2014 Personality Lecture 06: Carl Jung (Part 1)

Psychoanalytic thought today it's depth psychology that's a better way to think about it the psychoanalysis techic is Freud and Freud was not the only contributor to the Corpus of psycho analytic ideas Adler who we won't talk much about was certainly Adler was smart and he's he's under he's underrated today wasn't as Charismatic as Freud and Yung so and he didn't have the same flare for writing I suppose but he his ideas foreshadowed the development of later cybernetic ideas which we will talk about by by a good margin so Adler really had some some some smart

things to say um Yung is the person we're going to talk about today and next time and I'm going to talk about him in some ways indirectly because the best way to understand Yung Is to show you what you do with his ideas rather than really presenting the ideas themselves but I can give you a bit of an overview so one of the things that differentiates the Deb psychologists from say Behavior therapists and even from cognitive scientists is that you might say in one way they're more mystical which means more from the Romantic tradition than

the cognitive scientists and the Behaviorists so there's a temperamental split there because people who are high in openness and both Freud and Yung were very very high in trade openness are very interested in the domain of the imagination and the domain of fantasy because they have very active imaginations and they have very active fantasy lives and they're good visualizers and so um one of the things I've noticed in my clinical practice that there's always been a joke about de Psychologists that if you go see aian you have Freudian dreams and if you go see a

yion you have yian dreams and I suppose that means if you go to a behavior therapist you don't have any dreams at all but I actually think there's some truth in that because the more pragmatic people the more practical people are not going to be attracted to therapists who deal with issues that have to do say with the imagination and fantasy and so there's a natural parsing And one of the things I've noticed in my clinical practice is that imaginative people so those would be open and creative people um have a dream life that bit

R out to be interpreted in archetypal terms like I've had clients number of them now I have one right now I mean it's it's his dream life is is it's so Remar it's so rich it's remarkable he's a he's a genius dreamer every time he comes in there's like he has two dreams or three Dreams they're coherent they're complexly plotted they're interesting and and they chart what's going on in his life and they tell him what he should do it's like it's it's great it's but everyone isn't like that I also have clients who never

dream at all and then I've also seen when I've lectured to people I see this most particularly in in medical students because I've lectured a bit to medical students is like so maybe I'll do a seminar for the For the medical students and tell them a little bit about the symbols of transformation really because they're involved in first of all transforming because they're medical students and so you have to transform into a doctor and also of course they're helping people through Transformations all the time often negative but not always sometimes positive because sometimes you get

better and so it's useful possibly for them to understand those processes more Deeply generally with the medical school students I do half lecture that's more on like trait psychology and more behavioral and half of it on the more symbolic stuff which is kind of like this class is um and there's always about half the medical students on whom the more symbolic stuff just Falls flat they just they just just don't it's like talking about color to people who are colorblind and I I've I've thought about this a lot and I really do think it's Based

in temperamental differences so you know if you have an active fantasy life and you have an active imagination and you're a good visualizer and you dream a lot then that's the sort of person you are and if you and if you're on the other end of the scale which would be that you're very conscientious let's say and very low in openness which also tends to make you more conservative in your political presuppositions by the Way then dream analysis is probably not for you partly because you're just not going to come up with that many dreams

and even if they even if you do they won't necessarily be informative so you know there's been a very long battle in some ways in the psychological and psychiatric Community between people who take different perspectives on how you might address psychological problems but I don't know if the the issue of Type has been thought about seriously enough in that regard because we're really only starting to understand the dimensions the actual dimensions of Personality properly and to figure out what it means to be on one end of say openness and and versus the other one especially

if you're intelligent you can be intelligent not open those are complicated people they've got very analytical minds they make good lawyers like lawyers are often and this is Something you might think about if you're planning to become a lawyer um if you're high in openness it's a bad job for you you will not be happy you need to be really conscientious like off the scale and it helps to be disagreeable too so because if you're too agreeable well you're supposed to win if you're a lawyer you're not supposed to like nicely let the other person

win you know you're supposed to fight to win and so you have to be kind of fighty to do that And if you're high in agreeableness then it's a job that's kind of greats against your temperament so anyways so you you Yung were Yung I think the best way to think about Yung is that he was a student of two people he was a student of friederick nicher and he was a student of Freud and although the freudians when they write the history of psychoanalytic thought they pretty much portray Jung as a as like a

derivative thinker of Freud Um it's not the right way to think about his positioning historically because in some ways what what Yung was trying to do was to answer the question n posed at the end of the 19th century and because and the reason Yung was trying to answer it was because he believed it was the most important question that had been posed at the end of the 19th century and that was you know there's a famous quote by nche right I'm sure you've all heard it and that's the quote that God is dead So

what n said essentially was God is dead and we have killed him that's a different idea and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood and so it wasn't like a triumphal statement on n's part even though when you hear it quoted you always hear it quoted that way it's like it's a sort of Victory God is dead you know or something to celebrate it's not what n thought at all in fact he thought all hell was going to break loose because of it and he Predicted as much like in the in the

like in the 1870s I mean he predicted what was going to happen in the 20th century with in ridiculous accuracy like it's uncanny and that's partly because you know n was one of these people like Yung who are very grounded in their deep deep deep imagination and so they get wind of the currents that are moving through Society long before normal people do so in some sense you know you can imagine that in Any given population even with with you guys there's some of you guys who were living like 50 years ago and there's some

of you living now and there's some of you living 50 years in the future it depends on how intelligent imaginative versus how conservative you are because it's not like everyone develops that exactly the same historical rate and you get people like nche for example or Doki they're like 100 years ahead of every else and so you know people don't even Know what to do with them but stendall was like that too the the the writer he wrote in the 1830s and he was convinced that he was 100 years ahead of his time and stylistically that

was probably about right so and the people who were prophets regarded as prophets in in say Old Testament tradition they were the same sort of people it's like they had their ear to the ground in a sense and they could tell what was going on underneath everybody's facade it echoed In them and off often as the story go and I'm sure they have they have a mythological accuracy to them the people who were picking up the underground currents indicating often catastrophe felt absolutely compelled even at the risk of their own skin to warn people so

