Notes about Sexuality and Religion

By Jordan Peterson.

So one of the ideas is that the original Adam wasn’t a man like like a separate man it was more like a hermaphroditic being and in that hermaphroditic being there was a kind of undifferentiated perfection and then that was split into male and female and then that part of the goal of human beings is to reunite that as the singular unity that reestablishes the initial perfection and that’s actually the goal of marriage from a spiritual perspective.

You could read [about] that if you read Jung because he wrote quite a bit about that. So lovely, it’s such a good idea.

I turned my attention in this lecture to the older of the two creation accounts in Genesis: the story of Adam and Eve. In its few short paragraphs, it covers:

1. the emergence of human self-consciousness;
2. mankind’s attendant realization of vulnerability, mortality, and death;
3. the origin of the capacity for willful evil, as the ability to exploit that newly-realized vulnerability;
4. the emergence of shame as a consequence of that realization;
5. the shrinking from divine destiny that occurred when shame emerged; and
6. the beginning of true history, with the self-conscious toil that life in history entails.

Extracts

Full Transcript

Genesis and the Problem of Self-Consciousness
Hello everyone. So, hopefully, we’re going to get past Genesis 1 today — that’s the theory. I finished my new book yesterday. Yes, that’s taken about three years of writing; it’s quite a long time to write something. So yeah, I’m… it’s done except for the mopping up — you know, copy editing and that sort of thing. So, hopefully, it’s as good as I can make it. I don’t know that it’s any good, but it’s as good as I can make it.

The Density of Ancient Stories
Anyways, alright, so this is the stories that I’m going to tell you tonight. I’ve been thinking about — well, like the ones last week for that matter — for a very long period of time, but I think these even longer. One of the things that I just do not understand — I cannot fathom this, I cannot understand — how there can be so much information in such tiny little stories. Especially the story of Cain and Abel; that story, just every time I read it, it just flattens me because it’s only like a paragraph long. There’s just nothing to it, you know?

And I think about it, and I think about it, and I think about it, and I think about it. Every time I think about it, another layer comes out from underneath, and then another layer comes out from underneath it, and I can’t figure that out. Like, you know, the rational approach that I’ve been describing to you is predicated on the idea that these stories have somehow encapsulated wisdom that we generated interpersonally and behaviorally in an image over very vast stretches of time, and then condensed it into very, very dense articulated words that are then further refined by the act of being remembered and transmitted — and remembered and transmitted, and remembered and transmitted — over vast stretches of time. And that’s a pretty good argument; I’m willing to go with it. But it still never ceases to amaze me how much information such tiny little passages can contain.

So, we’ll take that apart today. And I think it’s especially true with the story of Cain and Abel because it works on the individual level, and it works on the familial level, and it works on the political level, and it works at the level of warfare, and it works at the level of economics. And it’s… that’s a lot for a little tiny one-paragraph story to cover, man.

The Postmodern Dilemma
Now, you know, you could object, “Well, with these stories, you never know what you’re reading into it and what’s in the story,” right? That’s part of — let’s call it — the postmodern dilemma. And fair enough. And there’s really no answer to that any more than there is an answer to, “How do you know your interpretation of the world is — well, let’s not say correct, but sufficient?”

There’s some answer to that: it’s sufficient if you can act it out in the world and other people don’t object too much, and you don’t die, and nature doesn’t take a bite out of you any more often than necessary. You know, those are the constraints within which we live. So, you have some way of determining whether your interpretation is at least functionally successful, and that’s not trivial. And I guess you can say the same thing to the interpretations that might be laid out on these stories. At the moment, that’s probably good enough. Hopefully, you find the interpretations functionally significant at multiple levels.

I also think the chance of managing that by chance is very, very small. You know, to be able to pull off an interpretation of the story that works at multiple levels simultaneously? You think with each level that it applies, the chances that you’ve stumbled across something by chance have to be decreasing, right? There’s a technical term for that in psychology; it’s called something like “multi-method, multi-trait method of determining whether or not something is accurate.” And the idea is the more ways that you can measure it and get the same result, the more confident you can be that you’re not just deluding yourself with your a priori hypothesis — you know, that there’s actually something out there.

So, I guess that’s another part of this method. And it’s also a method that I use in my speaking, I think. I don’t try to tell people anything that isn’t personally relevant, because you should know why you are being taught something, right? You should know what the fact is good for, and it should be good for you personally, at least in some sense. And then, if you act it out in the world, it should be good for your family, and maybe should have some significance for the broader community. And I think that’s what “meaning” means. I don’t really see the utility in being taught things that aren’t meaningful — facts that aren’t meaningful — because there’s an infinite number of facts and there’s no way you’re going to remember all of them. They have to have the aspect of tools, essentially; something like that, because we are tool-using creatures. Well, these stories have that aspect, as far as I can tell. There’s no doubt about that.

Foundational Stories and Critiques
So, here’s the stories in Genesis 2 — very famous stories, obviously. Virtually everybody who’s even vaguely versed in Western — roughly speaking — Western culture knows these stories. And that’s something that’s interesting too: that stories can be so foundational that everybody shares them. I mean, you can say the same thing about a fairly large handful of fairy tales as well — or you could, at least until recently.

But the fact that stories are foundational, I think, also means that they have to be given out kind of… well, even if you don’t give them any respect, you have to at least treat them as remarkable curiosities. So, why those stories? And why did they stick around? And why does everybody know them? It’s not self-evident by any stretch of the imagination.

You can use explanations — you can use the Freudian explanation. Freud sort of thought that the Judeo-Christian was predicated on the idea that the figure of the father, the familial father, was expanded up into cosmic dimensions so that mankind existed in the same relationship to the cosmic father — let’s say — that an infant or a small child existed in relationship to his or her own father. And that’s a reasonable critique, I would say, to some degree. But it does — and this was purposeful — it does imply (more than implied, for its case) that people who adopt religious belief that has a personified figure as at its apex are essentially acting out the role of dependent children.

And you know, I thought about that critique for a long time. And believe me, that’s been a powerful critique. One of the best books I’ve ever read, called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, I think took that line of argumentation; it developed it as well as any book I’ve ever seen argue it. Becker tried to bring closure to Freudian psychoanalysis on religion. He did a pretty wicked job of it. Like, I think the book is seriously flawed and wrong, but it’s really a great book. Some books are wrong in really good ways, right? They make a powerful, powerful argument; they really take it to its extreme.

I think Becker missed the point, and he missed it in the same way that Freud missed Jung’s point. And Becker, who wrote this book on the psychoanalysis of religion, never referred to Jung except very briefly in the introduction, and I think that was a major mistake. But Becker took the argument that the hypothesis of God is nothing but an attempt by human beings to recreate a quasi-infantile state of dependency and to be able to rely on an all-knowing father, and to thereby recover the comfort perhaps that we experienced when we were young and had a hypothetically all-knowing father (for those of us who are lucky to have someone who vaguely resembled that).

But the more I thought about that, the more that struck me as quite implausible across time. Charles Taylor, I think it was — Charles Taylor wrote an interesting book called The Origins of the Modern Self (he’s a McGill philosopher) — and I wouldn’t necessarily call him a friend of classic religion, but it doesn’t matter. He made a very interesting point about Christianity in particular. He said, “If you’re going to invent a religion that offered you nothing but infantile comfort, why in the world would you bother with conceptualizing Hell?” That just seems like an unnecessary detail to add to the whole story, right? If it’s all about comfort, why would you hypothesize that the consequence of a serious error was eternal torment? That doesn’t really sound very… it isn’t the sort of thing that is likely to make you feel comfortable.

James Joyce, when he wrote about that, said he had terrible nightmares when he was a child because of the hellfire sermons that Jesuits used to spout — spew forth, let’s say. And he wrote down what he remembered of them, and they were pretty hair-raising. I think in James Joyce’s book — I think it was Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — he talked about the Jesuits telling them, and telling him, that Hell was like a prison with walls that were seven miles thick, that was always in darkness and consumed by fire, and that the people who were trapped there were continually burnt by this dark fire that gave no light, which also simultaneously rejuvenated their flesh so that it could be burnt off eternally. In case you were wondering how it was going to be burnt off eternally, that’s apparently the process. It’s not easy for me to see that as an infantile wish-fulfillment, I’m afraid.

You could be a cynic about it. Elaine Pagels, who wrote a book on the Devil, was cynical about it in this manner: she thought that the Christians, so to speak, invented Hell as a place to put their enemies. And you know, yeah, fair enough — but no, that’s not accurate really. Well, although it’s convenient to have a place to put your enemies, Charles Taylor did point out, for example, that the modern terror of loss of self — let’s say, the existential loss of self and loss of meaning — was perhaps roughly paralleled by the medieval terror of Hell, you know, in terms of the existential intensity. And so it wasn’t… Hell wasn’t merely a place where those people that you didn’t care for would end up; it was the place where you were going to go if you didn’t walk the line properly. And so I don’t think Freud’s critique really holds water in the final analysis.

And then Marx’s critique, of course, was that religion was the opiate of the masses. And he made an argument that was similar to Freud’s, although somewhat earlier, based upon the presupposition that religious beliefs were stories told to the gullible masses in order to keep them pacified and happy while their corporate overlords — for lack of a better purpose — continue to exploit them and weaken them. And you know, I find the critique of human institutions as driven entirely by power very — let’s say — questionable to say the least. Of course, every human institution is corrupted by… is corrupt for one reason or another, and it’s also corrupt specifically by such things as deception and arrogance and the demand for unearned power. And the same thing, of course, can be applied to religious systems, but that doesn’t mean that they are in some special way characteristic of those faults. And maybe you think they are, and you know, maybe you can make a case for it, but it’s not prima facie evident that that is also a particularly useful criticism.

I don’t buy it; I think that’s far too cynical. I think that the people who wrote these stories… first of all, what are you going to do? You’re going to run a bloody conspiracy for three thousand years successfully? It’s like, good luck with that. You can’t run a conspiracy for fifteen minutes without somebody ratting you out. You know, it’s impossible. So, whatever is at the basis of the construction — not only of these stories but of the dogmatic structures that emerged from them — I think that it’s a terrible mistake to reduce them to unidimensional explanations. In fact, I generally think that reducing any complex human behavior to a unidimensional explanation is often the sign of a seriously limited thinker. I say that with some caution because Freud did do that with religion, at least to some degree, and Freud was a serious thinker. And Marx, I suppose, was a serious thinker — even though, well, yeah… is he someone you just… if you have any sense, Marx just leaves you speechless.

Neuropsychology and the Two Hemispheres
So anyway, so that’s all to say that I don’t think there’s any simple explanation for how these stories have the power that they have. I really don’t. I don’t think you can reduce it to political conspiracy, that’s for sure. I don’t think you could reduce it to psychological infantilism. I think you can make a case, like I have, that they are repositories of the collective wisdom of the human race.

I had an interesting letter this week from someone. I get a lot of interesting letters; I think I’m going to make an archive out of them and put them on the web at some point, with people’s permission obviously. And he said that he’d been following my lectures and noted that I had been making what you might describe as a quasi-biological or evolutionary case for the emergence of the information that the stories contained. And he said, “Well, how do you know that someone from a different religious tradition, or speaking of a different religious tradition, couldn’t do exactly the same thing?” And I thought, well, first of all, to some degree they could, because there is overlap.

Like, I’ve talked to you a little bit about Taoism, for example, and the Taoist view of Being as — you know — the eternal balance between Chaos and Order. One thing I didn’t tell you, I don’t think, about that… I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a neuropsychologist named Elkhonon Goldberg, who is a student of Alexander Luria. And Luria was, I think, the greatest neuropsychologist of the 20th century. He was a Russian, and he was one of the first people to really determine, in large part, the function of the frontal cortex — which was quite a mystery for a very long period of time.

And Goldberg… you know how we have two hemispheres, right? We have a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. And people often think of the left for right-handed people — right-handed males more particularly, because women are more neurologically diffuse. It’s one of the things that makes them more robust to head injury, for example. And maybe men are less diffuse and somewhat more specialized, which makes them a bit more specialized but a little more subject to damage.

Anyways, we have two hemispheres: left and right. And no one exactly knows why. And we know that they house quasi-independent consciousnesses, because if you divide the corpus callosum that unites them — which was done in cases of intractable epilepsy, for example — each hemisphere is capable of developing its own consciousness to some degree: the right generally non-verbal and the left verbal. And so there has been this idea that the left is a verbal hemisphere and the right is a non-verbal hemisphere. But that can’t be right, because of course animals don’t talk and they have a bifurcated hemisphere. So, if it’s right, it’s not causally right.

Goldberg hypothesized instead that the hemispheres were specialized for routinization and non-routinization, or for novelty and familiarity — or for Chaos and Order. And so that’s pretty damn cool. When I ran across that, I also thought about that as a signal of — what would you call it? — multi-method, multi-trait construct validation, because I’d never thought of the hemispheres as operating that way. And Goldberg came up with this in a historical pathway that was entirely independent from any mythologically inspired thinking — completely independent. In fact, it was motivated more by materialist Russian neuropsychology, which was materialist for political reasons and also for scientific reasons.

But the idea is that we have one hemisphere that reacts very rapidly to things we don’t know, and it’s more imaginative and diffuse, and it’s associated more with negative emotion because negative emotion is what you should feel immediately when you encounter something you don’t understand. Because it’s a form of thinking, right? Negative emotion: it’s like, “I’m somewhere where things aren’t what they should be.” The right hemisphere does that — generates images very rapidly to help you figure out what might be there. And then the left hemisphere takes that and develops it into something that’s more articulated and algorithmic and fully understood.

And so then there’s this dynamic balance between the right and the left hemisphere, where the left tries to impose order on the world. That’s Ramachandran, who’s a neurologist in California — very famous neurologist — who also developed a theory like Goldberg, who said that the left hemisphere imposes routinized order on the world, and the right hemisphere reacts to novelty and generates novel hypotheses. And he thought — and there is some good evidence for this — that’s what’s happening during the dream: that information is moved from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere in small doses, basically, so that the novel revelations of the right hemisphere don’t demolish the algorithmic structures that the left hemisphere has so carefully put together.

