I don't know if any other personality course in North America talks about Binswanger and Boss anymore maybe not But I think their ideas are extremely interesting And so I'm going to talk about them They were influenced very much by Martin Heidegger Who was one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers I would say probably - This school of This part of the phenomenological school was more influenced directly by a philosopher than any other school. And just to reiterate because you might keep wondering why I discuss so many philosophers in this course It's because Clinical Psychology in
particular is not strictly a scientific enterprise It's because it's oriented towards values as far as I can tell And I don't see that there is any way of getting around that and that because what you are trying to do as a clinical psychologist and perhaps what you're trying to do with your own life is to figure out how to live properly Now you can construe that as the absence of illness Which is - That's about as close as you get to a scientific model of living well So you don't have any illnesses But even the
idea of illness is an idea that's not precisely scientific It's an amalgam of scientific concepts and ethical concepts so There is no escaping it and if you're in the domain of ethics or values Then you're in what is more or less a philosophical domain But also if you're a scientist - if you're a scientist who is interested in personality It's also something you have to grapple with conceptually Because people live within an ethic and the ethic structures their perceptions And so even to study human beings as objects You still have to take into account they
ensconce themselves within a value system and you have to understand what that means So for me it's easier and more straightforward just to get right to the root of matter to begin with and these people also had insanely interesting ideas They're really useful to know And so this, I would say maybe these The philosophy that underpins this might be the most complex of all the philosophies That we're going to discuss And that's really saying something because there is no shortage of complexities say in Jung And it's very difficult to portray what these people were up
to I started by telling you, when we discussed Rogers a little bit That the phenomenologists were interested in the fact that people live within a self-defined perceptual world That might be one way of thinking about it Part of the way to start to conceptualize what that means is to consider for a moment just consider for a moment how many things there are in this room that you might look at and the answer to that is there's an infinite number of them Depending on how you're going to scale your perceptions You could spend, if you were
a painter, you could spend a month painting that tile Painting a representation of that tile because it's infinitely complex To get the colors right, to get the patterns right, there's no end to it really Because to make a representation that was accurate It would have to be as detailed as the thing itself and it's crazily detailed But you don't concentrate on that sort of thing So you think, you're surrounded by an infinite number of potential things to apprehend But that isn't the world you live in The world you live in is a very very constrained
subset of those things And part of the question is then: what's the nature of that constrained subset That's what you inhabit that's what makes up your experience And also how is it related to the infinitely complex objects that are around you And that's really what these people were trying to figure out. So you're in this perceptual frame, that's one way of thinking about it. That's the Dasein, by the way That's the existential frame or the phenomenological frame Because you can't think about it merely as perception Because it contains also, all of the things you experience
subjectively The emotions and the Qualia that You know Qualia is an element of being that say philosophers or scientists of consciouness have a particularly difficult time with. And it's like - it's the quality of pain which doesn't seem reducible to a set of objective facts Or the quality of color, or the quality of beauty, or the quality of love, or the quality of sorrow Those things seem irreducible to some degree in and of themselves Like what is pain made of? It doesn't even seem like a reasonable question. I mean you can say, how do you
decompose the neurological circuits that are involved in the experience of pain? Fine. But to ask what pain consists of or is composed of or what beauty is composed of, or love. Seems to be - There is something wrong with the formulation of that question Because those things sort of manifest them self as raw facts of existence And so they're constituent elements of this - of your field of experience Your phenomenological frame or this Dasein Which is the way that Heidegger conceptualized it. That's being there with you at the center of your what? Your realm of
experience Now here's some characteristics of the Dasein The thing that makes up you The past and the present are implicit in it What does that mean? Well, say you have a particular emotional response to something, maybe it's a negative emotional response. And you see this very frequently with arguments with people You're having an argument with someone you love. Like a family member, that's a good example So lets say it's the same damn fight you've had with your mother 50 times Okay that's interesting because what it means is that All of those 50 times you've fought
