[Music] sit on your bed one day and ask yourself uh what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't Mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl there's no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good
that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it and then you might also ask yourself and this is definitely worth asking is do you really have anything better to do And if you don't well why would you do anything else if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day that works and it i actually think that that's in accordance with with what we have come to understand about human perception because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim because you're you're a creature that Has a
name you have to have a name in order to do something you're an aiming creature you look at a point and you move towards it it's built right into you and so you have a name well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim well then so that sets up the world around you it organizes all of your perceptions it organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations So you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges
and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that eighth and you can concentrate on the on the on the day and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too because you can you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the day and it seems to me that that's that Makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning that that's how because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize
well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life well and then the issue is well back to noah well all hell's about to break loose and chaos is coming it's like when that's happening in your life you might want to be doing Something that you regard as truly worthwhile because that's what will keep you afloat when when everything is flooded and you don't want to wait until the flood comes just start doing that because if your ark's half built and you don't know how to captain it the probability is
very high that that you'll drown ask and it shall be given you seek and Ye shall find knock and it shall be opened unto you for everyone that asketh receiveth and he that seeketh findeth and to him that knocketh it shall be opened that sounded pretty optimistic again but but again i think it's a description of the structure of existential reality and and by by which i mean when i'm in my clinical practice and i observe and this is also the case with My students is let's say people's lives aren't what they would like them
to be and so then you ask why well forget about tragedy and catastrophe because that's self-evident and we're not going to discuss that although the degree to which you bring about your own tragedy is always indeterminate but i would never say that every terrible thing that is visited on a person is something they deserved i Think that that's a very dangerous presupposition especially because everyone gets sick and everyone dies [Music] but one of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability
that you're going to get what would be good for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be Wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you well why don't you because you don't try you don't think okay here's what i would like if i could have it and and i don't mean i don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't
what i Mean i mean something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay i'm caring for this person i would like things to go as well for them as possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case well people don't do that they don't sit down and think all right you know let's let's figure it out you've got a life It's hard obviously it's like three years from now you can have what you need
you got to be careful about it you can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with people has been is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange Because they don't neces it's a strange thing it's not quite that simple because you know you may formulate an idea about what would be good for you and
then you take 10 steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success And so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a proposition here and the proposition is if you actually want something
you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life In every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious About it you have to
think okay like i'm taking stock of myself and if i was going to live properly in the world and i was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation and i don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that i would aim at and so the issue is not so much the blindness of others even though There's as much blindness among others as there is in as there is for you but the issue here the advice here the description here is you should be concerned about what's interfering
with your own vision first and you should leave other people to hell alone in relationship to that and so if your mode of being in the world is if you would just act better things would improve for me Or if you identify the evil and the catastrophe as something that's outside that someone else needs to fix or that someone's response someone else is responsible for then you're not going to fix that and you're going to remain blind to the things that you're doing and not doing that make things not go well and so it's just
better to think all right i'm probably blind in many many Ways and maybe there are some ways that i could rectify that because it's highly probable that you're blind in all sorts of ways i mean it's in fact it's virtually certain and so it's just more useful to think how is it that i'm wrong in this situation i'll tell you something that i learned to do when i was arguing with my wife which happened quite frequently because When you actually communicate with people you find out that there's many things that you don't agree on and
that's because you're actually different creatures and so if you're actually going to have a truthful conversation then you're going to find out that you don't see things the same way and then you can either pretend that that's not the case and gloss over it and then end up in a 30-year silent war Or you can or you can have the damn fight when you need to have it and see if you can straighten it out so now and then we'd get in a situation where we were at loggerheads we couldn't move and you know it
would spiral up into hate speech let's say because yeah everyone laughs because they know they manifest plenty of hate speech towards those they Love so one of the things we learned to do was when we hit an impasse was to separate and to go our own ways and to go sit and think okay look we're at this unpleasant situation we can't figure out how to move forward i'd always think of course it's her fault obviously it's Her fault at least 95 but maybe there was something i did that contributed like 5 to it if you
