 Think the whole point of this If you if I had to use one sentence summary, which I am forcing myself To do right now, which? Unforce oneself If I am not to Good evening everybody if you like Greek myths Then this is your episode Pinocchio Hansel and Gretel Modern to medieval to ancient It's really hard to draw the long conscious construction and creation of it versus its roots to roots prehistoric or Campfire stories Tonight is the myth or a story from Sophocles as my inclination is It's butterscale what myths and stories Delphi The Oracle of Delphi tells King Laos of thieves that he'll have a child who's destined to kill him And not just that but sleep with his wife Chocosta The boy's own mother when a baby comes along in the king pierces his ankles And leaves him on a mountainside to die Shepard a shepherd finds the baby though and takes him to King Polybos and Queen Merope who name him Oedipus and raise him as their own who is real parent The Oracle doesn't see fit to tell him this But she does tell him that he's destined to kill his father and sleep with his mother Edibus Oedipus tries to run from this fate But ends up running those Laos in a scuffle. He's his real dad Later he wins the throne of thieves and unknowingly Marries his own mother of the Sphinx several several years and several children Edibus and Chocosta figure out the truth of everything with the unwilling help of Tyre Tyreseus the seer Chocosta hangs herself and at Edibus stabs out his own eyes The blind king then goes into exile with his only daughter Antigone and then eventually dies in the town of colonists So that's the myth and the nutshell and the reason I gave you only the summary Was that it's a really interesting article about myth and psychologist Sorry, he was primarily a physician Sigmund Freud Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung Who I'm growing increasingly Interested in based on his his Choice to study a such a broad scope of human history and specifically mythology and how mythology and religion intertwine with this Psych with the innate psychological structures of our brain that are universal that he calls the archetype So in the theories of these two Jung and Freud have almost monopolized the study of myth and Freud's key discussion Of his key myth that of Edibus fittingly occurs in the interpretation of dreams For he and Jung as well compare myths with dream now on the surface or our manifest level story of Edibus describes the figures Vane effort to elude that has been imposed on him Lately however, Edibus most wants to do what manifestly he least wants to know He wants to act out his edifice complex that manifests the manifest or literal Level of the myth hides the latent symbolic meaning Manifest level edifice is the innocent victim of fate His specific action kill this king as a result of that Take long the responsibilities of a king in tradition would have it that he would marry the so he is the culprit on the latent Level and rightly understood the myth depicts not edifice's failure To circumvent his ineluctable destiny, but his success in Fulfilling his fond the late meeting scarcely stops here for the myth is not ultimately about edifice at all It's just as the manifest level on which edifice is the victim Masks a latent one On which edifice is the victimizer so that level in turn masks an even more latent one Which the ultimate victimizer is the myth maker and any reader of the myth smitten with it Either is an adult a neurotic adult male stuck or fixated at his edible stage of development He identifies himself with edifice and through him fills his own edible complex At heart the myth is not biography, but an autobiography So another famous psychoanalysis at analyst psychoanalyst The Austrian auto rank Died in 1939 as well Who was Freud's protege at the same time, but later broke irrevocably with this with his master works out a common plot or a pattern from For a key category of myths those of male heroes The heart of the pattern is the decision by the parents to kill their son at birth to avert The prophecy that the son if born will one day kill his own father Unbeknownst to the parents though the infant is rescued and raised by others Grows up to discover who he is returns home to kill his father and succeeds in Succeeds him as king or noble Now interpreted psychologically the pattern isn't the enactment of Pattern is the enactment of edifice The son kills his father to gain sexual access to his mother Mainstream psychoanalysis has changed mightily since Freud's day contemporary psychoanalyst Like the American Jacob Arlo who died in 2004 See myth as contributing to normal development rather than to the perpetuation of a neuroses myth Abets Adjustment to the social and physical worlds rather than childish flight from them. I guess that means Encourages, okay So myth abets adjustment to the social and physical worlds rather than the child is Childish flight from them Furthermore myth now serves Everyone not merely the neurotics The classical Freudian goal is the establishment of oneself in the external world largely free of domination by parents and Instincts success is expressed Concretely in the form of a job and a mate young ins accept that goal but as that of only the first half of life first half in Inconvency to young adult and the goal of you know, I think that's where the Nietzschean influence on young really kicks in It's that will carries the most burden. That's the physical and Fundamental psychological growth the lion is Almost the culmination of the I guess the the actual climax of the abilities