with your mother are implicit in this fight So althought it's taking place right here and now, the past has shaped it And if you wanted to investigate the fight completely You'd have to get to the bottom of that entire train of interactions you've had with your mother So it's implicit in your current experience that's one way of thinking about it But the future is implicit in it too because What you're doing right now, it's as if the future is folded up in what you're experiencing right now and it unfolds as you interact with it And
so the reason it's conditional to some degree on you and your past is because it's your past and you that are determining the actions that you undertake right now that determine how the future is going to unfold around you Now not completely obviously because you don't have complete control over how things unfold But you seem to have some ability to determine how things unfold So one of the ways I've sort of conceptualized the phenomenological viewpoint This is one way of thinking about it I believe is that Instead of thinking - It does mean you have
to reconceptualize your idea of objects Like an object seems like a unidimensional thing in some sense. It's an object. But most of the things people interact with aren't like that at all So like here's an example Let's say you have Let's say you get You're writing the MCAT, you want to go to medical school You've written the MCAT, you get the envelope in the mail, it tells you what your score is You hold the envelope, what are you holding? Well if you think about it from an objective perspective, it's an envelope Who cares? It's just
a little piece of paper right? It's a rectangle of paper But that isn't what you're holding at all That's not what that thing is, that's how you see it. But it's not what it is at all and you know that. Your body knows that Because you're shaking. Well, what are you scared of? The envelope? Well the fact that you see it as an envelope is only an indication of just how narrow your perceptions actually are. Because it's a portal. Right? it's a portal through which you are going to walk into one of two worlds One
in which you're in medical school and the other in which you're not And it also actually contains the past Which is really strange because you think, well you already know what the past is. No you don't. Whatever that score is in there determines what your past was and you know that too. You go watch a movie and a bunch of things happen in the movie and then something twisted happens at the end and all the sudden (trilling) Everything that you thought about the movie was wrong and a whole new past for the movie pops into
being Well, are you a pre-med student? A valid pre-med student? Well the score will determine whether or not you were. Very strange, very strange Because you think of the past as fixed You know? And you think of the things you're interacting with as the things that you see and they're not And you're body is smarter than that, way smarter than that. Because it responds to, you could say And this is sort of a Rogerian perspective, your body is more likely to respond to what the thing actually is, than how it is that you see it.
Okay so, the past is implicit in the current being and the future is implicit in the current being And so the past and the future sort of folded up inside it And you can unfold them and take a look at them Now, here's the next thing So, from a classic scientific perspective, There's the world of independently existing objects and there's the world of subjects And the subject is really in a secondary relationship to the object Because the objective world is what's real But one of the things that the phenomenologists were concerned about that Is that,
well you run into this problem again of exactly how it is that you define the object Because, just as the envelope with the scores in it can't be reduced to the paper, So the object that you're interacting with only reveals what it is as a consequence of the way that you interact with it So for example if you take a complex object like another person It's like well, what is it that you are. Well a huge part of that is going to depend on exactly how I interact with you Because you could be a raging
beast if I interacted with you one way and you could be a perfectly, you know, cooperative entity that was very pleasant if I interacted with you another way And so partly what's happening - you can think of what you're interacting with as something that's really multi-faceted. Truly multi-faceted And you say, well you're trying to determine what it is. But the problem is that what it is manifests itself only in accordance with how you behave towards it And it's actually the case with even objects that you reduce right down to their constituent elements So you might
say like lets talk about subatomic particles. Hypothetically, the most objective thing there is Well it turns out that whether they're a wave or a particle depends on the way you set up the experiment Now I don't want to make quantum analogies but what I'm saying is that the object is a very very complicated thing And so even defining what it is means you have to adopt a frame of reference with regards to it And you undertake only some procedures and not others So, when you're defining an object even scientifically you actually don't define the object.