do what it is that you're called upon to do which is to lift your eyes up above the mundane daily selfish impulsive issues that might beset you and attempt to enter into a contractual relationship with That which you might hold in the highest regard whatever that might be to aim high and to make that important above all else in your life that that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence like nothing else can and i truly believe that that's the most practical advice that you could possibly receive the way that you fortify your faith in
life is to assume the best something like that and then to act courageously In relationship to that and and that's that's tantamount to expressing your faith in the highest possible good it's tantamount to expressing your faith in god and it's not a matter of stating well i believe in the existence of a transcendent deity because in some sense who cares who cares what you believe i mean you might and all that but but that's not the issue that's not the issue the issue it seems to me is how you act [Music] the issue is not
what you believe as if it's a set of facts but how you conduct yourself in the world the purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you it's a brilliant notion and so the idea is something like [Music] you can conjure up a representation of yourself you can conjure up a variety of potential representations of yourself Into in the future you can lay out how those future representations of yourself are likely to prevail or fail you can call the potential use in the future that will fail and then you can embody the
ones that will succeed you do that well simultaneously conjuring up a representation of your current state and determining for yourself because of your undue suffering which Elements of your pathetic being need to be given up so that you can move forward into that future and the goal what is it that you're aiming at with that work and that sacrifice that's the ultimate question what is it that you're trying to do you're trying to improve the future we believe that the future can be improved we believe that it can be improved as a consequence of our
sacrificial work and so once again what Are the limitations what are the limits to that what are the necessary limits to that i would say we don't know we conjured up this remarkable idea the future exists we can see it even though it's only potential we can adjust our behavior in the present in order to maximize our probability of success in the future how best to do that well the idea is something like don't hesitate to offer the ultimate sacrifice If you want the future to turn out ultimately well what is it that you could
contract for let's say if you were willing to give up everything about you that's weak and unworthy [Music] the proper sacrificial attitude produces a psychological state And then a social state that's a manifestation of that attitude that decreases the probability that the world will careen into hell and increases the probability that people will live high quality meaningful private lives in a society that's balanced and capable of supporting that and none of that seems to me to be questionable Really i also don't think it's anything that people don't actually know you know people have told me
many times that when they listen to me talk they're hearing things that they already knew but didn't know how to say it's something like that and this is one of those things that i think is exactly like that i mean i think it's at the very core of our moral knowledge and Which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge i mean let's get this straight moral knowledge is no trivial matter it's knowledge about how it is that you orient yourself in the world there's no more profoundly necessary form of knowledge well it's predicated on
on something that's exactly like this we know that we have to make sacrifices we know that we have to aim at what's good so then why isn't that we don't aim at what's best and Make the sacrifices that are necessary in order to bring that into play i think it seems to me that in some sense that's self-evident the question is why we don't do it but there's answers to that too life is hard and it hurts people it's rife with limitation and some of it's arbitrary and some of it's unjust and some of it's
worse some of it's malevolent which is even worse It's not surprising that that combination of vicissitude can turn people against being but i think even when that happens and even when people have the kind of history that if they revealed to you you would say well it's no wonder you turned out that way the people who turn out that way still know that it's wrong they still know that however deep their own suffering however arbitrary their own suffering However much that's caused by the malevolence of others as well as the tragedy of existence that that
does not in any way justify their turning away from the good and i believe everyone knows that i believe that they know it implicitly even if they don't allow themselves to know it explicitly and i believe that if they violate that idea then they violate themselves and that they end up in Kane's position which is the position of the man who's been given a punishment that is too great to bear now we're capable of making sacrifices in abstraction right to conceptualize a future that we want to let go of the things that are stopping us
from moving forward and to free ourselves from the chains of our original preconceptions pursue pleasure follow your impulses live for the moment Do what's expedient a mountain is something you have to climb and you have to climb to the pinnacle of a mountain and the mountain is up right and the mountain stretches up to heaven and it's a long journey to specify the right place on the highest pinnacle and and that's symbolic because of course it's a pinnacle that you're always trying to reach just like you're always trying to aim you're always Trying to climb
upward at least that's the theory depends to some degree of course on your definition of upward you're supposed to again to act out the highest good of which you're capable now that'll transform your life to some degree into an archetypal adventure there's no way around that because as you attempt to climb a higher mountain let's say or to aim at a higher target or something like that then the things around you will Become increasingly dramatic and of import that happens by necessity obviously because if you're aiming at something difficult and profound and you're really working