so n so Yung was definitely one of these people and now this question God is dead and we have killed him LED n to pose another question which was well what are we going to do to replace him because n Believed and I think it I think he was absolutely right about this I can't see how it could be otherwise he believed that the morality that had structured Western Society was predicated on the fundamental Axiom of divinity and so like the as far as nature was concerned the whole Corpus of morality was dependent on that

on that that axium being true or at least being accepted as true and when that accident was knocked out by say the conflict between science And religion because in some sense that's what did it then the whole system no longer had anything to stand on and could become entirely questionable and so n pointed that out and then doeski who was writing basically at the same time said well if there's no God then anything is permitted and what he meant by that was really in some sense what he meant by that was morality turns into what

what you can get away with because there's nothing final about it there's Nothing Transcendent about it and like we've played this problem out intellectually you guys are still right in the middle of this battle whether you know it or not I mean so what happened in the 20th century was that one of the consequences of that loss of an fundamental underpinning led Europe to swing radically to political extremes you know the Nazis were to think of the to think of the Nazis without thinking of that as a religious transformation is Like that's just not right

it was a religious transformation and it wasn't a good one so like it was a regression in some sense to to a morality that was way pre-christian like you it was not good and then you know you had the same it was like the rise of the state as an alternative to God well we we saw what that produced It produced hundreds of millions of painful deaths and it just about destroyed the world so it was a it was a bad problem and you know we sort Of skirted our way through that miraculously you know

the the that all I don't really think World War II came to an end until 198 1989 you know because there was the whole Cold War period after after the Germans and the Japanese had surrendered but I mean we just went from one war to another we just went to another one that everyone was too afraid to fight it was still a war you know and that didn't end until 1989 and for by some miracle God Only Knows Why you know It never degenerated into a thermonuclear exchange and it was close man we just barely

squeaked through that there was there were two times during that period one in 1964 during the Cuban Missile Crisis where they had those bloody icbms primed and so the way they worked was in the control panel which kind of looked like a Star Trek you know the old Star Trek sets there would be like a panel here And there's a little place you could put a key then about 20 ft over there there'd be another guy with a key and if he turned his key and held it for 10 seconds at the same time he

turned his key and held it for 10 seconds then the missile launched and an intercontinental ballistic missile is a bullet and and I mean that technically it's not a guided missile once you launch it like you you shoot a bullet it's gone you don't get to tell the bullet to come back once It's gone you you can turn around like a cruise missile an intercontinental ballistic missile it goes where you aimed it and you don't get to bring it back and so during the Cuban Missile Crisis the keys were in the locks so we were

10 seconds away man I tell you that was a tight Keyhole we barely squeaked through that one and looks like by about 1989 that the collective Consciousness or Y would say the collective unconscious of the Human race had decided that well maybe having it all end in like apocalyptic Annihilation wasn't necessarily for the best it's interesting because writers like Gira he wrote fa and Fa is this tale of a man who makes a a bet with the devil so that he can acquire infinite knowledge essentially and the devil in in FA is named mephistophiles and

Gira was trying to explain what human evil or evil per se what it's motive was and he did a lovely Job it's so smart what he said he said the devil's basic hypothesis and of course Gira expresses this in poetry is that life is so unbearably cruel and and random and tragic that it would be better if it had never existed at all and you know believe me there'll be times in your life where you think that you know where something has just knocks you off your feet in a completely un unjust manner you know

and that thought it'll rise up and like it's a compelling Thought and I think that's the thought that human beings were wrestling with well we've been wrestling with it forever but we didn't really vote on it till 1989 you know and life be one and you know life is a Troublesome business it's it's tragedy and you know everyone asks thems now and then is if their Consciousness is worth the pain well the answer to that is it depends on how you live that is the answer to that but you Know that's a complicated answer and

just because you know that answer doesn't mean that you know how to live anyways what's happened since 1989 as far as I'm concerned is that intellectuals who who are often possessed by the worst sorts of demons because they actually think that their intelligence can guide them properly in in in like the complex moral landscape it's not the case you see most intellectuals and this is certainly case Of most intellectuals in the universities and in especially in the late 20th century they were committed marxists like way past when they should have be you know George Orwell

by 1955 he was a left Winger brilliant guy he'd already figured out that whatever was going on in the so Soviet Union was not good so you like if you had your eyes open you were done with that by you know 10 years after World War II but people like Jean Paul sarra were members of the Communist Party way longer than they had any ethical right whatsoever to be you know it's a was an absolutely murderous philosophy and but but intellectuals toyed with that they still toy with it in the universities you know except it's

turned into postmodernism which is Marxism under a new guise you know and a lot of the the postmodern thought is not only leftwing disguised but it's also nihilistic and that's actually the other problem that the death of God produces One is okay I I don't have a religious Foundation I don't have any foundation under my feet to butress my moral claims or even to sort of help me determine what life is worth in the face of tragedy so I need something to replace that and then poof that's the state which is a really bad replacement

because if you think God's bad like you just try stellin on for tri on for size for a while and Ma as well you know and Hitler as well it's not like this was a Phenomena that was only linked to one say culture of people everybody became susceptible to it and the same murderous thing happened every time people tried that so it was China Cambodia Vietnam like wherever the Communist got into Power Man people died by the hundreds of thousands so Paul pot the guy who emptied the Cambodian cities that killed 7 million sorry I

think it was three million people he got his he got his graduate degree at the sbong in France And he said what he was going to do when he went back to Cambodia you know he didn't outline the whole murderousness element but he certainly had all the theory laid down in his fine French Academy so you know we mess with ideas in the universities and if we don't do it properly like people die it's important to get your ideas right so one answer to the death of God is you worship the state the other is

you worship nothing it's it's nihilism There's no distinction between anything and everything is pointless and there there's a massive strain of that sort of underground theorizing in postmodernism and a psychoanalyst especially a union would look at the postmodern response which is nihilistic and the fascist response which is sort of recourse to the state as motivated by something even deeper than that and that's the sort of process that nche was describing now for Yung is he wrote a book called ion for Example and if you want to have nightmares for the rest of your life that's