Chaos, Order, and the Fall of Man
And I like that theory too, because it also does help justify the hypothesis that I’ve been laying out for you, which is that, you know, there’s part of us that extends ourselves out into the world and tries to understand what we don’t know. And that part extends itself out with behavior, and also with emotion, and also with image, and then maybe with poetry, and then maybe with storytelling. And then, as that develops, then we develop more and more articulated representations of that emergent knowledge. And so you can map that quite nicely onto the neurologists’ and the neuropsychologists’ presumption about what constitutes the reason for the hemispheric differentiation.

But the other thing that’s so cool about the hemispheric differentiation argument, as far as I’m concerned — and this is really worth thinking about, man, because it’s a real… “noggin-scratcher,” I think Ned Flanders uses for that… I think it’s something like that. Anyways, you know, we do make the assumption that what it is that we are biologically adapted to is reality, right? It’s actually an axiomatic definition if you’re a Darwinian. Because nature is what selects by definition — that’s what nature is, it’s what selects. And if the nature that selects has forced upon you a dual hemispheric structure because half of you has to deal with the chaos and half of you has to deal with order, then you can make a pretty damn strong inferential case that the world is made out of Chaos and Order. And that’s really something to think about, man. You can think about that for a while if you want.

So anyways, for whatever reason, there is a lot packed into these stories. And so let’s investigate a couple more of them. We’ll start with this story of Adam and Eve. Now you may remember that the Bible is a series of books; “Bible” actually means something akin to “library.” And these books were written by all sorts of different people and groups of people, and groups of editors, and groups of people who edited over and over across very, very large periods of time. So they’re altered by no one and many at the same time. There was a tradition for a long time that the earliest books were written by Moses, but that’s probably not technically correct, even though it might be dramatically correct, let’s say — or correct in the way that a fairy tale is correct. (And I’m not trying to put down fairy tales by saying that.)

But there’s a number of authors, and the way the authors have been identified tentatively is by certain stylistic commonalities across the different stories: different uses of words, like the words for God, different poetic styles, different topics, and so forth. And people have been working for probably 200 years roughly to try to sort out who wrote what and how that was all cobbled together. But it doesn’t really matter for our purposes. What matters is that it’s an aggregation of collected narrative traditions — and maybe you could say it’s an aggregation of collective narrative wisdom. We don’t have to go that far, but we can at least say it’s aggregated narrative traditions, and that there was some reason that those traditions and not others were kept.

And there was some reason — complex though they may have been — why they were sequenced in the order that they were sequenced. Because one of the things that’s really remarkable about the Bible as a document is that it actually has a plot. And that’s really something! I mean, it’s sprawling and it goes many places, but the fact that something’s being cobbled together over several thousand years — maybe four thousand years, maybe longer than that if you include the oral traditions that preceded it, and God knows how old those are — but that collective imagination, part of the human collective imagination, has cobbled together a library with a plot.

And I see the Bible as a collective attempt by human beings to solve the deepest problems that we have. I think those problems are the problems of self-consciousness — primarily that: the fact that not only are we mortal and that we die, but that we know it. And that’s the unique predicament of human beings, and it makes all the difference. And I think that’s laid out in the story of Adam and Eve.

Interestingly — and I really realized this only after I was doing the last three lectures — the Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings. This puts a rift into the structure of Being — that’s the right way to think about it. And that’s really given cosmic significance. Now, you can dispense with that and say, “Well, nothing that happens to human beings has cosmic significance because we’re these short-lived, you know, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet that’s rotating out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters.” And it’s fine — you can walk down that road if you want. I wouldn’t recommend it. I mean, and that’s part of the reason I think that, for all intents and purposes, it’s untrue.

You know, it isn’t a road you can walk down and live well. In fact, I think if you really walk down that road and you really take it seriously, you end up not living at all. So it’s certainly very reminiscent… I mean, I’ve talked to lots of people who are suicidal and seriously suicidal, and you know, the kind of conclusions that they draw about the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation are very much like the kind of conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough. If you’re interested in that, you could read Tolstoy — his Confessions. Leo Tolstoy’s Confession is a very short book. It’s a killer, man. It’s a powerful book, very, very short. And Tolstoy describes his obsession with suicide when he was at the height of his fame — most well-known author in the world, you know, huge family, international fame, wealth beyond anyone’s imagining at that time, influential, admired, everything that you could possibly imagine that everyone could have. For years he was afraid to go out into his barn with a rope or a gun because he thought he’d either hang himself or shoot himself. And he did get out of that, and he describes why that happened and where he went when that happened.

The Path of Redemption and Truth
So the biblical stories, starting with Adam and Eve, they present a different story. They present the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings as a cosmically cataclysmic event. And you could say, “Well, what do we have to do with the cosmos?” And the answer to that is: it depends on what you think consciousness has to do with the cosmos. And perhaps that’s nothing, and perhaps it’s everything. I’m going to go with everything, because that’s how it looks to me.

Now, of course, anyone who wishes to is welcome to disagree. But if you believe that consciousness is a force of cosmic significance upon which Being itself is dependent in any real sense — at least in any experiential sense — then it’s not unreasonable to assume that radical restructurings of consciousness can worthily be granted some kind of cosmic or metaphysical significance. And even if it’s not true from outside the human perspective — whatever that might be — it’s bloody well true from within the human perspective, that’s for sure.

And so that’s the initial event in some sense: after the creation is the cataclysmic Fall. And then the entire rest of the Bible is an attempt to figure out what the hell to do about that. And everything in it is that. And so you could say, for example, in the earliest Old Testament stories, what seems to happen is that the state of Israel is founded, and it rises and falls and rises and falls. And so there’s this experimentation for centuries — millennia even — with the idea that the way that you protect yourself against the tragic consequences of self-consciousness is by organizing yourself into a state.

But then what happens is the state itself begins to reveal its pathologies. And as those pathologies mount, the state becomes unstable and collapses. And then it rises back up, and becomes unstable and collapses. And then it rises back up. After it does this a number of times — this is primarily from Northrop Frye’s interpretations — people start wondering if there’s not something wrong with the idea that the state itself is the pathway, is the place of redemption. That there’s something wrong with that idea.

And so then, I think on the heels of that comes the Christian revolution with its hypothesis that it’s not the state that’s the place of salvation; it’s the individual psyche. And then there’s an ethic that goes along with that too, which is quite interesting. The ethic of redemption, after the state experiment fails, let’s say, is that it’s within the individual that redemption can be manifested. And even insofar as the state is concerned, because the state’s proper functioning is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual, rather than the reverse, most fundamentally.

And the proper mode of individual being that’s redemptive is Truth. And Truth is the antidote to the suffering that emerges with the Fall of man in the story of Adam and Eve. And then that relates back to the chapters that we’ve already talked about, because there’s this insistence in Genesis 1 that it’s the Word, in the form of Truth, that generates order out of chaos. But even more importantly — and this is something, like I said, I most clearly realized just doing these lectures for the last three weeks — is God continues to say, as He speaks order into being with Truth, that the being He speaks into being is good.

And so there’s this insistence that the Being that was spoke into being through Truth is good. And so there’s a hint there — so interesting — a hint there right at the beginning of the story: that the state of Being that Adam and Eve inhabited before they fell, before they became self-conscious, insofar as they were made in the image of God and acting out the Truth, that that Being itself was properly balanced. And it takes the entire Bible to rediscover that, which is a journey back to the beginning.

And that’s a classic mythological theme: that the wise person is the person who finds what they lost in childhood and regains it. I think that’s a Jewish idea — that Zadok, if I remember correctly, who is a messiah figure, is the person who finds what he lost in childhood and regains it. His idea is this return to the beginning, except that the return is… you don’t fall backwards into childhood and unconsciousness; you return voluntarily to the state of childhood, while awake and then determined to participate through Truth in the manifestation of proper Being.

Now, you know, I’m a psychologist and I’ve taught personality theory for a very long time, and I know personality theory pretty well. And I’m reasonably well-versed in philosophy, although not as well-versed as I should be. But I can tell you, in all the things I’ve ever read or encountered or thought about, I have never once found an idea that matches that in terms of profundity — but not only profundity, also in believability.

Because the other thing I see as a clinician — and I think this is very characteristic of clinical experience and also very much described explicitly by the great clinicians — is that what cures in therapy is Truth. That’s the curative. Now, there’s exposure to the things you’re afraid of and avoiding as well, but I would say that’s a form of enacted Truth. Because if you know there’s something you should do by your own set of rules and you’re avoiding it, then you’re enacting a lie. You know, you’re not telling one, but you’re acting one out — it’s the same damn thing.

So if I can get you to face what it is that you’re confronting that you know you shouldn’t be avoiding, then what’s happening is that we’re both partaking in the process of attempting you to act out your deepest Truth. And what happens is that that improves people’s lives, and it improves them radically. And the evidence — the clinical evidence to that — is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things they’re afraid of, but that they’re avoiding, they get better. And you have to do it carefully and cautiously and with their own participation and all of that. But of all the things that clinicians have established, that’s credible — that’s number one.

And that’s nested inside this deeper realization that the clinical experience is redemptive, let’s say, because it’s designed to address… insofar as the people who are engaged in the process are both telling each other the truth. And then you think, “Well, obviously,” because if you have some problems and you come to talk to me about them… well, first of all, just by coming to talk to me about them, you’ve admitted that they exist — man, that’s a pretty good start. And second, well, if you tell me about them, then we know what they are. And then if we know what they are, we can maybe start to lay out some solutions, and then you can go act out the solutions and see if they work.

But if you don’t admit they’re there, and you won’t tell me what they are, and I’m like posturing and acting egotistically and taking the upper hand and all of that in our discussions — well, how the hell is that going to work? You know, it might be comfortable moment to moment while we stay encapsulated in our delusion, but it’s not going to work. So, a lot of that seems to… think it through, it seems pretty self-evident.

The Psychological View of Deception
And you know, Freud thought that repression was at the heart of much mental suffering. The difference between repression and deception is a matter of degree, and that’s all. It’s technical; it’s a technical differentiation. And Alfred Adler — who was one of Freud’s greatest associates, and much underappreciated, I would say — he thought that people got into problems because they started to act out a “life lie.” That’s what he called it: a life lie. That’s worth looking up because Adler, although not as charismatic as Freud was, was very practical and really foreshadowed a lot of later developments in cybernetics theory.

And of course, Jung believed that you could bypass psychotherapy entirely by merely making a proper moral effort in your own life. And Carl Rogers believed that it was honest communication, mediated through dialogue, that had redemptive consequences. And the behaviorists believe that you do a careful micro-analysis of the problems that are laid before you and help introduce people to what they’re avoiding. It’s like all of those things to me are just secular variations of the notion that “truth will set you free,” essentially.

So, you know, it’s a pretty powerful story. And A, it’s not that easy to dispense with; and B, the other thing is you dispense with it at your peril. Because what I have seen as well is that the people that I’ve seen who’ve been really hurt have been hurt mostly by deceit. And that’s also worth thinking about. You know, you get walloped by life — there’s no doubt about that, absolutely no doubt about that. But I thought for a long time that maybe, maybe, maybe people can handle earthquakes and cancer and even… but they can’t handle betrayal. And they can’t handle deception. They can’t handle having the rug pulled out from underneath them by people that they love and trust. That just does them in. You know, it makes them ill, but it does… where it hurts. That, you know, psychophysiologically it damages them, but more than that, it makes them cynical and bitter and vicious and resentful, and then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse.

The Discovery of Time and Self-Consciousness
So, you know, the story starts: God uses the spoken Truth to create Being that is good, and then the cataclysm occurs. And then human beings spend millennia trying to sort out exactly what to do about the fact that they’ve become self-conscious. And you know, by the way, we have, right? We are, in fact, self-conscious. No other animal has that distinction. Now, you’ll read that chimpanzees can — for example, if you put lipstick on a chimpanzee… it’s kind of a strange thing to do. Yeah, well, I won’t pursue that any further.

But the chimp — a chimpanzee — will wipe off the lipstick if you show it a mirror. And dolphins seem to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors. And there is… so there is the glimmerings of self-conscious recognition in other animals. But to put that in the same conceptual category as human self-consciousness is, to my way of thinking, it’s… well, it’s uninformed, to say the least. But I also think that it’s motivated; it’s motivated by a kind of anti-humanistic underlying motivation. Because our self-consciousness is so incredibly developed compared to that, that they’re hardly in the same conceptual universe. It’s like comparing the alarm cries of vervet monkeys when they see a predator to the language of human beings. It’s like, yeah, yeah, there’s some similarities… but they’re not language.

And the self-consciousness of animals is proto-self-consciousness, and it’s only there in a very small number of animals, and it’s nothing like ours. They’re not aware of the future like we are. They’re not aware of their boundaries in space and time — and that’s the critical thing. And most particularly, time. Human beings discovered time. And when we discovered time, we discovered the end of each of our being, and that made all the difference. And that’s what the story of Adam and Eve is about.

Monotheism and Hierarchies of Value
So, Genesis 1 is derived from the Priestly source, where God is known as Elohim or El Shaddai. And there’s God in the singular and there’s gods in the plural. And I suppose that’s because it seems that if you analyze the history of the development of monotheistic ideas, that monotheism emerges out of a plurality of gods. And as I mentioned, I think it’s because the gods represent fundamental forces at minimum, and those fundamental forces have to be hierarchically organized, with something absolute at the top. Because otherwise, they do nothing but war. Like, you have to organize your values hierarchically or you stay confused. And that’s true if you’re an individual and it’s true of your state. If you don’t know what the next thing you should do is, then there’s 50 things you should do, and then how are you going to do any of them? You can’t. You have to prioritize.

Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic. And so there’s some principle at the top of the hierarchy. And maybe the organization of the gods over time — that’s the battle of gods that Mircea Eliade talked about. And if you’re interested in that, you could read A History of Religious Ideas, which I would really recommend. It’s a three-volume book. It’s actually quite a straightforward read, as far as these things go, and Eliade does a very nice job of describing how and even why polytheism tends towards monotheism.

Even in polytheistic cultures, there’s a strong tendency for the gods to organize themselves in the hierarchy with one god at the top. In a monotheistic culture, in some sense, all the other gods just disappear across time and there’s nothing left at the top but God. But even in a polytheistic society, there’s a hierarchy of power among the gods.