What you say is here is a multi-dimensional entity if you approach it in this manner, that's the procedure, right? The methods. If you approach it in that manner, it will manifest that set of traits But the problem is, is that there's all sorts of other traits that it could manifest just as well If you treated it a different way And so the object itself is not something that - it's not something easily reducible to a single set of properties I was talking to one of my students yesterday, he had a pretty smart thing to say
about images. We were talking about deep images you know the sorts that you might see in a really high quality museum So maybe they're I don't know 15th century or 16th century renaissance masterpieces They're inexhaustible to some degree Which is why they're in museums and people go look at them you know decade after decade And it's partly because Every time you look at them you're different You go in one week, you look at it, you see something. You go in the next week, you look at it and you see something else. Well it's partly because
You're bringing something entirely different to the situation and the image is complicated enough to allow it to reflect something new to you depening on the stance you take in relationship to it And lots of things are like that lots of things are like that A book you read when you were sixteen is going to be an entirely different book when you read it when you're 35 Say well the book's the same. It's like, it depends on how you define the book Because it isn't even obvious where the book is exactly Well it's on my shelf
in the library It's like no, that's a chunk of paper that's on your shelf in the library Where exactly the book is, that's a much more difficult question to consider So it depends on how you define the book So without a subject, nothing at all would exist to confront objects and to imagine them as such True this implies that every object Everything objective in being merely objectified by the subject is the most subjective thing possible Well you also know this again when you're in an argument with someone "it's you" "no, it's you" "no it's you"
It's like, you don't know Are you being biased? Are you looking at the situation incorrectly? The person you're arguing with trying to convince you that it's your problem You think "no you made me angry" It's like hmm an interesting statement you know? as if you could do that But it does seem that way, you were being provocative "Well you're just too sensitive" "hmm how are we going to settle that?" Well it's a continual argument and that again has to do with the crazy entangled dynamic between subjective perception and objective perception I've showed you this before
and I actually think this is a pretty good Schematic representation of what's meant by Dasein And this is a complicated little diagram Although the diagram itself is quite simple It's predicated on the following assumptions You need to narrow down your world and what you're doing is narrowing it down from lets say an infinite set of possibilities To a finite set of manageable possibilities and you do that a bunch of ways Partly - merely - you can't your senses aren't acute enough to detect everything. So pure stupidity in some sense stops you from being absolutely overwhelmed
You don't have eyes in the back of your head for example so you don't have to worry about all those things you're not looking at behind you But then it's far more than that You just can't handle that full complexity so there's a continual narrowing process And then you exist inside that narrowed reality Like if I look at you like that There's not a hell of a lot of difference between that looking at you like that Like I can't really see these people. I can tell they're people, that's all I can see your face I've
got just about all of it right there That's a very narrow and you know you're moving your eyes around and inhabiting this constant narrow space Well what's that space - what does that space you inhabit consist of Well that's Dasein that space that you inhabit and so we can say It's something like this You have implicit in that perception a sense of where you are and what you are doing right now it's in the perception and then in the perception as well is what you're aiming at Because you're not just sitting here passively or you'd
be asleep or you'd be unconscious You're sitting here doing nothing You know, physically But you have an aim in mind and the aim is what you're pointing your eyes at The aim is what's structuring your perceptions The aim is what's revealing that part of the world that is being revealed to you, to you That's the revelation of the world It also structures your emotions. It also primes your behaviors So it's not a drive, it's not a goal it's not a motivation, it's more than that. It's all of that at once. That's sort of what your
personality is You see the phenomenologists don't really think about personality They think about the manifestation of your reality It's not exactly your personality It's that you're the center of a reality and you constitute that reality But all of your elements of experience constitute that reality and so it's simplest element is something like Where you are and where you're going and the embodied actions you undertake to relate those two things Which would include your eye movements because of course perception is an active phenomena You are shaking your eyes back and forth unbelievable rapidly Otherwise, if you
can make your eyes stand still, which you can do with great concentration Everything will black out Because you have to move your eyes back and forth so the light hits different cells cause the cells get exhausted And then they stop reporting. So you're just whipping your eyes back and forth in a micro-way constantly And as well as moving them around voluntarily and involuntarily So even perception is a lot more like feeling things out with your fingers Even when you're using your ears or your eyes It's very active, there's no passive perception it's a motor act
