. So what do you do? You stop relying on your conceptual schemes. That's part of the answer. You start relying on your instead on your ability to actively generate conceptual schemes in the face of chaos. And malevolence and so that makes you someone that identifies with your creative capacity, your creative, courageous capacity for articulation and action in the face of the unknown rather than some formulaic approach to the territory and that is not. And that the idea is that that elevates your character to the point where you can withstand tragedy and malevolence without becoming corrupt and that provides a permanent solution to the problem.

Speaker 1:          08:39          Well then you might say, cynically, what's your evidence that that's a permanent solution and answer that is while the evidence isn't all in yet, first of all, because people only live that way partially and so we haven't put the hypothesis to the full test and second, we don't know what our limitations are. We have no idea what our limitations are and they're, they're both greater and lesser than we imagined because you know, you have to ask yourself like if people stopped adding voluntarily to the misery of the world and devoted themselves to setting things straight, setting themselves straight and setting the things around them straight, what would happen? And the answer to that is, well, there'd be a hell of a lot less unnecessary misery in the world, so that might not be a bad place to start. But apart from that, there's very little that we can say, could we overcome the catastrophe of mortality?

Speaker 1:          09:32          Why not? You think that's beyond our capacity? Could we make the world a place where no one was suffering any more than necessary and still allow the world to exist? Well, possibly because we don't know the limitations of our capacity. We're only running at 40 percent if that. I would say if we don't make full use of all the people that are in the world, we don't have our situation set up so that the gifts that they could offer to everyone are fully realized. We haven't set the systems up for that yet. So we waste people like mad and then we waste ourselves like mad.