 So this is Kelly and she's a destroyer a devourer. That doesn't mean she's bad by the way It means she's something to contend with she's like Tmx So I'm going to take her apart so that you can see her because you can't unless unless you happen happen to know What this means because of your culture and even then you might not be able to see it. So let's figure it out Now she has eight legs. Why what has eight legs? Spider how do you all feel about spiders? Right and the reason you feel like that is because you have these little spider detectors on your skin Those are basically hairs and when the spider crawls along in the spider detectors You get this creepy feeling and that's you basically shaking your skin get rid of the damn spider Of course you can't do that anymore because you're not a horse, you know So you just kind of have a distigial feeling like that and spider can give you a good chomping, you know And so sometimes that's actually poisonous and that's not so good But also a spider is an interesting thing from a conceptual perspective because it spins a web and The web catches things that aren't paying attention And then the thing that isn't paying attention gets wrapped up in the spider's web and then it gets sucked dry So that's a spider. Okay, so she's a spider now Spiders are pretty cool too because they can spin webs, you know, and that's the web of fate by the way That's the web of fate So that's one thing she's up. She's a spider and then Well, she's in this web, but the web is made out of fire because that's fire and then inside the fire Those are skulls. So she's a spider that sits in a web of fire and skulls So believe me if you saw a spider like that You'd be looking at it you might scream first and maybe you would run away, but then you'd come back and look at it It's like, oh look, I found the spider. It's in a web of fire and skulls So that'd be very attractive to you. You probably wouldn't be able to forget about it And you know, that's one thing about Kelly. She's the bunch of things that you bloody well cannot forget about And so you could actually even say she's a model of all those things that you can't forget about and then you could say Well, she's an attempt to model all those things you can't forget about and You might say, well, why would you want to model those things? Well, it's because you bloody well better remember those things or you're not going to stay alive and then you might ask Well, should you be dealing with the things that you shouldn't forget about one by one? fighters say or Skeletons should you be dealing with that one-on-one or spiders or snakes or should you be dealing with that as a category? Right, that's the thing about human beings is we like to deal with things as categories because that way you can solve a whole bunch of problems at the same time You know, so you might say you do this all the time You don't If you go online online, you look at people who are having one advice about relationships. They want advice about relationships and you think well really what they want is to Figure out how to deal with this female or this male But they don't ask that question. They ask how can I improve my relationships? Which is that they're trying to solve the problem of how to relate to all the the set of all potential relationships right now? Because maybe that's better information Then exactly what to do about this particular male or female at this particular point in time now often It isn't but you can understand why people are pushed for that It's like why not get the general answer if you can then you solve the whole class of problems Okay, so what's the class of problems here the class of problems here is that class of problems It's how do you conceptualize the class of problems? It's a brilliant. That's such a brilliant question You know it first I mean maybe you can't maybe there's no commonality between all those things that constitute a problem But by the same token maybe there is well, this is an attempt to do that. Okay, so what else about Kelly? She's got a sword her hair is on fire. She also has a headband of skulls now people don't like skulls very much They creep us out and there's good reason for that because all things considered you should probably avoid places where there are a lot of skulls Because it's easy to infer from that that a lot of people like you died there And that might be because there's something around that's going to kill you just like I killed all those other things Or there's some illness or whatever. It's like get the hell out of there So even chimps don't like chip heads and they don't like immobile chip bodies So, you know a skull for us. It's like well, you can see it's death itself You know when it is that but it's an archetypal symbol and you don't get accustomed to skulls very very hard So she's got skulls everywhere. Well Sometimes she has the tongue of a tiger, but she doesn't in this particular representation But sometimes she does and that's the predatory element and the tiger that's a pretty fascinating thing Right because it's like 12 feet long 5 feet high You know, it's a major piece of engineering that and probably it will eat you so To put the tigers come on Cali also indicates that she's representative of those terrible awe-inspiring Predatory things that lurk in the forest. Of course, this is an Indian representation She often has a snake around her waist and usually it's a cobra, you know And cobras are another thing that people find absolutely fascinating like fire and then but not in this situation What she has wrapped around her instead are intestines and you see how our bellies hollow She just gave birth to that unfortunate character that she happens to be standing on and it's his intestines that she's eating Right now I failed to see how this symbol can protect you from death anxiety You know quite the contrary it seems to me to be something that would seriously evoke it You know, and there's no patriarchal protection here And I can't see how anybody could use this to oppress the peasants, you know Maybe they could scare them with it, but that isn't actually how Kelly is used So I don't think that that's