The first story is newer than the second one. So the story I’m going to tell you today is actually older than the one I already told you, even though their order was flipped by the Redactor, who’s the hypothetical person or persons who edited these stories together. We don’t know exactly why he, or the committee — or what… I suspect it was a single person, but who knows — we don’t know why the stories were edited together in the order that they were added together. But we could infer… I mean, they were edited together in that order because the editor thought they made sense that way. Because that’s what an editor does, right? An editor tends to take diverse ideas and then to organize them in some manner that makes sense. And part of the manner that makes sense is that you can tell them to people and the people stay interested, and you can tell them to people and people remember them. That’s one of the ways you can tell if you’ve got an argument right: because it’s communicable and understandable and memorable. And so this person was, let’s say, motivated by intuition to organize the stories in this particular manner.

Bargaining with the Future
So, the second — the Yahwist strand — contains the stories, the classic stories in the Pentateuch (that’s five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), which we’ll try to get through perhaps in these twelve lectures. We’ll see how that goes. The God in the Yahwist account is, for all intents and purposes, a sort of meta-person. And I dealt with that a little bit last week, because people tend to think of that as unsophisticated. But when you think that the mind — the ground of consciousness — is the most complex thing that we know of, then it’s not so unsophisticated to assume that the most complex thing that there might be is like that. Or at least it’s as good as we can do with our imaginations.

It’s also the case — and this is practically speaking — is that it is not at all unreasonable to think of God the Father as the spirit that arises from the crowd that exists into the future, right? And we talked about that in relationship to the idea of sacrifice, at least a little bit more, or we’re going to. You make sacrifices in the present so that the future is happy with you. The question is: what is that future that would be happy with you? And the answer to that is: it’s the spirit of humanity. That’s who you’re negotiating with. Because you make the assumption that if you forego impulsive pleasure and get your medical degree, that when you’re done in 10 years and you’re a physician, humanity as such will honor your sacrifice and commitment and open the doors to you, right?

So, you’re treating the future as if it’s a single being, and you’re also treating it as if it’s something like a compassionate judge. You’re acting that out. And maybe we had to imagine God in that form before we could understand… once we started to understand that there was a future, perhaps we had to imagine God in that form in order to concretize something that we could bargain with so that we could figure out how to use sacrifice to figure out how to guide ourselves into the future. Because that sacrifice is a contract with the future, but it’s not a contract with any particular person; it’s a contract with the spirit of humanity as such. It’s something like that.

And so, when you think about it that way, that should make you faint with amazement. Because that is such a bloody amazing idea, to come up with that idea that you can bargain with the future. That is some idea, man. That’s like the major idea of humankind. We suffer — what do we do about it? We figure out how to bargain with the future and we minimize suffering in that manner. It’s like, no other animal does that either. You know, like the lions, they just eat everything. I think a wolf can eat 40 pounds of meat in a single sitting, right? It’s like: there’s meat, eat it. It’s not like, “save some mammoths for tomorrow.” That’s not a wolf thing, man, that’s a human thing.

And that might mean you have to be hungry today. Or maybe you’re a farmer several thousand years ago — six thousand years ago or so, when agriculture first got going — and you’re starving to death waiting for the spring planting, and you think, “We bloody well better not eat those seeds!” Right? And that’s really something: to be able to control yourself, to make the future real, to put off what you could use today and not just in some impulsive manner. Maybe your kids are starving to death and you think, “We are not touching the seeds that we need for the future.” And for human beings to have discovered that, and then to also have figured out that we could bargain with the future — it’s like, man, that’s something. And I think that the stories that are laid out in this book actually describe, at least in part, the process by which that occurred.

The Garden and the Trees
The Yahwist stories begin with Genesis 2:4: “This is the account of the heavens and the earth.” So there’s two real creation stories at the beginning: the newer one, which is the first one; and the older one, which is the second one. And the older one begins in chapter two, and that’s the story that we’re getting into now. Adam and Eve are in that… Cain and Abel… know what the Tower of Babel… in the Yahwist strand… Exodus, Numbers… and there’s some of the Priestly version in there too, as well as the Ten Commandments.

Well, there are some lovely representations of a paradise. This is The Garden of Earthly Delights — what’s his name? Bosch, yes… Hieronymus Bosch. He has a crazy… I mean, how he didn’t get burnt at the stake is absolutely beyond me. I mean, you know, some of you know about Salvador Dalí; I suppose most of you do. I mean, Dalí’s a piker compared to Hieronymus Bosch, man. You could spend… because there’s three pieces of this particular painting, you could spend a very bizarre and surreal [time] looking at that painting. I don’t know what it was with Bosch, but he was some sort of creature that only popped up once — and probably for the best.

And so there’s been very many representations of paradise. I mean, God only knows what that is; it’s like, I could probably guess but I won’t. And then, look — I mean, that’s the lion lying down with the lamb, right? So that’s this idea that’s maybe projected back in time: that there was a time, or maybe will be a time, when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist, right? And the horrors of life are, of course, that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything’s born, and that the whole bloody place is a charnel house, and it’s a catastrophe from beginning to end. And this is the vision of it being other than that.

You know, there’s a strong idea… this is also implicit in the alchemical ideas, and I think it’s also implicit in the scientific revolution: that human beings can interact with reality in such a way so that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, and so that we can move somewhat closer to a state that might be characterized — oh, that’s obviously imagistic — but it might be characterized by something like that, where we have the benefits of actual existence without all of the catastrophe that seems to go along with it.

And Carl Jung, when he wrote about the emergence of alchemy or the emergence of science from alchemy, he thought of science as being motivated by a dream. Because for Jung, the dream was the manifestation of the instincts; it was the boundary between the instincts and thinking. He said, “Well, science is nested inside a dream, and the dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, that we could then learn enough about material reality to alleviate suffering, right? To produce the Philosopher’s Stone, to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live — or perhaps forever.” That’s the goal: to alleviate the catastrophe of existence.

And that idea — the idea that the solution to the mysteries of life that might enable us to develop such a substance, or let’s say a multitude of substances — provided the motive for the development of science. And you’ll trace the development of that motive force really over a thousand years. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. I mean, you know, those ideas are certainly well-supported by the historical fact: science did emerge out of alchemy. The question is, what were the alchemists up to? And they were trying to produce the Philosopher’s Stone, and that was the universal medicament for mankind’s pathology.

Jung felt that what had happened was that, you know, Christianity had promised the cessation of suffering — promised it for a thousand years — and yet suffering went on unabated. And at the same time, Christianity had attempted to really put emphasis on spiritual development, let’s say, at the expense of material development; thinking of material development as something akin to a sin, trying to get a control of impulsivity and all the things that went along with an embodied existence. There was a reason for it. But that by about 1000 AD, the European mind — somewhat educated by that point, somewhat able to concentrate on a single point perhaps because of a very long history of intense religious training — turned its dream to the unexplored material world and thought, “Well, you know, the spiritual redemption that we’ve been seeking didn’t appear to produce the result that was promised or intended, and so maybe there’s another place that we should look,” and that was in the damned material world, right? Which was supposed to be, at least according to some elements of classic thinking, nothing but the creation of the devil.

But the point I’m making is that, you know, it’s very difficult to underestimate the amount of human motivation that’s embedded in the attempt to alleviate suffering, to eradicate disease, to help people live a healthy life — and that’s the disease obviously — but to live a long life as well, and make things as peaceful as possible. I mean, you can be cynical about people and you can talk about them as motivated by power and being corrupt and all of those things, and all of those things are true. But you shouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater, because we have been striving for a very long time to set things right. And we’ve done actually not too bad a job of it for half-starving, crazy, insect-ridden chimpanzees with lifespans of 50 to 70 years. So you know, we could deserve a bit of sympathy for our position as far as I’m concerned.

The Walled Garden
Some other representations… this one I like, the one on the left. That’s Paradise as a walled garden. And that’s what “paradise” means… it’s associated with Persian pairidaeza, that means “walled garden.” And why a walled garden? Well, it goes back to the chaos/order idea. So this is where God puts man and woman after the creation: in a walled garden. Well, the wall is culture and order, and the garden is nature. And the idea is the proper human habitat is nature and culture in balance. As well, we like gardens. Well, why? Because they’re not completely covered with weeds and mosquitoes and black flies, right? So they’re civilized a little bit, but still within that civilization, nature in its more benevolent guise is encouraged to flourish. And people find that rejuvenating.

And so the idea that Paradise — the proper habitat of a human being — is a walled garden is a good one. And it’s walled because, well, you want to keep things out, right? I mean raccoons, for example, if you want to keep those things out, man — even though it’s impossible. And you know, you don’t want… well, there’s all sorts of things you don’t want in your garden like snakes. Walls don’t seem to be much use against them, but the idea that Paradise is a walled garden is an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. So the proper human habitat is a properly tended garden.

Now, the radical left-leaning environmentalists tend to make the case that the predations of the Western capitalist system are a consequence of the injunction that was delivered in Genesis by God to man to go out and “dominate” the Earth. David Suzuki has talked a lot about this, by the way. They believe that that statement has given rise to our inappropriate assumption that we have the right to exert control over the world and that that’s what’s turned us into these terrible predatory monsters — sometimes described as “cancers on the face of the earth” or “viruses” that have inhabited the entire ecosystem, who are doing nothing but wandering everywhere and wreaking havoc as rapidly as we possibly can.

Which is another perspective on the essential element of humankind that I find absolutely deplorable. I mean, if you look at the historical record, for example, even casually, you’ll find out that as late as the late 1800s — 1895 thereabouts — Thomas Huxley, who was Aldous Huxley’s grandfather and a great defender of Darwin, prepared a report for the British government on ocean sustainability. And his conclusion was: “Fish away, guys.” Man, there’s so many fish out there, the oceans are so inexhaustible that no matter how hard humanity tried for any number of years, the probability that we could do more than put a dent in what was out there was zero.

Now, Huxley turned out to be wrong. He didn’t realize that our population was going to spike so dramatically, partly because we got a little bit rich and our children stopped dying at the rate of like 60 percent before they were one year old, and you know, we actually managed to populate the Earth with a few people. But it wasn’t really until 1960 or so that we woke up to the fact that there were so many of us that we actually had to start paying attention to what we were doing to the planet. And that’s like what, 50 years ago? Well, we’ve just started to develop the technology or the wherewithal to understand that the whole world might be well considered a garden and we need to live inside the proper balance between culture and order — or culture and chaos. Before that, we were spending all of our time just trying not to die, and usually very unsuccessfully.

So I don’t agree with that interpretation of the opening sections of Genesis. I don’t believe that it’s given human beings the right to act as super-predators on the planet. I think that instead, the proper environment for human beings is presented quite properly as a garden, and that the role of people — and that’s explicitly stated in the second story in Adam and Eve — was to “tend the garden.” And that means to make the proper decisions and to make sure that everything thrives and flourishes so that it’s good for the things that are living there that aren’t just people, but also good for the people too.

The Serpent and the Trees
So fine, I think we could at least note that that’s a slightly different take on the story than the ultimately cynical interpretation that’s so commonly put forward today. Now, inside that walled garden is a couple of trees, and Adam and Eve, and some animals and all of that. And unfortunately, the tree happens to have a snake wrapped around it. Now, that’s an interesting thing. We’re going to talk about that a lot. And the snake in both of these representations is no ordinary snake. Say, it’s got a human head, and it’s got a human head there too.

So, whatever that snake is… well, let’s forget about looking at this from a religious perspective. Like, if you can just imagine that you’re an anthropologist and we’ve never seen this image before. It’s like: what do you see? Well, you see walls and you see a fairly pleasant enclosure, and then you see a tree and people are eating from the tree, but the tree has a snake in it that has a human head. And so then you might think, “Well, what’s a snake with a human head?” And then you’d think, “Well, it’s half snake and half human.” That’s hardly revelatory; it’s just self-evident. So whatever that snake is, it isn’t just a snake. It’s snake and human. Or it partakes in whatever human beings are.

And that’s very important. So we’ll continue. We’ll consider that later. And you see the same thing here. And you see in this particular version there’s the head; this one also has wings. And so this is a winged snake, sort of like a dragon. And so it curls on the ground like a reptile and it’s got an aerial aspect or a spiritual aspect. So here it’s a snake, which is like the lowest form of reptilian life, say — something that crawls on the ground. It’s something that’s human and something that’s spiritual at the same time, and it inhabits the tree… which look a lot like magic mushrooms, by the way, and you can look that up if you want. That’s quite an interesting little rabbit hole to wander down if you’re curious about it.

But there’s an idea here too: that there was something in the garden at the beginning of time that was like a snake, that was like a person, that was like something that was winged — it was something spiritual. So it’s spiritual, human, and reptilian all at the same time, and it’s the animating spirit of the tree. Okay, so keep that in mind.

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished” — this is in relationship to Genesis 1 — “and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created.”

The Wisdom of the Sabbath
There is wisdom in that one. I think the idea of the Sabbath, you know… because one of the things I’ve worked with, a lot of people who were hyper-conscientious, and the thing about hyper-conscientious people is that they’ll just work till they die. And that’s actually not very productive, because then they’re dead and they can’t work. And so what you have to do with hyper-conscientious people is you have to say, “Well, I know you’d rather do nothing but work, and maybe you’re just as guilty as you can possibly be when you’re not working, but let’s figure out what you’re up to. And what you’re up to, in all probability, is the attempt to be productive in the least problematic, longest sustaining possible manner. And that might mean you have to take a rest.”

So one of the things… I used to work with lawyers, with people who had risen to the top of large law firms, and they were hyper-productive types. They’re often, you know, trying to hit their impossible quota for yearly hours and burning themselves to a frazzle as a consequence. And one of the things that we used to do was… he couldn’t work fewer hours because that just didn’t work. But what we did was we had them take more time off. You know, like a four-day weekend every two months or something that was plotted out into the future. And then we’d track their billable hours, which is the degree of productivity. It would actually increase!

So that was so cool, because you could take hard-working people and you could say, “Look, you know, take a break.” “Why?” “Well, because you’ll be more productive if you take a break.” “No, that couldn’t possibly be… like, I should just work flat out all the time.” It’s like, “Test that out, you take a break.” Now, on that, it’s like… well, what happened was their productivity would increase, often by 10%.