at it then your life is going to become perhaps increasingly difficult and profound but that might be okay you might that might be exactly what you need as an antidote to the implicit limitations that face you as a human being [Music] the good father is precisely someone who is willing to sacrifice this child to the ultimate good you have a moral obligation as a parent to encourage your child to go out into the world right and to be whoever they can be to be the best they can possibly be and in doing that you're encouraging
Them to pursue the good you're sacrificing them to the good you're not keeping them for yourself selfishly you're telling them that they can go out and live their life and live it properly you don't want for your son what it is that you want for him you want for your son what would be best for him and for the World and you let go in precise proportion to your desire to have that happen when you have an infant you do everything for the infant because the infant can do nothing for him or herself but as
the infant matures and is increasingly capable of doing things for him or herself then you pull back right you pull back and every time the child develops the ability to do something you allow them Or encourage them to do it and you don't interfere you know so if your child is struggling getting dressed well obviously there's sometimes that you help them but mostly you let them learn so that they can know how to do it in the future that's better for you and it's certainly better for them there's a rule if you're working with the
elderly in an old age home and the rule is something like don't do anything for any of the guests Let's say that they can do for themselves because you compromise their independence and so as a mother you pull back and you pull back and you let your child hit him or herself against the world and you fail to protect them but by failing to protect them you encourage and ennoble them to the point where you're no longer necessary now they may still want to see you and It would be wonderful if that was the case
but the point is is that you're supposed to remove yourself from the equation by encouraging your child to be the best possible person that person can be and you sacrifice your desires all of your desires to that your personal desires even your desires for your child in relationship to you because you want them to move forward into the world as a light right as a Light on a hill that's what you want if you have any sense and so you don't get to keep your children at home because you need them how do we come
to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and more importantly potential one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't you know you can learn to kind of watch yourself like you're watching a stranger so you have to understand that you don't Know who you are and that's not easy to understand because you think you know but then you know you remember you can't control yourself very well you're not very disciplined you're full of flaws maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think but it's hard to
get low enough to understand How deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are now there's an upside to that too which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be and so the discovery of that you know is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are then you watch yourself you watch yourself like you're watching a stranger You watch what you say and you listen you think what what sort of person would say that and how am i reacting emotionally when i'm communicating in that manner
you know is that making me feel stronger weaker is it is it is filling me with shame is it helping my confidence am i laying out a lie am i deceiving myself and other people am i adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse and it Comes across as nothing but like self-centered narcissism um what are my dark fantasies what are my aggressive fantasies what is it that i'm willing to do what am i interested in so that i'll spontaneously pursue it what do i procrastinate about and why what am
i unwilling to do what do i think is good what do i congratulate myself for accomplishing and what do i berate Myself for failing to confront and to implement those are all incredibly complicated questions and you don't know the answers to them so that's a start and then in terms of potential well you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are especially the darker parts of yourself because then you discover your potential for mayhem there's some real utility in That you know discovery that you're dangerous it's such a useful
discovery it's actually something that strengthens you because the first thing that a realization like that can in fact produce is the ambition to incorporate that danger into a higher order personality and that can make you implacable i can make you someone who can say no When you need to say no you know that can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict and so that's unbelievably useful and so that's one of the potentials that you might discover the other thing you do to discover your potential is to well you challenge yourself you know it's like
take a bit of a look at yourself and Think about what's not so good that you could improve that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve you know and set yourself a little goal um you know maybe you're not studying at all at your university or maybe you're maybe you're at work and you've got this stack of paper there you know and you haven't looked at that damn stack for like a month and you know that You should be and you're bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that it's like
maybe i think i've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month i'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper how about tomorrow i just like put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and i like i glance through it for 15 seconds see if i can do that it's like well you set yourself a goal of improvement you know it's a humble goal there's things you could do to improve and you know what they are and there's small steps that you
could take that you might take that would put you in that direction and then the question is are you big enough to take those small steps you know are you Capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost child-like steps in order to manage them an answer to that is yeah you are most people have things they avoid you know and they're afraid of so i would say to some degree it's the law of everyone people vary in the degree to which They've
conquered that and you do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined but most of the time they've got disciplined in exactly this manner it's through slow incremental improvement and then you challenge yourself it's like well could i do this that would be better then you find out and then you think well is there something slightly larger and more challenging that i could do that would be better And and you try it and you find out and as you try it and you find out generally you get better at it and you can
