Did Paul Twitchell borrow from other authors in his writings?

Discussion:

(too old to reply)

Etznab

2021-06-03 12:50:37 UTC

"Yes. [... .]"

https://www.eckankar.org/explore/faqs/

An example of Paul Twitchell using eck master fiction to portray the idea of an ancient teaching from an ancient lineage of masters.

"Anyone following the path of ECKANKAR cannot go through a day satisfied that he has read some truth in the morning or that he is going to hear some truth in the afternoon or evening. There must be a conscious realization of truth going on all the time. This does not mean he is going to neglect his human duties and activities. It means that he is going to train himself to have some area in his consciousness always active in truth. Whether we look at the forms of nature as trees, flowers, or oceans, or whether we are meeting people, we find some measure of God in each experience. We train ourselves to behold the presence and activity of God in everything around us and live within the Word."

(Eckankar borrowed, compiled, copied, paraphrased, plagiarized version - The Key to Eckankar, Paul Twitchell - pp. 41-42)

"The student of spiritual wisdom cannot go through his day, satisfied that he has read some truth in the morning, or that he is going to hear some truth in the afternoon or evening. There must be a conscious activity of truth going on all the time. That does not mean that we neglect our human duties and activities; it means that we train himself to have some area of consciousness always active in truth. Whether we look out at forms of nature such as trees, flowers, or oceans, or whether we are meeting people, we find some measure of God in each experience. We train ourselves to behold the presence and activity of God in everything around us and to abide in the Word."

(Joel Goldsmith version, Practicing The Presence - p. 23)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/82916572/Practicing-the-Presence-of-God-Joel-S-Goldsmith

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.religion.eckankar/c/p__qMg7U4Xg/m/DJCqZMDnCgAJ

So Paul Twitchell and Eckankar borrowed from other authors and, instead of crediting the authors, they made up fictional masters said to come from an ancient lineage of Eckankar masters? And this is the ancient teaching of Eckankar since the dawn of history?

But where are the real ancient masters? Where is the real ancient lineage?

Numerous books borrowed from were not written by ancient authors. So where are any real ancient masters who contributed? They are imaginary?

Personally I think Paul Twitchell and Eckankar made / make it up as they went / go along. And this is very different from information passed on by word of mouth from real masters in an unbroken ancient lineage. I wonder why people don't find this a necessarily important point to clarify?

Henosis Sage

2021-06-05 07:59:44 UTC

Permalink

Post by Etznab
"Yes. [... .]"
https://www.eckankar.org/explore/faqs/
An example of Paul Twitchell using eck master fiction to portray the idea of an ancient teaching from an ancient lineage of masters.
"Anyone following the path of ECKANKAR cannot go through a day satisfied that he has read some truth in the morning or that he is going to hear some truth in the afternoon or evening. There must be a conscious realization of truth going on all the time. This does not mean he is going to neglect his human duties and activities. It means that he is going to train himself to have some area in his consciousness always active in truth. Whether we look at the forms of nature as trees, flowers, or oceans, or whether we are meeting people, we find some measure of God in each experience. We train ourselves to behold the presence and activity of God in everything around us and live within the Word."
(Eckankar borrowed, compiled, copied, paraphrased, plagiarized version - The Key to Eckankar, Paul Twitchell - pp. 41-42)
"The student of spiritual wisdom cannot go through his day, satisfied that he has read some truth in the morning, or that he is going to hear some truth in the afternoon or evening. There must be a conscious activity of truth going on all the time. That does not mean that we neglect our human duties and activities; it means that we train himself to have some area of consciousness always active in truth. Whether we look out at forms of nature such as trees, flowers, or oceans, or whether we are meeting people, we find some measure of God in each experience. We train ourselves to behold the presence and activity of God in everything around us and to abide in the Word."
(Joel Goldsmith version, Practicing The Presence - p. 23)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/82916572/Practicing-the-Presence-of-God-Joel-S-Goldsmith
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.religion.eckankar/c/p__qMg7U4Xg/m/DJCqZMDnCgAJ
So Paul Twitchell and Eckankar borrowed from other authors and, instead of crediting the authors, they made up fictional masters said to come from an ancient lineage of Eckankar masters? And this is the ancient teaching of Eckankar since the dawn of history?
But where are the real ancient masters? Where is the real ancient lineage?
Numerous books borrowed from were not written by ancient authors. So where are any real ancient masters who contributed? They are imaginary?
Personally I think Paul Twitchell and Eckankar made / make it up as they went / go along. And this is very different from information passed on by word of mouth from real masters in an unbroken ancient lineage. I wonder why people don't find this a necessarily important point to clarify?

extract fwiw .... http://youtu.be/ifwThjdVVNU

34:52
one of Frances Yeats books on the
34:55
Hermetic tradition refers to the birth
34:57
of the Rosicrucian movement and the idea
35:00
we've talked about in other interviews
35:03
that there are these hidden masters who
35:06
are in touch with the perennial
35:08
philosophy and are in their own way
35:11
guiding the evolution of the human race
35:14
well this I said this kind of golden
35:17
chain of these teachers the sages who
35:21
pass on the teaching he not got absorbed
35:22
into the general kind of Western
35:26
esoteric kind of consciousness and and
35:29
it turns up in in different ways in
35:32
modern times I would say yes yes the
35:34
gross secretions were kind of the first
35:37
hidden masters in the sense that well we
35:39
don't even although maybe hidden dazeem
35:42
quite the right word because no one ever
35:44
any of them so they were they ever
35:45
existed not any real sense still remains
35:48
a kind of you know talking point as it
35:51
were but I mean the story is that the
35:54
early 1600s in Kassel Germany these sort
35:58
of pamphlets appeared announcing the
36:00
arrival of this Brotherhood on the
36:02
Brotherhood of the rosie cross and they
36:05
were announcing this general reformation
36:07
of europe and it was along the lines of
36:10
what i was talking earlier this kind of
36:11
new world of religious religious
36:14
tolerance and sort of sharing of
36:16
knowledge and also sort of healing the
36:19
healing the sick this was another part
36:21
of the the Rosicrucian thing with people
36:23
with the whole idea they would go and
36:25
share their medical knowledge and just
36:27
as jesus you know he healed this is one
36:29
of the things he did so and Hermes is
36:32
also sort of the inventor of medicine
36:34
and all things of that sort and over
36:39
different you know over time other
36:40
pamphlets appeared and people started
36:43
wondering who were these people because
36:44
they were saying please come and join us
36:46
if you want to take part in this
36:48
wonderful transformation that's going to
36:49
take place soon

.....

this was a period when edouard schure appeared too ... aka the twitch Rama story et al in twitch's spiritual notebook.