So there’s wisdom here too, which is okay. And this alludes to the Adam and Eve story near the end: you’re self-conscious, you discover the future, you have to work. Well, then the question is, how much should you work? And one answer is: “You better bloody well work all the time, because no matter how much work you do, you’re not solving your problems. They’re coming along, man, and you can stack up all the money you want, you can stack up all the wealth you want, it is not going to protect you in the final analysis. So you better be hitting the ground running and you better run flat out all the time.” Well, what happens if you do that? Well, then you die. That’s not a good solution. So maybe you should rest.

And so, how does that rest get instantiated? Well, it’s not easy to tell. But one way to do it, let’s say conceptually, is to say, “Look, even God had to rest one day a week.” And so you don’t have to be so presumptuous to assume that if God had to rest one day a week, that maybe, you know, you are allowed to work non-stop without a break at all. You know, and I think our culture has slipped into that in quite a dangerous way because everything is open all the time. And I mean, I find that just as convenient as the rest of you, but you know, it’s so strange to talk to modern people because one of the things they always tell you… we say, “Well, how are you?” And what do they always say? They don’t say “good,” they don’t say “bad,” they say “busy.” Like, yeah, well… okay.

The Two Creation Stories
This is where Genesis 2 starts, and we finally got there. “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

Well, you know, there’s some archaic thinking in there. The breath is life, right? That’s psyche, that’s spirit, that’s inspiration, that’s respiration. That’s also pneuma, like pneumatic… it’s breath. And the reason that people associated life with breath — well, that’s not so foolish, you know? I mean, you’re breathing, man, and something you do all the time. And when you die, you stop breathing. And so the idea that there’s something integral to life about breathing — it’s a perfectly reasonable supposition. It actually happens to be very true.

And now, then, to associate the act of creation with the act of first of all inspiration and respiration, and the breathing of life into something that was inanimate is… well, what do you expect for a one-sentence description? It’s not a bad one-sentence description, you know.

“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden.” And Eden means “well-watered place.” And that’s particularly relevant, I suppose, if you’re a desert dweller, right? Because the issue there is: can you get enough water to make things grow? And so the walled garden, which is Paradise, is also Eden, which is a well-watered place. And water has the element of chaos. We already saw that in relationship to Genesis 1, where the underlying chaos was often assimilated symbolically to water. And so the idea too is that a certain amount of chaos has to be brought into the order in order for it to be fruitful. And you can see that in the form of allowing in the water.

“And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

So, two trees are marked out among the rest: one is the tree of life, and one is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, you know… you know when you read something like that, if you’re thinking about it, that you’re in a metaphorical space. Now, we’ve got to be careful about metaphors, because you know… I could say, “Yeah, that the chaos/order idea is a metaphor,” but then I also said, “Oh, wait a second, it’s a metaphor but it’s also what your brain is adapted to.” And so, you know, let’s just not be pushing the idea that it’s merely a metaphor too hard.

And the same thing is happening here. These are metaphors: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But that doesn’t exactly mean that they’re mere metaphors. Because sometimes, as I mentioned before, if you have a set of things and you abstract out from them a common element, you can make a strong case that the common element is more real than the set of things from which you extracted it. That’s the whole utility in abstraction. Why would you bother with it otherwise if you can’t take a set of things and say, “Look, there’s something in common across the set of things; it’s more important than the differences between them”? Then you wouldn’t bother abstracting at all. And so the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are abstractions.

Now, one of the questions is… this is a tough one, man. I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time why a fruit and something you eat would be associated with the transformations of psychology. Because that’s basically what happens in the Adam and Eve Story why Would it be something that you eat? Now Eric Newman who is one of ewing students had written a fair bit about this and got a fair ways with it.

He said, “Well, you know, we do have noted… we’ve noticed forever that the act of eating—especially if you’re hungry, especially if you’re starving—produces a rapid spiritual transformation.” Right? I mean, some of you… this is worth knowing. You probably have a crabby partner or child, because everyone does. And one thing you might try is that if they get erratic during the day and, you know, get all volatile about nothing at all, just give them something to eat. Really, I’ll tell you, man… I do this with my clinical clients all the time. It’s like, they say, “Well, I fly off the handle at the littlest things.” Like, okay, yeah. Just try this for a week: when you’re crabby and unreasonable, eat a piece of cheese or eat a peanut butter sandwich—eat something that’s high protein, high fat—and then just wait ten minutes and see if you’re sane. And you’ll find out that you’re sane after you eat so often that you just can’t believe how crazy you are when you’re hungry.

Look, here’s… it’s really absolutely bloody remarkable. So I’m telling you, try this. It’ll… it’ll… especially if you don’t eat breakfast, this will change your life. And so here’s a practical bit of information for you too, for all of you antisocial types who are going to end up in prison. So, if you’re in prison and you want to go on parole—okay, so you have to go in front of the judge and tell them why you’re not going to do it again—so here’s the deal, here’s the deal: it doesn’t really matter what you did, and it doesn’t really matter what you promise. What matters is whether you see the judge before lunch or after lunch. Because if you see the judge after lunch, the probability that you’ll get parole is 60% higher. Yeah, right? That is just like… so never have an argument with your partner when you’re hungry, or when they’re hungry. Especially if you want something from them, it’s like: “Here’s the sandwich.” They’ll eat it, then they’ll be happy, then you can manipulate them. Because before that, man… no.

Information as “Meta-Food”
So, you know, it’s not that unreasonable to think that there’s a spirit in food, because food rejuvenates. And it just doesn’t rejuvenate you physically; it rejuvenates you spiritually. And then, of course, there’s the other things that we consume that aren’t exactly like food that have a walloping spiritual impact, like alcohol, let’s say, which is a “spirit” and is regarded… Dionysius, right? I mean, it’s the god of the vine, and the god of the vine possesses you and makes you act all the fun ways that alcohol makes you act—you know, the fun ways that you regret the next day. And so there’s the spiritual element of that too.

And then, but there’s something even deeper that I think is so cool that’s associated with food and information. Because the story of Adam and Eve represents the fruit as producing a psychological transformation. And so the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is an abstraction across trees. And it’s trying to say: “Here’s something that’s common across trees… it’s a fruit that’s common across trees.” It’s something like that. And so the fruit that’s common across trees is something you might call “food.” Fair enough, that’s a generalization.

But here’s something that’s even more cool: the “food” that’s stable across the entire domain of food isn’t food—it’s information. It’s information. And we use the same bloody circuits in our brain to forage for information that squirrels use to forage for food, that animals use to forage for food. It’s the same circuit. And why is that? Because we figured out that knowing where things is—knowing where the food is—is more important than having the food. And so, knowing where the food is is a form of massive food. Information is a form of meta-food.

And once you have… well, that’s why we’re information foragers. And so once you grasp that, and that idea is embedded into the story of Adam and Eve… so whatever it is that they ingest is a form of meta-food. It’s infinite information. And, you know, we’ll trade food for information, right? So if you’re stuck on the edge of the highway and, you know, your hood’s up and you’re going places—this thing has turned into a pile of junk that you don’t understand—and somebody pulls beside you, up beside you in their… mechanic. And they point to something and say, “Well, just put that wire back on there.” You’ll immediately give them a sandwich, right? Or you’ll offer them something in return. You know what I mean? Because they’ve provided you with information that has value. And it has value because it actually provides you with energy. Because information provides you with energy—because otherwise, why would we bother with it? And so food provides energy, but so does information.

And so, there’s the idea of food that you abstract from everything you can eat, but then there’s the idea of what you could abstract from all sources of food, and the answer to that would be information. And the trees that are being referred to in Adam and Eve are these “meta-trees.” They’re not ordinary trees. Just like Paradise is no ordinary place, like Adam and Eve are no ordinary people, and just like the Logos that God is using at the beginning of time is no ordinary conception. And these aren’t… they’re not metaphors. They’re more than metaphors; they’re… I think of them as hyper-realities. It’s something like that. They’re more real than what you see. They’re more real than the reality that presents itself to you. And lots of things are like that, right? Numbers are like that. We wouldn’t think or abstract if there weren’t things that were more real than what we can see.

The Geography of the Ideal
So what’s most real? Well, that’s partly what we’re trying to figure out. “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.” That’s produced a tremendous amount of speculation.

Now, you know, the Garden of Eden is also the Holy City—that’s another way of thinking about it. It’s Jerusalem, right? Or it’s the ideal state, which could be the ideal city, or it could be an ideal state of being, or it could be the ideal state here if all of those things stacked up at the same time, right? This is a mandala, and this is the mandala form that people hypothesized that constituted the structure of Paradise. You notice it’s got this cross-form that’s eaten itself. And there’s the center of Eden, and there’s the rivers—those are rivers, not snakes—those are the rivers that go out of it. And they’re turned into these mandala images that are representative of what Jung described as the “Self,” which would be the center element of Being that he associated… of conscious Being that he associated with divinity, I would say, but also with the idea of the Holy City. So I’m just showing you that to show you where the imagination has taken ideas of Paradise.

“The name of the first river is Pishon: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.”

So, there’s this strange intermingling there of geography with mythical geography, right? Which you see happen fairly frequently in the books. “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” Okay, so that’s a good… that’s a good command. That’s what you’re supposed to do: is take care of the damn thing. With a lot of work to make it right, took a whole week.

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.'”

Well, there’s a bunch of questions there that people have been puzzling… they’re puzzling over for a long time. God is a tricky character in the story of Adam and Eve. It’s like, okay, if we can’t eat the damn thing, well, why put it in the garden to begin with? That would be one question. And, You made us, and then You told us not to eat this, knowing perfectly well that the first thing we were going to do is eat it. Because people are of exactly that type—which is that if you say to them, with their insatiable curiosity, “This is all fine and nice, but over here is something you should never look at,” and then you leave the room… it’s like everybody is over there trying to figure what the hell that thing is instantly, right? Because we’re curious, curious, curious, curious creatures.

And so you have to wonder exactly what God was up to here. And there’s Gnostic speculation that the original God was not really a very good God—He was kind of an unconscious, evil God—and that He wanted His creation to be unconscious and so forbade them from developing consciousness. And that it was a higher god who, maybe in the form of the serpent, who tempted human beings towards consciousness. And you know, that idea got scrubbed out of classic Christianity pretty early, although there’s something that’s interesting about it. And there are remnants of it in different forms that stayed inside the story—like the idea that the Fall was, you know, a terrible tragedy, but on the other hand, it was the precondition for the greatest event in history, which was the birth of Christ and the redemption of mankind.

So, it’s complicated. Let’s put it that way. God only knows what God was up to, but you know, this is a good example of that ambivalence to me again. That it’s an indication of the sophistication of the people who put these stories together. I also consider this somewhat miraculous because, you know, if you were just a simple propagandist of sorts, you wouldn’t leave this sort of complexity in the text. You’d just get rid of that. Because if you’re a propagandist, everything is supposed to make sense along the ideological plane, and here God is supposed to be good. It’s like, well, we better get there to that line because something’s up with it. It’s obvious what it is. But that isn’t what people did. And to me, that indicates that they were doing two things: as they were trying not to be too careless with the traditions that they were handed—they were touching them at their peril, they were very careful with them—and also that they were actually trying to understand what was going on. Because why otherwise keep this? Why not just simplify it? Or maybe just attribute this to the devil? That would be easier than having God do it.

The Naming of the Animals
“And the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.’ And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all the cattle (and ‘cattle’ means ‘animals’ basically) and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.”

Okay, well, a couple of things there. Speculation number one: it’s like, why does God care what Adam calls the animals? And the answer that seems to be is associated again with the magic of speech, right? So that we know, according to the story, that human beings were already made in the image of God, and that God used language in order to call order forth from chaos. And that human beings were made in that image, and so there’s an echo of that here, even though it’s from an independent tradition. And the echo is: the thing isn’t quite real till you name it. And that’s quite… and that’s an interesting thing.

And we don’t exactly know how far that extends. It’s certainly the case that, like, “seeing things”… things often exist in a strange potential form, an interconnected form where everything’s confusing, like a massive confusion. Before you put your finger on it and name it, “What’s going on here?” You name it, it’s like you carve it out from all that underlying chaos, it makes it into a grip… a thing you can then contend with. And you might say, “Well, it was real before you named it.” It’s like, well, yes, it was real before you named it the same way things are “there” when there’s no one there to perceive them. And it isn’t obvious how things are “there” when you’re not there to perceive them.

I’ll tell you something bloody weird about perception. You can look this up: John Wheeler. John Wheeler’s a physicist. So here’s a really cool thing. Let’s say you go outside at night and you look up and you see a star. And like, so a photon from that star enters your eye. Then maybe that photon has been cruising along for like 30 million years. Do you know that that photon would not have been emitted from that star at that time if your eye wasn’t there at that time to receive it? You think, “Well, how the hell can that be? Because it happened 20 million years ago!” It’s like, well, I don’t know how it can be, to tell you the truth, but I know that John Wheeler has done a very good job of detailing out why that’s true and necessarily true.

And so, Wheeler is also the physicist who developed the notion of “it from bit,” and he believes that the world is best construed as… the potential of the world is best construed as a place of information. It’s something like “latent information.” And that what consciousness does is transform the latent information into something like concrete reality. He doesn’t mean that metaphorically. And one of the cases that he makes in that regard is this story that I just told you: is that the photon couldn’t have left from where it was unless it had a place to go.

Now, it’s complicated and confusing because from the perspective of a beam of light—from a photon—there is no time and there’s no distance from one point to another. Which, of course, that’s completely impossible to understand. But from the perspective of a photon, the universe is completely flat perpendicular to the direction that the photon is traveling. So it’s “there” and “here” at the same time. For us, it’s not; it’s like 20 million years ago. But for the photon, it’s all here and now.

Anyways, the reason I’m telling you all that is because the relationship between consciousness and reality is by no means straightforward. It is seriously not straightforward. And physicists… physicists debate what the relationship is between consciousness and reality, and they debate about what the sort of phenomena that I just described mean. And I’m not really qualified to enter into that debate because I’m not a physicist. But I do know, and I’ve read It From Bit of Wheeler’s—at least as much of it as I can understand—and I do at least know that that’s what he claimed. And I also know that that claim is not… that’s a claim that’s taken seriously among physicists of the caliber of the physicists who can understand Wheeler.