take on larger and larger challenges you know you take responsibility for yourself that's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back it's like take on the world man but only at the level that you can manage when you're ignorant and biased and Deeply flawed and immature it's where everyone starts you don't want to take you don't want to bite off more than you can chew but it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with with part of reality you know some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at victory and then
you attain victory over some small part of the chaos and then you're the person who's victorious over chaos you're just a beginner but that's who You are and then maybe you can get unbelievably good at that and you do that by challenging yourself humbly at the level that you're able to function it's easier to understand if you think about a child that you're trying to rear properly and you want to make that child help that child reveal their their highest potential whatever that is whatever that means And what you do is you don't set them
a series of impossible tasks in the hope of undermining their self-confidence you form a relationship with them that is predicated on your interest in their highest mode of being and then you offer them challenges that are precisely optimized to their ability right so they can do them but they have to stretch the two elements of their ability would be what they can do and what and how much they're capable of at Transforming what they can do and an optimal challenge is stretches you to the end of what you can do and then into the domain
of of how you can transform you have to be humble and wise enough to understand that you might have to aim pretty damn low especially in those places where you're not functioning well and it might be so embarrassing that you can't that you can't bring yourself to fathom That that's actually who you are you need the loss of that arrogant ego because it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward you know it's part of the adversarial process mythologically speaking that stops moral progress you're too proud of who you think you are to notice what you're
like so that you could change properly you don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself it's probably associated with some delusion that Helps you maintain a positive although very fragile self-image you know in the absence of genuine effort it's not to be recommended so you know yourself by watching and paying attention it's not thinking exactly it's not imagination it's just it's watching like you're like you're a snake because a snake watches like cold-bloodedly With no emotional reaction just to see what's there it doesn't allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed
so you watch yourself like that as if you don't know who you are well that's the beginning and then you challenge yourself continually to see how far past yesterday you could Push today and tomorrow and to continually experiment with expanding the domains not only of your competence but of your ability to increase that competence the upper limit to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it the more that's guided by the highest of all possible visions right the alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good the more it's accompanied by
truth in Speech and action the more you will develop your potential and i believe that potential to be as unlimited in the upward direction more unlimited in the upward direction than it is unlimited in the direction that brings people to to the political and social hells that so often characterize the world that we inhabit And so you also i suppose have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure because it's a hell of a thing to bear that kind of responsibility it takes a person out of the ordinary it takes them out of themselves
but there's deep meaning to be had in it and it's and there isn't anything better that you can do [Music] there's this old idea that you go into the abyss it's an idea that you can gaze into the abyss you gaze long and what you find in the abyss is a monster that's the dragon at the bottom of the abyss let's say that's satan himself for that matter but if you go into that into that as deeply as you can what you find is you find your fragmented Father in a in a comatose condition in
a desiccated and and separated condition and then you revivify that well what does that mean it means something it means that if you look in the darkness you find the light that's one thing it means and that the light really stands out against the darkness but that the light is to be found in the darkness so that's a very interesting thing that's a Quest narrative but it means more than that it means something fundamental so we know for example that if you take yourself out of your current state of predictability and safety you put yourself
in a new situation you'll learn right you'll incorporate new information so that's a cognitive issue but that isn't all that happens what happens is that new genes turn on within you and code For the production of new proteins and that happens neurologically new parts of you turn on and so the idea is that if you can move yourself out into the world and push yourself out against a maximum array of challenges more and more of you turn on turns on and then the question would be well what would you be if all of you that
could be turned on was turned on and the answer would be you Would be the resurrection of the ancestral father that's what you would be and so that's why christ says i am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the father except through me what that means is that if you take on the unbearable burden of being voluntarily then that transforms you into the ancestral father and that's true and so that's unbelievably optimistic it's so interesting because it's it's dark beyond belief Well the world is characterized by suffering and
by malevolence of a depth that's virtually beyond comprehension but if you choose to comprehend that what you discover in that is the light that destroys the darkness and that's well that's and that's really something to discover it's there isn't a discovery that's more profound than that that's the search for the holy grail or the philosopher's stone all of that If you actually want something you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make
the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you Obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like i'm taking stock of myself and if i was going to live properly in the world and i was going to set myself up Such that being would justify itself
in my estimation and i don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that i would aim at you could try this this is a form of prayer knocking sit on your bed one day and ask yourself what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question But you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know