a really good book to read I mean it's a it's that book just terrified me cuz Yung what he did in that book basically was investigate the fantasy that he believed that all of Western Civilization had been predicated on for the last 4,000 years now because you really believed that what drove human beings was and it's a pedian perspective in some weird ways was the revelation of The successive unconscious revelation of fantasies where were at the Forefront of the our movement into unknown territory so it's like there's unknown territory and then there's known territory but

there's this weird intermediary space between them and that intermediary space where you kind of know but kind of don't know that's where your imagination plays and of course that's the case right because when you encounter something and you don't really don't know much about It you imagine what it might be and so it takes on the structures of your imagination and so in some sense what you're dealing with as you move through history expand your domain of knowledge into the unknown is you encounter your own fantasy anyways if you want to know about that you

could read like volume 9 and N9 91 and 92 of you one's called archetypes of the collective unconscious and the other's called ion but like It'll take you a while to crack them you have to beat your head against those books quite a bit because what what Yung is outlining in some sense is so shocking it's almost impossible to grasp once you get the picture all of a sudden things flip around because you understand what he's talking talking about but before then man it's it's it's tough going it's funny because Yung has been uh there's

a guy named Richard null who wrote a biography of Yung and he was A jealous guy I think and he was crooked too because his book was called the Ary and Christ and he used like Nazi imagery on the cover and it was his publisher that talked him into doing that because he thought the book would sell more it's like you don't do that well or if you do that indicates really what you're up to right because of the because of what you're willing to allow to happen to your work so anybody who would have

Thought about that wouldn't have used Nazi imagery to gain economic utility out of writing a criticism of Y because it's it's it's a crooked maneuver so then you have to think okay what's what's he up to why is he doing this now Yung has been so he accused Yung for example of basically starting a cult and I can understand that but what I found so amusing about no's book is that what Yun was actually up to was so much More so much more terrifying than a mere cult it was sort of like accusing a like

a serial killer of stealing a loaf of bread it's like yeah well maybe he stole a loaf of bread but compared to what he was actually up to it's it's really not relevant so I mean Yung was trying to bring the primordial imagination back into the world and to make people conscious of it it's like that's something man really that's Really something so that reading I read everything you wrote except the books that were like published after his collected works I read some of those it took me a long time and it just tore me

into bits like I didn't know what the hell which way was up halfway through those books I mean n is bad enough because n will set out to destroy your presuppositions in fact I have a client right now who's being left like depressed for like 5 Years because he wasn't particularly educated and he you know started reading nche and he had been a Christian and he thought well I'm a Christian I can take on nche it's like no you can't no no you can't like n was so smart that it's just it's mindboggling he he

came up with the best narcissistic statement I think that's ever been written and this is what he was like cuz he he was a very sick man and he could only write for very short periods of time so he triy to Cram everything he could into a single sentence and so each sentence is like a little bomb but one of his now and then he'd write you know something self-referential so one phrase of his is I write more in a I write in a sentence what other people write in a book that's pretty good that's

a good brag but then he topped it right away after he said H what other people can't even write in a book yeah so that's pretty narcissism and then like he just punched Through that like was there yeah so but it's true like that's the thing it's true so it wasn't narcissism I mean for anyone else it wouldn't be for him it was just true so yeah yeah so back to you n just sort of hypothesized that in order for people to overcome the psychological consequences of the destruction of their religious underpins they would have

to transform themselves into virtually into the thing that they had killed so n's and this was believe Me for n this was like a revelatory solution he came up with this in a book called thus spake zerra now everybody who reads nche starts to read thus there zerust because it's got such a cool title you know but you shouldn't read that book at least not until you've read say Beyond Good and Evil and other books that he wrote Because thus spake zerust is a weird book it's like an old Testament Revelation and it really is

it's like it's a fantasy this man comes Down from the mountain and he starts to spout off like Poetic Revelations and n's the rest of n's books are like this very very clear and cutting thought whereas this one is like a it's like a Shakespearean drama almost you know and the reason for that is because n was reaching beyond the grip of his intellect to try to formulate answers to questions that he could not he could not grasp because what he was trying to figure out is well as human beings have Developed cognitively in some

sense we've escaped from our culture and our instincts and when we're embedded in our culture and our instincts we're embedded unconsciously within a religious framework it's the framework of presuppositions from which we emerged like people didn't think up religions what there's some little weird little what you call conspiracy going on for 3,000 years it's like no it's not about power even though it can be twisted to Be about power everything can be or Twisted to be about economics it's about fantasy you know that the all you look inside a European Cathedral all you see is

fantasy it's in it's in brilliant lights portrayed everywhere it's trying to say something to you well what's it trying to say Well it turned out when people asked themselves that instead of just acting it out they hadn't got a clue what it said had no idea what it said any more than you guys know why you Have Christmas trees so how many of you have Christmas trees yeah why oh I don't know I never noticed we had Christmas trees you know no but my point is my point is that in a culture you can follow

you follow the Customs because that's what you do and but then when you wake up a bit and you think well you're just like a pedian child who is taken out of the game and forced to look at it it's like well why are you Playing that game and what are the rules well i' never thought about it before well as soon as people started to think about the games they were playing was often because they encountered other people who thought apparently thought differently you know so if you're like a marauding Christian and you go

into the East and all of a sudden you come up with a Buddhist and he's smart it's like you two have big problems right cuz you're smart and he's smart and you Don't think the same way at least apparently you don't think the same way at all so even if you say well those Buddhist you know we should just wipe them out it doesn't matter because their thoughts are already there and they've been working know them for like a couple of thousand years and whether you like it or not they're going to make you think

and once you start thinking about your religion you're in trouble and so that's the situation we're in right now So Yung took this problem that n had posed seriously because Yung was caught up quite dramatically in the events of of of Nazi Germany now you know when we think about Nazi Germany we think of course that it was perfectly obvious that the Nazis were the were the perpetrators and that you know everyone else was the victim and that if we were there we would have clearly seen that and we wouldn't have been Nazis and it's

like that's not true that isn't how it Worked because these things happen slowly they sort of happen piece by piece you know we started seeing a similar thing happen I think after the after the Twin Towers fell in New York you know it's like people gave up 5 10% of their civil liberties in in like a month you know and and and it was okay it was like wasn't okay wasn't okay and it just shows you how easy that sort of thing can can start you know the Germans were under tremendous stress in the 1930s