So that’s pretty interesting. So anyways, there is emphasis again on this importance of naming in order to make things real, you know? And sometimes people won’t name things just so they don’t become real. So, you know, if you’re… if you have a relationship, which undoubtedly you do, and it has problems, which undoubtedly it does—you bloody well know that lots of times there’s something under the carpet that no one wants to name. And everybody’s thinking, “Well, as long as we don’t name it, it’s not really there.” And in some sense, it really isn’t there, because you could act as if it’s not there and get away with it, at least for short periods of time. The second you name that thing, it’s like you give it form and it’s there, and no one can ignore it. And that’s annoying because then you have to deal with it, or face the consequences.

But the reason I’m telling you that is because we have an intuition, even, that we can have things not exist by not naming them. You name it, and it comes forward with staggering clarity. And it’s not as if naming it is the only thing that gives it reality, but it is something like… it sharpens it, brings it into focus, and gives it borders and barriers, and borders and boundaries. And so, anyways, God’s interested enough in what Adam has to say that He has him name all the animals. And that sort of makes them into animals.

Now, there’s more to the linguistic story than that. So, the social psychologist Roger Brown was one of the ones who studied this really interesting phenomena, which is associated with the relationship between perception and action. You know how a kid will call a particular animal a “cat”? Well, the word “cat” is very short, like the word “dog.” And it turns out that, you know, you could think that we could perceive cats as multicellular organisms—like we could see the cells, we could see the molecules, we could see the atoms, or we could see the ecosystem that the cat is part of. But we don’t. Or maybe the broader mammalian classification that it’s part of—we could perceive that as the unit of perception, but we don’t. We perceive things at the level of “cat.”

And you can tell the perceptual level that people naturally perceive at—which doesn’t seem to be socio-culturally determined to any great degree, by the way—because the words are often short and easily remembered and early learned. And so there’s this level of analysis, out of all the possible levels of analysis that the world does exist at, that we perceive it at. A certain level of analysis. And that level of analysis seems to have something to do with the world’s functional utility for us at that level. And the perception at that level and the naming at that level gives things a reality at that level.

You know, because the thing about things is that they’re not easily separable from other things. They’re tangled together in all sorts of strange ways. And yet, when we cast our eye and use our language to orient ourselves in the world, we cut things up into discrete, discriminable objects that we can then utilize. And there’s something about that that makes them real in a way that their interconnected potential—the interconnected potential that they were before that—it’s not real in the same way. At least, I think it’s even less real. I think that’s the right way of thinking about it, even though it’s not completely unreal. But it’s an echo. Adam’s a little God at that point, a little God the Father. And God’s already done the groundwork, but Adam has to come along and say, “Well, that’s a cat.” It’s like, poof—whatever that is, is now a cat. And that’s a dog, and that’s a sheep. And you know, it gives them… it gives them something like pragmatic form.

The Union of Man and Woman
But for Adam, there was not found an help meet for him. “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

That’s a walloping statement to put in there at the end of those three sentences. And “therefore” comes as somewhat of a surprise, but there’s an injunction there. Well, it’s a good injunction, man. I’ll tell you: people who don’t do that, they have a hell of a time in their marriage. And so this is a good thing to know if you are married or if you’re planning to get married. It’s like, you know, we have a very strong orientation towards our parents, and for good reason. But the injunction here is that that’s secondary once you’re married. And failure to do that makes your marriage collapse—and then you deserve it to collapse, as far as I’m concerned—because it’s a reflection of your pathological immaturity and your unwillingness to extract yourself from the, you know, talon-like grip of parents who are a little bit too much on the interfering side.

But the injunction… there’s a deep injunction here, it’s very complicated. So one of the ideas is that the original Adam wasn’t a man—like, a separate man—it was more like a hermaphroditic being. And in that hermaphroditic being, there was a kind of undifferentiated perfection, and then that was split into male and female. And then, part of the goal of human beings is to reunite that as the singular unity that reestablishes the initial perfection. And that’s actually the goal of marriage from a spiritual perspective. And you could read about that if you read Jung, because he wrote quite a bit about that.

So lovely, it’s such a good idea. So, I had these friends that went to Sweden to get married. They were Northern—they were from Northern Alberta—but their heritage, both their heritages, were Swedish. And in this ceremony they did this cool thing. Yes, they were being married, and they had to hold a candle up between them while they were being married. And you think, “Well, okay, what’s the candle?” That’s a source of light; the source of illumination. Right? The source of enlightenment. It’s the candle that you put on Christmas trees in Europe. So it’s the light that emerges in the darkness, in the depth of winter. It’s a symbol of life in darkness. It’s the reemergence of the sun at the darkest, coldest time of the year, which is also associated symbolically with the birth of Christ for all sorts of complicated reasons.

And so the candle is all that. And then the next question is: why do you hold it above you? And the answer is because what’s above you is what you’re below to. So it’s… simplify… something transcendent. And so why do you both hold on to it? Well, because you’re both supposed to hold on to the light, right? And you’re supposed to be subordinate to the light. And so you ask, “Well, who’s in charge in marriage?” Well, the light. That’s the idea.

So you come together as one thing; you’re no longer two things. It isn’t what’s good for you and it’s not what’s good for your wife; it’s what’s good for the marriage. And the marriage is about the combined being, which is the reassembly of the original… hermaphroditic being at the beginning of time. That’s the idea, and that’s all packed into like these four sentences. And you know, there’s been… well, all of these sentences have a tremendous history of interpretation associated with them, right? It’s just endless and endless and endless.

And that’s one of the lines. And so it’s also an antidote to the idea that woman, taken out of man—which is obviously the reverse of the biological process, by the way—makes women in some sense subordinate to man. That is not built into this text. I don’t see that at all is built into the text. And there’s something else that’s associated with it, too.

Consciousness and the Archetypal Rescue
There’s an idea that, you know, in Sleeping Beauty… you know, Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep. And the reason she goes to sleep is because—you have to remember what happens—is she has parents who are quite old and so they’re pretty desperate to have a child, like so many people are now. And they only have one child, like so many people do now. And they wanted it to happen to this child because, like, hey, it’s a miracle and there’s only one of them. And so she’s the princess. And so it’s like, “We’re not letting anything around here.”

So they have a big christening party, right? And they invite everybody, but they don’t invite Maleficent. And Maleficent is the Terrible Mother; she’s Nature. She’s like the thing that goes bump in the night; she’s the devil herself, so to speak. She’s everything that you don’t want your child to encounter. So the King and Queen, saying, “Well, we just won’t invite her to the christening”—it’s like, good luck with that. That’s an Oedipal story, right? The Oedipal mother is the mother who devours her child by refusing… by overprotecting him or her. So that instead of being strengthened by an encounter with the terrible world, they’re weakened by too much protection. And then when they’re let out into the world, they cannot live.

And that’s the story of Sleeping Beauty. And that’s what the King and Queen do. And they apologize to Maleficent when she first shows up and say, “Well, you know,” they have a bunch of half-witted excuses why they didn’t invite her. “We forgot.” Like, I don’t think so. You know, you don’t forget something like that. And she kind of makes that point. It’s like, the whole horror of life—you don’t forget about that when you have a child, that’s for sure. You might wish that it would stay at bay, but you do not forget about it. The question is: do you invite it to the party?

And the answer is: it bloody well depends how unconscious you want your child to be. And if you want your child to be unconscious, well, then you have the added advantage that maybe they won’t leave home, and so you can take advantage of them for the rest of your sad life instead of going off to find something to do for yourself. Well, and then of course you can take revenge on them if they do have any… any what would you call it, impetus towards courage that you sacrificed yourself 30 years ago and want to stamp out as soon as you see it developing in your child. That’s another thing that would be quite pleasant. And so that’s what happens in Sleeping Beauty, yeah.

Well, none of this is pleasant, and nothing that happens in that story is pleasant. So Sleeping Beauty—she’s naive as hell. They put her out in the forest and have her raised by these three, like, goody-two-shoes fairies that are also completely devoid of any real potency and power, right? There’s nothing Maleficent about them. And then the first idiot prince that wanders by, she falls in love with so badly that she has post-traumatic stress disorder when he rides off on his horse. Great. That’s what happened.

And then she goes into the castle and she’s all freaked out because she met the love of her life for like five minutes, for God’s sake. And you know, that’s when the spinning wheel—that’s the Wheel of Fate—pops up, and she pricks her finger. Right? They tried to get rid of all the spinning wheels; they tried to get rid of all the wheels of fate with her pointed end. But she finds it, pricks her finger, and falls down unconscious. Well, she wants to be unconscious, and no bloody wonder. She was protected her whole life; she’s so damn naive that her first love affair just about kills her. She wants to go to sleep and never wake up.

And so that’s exactly what happens. And then she has to wait for the prince to come and rescue her. Well, you think: “How sexist can you get, that story?” Well, seriously, because that’s the way that that would be read in the modern world. It’s like, “She doesn’t need a prince to rescue her.” That’s why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.

So you can say, you can say, “Well, the princess doesn’t need a prince to rescue her.” But you know, that’s a boneheaded way of looking at the story, because the prince isn’t just a man who’s coming to rescue the woman—and believe me, he’s got his own problems, right? He’s got a whole goddamn dragon he has to contend with. But the prince also represents the woman’s own consciousness. The consciousness is presented very frequently in story as symbolically masculine, as it is with the Logos idea. And the idea is that without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. And so you can read it as: well, the woman who’s sleeping needs a man to wake her up. And of course, just like a man needs a woman to wake him up. It’s the same damn thing; that’s the dragon fight in Sleeping Beauty.

But it’s also the case that if she’s only unconscious, all she can do is lay there and sleep—like the sleep of the naive and damned. She has to wake herself up and bring her own consciousness—or own masculine consciousness—into the forefront so that she can survive in the world. Of course, women are trying to do that like mad. But that’s partly what’s represented in the story like that. And that’s partly what’s implicit in this idea: is that unless the woman is taken out of man, so to speak, then she isn’t a human being; she’s just a creature. And that’s partly what’s embedded in this story. So you don’t want to read it as a patriarchal… you want to read anything that way. So really, it’s… yeah, I won’t bother with that, but really, we can do better than that, man.

The Commitment of Marriage
“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” It’s like, yeah. The other thing about marriage—this is really worth knowing too, is that I’ve learned this in part from reading Jung—it’s like: what do you do when you get married? That’s easy. You take someone who’s just as useless and horrible as you are, and then you shackle yourself to them, and then you say, “We’re not running away no matter what happens.”

Yeah, well, that’s perfect, because then you don’t get to run away. And the thing is, like, if you can run away, you can’t tell each other the truth. Because if you tell someone the truth about you and they don’t run away, they weren’t listening. And so if you don’t have someone around who can’t run away, then you can’t tell them the truth. And so that’s part of the purpose of the marriage: it’s like, okay, okay, I’ll bet on you, you bet on me. It’s a losing bet; we both know that. But given our current circumstances, we’re unlikely to find anyone better, that’s for sure.

You know, there’s two things that come off of that. One is, you know, people are waiting around to find Mr. or Mrs. Right. It’s like, here’s something to think about, man, to put yourself on your feet right: if you went to a party and you found Mr. Right, and he looked at you and didn’t run away screaming, that would indicate that he wasn’t Mr. Right at all. Right? It’s like the old Nietzschean joke: if someone loves you, that should immediately disenchant you with them. Right? Or it’s the Woody Allen joke: “I’d never belong to a club that would take me as a member.”

So, so that’s a… that’s an interesting, that’s a very interesting thing to think about. And so you’re going to shackle yourself to someone who’s just as imperfect as you are, and then the issue is: you might be in a situation where you can actually negotiate. Because you might say, “Well, there’s some things about you that aren’t going so right, and there’s some things about me that aren’t going so right, and we’re bloody well stuck with the consequences for the next 50 years. So we can either straighten this out, or we can suffer through it for the next five decades.”

And you know, people are of this or that… without that degree of seriousness, those problems will not be solved. You’ll leave things unnamed because there’s always an “out,” like… and it’s the same thing when you’re living together with someone. You know that people who live together before they’re married are more likely to get divorced, not less likely. And the reason for that is: what exactly are you saying to one another when you live with each other? Just think about it. “Well, for now, you’re better than anything else I can trick, but I’d like to reserve the right to trade you in conveniently if someone better happens to stumble into me.”

Well, how could someone not be insulted to their core by an offer like that? Now, they’re willing to play along with it because they’re going to do the same thing with you. Now, well, that’s exactly it, and it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I know you’re not going to committo me so that means you don’t value me or our relationship above everything else but as long as I get to escape if I need to then I’m willing to put [up] with that.” It’s like that’s a hell of a say I mean you might think how stupid [is] it to shackle yourself to someone it’s like it’s stupid man. There’s no doubt about that but compared to the alternatives it’s pretty damn good because without that shackling there are things you will never ever learn because you’ll avoid them you can always leave and if you can leave then you don’t have to tell each other the truth. It’s as simple as that because you can just leave and then you don’t have anyone you can tell the truth to.

So there are some representations of the idea of the original… it’s not… this isn’t all Adam. This is… this is an old Chinese symbol. I think it’s Fuxi and Nüwa—I think I have the pronunciation wrong—but it’s really cool. See? See the snakes down here? They’re kind of like a DNA symbol, which I find very interesting. And so that’s the original Cosmic Serpent. That’s sort of the potential out of which that emerges, and then that’s the differentiation of that into male and female.

And so that’s like the predatory unknown—that’s one way of thinking about it. That’s the most fundamental conception of mankind is something like that: is the predatory unknown, and then the bifurcation of that into the two fundamental cognitive elements of human perception: masculine and female. And you see the same thing here. This is Chinese; this is Egyptian, also extraordinarily old. It’s the… it’s the great serpent that underlies everything, bifurcating itself into Isis, Queen of the Underworld, and Osiris, King of order.

You see the same thing in an old alchemical symbol. I love this one. It looks quite a lot like the little thing that Harry Potter chases around… it—yeah, and that’s not accidental, by the way. Because the seeker is the thing—the thing that chases this. And the seeker that chases this and catches it, wins. And that’s a really old idea. And how the hell J.K. Rowling knew that, I cannot figure out, because that is a very, very archaic symbol… arcane symbol. On Google, it’s called the “Round Chaos,” and the only reference to the Round Chaos that I can find on Google is on my webpage. And so I have no idea how Rowling came up with that—I mean, I know she looked at a lot of old texts—but the idea that if you play the meta-game and you catch this, you win all the games, is exactly right. And that’s the motif for… what’s the name of that? Quidditch.