to perceive and so your motor act is determined by your hierarchy of values that's one way of looking at it So another way of thinking about it is that's how the past and future are implicit in it Your very active perception is determined by your entire value structure So It's implicit inside of it, it's folded up inside of it You can tell that too because if something violates it Again, maybe an argument with someone It's good to think about people as the thing you interact with the most as the canonical object Cause they're so damn
complicated and they get in the way all the time and when someone gets in the way of what you're doing You know, it isn't obvious what they're interfering with It might be the little micro-routine that you're undertaking right now You know, maybe you go home and you make a nice dinner and the person you're making it for is all rude about it Okay so what exactly are they getting in the way of? Well They're certainly getting in the way of your expectations of having a nice emotional time for the next hour But you have no
idea how indicative that is of some serious flaw In you, or them, or the relationship, or the situation, or the way you've conducted your whole life Or the way they've conducted their whole life and all of that's packed in there It's sort of like the unconscious of the psychoanalysts but it's more - it's not the same conceptualization. It's another way of looking at the same phenomena So Alright so the two people we're going to talk about most are Medard Boss And he was influenced by Martin Heidegger, who was a great philosopher Taken to task often
because he turned out to be tangled up with the Nazis more than he should've been And Husserl, that's Edmund Husserl, who was actually if I remember correctly was Martin Heidegger's teacher That's Ludwig Binswanger - and they were Both of these two people were influenced both by Freud and Jung Okay so here is one of Binswanger's claims I love this claim it's such a cool idea And I think there is neurological support for it. Neuropsychological support What we perceive are "first and foremost" not impressions of taste, tone, smell or touch Not even in things or objects,
but meanings Well that's an interesting idea Because You know it's been said that every person in an unconscious exponent of some great philosopher's presuppositions Well, mostly the way you think about the way you perceive is that there are objects in the world You see the objects You think about the objects, you evaluate the objects You decide how to act on the objects, and then you act Right? it's from Object, sense, perception, emotion, cognition, action That's wrong. That isn't how it works It's partly not the way it works because You're actually - the way that you
interact with the world exists at multiple levels So for example You have reflexes so if I If I poke you hard, you'll react like that. You'll jerk back And that, you do that without thinking That's part of a neurological circuit that's very deeply embedded and that's virtually automatic It's reflexive. It doesn't require conscious perception at all It's too slow for starters And so you have - there's multiple levels of you interacting with the world. And at one level, you're seeing objects, you're thinking about them, you're planning what to do But you're doing all sorts of
other things that are way faster than that and other things that are way slower at the same time. Now what Binswanger claims Is that what you see in the world are meanings So it's the meaning detection first and the object recognition second Now that's a hell of a claim, that is But there's definitely levels of your nervous system That operate in that manner So for example Here's a good example, people have blind sight There visual cortex is damaged they can't see objects So they think they're blind But if you show them an angry face, they'll
manifest a change in the skin conductants, They'll orient And it means that the eyes are still mapping the face onto the amygdala And the amygdala is mapping the pattern onto the body, no object perception Pattern Pattern Pattern No object perception And so the meaning is what's being perceived first and foremost And you have to perceive meanings first because you actually want to stay alive That's the trick So the world is full of these things that have meanings to you that are relevant to your survival And what you're perceiving first is the relevance of the pattern
to your survival And the idea that you can conceptualize that as a set of objects Well first of all, that's a pretty new idea Technically speaking, right? Because Technically speaking we didn't really start to conceive the world as subject in an objective world until we really formalized science Now science was implicit long before it became explicit But it didn't become explicit until about 500 years ago So you react to meanings So here's an example Babies if you If you have two surfaces and you put a piece of glass between them You know, they're elevated And
you put an 8 month year old baby on the one surface so they can crawl It won't crawl across the space And you might say it sees a hole and won't crawl across it But that isn't what it sees. It sees a place to fall off Direct, that's direct perception So when I see this for example My eyes see that as a pattern That pattern's on my retina it's propagated through my optic nerve It's propagated into my brain, it's propagated onto my motor cortex And the propagation is This That Right? So I can pick it
up And as soon as - when I look at that this is implicit That's implicit in the perception You think well why do you see that at the size and resolution you see it at? That's why So the fact that you see it that way has this implicit in it It isn't that you see the object and match your hand to it It's that matching your hand to it is part of the perception of the object It's what gives the object meaning And so you see actually you perceive the meaning of the object It's part
of the perception And you can't not see the meaning of the object Well if you're a scientist you can sort of separate out the object from its meaning That's actually what science does It tears the object away from its meaning And then of course there is nothing meaningful left So science ends up value free. But that's because the meaning has been torn out of it Now there's technical reasons for doing that But Binswanger's point is don't kid yourself you see the meaning first. Here's an example You watch the trade towers fall What did you see?