a useful way of thinking about it at all now interestingly enough Kelly is something you made sacrifices to Now that's cool because it's weird people have had a hard time to figure out the whole idea of sacrifice so there's this guy Who was a journalist in the 1960s and he wrote a book his name was Arthur Kessler He wrote a book called the ghost in the machine, which is a book about consciousness And one of the things he pointed out was that the motif of sacrifice seemed to be Architectural it was universal it was happening everywhere and one of the side effects of that was human sacrifice Gods were upset if you sacrifice a couple of slaves or Captures or children because the Carthaginians used to do that all the time their own children and they have them smile before they killed them So it was brutal brutal, but the Carthaginians they would commit suicide at the drop of a hat because their Basic idea was if you screwed up while you're wrong time to kill yourself. There's no hope for you So it's very common idea, you know, and the Japanese still practice that before World War two as well It's like so so anyways so the whole idea of sacrifice pretty damn dark You know and and Kessler regarded as evidence that the human race was basically insane like in a fundamental Biological manner that was not fixable. So it was like the ultimate in original sin theorizing You know That was written when everybody was all shorted out about the fact that we were gonna blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons And so the idea that humans were basically insane Which it's not a bad theory, you know, you can even say we're we've been driven insane by the nature of being anyways You make sacrifices to Kelly They're often blood sacrifices Now that's kind of interesting because one of the things that you might notice about what Kelly represents Which you might say is the predatory like almost Diabolical side of nature, you know the part of nature that's really working hard at doing you in is that it does seem to thrive on blood And so there's an idea here, which is if you give the damn thing what it wants Maybe it will leave you alone But there's a more sophisticated idea right beneath that because what happens if you sacrifice to Kelly is she turns into her opposite And her opposite is well, it's the opposite of this. It's benevolent nature It's the kind of nature that That environmentalists believe in, you know, it's like nature as French impressionist landscape It's not the ski mosquitoes and Guinea worms and cancer and crocodiles and gangrene. It's you know, it's It's a sunny day in that old-growth forest where you know Disney deer bouncing around smiling at you, you know And that's nature too because nature is what gives and if you use the feminine the feminine Symbolism I mean your mother is certainly someone who could be an absolutely horrific force and that often happens to infants But by the same token, she's the bearer of everything that pulls you into life You know when her her contact with you or her physical contact or ability to play with you The fact that she looks at you the fact that she feeds you directly from her body It's like that's the whole opposite of Kelly the destroyer and they're both elements of the feminine and Part of the reason I think that it's the feminine per se that came to represent the destructive element of nature as well as the positive element is that men Experience women in many ways as the destructive element of the feminine because men are always being rejected by women and women are nature because nature is what selects you to reproduce and So the answer for most women to most men is you're a nice enough guy But there's no way your genes should propagate themselves into the future, you know And that's as harsh a judgment as can possibly be rendered if you watch crumb for example, which I would highly recommend It's full of great mother symbolism is he's he describes himself as someone who's so much of a loser He's not even in the dominance hierarchy, you know, he's not at the bottom He's outside, you know, so he describes himself as someone for it was especially him and his older brother It was virtually impossible for them to even conceive of the idea that they might ask a girl in high school It wasn't that they would get refused. It was that it was inconceivable that they could even do it That's where they were in the dominance arc So of course from and who has a mother to go with it, you know All his females are like these extremely physically powerful bird-headed Goddesses more or less and he construes himself as this little warp thing That's you know, sort of coloring at their feet and it's deeply embedded in him and no wonder Given his circumstances. It's no wonder. He actually did a remarkable job of Developing himself in a productive manner, right given what he had to look at. But anyways Yeah, he has sacrificed to Cali and he's bring forth its opposite now it's I Was once I thought I thought I understood I thought that I had come to understand the idea of sacrifice I think I figured this out about 15 years ago It just blew blew me over when I figured it out because it had always been viewed either as a kind of an epithenomena Or something that's pathological, but it's not it's the most Remarkable it's one of the most remarkable conceptual discoveries that human race has ever made Because what it meant was we started to figure out that if you gave something what it wanted If you gave something something of value Then you could turn it into something that might be beneficial to you so it's the it's it's the concomitant of Delayed gratification Because delayed gratification is a sacrifice. So, you know the the the marshmallow experiment, right? Okay, so you get these little kids and you torture them. You say like hey, they like marshmallows. It's like yeah Here's a bunch of them now if you don't eat those marshmallows You get to have more marshmallows And so then you leave and some of the kids eat marshmallows, right? And you got to admit those kids there's something about them to get the damn marshmallows, you know So if there was an earthquake Right then those kids