Yeah, so there’s the potential—that’s like the potential out of which God made the world at the beginning of time. And what emerges out of that is some kind of… that’s a dragon, you know? That in the dragon fight, that’s partly the serpent that’s in the Garden of Eden. And then that’s the manifestation of masculine and feminine out of that potential predatory unknown. Masculine and feminine… it’s like a single… it’s like a single representation of the evolutionary history of human cognitive consciousness. So cool. And that’s also an image of the ideal: it’s the union of sun and moon, and it’s this hyper-creature, hermaphroditic. It’s also the Adam and Eve that existed at the beginning of time before the Fall, and it’s the purpose of marriage. All of that as a sacrament, all of that in these images—it’s just absolutely unbelievable what images can pack into them.

Vulnerability and the Emergence of Shame
And there’s more classical representations of Eve being extracted from Adam. And this is a cool line: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” Well, that… see, someone who wrote that would only write that like that if they were surprised that they weren’t ashamed. Because why would you point it out otherwise?

And so there’s this intimation of two things. Number one is: there was a point in time when human beings were naked and they weren’t ashamed of it. And there is a point of time, which is now, where they’re naked and they are ashamed of it. And then the question is, well, what’s the association with nakedness and shame? And that’s all often given a sexual connotation in classic interpretations of the Adam and Eve story because of its association with nudity, I presume, but I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.

So you think… I know I would notice my daughter… she probably won’t be very happy that I’m revealing this in this lecture, but my daughter was never really concerned about nudity when she was a little kid. All the same to her, one way or another. But my son, by the time he was three—man, that kid was private. His bedroom door was shut; the bathroom door was shut. It was like, “Get the hell out of here.” And that seemed to just happen of its own accord. And you know, we had two children, and one was like that, the other one wasn’t. I didn’t think we had much to do with it at all, but it was really fascinating to watch that emerge in him.

And you know, that sense of self-consciousness does seem to emerge in children somewhere around the age of three. And you know, that’s generally also when we start thinking that maybe having your baby wander around naked on a beach isn’t exactly the best idea. There’s something like that. Nudity in children is generally okay under some circumstances; in public display, we seem to think of that as merely acceptable. Why? I don’t know why it stops being acceptable. Well, that has something to do with sexuality, obviously, but it’s a very complicated phenomena.

But you know, that whole nudity thing is… is a very complicated thing. I mean, first of all, people are kind of strange because we’re hairless, roughly, you know, compared to most animals. And we don’t know why that is. Some people think it’s because we lost our hair when we were wandering around in the desert, running around in Africa, because we’re really, really good runners. We can run down animals. Say, like, a human being in good shape can run a horse to death in a week. We can really run, man. And a lot of our ancestors, the Kalahari Bushmen, still do this—they just run an animal until it dies. And the Bushman doesn’t die. I mean, they also sometimes shoot them with poison arrows, but they can just run them till they die. So we have tremendous endurance, and you have to be able to get rid of a lot of heat if you’re going to run around in the desert, so we don’t have much hair. That’s one explanation.

And Buckminster Fuller had an interesting explanation, which was he thinks that at some point during our evolution we spent a lot of time near the water. And so we’re like fish-apes, something like that. Well, you know, we like to be on the beach, and there’s lots of food there, and we like to swim, and we’re really good at swimming for terrestrial creatures. And we cry salt tears like some seagoing creatures, and women have a layer of subcutaneous fat like some seagoing creatures, and we have kind of… our feet are—which are very odd things—are kind of good for flapping in the water, although we can also walk with them. And so he thought that maybe that adaptation was to water existence, like seals and so forth. Like, we kind of went back to the ocean but not quite.

But anyways, the evolution of that hairlessness is an interesting thing, but it certainly does make us exposed to the world in a way that animals that have a covering of fur aren’t. And then we’re upright, which is very strange because most animals aren’t; they’re on all fours and so their very vulnerable parts are protected and not exposed to view. And then, of course, when you’re standing up nude, your psychophysiological quality is on painful display.

Right? And people complain about that all the time. You know, if you look at the feminist tack, for example, on beauty: the idea that women have eating disorders is directly attributed to the presence of too many beautiful women on the cover of magazines. Something like that. Even though women buy those magazines, and they’re attracted to them, and their mood goes up when they purchase them. And if the stimulus was negative, the women would avoid the magazines and not buy them. So as a theory, it’s a very, very bad one. But it’s still the case that standards of beauty shame people, and that’s for sure. And everyone! Because if you’re not ugly now, man, you’re going to be at some point in your life.

So that’s kind of a rough thing to contend with, right? It’s a rough thing to know that there’s an ideal that you could be, and maybe even one that you’re not going to be for long, or never were. And it’s really an appalling issue because I think it’s harder on women, because women are judged by men more for their youth and fertility—that’s how it turns out from the evolutionary point of view. Men are judged more on their socioeconomic status by women. It’s harsh both ways. But so anyways, it’s a terrible thing to carry the knowledge with you that you’re exposed to the most serious possible evaluation of the quality of your being that you can possibly be exposed to all the time. And that that’s further amplified if you’re without clothing. And so part of clothing is protection, but a tremendous amount of it is merely stopping other people from evaluating you too harshly all the time. It just gets in the way.

The Serpent and the Intellect
Anyways, this story makes the case that at some point we were like that. Well, animals are like that, so it seems perfectly plausible that at some point we weren’t like that, but at some point that changed. “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, ‘Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?'”

I like this. This is… oh, I can’t remember who did the etching. Who is it? Gustave Doré, yeah. Doré exactly. Doré did etchings for Paradise Lost that are absolutely remarkable. And this is Satan, and this is the snake here. And of course, in the Genesis story, Satan is weirdly associated with the snake. And I’ll tell you, that’s a tough one to sort out because in the story of Adam and Eve, there’s no indication whatsoever that the serpent who tempts Eve is also Satan, the author of all evil. And how in the world those two stories got tangled together… well, I think I figured that out, and I’m going to tell you that tonight. But it took a very long time to figure it out, and it’s absolutely… it’s so bloody brilliant. I just can’t believe that people figured it out; it’s so unbelievably, spectacularly brilliant. And that’s an intimation of that idea, right? That there’s a kinship between these two things.

Anyways, “the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field.” “Subtil” is an interesting word. This is from the Oxford English Dictionary. So, because we’ll amplify the word a bit—this is what you do in Jungian dream interpretation, for example, is to kind of look at the connotations of the concepts that are associated with the dream. “Subtle: Of a person or animal and action/behavior: crafty, cunning, sly, treacherous.” So it’s something that sort of sneaks along, right? It’s not something that you really pick up on that easily. “Of a look or glance: sly, furtive, surreptitious. Of a person: skillful, expert, clever. Of a work of art/mechanical device: cleverly made or designed, ingenious.”

Well, I think that’s all fairly… all those terms so far are fairly well attributed to snakes. I mean, they are very cool things, and they are very well designed. They’re quite remarkable, and they’re also very subtle. “Of the nature of or involving careful discrimination of fine points or fine points difficult to understand and abstruse. Of a person/the mind/intellectual activity: characterized by wisdom and perceptiveness, discriminating, discerning, and shrewd.”

That’s interesting because Milton’s Satan is also the intellect. And you know, you see that very often—the bad guy is an evil scientist, right? And there’s something about… and then you see the same thing in The Lion King with Scar. I mean, Scar’s an intellect and arrogant, deceitful intellect. There’s nothing stupid about Scar; he’s not wise, but he’s the evil voice that’s always whispering in the King’s ear. And that’s associated with the pride of the intellect. And the Catholics had warned humanity about the pride of the intellect for centuries. That’s partly what produced somewhat of the schism between Catholicism and science, although that’s much overstated if you look at the historical record. The idea was that the intellect has its own particular… it’s a remarkable faculty. Let’s say it’s the highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom—that’s the way that Milton portrayed it—but it’s also the thing that can go most terribly wrong. Because the intellect can become arrogant about its own existence and accomplishments, and it can fall in love with its own products. And that’s what happens when you’re ideologically possessed, because you end up with a dogma—like, say, a human-constructed dogma in Solzhenitsyn’s words—that possesses you completely, of which you believe is 100% right. It eradicates the necessity for anything transcendent. And so that’s the “subtil” element of the intellect that’s associated symbolically with the snake in the garden of Paradise.

“Of a feeling, scent, sensation: acute and keen, involving distinctions that are fine or delicate, especially to such an extent as to be difficult to discern or analyze. Also almost imperceptible and elusive. Having little thickness or breadth: thin, fine. Subtil matter: rarefied, barely there at all.”

And the woman said unto the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, ‘Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.'”

And the serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

Sneaky. Subtle. It’s a nice story. The first thing is, for instance, the instant implication is: “Well, you can’t trust God.” So that’s pretty sneaky. And the next is: “He’s trying to pull a fast one on you.” And the next one is: “He’s trying to do that because He’s jealous, and He doesn’t want you to know things that He knows because that would be so good.” And He’s lying to you anyways because you’re not going to die. And if you eat it, contrary to what you’ve been informed, then all that’s going to happen is your eyes will be open and you’ll be like gods, knowing good and evil. That sounds pretty damn good.

So you know, Eve… but as she… and it’s no wonder she’s susceptible to such blandishments. And it’s quite interesting too because God tells Adam and Eve not to eat the damn fruit, but they never promise not to. Right? So they haven’t promised; they’ve just been told to. And, well, should they be obedient? Well, how obedient do you want your children to be? You want them to be obedient enough so they don’t get hurt, but disobedient enough so that they go up in the world and do something courageous—and they break some rules so that they learn some things. And so you know, it’s a very paradoxical story.

Co-Evolution and the Price of Vision
Anyways, the serpent won this round, man. And so Eve pays attention to the snake. So again, we have the same set of images, right? We have Adam and we have Eve, we have this tree, and we have this strange serpent that’s a dragon-like form, a sphinx-like form that’s associated with the tree. The snake is eternally associated with the tree. Well, the snake was eternally associated with the tree! We spent, God only knows how many tens of millions of years as tree-dwelling primates, and one of our primary predators… we had three primary predators: snakes, birds, cats. And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. And the lesson the snake tells people is, “You bloody well better wake up, or something you don’t like will get you.”

And who’s going to be more susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve. And the reason for that is: Eve has offspring, and there’s nothing tastier to a snake than a child. And so Eve had every reason to be self-conscious and neurotic. And women are more self-conscious and neurotic than men by quite a substantial amount, and that’s true cross-culturally, and it emerges at puberty. And part of the reason is, as far as we can tell, is that women are more sexually vulnerable. They’re also smaller, so that’s a problem if you’re engaged in a physical altercation.

But most importantly, I think, is: why would you ever assume that a human female’s nervous system is adapted to her well-being? Why wouldn’t you assume instead that her nervous system is adapted to the female-infant dyad? Because if it isn’t, then the infants die. And so you might take… well, women are way more susceptible to depression and anxiety than men are—that’s a hell of a burden to bear—and that’s also true cross-culturally, by the way, and it also kicks in at puberty. And the biggest differences are in Scandinavia, for those of you who think it’s socio-cultural (which it isn’t). But there’s reasons for it, you know? And it’s also at puberty when men and women start to become sexually dimorphic in terms of size, and men are way more powerful in their upper bodies—it’s incomparably more powerful—and so that makes them a lot more dangerous. The primary human defense mechanism is punching. Chimps can punch too, but human beings… it’s a punch, and most of the force in that is upper-body and shoulder. And so a woman’s no match for a man in a fight. So she has every reason to be nervous, especially when you add that to her additional sexual vulnerability and the fact that she has to take care of extraordinarily dependent infants who are extremely fragile for a very long period of time.

And so she had every… and women are more self-conscious than men. The empirical literature on that is clear; it’s associated with trait Neuroticism because self-consciousness is actually an unpleasant emotion. Who wants to be self-conscious? If I’m self-conscious on the stage talking to you, then all of a sudden I can’t even talk to you—all I’m doing is thinking about me and all the things that are wrong with me, and I fall inside myself. It’s like… self-consciousness, although it’s a great gift, let’s say, is nothing pleasant. It’s associated primarily with anxiety.

So we’ve had every reason to pay attention to the snake, that’s for sure. I think I read this week that among—I can’t remember which tribe it was, unfortunately, although I did put a footnote in my new book about this—these were jungle-dwelling tribal people: 5% of the adults had been attacked by a python, and a substantial number of children had been killed by them. So snake predation was no joke. It shaped our evolutionary past and still is no joke in many places. And so we’re attuned to snakes.

And the thing is, as Lynne Isbell pointed out (an anthropologist), we are really good at detecting the camouflage patterns of snakes, especially in the lower half of our visual field. And there’s evidence that part of the reason that human beings have such acute vision—which means that our eyes “opened,” let’s say—is because we co-evolved with snakes and we learned how to see them. And then the price we paid for seeing was that our brain grew, because you need a lot of brain to be able to see. And the consequence of our brain growing is one day we woke up and discovered the future—and the future is where all the snakes might live, instead of where they live right now.

So there’s that. And the same so-interesting images again. You see in this one you have the specter of death in the tree with the snake and the fruit. Now fruit is interesting—I already made the case that there’s a tight linkage between what you eat and information, right? A conceptual link as well as a practical link. But it’s also the case that we can see colors, and the question is why? And the answer is because we evolved to see ripe fruit! So in the story of Adam and Eve, human beings are given vision by the snake and the fruit, and that turns out to be correct. So isn’t that something?

Hypergamy and Selective Pressure
And then you think: what role do women play in relationship to men? Well, first, they make them self-conscious. Let’s not ever forget about that. Because I would say the primary role that women have in relationship to men is to make them self-conscious, and men don’t precisely like that. There’s nothing that will make a man more self-conscious than being rejected. And why? Because… why is he rejected? Well, obviously Mother Nature, in the guise of that particular woman, has said, “You’re not so bad for a friend, but there’s no reason that your genetic material should propagate itself into the future.” Right? Well, it’s not like men are exactly happy about being made self-conscious by women, right? It’s a major source of continual tension between men and women, and it’s no wonder.