their whole economy blew out they had to like take wheel barrels full of billions of marks to buy a piece of bread their currency fell to zero unemployment was staggeringly high they were paying off debts like mad because of the first world war and there was a real threat that the Communists were going to start a revolution it's like you don't have problems like that so the the the Germans had no idea what to do you know and and Hitler was a a canny Canny person with a brilliant brilliant sense of drama I mean he

was a real he was a master of dark fire that guy and I think his his unconscious fantasy was let's see how much we can destroy before we die in the in the what purifying Flames that was Hitler so and he was he he was a compelling person and the fantasy that he had in the back of his mind I'll tell you that developed at one point it was a very hard thing to escape from that's why the Germans became Nazis It wasn't like this was like magic that had emerged and it was black magic

so Yung was very interested in this because he was in the Germanic speaking areas of the world when this happened and he felt felt himself pulled very strongly by what the nais were doing especially in the early stages of the development of the political platform because things did stabilize you know and then they stabilized before they went completely Out of control and of course looking in retrospect you can see the seeds of what eventually transpired to become such a catastrophe but at the time it was by no means self-evident that such a thing was going

to occur especially given all the other horrible things that were likely to occur so Yung had a had a vision at one point in on a train I think it was in Switzerland that Europe had become so covered with blood that the blood was starting to flow over the mountains into Switzerland because of course Switzerland is neutral and he said it was one of the most horrifying nightmares of his life and this was in I think 1930 it was late late 1930s anyway so it was a premonition of war and he spent a lot of

time trying to understand well if you weren't going to become a fascist and worship the state and you weren't going to become a nihilist and worship nothing what in the world were you going to do Exactly to orient yourself and how would you protect yourself against the attractions of blind state identification for example or the attractions of nihilism you know you might say well nihilism has no attraction at all because it says to you everything is irrelevant nothing you do has any importance because that's nihilistic basically well what's the what's the the psychoanalyst would say

what's the secondary gain from that like Yeah you say that's what you believe and maybe you even act it out and you also say well you've come to that conclusion through you know a rational process of deliberation but this psycho analyst would say it's kind of convenient that that also alleviates you of all responsibility isn't it and it kind of sheds a little dampness on your claim to pristine cognition as the driving force between you know behind your adoption of that theory you know it's like it's like The patriot who claims that you know the

reason that he's kicking someone in the head is because he's patriotic it's like no no no you're patriotic so that you can kick someone in the head and still look at yourself in the mirror in the morning has nothing to do with rational deliberation and so the psychoanalysts and Yung was like this in particular you know they were always extremely skeptical about people's rational claims about their commitments to ideology and Rightly so one of the things Yun said that I love he said some things that were so brilliant was that people didn't have ideas ideas

had people and when you think that I see it's like it's like I think this is so funny it's like Dawkins idea of the meme you know some of you how many of you read Dawkins he's you know yeah okay so Dawkins has this idea of mean it's so funny to read Dawkins because he's like 20% of the way of being in Union without even knowing it And so he's produced this idea called meme which is these they ideas a meme is an idea that sort of has an independent existence in a sense because it

can infect different minds or move from mind to mind and he kind of thinks of it more like a fad while the archetypes are memes except they're no fads they're memes that have lasted for like 20 20,000 years or maybe 20 million years we have no idea how old they are and Yung got where Dawkins was going like You know 50 years before and 200 stories deeper so it's so funny to read Dawkins because what he is searching for has already been figured out by Yung but he's so prejudiced against any kind of religious thinking

that there's no way he'll ever find it so so one of the things Yung did was he he deeply deep deeply studied the substructures of thought so for you like you know we talked about p a bit and we said for PJ you kind of built your brain From your body upward brilliant idea it's so smart but Yung Yung has a lot of p in him it's it's more implicit but for you not only was your the substructures of your thought biological and so therefore based in your body but your body was also cultural and

historical you know so partly because you're you're an evolved creature and so God only knows what's in there 3.5 billion years worth of weirdness that you can draw or That can that can move you where it wants to move you but all also you're being shaped by cultural Dynamics all the time and human beings in particular like we're just watching each other like mad all the time to see what we're up to what people think of us how we should behaving are we being boring are people attracted to us it's like we're social right to

the core and and that's another way that you can understand an archetype is like part of the archetype is that we Are social to the core so we're interested in other people and more if you're extroverted and less if you're introverted but it doesn't matter by by the standards of say solitary animals we're so social it's just unbelievable and so that's built in it's built in what's built in is that you find that interesting that's the archetype the archetype is whatever it is that makes you find that interesting it's beyond your control like if you're

extroverted You're interested in people you didn't decide that it decided it for you the question is what is it well it's your brain your brain your lyic system whatever the hell that means like we don't know what that means you know I we have no idea how your brain produces Consciousness like I'm I'm dead serious we haven't got a clue and what that indicates to me since we've been hacking away at it for say 400 years is that the way we think about Consciousness is Wrong because we're not getting anywhere like we go long ways

with lots of things we're not getting anywhere with Consciousness okay so back to the archetype so because I can tell you how these things arise to some degree so you're interested in other people say and so you're interested in them because they're unbelievably useful resources right because they know things they have resources that you want plus you want even subtle things from them you want Their attention you want to play with them you know you there's all sorts of things that you need and want from other people so the social interactions are incredibly valuable and

informative but the information is interesting because part of what every single person is constantly broadcasting to every other person is how to behave so now if you meet someone and and let's say you find them interesting well I can tell you That the more ideal they are assuming you're not too wared the more ideal they are the more you're going to be interested in them because that actually is what defines ideal like as you become ideal you could say that is also the same as becoming High status as you become ideal then you're interesting to

people so that's interesting because that what that means is that you can read off people's interest to find out when you're deviating from the ideal and They don't even know what the ideal is the ideal is that to which their attention is inex inexorably drawn and they're always telling you when you fall short of the idea always it's being broadcast at you all the time and then your imagination back there is to try and figure out just what is this ideal you know because your imagination is watching you in a petent sense noticing what you