The Great Initiates by Edouard Schure 1884 - Thesophy Rudolph Stiener links
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-M0yAR0UPhPNXhNVFRFMjRyTDg/view

Twitch is much closer to a professor david lane or a Gary Lachman than everyone is willing to admit. and face up too.
he lacked the requisite university discipline for accuracy and evidence based conclusions (and maturity/honesty) is all.

Henosis Sage

2021-06-05 08:02:42 UTC

Permalink

Hi etz, came across this little video i'view as per the topic. all these kind of incestuous relationships // themes // ideas // ideologies // and similarities that arise and have done forever // for long long time. People keep arriving who re-invent the wheel in their own likeness // culture. (eg Twitchell//Hubbard and the brash american style of new age ,masters / guides in the 60s that arose)
The Hermetic Tradition and Hermes Trismegistus with Gary Lachman
http://youtu.be/ifwThjdVVNU
extract fwiw .... http://youtu.be/ifwThjdVVNU
34:52
one of Frances Yeats books on the
34:55
Hermetic tradition refers to the birth
34:57
of the Rosicrucian movement and the idea
35:00
we've talked about in other interviews
35:03
that there are these hidden masters who
35:06
are in touch with the perennial
35:08
philosophy and are in their own way
35:11
guiding the evolution of the human race
35:14
well this I said this kind of golden
35:17
chain of these teachers the sages who
35:21
pass on the teaching he not got absorbed
35:22
into the general kind of Western
35:26
esoteric kind of consciousness and and
35:29
it turns up in in different ways in
35:32
modern times I would say yes yes the
35:34
gross secretions were kind of the first
35:37
hidden masters in the sense that well we
35:39
don't even although maybe hidden dazeem
35:42
quite the right word because no one ever
35:44
any of them so they were they ever
35:45
existed not any real sense still remains
35:48
a kind of you know talking point as it
35:51
were but I mean the story is that the
35:54
early 1600s in Kassel Germany these sort
35:58
of pamphlets appeared announcing the
36:00
arrival of this Brotherhood on the
36:02
Brotherhood of the rosie cross and they
36:05
were announcing this general reformation
36:07
of europe and it was along the lines of
36:10
what i was talking earlier this kind of
36:11
new world of religious religious
36:14
tolerance and sort of sharing of
36:16
knowledge and also sort of healing the
36:19
healing the sick this was another part
36:21
of the the Rosicrucian thing with people
36:23
with the whole idea they would go and
36:25
share their medical knowledge and just
36:27
as jesus you know he healed this is one
36:29
of the things he did so and Hermes is
36:32
also sort of the inventor of medicine
36:34
and all things of that sort and over
36:39
different you know over time other
36:40
pamphlets appeared and people started
36:43
wondering who were these people because
36:44
they were saying please come and join us
36:46
if you want to take part in this
36:48
wonderful transformation that's going to
36:49
take place soon
.....
this was a period when edouard schure appeared too ... aka the twitch Rama story et al in twitch's spiritual notebook.
The Great Initiates by Edouard Schure 1884 - Thesophy Rudolph Stiener links
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-M0yAR0UPhPNXhNVFRFMjRyTDg/view
Twitch is much closer to a professor david lane or a Gary Lachman than everyone is willing to admit. and face up too.
he lacked the requisite university discipline for accuracy and evidence based conclusions (and maturity/honesty) is all.

plus

(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.

Henosis Sage

2021-06-05 08:09:02 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

PS

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning/

I could re-write all that into the NU-Man Vardankar ECK Marman Masters 12 rules for life and their 12 Wisdom Temples' Spirito Planes of Meaning .....

(sigh)

but but but Rumi and Twitch are soooooooooooo very special ..... (big sigh)

Henosis Sage

2021-06-05 08:15:20 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

PS
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning/
I could re-write all that into the NU-Man Vardankar ECK Marman Masters 12 rules for life and their 12 Wisdom Temples' Spirito Planes of Meaning .....
(sigh)
but but but Rumi and Twitch are soooooooooooo very special ..... (big sigh)

I am not pushing Petersen .... he's an example of thousands upon thousands of others.
Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority
2,135,130 views
•7 Jun 2017
Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Although I thought I might get to Genesis II in this third lecture, and begin talking about Adam & Eve, it didn't turn out that way. There was more to be said about the idea of God as creator (with the Word as the process underlying the act of creation). I didn't mind, because it is very important to get God and the Creation of the Universe right before moving on :) .

In this lecture, I tried to outline something like this: for anything to be, there has to be a substrate (call it a potential) from which it emerges, a structure that provides the possibility of imposing order on that substrate, and the act of ordering, itself. So the first is something like the precosmogonic chaos (implicitly feminine); the second, God the Father; the third, what the Christian West has portrayed as the Son (the Word of Truth).

and on and on it goes.

Henosis Sage

2021-06-05 08:17:02 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

PS
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning/
I could re-write all that into the NU-Man Vardankar ECK Marman Masters 12 rules for life and their 12 Wisdom Temples' Spirito Planes of Meaning .....
(sigh)
but but but Rumi and Twitch are soooooooooooo very special ..... (big sigh)

I am not pushing Petersen .... he's an example of thousands upon thousands of others.
Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority
2,135,130 views
•7 Jun 2017
Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Although I thought I might get to Genesis II in this third lecture, and begin talking about Adam & Eve, it didn't turn out that way. There was more to be said about the idea of God as creator (with the Word as the process underlying the act of creation). I didn't mind, because it is very important to get God and the Creation of the Universe right before moving on :) .
In this lecture, I tried to outline something like this: for anything to be, there has to be a substrate (call it a potential) from which it emerges, a structure that provides the possibility of imposing order on that substrate, and the act of ordering, itself. So the first is something like the precosmogonic chaos (implicitly feminine); the second, God the Father; the third, what the Christian West has portrayed as the Son (the Word of Truth).
http://youtu.be/R_GPAl_q2QQ
and on and on it goes.

HEY, FROM VERY LEFT FIELD .. (remember George Lakoff ideas re politics the familiy etc ??)

1. Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology
8,484,575 views
•2 Feb 2011

(March 29, 2010) Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky gave the opening lecture of the course entitled Human Behavioral Biology and explains the basic premise of the course and how he aims to avoid categorical thinking.