of that growth Physically more so than mentally and then the child the transition from lion to child is one of rare actual manifestation in the real world whereas we're Your ego Ultimately incorporate your place in the actual social cultural historical structure that you're sitting within and you recognize that You you are master of your own personal domain but in order to do anything outside your own domain interact with others in the world you have to accept your limitations as finite being in the world and And and check check your ego. I guess really is what it is You develop such a powerful Powerful tools in your psyche at that point of the transition to childhood again is that you can in fact incorporate data into your life That doesn't fit with what you know so you're able to Maintain your own awareness of your abilities in the face of Something you don't understand. I shouldn't have I should not have I was just trying to think aloud Try to synthesize these these two ideas. I guess so we left off before I Made a fool of myself the goal of the uniquely young in second half of life of adulthood Is consciousness not however of the external world as Summed up by the Freudian term reality principle But of the distinctively Jungian Jungian Conscious one must return to that unconscious from which one has unavoidably become Severed in the first half of your life, but not to sever one's ties to the external world On the contrary the aim is to return in turn to the external world The ideal is balanced between consciousness of the external world Inconsciousness of the unconscious game of the second half of life is to supplement Not abandon the achievements of the first half Yeah Work in my way through the genealogy of morals right now and as someone who's Not being formally or hasn't been formally trained in Philosophy, you know, maybe maybe it's ultimately gonna be better for me because I don't have a Rigid structure in which to put my ideas so maybe I might see things from a different light but probably not because It's um It's a little more chaotic to approach it this way so there's probably a lot of things that A good philosophy professor could in fact teach me or guide me in the direction of Observing before I'm conscious of it But nonetheless, it's really fascinating that Nietzsche's ideas is that the reason laws and myths and traditions are so important is that they enable us to Have a Predictability about society they enable a kind of Relative Stasis So that change doesn't happen to chaotically too dramatically There's an underlying order to how human beings operate, you know, for instance The five-day work week The general fact that we work during the day and sleep at night. That's Traditionally culturally Enforced almost Not everyone does it and that's that's the point is that you want to balance between those two That's probably a really bad example, but Just almost anything you do like having breakfast three meals a day And then of course I'm trying to think of things that aren't a law explicitly law like stop signs following driving and You know not physically harming other people these things help us Because they they are a Relative in a small period of time a constant that we can use As a baseline to predict the future and by predicting the future. I mean of our personal actions Actions so that we can make promises try to avoid making a fool of myself twice so Basically the significance of our ability to make promises is that a we need a powerful memory a will that That an event won't be forgotten and a Confidence in our ability to predict the future And that's significant because laws and traditions like I'm talking about Allow us to be predictable and therefore we can assume responsibility of Our promises and our ability to fulfill them and this allows the Existence of a sovereign or free individual so through a complex analysis it sounds ironic, but the Instantiation of rules in a society whether it's explicit in law or implicit in culture Such as you know free speech let someone speak, you know Don't punch someone in the face Without letting them to speak first. I guess as a very crude example stuff I'm so immersed in it that I can't detach myself and see it like in my room The fact that we wear clothes, you know, this is One thing. I don't know maybe waving to someone. That's something that You know, you just say we just do it to be nice because not everybody does it but the fact that a lot of people do it is evidence of some sort of implicit agreement, you know that If we're neighbors, and I asked to borrow a cup of coffee it's implied that there'll be a little bit of Acknowledged debt to you and in the future you can cash in on that debt to a similar extent but we need rules like this to create a sovereign individual so that If it was chaotic you might not be able to predict the future and you might not in the sense that the society Wouldn't necessarily be probable to still exist in the same fashion that it currently does so therefore you wouldn't be able to Predict that in the future. I will have a cup of sugar. I will have a job. I will my family will still be together To be able to give you the assets to return the favor And so society at large is composed and very organized and very rigid roughly Because of that reason because it allows us to say okay, it's stable in five years from now I will still be alive because if anything I have the welfare system to back me up or I have my neighbors or my family or Something like that or I have just the general good nature or good will of other citizens That isn't