do and then trying to figure out what that is so you'll have Fantasies about the ideal that that often happens in in a romantic relationship especially at the beginning of it because you know you you project your idealization onto the person that you romantically attracted to that's the projection of an archetype so Yung would say the woman will project an animus onto the man the Animus is her conceptualization of what the ideal man is it's unconscious because it's rooted in fantasy and the man will be in Concordance with that projection in some areas that's those

are the areas where she likes them by the way and will be discordant in other areas and that's the areas where she constantly disappoints him as the relationship develops so the the ejection is there in part to help the person understand who it is that they're dealing with because when you meet someone you have you have to assume something about them it's the same as projection you have to assume something About them and if you find them fascinating which is what happens if you fall in love maybe it's because they smell good or they're symmetrical

or something you immediately assume that well those things really matter you immediately assume that they embody the ideal it's an oversimplification but the oversimplification has a basis and the basis is if it's interesting to me it must be close to the ideal well yeah except the person that you're going out With attracted to is Warped and bent and flawed and twisted and you know 300 ways and you'll find that out soon enough just as they will about you and that often just blows the relationship into bits cuz the person will say well she wasn't who

I thought she was it's like well who said whoever said she was who you thought she was it's like where did you get the misapprehension that she was going to be who you thought she was God what do you know you know you're LED You're LED around by your sense of smell and your ability to detect symmetry it's like that's yeah that's not very sophisticated so those are those are so the anima and animus are two primary Union archetypes and they're very complex but that kind of gets at the surface um the ideal that I

was describing so people are broadcasting information to each other which is be ideal be ideal be ideal be it's like be my ideal obviously but let's say let's Say if if I took a thousand ideals and then averaged them or extracted out the common ideal the ideal that was common to all of them that would be a savior figure that's what a savior figure is and then now now and then someone comes along who acts quite a bit like that and poof you've got yourself a religion so do not be thinking that these images that

people fall around like like you know like what blood hounds on a trail do you not be thinking That those things are like conscious cognitive constructs like conscious cognitive constructs like Marxism they last like 50 years and they kill 100 million people and then that's the end of that a good religious system man that will keep a culture going for like 3,000 years and even at the end of it it doesn't disappear we know that the story of Horus and osus for example drove Egypt like Catholicism drove Europe for Like 3,000 years that's a long

time and then it turned into Christianity so it's not like it disappeared actually it sort of transmuted into Judaism and then turned into Christianity so it's not like the ideas disappeared they didn't disappear at all and believe me you're just as possessed by them as any ancient Egyptian it's just that you're more fragmented and conflicted because what your unconscious assumes and what your conscious mind assumes aren't the same Thing and so like you're all at war with yourself that's partly what makes you attracted to like moronic ideologies by which I mean any ideology because they're

all they're all false idols and false gods and they're shallow they're shallow and deadly and they ruin your life they destroy your soul so that's a just a catastrophic response and that's why it's so terrible to have that discordance between your instinctual being your deep instinctual being and Your little fragile you know half-witted conscious mind that sort of thinks it's in control it's like you're not in control of anything believe me best you can do is follow what's right that's the best you can do we I mean we even know this neurologically to some degree

like if you look at the hypothalamus it's a little part of the brain we'll talk about quite a bit it's sort of where the Freud Freudian ID resides to the degree that it resides anywhere it's this Collection of nuclei that do things like make you hungry or make you thirsty or make you you know sexually desirous or um make you defensively aggressive or make you terrified of an intruder who who who threatens your dominant status this little tiny part of your brain it's hardly even there at all has massive projections coming up into the cortex

and then there's little tendrils going down to regulated and so basically as long as everything is pretty much Perfect your conscious mind is in control but as soon as things deviate from the path to any degree whatsoever the really smart parts of your brain take over and then you do what they tell you to do or you suffer the consequences so you see this with people who binge eat for example or sometimes people develop a condition called polydipsia which is often a consequence of hypothalamic damage attended on a stroke and they'll drink water till they

die You cannot stop them because they they're ragingly thirsty like someone who's starving and like you can say well you've had enough water it's like no that is not going to cut it it's not going to cut it you're not getting anywhere with that and you see the same thing with people who have like obsessive compulsive disorder something like that when they're not in the grip of the disorder they're perfectly normal you get those people to touch something They don't want to touch it's like they're not the same person the second they do that and

whatever they thought of themselves you know the the s that was supposed to be in control that bloody thing is like it's like a wagon with a child and it being towed behind an elephant there's just it's got no control at all so you have one of the things that's terrifying about Y is that there there's no escaping the realization of the nature of the forces That are behind the puppets that we are you know in Pinocchio that's why Pinocchio is a puppet right something's pulling his strings he's a marionette and the things that are

pulling his strings well they might have his best interest in mind but they might not too and so that's what Pinocchio is about actually and it's also about how not to be a Anin turns out that you have to go to the bottom of the ocean and find your father in a whale and then drown that's How you stop from being a puppet it's like and you think well you don't believe that and I would say well yes you do you went and watched the movie and you enjoyed it not only that you understood it

even though you don't have any idea what it's about and also on the face of it it's absolutely absurd it's like it's not a puppet first it's a drawing of a puppet so that's weird that like that's two levels of weird and then like what the hell's with the cricket Where' he come from you know and what's what's his role and why is he the conscience and why does he get like activated by a fairy and why is the fairy a star it's like you're in there you know like Cletus the slack jaw Y watching

the screen captivated by it and you know you walk out and you don't even notice that you're so peculiar that it's just beyond belief you don't even notice that that's so peculiar it's like what the hell are you doing in that theater Watching this marionette follow a bug around to an to a whale it's like you walk out oh that was so touching really like really people are really crazy you know and and and weird like we're like rhinoceroses or or platypuses or ostriches or Penguins we're weird right to the core and when you start

to the weirdness is so deep and so ancient that even starting to touch consciousness of that just is just rocks your your boat so but but one Thing or another will rock your boat so sometimes it's nice to choose what what thing it is It prepares you for things too so I'll tell you part of what Pinocchio means Pinocchio is a Marinette anybody can pull his strings I mean he's got a good heart but what's that worth nothing virtually nothing because he's naive you know you can man it's the fox and the what is it