Good huh? ;-)

Henosis Sage

2021-06-05 08:28:49 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

PS
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning/
I could re-write all that into the NU-Man Vardankar ECK Marman Masters 12 rules for life and their 12 Wisdom Temples' Spirito Planes of Meaning .....
(sigh)
but but but Rumi and Twitch are soooooooooooo very special ..... (big sigh)

I am not pushing Petersen .... he's an example of thousands upon thousands of others.
Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority
2,135,130 views
•7 Jun 2017
Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Although I thought I might get to Genesis II in this third lecture, and begin talking about Adam & Eve, it didn't turn out that way. There was more to be said about the idea of God as creator (with the Word as the process underlying the act of creation). I didn't mind, because it is very important to get God and the Creation of the Universe right before moving on :) .
In this lecture, I tried to outline something like this: for anything to be, there has to be a substrate (call it a potential) from which it emerges, a structure that provides the possibility of imposing order on that substrate, and the act of ordering, itself. So the first is something like the precosmogonic chaos (implicitly feminine); the second, God the Father; the third, what the Christian West has portrayed as the Son (the Word of Truth).
http://youtu.be/R_GPAl_q2QQ
and on and on it goes.

HEY, FROM VERY LEFT FIELD .. (remember George Lakoff ideas re politics the familiy etc ??)
1. Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology
8,484,575 views
•2 Feb 2011
(March 29, 2010) Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky gave the opening lecture of the course entitled Human Behavioral Biology and explains the basic premise of the course and how he aims to avoid categorical thinking.
http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA
Good huh? ;-)

ok quick look at the great initiates by schure

go to page 162 to pick up here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-M0yAR0UPhPNXhNVFRFMjRyTDg/view

this example kind of explains my meaning ....

13. The Radiance of the Solar Word
Such is the legend of Krishna, reconstructed in its organic whole and placed in
historical perspective.
It sheds a vivid light on the origins of Brahmanism. Naturally it is impossible to
establish on the basis of actual documents that behind the myth of Krishna is a
real person. The threefold veil which covers the evolution of all oriental religions
is thicker in India than elsewhere. For the Brahmans, absolute masters of Hindu
society, sole guardians of its traditions, often remolded and transformed them in
the course of ages. But they faithfully preserved all the basic elements, and if
their sacred teaching has changed with the centuries, its core has never been
touched. Therefore, unlike many European scientists, we do not explain a figure
like Krishna by saying that it is "a fairy tale drawn out of a solar myth, with a
philosophic fantasy to cap it all." We do not believe that this attitude explains
how a religion was established which has lasted thousands of years, has
produced a marvelous poetry and several great philosophers, has resisted the
strong attack of Buddhism,20 the Mongol and Mohammedan invasions and the
English conquest, preserving even in its extreme decadence, the feeling for its
unknown and exalted origin. A great man is always involved in the origin of a
great institution. Considering the dominant role of the character of Krishna in
epic and religious tradition, his human elements on the one hand and his constant
identification with God manifest, or Vishnu, on the other, it behooves us to
believe that he was the creator of the Vishnu cult which gave Brahmanism its
power and its prestige. It is therefore logical to admit that in the midst of the
religious and social chaos which the invasion of naturalist and passional cults
made in primitive India, an enlightened reformer appeared who revived the pure
Aryan doctrine with the idea of the Trinity and the Divine Word made manifest,
who put the seal on his work by the sacrifice of his life, thus giving India her
religious soul, her national impress and her definitive organization.

Krishna's importance will appear still greater and of a truly universal nature if we
recognize that his doctrine contains two basic ideas, two organizing principles of
religious and esoteric philosophy. I am speaking of the organic doctrine of the
immortality of the soul or progressive lives through reincarnation, and his
teaching of the Trinity or the Divine Word revealed in man. I have but briefly
indicated the philosophical import of this major concept which, when thoroughly
understood, brings about life-giving results in all domains of science, art and life.
In conclusion, I shall confine myself to a historical remark.
The idea that God, Truth, Infinite Beauty and Goodness are revealed in
conscious man with a redemptive power which rises to the heights of heaven
through the power of love and sacrifice -- this idea, fecund above all others,
appears for the first time in Krishna. It is personified at the moment when,
forsaking its Aryan youth, humanity is about to sink deeper and deeper into the
worship of matter. Krishna reveals the idea of the Holy Word; humanity will no
longer forget it. Humanity will thirst even more for redeemers and sons of God
as it realizes its decadence more keenly. After Krishna, the Solar Word shines
powerfully in the temples of Asia, Africa and Europe. In Persia, it is Mithras,
reconcilor of the luminous Ormuzd and somber Ahriman; in Egypt, it is Horus,
son of Osiris and Isis; in Greece, it is Apollo, god of the sun and the lyre; it is
Dionysius, awakener of souls. Everywhere the solar god is a mediating god, and
light is also the Word of Life. Is it not also from this that the Messianic idea
comes? Be this as it may, it is through Krishna that this idea entered the ancient
world; it is through Jesus that it will spread over the entire earth.
In the remainder of this secret history of religions, I shall show how the teaching
of the divine Trinity is linked to that of the soul and its evolution, and how and
why they are implied in and complement one another. Let us say at once that
their point of contact forms the vital center, the glowing crux of esoteric
doctrine. In observing the great religions of India, Egypt, Greece and Judea
merely externally, one sees only discord, superstition, chaos. But, investigate the
symbols, question the Mysteries, look for the basic teaching of the founders and
prophets, and harmony will be observed. By varied and often indirect roads one

will finally recognize that to fathom the arcana of one of these religions is to
fathom the arcana of all the others. Then a strange phenomenon comes about. Bit
by bit, but in a widening circle, one sees the doctrine of the initiates shine in the
center of religions like a sun, while each single religion appears as a different
planet. With each of them we change atmosphere and celestial orientation, but it
is always the same sun which lights our way. India, the great dreamer, plunges us
along with herself into the dream of Eternity. Grandiose Egypt, of deathly
austerity, invites us to the journey beyond the grave. Enchanting Greece
transports us to magic festivals of life and gives her Mysteries the character of
alternating charm and terror, and of her eternally passionate soul. Finally,
Pythagoras scientifically formulates esoteric teaching, gives it perhaps the fullest
and soundest expression it has ever had, for Plato and the Alexandrians were but
its popularizers.
In the jungles of the Ganges and the solitudes of the Himalayas we have seen the
source of this esoteric teaching.