But it’s also the case—and this is something really cool and interesting to know—you know, we diverged from the common ancestor between us and chimpanzees about six million years ago. Here’s why, at least in part: chimpanzee females are non-discriminant maters. They’ll mate with any male when they go into heat (which human females don’t). When they go into heat, then any male is allowed access. Now, the dominant males chase the subordinate males away, and so the dominant males are more likely to leave offspring, but it’s not because of the female choice. That’s not the case with human beings. Human females engage in hypergamy. And hypergamy is the tendency—this is also true cross-culturally, and it’s also quite… it’s just as extensive in Scandinavia (there’s a bit of attenuation but not much)—women mate across and up dominance hierarchies. Men mate across and down.

Okay? Well, that has to be the case, because obviously it has to work that way—if one goes up, the other has to go down. The socioeconomic status of a woman determines almost zero of her attractiveness towards a man, whereas the socioeconomic status of a man is a major determinant of his attractiveness towards a woman. And it isn’t just wealth, either, because that’s been tested. It’s his capacity to generate and be productive and to share. Because that beats the hell out of wealth—wealth can disappear, right? But the capacity to be productive and share, that’s a much more important element. And why not be chosen on the basis of that? Especially because women have to have infants, and infants make the women dependent. And the woman is just looking logically, rationally, and from an evolutionary perspective for someone who’s useful enough to give a tool and a hat.

So women make intense demands on men, and it’s no wonder. But the thing is, is that because women engaged in hypergamy, at least in part, we diverged quite rapidly from chimpanzees. Because the selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. Now, there’s two things that happened, as far as I can tell: the men competed for competence, let’s say. So the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best man to the top virtually by definition. And then the effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women, who are programmed to peel from the top, select them. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring. And that seemed to be what drove our cortical expansion, for example, which happened very, very rapidly over the course of evolutionary time.

So: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

Oh yes, and women share food. That’s a very strange thing, because most creatures don’t do that, right? Most animals don’t share food. Like, if you’re a wolf and you bring down something in a hunt, you eat your fill; the dominant creatures eat their fill, and then if there’s some left over, the subordinates get to eat too. But that isn’t how human beings work. We share food. Now you can imagine how that evolved, because lots of female creatures share food with their offspring. Okay, you don’t need much of a twist in that from an evolutionary perspective till you start to share food not only with your offspring, but with your mate. And that’s another way that you entice a mate: “We’re going to be better together than alone.” Well, that’s the offering of the fruit.

Well, what’s the self-conscious part? Well, here’s part of the bargain: “I’m going to wake you up, and partly I’m going to wake you up because you need to be woken up, because I have this infant that needs some damn care, so you bloody well better be awake.” And part of the bargain is, “I’ll offer you something—I’ll offer you some food.” And in response, we’re going to make a team. And that’s the deal, and that’s the human deal. And that’s why we’re more or less monogamous, and why we more or less pair-bond, and why something approximating marriage is a human universal—it’s cross-cultural. Now you can find exceptions, but who the hell cares? Just really, man, who cares? You look at the vast pattern, the vast pattern. Well, and the price we pay for having large brains is that we’re very dependent, and it takes a long time for us to get programmed. And because of that, we need relatively stable family bonding, and that’s basically what we’ve evolved. And you don’t get that without making men self-conscious. Because male creatures… why not impregnate and run? I mean, why the hell not? And that’s something to really, no kidding, like, that’s the thing to think about. It is not why men abandon their children—that’s the mystery. It’s why any men ever stick with them! That’s the mystery. Because you just have to look at the animal kingdom and… like, the simplest and easiest thing is always the most likely thing to occur. So it’s the exception—that long-term commitment—that needs explanation.

The Discovery of Death and Vulnerability
“She took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened (implying that before that they were closed) and they knew they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”

So that’s so interesting. So their eyes are open, which indicates that they weren’t to begin with. So whatever God created to begin with was kind of blind… in a way, but not blind in some strange way because they weren’t obviously wandering around in the garden bumping into trees. It was some sort of metaphysical blindness that’s been removed by whatever has just happened. And whatever’s just happened also made them realize that they were naked. Okay, so what sort of eye-opening is that? What does it mean to realize that you’re naked? It means to realize that you’re vulnerable. That’s what people discovered: “Oh, we can be hurt.”

So you’re a zebra in a herd of zebras, and there’s a bunch of lions around there laying on the grass. You don’t care. Those are “laying down lions.” Laying down lions are no problem. It’s standing up, hunting lions that are the problem. You’re not smart enough to figure out that laying down lions turn into standing up hunting lions, so you’re not like building a fort to keep the lions out. You’re just mindlessly eating grass. You’re not very awake. But that’s not what happens to human beings is they wake up and they think, “We’re vulnerable permanently. It’s never going away.” Right? It’s the recognition of that eternal vulnerability.

What happens? The first thing they do is clothe themselves? Well, what happens when you’re naked when you need protection from the world? Well, obviously, look—you’re all wearing clothes. You know why? Well, we’ve been doing that for a very, very long period of time; it’s tens of thousands of years at minimum. In fact, you can track more or less when clothing developed because you can do DNA testing of the kind of lice that cling to clothes rather than hair. And so we have a pretty good idea of when clothing emerged and of different types as well. So that’s quite cool.

But the point is, they’re naked and they think, “That’s not so good. We’re vulnerable.” So their eyes were open enough so they become self-conscious, and they recognize their own vulnerability. And the first thing they do is… the first step of culture is to protect themselves with something from the world. And you protect yourself from the world and from the prying eyes of other people.

This is the book by Lynne Isbell: The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent. Why we see so well. “From the temptation of Eve to the venomous murder of the mighty Thor, the serpent appears throughout time and culture as a figure of mischief and misery. The worldwide prominence of snakes in religion, myth, and folklore underscores our deep connection to the serpent. But why, when so few of us have first-hand experience? The surprising answer this book suggests lies in the singular effect of snakes on primate evolution. Predation pressure from snakes, Isbell tells us, is ultimately responsible for the superior vision and large brains of primates and for a critical aspect of human evolution that was tested recently.”

Psychologists have known for a long time that people can learn fear to snakes, but they discovered in primates recently a set of neurons (pulvinar neurons) which are specialized. That’s an old, old perceptual system revealing neurobiological evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes. So that’s from 2013. So the snake definitely woke us up.

Color vision as an adaptation to fruit-eating in primates… it’s not by accident that women make themselves look like ripe fruit in order to be attractive to men, right? And that’s also not socio-cultural in origin.

“And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.”

That’s interesting. What’s the implication? Prior to being woken up, prior to recognizing nakedness and vulnerability, there is no reason for men and women to hide from God. Now, are they hiding from God while they’re naked? They’re vulnerable. Okay, so think about this. Think about this. It’s like… imagine that you have the capacity to live truthfully and courageously and forthrightly. Just imagine that. And then imagine why you might not do that. And then imagine: how about fear and shame? How would that work?

Well, let’s say that the idea of living forthrightly and truthfully and courageously is analogous—given what we already know about these stories—to walking with God in the garden. What stops people from doing that? What stops people from hiding? Well, it’s their own… it’s a recognition of their own inadequacy. They look at themselves and they think, “How in the world is a creature such as I supposed to live properly in this world with everything that’s wrong with me?” And so what do you hide from? Well, you go home, you sit on your bed for five minutes, and ask yourself, “What have you hidden from in your life, man?” You’ll have books of knowledge reveal themselves to you in your imagination, right? So, well, why are you hiding? Well, it’s no bloody wonder you’re hiding. It’s no wonder that people hide. That’s the thing that’s so terrifying about this story. We woke up and we thought, “Oh my God, look at this place. Like, this is serious. There’s some serious trouble here, and we’re in some serious trouble, and we’re not what we could be.”

And so we hide, and that’s what the story says. People woke up, they became self-conscious, they recognized their own vulnerability, and that made them—made them hide from manifesting their divine destiny. It’s like, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”

And the Lord Go—there, I love this part of the story, and it’s so funny. And the Lord God called—and we could use a little humor at this point—and the Lord God called him to Adam and said unto him, “Where art thou?” And Adam said, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked.” So, in case there was any doubt about that, that’s why. “And I hid myself.” And God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the tree wherefore I commanded you that you should not eat?”

And this is where Adam shows himself in all his post-Fall heroic glory. And the man said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” So that’s that… heard, man, that’s such… it’s so, you know.

Again, there’s a modern feminist interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve that makes the claim that Eve was portrayed as the universal bad guy of humanity for disobeying God and eating the apple. It’s like, fair enough, you know. Looks like she slipped up and then she tempted her husband, and you know, that makes her even worse, although he was foolish enough to immediately eat, so it just means she was a little more courageous than him… got there first. But it’s Adam who comes across as really one sad creature in this story, as far as I’m concerned. Well, c’mon—he manages in one sentence… it’s like, first of all, it wasn’t him, it was the woman. And he even blames God more than just the woman: “It was that woman, and you gave her to me, and she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” It’s like, so hey, Adam’s all innocent, except now he’s not only is he naked and disobedient and cowardly and ashamed, he’s also snivelly, backbiting—think he rats her out like the… and he gets the opportunity, and then he blames God.

It’s like—and that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right, man. You go online and you read… you read the commentary that men write about women when they’re resentful and bitter about women. You read it; it’s so interesting. It’s like, “It’s not me, it’s those bitches.” Okay, that’s right. “It’s not me, it’s them.” And not only that, “What a bloody world this is in which they exist.” It’s exactly the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing, and it is absolutely pathetic.

The Curse and the Protective Mother
All right. And the Lord God said unto the woman, “What is this that thou hast done?” And the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” Well, she has a bloody excuse. First of all, it’s a snake—I mean, those things are… we already found out they’re subtle. And second, it turns out that the damn snake is Satan himself, you know, and he’s rather treacherous. So the fact that she got tangled up in his mess, let’s say, is… well, problematic, but it’s a hell of a lot better excuse than Adam has.

And the Lord God says unto the serpent, “Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Snakes, by the way, are lizards that lost their legs, just so you know. “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

I love these pictures—they’re so smart. And again, strip the religious context from them and just look at them for a second. What do you see? You see the eternal mother holding her infant away from the snake. See it down there? Right? Crocodile, snake… everything predatory that’s been after us for like 60 million years. The reason we’re here is because of that. That’s why it’s a sacred image.

You know, this one I like even better. See, down there? There’s something like the moon, and then there’s a reptile down there that Eve is standing on. This is really old, and I showed you this before, but I think it’s so cool. She’s coming out of this thing that’s like a hole in the sky, you know, because it indicates the eternal presence of this figure. It’s something like that—the eternal recurrence of this figure. It’s an archetype. But then the potential out of which she is emerging… these are all musical instruments back here, and so what the artist is representing is the great patterns, complexity of being, and the emergence of the protective mother from that background, protecting the infant eternally against predation. It’s like, how can it not be a holy image? If it isn’t the holy image, if you don’t think it’s a holy image, then there isn’t something wrong with the image; there’s something wrong with the perceiver.

Unto the woman he said… well, God’s just outlining the consequences of this right now. It’s like, “Okay, well, now you’ve gone and done it. You’ve woken up. This is what’s going to happen: I’ll greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” (To say he “should” says he “will.”) Why in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children? Well, when you develop a brain that big so that you can see, it’s not that easy to give birth anymore. And then you produce something that’s dependent beyond belief, and that’s one of the things that you would say dooms you to precisely this.

The Invention of Work and History
So—that’s the punishment for waking up. And Adam… “Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, ‘Thou shalt not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” What’s that? The invention of work. “Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field.” It’s the invention of work. What do people do that animals don’t? Work. What does work mean? Means you’ve sacrificed the present for the future.

Why do you do that? Because you know you’re vulnerable, because you’re awake. And so from here on in, from this point, there’s no return to unconscious paradise. I don’t care how many problems you’ve solved so that today is okay—you’ve got a lot of problems coming up. And no bloody matter how much you work, you’re never going to work enough to solve them. And so all you’re going to do from here on in is be terrified of the future, and that’s the price of waking up. And that’s the end of paradise, and that’s the beginning of history, and that’s how that story goes.

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” And Adam called his wife’s name Eve because she was the mother of all living. Unto Adam also and unto his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them. That’s William Blake, by the way.

And the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever…” (I’ll go over this again next week.) Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Unit 731 and the Capacity for Evil
One more thing and then we’ll stop. So I thought, why in the world… so Adam and Eve are tempted by the snake, they eat the fruit, they wake up, they realize they’re naked, they realize that they’re vulnerable, they realize the future, they realize they’re going to die, they realize that they have to work. It accounts for difficulty in conception and the fall of humankind from unconscious paradise. Okay, that makes sense.

What about the knowledge of good and evil? What in the world does that mean? The Mesopotamians believed that human beings were made out of the blood of Kingu, who was the worst monster at the time… who was the goddess of chaos could imagine and then produce. So their idea was that whatever was about humanity, there was something deeply, deeply, deeply demonically flawed. So that’s their conception. And then some of that same milieu that these stories emerge… so what is opening your eyes and realizing your vulnerability have to do with the knowledge of good and evil?

Really, I thought about that. I really thought about that—I got to tell you, I thought about that for like 20 years because I knew there was something there that I could not put together. And at the same time, I was… I was reading things. I’m going to tell you something truly awful, and so if you need a trigger warning, you’re getting one—and believe me, I do not give trigger warnings lightly—so I’m going to tell you something you will never forget.

So this is what Unit 731 used to do in China—a Japanese unit during the Second World War, right? As far as I can tell, they did the most horrific things that were done to anyone during World War II, and that’s really something. So this is what they did: they took their prisoners and they would put them in a position so that their arms would freeze solid, and then they would take them outside and pour hot water over their arms, and then it would repeat that till the flesh came off the bones. And they were doing that to investigate the treatment of frostbite for soldiers.

You can look up Unit 731 if you want to have nightmares. So that’s Unit 731. That’s human beings. Someone thought that up and then people did it. That’s knowledge of good and evil. Here’s the key, man: you know you’re vulnerable. No other animal knows that. You know what hurts you. Because you’re vulnerable, now that you know what hurts you, you can figure out what hurts someone else. And as soon as you know what hurts someone else and you can use that, you have the knowledge of good and evil.

