So then I learned about Piaget and Piaget had some very interesting ideas and I think I've told you already what Piaget was up to he wasn't a developmental psychologist he didn't even regard himself as a psychologist he wanted to reconcile science and religion that's what he was doing through his entire bloody life because it would drove him crazy when he was in adolescent and he didn't think that he would be able to survive unless he could bring those two things together so he's working on the same problem and so one of the things that Piaget who was very prone to observation he was an ethologist of human beings that's a good way of thinking about an ethologist is a scientist who studies animals by watching their behavior rather than studying them under laboratory conditions and he got very interested in the spontaneous emergence of morality in the play of children it was so smart this so smart that idea that you know when kids come together and unify themselves towards a particular goal so in play that a morality emerges out of that and that that morality and I've mentioned this before there's a morality in Game one there's a morality in game two there's a morality in Game three what's common across all those morality is a meta morality and so the meta morality emerges from the particular morality z– that are embedded in particular cooperative situations we could say cooperative and competitive situations you can expand that out today you can expand that out biologically to some degree to the idea of the dominance hierarchy right every social animal and even many animals who aren't social are embedded in a dominance hierarchy the dominance hierarchy has a structure we couldn't call it a dominance hierarchy dominance hierarchy a b c d e thousands of them across thousands of years you extract out from all of them what's central to all of them that's the pyramid of value what's the what's the question do you need answered about the pyramid of value what's at the top does that's the ideal that's the eye at the top of the pyramid or the golden buddha in the in Lotus it's the same thing it's the same thing as the crucifix paradoxically enough and that has to do it has to do with something like the voluntary acceptance and there or transcendence of suffering it's something like that these are not arbitrary ideas they're deeply that's my case anyways they're deeply deeply deeply rooted in biology and culture there there is deeply rooted in biology as the dominance hierarchy is rooted in biology and we already know the answer to that the dominance hierarchy has been around for 350 million years it's a long time you don't get to just brush that off and say well morality some sort of second-order cognitive problem it's like no it's not I can't I can tell you something about its instantiation in your nervous system you have a counter at the bottom of your brain that keeps track of where you are in terms of your status and it bloody well regulates the sensitivity of your emotions so if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy barely clinging on to the world everything overwhelms you and that's because you're damn near dead and so everything should overwhelm you you've got no extra resources any more threat you're sunk so you become extremely sensitive to negative emotion and maybe also impulsive so that you grab well the grabbing is good and if you're near the top in the dominant hierarchy and your counter tells you that then your serotonin levels go up you're less sensitive to negative emotion you're less impulsive you live longer like everything works in your favor your immune system functions better and you're oriented at least to some degree towards the medium and long-term future and you can afford that because all hell isn't breaking loose around you all the time and so then the question is is there a way of being that increases the probability that you're going to move up dominance hierarchies well that doesn't seem to be a particularly provocative proposition unless you think that it's completely arbitrary and random and that you can think that if you want but I don't think there's any evidence for that whatsoever I mean we certainly have even for sexual selection we impose criteria they're not ramp random and arbitrary so okay so back to young so what was young trying to do well he was trying to see see young believe that once we had stopped populating the cosmos with gods that they went inside that's a good way of thinking well think think about it this way you know mmm the archaic person looks at the sky and uses his imagination to populate the sky what the sky well it's the constellations it's the domain of the gods well why well because the gods are what RB are out there beyond your understanding well that's what you see when you look up at the sky so you populate the night sky with figures of your imagination so the gods are the things that you broadcast out of your imagination and see spread over the world it's like the contents of your unconscious are manifesting themselves when you encounter the unknown it's exactly what it is that's exactly how how else could it be right you're projecting your fantasy onto what you don't understand that's how you start to cope with what you don't understand you populate the unknown with deities where did they come from they came from your imagination well what happens when you take them out of the world do they disappear no they just go back into your imagination so that's where young dug down to find them that's the same motif as rescuing your dead father from the-from or rescuing your father from the belly of the whale it's the same idea is that the corpses of the gods inhabit your imagination so where do you go if you need to revivify them you go into your imagination and that's exactly what Jung did and that means this is no secret if you read Jung he tells you that's what he did he tells you that's why he did it it's not an interpretation on my part so then then the question is what's down there is it just mass and catastrophe or is there something in it that's patterned while Jung's proposition was that you read it you rediscover the great archetypes that guide human being by investigating the structure of your imagination when he thought about the imagination in some sense at least in part as a manifestation of your of your biology well yes what else would it be you know and I told you that story about my nephew I believe right about him running around as a knight and then going off to have a combat with the dwarves and the Dragons it's like well where did that come from well partly it came from his culture right because it