Notes for this lecture:

20. Sakia-Muni's greatness resides in his sublime charity, in his moral reform
and in the social revolution he brought about through overthrowing the ossified
castes. But Sakia-Muni added nothing to the esoteric doctrine of the Brahmans;
he only revealed certain parts of it. Its psychology is fundamentally the same,
though it follows a different path. (See my article on La Legende de Bouddha in
Revue des Deux Mondes, July 1,1885)
If the Buddha is not represented in this volume, this is not because we do not
recognize his place in the series of the Great Initiates. Rather it is because of the
special plan of this book. Each of the reformers or philosophers selected is
intended to show the doctrine of the Mysteries in a different aspect and at
another stage in its evolution. From this viewpoint, Buddha would represent a

needless repetition in connection with Pythagoras, through whom I developed
the doctrine of reincarnation and evolution of souls, on the one hand, and on the
other, with Jesus Christ, who promulgated for the West as well as the East, the
ideal of universal Brotherhood and Love.
As for the book Esoteric Buddhism by Sinnet, which in some respects is very
interesting, worthy of being read, and whose origin many people attribute to self-
styled initiates still living in Tibet, it is impossible for me, until otherwise

informed, to see anything in it but a very clever compilation of Brahmanism and
Buddhism, with certain ideas borrowed from the Kabbala, Paracelsus, and a few
thoughts from modern science.

HERMES: The Mysteries of Egypt

The Great Initiates .....end quote

THE THING IS THIS ... WHY TAKE ANYTHING SAID BY SCHURE, OR SINNET (THEOSOPHY) OR TWITCHELL, OR KLEMP OR MARMAN AT FACE VALUE AS IF IT WERE TRUE .. OR EVEN CLOSE TO TRUE???????????

WHY WOULD ANYONE CARE CARE TUPPENCE ABOUT WHAT MARMAN THINKS SAYS OR BELIEVES???
I DO NOT.

Henosis Sage

2021-06-05 09:48:46 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

PS
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning/
I could re-write all that into the NU-Man Vardankar ECK Marman Masters 12 rules for life and their 12 Wisdom Temples' Spirito Planes of Meaning .....
(sigh)
but but but Rumi and Twitch are soooooooooooo very special ..... (big sigh)

I am not pushing Petersen .... he's an example of thousands upon thousands of others.
Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority
2,135,130 views
•7 Jun 2017
Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Although I thought I might get to Genesis II in this third lecture, and begin talking about Adam & Eve, it didn't turn out that way. There was more to be said about the idea of God as creator (with the Word as the process underlying the act of creation). I didn't mind, because it is very important to get God and the Creation of the Universe right before moving on :) .
In this lecture, I tried to outline something like this: for anything to be, there has to be a substrate (call it a potential) from which it emerges, a structure that provides the possibility of imposing order on that substrate, and the act of ordering, itself. So the first is something like the precosmogonic chaos (implicitly feminine); the second, God the Father; the third, what the Christian West has portrayed as the Son (the Word of Truth).
http://youtu.be/R_GPAl_q2QQ
and on and on it goes.

HEY, FROM VERY LEFT FIELD .. (remember George Lakoff ideas re politics the familiy etc ??)
1. Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology
8,484,575 views
•2 Feb 2011
(March 29, 2010) Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky gave the opening lecture of the course entitled Human Behavioral Biology and explains the basic premise of the course and how he aims to avoid categorical thinking.
http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA
Good huh? ;-)

OK a little bit from AU
1
1. Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology

thinking of Marman and his many Categories (TWT and Lenses of perception) and (faulty) dialectical thinkingimagining he can see the difference between a belief, an opinion, and a real historical fact and whatever it is he thinks Twitchell meant/intended.

25:43 http://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA

Obviously when people are thinking
25:45
about stuff like behavior, and they do this professionally,
25:48
professional biologists, yes, and they understand also.
25:53
This is just the strawman.
25:55
Ooh, we're going to be more sophisticated in our thinking
25:57
than endocrinologists, and geneticists, and all of those.
26:01
They obviously know that these things interact,
26:04
and there's not just one explanation.
26:06
And it's just the area they focus on.
26:08
They understand that.
26:09
Let me read you a few quotes to show
26:12
just how much some of these folks don't understand that.
26:17
First quote.
26:19
"Give me a child at birth from any background,
26:22
and let me control the total environment in which he
26:25
is raised, and I will turn him into anything
26:27
I wish him to be-- whether doctor, lawyer,
26:30
or beggar, or thief."
26:32
This was John Watson, 1912, one of the founding fathers
26:36
of the school of psychology called behaviorism.
26:40
Behaviorism-- that sort of reached its apogee
26:42
with this guy BF Skinner in the 1950s.
26:45
This notion that if you could control
26:47
the rewards, the punishments, the positive,
26:49
the negative reinforcements, you could turn anybody
26:52
into anything you want, whether doctor, lawyer, beggar,
26:55
or thief.
26:56
And we know that isn't the case.
26:59
We know that's not possible.
27:01
We know that.
27:02
All you have to do is throw in one other factor
27:05
and like a lot of protein malnutrition during fetal life,
27:08
and you're not going to be able to do that.
27:11
That being a crude example of just how wrong this guy was.
27:14
You cannot have all the control over the environment and turn
27:18
somebody into whatever you want.
27:20
Here's a guy living pathologically in this bucket
27:24
that behavior could be explained solely by understanding reward
27:27
and punishment.
27:29
Interesting factoid-- this John Watson guy.
27:31
Shortly after that, he was driven out
27:33
of academia for a wild scandal that he was involved in.
27:37
And he spent the rest of his career
27:39
apparently as an extremely successful advertising
27:42
executive.
27:43
Going to show you something-- he may not
27:44
have been able to turn people into anything
27:46
he wanted, but apparently he could
27:47
make them buy all sorts of geegaw nonsense.

Ta Da .. smile

Etznab

2021-06-05 13:07:15 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

PS
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning/
I could re-write all that into the NU-Man Vardankar ECK Marman Masters 12 rules for life and their 12 Wisdom Temples' Spirito Planes of Meaning .....
(sigh)
but but but Rumi and Twitch are soooooooooooo very special ..... (big sigh)

I am not pushing Petersen .... he's an example of thousands upon thousands of others.
Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority
2,135,130 views
•7 Jun 2017
Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Although I thought I might get to Genesis II in this third lecture, and begin talking about Adam & Eve, it didn't turn out that way. There was more to be said about the idea of God as creator (with the Word as the process underlying the act of creation). I didn't mind, because it is very important to get God and the Creation of the Universe right before moving on :) .
In this lecture, I tried to outline something like this: for anything to be, there has to be a substrate (call it a potential) from which it emerges, a structure that provides the possibility of imposing order on that substrate, and the act of ordering, itself. So the first is something like the precosmogonic chaos (implicitly feminine); the second, God the Father; the third, what the Christian West has portrayed as the Son (the Word of Truth).
http://youtu.be/R_GPAl_q2QQ
and on and on it goes.