necessary from a very very objective standpoint, but in fact is Necessary if you want to continue to play the game of stable organization we We call a society over a long period of time with as many people as possible the reciprocation of debts and credits and General good nature is a key factor of that and The sovereign individual has tremendous responsibility then to To make claims about their future actions. So if I know society is going to be relatively stable and Therefore I know that okay, I Can promise you something then it's my fault if I don't Act out and fulfill that promise in the future and therefore it's my personal responsibility To to avoid call this sense of responsibility according to Nietzsche our conscience So our conscience he tried to basically he tried to bury very very deep into millennia of history and prehistory with human beings and Derive where our sense of conscience comes. That was a terrible explanation. I know but you know I'm just trying to flesh out my own idea. So let's see if I can incorporate that into what we're learning about young Ian theory about Breaking out from that Stabilized society and then doing something very personal and individual and or not breaking out because you're you're becoming a part of it, but if you You you're individual you're individualizing yourself by choosing a specific job and choosing a specific mate and then You're like a specific example of a very general concept that includes getting a job and choosing a mate and fitting into somewhere into the structure of Society and so young says the second part of your life once you've established yourself as an individual in society Then the second part Is to return So this is where Joseph Campbell the American mythologist who died in 1987 provides the classical young Ian counterpart to rank on hero myths Or ranks pattern limited to males centers on the heroes toppling of his father Campbell's centers on a journey and Anybody who's taken college college English 101, you know, well I have you know watched Star Wars or the Hobbit or something like that to Give them a modern-day example of how pervasive in ubiquitous really this this idea of a hero's journey really is and The heroes without hero. Yeah, the hero with a thousand faces That's why that book was so popular by Joseph Campbell was because almost any story that's a That ages better that ages. Well It is popular will have some variant Of this myth, but the variant can't vary too much because there are certain core aspects of the journey that everybody must Go through in order to Live Fulfilled life a meaningful one at that So let's wrap flesh this out Campbell's centers on a journey undertaken by an adult female or male hero from the known human world To the therefore to the here-to-for unknown world of gods interpreted psychologically That journey is an inner not outer Trek From the known portion of the mind ordinary or ego consciousness The object of which is the external world To the unknown portion in the mind the young in unkind this the successful hero must Not only reach the strange new world, but also he may must also return so it's a I guess the alternative would be either descend into madness and become such a perverse New version of ourselves that our old selves would have completely rejected us which might be a form of Madness in Psychological terms success means the completion of the goal of the second half of life So the most influential Jungian theorist of myth after young himself was Eric Neumann is protege Who died in 1960 and James Hillman which I recommend looking him up on YouTube. There's a lot of Really profound lectures and more casual talks by by Hillman That you can find so young Neumann systematizes the developmental or evolutionary aspect of Jungian theory which is Which is why I like Jordan Peterson so much because Jordan Peterson Has he he's just so well-read and he pulls from so many different areas and science in the evolution evolutionary theory and science as well is a big part of Why he is so confident that he's correct about essentially his whole idea is that Taking on as much responsibility. It's kind of what you know Nietzsche is saying really but he's trying to prove it Psychometrically Or psychologically using psychometrics in other areas of science his idea is that The best way to live for the best life is a life that has The most profound meaning and to get meaning and profound meaning at that you must take on as much responsibility as you can and Even if you don't believe in objective meaning in a million years from now Your life will be forgotten in a billion years from now or ten billion our star will have already exploded and Perhaps our civilization our species our whole earth would have been forgotten as Nietzsche said in a momentary a few momentary breaths of the universe our society our civilization our earth will have evolved and Destroyed life at the end of it nothing will have been done so you can take that perspective and follow in the meaninglessness the nihilism of it or you can acknowledge that when you feel sad it's because Well, I don't know why it's because Specifically, but the fact that you feel sad and you feel happy and you have emotions tells you that Your brain values different things and when you really ask That unconscious that lies within us all of that archetypal archetypal mind that we all have that we all share From what young and Nietzsche and Peterson believe is our evolutionary history is a desire to develop our character and in our physical abilities go out find something new and explore