Well you could say you saw the towers fall It's like why are you in shock for two days afterwards then? Well because what are the towers exactly? As long as they're standing and operating, they're towers. As soon as they fall, God only knows what they are Maybe they're the beginning of the next war You know? Who knows what they are? And so everyone was in shock for three days Because what they saw was the indeterminate meaning of that event And it opened all sorts of gateways It's like well, the towers fell, there's gateways open everywhere.
We don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going to happen next. We don't know where we are And that's direct perception mapped onto your body. Bang, you're in shock You see the meaning first And well you constrain it down to well why are you so upset? Well the towers fell It's like that's the best you can do for a verbal utterance It's what your perceptual systems reported to you But God only knows what happened We still don't really know what it meant that they fell Now most things have put themselves back together but
And then you think well what does it mean? What does it mean that what you see first is the meaning? and that's a really tricky question because you might say well That's when you get back to the problem of what constitutes real So I could say well you've evolved to see the meaning Well then we might ask Well if you've evoled to see the meaning and that's kept you alive Is there anything more real than the meaning? Because somebody who is a materialist would say "well no, the object is more real" It's like no, it
depends on how you define real It might be that the most real thing about the visual cliff is that that's a falling off place And that its secondary description as a you know an object A hole or something like that That's something you paint over the top of the primary reality And so, Well here's a practical application of it or at least one of the things I think is practical You know, you can have experiences that differ in their, lets call it, high quality meaning You know so you get engaged and engrossed in something and
you're happy about that It's not that you're happy It's that you're engaged and engrossed in it, you would do it again Even though it might take effort You can tell that where you are is meaningful Well I think what happens in that situation is that You're in a Piagetian place Where many of the games that you're playing are stacked sort of isomorphically on top of one another And the experience of meaning is the fact that you're playing a small game properly Nested inside a larger game, you're playing it properly Nested inside a larger game, you're
playing it properly too, etc all the way out Past is balanced, future is balanced everything is stacked up And there's a report coming from your being telling you that, that's why you're engaged You might say well maybe that's real. Maybe it's more real than anything else That's a strange thing because if you think that meaning is separate and secondary from the real objective world Then the reality is the object But it isn't obvious that the reality is the object It's certainly not how we act It's not how we perceive And so Did we evolve to
perceive reality? It depends on what you mean by perceive Perceive might mean did we evolve mechanisms that allowed us to survive in the face of that reality. Yes. Is that whats real? What enables you to survive in the face of reality? It's a definition It's a perfectly reasonable definition unless you can come up with a better one Meanings are primary Now that brings up a strange issue So what determines the meaning of what it is you're perceiving Well this is where Binswanger and Boss disagree Binswanger says It's the a-priori ontological structure. The world design, or
matrix of meaning Okay so what does that mean? Well, you have a particular history. Biological and cultural and individual And you're viewing the world through the lense of that set of particularities So it's almost if you are behind a curtain and the curtain has certain hoels in it And you can see through the wholes in the curtain but the curtain is your construction so the curtain with the holes determines what you see Well, Boss would say no it's the opposite in a very strange thing The meaning of the world manifests itself to you more or
less of its own accord And It's a tougher one to explain Disclosure of meaning: Boss the revelation of the object The emergence of the phenomena: the numinous The very word phenomena is derived from phainesthai To shine forth, to appear, to unveil itself, to come out of concealment or darkness Okay here's an example you see someone beautiful Is it your perception is it your perception or does the beauty exist? That's the difference between Binswanger and Boss Cause Binswanger would say well the reason that thing appears to you as beautiful is because of the way you're filtering