you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl [Music] you're perfectly capable of thinking god only knows how you're perfectly capable of of immense feats of imagination and and dream and fantasies god only knows How you do all of that what would happen if you consulted yourself about the best possible outcome for you you might get an answer in order for us to set things right we have to understand that we we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility not only as if it's ours which it is but as if there
isn't anything better that we could do and you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can possibly Conceive of and that's the primary call to adventure in life you need a meaning in your life to forestall the suffering and to make you strong enough to resist malevolence where's the meaning to be found rights impulsive pleasure and happiness no responsibility oh who would have guessed that It's not part of the narrative what makes life worth living is to pick up take its catastrophe and embrace it and carry it and to realize through that
process who you are when i talk to audiences about the relationship between responsibility and meaning they inevitably go dead silent there's not a there's not a rustle there's not a cough it's like is that the secret is that the secret is That it's the voluntary adoption of responsibility it's like well that's the that's the central message of the west it's like to pick up your cross and bear it you know and everyone's been told that but they don't know what it means because it's not been articulated enough so that it becomes something that's practical it's
like yes look at the terrible responsibilities you have right in front of you your family is hurting you're in trouble There's problems in the world it's like all of that's right there and all you have to do is all you have to do is take responsibility for it and then you've got what you need it's something so magnificent that happiness pales in comparison so it's it's it's thin gruel happiness and young people know that they're pursuing hedonistic pleasure and you know no wonder but there's nothing in it That's sustaining and all it does is make
you cynical it's like is that's all there is another one night stand another another binge party you know and it's not like i have anything against in principle against some of that exuberant youthful hedonism look the universities have turned into places of parties why well because that's what the students find best to do there well That's not good what you want to offer them is a reason to not party it's like no you've got to understand you come to this class hung over you're not going to be able to get it you're not going to
be able to write properly you're going to pay a price for that hedonism it's like and the price will be too high for you to bear it's like oh well enough hedonism for me then like i've got something important to do that's the way out of that [Music] before you can be a painter who can paint what's beyond mere memory you you have to inculcate that discipline skill and a lot of that is painful repetition and hard grinding work it's the sacrifice of the present for the future but once you manage that then things open
up that's why we have disciplines right i mean the words aren't there by accident you have to narrow yourself first and Then you can broaden outward and so that's and that's part of the process of maturation that's part of the sacrifice of childhood say in childhood you're nothing but potential but it's not realized and you don't know how to realize it and so then the question is well how do you get to a point where you realize the potential and the answer is you sacrifice almost all of it to a single direction and so That's
the thing about growing up is that when you're a teenager and a young adult you have to sacrifice everything you could have been as a child to be the one thing that you're aiming at but then that opens up everyone in their right mind knows that there's a million ways of doing things wrong and one way if you're lucky to do things right and so the notion that it's a very very narrow pathway that you tread upon if you're doing things right That's wisdom that's the line between chaos and order that you're supposed to be
on constantly right it's a very very thin line because if you're a little bit too far in one direction then it's too much chaos and if you're a little too far in the other direction then it's too much order and both of those aren't good it has to the balance has to be exactly right and you can feel that and i truly believe you can feel that and i think it's your deepest instinct it's your Deepest instinct and i mean that i mean that biologically i don't mean that metaphorically i think that your psyche is
arranged to exist in a cosmos that's composed of chaos and order i think that's why you have the hemispheric structure that you have and then when you feel as if you're meaningfully engaged in the world when the terror of your mortality strips away and you're engaged and it's Timeless that's the deepest instinct you have telling you that you're in the right place at the right time and then what you do is practice being there practice being there and that's that that narrow spot that's so difficult to find you wander around it maybe if you're lucky
you can watch you can watch this is an experiment watch yourself for two weeks like you don't know who you are because You don't so watch yourself for two weeks and notice there's going to be times when things are proper they're raid properly for you it's not easy to notice because when they're arrayed like that you're so engaged you don't exactly notice you know but you'll see oh i'm in the right place it's like okay how'd i get here what am i doing right you know how is it that this could happen more often i'd
like this to Happen more often how would i have to conduct myself in order for that to happen more often and then you practice that and then maybe instead of 10 minutes a month or 10 minutes a week it's like 15 minutes a day and then it's half an hour a day and then it's an hour a day and then it's four hours a day and maybe if you if you're extraordinarily careful then you get to a point where you're like that a good proportion of the time [Music] you are not the master of your
own house there are spirits that dwell within you meaning you have a will and you can exercise a certain amount of conscious control over your being but there are all sorts of things that occur within you that seem to be beyond your capacity to control your dreams for example that's a really good example are your impulses for example you might think of those as So foreign from you that they're not even you don't even want them to be part of you but but more subtly even how about what you're interested in what compels you like