that stupid cat that manipulate him right and basically Behind them you'll see the devil because that devil pops out quite quickly in Pinocchio and he's the thing that's behind all the local manifestations of evil that are trying to pull Pinocchio's strings he gets blown off the right path pretty badly almost turns into an unconsciously brain donkey who ends up working in the slave mines which is exactly what happens by the way you know to that's what happened to Devout Communists who found themselves Swallowed up by stell's Nightmare in the 1940s and the 1950s it's like

well we were so good we did everything you wanted it's like yeah well it turned out what we wanted is for you to die painfully so you know congratulations so you know and that's brilliantly laid out in Pinocchio which in fact was written in the 1930s brilliantly laid out it's it's way it's a way more intelligent analysis of the 1930s than anything you'll ever find That was written so Pinocchio you know he's trying to Hue the proper path and he learns that he shouldn't lie that's a that's a what do you call archetypal idea I

can tell you why that is later and it turns out that in order to get out of the horrible mess that he's put himself in partly by being an an un a slavish adherence adherent to like momentary pleasure and nihilism you know he ends up half a jackass who can't speak Properly without braying so that makes him an ideologue and the only way that he can get out of that is to go down to the bottom of the ocean as deep as he can possibly go deeper than anything is willing to go to find his

father what's his father his father is the culture that he lost touch with you know and to the degree that you guys are lost like all human things are lost the reason you're lost is because you've never rescued your father from the bottom of The ocean you haven't gone deep enough you you won't have even known it was necessary it's necessary you're a social historical cultural creature right down to where you become a biological creature and if that isn't part of you and if that part isn't functioning properly then you're you can just be blown

off course by the wind there's nothing to you you're not grounded in anything that's partly why the shaman when they Go down communicate with their ancestors that's what they're trying to do they're trying to pull up the cultural under structure of their of their societies up into Consciousness to make use of it and you constantly have to have a dialogue with that because you know I say say your background just for the sake of argument is Jewish a lot of the lines of of you know the culture that you're embedded in was written down by

people Several thousand years ago it's like it's not easy to figure out what the hell those people were talking about or why it's relevant to you so there has to be a dialogue continually going on between the present and the past so that you can bring the wisdom forward without losing what's in it because if you lose what's in it it's like you're just nowhere you know I see this all the time in my in my practice you know often it happens to people who get divorced or Who are living together and not married which

you think well you're free it's like you don't want to be that free you know you want to argue with your partner about every single thing for the rest of your life well that's what you have to do if you don't let your culture guide you it's like there's no rules go ahead make up all the rules see how easy that is Christ that'll kill the average person in 10 years it's just such a weight and you only have one life you Know you might as well let some tradition guide you so you have some

peace some of the time or you'll end up divorced and with children it's like H you you that's cancer for lots of people they get divorced they have children they get locked into a custody battle and they're done that's the end of their life they're ruined by it so you step outside of the guidelines of your culture at your own Peril and modern people because they're so coddled think Oh yeah well we can handle it it's like sure you can you wait till you get there you'll find out that you can can't handle it and

it'll be too late what has what will have happened is that you know the whale that you were supposed to go confront and rescue your farther from has risen out of the water and taken you down and you're done that's chaos so these are serious issues like Yung I would say was the most serious thinker of the 20th century like he was so he Was so serious that the pseudo serious people who read them just bounce off them they don't even know what the hell he's up to so and Yun was one of those thinkers

who was addressing questions that most people don't know exist like at the bottom of reality and who was also answering them so he's a twofold blow to the intellect first he tells you that you're so stupid you don't even know what's wrong you can't even ask the Right questions and then he answers them it's like oh boy yeah that'll that'll uh do in your intellectual tensions so and the contrast between Dawkins I think and yil is exactly the right contrast it's the contrast between the intelligent modern Dawkins and the sort of historically centered wise man

and it's it's sort of painful for me to watch because I kind of watch Dawkins and you know he's he's not a happy man and he's got a tremendous resentment against the Church I'm sure something terrible must have happened to him when he was a child but anyways let me show you some of this stuff because it's such fun it's such fun didn't it sound fun not really okay so I'm going to show you the opening of the lot Lion King y yeah yeah good good good good idea thanks yeah like why not use a

media player That works okay so what I'm going to play for you is the opening scene the opening scene is very nicely designed you know it's uh the music I find a little bit manipulative it's a little Poppy and and and and it's manipul like it's an interesting example of how art can go wrong because it's sort of art designed for a purpose and art cannot be designed for a Purpose the purpose of art is Art's purpose not your purpose and so if you're trying to bend the art to your purpose it's like you're you're

like you're painting a picture of a stickman on a stained glass window like you just don't have you just haven't got the right orientation art is an exploratory process and it's supposed to take you beyond what you know if you take art and try to force it into your pre preconceptions then you're you're a Propagandist and an ideologue and like you're you're bending the greater to the Lesser so and that makes it feel cheap and and and and it doesn't fit well and like The Lion King is a pretty good movie and I mean from

a from a psychological perspective it devolves into propaganda from time to time that happens now and then in Disney films but you know it's it's it's still a work it's a work of Genius which is why you all know It this is where you get your religion okay so that's an archetypal image they open with it right so it's the dawn of Consciousness so it's the new day but it's also the dawn of Consciousness it's the dawn of Consciousness because you're a visual creature and it's also the dawn of Consciousness because you wake up in

the morning so it's like sun rise light Dawn Of Consciousness and then the music is a celebration of that and you can Feel it grips you right away I mean that that part of the music is really really nice I think that's the is that the gospel singers from South Africa I think it is the guys that played with Paul Simon I think so they're great okay so what are all the animals doing all of a sudden waking up and they're waking up and they're paying attention to a call right call is musical so then

the question is well what's Music well music is a representation of like the dynamic patterns of things and so you get all this complex information that's going on right off the bat Consciousness Dawns and now there's a call and everything that's sentient is to pay attention to the call that's pretty good for like 5 Seconds of [Music] film [Music] so now there's the filmmakers hit you With a whole succession of very beautiful images and you know they do that with a very beautiful music that's underneath and that's to put you like in a state of