Post by Henosis Sage
In this lecture, I tried to outline something like this: for anything to be, there has to be a substrate (call it a potential) from which it emerges, a structure that provides the possibility of imposing order on that substrate, and the act of ordering, itself. So the first is something like the precosmogonic chaos (implicitly feminine); the second, God the Father; the third, what the Christian West has portrayed as the Son (the Word of Truth).
http://youtu.be/R_GPAl_q2QQ
and on and on it goes.

One of the great deficits regarding so-called history, IMO, is the actual timeline and evolution of information and facts.

Today people read "stories" about the past and what happened; what it was like then. And the stories are absent genesis. In other words, people have to remove actual factual history and the way that things actually were, in order to first replace the truth with something made up. Somewhat like in the movie Planet of the Apes where the Ape hierarchy quarantined actual history and evidence of the actual history of the world!

So many stories that can teach things, but are they teaching from actual historical events that actually happened? IOW, true history? Or are the stories teaching via a fictional, made up narrative?

Etznab

2021-06-05 12:57:11 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

"[...] I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals."

Good point. Like animals!

Animals is a word that comes to mind often when I listen to the news and what the hierarchy is doing. A recent news clip mentioned that China had somewhere around 300 nuclear weapons and that the U.S. had 60,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I thought, Who needs 60,000 nuclear weapons? And who - with that many weapons - worries about other countries wanting to even the score?

ANIMALS!

Henosis Sage

2021-06-06 10:37:25 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.

[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

Henosis Sage

2021-06-06 10:59:51 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.
[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

and later on ...

21:52
And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.
21:59
Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.
22:06
And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.
22:17
Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.
22:21
Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night.
22:25
I've had clients like that.
22:26
They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
22:30
I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.
22:36
Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
22:46
So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it.
22:50
So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
22:54
It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,
22:59
as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.
23:04
That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.
23:15
Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about.
23:22
But what the hell does that mean?
23:24
A thought appears in your head.
23:25
What kind of ridiculous explanation is that?
23:30
It just doesn't help with anything.
23:32
Where does it come from?
23:34
Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head.
23:36
Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.
23:41
So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?
23:45
Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?
23:47
Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.
23:55
And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.
24:00
And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.
24:05
And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.
24:09
And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.
24:14
They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?
24:16
They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."
24:27
Chimpanzees don't say that.
24:30
It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.
24:36
They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness.
24:43
And that's not the case with us at all.
24:45
We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.
24:51
And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.
24:59
Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...
25:08
some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.
25:16
I'll give you just a quick example.

from http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

cheers ;-)

Henosis Sage

2021-06-06 11:08:43 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.
[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

and later on ...
21:52
And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.
21:59
Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.
22:06
And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.
22:17
Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.
22:21
Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night.
22:25
I've had clients like that.
22:26
They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
22:30
I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.
22:36
Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
22:46
So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it.
22:50
So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
22:54
It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,
22:59
as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.
23:04
That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.
23:15
Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about.
23:22
But what the hell does that mean?
23:24
A thought appears in your head.
23:25
What kind of ridiculous explanation is that?
23:30
It just doesn't help with anything.
23:32
Where does it come from?
23:34
Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head.
23:36
Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.
23:41
So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?
23:45
Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?
23:47
Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.
23:55
And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.
24:00
And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.
24:05
And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.
24:09
And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.
24:14
They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?
24:16
They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."
24:27
Chimpanzees don't say that.
24:30
It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.
24:36
They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness.
24:43
And that's not the case with us at all.
24:45
We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.
24:51
And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.
24:59
Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...
25:08
some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.
25:16
I'll give you just a quick example.
from http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
cheers ;-)

and this too .. most curious

30:35
Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.
30:40
And then I thought, well how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know?
30:47
How does that make any sense?
30:49
First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream?
30:55
It's like you're not- there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?
30:59
The dream happens to you just like life happens to you.
31:02
I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's
31:09
you're laying there asleep and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you.
31:16
And you don't know how. You can't do it when you're awake.
31:20
And you don't know what it means! It's like what the hell's going on?
31:23
And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because
31:27
you get this with Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
31:37
You, you know, use a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
31:47
And you don't control it. And what does?
31:50
Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd.
31:59
Because there's nothing random about dreams.
32:02
They're very, very structured and very, very complex.

Henosis Sage

2021-06-07 06:09:43 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.
[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

and later on ...
21:52
And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.
21:59
Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.
22:06
And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.
22:17
Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.
22:21
Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night.
22:25
I've had clients like that.
22:26
They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
22:30
I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.
22:36
Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
22:46
So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it.
22:50
So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
22:54
It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,
22:59
as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.
23:04
That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.
23:15
Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about.
23:22
But what the hell does that mean?
23:24
A thought appears in your head.
23:25
What kind of ridiculous explanation is that?
23:30
It just doesn't help with anything.
23:32
Where does it come from?
23:34
Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head.
23:36
Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.
23:41
So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?
23:45
Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?
23:47
Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.
23:55
And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.
24:00
And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.
24:05
And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.
24:09
And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.
24:14
They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?
24:16
They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."
24:27
Chimpanzees don't say that.
24:30
It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.
24:36
They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness.
24:43
And that's not the case with us at all.
24:45
We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.
24:51
And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.
24:59
Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...
25:08
some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.
25:16
I'll give you just a quick example.
from http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
cheers ;-)

and this too .. most curious
30:35
Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.
30:40
And then I thought, well how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know?
30:47
How does that make any sense?
30:49
First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream?
30:55
It's like you're not- there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?
30:59
The dream happens to you just like life happens to you.
31:02
I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's
31:09
you're laying there asleep and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you.
31:16
And you don't know how. You can't do it when you're awake.
31:20
And you don't know what it means! It's like what the hell's going on?
31:23
And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because
31:27
you get this with Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
31:37
You, you know, use a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
31:47
And you don't control it. And what does?
31:50
Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd.
31:59
Because there's nothing random about dreams.
32:02
They're very, very structured and very, very complex.