where does that come from exactly because you can't conjure it up of your own accord you know so if you're a student and you're taking difficult course you might say to yourself well i need to sit down and study for three Hours but then you sit down and that is what happens your attention goes everywhere and you might say well whose attention is it then if it goes everywhere because you say it's your attention it's like well if it's your attention maybe you would be able to control it but you can't and so then you
might think well jen just exactly what the hell is controlling it and you might say well it's random it's well it better not be random i can tell You that that's that happens to some degree in schizophrenia there's an element of randomness in that it's not random it's driven by the action of phenomena that i think are best considered as something like sub personality you can't make yourself interested in something interest manifests itself and grips you that's a whole different thing And so what is it that's gripping you and how do you conceptualize that is
that a divine power well it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it and so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by and what you're interested in and sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not but you're compelled forward by your interest and so the idea that what moves you away From your country and your father's house and the comforts of your child at home is is something that's beyond you and that you listen to and hearken to that's exactly right and you
can say well i don't want to call that god it's like it doesn't matter what you call it exactly it doesn't matter to what it is what it's called it still is And if you don't listen to it that's the other thing if you don't listen to it and i've been a clinician and talked to enough people now as old as i am to know this absolutely if you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine you'll have everything that's terrible about life in
your life and nothing about it that's good and worse you'll know that it was your fault and that you Squandered what you could have had so this is not only a calling forth but a warning [Music] one of the things that i've noticed in my life is that nothing i've ever done was wasted and by done i mean put my heart and soul into you know like like attempted with with all of my effort That that always worked now it didn't always work the way i expected it to work that's a whole different issue but
the payoff from it was always positive something of value always accrued to me when i made the sacrifices necessary to do something worthwhile go somewhere you don't understand you have to go into the unknown and that's that's god's first command go into the unknown because you already know what you know And so and that's not enough unless you think you're enough and if you're not enough and you don't think you're enough then you have to go where you haven't been get away from your family enough so that you can establish your independence and that isn't
because there's something wrong with your family but it means get away you know i talk to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection and they know it themselves and that means They're deprived of necessity then you have to get yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity to drive you forward and that's to become independent and to become mature you know we've been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms and there's something about that there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong and people are starving for the
Antidote and the antidote is truth and responsibility right and it isn't it isn't because that's what you should do and some some i know better or someone knows better for you what you should do since it's that that's the secret to a meaningful life and without the meaningful life then all you have is suffering and and nihilism and despair and all of that and self-contempt and that's not good and it's necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility If you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world that you
would be an overwhelming force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works if you forthrightly pursue that which god directs you to pursue let's say that all things are possible and so we don't know the limits of human endeavor we truly don't And it it's it's premature to put a cap on what it is that we are what it is that we're capable of and so you know you're already something and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration but you might wonder if you
did nothing for the next 30 years except put yourself together just exactly what would you be able to do and you might think well that's worth finding out but of course that's that's the adoption of responsibility [Music] there's lots in the world to fix everything that bothers you about the world and about yourself should be fixed and you can do that i have a friend he lives in montreal his name is james simon he's a great painter and he's taught me a lot of things help he's helped me design my house and beautify it and
i bought some paintings from him A couple of years ago and he did this series of paintings where he went around north america and and stood in different places and then he painted the view from here down and so it's his feet planted in different places on roads in the desert on the ocean yeah well you know he was trying to make a point and the point was that wherever you are it's worth paying attention and that's because you know so all these places that he visited he Looked exactly where he was standing by the
side of the road in the desert sounded mundane in some sense but then maybe he put 40 hours into that painting you know it's very very realistic painting with really good light and what he's telling you as a painter is everything is worth paying attention to an infinite amount but you don't have enough time so the artist does that for you right the artist looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and then gives You that vision and so then you can look at the painting and it reminds you that everything that there is
is right where you are and that's a hard thing to realize but it's actually true and so i've i've been telling people online in various ways and in lectures that they should start fixing up the world by cleaning up their room how you would like your life to be what you would like your character to be three to five years down the road if you Were taking care of yourself like you were taking care of someone that you actually cared about so you kind of have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself like