and experience and Create even Something new out of all the chaos that we don't know Chaos being a very general term for things that aren't within your current understanding of the world And it could be your next door neighbor's room your living room or something, you know Because if you've never been over there, you don't understand it let alone that their mind because certainly we don't understand our owns no way we could understand them and Yeah, without rambling too much to get off my point meaning comes from developing your skills to the point that you can confront the unknown without breaking down and without Without cowering away from it. So you don't want to jump into it too deep. You want to walk that yell that Yin-Yang sign between order and chaos Have one foot in order something you you're very very comfortable with but it's boring and it's prone to tyranny and Stasis and then you want to have one foot in chaos the unknown the thing that Can perhaps bring new and better ideas to the order yet also has the potential for infinite you know regression into a black hole of chaos and negative negative Disintegration of order, you know, which wouldn't be good. You need some order. So Is the whole idea of what it makes life the most meaningful and it is Almost infinitely embedded in our myths our deepest myths from Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greek to Judeo-Christian Old Testament myths to Indian myths Chinese mess Asian mess, you know Native American myths is that you want to Be The individual who is who has disciplined themselves enough to be able to go out confront the unknown Create something out of it and bring it back to help their community because we're fundamentally Social creatures and we get meaning out of Communication and interaction and development of relationships between each other. So Yeah, that's why this all interests me because science tells us That when I drop this book Gravity will make it fall at an accelerated rate to Ridiculous precision science tells us these things and this microphone in the computer and the cell phone I'm recording on are only Only able to exist because of what we know about electricity electromagnetism and even quantum mechanics is an integral part of all this so You know Not just capacitors and resistors and you know batteries, but also more complex quantum mechanical level stuff like Op amps which are fundamentally A bunch of transistors arranged in the very specific way in a transistor I heard one of my professors say a transistor in a thousand years to you know, he's an electrical engineer He's a doctor So of course, he's a little biased, but he says that in a thousand years they're gonna look back and say the most breakthrough important Development technological development of that civilization our civilization will be the transistor So go look that up if you're technically interested in that But that's the whole point is that of what Peterson is saying is that Technology gives us all these things, but what we choose to do with it is in fact a whole Separate domain of exploration and intelligent intellectual Their pursuits worthwhile because his main idea of you can have a field But the field itself you can own infinite number of facts about that field and all those facts Themselves don't tell you how to walk through it You can have an infinite number of ways to walk through it. It's a little shadier on this side less lines on this side there's not a huge pit in the middle of You know if you take the middle road or something like that, but I guess the point is that religion in science or at least myths and tradition and culture in science are The opposite of opposites in fact they're integral and we need them to develop as a society and To find meaning in our life. We need each other. We need traditions and myths to Help inform our everyday interactions or else you'd Literally not have any time to explore Fringe concepts of science and philosophy if you were worried about Whether my neighbor was gonna wave to me or shoot a gun at me tomorrow. You need Stabilizing culture you need Enforced culturally enforced Principles of morality of how to act, you know, like if I see I saw a video the other day on Unread it About I looked like it was in Asia Maybe some two guys and biker helmets walked up to a lady carrying walking with her little like a three-year-old three-year-old daughter and They didn't they basically tried to take the kid and The lady ran across the street yanked him out of their hands But they weren't like being extremely forceful because because there were a ton of people around they're on a main busy a busy main road and the the exact Justification of why we should have cultural norms and Agreed upon ubiquitous morals Is that she walked cross-street a truck of it looked like a fire truck? Might have been like a medical like an EMT. They got out and chased the guys. So Yeah, sorry that was a long tangent, but I Think they never never realized that Psychology young and Freud and Nietzsche had and all these other guys Adler Neumann rank Joseph Campbell, I never realized they had Permiated they had they had What's the word I'm thinking of and it penetrated so far into understanding our psyche like and I always thought it was just boring You know, like that guy the dogs in the bells pass Peslaw I thought it was like Interesting experiments, but they didn't under they never had an agreed-upon Theory behind it, and I guess they there are a lot of maybe contradictory theories, but at the same time there are a lot of broader deeper theories that