here's anoother quote from jordan petersen

85:42
I want it all laid out causally so that B follows A and B precedes C,
85:50
and in a way that's understandable and doesn't require a leap
85:54
any unnecessary leap of faith.
85:56
Because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible.
86:03
It's that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe.
86:07
And that's not good because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell.
86:10
And then you have to scrap the whole thing because in principle the whole thing is about truth,
86:14
and if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies, then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that?
86:21
So I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.

http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God

Henosis Sage

2021-06-07 07:34:43 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.
[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

and later on ...
21:52
And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.
21:59
Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.
22:06
And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.
22:17
Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.
22:21
Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night.
22:25
I've had clients like that.
22:26
They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
22:30
I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.
22:36
Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
22:46
So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it.
22:50
So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
22:54
It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,
22:59
as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.
23:04
That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.
23:15
Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about.
23:22
But what the hell does that mean?
23:24
A thought appears in your head.
23:25
What kind of ridiculous explanation is that?
23:30
It just doesn't help with anything.
23:32
Where does it come from?
23:34
Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head.
23:36
Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.
23:41
So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?
23:45
Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?
23:47
Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.
23:55
And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.
24:00
And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.
24:05
And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.
24:09
And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.
24:14
They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?
24:16
They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."
24:27
Chimpanzees don't say that.
24:30
It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.
24:36
They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness.
24:43
And that's not the case with us at all.
24:45
We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.
24:51
And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.
24:59
Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...
25:08
some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.
25:16
I'll give you just a quick example.
from http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
cheers ;-)

and this too .. most curious
30:35
Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.
30:40
And then I thought, well how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know?
30:47
How does that make any sense?
30:49
First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream?
30:55
It's like you're not- there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?
30:59
The dream happens to you just like life happens to you.
31:02
I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's
31:09
you're laying there asleep and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you.
31:16
And you don't know how. You can't do it when you're awake.
31:20
And you don't know what it means! It's like what the hell's going on?
31:23
And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because
31:27
you get this with Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
31:37
You, you know, use a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
31:47
And you don't control it. And what does?
31:50
Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd.
31:59
Because there's nothing random about dreams.
32:02
They're very, very structured and very, very complex.

here's anoother quote from jordan petersen
85:42
I want it all laid out causally so that B follows A and B precedes C,
85:50
and in a way that's understandable and doesn't require a leap
85:54
any unnecessary leap of faith.
85:56
Because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible.
86:03
It's that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe.
86:07
And that's not good because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell.
86:10
And then you have to scrap the whole thing because in principle the whole thing is about truth,
86:14
and if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies, then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that?
86:21
So I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God

seems related to the original thread topic imo
with a baby v bathwater ref to boot

petersen again

94:35
The idea, for example, of the formulation of the, let's say, the image of God, as an abstraction, that's how we're going to handle it to begin with.
94:43
I want to say, though, because I said that I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary,
94:49
I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible.
94:56
But it's not explicable.
94:58
And so I don't want to explain it away, I want to just leave it, as a fact.
95:02
And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well we'll leave that as a fact, and a mystery.
95:07
But we're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to extract out the ideal,
95:16
and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation.
95:21
And so, that's good enough. That's an amazing thing, if it's true.
95:25
But I don't want to
95:28
throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say.
95:30
It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors.
95:34
Well, what does that mean?

Henosis Sage

2021-06-11 11:39:47 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.
[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

and later on ...
21:52
And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.
21:59
Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.
22:06
And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.
22:17
Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.
22:21
Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night.
22:25
I've had clients like that.
22:26
They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
22:30
I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.
22:36
Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
22:46
So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it.
22:50
So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
22:54
It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,
22:59
as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.
23:04
That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.
23:15
Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about.
23:22
But what the hell does that mean?
23:24
A thought appears in your head.
23:25
What kind of ridiculous explanation is that?
23:30
It just doesn't help with anything.
23:32
Where does it come from?
23:34
Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head.
23:36
Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.
23:41
So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?
23:45
Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?
23:47
Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.
23:55
And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.
24:00
And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.
24:05
And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.
24:09
And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.
24:14
They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?
24:16
They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."
24:27
Chimpanzees don't say that.
24:30
It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.
24:36
They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness.
24:43
And that's not the case with us at all.
24:45
We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.
24:51
And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.
24:59
Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...
25:08
some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.
25:16
I'll give you just a quick example.
from http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
cheers ;-)

and this too .. most curious
30:35
Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.
30:40
And then I thought, well how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know?
30:47
How does that make any sense?
30:49
First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream?
30:55
It's like you're not- there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?
30:59
The dream happens to you just like life happens to you.
31:02
I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's
31:09
you're laying there asleep and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you.
31:16
And you don't know how. You can't do it when you're awake.
31:20
And you don't know what it means! It's like what the hell's going on?
31:23
And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because
31:27
you get this with Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
31:37
You, you know, use a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
31:47
And you don't control it. And what does?
31:50
Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd.
31:59
Because there's nothing random about dreams.
32:02
They're very, very structured and very, very complex.

here's anoother quote from jordan petersen
85:42
I want it all laid out causally so that B follows A and B precedes C,
85:50
and in a way that's understandable and doesn't require a leap
85:54
any unnecessary leap of faith.
85:56
Because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible.
86:03
It's that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe.
86:07
And that's not good because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell.
86:10
And then you have to scrap the whole thing because in principle the whole thing is about truth,
86:14
and if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies, then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that?
86:21
So I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God

seems related to the original thread topic imo
with a baby v bathwater ref to boot
petersen again
94:35
The idea, for example, of the formulation of the, let's say, the image of God, as an abstraction, that's how we're going to handle it to begin with.
94:43
I want to say, though, because I said that I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary,
94:49
I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible.
94:56
But it's not explicable.
94:58
And so I don't want to explain it away, I want to just leave it, as a fact.
95:02
And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well we'll leave that as a fact, and a mystery.
95:07
But we're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to extract out the ideal,
95:16
and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation.
95:21
And so, that's good enough. That's an amazing thing, if it's true.
95:25
But I don't want to
95:28
throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say.
95:30
It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors.
95:34
Well, what does that mean?