it And Boss would say no The beauty inheres in the object itself and manifests itself. It shines forth And so I really like this concept this concept of phenomena That's why they're phenomenologists phainesthai means to shine forth From the phenomenological perspective you pursue those things that shine forth Now you remember this is kind of a parallel idea I suppose it's a parallel of Jungian ideas You remember in Harry Potter that when they're playing Quidditch he's always chasing the snitch? And you remember how, if I've got this correctly, Quidditch is basically two games at the same
time right? There's the standard game and there's the game that the seekers play Yes? I've got that right? What happens if the seeker gets the snitch? Games over right? They win Very interesting. She has a brilliant imagination that woman, Rowling So the idea is that in every game there's two games going on at the same time. There's the ordinary game And there's the game that the seekers play and the seekers chase the thing that shines at them And that's what that little thing is the snitch. It's a round circle with wings. It's a very very
old old old symbol It's a symbol of what It's a symbol of reality before it's fractionated into its parts I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that It's a symbol of It's a symbol of Imagine that there are things that move forward to make you curious And you were trying to figure out what was common among all the things that made you curious That thing that Harry Potter's chasing, that's a symbol of that It's golden like the sun, it flits around and attracts your attention and it's always moving And if you're
seeking, you chase it. So that's the phenomenological idea, that's the disclosure of meaning You say well when you're curious about something, why are you curious about that? Is it calling to you? Or is it something that you're interpreting? Well I would say it's both I think that's the way to resolve this puzzle It's that There isn't a perceiving entity without a structure And your structure has been evolving itself for three and a half billion years There's no perceiving entity without a structure But by the same token the thing that's being perceived Also shines forth with
its own potential manifestation And you need to think of it both ways at the same time But the curiosity issue is a really fascinating one Because curiosity pulls you forward It's not random That's the thing that's so cool You can't really control it, but it's not random If your curiosity is random, you're schizophrenic And I mean that technically Because one of the things that happens to schziphrenics is that the mechanisms that establish relevance become pathologized And they see meaning everywhere, randomly And that's partly why they generate delusions Because the incoherent manifestation of meaning calls out
for a representation They develop a paranoid delusion if they're intelligent enough to put everything together So you're curious and something pulls you forward Well you can interact with the curiosity and you can follow it but you can't really direct it The question is where is it taking you? So that little ball, that was a manifestation Of what the Greeks referred to - Greeks? Is that right? - Mercurius It's a Roman and Greek God Mercurius The spirit Mercurius is the messenger of the Gods. The winged messenger of the Gods It flits around You say well the
curiosity pulls you forward To where? Well to wherever it wants to take you Well that's a Jungian idea as well Is that your curiosity is like the manifestation of your self to the ego Right? It's the thing that you could be in the future calling you forward Something like that Very strange idea Very interesting. See when you start to understand That you're not in control of what makes you interested in things The whole world shifts around on you Because the question is if you're not in control of that, what the hell is directing it? What's
going on? It's not you It's not under your control It's not random. It's alive. It's dynamic It has an orientation towards something That's the Jungian self. Or that's the manifestation of meaning Yes very strange I told you this already See there's an old representation, a very old represenation of the snitch right there Now this is an old symbol, eh? You've got this dragon of chaos here It's kind of like an octopus as well That twist in its tail refers to infinity. Dragons almost always have an infinite tail like that And it's got the claws of
a bird, maybe a bird of prey The body of an animal and the head of a snake And then down here You see its got the sun up there so it's sort of aiming upwards towards the sun this thing And then down here is this thing called the round chaos. It's an old alchemical system And if you look the dragon is fertilizing this And that has potential in it like an egg It's full of potential And so it's matter and spirit at the same time It's sort of like it's a representation of that which you're
exploring Because you could say well the thing that you're exploring It's sort of a constructivist idea You explore something new What do you generate from the exploration? You. Because as you explore it you learn things. That changes you. So you generate psyche out of the exploration. That's spirit. And you also generate the world out of it But the thing to begin with is psyche and world at the same time And that's what this thing represents And that's what Harry Potter is chasing That's what makes him a seeker Very strange ideas Now I'm going to tell