he was a knight and and so obviously that's a cultural construct but the thing is is that his imagination is it's this structure that's looking for things to fill itself with just like your predisposition to language you have a predisposition to language what is that we don't know what does it do it looks for things in the world to fill itself with right and if you're if you first of all when you start to learn how to speak you babble every phoneme did you know that there's there's larders if I was learning to speak an Asian language there would be phonemes I couldn't pronounce and vice-versa an infant all of them they babble all the phonemes and then as they start to learn the language they lose the ability to say a bunch of them and only retain the ones that are relevant to that language so a baby babbles all laying all possible languages that's a way of thinking about it and then loses the ability so that's a manner that you can see there so you could say well you manifest the potential to be possessed by all the set of all possible archetypes it's built into your biology and then as your enculturated in your own culture the set of archetypes that manifest its benefits themselves in that culture are the ones that you pull in for your own use so my my nephew's running around like a knight well you know if he would have been born in the middle of the Amazon he would be running around with a bow and you know a poisoned arrow and a bow it's the same thing it's the same idea it's just trapped out in different cultural dress and he his little imagination was trying to solve the problem how do you deal with the unknown well what's the unknown it's these little devils that keep biting jumping up on you and biting you and they come out without end so just killing them it's like cutting the head off the Hydra right seven more grow well what the hell good is it to solve one problem when there's just a bunch more problems that are come going to come after you and that's everyone's question that's the ultimate question of nihilism right why bother solving a problem if all that's going to happen is that twenty more problems are going to come your way why not just give up and die well right it's a good question it's that it's a good question right is this suffering so intense that the whole game should just be brought to an end that's another fundamental question of existence and people who've become truly malevolent answer that question in the affirmative they say it's too much we should destroy it now I wouldn't say they're precisely doing it only for humanitarian reasons but you have to understand and appreciate the logic it's not irrational that's the other thing it's not irrational to work for the destruction of being it's not irrational in fact it might be the most rational thing you could come up with depends on your initial initial set of presuppositions so you down into the belly of the beast so to speak to to to to to see what lurks in the imagination he sees the birthplace of archetypal ideas well what are our typical ideas there there are patterns of it you could think about them as representations of patterns of adaptive behavior and so then you might ask well where did they come from well that's part of what I've been trying to to to teach you about they evolved as far as I can tell right they evolved collectively is that our society and this is the dominance hierarchy idea doormen desire key set themselves up as a matter of course they're the standard way that animals organize themselves in a territory well ok human beings are watching those dominance hierarchies since we became self-aware thinking what the hell are we up to what the hell are we up to what's and there's a question that lurks in there what constitutes acceptable power what constitutes acceptable sovereignty who should lead who should rule what should be at the top well we talked about that the Mesopotamians figured that out speech and vision that's Marduk speech vision and the willingness to come front the terrible unknown that's what should rule well what's that an arbitrary idea or is that a great idea how could it be any other way well that's what human beings are like and I don't think that you can read the Mesopotamians story and understand the reference which isn't an easy thing to do and fail to draw that conclusion Marduk has eyes all the way around his head he speaks magic words he goes off to fight time at the dragon of chaos well what's that that's the reptilian predator that lurks in the unknown well is any of that is it is there anything about any of that that stands in opposition to what you would presume if you were just analyzing our situation from a purely biological perspective we're prey animals were predators we'd be threatened by reptiles forever why wouldn't we use the predator that lurks in the dark forests or the water as a representative of the unknown why wouldn't we harness that circuitry we already have it at hand and even more to the point how could we do anything else it's it makes perfect sense well so then what you might say well what would you want to be king you could say king of the world or king of your own soul what do you want to subordinate yourself to how about your heroic willingness to encounter the unknown and articulate it and share that with people there's no nobler vision than that and I don't see that it's merely arbitrary and so and it's not merely arbitrary – because if you do that to the degree that you do that assuming your society isn't entirely corrupt you will be successful it will actually aid you practically you'll rise up above men you'll be selected by women you'll be admirable you'll be valued and and you know that because if you look at the people that you admire in value again unless you've taken a detour into dark places and are are possessed with admiration for people who are working for malevolent purposes and for destruction you just have to watch the people that you admire and try to figure out what's common across them and draw your own conclusions and you can ask yourself to when you're torturing yourself with your conscience because you're not doing what you should be and you know it what is it that you're torturing yourself in relationship to you have a vision of your own ideal and you torment yourself if you're not matching it what's the ideal well you don't know right it's it's kind of incoherent and and poorly articulated but that doesn't mean it isn't trying to manifest itself and and make itself known to you it's really the purpose of religious education is to make that ideal articulated you
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