It’s the nature of truth that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Henosis Sage

2021-06-12 07:35:09 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.
[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

and later on ...
21:52
And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.
21:59
Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.
22:06
And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.
22:17
Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.
22:21
Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night.
22:25
I've had clients like that.
22:26
They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
22:30
I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.
22:36
Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
22:46
So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it.
22:50
So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
22:54
It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,
22:59
as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.
23:04
That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.
23:15
Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about.
23:22
But what the hell does that mean?
23:24
A thought appears in your head.
23:25
What kind of ridiculous explanation is that?
23:30
It just doesn't help with anything.
23:32
Where does it come from?
23:34
Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head.
23:36
Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.
23:41
So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?
23:45
Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?
23:47
Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.
23:55
And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.
24:00
And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.
24:05
And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.
24:09
And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.
24:14
They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?
24:16
They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."
24:27
Chimpanzees don't say that.
24:30
It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.
24:36
They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness.
24:43
And that's not the case with us at all.
24:45
We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.
24:51
And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.
24:59
Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...
25:08
some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.
25:16
I'll give you just a quick example.
from http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
cheers ;-)

and this too .. most curious
30:35
Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.
30:40
And then I thought, well how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know?
30:47
How does that make any sense?
30:49
First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream?
30:55
It's like you're not- there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?
30:59
The dream happens to you just like life happens to you.
31:02
I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's
31:09
you're laying there asleep and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you.
31:16
And you don't know how. You can't do it when you're awake.
31:20
And you don't know what it means! It's like what the hell's going on?
31:23
And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because
31:27
you get this with Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
31:37
You, you know, use a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
31:47
And you don't control it. And what does?
31:50
Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd.
31:59
Because there's nothing random about dreams.
32:02
They're very, very structured and very, very complex.

here's anoother quote from jordan petersen
85:42
I want it all laid out causally so that B follows A and B precedes C,
85:50
and in a way that's understandable and doesn't require a leap
85:54
any unnecessary leap of faith.
85:56
Because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible.
86:03
It's that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe.
86:07
And that's not good because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell.
86:10
And then you have to scrap the whole thing because in principle the whole thing is about truth,
86:14
and if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies, then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that?
86:21
So I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God

seems related to the original thread topic imo
with a baby v bathwater ref to boot
petersen again
94:35
The idea, for example, of the formulation of the, let's say, the image of God, as an abstraction, that's how we're going to handle it to begin with.
94:43
I want to say, though, because I said that I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary,
94:49
I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible.
94:56
But it's not explicable.
94:58
And so I don't want to explain it away, I want to just leave it, as a fact.
95:02
And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well we'll leave that as a fact, and a mystery.
95:07
But we're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to extract out the ideal,
95:16
and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation.
95:21
And so, that's good enough. That's an amazing thing, if it's true.
95:25
But I don't want to
95:28
throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say.
95:30
It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors.
95:34
Well, what does that mean?

It’s the nature of truth that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

a curious section about being in the right place time, engaged, yin/yang etc.

(petersen and the bible/genesis etc. fwiw )

Henosis Sage

2021-06-12 11:31:00 UTC

Permalink

Post by Henosis Sage

plus
(the dreaded) Jordan B Peterson
3.76M subscribers
Lecture I in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories series from May 16th at Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. In this lecture, I describe what I consider to be the idea of God, which is at least partly the notion of sovereignty and power, divorced from any concrete sovereign or particular, individual person of power. I also suggest that God, as Father, is something akin to the spirit or pattern inherent in the human hierarchy of authority, which is based in turn on the dominance hierarchies characterizing animals.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w

an extract from Petersens video
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
12:39
and that's this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, which I really do think of, they're like crippled religions, that's the right way to think about them.
12:49
They're like religion that's missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along.
12:53
And it provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it's warped and twisted and demented and bent.
12:59
And it's a parasite on something underlying that's rich and true.
13:04
That's how it looks to me, anyways.
13:06
So I think it's very important that we sort out this problem.
13:12
I think that there isn't anything more important that needs to be done that.
13:17
I've thought that for a long, long time.
13:20
Probably since the early eighties,
13:24
when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health.
13:32
You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems.
13:38
It's like, why the hell do they care, exactly?
13:40
What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100% correct?
13:47
People get unbelievably upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak.
13:52
[LAUGHTER]
13:53
And it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why.
13:58
But there's some, it's like there's a fundamental truth that they're standing on.
14:03
It's like they're on a raft in the middle of the ocean and you're starting to pull out the logs.
14:07
They're afraid they're going to fall in and drown.
14:10
It's like, drown in what?
14:11
What are the logs protecting them from?
14:15
Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system?
14:21
These are not obvious things.
14:23
So, I've been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time.
14:27
I've done some lectures about that are on Youtube; most of you know that.
14:31
Some of what I'm going to talk about in this series you'll have heard, if you've listened to the Youtube videos.
14:36
You know, I'm trying to hit it from different angles.
14:40
So Nietzsche's idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values, essentially.
14:47
Now he understood that we understood that we have bodies and we have motivations and emotions.
14:51
Like, he was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time because he knew that our capacity to think wasn't some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology,
15:02
constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body.
15:06
He understood that.
15:08
But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values.
15:18
And he thought about the person who creates their own values as the over-man or the super-man.
15:25
And that was one of the parts of Nietzschian philosophy that the Nazis, I would say, took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology.
15:38
And we know what happened with that.
15:39
That didn't seem to turn out very well, that's for sure.
15:44
I also spent a lot of time reading Carl Jung.
15:46
It was through Jung and also Jean Piaget, who was a developmental psychologist, that I started to understand that our articulated systems of thought
15:55
are embedded in something like a dream and that that dream was informed, in a complex way, by the way we act.
16:05
We act out things we don't understand all the time.
16:08
If that wasn't the case, then we wouldn't need a psychology or a sociology or an anthropology or any of that
16:13
because we would be completely transparent to ourselves.
16:15
And we're clearly not.
16:17
So, we're much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way that we behave contains way more information than we know.
16:25
And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge is being extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave
16:33
and telling stories about it for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
16:37
Extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity.
16:42
And trying to represent them, partly through imitation, but also drama and mythology and literature and art and all of that.
16:50
To represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like.
16:53
That process of understanding is what I see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories.
16:59
And it's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes the book so complex.
17:07
But I see in it a struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears, say, and to become conscious of what it means to be human.
17:18
And that's a very difficult thing because we don't know who we are or what we are or where we came from or any of those things.
17:24
The light life is an unbroken chain going back three and a half billion years.
17:28
It's an absolutely unbelievable thing.
17:30
Every single one of your ancestors reproduced successfully for three and a half billion years.
17:36
It's absolutely unbelievable.
17:38
We rose out of the dirt and the muck and here we are, conscious, but not knowing.
17:44
And we're trying to figure out who we are.
17:46
A story, or several stories, that we've been telling for three thousand years seems to me to have something to offer.
17:53
And so, when I look at the stories in the Bible, I do it, I would say, in some sense with the beginner's mind.
18:00
It's a mystery, this book.
18:02
How the hell it was made, why it was made, why we preserved it, how it happened to motivate an entire culture for two thousand years, and to transform the world.
18:11
What's going on? How did that happen?
18:13
It's by no means obvious, and one of the things that bothers me about casual critics of religion is that they don't take the phenomena seriously.
18:21
And it's a serious phenomena.
[ interesting discussion / topics imo ]