harmony with well not only with nature but with your own conceptions of nature and your sense of Aesthetics it works quite nicely it put popsy into a dream very [Music] quickly the day on the Planet anding step there's see can ever be seen more to do [Music] 's roll okay so there's a lot going on there so the the lyrics are quite interesting because because the lyrics are making representation to the to that state of being that I talked to you about that William James had experienced say with His nitrous oxide Visions but that also

that pH and the constructivist sort of think about as the ground of being so you know the the The Lyricist made a case that what surrounds you is informative to a degree that you will never be able to comprehend it and the implication under that is that you know the at least one of the ways of construing the ground of experiential being is as a information Rich Matrix and the music is Pushing you in that direction too because the music is the music is a representation of what that information Rich Matrix is like because it

it's patterned and complex but understandable but and it also evokes emotion so that's reality and there's a lot of paradise imagery in here too because it's sort of like all these animals are they're all doing the same thing and they're sort of existing in harmony it's like just elephants covered with birds and so it's In a way it's a childish view of the world because you know those elephants are covered with kcks and you know the lions are half starved because it's been a a drought and you know it's it's it's not so good out

there on the African plains it's not all you know that will teach me okay so but but they're getting you the mood now the the the The Lyricist also made reference to the fact that there there's this there's a there's a Paradise there's an element of Genesis in the lyricism because she she talks about our arrival on the earth so to speak and then our the dawning of Consciousness which is the step into the Sun and so that's an archetypal Motif we're placed on Earth well here we are after all and poof we woke up

and that the reason that's an archetypal idea is because that's what happens to everybody right poof you're placed on the earth Bang one day you wake up it's like it's the Eternal experience of human beings and there's something that's deeply real about it now that was that was cool we better watch that we better watch that again so that's a revelation right so that's a very sneaky bit of the camera work so you know first of all your your vision is obscured but then it's it's directed by the motion to this like Place what's that

well that's a good Question it's what Pride Rock and just what exactly is pride rocking where the king is that's right the rock is where the king is that's right that's the top of the that's the top of the pyramid now remember those remember those trees I showed you from the shaman it's so cool I just figured this out the other day inside that tree there was a mountain and the mountain was surrounded by a snake you remember that there's a Circle with a snake around it that's exactly the structure of this lion came set

up you remember that so you got the mountain in the middle there what's on the outside m h hyenas that's right the chaos is out there where the light won't touch right it's a perfect representation of the Scandinavian world tree so cool so okay now obviously you and other animals are supposed to lift up your eyes which is what the filmmaker Made you do and focus on this thing it's a rock what is a rock what does a rock stand for structure yes exactly why balance structure why why is it Rock a good metaphor for

that it's a solar that's right rocks they're they're strong even in an earthquake if you're lucky they won't lick ify so you can you want to stand on a rock right the question is what kind of rock do you want to stand On and that's exactly is it a physical Rock that's one way of looking at it or is there a metaphysical Rock that's even a better rock well that's partly what this film investigates but at the moment there's a rock it's been there forever and the King has been there forever and the king is

the thing at the top of the dominant hierarchy which is why you lift up your eyes to it and the King here is a lion why does that make sense Lions aren't Kings after all but makes Sense why they're they're at the top of the food chain okay so that's a good one any other possible reasons yes maybe the main sort of represents a Regal Authority yeah that's good yeah definitely and and the animators capitalize on that all the time and they're kind of noble looking you know because they're muscular and and and plus they

could eat you right so that sort of indicates that There are certain circumstances under which you are at the bottom of the hierarchy and the lion is in fact at the top so cuz a lion is also an a inspiring Beast like you know the shepherds in the Old Testament around that time you know a Shepherd you think well Shepherd he's dressed this little frilly hat and you know he's he's not much of a Powerhouse at all but those guys used to fight off Lions it's like that's that's you got to be really tough to

fight off a lion with A stick you know so yeah so anyways okay so there's the Rock and the sun is shining on it and what are the animals doing gathering around the rock now we accept that as a narrative possibility right you're not sitting there thinking in the theater what the hell are those animals doing gathering around the Rock and the fact that you're not sitting there thinking that is an indication that you're Following the archetypal Trail of the story it makes sense to you that a diverse bunch of drawings of animals would you

know come together around a rock that makes sense why well it it has something to do with our our dominance hierarchy proclivity and the fact that we can recognize a an author an authority structure and we know how to interact with it and so these aren't animals after all they're they're They're people well they're not CU they're drawings but they're certainly not animals they're not acting like animals so or they're acting like half human half animals all right now who's that little guy okay what what's he good for information yes why why is he good

for information and so so what why is that relevant he can get up there way the Hell up there where the king can't even see and he can see everything it's horus's eye that's exactly right that's the that's the Egyptian eye that says pay attention and so so the bird is the the bird is attenion fundamentally so and the King by the same the bird he's a little ratty bird and he's kind of funny I think he's he's that English comedian so he's a bit of a comical character but the king the king will Listen

to him and so that shows that this king is a properly humble King cuz it's just a stupid bird and you could like bite it in half in one bite which is kind of what scar threatens to do because scar doesn't want to pay attention cuz then he figure out who he was so but the king he'll pay attention to even you know this is also why in fairy tales it's often this the the youngest son the oldest son is usually the one who Everyone likes and admires And you know he's like the football he's

like the football quarterback you know of of the fairy tale and the younger son is like well he's kind of a little weasly useless guy and the older son always fails and then usually the Second Son fails too it's usually because they're arrogant and then the third son he's so clueless doesn't even know what to do but they kick him out cuz they just assume get rid of him and and you know why not let him go you don't want Him around anyways and so he wanders out in the bush and you know he comes

across a gnome or something that you know it's like you just ignore it the other brothers did but he doesn't know what the hell he's doing so the gnome talks to him and he thinks well I might as well talk to this gnome and you know then the gnome tells him what to do and and then then the youngest son wins and that's an archetypical story too it's like if you don't know what you're doing Don't be so sure that you know who to ignore now that's a very very useful piece of advice but then