Well, it’s a pretty good trick that the snake pulled because it doesn’t look like it’s exactly the sort of thing that we might have wanted if we would have known what the consequence was. But as soon as a human being is self-conscious and aware of his own nakedness, then he has the capacity for evil, and that is—that’s introduced into the world right at that point.

The Internal Snake
And here’s the rest of the story. So there’s the snake, right? And you’re some tree-dwelling primate, and the snake eats you, and that sucks. So that’s like, “Let’s watch out for the damn snakes.” And then you think, well, wait a minute… your brain grows and you think, “Wait a minute. Well, there’s not just snake; there’s where snakes live. Why don’t we just get the hell out of the tree and go hunt down the snakes and get rid of them?” So those are sort of like potential snakes. And so the snake becomes potential snake, and it’s the same circuit that you’re using to do this thinking. And then you get rid of the damn snakes—it’s like St. Patrick chases the snakes out of Ireland, no more snakes, everything’s paradise.

It’s like, no. No, no, that’s not… that’s not how it works. No. Well, now you’ve got the human snakes. You’re a tribe, you’ve got tribal enemies, you got to defend yourself against the human snakes, right? So maybe your empire expands and you get rid of all the human snakes, and then what happens? Well, they start to grow, developed inside. It’s like, you get rid of all the external enemies and you make a big city, and all of a sudden there’s enemies that pop up inside.

Because the snake isn’t just the snake in the garden, and the snake isn’t just the possible snake, and the snake isn’t just the snake that’s your enemy. The snake is your friend! Right? Because your friend can betray you, and then it’s even worse than that because you can betray you. And so even if you get rid of all the outside snakes, you’ve got an inside snake, and God only knows what it’s up to. And that’s why the bloody Christians associated the snake in the Garden of Eden with Satan. It’s unbelievably brilliant! Because you got to think, what’s the enemy? Well, it’s the snake. Fair enough. But you know, that’s good if you’re a tree-dwelling primate, but if you’re a sophisticated human being, you know, with six million years of that additional evolution, and you’re really trying to solve the problem of what it is that’s the great enemy of mankind—well, it’s the human propensity for evil as such. Well, that’s the figure of Satan; that’s what that figure means.

Just like there’s a Logos that’s the truth that speaks order out of chaos at the beginning of time, there’s an antithetical spirit, the hostile brother—that’s Cain and Abel, which we’ll talk about next week—that’s doing exactly the opposite. It’s motivated by absolutely nothing but malevolence and the willingness to destroy, and it has every reason for doing so. And that’s what’s revealed in the next story in Cain and Abel. In one paragraph, the first glimmerings of that outside of the strange insistence by the Christian mystics, let’s say, on the identity between the snake in the Garden of Eden and the author of all evil himself.

Q&A: Abortion and Consciousness
Okay, so we only have 15 minutes today. I wanted to finish that, so apologies for going over a little longer. All right.

Question: Hi Dr. Peterson. Over the last couple weeks and further back, you talked a lot about consciousness and the importance of it. I was hoping to get your opinion on an issue of consciousness that has often seen Christianity among other groups and politics kind of clashed. So I’m hoping to get your views on any consciousness or lack thereof of a human fetus and how that impacts abortion, or whatever they are, and any legislation. Thank you.

Dr. Peterson: Thank you. Okay, so the first question is: do I have an answer for that that’s a good enough answer to actually reveal? I know I don’t, but I can flail about a little bit around it. Abortion is clearly wrong. I don’t think anybody debates that—you wouldn’t recommend that someone that you love have one. Okay. Now, having clarified that, that mere statement doesn’t eliminate the complexity of the situation. The first question is: should everything wrong be illegal? That’s a tough question. Everything that’s wrong isn’t illegal. Then there’s the additional complication of the difference, let’s say, in gravity regarding the problem in relationship to men and women, and we don’t know how to deal with that.

Having said that, I would say that it’s actually the wrong question. There’s something Leonard Cohen said once: he said that in a massacre, there’s no decent place to stand. And what he meant by that was sometimes you’re where there is no good decision left. No matter what you do, it’s wrong. So then the question is: how did you get there? Well, let’s say you’re in a position where you are inclined to seek an abortion. The question is: how did you get there?

Now, we have a lot to straighten out about the sexual relationships between men and women in the modern world. They’re bent and warped and demented out of shape. One of the things I see with young people, for example, is that they will engage in sexual acts with one another that they would not talk about with one another. I mean, couples will do that for that matter—like married couples will do that—but they’re married, that’s a different story. It seems to me that if you are willing to engage in a sexual act with someone with whom you would not discuss that act, you probably put the cart before the horse.

So the discussion regarding the legality of abortion is nested inside a larger discussion about the morality of abortion, and that’s nested inside a larger discussion about the proper place of sexuality in human behavior. And to me, that’s the level at which the problem needs to be addressed. Now, I don’t have the answer to that, you know, because the old answer was “get married.” That was a good answer, and it’s an answer that people should still listen to. But we’ll put that aside momentarily.

I had a client at one point who was—I don’t know, she was probably… I’m going to disguise her in a variety of different ways—she was 27 and had come from a relatively conservative background. Quite a timid, fearful person, and also not very… well, not sophisticated in relationship to relationships, and she never had sex. What was a bunch of things she’d never done? Well, the answer from me to her wasn’t “continue to be timid about everything,” because that wasn’t working out for her. She needed to go have some adventures.

Now, sexual adventures, like other adventures, are dangerous. And so you have to be very careful when you encourage people to go out and have adventures, but… but but too much timidity and caution also constitutes a pathway to perdition, let’s say. You can’t just say to people in the modern world, “Well, you know, no sex till you’re married,” unless you’re going to get married when you’re very young—and perhaps you should, I don’t know about that. But I don’t think that we’re mature enough as a culture to have a serious discussion about sexual propriety, especially in the aftermath of the birth control pill. And we seriously need to do that, and we haven’t. And so I think the eternal debate about abortion, horrible as it is, is a surface manifestation of a much deeper problem.

Now, I talked a little bit today about the utility of marriage—like, the spiritual utility of marriage—and that’s something that I think we’re so immaturely cynical as a culture… like, we don’t… we’re not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really think about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place that people could tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another. It signifies a place where sexuality can properly be integrated into life—that’s no easy task. It’s a place where children, at least in principle, can be put first and foremost as they should be once they exist. And so there’s a much broader discussion that has to happen, I think, before any concentration on the legality of abortion is liable to get anywhere at all. That’s what it looks like to me. So that’s the best I can do with that question.

Q&A: DNA and Speculation
Question: Hi Dr. Peterson! Earlier you showed a picture of Fuxi and Nüwa—yeah, right—and Osiris. And in your Maps of Meaning, you also explained that cultures around the world have these twin snakes—yeah, they’re everywhere, man—yeah. And so you mentioned that you believe this is a representation of DNA. You would bring that up… Jesus, what is it with you guys tonight? Huh? Yeah.

Dr. Peterson: Well, yeah. No, I wouldn’t say I believe that. I have my suspicions that that might be it, yeah. Because “believe” is too strong a word. But those representations are everywhere. And read this book—this is a good one… oh, man, now I have to remember… the book by an anthropologist who went down to the Amazon jungle and experimented intensively with Ayahuasca. I think it’s called The Cosmic Serpent. I think that’s the name of the book. You could read that. There’s another one called Breaking Open the Head, which is also pretty damn interesting. And there’s something to those books. I mean, The Cosmic Serpent kind of goes off on a bit of a tangent, I would say, although Breaking Open the Head is better—it seems to stay more constrained and tight.

But there’s… we don’t know the limits of our perception, especially under certain conditions. And I think people have had intimations of DNA as the Cosmic Serpent forever. So yeah! But that’s a… like, that’s way out on the frontiers of my knowledge, right? Like, I’m guessing in a dreamlike way when I’m making statements like that.

Questioner: Because you did mention that you did believe that there were sort of maybe some dreams and interpretations that might have emerged, but I don’t see how we could perceive DNA as it is.

Dr. Peterson: Right. Well, yes. We didn’t objectively, but I’m not so sure we didn’t subjectively. But it remains very strange that these double helixes exist in so many places and that they’re often utilized as healing symbols with the snake. So anyways, like I said, that’s… what do you call that? I’m—it’s not hypothesizing; it’s one thing worse than that: speculating. Those are speculations. I’m operating at the edge of my understanding. But our perceptions can… are very mutable, and we can see things under some conditions that you wouldn’t think that anybody could see. So, okay, yep.

Q&A: The Shadow and Choice
Question: So I was just starting to have a thought while you were talking about sort of getting to the end of the talk about the snake and the apple and so on. So what you’re saying is the moment that that… that Adam and Eve eat the apple, they become nervous or whatever, so that’s awareness of their own vulnerability. So then, like you said, it’s also awareness of their own capacity to do harm. So it’s like when they are eating the apple, then that’s them—their immediate sort of nervous reaction is because they ate the apple and they kind of became evil in that moment or something like that?

Dr. Peterson: Well, they woke up. And because they woke up and realized how they could be hurt—how they could and would be hurt over the upcoming overtime—it’s the same as the discovery… the discovery of your own nakedness and the discovery of time are very, very similar phenomena. I mean, sure, as soon as you know how you can be hurt, well, you know, if you are to just consult your evil fantasies, it’s like, “What’ll really hurt him?” “Oh, yeah, that would work.” It’s like, how do you know that? Well, you just think about it: “What would happen if that happened to me? That would hurt. Oh yeah! That’ll work.” It’ll hurt him or her. And you know, you probably think that way twice a week or maybe twice a day. Jesus, every time you have an argument with someone, all you have to do is look at the back of your mind a little bit. You don’t want to, that’s for sure, but if you do, you’ll see these sorts of thought processes generating constantly. It’s like, you know, in a back-and-forth discussion, particularly with people you love, it’s like you’re always looking for a place to put the knife in.

Questioner: So it seems really similar to me, or seems like they’re kind of discovering the kind of like Jungian Shadow within themselves. So that that is the moment where it got introduced into the human spirit?

Dr. Peterson: Sure. One of the things about the Shadow is that it’s also when you integrate that, that’s what makes you a substantial person, right?

Questioner: Oh, it’s like… it seems to me that on one hand, well, it seems like this tragedy that Satan—the most evil, the father of evil, whatever—has introduced into people. But it also seems like without that Shadow, that people are kind of insubstantial.

Dr. Peterson: So, yeah. Well, right. Right. I mean, like I said, I said that there’s been a multitude of interpretations emerge as a consequence of that story. What was God up to? Was God in fact evil, the initial God? Like, why would He create a snake? Why would He put it in the garden? Why would there be these trees? What the hell is going on with the whole Satan thing? You know, it’s very, very problematic.

Well, we’ll talk about it more. And then this again is… let’s call it speculation. Well, if you want to make something strong, you test it. And maybe if you want to make something ultimately strong, you test it ultimately. And I think that there’s an aspect of being that has that element: is that human beings are tempted ultimately. It’s partly because we know good and evil now, and so that’s the landscape in which we exist. So you could say: the landscape is across its chaos and order, and it’s good and evil, and we’re stuck in the middle between those two things. It’s a very common theme, by the way, in video games—exactly that: chaos, order, good, evil. It’s the basic plot of endless video games, and that’s perhaps because it’s the basic plot. Those are the things we have to contend with.

Well, I had a vision once—shouldn’t tell you this, but I will anyways. I had a vision once that I went to heaven and I was put in a Roman amphitheater with Satan. Just like Thor encountering the Hulk, right? That’s coming up in that new Avengers movie. So it was rather a shock because I thought, “There was a hell of a thing to happen in heaven.” And so I had this battle and I won, and at the end I came up to God and said, “Like, you know, what’s with the whole Roman amphitheater thing there? It seemed like it was over the top to me. Why would you put me in a ring with something like that?” And He said, “Because I knew you could win.”

And you know, I don’t know what to make of that (haha). One thing I should teach you to make of it is I shouldn’t tell you, but whatever. But you know, there’s something… there’s something to that in my estimation. It’s like: do you protect the people you love, or do you try to make them strong?

Questioner: So you think it’s that—it’s not that we have like Satan to thank for making us substantial—it’s that God gave us Satan in order to make us substantial?

Dr. Peterson: Well, I’d hesitate to say that because, you know, it’s so cut and dried. But I would say that there’s this… that’s a strong underlying theme in the biblical narrative, yes. Now, it’s certainly not the only theme; it’s not the only interpretation by any stretch of the imagination. But there is something there.

And there’s something there, you know, at the end—we didn’t talk about this—God puts up His flaming sword and these Cherubim to keep you away from the tree of life. It’s like, see, if paradise and immortality are the promised land, then what’s with the whole flaming angel and sword thing? We could have just had the damn fruit five thousand years ago and not bothered with the problem. Well, it seems to me that there’s something like… I don’t know what it is. Consciousness through tragedy? Clarity through suffering? Maybe something like that. Or maybe the perfection that lurks as a potential in the future is something that has to be earned rather than given. Maybe it has no value without free choice. Maybe we have to distinguish between good and evil now that we have the capacity to actually apprehend them. Maybe that’s what life is about. Maybe that’s the separating of the wheat from the chaff.

See, that’s the idea in Revelation, right? Because when Christ comes back in the book of Revelation, He divides the damned from the saved, and the saved are the people who lived in Logos, roughly speaking, and the damned are those who don’t. And so there’s this idea that there’s this dynamic that underlies experience that is, in fact, that sorting.

Now, I don’t know what to make of that at all, but that’s the story. But what I can make of that is that I… I can’t put a lever underneath the argument that I just made tonight about the relationship between the development of vision, the snake, the fruit, nakedness, time, the future, work, and most importantly, the emergence of evil. That seems to me to be… I cannot find a way to undermine that argument. It seems… I can’t break it. And that’s what I’m always looking for when I’m trying to formulate ideas: I’m trying to look for something that no matter how hard I try, I cannot break. And I can’t break that set of ideas. Now, what the full implication is of that set of ideas, God only knows, right?

But I could say also, practically, you know, one of the things that I’ve observed is that lies and deception destroy people’s lives, and when they start telling the truth and acting it out, things get a lot better.

Gotta stop.