you like someone you have respect for and that you want the best for that's not easy because people don't necessarily have respect for themselves and they don't necessarily want what's the best for themselves because they they have a lot of self-contempt and a lot of self-hatred a Lot of guilt i think you have an obligation it's one of the highest moral obligations to treat yourself as if you're a creature of value how you would like your friendships to be conducted because it's useful to surround yourself with people who are trying to move forward and and
more importantly who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move backwards not when you fall that isn't what i mean but when you're doing self-destructive things Your friends shouldn't be there to cheer you on you look at the world through a story you can't you can't help it and this in the story is what gives value to the world or or the stories what you extract from the value of the world you can look at it either way here somewhere and it's not good enough right that's the eternal human predicament wherever
you are isn't good enough and to some degree that's Actually a good thing because if it was good enough well there's nothing for you to do so it's actually maybe a good thing that it's insufficient and that might be why sometimes having less is is better than having more and i don't want to be a pollyanna about that i mean i know that there's deprivation that can reach to the point where it's where it's completely Counterproductive but it isn't always the case that starting with little is you if you start with little you start with
more possibility it's something like that so you move from always from what's unbearable about the present to some better future right and if you don't have that then you have nothing but threat and a negative emotion you have no positive emotion because the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the Better future and then the evidence that you generate yourself that you're moving towards it that's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes so you want to set up this structure properly it's very very important and so what it means is that you
want to be going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is worth the while and you can ask yourself that and well we know what's wrong with life it's rife with suffering and Insufficiency and deception and evil it's all of that obviously okay what would make the journey worthwhile or you can ask yourself that it's like all right in order to bear up under this load what is it that i would need to be striving to attain and if you ask yourself that that's to knock and and the door will open that's what that
means if you ask yourself that then you will find an answer and you'll think you'll shrink away from it you'll think Well there's no way i could do that it's like well you don't know what you could do you don't know what's possible and you're not as much as you could be and so god only knows what you could what you could do and have and give if you sacrificed everything to it you have to sacrifice that which is most valuable to you currently that's stopping you and god only knows what that is it's certainly
the worst of you It's certainly that and god only knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of you [Music] resentment is a key human motivation and i would say it's a great teacher to listen to your resentment is one of the best things you can possibly do resentment only means one of two things it means either like shut the hell up grow up quit whining and get on with it that's One thing it means or someone is playing the tyrant to you might even be you you have something to say and do
that you should say and do to put it to a stop and so maybe resentment can show you the pathway to doing that like a resentful person wants other people to change and if you're resentful then your motivations aren't trustworthy in fact they're very very dark and what should you do instead how do you Treat your own resentment i would say well solzhenitsyn who i'm a great i'm a great admirer of solzhenitsyn his book the gulag archipelago was one of the things that brought down the soviet union and he said that one man who stopped
lying could bring down a tyranny and you know he said that with some authority and he said when he was in the gulag camps you know meditating on how the hell he got there and he had a rough life man i mean First of all he was on the russian front at the beginning of world war ii and then he was thrown in the gulag camps and that was just the beginning of his adventures man he had a rough life he was in the camps he was thinking what the hell how did i get here
what's going on and he had hitler and stalin to blame right so if you have if you need someone to blame man hitler and stellan that that's great but he that isn't what he did he said he meditated for a while Once he realized that he might have something to do with in some strange way with the way things turned out for him and he said he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb in his memory he thought okay where did i go wrong but by my own judgment when there was a path in
front of me when did i take the path that i knew i shouldn't take because you all know that right you know Sometimes you don't know if what you're doing is good or if it's bad it's just ignorance you just don't know but sometimes you bloody well know and you do the thing you know you shouldn't do anyways that happens a lot and why do you do that spite is part of it stupidity there's all sorts of reasons but you certainly know you do it solzhenitsyn thought okay well what would happen if i took responsibility
For where i am in this concentration camp and then i went over my whole life and tried to figure out all the things i did that were wrong by my own estimation that increased the probability that i would get here and then what would happen if i tried to set them all right now in the present and that's why he wrote the guru like archipelago and one of the consequences of that as i said was it sped the dissolution of the soviet Empire so hey that's not bad eh like you make a real confession you
really repent you do your penance which is writing this book and you completely change the geopolitical landscape of the world it's like and that that's worth thinking about because it's not only solzhenitsyn who did that nelson mandela did something quite similar it's not so impossible and so the idea that what you should do if you're feeling Resentful about the nature of being or suffering too much for your own life let's say is straighten the damn thing out like seriously try it for a year even try it for a week try not doing the things you
know you shouldn't do try not saying the things you know to be false and just watch what happens you might as Well give it a shot right because you say well i'm all in for a year you know i'm going to do things right and then i'll just stand back and kind of watch how things unfold and maybe i'll reconsider at the end of that year it's like try it try it i mean i would say i've had thousands of letters now from people who are saying hey i tried that you know and hey you