you might ask yourself how do you know when you don't know what you're doing so do you have any thoughts on that how is it that you would know if you didn't know what you were doing you're consistently failing yes but there's that's very good that's very good but there's one more thing that goes along with that I and I'll just add It because it's it's you know a bit of a trick in some sense and it's bothering you right so there's there's failure plus suffering now one of the inferences that you can draw from

failure plus suffering is that nature is your enemy and you're a victim of the great father it's like very standard presupposition especially of young people because of course you're failing you're young it's like what the hell you know you know you got a whole Bunch of things to learn yet before you can be successful but you know but it's an that's an archetypal situation in large part okay [Music] so great so now we see the king so what do we notice about the king he's kind of a tough looking guy he's not one of these

defeated Lobster types of lion kings he's like an upstanding sort of Confident okay so he's he was also in the sun right so the Sun Shines on the king and that's because the king is awake and and The Sun Also illuminates him you may not know this but you have you've seen coins of course silver coin that's the moon the head of the queen is the head of the queen on the moon and gold coins are the Sun and so are halos and the idea is that the thing that's at the top is like the

sun and why is it like the sun well because the sun is Consciousness and why is the unconsciousness because you're awake during the day now there's a bunch of other reasons as well there the sun is also the thing that defeats darkness and that's what the king should be and that's right in her coins and they're s they're symbols of value so there oh and the wind is blowing on it it's not bothering by the way but that's a that's a divine wind that's Numa Numa that's spirit because Spirit is often wind as in inspiration

and respiration that's all spirit so spirited King here comes the bird it's not lunch it's his friend [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and now who in the world is that that's Carl Young Yeah who's that well that's the Virgin Mary in Christ that's the Virgin and the sun it's a way older idea than the Christian idea it's been around forever why because any culture that doesn't worship the mother and child dies obviously so it's an archetypal image of value clearly obviously you don't have to think about that much so oh yeah that's I love that it

always happens he There's there two things always happen when I show this always because it evokes archetypal emotions so you all going making always and that cute noises right what kind of noises are those yeah it's oh so babies babies like that noise that's why you're making that noise it's like baby like that noise they'll smile at you and then you'll think that the baby likes you even though it's just a survival mechanism it is but the baby actually Likes you so what why is that cute first of all it's not real you might notice

that it's a dry why is it cute cute what makes it cute big big eyes yeah that's a good one yeah that's that's part of it aliens have big eyes too though what else cuddly it's cuddly yeah yeah so it's mamalian that's how it's not a lizard you know so that's helpful it's got fur so you can pet it sort of Invites being petted and it moves like this it's like that's so cute you know that little polar bear I've been watched a little bit of that like that's like pathological cute that thing and it's

you know part of it is it's sort of wobbling around it's like the poor thing it's trying to walk it's having a rough time and everybody thinks oh that's so cute if that was happening to you you would think it was cute but but you know animals animals across a Diverse range of Maman species no cute you know and they they tend to respond to like big eyed symmetrical small noosed flat-faced um helpless movement cuddly and not eating it right it's it's so it's an inhibitory it's a set of inhibitory perceptual mechanisms in large part

but since we're also mammals you better think that thing's cute because you're going to be taking care of it for a long time so you know it There has to be a deep deep deep biological connection it's forged almost immediately and of course that's mediated in women in particular by oxytocin which is released in tremendous quantities after birth and during breastfeeding so and it's necessary you know it turns on new circuits and there are circuits you need cuz like one day you're not a mother and then the next day you are that's not you are

not the same creature At that point and you don't want to even be the same creature you're pretty happy about the whole issue hopefully so that's very interesting image because first of all he was playing with with the little lion king with those balls and there so there this sort of globe thing that's attracting them so of like representations of the Sun and you might think well you're just reading that into it but then of course this happens it's like this is this is Like he's breaking open the sun to release the essence of the

sun onto the Little Lion King so and he is because the sun represents gold gold is pure right gold won't mix with any other metal so that's partly why it's a symbol of value it's a noble metal the sun is made out of gold so to speak except it's like Meta Gold from a symbolic perspective ex it because it's like the gold of higher Consciousness and it's being dumped on the Little Lion King Because for the tribe's sake and then maybe even for the sake of the whole ecosystem around the tribe that King better be

awake so that's what this like little Carl Young baboon here is trying to get get [Music] going [Music] okay so now you notice two things lovely this is lovely very well put together scene it's very thoughtful so the Animals are starting to lift up their head so you you get the sense of heightened interest and the music is starting to rise a little bit and speed up and Tempo a little bit and you know something's going to happen here that's associated with the little Pinnacle of the of the of the rock there [Music] [Music] [Applause]

[Music] I know till we find our brilliant brilliant no it's so so well edited you know so this this little thing that now represents what will become the guiding consciousness of the land is revealed and the automatic response of all the animals is first to Bow so they're in awe as they should be and then to celebrate and then that's you know That's pretty good it's pretty impressive but then you know God himself gets in the act because just at the opportune time the sun breaks and sh on the little lion at the same time

they move the music up like they Chang the key of the music and so it it it causes an upselling of emotion and that's y would call that if if and when that happened that's what he would call a synchronous event so that's a demonstration of a synchronous event It's where they're very rare these things they're from a union perspective they're they're they occur in in very emotionally intense situations where the context the external context of the occurrence seems to match the meaning of the occurrence so anyways whether or not you believe such things are

possible that is exactly what this little film clip is trying to [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] demonstrate the ccle of [Music] yeah pretty decent all right so you got the animals you got the stone hierarchy that's a pyramid you've got the thing that's at the top of it just like the little pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill with the eye on top Exactly the same idea part of the idea is that the thing that's at the very top of the pyramid isn't part of the pyramid so it's not Stone The Little Lion King

he isn't Stone he's the thing that produces Stone as he moves through time right because he's the culture producing force and so this is set up to demonstrate visually that at the center of being is culture at the top of culture is the culture producing process or force and that's the illuminated Savior and that's what all the animals worship instinctively it's like yes that's right that's how it goes we'll see you on Tuesday