and later on ...
21:52
And so Jung got very interested in dreams and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths.
21:59
Because he would see in his clients' dreams echoes of stories that he knew because he was deeply read in mythology.
22:06
And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes, the dream and the story, and storytelling.
22:17
Well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them.
22:21
Some people remember dreams all the time, like two or three a night.
22:25
I've had clients like that.
22:26
They often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
22:30
I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable, at the time.
22:36
Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
22:46
So it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking, that's a good way of thinking about it.
22:50
So because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
22:54
It's doing its best to formulate something. That was Jung's notion,
22:59
as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors that were hiding the dream's true message.
23:04
That's not what Jung believed, he believed the dream was doing its best to express a reality that was still outside of fully articulated conscious comprehension.
23:15
Because you think, look, a thought appears in your head, right? That's obvious. Bang, it's nothing you ever ask about.
23:22
But what the hell does that mean?
23:24
A thought appears in your head.
23:25
What kind of ridiculous explanation is that?
23:30
It just doesn't help with anything.
23:32
Where does it come from?
23:34
Well, nowhere. It just appears in my head.
23:36
Okay, well, that's not a very sophisticated explanation, as it turns out.
23:41
So you might think that those thoughts that you think, well, where do they come from?
23:45
Well, they're often someone else's thoughts, right?
23:47
Someone long dead, that might be part of it, just like the words you use to think are utterances of people who've been long dead.
23:55
And so you're informed by the spirit of your ancestors, that's one way of looking at it.
24:00
And your motivations speak to you, your emotions speak to you, your body speaks to you.
24:05
And it does all that, at least in part, through the dream.
24:09
And the dream is the birthplace of the fully articulated idea.
24:14
They don't just come from nowhere fully fledged, right?
24:16
They have a developmental origin, and God only knows how lengthy that origin is, even to say something like, "I am conscious."
24:27
Chimpanzees don't say that.
24:30
It's been seven million years since we broke from chimpanzees, something like that, from the common ancestor.
24:36
They have no articulated knowledge at all and very little self-representation in some sense, and very little self-consciousness.
24:43
And that's not the case with us at all.
24:45
We had to painstakingly figure all of this out during that, you know, seven million year voyage.
24:51
And I think some of that's represented and captured, in some sense, in these ancient stories.
24:59
Which I believe were part of, especially the oldest stories, in Genesis, which are the stories we're going to start with, they were... that...
25:08
some of the archaic nature of the human being is encapsulated in those stories, and it's very, very instructive as far as I can tell.
25:16
I'll give you just a quick example.
from http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
cheers ;-)

and this too .. most curious
30:35
Jung was a great believer in the dream, and I know that dreams will tell you things that you don't know.
30:40
And then I thought, well how the hell can that be? How in the world can something you think up tell you something you don't know?
30:47
How does that make any sense?
30:49
First of all, why don't you understand it? Why does it have to come forth in the form of the dream?
30:55
It's like you're not- there's something going on inside you that you don't control, right?
30:59
The dream happens to you just like life happens to you.
31:02
I mean there is the odd lucid dreamer who can, you know, apply a certain amount of conscious control, but most of the time it's
31:09
you're laying there asleep and this crazy, complicated world manifests itself inside you.
31:16
And you don't know how. You can't do it when you're awake.
31:20
And you don't know what it means! It's like what the hell's going on?
31:23
And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts, because
31:27
you get this with Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
31:37
You, you know, use a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
31:47
And you don't control it. And what does?
31:50
Is it random? You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd.
31:59
Because there's nothing random about dreams.
32:02
They're very, very structured and very, very complex.

here's anoother quote from jordan petersen
85:42
I want it all laid out causally so that B follows A and B precedes C,
85:50
and in a way that's understandable and doesn't require a leap
85:54
any unnecessary leap of faith.
85:56
Because that's another thing that I think interferes with our relationship with a collection of books like the Bible.
86:03
It's that you're called upon to believe things that no one can believe.
86:07
And that's not good because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell.
86:10
And then you have to scrap the whole thing because in principle the whole thing is about truth,
86:14
and if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies, then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that?
86:21
So I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.
http://youtu.be/f-wWBGo6a2w
Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God

seems related to the original thread topic imo
with a baby v bathwater ref to boot
petersen again
94:35
The idea, for example, of the formulation of the, let's say, the image of God, as an abstraction, that's how we're going to handle it to begin with.
94:43
I want to say, though, because I said that I wasn't going to be any more reductionist than necessary,
94:49
I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible.
94:56
But it's not explicable.
94:58
And so I don't want to explain it away, I want to just leave it, as a fact.
95:02
And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well we'll leave that as a fact, and a mystery.
95:07
But we're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to extract out the ideal,
95:16
and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation.
95:21
And so, that's good enough. That's an amazing thing, if it's true.
95:25
But I don't want to
95:28
throw out the baby with the bathwater, let's say.
95:30
It's a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors.
95:34
Well, what does that mean?

It’s the nature of truth that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

a curious section about being in the right place time, engaged, yin/yang etc.
http://youtu.be/hdrLQ7DpiWs (petersen and the bible/genesis etc. fwiw )

ref
"what true speech creates is good" ?

Jordan B Peterson
3.78M subscribers
Lecture II in my Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories from May 23 at Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto. In this lecture, I present Genesis 1, which presents the idea that a pre-existent cognitive structure (God the Father) uses the Logos, the Christian Word, the second Person of the Trinity, to generate habitable order out of precosmogonic chaos at the beginning of time.

It is in that Image that Man and Woman are created -- indicating, perhaps, that it is (1) through speech that we participate in the creation of the cosmos of experience and (2) that what true speech creates is good.

It is a predicate of Western culture that each individual partakes in some manner in the divine.
This is the true significance of consciousness, which has a world-creating aspect.
url http://youtu.be/hdrLQ7DpiWs

fife

2021-06-12 13:15:03 UTC