would have won. Okay, so that's something to think about because delayed gratification is not always the right answer The environment has to be stable enough So that the probability that you will get what you've delayed for is high And so if you're living in sheer chaos, you're a fool to delay gratification It's like eat the damn marshmallow now. So so it's not like delayed gratification is The solution for everything it's not but sometimes it's the solution. So what do you do? You make a sacrifice now and the idea is it will pay off in the future so then you think about that in archetypal forms it means that You forgo something of value now. It's a sacrifice. You let go of it and the deal is If you let go of it better things will happen to you in the future And you know, no other animal has figured that out. Well squirrels, maybe You know because they store nuts, but I don't really believe that they I Think it's fundamentally an instinct, you know, you know what I mean I don't think they generalize from that idea. They do act it out But I don't think they've generalized from it. They haven't turned it into a concept And so the concept here is the world is Constituted such that it has a tremendously destructive element, but if you can barter with that properly Then you can flip it over and the part of it that's positive will reveal itself. It's like that's bloody brilliant It's unbelievably brilliant and there's even another element to it because let's say That all your all you've been getting from reality for a while is Kelly It's all spiders and snakes and fires and skull, you know, it's and and things that want to eat you. You might think Why is that? And one answer is well, that's just what it's like But then that's a problem because that's not just what it's like You know that the opposite is there and you might say well, where the hell is that? Like why is it hiding its face from me? And one answer is I Reality is cannot be contended with you. That's one answer But that's like you're depressed and hopeless to do that. It's like you're done. Here's another answer You might be doing something wrong and then you might think well What would it mean to be doing something wrong? And then we might say maybe you're hanging on to something you value a little too tightly Maybe one of your axiomatic presuppositions like the thing that's at the top of your damn value structure is actually sufficiently outdated or pathological such that if you hold on to it all you're going to get is Frowns and misery so maybe have to let it go That's a sacrifice. And so maybe that's why the rule is when you're making sacrifices to Kelly That is don't sacrifice the low-quality junk You sacrifice the stuff that you're attached to because if things aren't going right it could be But it's because you're attached to the wrong things now. That's interesting That's starting to get very interesting because that means that people are starting to think Maybe my attitude has something to do with this Something I can change maybe it's not just the factual nature of the extra the world It's something I can contend with and dance with and maybe if I readjusted my moral schema The probability is kind of low that Kelly will be there all the time And it'll be pretty high that her positive counterpart shows up. So then the question might be how do we set make the Sacrifices that are necessary to organize our schema of interpretation and behavior such that when we implemented in the world Reality shines its positive face on us and not its negative face And like that's a incredibly complicated problem, right? I mean that's like that's a problem You need to be trying to figure out an animal for that matter forever You know wasn't till there were human beings that we started to get some conceptual Representation of it, but then the other thing too is you guys are all doing that You have a big bet going with nature and the bet is Make some sacrifices right now or maybe your parents are making sacrifices on your behalf, and what's the bet the bet is? It'll be worth it But what does that mean? It means that if you make the proper sacrifices you discipline yourself you don't You're not too disillusioned with your resources you pay attention and you wait Your life will be better That's pretty cool because it might be true and if it's true that none of this is a delusion or delusion It's just low resolution first pass Representation That's smart. And so you know from a peugeotian perspective. Well, what do you do before you understand something? You act it out And so the people that are making sacrifices. They're acting out this idea. Do they know the idea? And it's what you mean by no No, they're acting it out. They're dramatically representing it. Is that knowledge? Well, it's a form of knowledge Is it the kind of abstract knowledge that we're talking about right now? No But it's the immediate precursor to that you don't get from the phenomenon to the articulation without running it through some bodily representations and some drama and this is so damn complicated that you know You probably couldn't get to it till you had civilizations that were pretty damn good and lots of people thinking about this all the time You know and so the person who came up with this they would have experienced it as a religious revelation It's like what's the nature of reality? Who if you get this image, you know, it's of this multi-armed goddess and it's it's in flames And it's in a web and it's like terrifying you it's terrifying you you're gripped by it and you make a representation And part of the reason you worship it is because the bloody thing is got you in its grip and no wonder because there's an idea behind that It's so powerful that you should be gripped by it. You should be unable to forget it Because it's a it's an absolute. It's a stellar stroke of genius It's a real revelation and it sets the whole human race on the path to Making the proper sacrifices so that the fire and the bugs and the insects and the snakes and the tigers Stay the hell away and a good thing It's a good thing and then maybe now and then you know the world's configured so that it's beneficial to us