you a dream There was a dream I had while working on these ideas And I'm going to tell you the dream for two reasons One is because it bears directly on these ideas Two because well we just covered psychoanalytic thought and I want to show you how a dream can work Cause it's not easy to find a dream that you can interpret in a way that's public that makes sense Cause they're usually so tightly defined contextually You can define them in the therapeutic context because you know so much about the person It's very hard to
pull that out and make it meaningful outside of that context But this dream works. Ok so, I was dreaming I was dreaming that there was a small object. It was a circle, a sphere about this big. And it was floating on top of the Atlantic Ocean And I had kind of a birds eye view of it and I was following it along Like maybe you know like a drone would follow behind an object And it was floating And it was really zipping along man, it was really really fast And then the scene shifted To a
bunch of scientists they were sitting inside a room full of television monitors And they were watching this thing move across the Ocean And so it was here and it had four hurricanes beside it one here, one here, one here, and one here So it was in the center of four hurricanes So whatever it was was like some bloody potent thing zipping across the ocean Then the scientists got a hold of it I guess and the scene shifted And I was in a museum like an old Victorian museum And this thing, this ball was now inside
a Imagine a wood stand With a glass case on top of it It was inside the glass case and it was floating and it was sort of pulsing a little bit And so inside the room there was Stephen Hawking And the American President I don't remember who it was he was sort of faceless But Stephen I thought, Stephen Hawking? What the hell Disembodied intellect That's Stephen Hawking so that's what that meant And the President well he's just the symbol of order And so this thing whatever it was that was surrounded by these winds Had been
placed into a category system right? It was in a museum, it was boxed in. It had been conceptualized and categorized Partly by disembodied intellect, that was Stephen Hawking, and partly by social order And so there's a Binswanger Boss thing going on there The thing pulses and is alive so its got its own power But it's also encapsulated in a category system So I'm a third person observer in there I'm not in the room I'm just seeing this So that was fine So the next thing that happened Oh yes, one of them described the features of
the room Its walls were seven feet thick They didn't want this thing going anywhere And it was made out of titanium dioxide I thought, what the hell is that? Well it's a paint It's a paint substance but it's also what the hull of the Starship Enterprise is made out of So my dream was saying well what's the hardest substance there is? Well it's titanium dioxide It's not getting out of that box The walls were designed to permanently constrain the object Okay now the next thing that happened was this object was You could tell it was
kind of alive And it kept shifting around and at one point it turned into a chrysalis you know a cocoon And I thought what the hell does that mean? And then, so it turned into a cocoon And I don't know if you've seen a chrysalis when it's just about to hatch But it twitches around eh? It's alive that thing So they're very strange things And then at the end it turned itself into a pipe Like a Meerschaum pipe And I thought Then it reformed itself into a sphere And just shot right out of the room
Like the walls weren't even there It decided it was gone bang! It was gone And I woke up and I thought what the hell What the hell does that mean? It took me forever to figure this out So then about two years after experiencing this dream, I was reading Dante's Inferno In the ninth Canto, a messenger from God appears So Dante goes down into hell right? It was Dante's attempt to describe It's brilliant So imagine that you go to a bad place psychologically right? So your life has collapsed that's terrible But then you're trying to
figure out what you did wrong and how you're to blame for it And so what you do is a descent A descent into your own foolishness and stupidity Level, by level, by level And that's what Dante was trying to explain That's what that hell was Levels of catastrophe and there's something right at the bottom And he found that it was betrayal that was at the bottom So in any case I was reading that And there's a line in there that made me remember this dream Cause I tried to figure out this dream for years eh
So that was like a herald of the arrival of this messenger It's a very powerful scene And I thought about this dream with this thing with the four storms So The pipe thing that really, that really took me forever to figure out And I finally remembered this painting by Magritte This is not a pipe Right so what does that mean? Well what it means is the representation is not the thing It's a very famous painting right? The representation is not the thing Well even the perception is not the thing And that's what the dream was