know Worked i read this great line in the t.s eliot play called the cocktail party and in it this woman comes up to a psychiatrist and she says you know i'm having a really rough time of it i'm suffering badly my life is not going well and then she says uh i hope that there's something wrong with me and the psychiatrist says what the hell do you mean by that and she says well here's how i look at it there's either Something wrong with the world and i'm just in it and that's how it is
and then like what am i going to do about that because it's the whole world or maybe i could be fortunate and there's something wrong with me that's causing all this unnecessary suffering and if i would i could just set it right i could learn and i could set it right and so well i've been thinking about that for a very long time and i think well if your Life isn't going the way it is you know you can find someone else to blame which is pretty convenient for you and also relatively easy or you
could think okay i don't like life i don't like the way my life is unfolding maybe i don't like life in general because it's tragic and and tainted with evil how do i know if my judgment is accurate and the question is well have i really Done everything i possibly could to set my life straight because maybe i shouldn't be judging it it's quality or the quality of life itself or being itself for that matter if i haven't done everything i possibly could to set my life straight well so there's a there's a task humility
element is it took me a long time to understand why there's religious injunctions supporting humility To even understand what the word really meant in that sort of technical sense and it means something like this it means what you don't know is more important than what you know then then what you don't know can start to be your friend you see people are very defensive about what they know but the thing is you don't know enough and the re you can tell you don't know enough because your life is not what it could be and neither
Is the life of the people around you you just don't know enough and so what that means is that every time you encounter some evidence that you're ignorant someone points it out you should be happy about that because you think oh you just told me how i'm wrong it's like great like maybe i had to sift through a lot of nonsense to get through the real message that you're telling me but if You could actually tell me some way that i'm wrong and then maybe give me a hint about how to not be wrong like
that well then i wouldn't have to be wrong like that anymore that that would be a good thing you can embark on that adventure by listening to people and if you listen to people they will tell you they'll tell you amazing things if you listen to them and many of those things are little tools that you can put in Your toolkit like batman and then you can go out into the world and use those tools and you don't have to fall blindly into a pit quite as often and so the humility element is well do
you want to be right or do you want to be learning and then it's deeper than that it's do you want to be the the tyrannical king who's already got everything figured out or do you want to be the continually transforming hero or fool for that Matter who's getting better all the time and that's actually a choice you know um it's a deep choice and it's better to be the self-transforming fool who's humble enough to make friends with what he or she doesn't know and to listen when people talk and listening is a transformative exercise
like if if you listen to the people in your life for example if you actually listen to them they'll tell you what's wrong with them and how to fix it and What they want they can't even help it if you start listening because people are so shocked if you actually listen to them that they tell you all sorts of things that they might not have even intended to things they don't even know and then you can you can work with that and the other thing that's so interesting you know now and then you have a
meaningful conversation right you have a good Conversation with somebody you walk when you think geez you know we really connected and i know more than i did when i came away from that conversation and during the conversation you're really engrossed in it and that feeling of being engrossed is a feeling of meaning and the feeling of meaning is engendered because you're having a transformative conversation your brain produces that feeling of meaning for it says oh yeah This is exactly where you should be right here and now it's it's the right place and time for you
and that's a great place to occupy and so a good conversation where people are listening has exactly that nature and the reason it has that nature is because it is in fact transformative it's one of the truisms of clinical psychology like if you're a clinical psychologist a huge part of what you do is just listen to people It's like you know they come in they're unhappy and they'd rather not be something like that you say well why do you think you might be unhappy and they don't know they have some ideas they may have to
ramble around for like a year before they figure out why they're unhappy they get rid of a bunch of reasons why they thought they were unhappy that are untrue and then you kind of get to The heart of the problem then you might ask them well if you could have what you wanted so that your life would be okay what would that look like then they have to ramble around a bunch about that because they don't really know but the listening will straighten them out because people think by talking and in order to think you
have to have someone to listen because it's very hard to think hardly anyone can think and even The people who can think can only think about a limited number of things but almost everybody can talk and you can listen to yourself talk and if someone listens to you then well then you also have a foil for your thoughts right because you can watch the person when you're talking and see if you're boring or see if you're amusing or if you're engrossing all of those things so like if you're arguing with your wife let's say or
your husband Big party is going to want to win that's stupid because because you don't want that you want to you want to defeat your wife in an argument oh well great like if she was going to disappear tomorrow no problem but like you're going to like live with defeated miserable her for the next week that's no good so you listen and you think okay well here's here's what you what i think you said and maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborated than was The case with the original utterance so that you
get the damn argument right because you don't want to win you want to fix the problem that's the winning [Music] you