verified or At least found variants of them are found in myths. So it's interesting that science can It's still trying to keep up with some of the wisdom of some of the oldest myths that we have So back from the detour Really just use this as an outlet to talk to myself And I just I'm just so grateful that at least that even one or two of you enjoy Some of these topics some of these subjects So to finish this up by far the most Radical development in the Jungian theory of myth has been the emergence of archetypal psychology Which in fact considers itself Post-Jungian in fact The chief figure in this movement is James Hillman another important figure is David Miller archetypal psychology faults classical Jungian psychology on multiple grounds By emphasizing the compensatory therapeutic message of mythology Classical Jungian psychology purportedly reduces mythology to psychology and gods to concepts and espousing a unified self or self with a capital S as the ideal psychological authority Jungian psychology supposedly projects onto psychology a Western specifically monotheistic more specifically Christian Even more specifically Protestant outlook That's like a sentence. I would have written The Western emphasis on progress is purportedly Reflected in the primary Jungian in the primacy Jungian psychology in the primacy It accords the ego the Western emphasis on progress is purportedly reflected in The primacy Jungian psychology accords hero myths a primacy it Accords the ego even in the ego's encounter with the unconscious The encounter is intended to a bet or aid development I don't know why I keep a bet seem like a negative connotation But so and finally Jungian psychology is berated for placing our archetypes in an unknowable realm distant from the known realms of symbols as a corrective human and his followers advocate that psychology be viewed as Irreducibly mythological Myth is still to be interpreted psychologically but psychology itself is To be interpreted mythologically one grasps the Psychological meanings of the myth of Saturn by imagining oneself to be the figure Saturn not by translating Saturn's plight into clinical terms like depression the depressed Saturn represents a legitimate aspect of one's personality Each God deserves its due The psychological idea should be pluralistic rather than monolithic in mythological terms polytheistic rather than monotheistic Or Greek rather than biblical Which is a fascinating topic in itself I won't go into insisting that archetypes are to be found in symbols rather than outside them Hillman espouses a relation to the gods in themselves and not something beyond them The ego becomes but one more archetype With its attending kind of God and it is the soul rather than the ego that experiences the archetypes through myths Myths serve to open up one soul open one up to the souls Think the whole point of this If you I had to use one sense summary, which I am forcing myself to do right now which unforce oneself If I am not to is that our minds rate on so many levels if I ask you to remember this number 739846 you do That's probably the highest level. I think the The most surface level rather because highest might mean most valuable, but that's not what I mean I guess the highest to lowest the lowest value would be the deepest most emotional most reptilian deepest oldest evolutionarily and We simply don't theory just like gravity versus strong weak myth is Still or no according to this article. It is the best way to still explain Or at least help understand better What our deepest drives and these of forces Contributing to our Life decisions our myth and psychology in the study of them both is immensely helpful to To not just understand yourself, but when you do understand yourself, it's helpful to Nietzsche is so Still so anonymously respected and read because he never explicitly stated something he didn't understand himself But he had little glimpses of it. I guess like that's why Dostoevsky is so important in Peterson's thought because we understand everything through story and We haven't yet came come to the point where myth is Surpassed by anything in terms of explaining our drives and story is Next time you watch a story for instance Think of all the objective things that happen in the world of the character that are left out because you all you care about is What happened to the character? What was the most important thing that happened to the character that forced him to do something and then what was that something that he Did in reaction to that and maybe maybe how did it affect some of the people in his life? But you know, you there's a lot left out is my point when we When we tell a really really good story, you know the godfather for instance, I bring that up a lot because I'm just I've watched it like three times in the past six months I think Because it's so compact and dense yet. It leaves out so much unimportant information to the story and that's kind of The opposite of the scientific mindset So Yeah, next time you walk into a room pay attention to what are the first three things you observe about it and Why you observe that? Why didn't you choose to? Look at you know, what color the ceiling or wall is versus Where if it's classroom where the teacher's desk is and where all the student seats are It's because the ladder is more relevant to you than the former are certainly not as Simple as we as I used to think they are get some sleep. I Hope your dreams are archetypal and you wake up influenced in some unknown way to Again incrementally change your life towards the better