trying to get at It's like this thing This thing that was so powerful and so capable of transforming Could be encapsulated temporarily within a conceptual system But whenever it decided to leave it was just going to leave And so What is was referring to was the potential that there is inside objects So for example And it's such a complicated thing to explain Nobody knew what cell phones were going to do You make the cell phone You think you know what it is You don't know what it is No one knew what the birth control pill
was going to do You make it, you think you know what it is, you have no idea what it is And it's going to do some of the things you think it will do And it's going to do a bunch of things you have no idea about And that's because Things are more complex than they look They're multi-dimensional and they have I wouldn't say a life exactly but they have an intrinsic complexity That tends to unfold across time And it's only somewhat predictable And so you have things under your control and in your grasp to
some limited degree But at any point it's like the switch in the yin yang symbol At any time chaos can collapse into order Or order can collapse into chaos And that's what that dream meant Another painting by Magritte trying to express the same thing right? All men in suits, all uniform, all thinking the same way Same haircuts, completely socialized Blinded by their own perceptions That's us Cause you think well your perceptions illuminate and bring you information It's yes and no They also constrain to equal degree I dreamed much later about a year later This was
a very cool image too You know that image I think is it Da Vinci or Michelangelo Of the man inscribed in the square inside the circle It's a very famous image Well it was like that except It was a cube and not a square And so there was kind of a faceless person, almost like a mannequin inside this cube And he was suspended about two feet off the ground And on the front wall It was like wall paper designs, there were these little squares about this big And they mandalas square with circles inside them And
then inside the circle there was a little snake tail that was out And the whole wall was covered with these snake tails And the person When the person walked forward the wall would move forward And when he walked backwards the wall would move backwards So it was always this far away And he could reach out and pull any of those snakes into being And so that was another dream of the same sort of idea What do you have in front of you? A world of objects No You have a world of potential in front of
you And you can interact with any aspect of that potential And while you're doing so, you realize it You pull something into being that wouldn't have been there before And what you see in front of you is a wall of potential The potential is not infinite because you're constrained But, it's still For all intents and purposes it will do you just fine it's more potential than you could ever need And so the dream See dreams Dreams are at the forefront of thinking They get there before you The creative imagination is at the forefront of thinking
If you think that you're moving out into the unknown To gather new information What gets there first is the imagination Obviously that's what Piaget says about children as well You imagine it first Then maybe you can represent it in speech And a dream is part of that imaginative process That's what artists are doing They're going out into the unknown And representing it imaginatively So what does that painting mean? Well if the artist knew that he'd just write it down Right? The art is beyond what's articulable otherwise it's not art it's just propaganda So the artist
and the dream their out on the frontier right? That's the open imagination And so when you're conceptualizing new things The dream and the imagination can bring you places that you don't even know that you can go And it's a mystery too It's like I don't know how I figured this out It was as if the figuring out manifested itself inside me Cause that's the experience in a dream right? You don't feel "I dreamed this up" You feel "I had a dream." Where did that come from? It springs out of the unknown and offers something to
you Here's pathology as conceptualized by the phenomenologists It's a very interesting way of thinking about it Existential guilt and fear as debt to possibility Well so there's this idea It's like an exisitential idea that you have some problems That you have some problems in your life Well part of the Dasein is the sense of responsibility that you have to address those problems It's part and parcel of the way that human beings manifest themselves in the world So part of your pathology would be failure to bear the responsibility for your being And a sense that you
have a debt to your existence And according to the phenomenologists that's built right into the sense of your being It's a remarkable conceptualization Right well that's a good place to stop Okay good we'll see you in a week and a half
